Aaron Swartz
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Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz’s heartbroken dad yesterday blamed the US government for his son’s suicide in an emotional eulogy at the young man’s funeral.
“Aaron did not commit suicide — he was killed by the government. And [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] betrayed all its basic principles” in helping the feds, said grieving dad Robert Swartz to 200 mourners packing Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Ill.
“Aaron did something that wasn’t illegal and was destroyed by it,’’ Robert added. “He could have done so much more.”
Aaron, 26, hanged himself Friday in his Brooklyn apartment amid charges that he had illegally hacked into millions of archived MIT documents.
As the feds bore down in a case that many experts considered basically much ado about nothing, Aaron became so tormented that he finally “fell into the pain,’’ said his weeping girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman.
“Aaron wanted so bad to change the world. He believed you had to see the world for how it really was to change it,” she told mourners through tears.
“With this [upcoming] trial and everything he was facing the last two years, I think [Aaron] fell into the pain.
“I love him, I miss him and I’ve learned so much from him,” she said.
Mourners included Aaron’s stricken mother, Susan, and two younger brothers, Noah and Ben.
Also attending the service were members of the hacktivist group Anonymous — which offered its own defiant “tribute” yesterday.
The group hacked into two Web sites run by MIT — where Aaron had been studying ethics when he infiltrated its computer systems — to post an “in memoriam.’’
“The situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of US computer-crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes,” Anonymous wrote.
Aaron had planned to post the MIT documents on the Web as a statement in favor of freedom of information. He faced decades behind bars and millions of dollars in fines.
He killed himself two days after his lawyer had futilely tried for a second time to negotiate a no-jail plea deal with prosecutors. But the government’s lawyers had insisted Aaron do at least six months behind bars.
Assistant US Attorney Steve Heymann in Boston was leading the probe. It was revealed yesterday that he also was the prosecutor pushing the 2008 hacking case against Jonathan James, 24, who wound up committing suicide, too.
Heymann could not be reached for comment.