Some Aaron Swartz Secret Service Documents Released
Good. Now release the other 14,396 pages.
The first of 104 pages of Secret Service documents on the Aaron Swartz case have been released through a Freedom of Information Act request. Despite requests by both MIT and JSTOR to review any documents before they are released, these 104 pages have been made public without any such review.
Read MoreMIT Releases Report on Aaron Swartz Case, Claims “Position of Neutrality”
An MIT review panel found that MIT did nothing wrong during the Aaron Swartz case.
While under federal prosecution that many felt was extreme for his crimes, Aaron Swartz committed suicide earlier this year. MIT has released a report examining their culpability in the matter. It indicates that MIT maintained a "position of neutrality" throughout the proceedings, claiming they neither sought Swartz' prosecution nor defended him.
Read MoreNew Blog Preserves the Dead’s Final Tweets #LastWords
Some people are fascinated with the last words someone says before they die, and the Internet is full of sites that list famous last words. A new blog has taken that morbid curiosity into the 21st century and has begun preserving the final tweets of the deceased, potentially giving way to the new saying "Tweet every tweet as if it were your last."
Anonymous Says They’re Responsible for Taking Down U.S. Sentencing Commission Site
Continuing a string of threats and attacks following the death of Aaron Swartz, Anonymous claims to be responsible for taking down the United States Sentencing Commission website yesterday. They also claim that ussc.gov is not the only government website they currently control. Shortly after the attack the site was taken down, and now appears to be running normally. In the message they posted on the site, Anonymous also claims to have sensitive government information that it will leak to the media.
Here’s What U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Has to Say About the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz's suicide last week was just the beginning. The public outcry from the tech community has been massive, with a petition to remove the prosecuting attorney for Aaron's case, one Carmen Ortiz, from office hitting the required number of signatures for an official White House response relatively quickly. In large part, a majority of these complaints center around the opinion that the prosecution was overzealous at best. Ortiz, for her part, has remained mum on the subject. Until last night, that is. Her office has released an official statement on the matter of Swartz's prosecution and, uh, it's... definitely something.
Petition to Fire Aaron Swartz’s Prosecutor Hits Required Signatures for White House Response
Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11th, and while no one but Swartz will ever truly know why, many have speculated that the legal troubles he was facing were a factor. He was being aggressively prosecuted for unlawfully obtaining information and recklessly damaging a protected computer after he made repeated efforts to steal files from JSTOR. The District Attorney leading the case against him was D.A. Carmen Ortiz, and the We the People petition to have her fired has already hit the required number of signatures needed to receive a White House response.
Anonymous Hacks MIT Site in Wake of Aaron Swartz’s Suicide [UPDATED]
The hacker group Anonymous defaced pages of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) site just hours after the school announced it would launch a full investigation into their role in Aaron Swartz's death. Swartz committed suicide on Friday while facing millions of dollars in fines and up to 50 years in prison for stealing documents from MIT and academic database JSTOR. In response, Anonymous has publicly called for the reform of computer crime laws and prosecution, and they've been busy the last few days petitioning the White House to classify DDoS attacks as a form of protest while also engaging in this hack of MIT.
Things We Saw Today: The Littlest Bender
Things We Saw Today
Former Reddit Co-Owner Aaron Swartz Commits Suicide
What a miserable thing to wake up to. Aaron Swartz, former Reddit co-owner, committed suicide yesterday in New York City at the age of 26. That's more or less the extent of what we know at this point, and it's enough to be heartbreaking as it is. Whether you approve of his actions or not, Swartz has had a major impact on the Internet as a whole. Not only was he essentially a co-founder of Reddit, but he also helped found Demand Progress, which fights for civil rights among other things. In short, his legacy lives on, but he'll definitely be missed.
Former Reddit Co-Owner Arrested for Excessive, Suspicious JSTOR Use
Yesterday, Aaron Swartz, former co-owner of Reddit, was arrested for downloading upwards of 4.5 million articles from the JSTOR academic archive, willfully evading MIT's attempts to stop him. The charges, according to Ars Technica, allege that Swartz "unlawfully obtain[ed] information" and "recklessly damag[ed]" a protected computer. Considering JSTOR is an academic, electronic library and most schools pay for unlimited access, these charges straddle a weird line between Swartz's potentially authorized uses and his suspected unauthorized intent.
David Segal, an executive from the advocacy group Demand Progress that Swartz helped found, likened the charges to "trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library." While this may technically be the case, Swartz's methods of downloading this articles were decidedly suspicious, and clearly, defiantly against the wishes of MIT.
RSS