Hundreds honor information activist Swartz
Portraying his suicide as the product of injustice, friends and supporters at a memorial Saturday for free-information advocate Aaron Swartz called for changing computer-crime laws and the legal system itself.
At a New York City ceremony that was part tribute and part rallying cry, Swartz — who killed himself in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, apartment as he faced trial on hacking charges — was painted as a precocious technologist, erudite activist and hounded hero. One speaker called him nothing less than an “Internet saint.”
To prosecutors, the 26-year-old Swartz was a thief whose aims to make information available didn’t excuse the illegal acts he was charged with: breaking into a wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and tapping into its computer network to download millions of paid-access scholarly articles, which he planned to share publicly.