Web activist's dad blames govt for death

2013-01-16 09:39

Aaron Swartz hanged himself after pleading not guilty to the charge of stealing scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an attempt to make them freely available. (Pernille Ironside, ThoughtWorks, AP

Highland Park - Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz was "killed by the government", his father told mourners on Tuesday during his son's funeral in suburban Chicago.

Swartz, who help create Reddit and RSS, the technology behind blogs, podcasts and other web-based subscription services, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment. He was facing federal charges that alleged he illegally gained access to millions of articles from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer archive.

Robert Swartz said during the service in Highland Park that his son was "hounded by the government, and MIT refused him", the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

"He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles," he said.

Swartz, 26, was facing charges that carried a maximum penalty of decades in prison. His trial was scheduled to begin in April.

US Attorney Carmen Ortiz had no comment about Robert Swartz's remarks, Ortiz spokesperson Christina DiIorio-Sterling said.

Swartz's family also lashed out against prosecutors on Saturday, saying the death was "the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach".

Swartz's case highlighted society's uncertain, evolving view of how to treat people who break into computer systems and share data not to enrich themselves, but to make it available to others.

Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the internet, and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, director of the Safra Centre for Ethics where Swartz was once a fellow, both spoke at the funeral.

"We felt the indictment was nonsense and that he would be acquitted," Berners-Lee told the newspaper after the service.

- AP