The two leaders of a congressional committee have sent a letter
to the Department of Justice demanding a briefing on why the department chose to
so fervently pursue charges against coder and internet activist Aaron Swartz,
who committed suicide earlier this month.
The committee leaders asked the Justice Department to explain
what factors influenced its decision to prosecute Swartz and whether his
advocacy against the Stop Online Piracy Act played any role in that
decision.
The 26-year-old
Swartz was found dead on Jan.
11 this year of an apparent suicide. His death has been attributed in part
to the increasing money pressures he faced over his upcoming trial, scheduled
for April, and his fear of spending time in prison.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight
and Government Reform committee, and ranking minority leader Elijah Cummings
(D-Maryland) wrote in their Jan. 28 letter that it appeared that prosecutors had
intentionally bulked up the felony counts against Swartz in order to increase
the amount of time in prison he would face.
On July 14, 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with four
felony counts, including wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information from a
computer and recklessly damaging a computer. Then on Sept. 12, 2012, prosecutors
filed a superseding indictment with thirteen felony counts.
“It appears that
prosecutors increased the felony counts by providing specific dates for each
action, turning each marked date into its own felony charge, and significantly
increasing Mr. Swartz’s maximum criminal exposure to up to 50 years imprisonment
and $1 million in fines,” the lawmakers
wrote in their letter (.pdf).
Swartz, who helped
develop the RSS standard and was a cofounder of the advocacy group Demand
Progress, was indicted after he allegedly gained entry to a closet at MIT and
connected a laptop to the university’s network in order to download millions
of academic papers that were distributed by the JSTOR subscription service.
Although Swartz later handed over a hard drive that contained the documents, and
JSTOR did not pursue a complaint, the Justice Department pushed forward with
prosecuting Swartz, with U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz insisting that “stealing is
stealing.”
Swartz, who did some coding for Wired and was at one time
employed by Wired’s parent company, was reportedly offered a plea agreement that
would have had him serving 7-8 months in prison if he pleaded guilty to 13
felony counts. Prosecutors threatened that if the case went to trial they would
seek a prison sentence of 7-8 years. Swartz was also reportedly offered a
six-month prison sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, but turned down all
plea offers because he did not want to spend any time in prison or carry the
burden of a felony conviction, which would have restricted his choices in
life.
His family blamed his suicide in part on the overzealous
prosecution by the Justice Department.
In addition to wanting to know what influenced the Justice
Department’s decision to prosecute and whether Swartz’s advocacy work played a
role in that decision, the lawmakers want the Justice Department to tell them
why the superseding indictment was necessary after Swartz had already been
charged. They also want to know how the criminal charges and plea offer compared
to those in other cases brought under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, under
which Swartz was charged.
Demand Progress praised the committee’s decision to question
the Justice Department.
“We believe that a non-partisan inquiry into prosecutors’
handling of Aaron’s case will air important facts, demonstrate the over-breadth
of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — under which he was prosecuted, and might
even reveal misconduct on the part of the prosecutors who led the crusade
against him,” Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said in a
statement.
After Swartz’s
death, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts who was prosecuting his case said that
the actions of her office were “appropriate
in bringing and handling this case.”
“The career
prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law
they had taken an oath to uphold, and
did so reasonably,” U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz told reporters.
Ortiz also said that had Swartz been convicted, he would have
been confined to a “low security” facility.
Protestors have
organized a whitehouse.gov petition
demanding that the Obama administration remove Ortiz from her job. The petition
has garnered more than 25,000 signatures — the threshold at which the
administration is obliged to respond to the petition in one way or another.
Activists and law experts have also called for the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act to be revised to make clear distinctions between criminal
hacking and simpler acts of unauthorized access to computers, so that all
offenses are not prosecuted with the same heavy hand.
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