What Aaron Swartz actually did

Emptywheel, a.k.a. Marcy Wheeler, with her usual obsessive attention to minutia, reconstructs exactly what Aaron Swartz did on which date. (We have discussed the Swartz case in previous posts. Hell, everyone on the net is talking about it.) Also see this HuffPo piece -- and, if you haven't read it yet, this expert's explanation as to why the Great MIT Hack was not really a hack at all.

I think Marcy's point here may be of importance:

The government’s consolidated response to Swartz’ suppression motion claims that “neither local nor federal law enforcement officers were investigating Swartz’s downloading action before January 4, 2011, when MIT first found the laptop.” Note, they refer just to Swartz’ downloading action, not Swartz (though that may just be legal particularity), so it is possible though unlikely that federal law enforcement officers were investigating other activities of Swartz before then (we know the FBI had investigated his PACER downloads the previous year).

"Unlikely"? Well...that's a matter of opinion. The careful wording may be revelatory. I suspect that the government had been looking for a way to get Swartz for quite some time.

As we noted in an earlier post, there are indications that the government was after Swartz for reasons other than downloading a whole bunch of JSTOR articles (which he did not distribute and from which he did not profit). His earlier hack into PACER (the legal information system) put him on Uncle's radar, and his expressed sympathy with Wikileaks no doubt put him on Uncle's enemies list.

To me, the JSTOR charge seems more like a gimmick, a means of intimidation. I think Uncle wanted to turn Swartz -- force him to work for them, or force him to rat someone out. At the very least, they wanted to make sure that Swartz could no longer lead the charge against things like SOPA.

The death of Aaron Swartz certainly removes a strong voice against governmental intrusion. The video above offers Swartz' take on TrapWire, a system which allows the government to access all security cameras in the country. The video below offers Swartz on Wikileaks -- and on Rupert Murdoch's attempt to set up his own "leak" site, which is a hilariously obvious fake.