US justice drives internet advocate to suicide, lets bankters abscound with billions‏

I regret I never heard of Aaron Swartz till an acquaintance posted a tribute to Swartz on Facebook about his suicide at age 26 on January 11. Only later did I get the full story of this remarkable computer genius and political progressive who dedicated his short life to expanding the dissemination of knowledge via remarkable creativity and activism that brought him both fame and the prosecutorial wrath of Uncle Sam.

Swartz was a prodigy who, at age 14, co-wrote the specification for RSS, a Web-publishing technology for delivering syndicated content from frequently updated sites, such as blogs or news websites. RSS allows Web consumers to receive the latest stories on a feed without having to constantly revisit their favorite pages. Swartz was the teenager behind the automatic updates you receive from podcast subscriptions or general news sites. After dropping out of college he created Infogami, which was later merged with Reddit, the freewheeling social-news site where users vote their favorite stories onto the main page.

But two years ago Swartz ran afoul of federal prosecutors and faced up to 35 years in prison for downloading too many articles from JSTOR, an online service providing access to academic articles. By downloading more articles than JSTOR's terms of service allowed, he was in technical violation of their terms of service which the feds used to ensnare him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. JSTOR not only declined to press charges, they passed on a civil suit as well. Swartz stole nothing and gained nothing from his computer shenanigans, other than to cement his computer cult hero status as the most prominent proponent of expanding the infinite knowledge of the Internet. The millions of articles he downloaded are not confidential, are now available to everyone and there is no evidence that his actions were other than strictly for the public good. Yet the prosecutors prevented Swartz from copping a misdemeanor plea and set an April trial date and the prospect of being a 60 year old man before he could resume his life. Almost everyone from his family to his friends to his legions of admirers and legal defenders are certain that prosecutorial overreach led to his tragic early death.

Meanwhile the gluttonous banksters and financial crooks who absconded with fabulous wealth while America nearly collapsed in 2007-08, have somehow slid by the same feds who relentlessly demonized Swartz. They simply have too much money and too much power and too much status to mess with. The scales of justice are supposed to be blind; not deaf and dumb.