The Justice Department will in the near future provide a brief to House lawmakers on its case against late Internet activist and entrepreneur Aaron Swartz, Boston.com’s Political Intelligence blog reported Tuesday.
Swartz was charged by federal prosecutors with 13 felony counts in July 2011, including computer and wire fraud, for downloading 4.8 million subscription journal articles from the Web. In January 2013 he took his own life. Though Swartz publicly posted online about struggling with depression, his family, friends and supporters in the tech industry and academia have made statements arguing that the federal prosecution was overzealous and contributed to his decision to take his own life.
The Justice Department will provide its written brief to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who previously told The Huffington Post he would be probing the Justice Department’s handling of the case and who compared Swartz’s crime to that of seminal classified information leaker Daniel Ellsburg, who leaked the Vietnam-era “Pentagon Papers.” Issa confirmed the committee would be getting the brief on Twitter on Monday evening.
The government dropped all charges following Swartz’s suicide. The lead federal prosecutor in Swartz’s case, U.S. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz of Massachusetts, previously released statements noting that her office didn’t seek the maximum penalties for Swartz and would not have pursued a different course of action.
