Fans of dead data 'liberator' Swartz press Obama to sack prosecutor
'Aaron's Law' to ease 'outlandish' US computer laws
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
A new online petition has called for the firing of US attorney Carmen Ortiz for pursuing Aaron Swartz with charges that could have put him in prison for at least three decades.
Meanwhile, Democrat congresswoman Zoe Lofgren has drawn up a new bill called "Aaron's Law" to amend the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act used to prosecute Swartz until his death last week.
Internet prodigy Swartz, 26, took his life on Friday in the midst of a lengthy computer fraud case against him. The charges were brought after he copied 4.8 million scientific articles from the nonprofit journal archive JSTOR to allegedly redistribute online.
In the days after he was found dead at his New York home on Friday, Swartz's family said their son's suicide was "the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach".
Now Lofgren has announced on Reddit, the immensely popular discussion website Swartz helped build, her intention to put forward Aaron's Law. The bill aims to tighten up the Act's definition of fraud.
"There’s no way to reverse the tragedy of Aaron’s death, but we can work to prevent a repeat of the abuses of power he experienced," she wrote.
"The government was able to bring such disproportionate charges against Aaron because of the broad scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the wire fraud statute. It looks like the government used the vague wording of those laws to claim that violating an online service’s user agreement or terms of service is a violation of the CFAA and the wire fraud statute.
"Using the law in this way could criminalise many everyday activities and allow for outlandishly severe penalties."
Her proposed bill, which would need to be discussed and passed around the House of Representatives and the Senate to take effect, asks to change the CFAA to make it more specific by excluding certain violations of user agreements.
Meanwhile, a White House website petition to have US attorney Ortiz removed from office for "overreach" in Swartz's case has surpassed the 25,000 signatures it needs to land an official response. More than 35,000 people have signed the petition since it was created on Saturday.
Swartz was known to be depressed and took his life shortly after his legal team was unable to convince prosecuting lawyers to reduce the charges for "liberating" the JSTOR archive and help him avoid a long spell behind bars. ®
COMMENTS
Copyright law needs fixing
It has for too long been made too powerful by "MAFFIA" lobbyists such as the RIAA and MPAA. Now this is leading to suicides based on copyright of science research done using pubic money.
In the entertainment industry, for example, copyright law has already led to countless legal extortion claims against file sharers who are told to cough up $3K or be ruined. As it stands copyright law is abused by large corporations that use the RIAA, MPAA and the like to do their dirty work, to prevent bad PR.
Re: Not to speak ill of the dead...
troubled man finding a way out of bad decisions he had made
People who use terms like 'finding a way out' don't have a very good idea what they're talking about. People retain the will to live while being tortured, while imprisoned, during terminal illnesses, and amidst hopeless poverty and misery.
Suicide is not 'a way out' - it's a response to a situation which is quite literally intolerable. Humans have a primal - for obvious reasons - fear of and aversion to death, one even stronger than the drive for power or sex or anything else. People desperately want to stay alive. It's built in. For someone to commit suicide requires life to be such a waking nightmare that 'easy way out' - or *any* 'way out' - is an absolutely absurd way to describe it. If your hands were being held in a fire, you'd do almost anything to make it stop. If you were pinned under a boulder, you'd do almost anything to get free - but that doesn't mean that sawing your arm off with a pocket knife is 'the easy way out'.
Those who commit suicide may be incorrect about the impossibility of things being better, but that's in the nature of depression - though it's sometimes also true. But overcoming the instinct to remain alive requires such a terrible alternative that describing suicide as some kind of strategy for improvement is absurd.
what I find bizzare
is that JSTOR (the aggrieved party) actually urged the prosecutor to drop the charges. I understand why the state has the right to prosecute without the consent of the aggrieved but cases such as this make me wonder for a moment if that shouldn't be changed.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
