Showing posts with label Issa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Issa. Show all posts

Friday, March 8, 2013

Aaron Swartz: Was the DOJ Prosecution Political or Something More?

Aaron Swartz: Was the DOJ Prosecution Political or Something More?

Nomadic Poilitics Aaron Swartzby Nomad


In what might seem as "stating the obvious" Huffington Post has an article about the prosecution / persecution by the Justice Department of Aaron Swartz. 
In a past post, we looked at the case in which Swartz, who committed suicide in January, had been indicted and faced prison time for downloading millions of academic articles from an online archive. 
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.
The 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,” Swartz wrote in the manifesto.