Aaron Swartz Was Targeted by Feds Over His Activism

The Department of Justice admitted that Aaron's Swartz past activism played a role in his prosecution, according to a new report.

The revelation came during a briefing led by Steven Reich, an associate deputy attorney general, in front of the Congressional Oversight Committee, which is investigating the government's prosecution of the late activist and coder, who committed suicide on Jan. 11.

The Huffington Post initially reported the news. A committee aide later confirmed the report to Mashable. "That is consistent with what the investigators heard from the Justice Department," the aide said.

Prosecutors focused on Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto." The federal prosecutors told the committee, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), that the manifesto proved Swartz had malicious intent when he downloaded millions of scholarly articles from the online database JSTOR. In other words: he downloaded the documents to share them widely.

Swartz was facing criminal charges for his alleged downloading of the JSTOR articles at the time of his death. He was potentially facing 50 years in jail and $1 million in fines. Many of Swartz's family and supporters believe the government's prosecution was overzealous and led to his suicide.

In the manifesto, published online in 2008, Swartz made a passionate case for the Open Access Movement, which advocates for free and easy access to scientific research.

"We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive," Swartz wrote. "We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access."

"It's called stealing or piracy," Swartz continues, referring to people "liberating the information locked up by the publishers," in other words, the "guerrilleros" of the open access movement. "But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy," he wrote.

Critics see this revelation as proof that the government was going after Swartz for his activism. Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer and blogger at Harper's magazine, told Mashable that the report struck him as "extremely revealing."

"The more that comes out doesn't make the position taken by the Justice Department seem more reasonable, the more of it comes out the more ridiculous their position is,” he said in a phone interview.

For Horton, Swartz was viewed as an "effective advocate of policies contrary to their views; so he was their enemy," he said. "To try to criminalize someone over that is completely unacceptable."

What's more, the manifesto itself wasn't that threatening, Horton said. As blogger Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes, "[The manifesto is] not quite as extreme as some make it out to be," since it refers to material that is out of copyright and it also talks about buying access to databases before releasing its contents online. "Apparently, the DoJ thought it was a reason to throw the book at Swartz, even if he hadn't actually made any such works available," he writes.

Reich also told congressional staffers that they offerred Swartz a plea deal that would have sent him to jail for three months, according to HuffPo's anonymous sources. Additionally, the sources said the briefing gave staffers the impression that the Justice Department wanted to put Swartz in jail to justify the prosecution. At the time of publishing, Mashable's comment request to Reich was unanswered.

Last week, the White House issued a directive expanding access to publicly-funded scientific research. The decision was applauded by Open Access supporters.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Quinn Norton.