Unless he engaged in autoerotic asphyxiation, Aaron Swart killed himself on purpose by hanging. Since he lived in Brooklyn, his use of a rope prevented one more senseless gun death.
Since you probably have no idea who he was (I didn’t), he was one of these 20 something Occupy type people – born with the gift from God of being a brilliant computer programmer – who decided his purpose in life was to fight for “social justice”, meaning that there is no need for property rights, and “information was meant to be free”.
In that spirit, he allegedly downloaded millions of journal articles from a subscription service named JSTOR. His apologists describe this act as a “victimless crime”, with which the owners of the copyrights and the US government strongly disagree. He was about to go on trial for his actions.
An interesting note – he will be buried where his parents live, in Highland Park Illinois. Highland Park is where the top 1% of the top 1% live. The mean (average) family income is $158,000 and the town is 91% non-Hispanic whites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Park,_Illinois
Highland Park is close to and demographically very similar to Glen Ellyn, the childhood home of Weather Underground co-founder and Barack Obama advisor William Ayers.
I read this morning that Swartz had been very critical of the Obama Administration. Strange…
Sad to hear about the death. I hadn’t heard of him until after the death. Not all “victimless crimes” are equal, some are more equal than others. 😉
If he went to their FTP server and accessed files that were unprotected and read a few articles, or copied the contents for reading later, that is one level, IMHO.
If on the other hand, he copied them and was selling them or distributing them free to potential subscribers of the site, that is an all together different scenario.
I am not an attorney and I don’t know what the details are on the current law, but historically, law had placed a large emphasis on the person’s intent.
Well, one indicator of intent is whether a person tries to hide what they are doing.
The details are that MIT runs this service that has online archuve access to something like 1,500 journals. He had an account that allowed limited free use to access the information as a non commercial user. He wrote scraping scripts to download the articles rapidly. They cancelled his account.
To speed up the process, he took his laptop and gained access to a wiring closet on the MIT campus in Cambridge Massachusetts (he lived in New York, remember). He was caught doing that. It’s the point MIT and the non-profit entity that manages the collections said enough is enough. MIT itself didn’t press charges.
That’s probably not the reason why Obama’s DoJ were so hot in teaching him (and others like him) a lesson – he had done the same thing to “liberate” millions of court documents behind a pay wall. His motives and methods are very similar to the Anonymous Group. It wouldn’t shock me if he was involved.
http://gizmodo.com/5975646/anonymous-hacks-mit-in-aaron-swartzs-name
Anonymous has put a message on MIT’s web site calling Aaron their friend and a supporter of their cause
Interesting observation:
Another person who, while clashing with the Feds, was also found hanged:
1) Deborah Jeane Palfrey
Don’t forget Vince Foster… Or the guy at the Mena Arkansas who committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head…