Hundreds honor activist Aaron Swartz in NYC

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron Swartz's partner and Founder and Executive Director of SumOfUs.org, speaks during his memorial service, Saturday, Jan. 19, 2013 in New York. / AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

NEW YORK Hundreds of friends and supporters of Aaron Swartz are gathered in New York City to pay tribute to the free-information activist and online prodigy who killed himself last week.

The 26-year-old Swartz hanged himself in his apartment in Brooklyn the month before he was to go on trial in Boston.

Federal prosecutors accused him of breaking into a computer wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 and tapping into the university's computer network to get millions of paid-access scholarly articles.

Swartz's family has blasted prosecutors' handling of his case, saying overreaching led to his death.

A grandson of activist folk singer Pete Seeger read a message from Seeger praising Swartz.

The statement said it was "a tragedy for this brilliant young man to be so threatened that he hanged himself."

[mitcheisenstei]

Aaron Swartz was a bum and a loser who should have gone to jail, but was too much of a coward to take his medicine. Using the excuse that a person who was smart enough to get into an MIT computer system, was too naive to understand the workings of the legal system, is ridiculous. But if it is true, it shows how mentally ill he was and how mentally ill most hacker are, deluded in their grandiose mission to break the law to show how the government is breaking the law. the hackers in anonymous are obviously failures. They havent the ability to work within the system to make the world better, which makes them victims, like ted kazinsky who became a unibomber when he was unable to stay on track to become a scientist and fell off the road into insanity. thats what Anonymous is; a group of anarchist losers who know they cannot accomplish much in the world, and lacking that ability, have to delude themselves with the fantasy that they are on some god given mission to save the world from itself. they are a bunch of terrorists who need to be hunted down like Bin Laden

[MrXyz13]

I woke up today w/ some hope for the future, but then I read your comment and realized again that we are all doomed. If only there were a virus that targets idiots.

[seriouspause]

I fully second MRXYZ13's reply. Swartz may have been flawed, but he was a leader in many respects, and this mindless hatred of him gets it backwards. History has played out like this. People who try to address shortcomings in the system--from Soviet Russia to modern day China--are marginalized, written off as "losers" and "bums" who aren't good enough to work within the system to improve it. Swartz may not have been a human rights hero, but he was no terrorist. He was trying to do good the best way he knew how. To miss the forest for the trees here is really sad.

[selcukhhu]

JSTOR is the real criminal here. They and Elselvier have made a grab for archived (often ancient but still valuable) publicly funded research publications, and designed an equally illegitimate and illegal business model where they can fleece the research community and individuals needing this information by charging exobitant prices for articles that have zero distribution costs. These companies are inhibiting, obfuscating and ultimately hurting progress in scientific research and medicine. They should be tarred and feathered for their nefarious greed, rather than being backed by government lawyers. Even doctors trying to find out how to treat difficult or rare cases cannot efficiently search details in case reports published decades ago because of these companies' cronyism, and yes it hurts patients and their care!! Aaron did the right thing.

[AmidYousef]

And the Government Tyrant #CarmenOrtiz still has not Given All Her wealth to #AaronSwartz family?
I suggest she does that and becomes slave to the people as provided by the 13th amendment
Come see tribute www.Tvshowhow.com/aaron

[ILSCCP]

We the people need to work together to change the law and other pro actions to change the legal system. http://blog.ilsccp.org/2013/01/we-the-people/

[jarrellkaren]

Calling him a wussie, I don't believe that far from that would be the term.
He was very troubled is more like it. I'm saddened for his family. I had two people in my family that committed suicide, so I know what they are going through. I will say a prayer for them.....

[David Hoffman100]

He knew that what he had done was illegal and was going to be convicted. Physical intrusions and physical modification of a network were clearly things he did. The problem is he failed to appreciate that the actual amount of time to be in prison can be kept relatively low by the judge. If he represents no flight risk, he might stay out of prison during his appeals. Very rare, but it can be done.

This reminds me of the Randy Weaver case. The man was deluded into believing all kinds of falsehoods about how the federal justice system worked. If he had studied a broader range of information, he probably would have understood that going to trial for making and selling illegal short barreled shotguns was not going to necessarily result in a long sentence. The ATF did not really care that much about short barreled shotguns, they were after illegally modified firearms that could fire fully automatically when the trigger was pulled. Those equipped with sound suppressors were to be the main target. Randy Weaver was used in a ridiculous attempt to infiltrate the really big illegal weapons modifiers. The ATF was too incompetent to recognize that he would be useless to them in that endeavor. He was very probably never going to be part of the inner circle that created such firearms. He could have gone to trial, served his light sentence, and then gone home.

The same probably would have happened in the Aaron Swartz case.

Drama created by not having a realistic view of the court and prison system.

[kthomp1123]

To put what happened to Weaver and his family and what happened to Swartz on even the same page of a website is a stretch.
The Fed's raided Weaver's property in a full military siege and killed his family, murdered his wife holding their baby.
Swartz is a different case entirely. Weaver was a patsy who the Feds 'knew' would be a problem so they showed up with an invasion force like they did in Waco to make a statement - and Swartz was living the easy life in his apartment waiting for trial.

[cagestoker]

You're right, a crime like this, unless the judge wanted to make an example out of him, would have cost him six-months in county jail, max. The prosecutor probably told him he could get up-to-five-years. That can play on one's mind. And a computer-nerd like this guy can't be away from the internet overnight,. So he offed himself. *Funny Story

[matt6052]

He would have been a lot more trouble locked up. There would have been plenty of people calling him a political prisoner for information freedom. He would have always had Internet access, legally or illegally. It just would have been one thing after another. Every act of cyber-disobedience would have suddenly had a cause to justify it. There's actually some reason to believe that his death was not a suicide, because his imprisonment would have been so disruptive.

[MidWestSense]

I said seek to change the law. History is full of civil disobedience that eventually changed the law.