Aaron Swartz Becomes An Hero After Stealing Computer Data

If there is anything I’ve learned over the past few years its that anyone that brands themselves an “internet activist” is nothing more than than an enraged liberal who feels entitled to someone else’s stuff without having to pay for it. Aaron Swartz, a co-founder of the Reddit site felt that he was entitled to steal research papers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because “information is meant to be free” or some similar tripe.

He had downloaded about 5 Million articles which were available via a paid subscription illegally, with the intent of giving them away for free. Because justice. The cops busted him and slapped his ass with 13 felony charges and the possibility of spending 30 years in the slammer. So Swartz fessed up and did the right thing- ha, not really, he took the coward’s way out and hung himself with his girly-sized 24 inch belt, becoming an instant an-hero on the Internet.

From the DailyMail here:

Just moments after hidden camera’s captured Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz breaking into Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network he was arrested as he desperately tried to flee chasing campus police. Tackled and handcuffed, the gifted computer programmer was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer as he tried to steal millions of scholarly papers from the JSTOR archive.

Facing up to 30-years in prison for the attempted January 2011 heist, it is thought that the stress and strain of the looming federal criminal case contributed to the depression which is being blamed for 26-year-old Swartz taking his own life on Friday in his Brooklyn, New York apartment.

The surveillance images show Swartz entering the closet three days in a room and on January 6th 2011 an observing campus police officer saw Swartz attempt to leave MIT property with the laptop and hard drive.

Swartz’s laptop had been using MIT’s network to rapidly download 4.8 million articles from JSTOR. JSTOR is an archive of academic journals to which many universities, including MIT, pay large amounts of money for access. MIT valued that information at $50,000, according to the Cambridge Police incident report.
Swartz’s intention was to upload all of the documents to a peer-to-peer file-sharing site, where anyone could access them for free.

Aaron Swartz was found hanging from his belt near his bedroom window, sources in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York said. The death was pronounced as a suicide by the city’s medical examiner

Swartz’s friend Larry Lessig, a Harvard University professor and internet law expert, similarly blamed the federal prosecutor, who he called a ‘bully,‘ on his blog and said that Swartz had been ‘driven to the edge’ by the government’s aggressive and disproportionate handling of the case.

Ironically, Swartz’s suicide came just two days after JSTOR announced that it will be releasing more than 4.5 million articles to the public.

Ironically? How about hysterically funny? Swartz deliberately chose a course of action to break the law, defraud a business which charges money for access to documents, and then couldn’t find the internal fortitude to handle the consequences, regardless whether or not those documents would be published later. And why is it any time some weak-minded ninny offs himself its some bully’s fault? Even the prosecutors catch the bully rap now for punishing crime.