- The federal government charged Internet activist Aaron Swartz with 13 counts of fraud and other offenses before he committed suicide.
The Internet’s Own Boy: the Story of Aaron Swartz isn’t a movie designed to leave audiences ambivalent about its subject. We mourn our martyrs, and we shake a fist at the powers-that-be that drive them to martyrdom. Swartz hanged himself 18 months ago at the age of 26, and director Brian Knappenberger wants that fist shaken. Swartz’s cause was the untrammeled flow of information on the Internet, and he died awaiting trial on federal charges that he’d illegally downloaded millions of articles from JSTOR, an academic database. Swartz believed the information in these articles should be public property.
As Swartz’s legal predicament went from bad to worse on the screen, my thoughts drifted to last winter’s NATO 3 trial. This was the terrorism trial in Cook County Criminal Court that, if you casually followed it in the papers, you might have thought the government lost.
The Tribune story began, “Cook County prosecutors’ first-ever terrorism case collapsed Friday.” A defense attorney praised the jury for seeing through the prosecution’s scheme. “This was a political prosecution in every sense of the word,” he said.
