Anonymous Leaves A Tribute To Aaron Swartz On MIT Website

Online hacktivist group, Anonymous bought down the official MIT website to pay a tribute to Aaron Swartz, a late internet activist and a great contributor to the cyberspace. ”We tender apologies to the administrators at MIT for this temporary use of their websites,”tells a postscript to a memorial note posted by them, on a sub-domain of the official MIT website. “We do not consign blame or responsibility upon MIT for what has happened, but call for all those feel heavy-hearted in their proximity to this awful loss to acknowledge instead the responsibility they have — that we all have — to build and safeguard a future that would make Aaron proud”.

Aaron Swartz:
Aaron Swartz was the creater of the RSS feed and co-founder Reddit, Demand Progress, Avaaz and a brave-heart in the SOPA/PIPA campaign. He committed sucide on January 11, 2013 in New York at the age of 26. Schwartz was in the news in 2011 for taking 4 million documents from JSTOR, an online aggregator of scientific journals. He was charged with computer fraud by the U.S. Attorney Massachusetts.

Hacked Website Details:

" In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz, November 8, 1986 – , Requiescat in pace.

A brief message from Anonymous.

Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing — an ideal that we should all support.

Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron’s act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences.

Our wishes
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.

For in the end, we will not be judged according to what we give, but according to what we keep to ourselves.

Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace."