 "Aaron Swartz's suicide: Anonymous hacks two MIT sites")
Reddit co-founder and Internet freedom activist, Aaron Swartz’s suicide has sparked a volley of protests online, with many of them targeted at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT).
Swartz was due to be tried for allegedly stealing 4 million articles from JSTOR, a digital archive for academic articles. JSTOR had dropped the charges after the digital copies of the articles were returned. However the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) did not do the same and decided, along with the Massachusetts US Attorney to continue with charges against him.
Now it seems that hacker group Anonymous has come out and taken down two of MIT’s sites. One is the Cogeneration Project website. This is a ten year, forty million dollar initiative by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to generate its own electricity. This is the other url that has been hacked.
Anonymous’ message this time is a departure from its usual crazy anarchist rant. Instead the collective has called for a re-examination of computer laws and said that the government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for. Aaron was known support for Internet freedom and Creative Commons.
[caption id=“attachment_587118” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screengrab of the MIT website that has been hacked.[/caption]
Anonymous has also put out a wish list for reforms, detailed below:
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS ADWe call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.
Anonymous’ demands echo a lot of points generated by the debate around Swartz’s death. The fact that the prosecution thought that the Swartz was a felon and deserved 35 years in prison for Academic articles seems overstretched at best.
Meanwhile a tribute site has already been created for Aaron Swartz where people are sharing links to their academic articles for free. In fact, even JSTOR announced a couple of days before Swartz’s suicide, that they would make over 2 million of their articles free.
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