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Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Late Cyber-Activist Aaron Swartz as Tributes Flood the Internet

HeadlineJan 15, 2013

Federal prosecutors have dropped the charges against computer programmer and cyber-activist Aaron Swartz following his suicide on Friday at the age of 26. In an email to The Boston Globe, his attorney wrote the dismissal was “too little too late,” saying it “would have been welcome this time last week.” Aaron was facing up to 35 years in prison for entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading millions of articles provided by the nonprofit research service JSTOR. His family had said prosecutors were partially to blame for his death. A petition on the White House website to remove U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office over alleged overreach in the case has received more than 25,000 signatures, reaching the threshold needed to demand a response from the Obama administration. Tributes to Aaron Swartz are continuing to flood the Internet. Academics have posted links to PDFs of their own copyrighted work using the hashtag “#PDFtribute.” The group Anonymous hacked the MIT website and posted a statement calling the prosecution “a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for.”

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