Source – disinfo.com, By By Jacob Sloan
– The decision to hound Swartz on flimsy charges with the possibility of decades in prison was in part because of an anti-copyright manifesto written by Swartz in 2008, reports the Huffington Post:
A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution.
The manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.”
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world,” Swartz wrote in the manifesto.
Swartz was 26 when he killed himself in January. He had been indicted and faced a prison sentence for downloading millions of academic articles from the online database JSTOR, though he maintained he had permission to access them.
Aaron Swartz’s Father Says Reddit Co-Founder Was ‘Killed By The Government’
Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz was “killed by the government,” his father told mourners Tuesday during his son’s funeral in suburban Chicago.
Swartz, who help create Reddit and RSS, the technology behind blogs, podcasts and other web-based subscription services, was found dead Friday in his New York apartment. He was facing federal charges that alleged he illegally gained access to millions of articles from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer archive.
Robert Swartz said during the service in Highland Park that his son was “hounded by the government, and MIT refused him,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported (). http://bit.ly/V2s8zv
“He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles,” he said.
Swartz, 26, was facing charges that carried a maximum penalty of decades in prison. His trial was scheduled to begin in April.
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz had no comment about Robert Swartz’s remarks, Ortiz spokeswoman Christina DiIorio-Sterling said.
Swartz’s family also lashed out against prosecutors Saturday, saying the death was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”
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