Feds Used Aaron Swartz's Political Manifesto Against Him | Threat Level | Wired.com

"The prosecution of Aaron Swartz was motivated, in part, by the 2008 'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto' the internet activist had penned advocating for civil disobedience against copyright law, Swartz’s attorney confirmed Friday. The revelation underscores that the hacking charges against the former director of Demand Progress were bolstered by the 26-year-old’s philosophy of a world unhindered by copyright law, a world in which he said it was a 'moral imperative' to unshackle the 'privatization of knowledge.' The Huffington Post first revealed the matter Friday, citing anonymous sources familiar with a closed-door briefing between the Justice Department and members and staff of the House Oversight Committee. Swartz, who had also written about his own depression, was found dead at his Brooklyn apartment last month after committing suicide. He was under indictment (.pdf) in Massachusetts for more than a dozen counts of computer hacking and wire fraud in connection to the downloading of millions of academic articles from a subscription database at MIT. An internet sensation who helped develop the Creative Commons and was part of a small team that sold Reddit to Wired parent company Condé Nast, Swartz had apparently planned to release to the public the millions of JSTOR academic papers he downloaded. His attorney, Elliot Peters, said prosecutors were 'very focused' on the manifesto Swartz penned from Italy. 'They were very focused on it, and appeared to be planning to use it as evidence of Aaron’s intent to take the JSTOR material and somehow post it online to make it available for all,' Peters told Wired on Friday. 'They had spent a lot of energy investigating that document — who wrote it, whether it conveyed Aaron’s point of view, etc.' The government, Peters said, 'had also subpoenaed various versions of the document from the Internet Archive,' Peters said."