Defending the Government in the case of Aaron Swartz
It seems ironic that someone might freely write a story on a site, denouncing some of the actions of Aaron Swartz, a computer genius who sought freedom of expression on the internet through his invention of Reddit. While I do believe that Aaron Swartz was treated too harshly with the many allegations that were brought against him, he was not entirely free from blame in the legal cases he faced. Aaron Swartz, as depicted in the 2014 documentary, “The Internet’s Own Boy,” while at MIT, went into an unauthorized computer room in which he attempted to download countless JSTOR documents to a hard drive. Authorities noticed the laptop loading overnight and put up cameras capturing Aaron Swartz retrieving his laptop the next day. The police arrested him the same day. In court, Swartz was given the opportunity to make the case go away, if he agreed to serve three months in prison, as well as time in a halfway house. He refused, and as the case went on the charges accumulated, and Aaron was looking at as many as 35 years in prison.
Aaron Swartz is described by friends, family, and supporters alike, as a gentle genius, whose main goal in life was to make the world a better place to live in. Swartz felt that, as written in his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” that freedom to information was very important in leading to discovery. This Manifesto hinted that Swartz had the intention of releasing all the information from JSTOR onto the internet either as a competitor to JSTOR or freely. Whether or not this was his intention, the government was able to charge him. Critics of the authorities in the case of Aaron Swartz, believe that police did not consider Swartz past desire of “making the world a better place” and genuinely trying to fix problems. However, the government cannot know this for sure. Critics also might argue that trying to “make an example with Swartz” was wrong, but the dangers of widespread hacking cannot be overlooked. Today, hacking has received much attention as a threat to national security. Sam Biddle in his article, Here’s the Public Evidence Russia hacked the DNC — It’s not Enough, writes that, there is “good reasons to believe Russians had something to do with breaches into email accounts belonging to members of the Democratic party…” He admits that though there is good evidence that it happened, one must be careful in calling Russia the culprit. Nonetheless, the dangers of hacking can be astronomically important, and just because Swartz’ infraction was minor, such crimes cannot be treated lightly.
Aaron Swartz’ case became truly unfair to him and his family, but Swartz is not entirely free from blame. Swartz received a bargaining chip of three months in prison to make the entire problem go away. I feel like he should have been able to see the magnitude of the situation he was in and conceded and received poor advice by choosing to fight and avoid the charges. The crime itself was relatively minor, but after seeing Sony be hacked in 2011 by the large group of masked hackers, Anonymous, putting hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers at risk, it should be well understood that crimes involving computers are to be handled with an iron fist.
