Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann in a still from a CNBC documentary on the case of hacker Alberto Gonzalez.
U.S. assistant attorney Stephen Heymann built his career taking on hackers in computer crime cases. Now at least 25,000 people believe he took one such case too far–enough voices that the White House will have to respond to their calls that he be fired.
Over the weekend, a petition on Whitehouse.gov calling for the dismissal of Heymann reached 25,000 signatures, the threshold that requires a response from the administration under the rules outlined on the site. The outcry follows the suicide of activist Aaron Swartz last month, who was being prosecuted by Heymann for allegedly violating computer crime laws in his downloading of millions of academic papers from the website JSTOR.
The petition hit its goal after Swartz’s girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman posted a call for signatures in her blog late last week, calling for Heymann’s firing and an investigation into what she described as prosecutorial overreach in Swartz’s case.
“Heymann saw Aaron as a scalp he could take,” she wrote. “He thought he could lock Aaron up, get high-profile press coverage, and win high-fives from his fellow prosecutors in the lunchroom. Aaron was a way of reviving Heymann’s fading career. Heymann had no interest in an honest assessment of whether Aaron deserved any of the hell he was being put through.”
Heymann isn’t the only prosecutor the White House must now consider firing in the Swartz case. Another petition calling for the dismissal of Heymann’s boss, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, quickly reached more than 52,000 signatures in the days following Swartz’s suicide.
But Heymann holds special significance for hackers and digital activists. He serves as chief of the computer crime unit for Massachusetts’ U.S.’s attorney’s office, one of the first such operations in the country. In 1996, he led the prosecution of an Argentine man accused of hacking into Harvard’s computer network, a case that involved the first-ever Internet-based wiretap.
More recently, Heymann served as prosecutor in the case of a group of hackers involved in the unprecedented theft of hundreds of millions of credit card numbers from the networks of companies including TJ Maxx and Heartland Payment Systems. Heymann received a Department of Justice award for his convictions of five defendants in the case, which included a 15-year sentence for the most active member of the team, Alberto Gonzalez. But the case’s outcome was also controversial: One defendant, Stephen Watt, was sentenced to two years in prison despite claiming to have merely written one element of the software Gonzalez used. Another hacker involved in the case, Jonathan James, committed suicide.
Accusations that Heymann overreached in prosecuting Swartz have reached a much higher pitch. Swartz, after all, had no intention of profiting from the JSTOR articles he downloaded and even gave the files back to JSTOR, which then ceased to press charges against him. Swartz’s supporters including freedom of information activist Lawrence Lessig have attacked what they call prosecutorial overreach in the case. And two congressmen have also demanded the Department of Justice investigate and explain the prosecutors’ behavior.
A spokesperson at the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment, but U.S. Attorney Ortiz has previously defended Swartz’s prosecution and Heymann’s conduct: “I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life,” she wrote in a public statement last month. “I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably.”
Soon we’ll know whether the White House holds the same opinion of Heymann’s actions–and those of Ortiz herself.
Correction: This post originally included a photo that was labelled as Stephen Heymann. In fact it showed MIT president Rafael Reif. Apologies for the error.
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