By Matthew Herper, Forbes Staff
I’ve thought long and hard about this post, and have sat on it for a long time. But reading New York Magazine‘s feature on internet activist Aaron Swartz, and efforts, in its words, to turn him into a martyr, has made me finally decide to publish it. I think that the tech culture’s tendency to turn make his death into an almost heroic act may be harmful for other people at risk of suicide. …read more
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By The Huffington Post News Editors
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, sources told The Huffington Post.
Swartz’s 2008 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. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive,” Swartz wrote in the manifesto. “We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”
The case of computer whiz Aaron Swartz — who committed suicide after federal prosecutors charged him with 13 felony fraud counts — has become, for some, emblematic of how overzealous prosecutors.
U.S. lawmakers pledged to rewrite an antihacking law as hundreds of people gathered in Washington, D.C., to mourn the death of Internet activist and innovator Aaron Swartz.
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Filed under: Breaking News
Hackers affiliated with Anonymous seem to have published information from more than 4,000 American bank executive accounts on a government website last night, Violet Blue of ZDNet reports.
The alleged hack is part of its new “Operation Last Resort” campaign, which defaced two .gov websites last week to protest the prosecution of hacktivist Aaron Swartz.
The hackers are calling for reform of U.S. computer crime law (specifically the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) after…
Hackers Post Private Data From More Than 4,000 US Bank Executives originally appeared on DailyFinance.com on 2013-02-04T13:20:00Z.
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By John Johnson 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.
The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”
The hackers say they’ve infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.
Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors. Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.
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By Matt Cantor 
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U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said Wednesday that prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Internet activist Aaron Swartz that warranted severe punishment.
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By Timothy B. Lee, Contributor Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor who hounded Aaron Swartz in the months before his Friday suicide, has released a statement arguing that “this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case.” She says that she recognized that Swartz’s crimes were not serious, and as a result she sought […]
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By John Johnson 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
By Tarun Wadhwa, Contributor (Image Source: MaverPix) Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment on January 11, 2013 The collective outpouring of grief and anger at the circumstances surrounding the death of Internet visionary Aaron Swartz are only continuing to grow. In the past few days, we have seen his friends and co-workers share […]
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A petition posted on whitehouse.gov that seeks the removal of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who oversaw the prosecution of Internet activist and pioneer Aaron Swartz on hacking-related charges, is nearing 40,000 signatures.
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As funeral services were held for Internet activist Aaron Swartz, the debate intensified over what some called a “draconian” US computer crime law used by allegedly overzealous prosecutors.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
By Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff Aaron Swartz, who faced as much as 35 years in prison under hacking charges and killed himself last week. If any good comes out of the tragic suicide of brilliant programmer Aaron Swartz, it may be a new political will to reform the the bluntly crafted hacking laws that allowed prosecutors […]
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By Liam Carnahan 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
A draft bill to exclude terms of service violations from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Image: Demand ProgressThe proposed amendment to the anti-hacking law comes in the wake of the suicide on Friday by Internet activist and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud and other crimes for allegedly accessing and downloading millions of documents from the JSTOR online database through the network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Swartz allegedly intended to distribute a significant proportion of JSTOR’s archive through file-sharing sites. If convicted, he could have faced up to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million.
The government was able to bring disproportionate charges against Swartz because of the broad scope of CFAA and the wire fraud statute, wrote Representative Zoe Lofgren in a post on Tuesday on the Reddit news-sharing site in which Swartz played a key role. “It looks like the government used the vague wording of those laws to claim that violating an online service’s user agreement or terms of service is a violation of the CFAA and the wire fraud statute,” she said.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
A draft bill to exclude terms of service violations from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Computerworld Latest
