The subsequent outrage over Swartz’s death, voiced by both critics of US computer-crimes laws and of aggressive prosecutorial tactics commonly employed by the country’s judiciary, has now led to a “formal bipartisan involvement” from Republican California Rep. Darrell Issa and Democratic Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, The Los Angeles Times reports on Wednesday.
The two lawmakers, reportedly the “top watchdogs” of government performance in the US Congress, have asked Attorney General Eric Holder in a Monday letter to the Justice Department to explain the federal prosecution of Swartz, a 26-year-old popular ‘hacktivist’ and co-founder of social news site Reddit that was found dead in his New York apartment earlier this month.
“Many questions have been raised about the appropriate level of punishment sought by prosecutors for Mr. Swartz’s alleged offenses, and how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, cited in 11 of 13 counts against Mr. Swartz, should apply under similar circumstances,” the pair wrote in their letter, as quoted in the Times report.
The two lawmakers further pointed out in their letter that government prosecutors had filed “amended charges that upped the case’s maximum penalties to 50 years in prison.”
Representatives Issa and Cummings also demanded from the US Justice Department to explain what influenced the decision by federal prosecutors to charge Swartz the way they did and whether he was being singled out for his open-Web advocacy.
According to the report, the two also asked to know how the charges against Swartz compared with other identical cases, what type of plea bargains were offered to him and why, and whether they had evidence pointing to other hacking by the internet activist, who has in the past censured the joint US-Israeli attempts to launch cyber attacks on Iranian computer networks.
Moreover, the report adds, Republican Texas Senator John Cornyn also forwarded a letter to the US attorney general on January 18 asking “whether the prosecution of Swartz was retaliation for his abundant open-records requests.”
Before his death, Swartz was threatened with decades in prison for downloading millions of academic articles from scholarly database, JSTOR, via the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s network.
Although JSTOR refused to press charges against Swartz, US government attorneys decided to move ahead with a criminal prosecution anyway.
Following Swartz’s death, his family and friends charged that US attorney’s office in Boston had “hounded” Swartz to his death, while his father insisted during his funeral that the US government had killed his son.
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