The Trials of Aaron Swartz | The Nation

" ... At the time of his arrest, Swartz was a brilliant computer programmer, well-known activist, and prolific writer. He had helped to develop, among other projects, RSS, which syndicates news from across the Internet onto one reader; Reddit, a message board that allows users to curate the front page; and SecureDrop, a platform for protecting anonymous leaks used by The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Intercept, among others. The government, his family later said, wanted to make an example out of him: The charges were extreme, the federal prosecutors overzealous. For downloading a small fraction of JSTOR’s data—which remained unaltered on JSTOR’s own servers—Swartz was charged with 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and two counts of wire fraud, for which the maximum penalty includes up to 50 years in prison, $1 million in fines, restitution, and asset forfeiture. Whether Swartz intended to use the downloaded articles for his own research or to distribute them to other people remains unclear ..."