15 January 2013, 07:09 PM IST
It is hard not to feel a certain level of satisfaction looking at this petition on the White House site – asking for the removal of District Attorney Carmen Ortiz – the woman behind the Aaron Swartz case. The petition racked up the required 25,000 signatures in less than a week.
Enough and more has been written about Swartz's suicide. There is this touching piece by Quinn Norton, a lover and a friend. There's this piece by Glenn Greenwald detailing the ways in which Swartz was a fearless activist for freeing information and an open internet without regard for personal enrichment or these pieces by Cory Doctorow and Laurence Lessig about a brilliant and sensitive human being. Tim Berners Lee tweeted"Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep."
Swartz was a depressive, and had been one for a while. But his family is clearabout what drove him to his suicide: "It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."
But the Obama Department of Justice is unlikely to do anything – regardless petitions or parental anguish. The case of Aaron Swartz was one about open information – and the Obama administration – like any other Government - detests transparency. Ortiz is a close friend of Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder – whose tenure has seen some of harshest crackdowns on whistleblowers (more than all his predecessors combined) in a long time while absolving bankers and torturers of wrongdoing. The Department of Justice had been after Swartz ever since he took downloaded 19 million pages of court documents (not covered by copyright) from PACER, a system that charged 8 cents a page – using a trial membership.
The Swartz prosecution (dropped since his suicide) is just another milestone in a changing internet, where governments and corporations exercise greater and greater influence. We are already seeing it, around the world. Iran has a halal Internet. China monitors every post and expects ISPs to handover posters of 'illegal' information for punishment. And as for us – the Indian government is a "country under surveillance" on the Reporters Without Borders' Internet Enemies list – and with good reason – given Kapil Sibal's (later denied) tantrums about pre-screening user content on the web or the arrest of two girls for posting innocuous status updates after Bal Thackeray's death or where torrents are blocked because some company wants protection against copyright violations of its inexplicably viral hit.
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