Did federal prosecutors hound 26 year old computer "wunderkind"Swartz to suicide?

[No Elephants]

Jan 16, 11:47 PM EST

To supporters, Swartz was protagonist for a cause
By DENISE LAVOIE and ALLEN G. BREED
Associated Press

<snip>

"It was an act of personal risk," said James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School who had known Swartz for six years. "I don't think he understood just how much the system would come down on him over it."

Swartz, a wunderkind who helped create Reddit and RSS, the technology behind blogs, podcasts and other Web-based subscription services, was found dead Friday in his New York apartment.

Swartz's friends and family blame federal prosecutors for his suicide, saying they pursued him relentlessly in the years since he helped post millions of federal court documents for free online rather than the few cents per page charged by the government through its electronic archive. He was never indicted. But three years later, he was charged in Boston with using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to download nearly 5 million academic articles from an online clearinghouse for scholarly journals.

His lawyer, Elliot Peters, said prosecutors were insisting he plead guilty to all 13 felony charges and serve four to six months in prison or go to trial and face up to 35 years. Swartz rejected that offer, saying he didn't want to be branded a felon.

As you may or may not know, the PATRIOT Act classes copyright violation as "terrorism."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_invocations_of_the_Patriot_Act#Investigating_copyright_infringement

Things that used to be simply a violation of civil or criminal law are now terrorist acts.

Can you imagine a kid turning in a parent for xeroxing a photo of Mickey Mouse to decorate for a birthday party?

Do we have CIA agents watching all the Kinko style places in the country?

26 years old and he had already helped create Reddit and RSS. Who knows what he might have accomplished?

[Enthusiast]

1. It started in 2,000 when the stole the election............nt

As you may or may not know, the PATRIOT Act classes copyright violation as "terrorism."

[No Elephants]

2. Maybe.

Maybe it started when politicians started "governing (snicker) with their own re-elections and financial well-being as their first priority.

Maybe it started when the lobbyists overrunning Washington, D. C., started muliplying exponentially, circa 1980.

Maybe it started when the Koch brothers got into politics.

Maybe it started when white Southern males took over the Democratic Party--both times.

I find very little reason to blame Republicans in general or Bush in particular for the current state of affairs.

The PATRIOT Act has been re-passed under Obama. I think I heard he made it even more far-reaching.

Republicans have always been Republicans. The solution used to be to vote them out--or to vote out whichever party you thought had taken the nation and your family in the wrong direction.

As best I can tell, the country and our political broke down when Republicans ceased to have real opposition from Democrats and, if anything, got collusion.