‘Anonymous’ Hackers Replace MIT Website With Aaron Swartz Tribute, List of Demands

In memory of Aaron Swartz, members of the hacktivist group Anonymous replaced MIT’s website with a tribute to Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide over the weekend.

The Verge reports:

In stark red-on-black formatting, the message calls Aaron’s prosecution “a gross miscarriage of justice” that “highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining.” The authors go on to demand the reform of copyright and intellectual property laws, and “a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet.”

Aaron Swartz’ family released a press release blaming federal prosecutors for his suicide. An advocate for free information, Swartz was arrested in January 2011 after he allegedly used a Python script running on a laptop hidden in a maintenance closet at MIT to download publicly available academic papers from the JSTOR database.

Many have pointed out how quickly prosecutors jumped at the opportunity to prosecute Swartz, but have yet to prosecute those who intentionally blew up the global economy.

The Huffington Post reports:

The manner in which Aaron had been prosecutedoffers a sharp contrast to the manner in which our legal system dealt with corporate America after the 2008 financial crisis, where there were no prosecutions of top corporate figures. Sadly, the contrast highlights that trying to disseminate knowledge, quite literally by making academic journal articles available online, is a greater crime than bringing down the United States economy through “corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking.”

What this clearly demonstrates is that the U.S. government favors some classes of Americans over others. Those who commit alleged crimes to benefit humanity are swiftly prosecuted, while those who commit crimes to enrich themselves are allowed to go free without even the threat of prosecution.

 

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