The Verge - Aaron Swartz: his death and legacy

The New Yorker launches Strongbox, an anonymous inbox developed by Aaron Swartz

2013-05-15T14:49:31Z

Before his suicide in January, hacktivist Aaron Swartz was working on an ambitious project: an encrypted dead drop system that could receive and protect files from anonymous sources. Wired editor Kevin Poulsen, who met Swartz when his site Reddit was sold to Condé Nast (which owns both Wired and The New Yorker), had asked him to help design a secure and anonymous inbox for investigative reporting. Over the course of a year, Poulsen and Swartz worked out the system with help from security expert James Dolan, creating a stable version by December 2012.

But the tentative launch plans were derailed by Swartz's death. "In the immediate aftermath, it was hard to think of anything but the loss and pain of his death," writes Poulsen. "A...

US Attorney's Office accused of deliberately withholding evidence in Aaron Swartz trial

2013-03-14T09:11:42Z

Aaron Swartz’s former lawyer in the JSTOR case, Elliot Peters, is accusing federal prosecutor Stephen Heymann of professional misconduct, alleging that he deliberately withheld an email that would have helped suppress illegally-acquired evidence. In a complaint filed January 28th and published by The Huffington Post, Peters accuses the Assistant US Attorney of violating his duty of candor to the court, as well as using an "extreme" plea offer to "coerce" a deal, and requests a formal investigation by the Department of Justice into the matter.

Aaron Swartz to receive posthumous 'Freedom of Information' award for open access advocacy

2013-03-13T19:20:06Z

Internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz is slated to receive posthumous recognition in Washington for his efforts promoting free access to taxpayer-funded research.

The James Madison Freedom of Information Award is administered by the American Library Association, and recognizes "individuals who have championed, protected and promoted public access to government information and the public’s right to know national information."

The award will be presented by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who received the honor last year for her work in defeating the SOPA copyright bill, and recently rallied in support of Swartz after his suicide in January. Swartz had faced charges under the decades-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for...

Attorney General Holder defends Swartz case as 'a good use of prosecutorial discretion'

2013-03-06T22:59:22Z

Attorney General Eric Holder has defended the Justice Department's treatment of Aaron Swartz, saying that it was an example of "a good use of prosecutorial discretion." In a Senate hearing today, John Cornyn (R-TX) asked Holder for a response to his questions about Swartz's prosecution for copying articles from JSTOR — he's previously suggested that the Justice Department overzealously prosecuted Swartz as retaliation for a previous case or to "make an example" of him. In response, Holder said that protests have focused too heavily on the heavy jail sentence Swartz faced, and that prosecutors never intended him to spend more than a few months in prison.

"These news reports about what he was actually facing are not consistent with the...

Petition to fire Aaron Swartz prosecutor reaches threshold for White House response

2013-02-13T00:44:18Z

The White House must reply to an online petition requesting the removal of Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, who prosecuted Aaron Swartz before his death, after it reached the threshold of 25,000 signatures. The "We the People" online tool raised the number of responses needed to trigger a mandatory reply to 100,000 last month, but the move wasn't retroactive; the Steve Heymann petition was filed just a few days before the change went into place.

Aaron Swartz's battle to free the PACER legal document database

2013-02-09T00:34:17Z

26-year-old Aaron Swartz died tragically this year amidst threats from federal prosecutors over his involvement with downloading texts from the JSTOR academic collection. Ars Technica takes a look at an earlier effort by Swartz to liberate documents from the legal filing database known as PACER. An acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, PACER lets the public pull US court filings — at a cost (it currently runs 10 cents per page, which can add up rather quickly when combing through lengthy legal documents). PACER also features in a recent profile from Slate, which covers Swartz's ideological evolution from an inquisitive young man to someone who, in the words of his friend Seth Schoen, believed he could "fix the world...

House Committee asks Attorney General for briefing on Aaron Swartz prosecution concerns

2013-01-29T02:47:16Z

US Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) already let it be known that he would be looking into whether federal prosecutors had gone overboard in their prosecution of Aaron Swartz, and now he's following through on that promise. In a letter today from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, both Issa and fellow Representative Elijah Cummings asked US Attorney General Eric Holder for a briefing about the decision by federal prosecutors to bring charges against Swartz. "Many questions have been raised about the appropriate level of punishment sought by prosecutors for Mr. Swartz's alleged offenses," the letter reads, "and how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, cited in 11 of 13 counts against Mr. Swartz, should apply under...

Memory to myth: tracing Aaron Swartz through the 21st century

2013-01-22T17:30:05Z

I met Aaron Swartz in Cambridge shortly after he’d been indicted for downloading lots of JSTOR articles on MIT’s network in 2011. My Wired colleague Ryan Singel had been writing about his story, and I’d talked a lot with my friends in academia and publishing about the problems of putting scholarship behind a paywall, but that was really the level at which I was approaching it. I was there to have brunch with friends I’d known a long time only through the internet, and I hadn’t known Aaron that way. I certainly didn’t want to use the brunch to put on my journalist hat and pepper him with questions. He was there primarily to see his partner Quinn Norton’s daughter Ada, with whom he had a special bond. The two of them spent...