Feds Used Aaron Swartz's Political Manifesto Against Him

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.

Here is an excerpt from Swartz's brief manifesto:

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

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. 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.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who has come under fire for the Swartz prosecution on accusations she abused computer hacking laws, offered Swartz a six-month plea deal in the weeks before Swartz's death. Swartz refused the offer.

Prosecutors did not immediately respond for comment.

The prosecution, in part, tested the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1984 to enhance the government's ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality.

The government, however, has interpreted the anti-hacking provisions to include activities such as violating a website's terms of service or a company's computer usage policy.

The indictment accused Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. The grand jury indictment also notes that Swartz didn't provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network. Swartz also allegedly sneaked an Acer laptop bought just for the downloading into a closet at MIT in order to get a persistent connection to the network.

Swartz hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents, according to the indictment.

Swartz is no stranger to the feds being interested in his skills at prodigious downloads.

In 2008, the federal court system decided to try out allowing free public access to its court record search system PACER at 17 libraries across the country. Swartz went to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago and installed a small PERL script he had written. The code cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from PACER every three seconds. In this manner, Swartz got nearly 20 million pages of court documents, which his script uploaded to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service.

While the documents are in the public record and free to share, PACER normally charges 10 cents per page. Swartz was not prosecuted for the PACER activities.