I wish we had more steady, long-term mainstream journalism on the case of Aaron Swartz. I was thinking after Darrell Issa's closed low-level staff briefing from the DOJ, and Holder's firm answer to Coryn that there was no prosecutorial misconduct, that we might see this whole hysterical uproar subside. Maybe not.
According to the Boston Globe, Issa is determined to continue and widen his probe, I'm not sure why, or under what pressure or protext or motivation.
Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said in an interview that he plans to expand his inquiry into how the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz of Massachusetts handled the case.
Issa said his committee is seeking information from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Swartz hacked computers, and JSTOR, the scholar database whose files he downloaded.
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Issa’s staff was recently briefed by the Justice Department on the rationale for the prosecution of Swartz, but Issa said the committee was left with many questions that he hopes will be answered in an expanded inquiry.
It's not not just the case, per se, but a larger agenda that involves questioning the CFAA in general and all hacker prosecutions (because it's not in the interests of Big IT to have their vast stable of unpaid employees face jail time for their "innovation" and "curiosity").
The Globe noted:
Two officials with knowledge of the House Oversight Committee briefing said the Justice Department pointed to Swartz’s past advocacy of free and unrestricted information online as evidence of his intent to distribute the documents. The officials confirmed a report in The Huffington Post that a Justice official referenced the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” that Swartz wrote in 2008, which called for “civil disobedience” toward copyright laws since “information is power.”
Of course, Quinn Norton is busy trying to tell anyone who will listen that there were four authors to this manifesto, that maybe Swartz didn't really author it, that maybe he didn't really sign it, etc. She feels quilty that she told the feds about its existence.
Apparently JSTOR is activated on this now as well:
JSTOR has begun informal communication with the committee and will cooperate in its investigation as needed, an official said. MIT, meanwhile, launched an internal inquiry on its actions related to Swartz and will release its findings in a matter of weeks, though officials wouldn’t comment further.
I'm really waiting for that MIT report. I don't think it will be unbiased given that the author of it, Hal Abelson, is a founder of Creative Commons. On the other hand, there is a certain "honour of uniform" that MIT may want to uphold here or they will be seen to be harassing hackers that in fact they are famous for promoting. They're going to tread carefully here. And I expect obfuscation for them. I espect them, like Chris Soghoian, to say, "I knew and liked Aaron, but what he did..." and trail off. They will exonerate their IT people. They will say they thought it was the Chinese, and they will then not exactly blame prosecutors who might expose them in a lie, but buck it back to them.
But here's the sort of thing that a real journalist came up with that not a single tech journo or blogger came up with out of this briefing -- that in fact neither Huffo or Slate would tell us (if they or their sources knew):
The briefing also touched on prosecutors’ knowledge of Swartz’s history of depression the two officials said, as critics contend that the prosecution contributed to the 26-year-old’s decision to take his own life. Swartz’s release on $100,000 bond in July 2011 came under a condition, among others from Judge Judith Dein, that he seek mental treatment as directed by pretrial services.
“I’m a little concerned about some mental health issues here,” Dein said during Swartz’s arraignment, according to a court recording of the proceedings. “I guess there’s been some concerns in the past about his ability to handle the situation.”
That's for sure.
It doesn't sound as if the "two officials" are not the same as those lower level "Congressional staffers" who talked to Huffpo, I guess. They could be other congressional members of the House Oversight Committee. Why? Because those congressional staffers never mentioned this very important fact of the judge's concern about Swartz's mental health and the ordering of treatment. That hardly sounds like an evil state trying to kill an innovative hacker now, does it.
Unlike the tech press, the Boston Globe tried to seek out a critic of the hysteria, Orin Kerr, who is not credible for the extremists because he used to be at the DOJ himself, and because he takes the libertarian rather than the copyleftist view on tech matters:
Orin S. Kerr, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, said what Swartz did “was pretty clearly a felony . . . this was not something that was even in the periphery of the statute.” Kerr nonetheless argued that the law’s punishments are overly harsh, adding that its broad language can criminalize something as minor as violating a terms of service agreement.
But this is a conflation of a more subtle argument Kerr makes on the blog Volokh Conspiracy -- he is distinguishing between the clear felony he believes Swartz committed, and the need to reform the law in general as it has too harsh punishments -- a separate issue. Because he's always maintained that the prosecutors properly applied the law.
Now comes the Truth-out gang. I have little use for this web site as it always has the sweaty feeling that all conspiratorially-minded sites do of fervent devotees of either Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn (a founder) or Ron Paul or worse. It has all the usual pro-Palestinian stuff like this anti-BDS post and that's a marker.
The author claims that the rejection by the DOJ of FOIA complains on Swartz are unlawful. But what's interesting is that while on this FOIA expedition, Ryan Shapiro, an MIT PhD student stumping for Swartz and his cause, finds out that the Swartz investigation is still open. That is, the criminal case is closed, but the investigation is open. Or at least, that's how he reports it:
A FOIA analyst at the Secret Service, which is under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, told Truthout Tuesday that despite the Justice Department dropping its case against Swartz, "our investigation is still open and we cannot release any information on that subject."
Investigative blogger Marcy Wheeler, who examined the court documents in Swartz's case, noted that the "involvement of the Secret Service just as [Swartz's case] evolved from a local breaking-and-entry case into the excessive charges ultimately charged makes it clear that this was a nationally directed effort to take down Swartz."
It's interesting to go over Wheeler's timeline. She believes Swartz's filing of an FOIA on a very precise question about Manning's treatment, based on David House's meeting with him in the brig at Quantico, was somehow what led to Secret Service interest in him, even though he had hacked MIT multiple times by then and the persistence of him doing that was what led to MIT IT personnel finding the computer on their LAN in the server closet on January 4, 2011, and to Swartz's arrest January 6, 2011.
I'd be happy if this case were closed now and I didn't have to spend voluntary time I don't really have much of to be blogging about it. I bother because I think it's very important that the criminality of hackers not become eluded and eroded and merged with "innovation" to absolve it, because the hacker culture is antithetical to human rights.
But I have a conviction like others that there's something behind all this that we're not hearing and it's going to be significant. And that "something" isn't that the government did something wrong, but that Swartz was involved in something like WikiLeaks or some other hack.
Why would the investigation still be open? Into what?
Why did Swartz need that transcript of House in the brig so badly? Why was it so important for him to show that Manning was badly treated? Swartz was no human rights activist as I have written many times. He wasn't a case-worker who picked up cases. He didn't work on Manning's case from what we can tell although he supported him. He supported WikiLeaks broadly. House himself pretty much had already given an account of his meeting in the brig on his own blog four days before Swartz filed the FOIA. What was the urgency to get the government's version? What was it about? Can House shed any light on this?
So what was up? Was Swartz afraid, for example, that Manning was telling people that Swartz had helped him? Or used scripts Swartz had made or distributed? Or there were people that Swartz and Manning knew in common involved in WikiLeaks or something? Or maybe he just had acquired a yen for FOIAs by that time and tried to write precise, wonky FOIAs to get information "just because"?
I've never understood why an MIT hacker was allowed to visit Bradley Manning in the brig, but maybe the government thought they could flush out of him something relative to their probe by taping his conversation when he met with Manning.
At this point, I feel as if there is quite a bit about this case we're not getting information about.
Imagine, back in 2011, the judge mandated Swartz to seek mental health treatment (did he?). And yet not a single story has given us this information until now.
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