The president of MIT released a statement of contrition yesterday regarding the university’s involvement in the federal case against Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday.
Swartz, 26, had been facing up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in charges stemming from the distribution of academic journals downloaded from the campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man, who touched the lives of so many,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said.
“It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”
Reif also called for a “thorough analysis” of the university’s involvement.
The emotional statement came after Swartz’s lawyer called the case against his client “horribly overblown” and his family called his death a “product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”
Even officials at JSTOR, the subscription service from which Swartz allegedly stole, have criticized the actions of the US Attorney’s Office in Boston.
Swartz was arrested on the campus of MIT in 2011 after downloading more than 4 million files on a laptop hidden in a networking closet there. His trial was slated for April
He maintained that the materials gathered from JSTOR and other databases should be available for public use.
His crusades for Internet freedom made him somewhat of a folk hero, but ultimately led to his downfall.
The Internet community has mourned the loss of Swartz, who has been described as a genius.
At the age of 14, he creating the technology behind RSS feeds. He went on to co-found Reddit.com, a social-news and entertainment site whose users either post links to content or create their own.
The hacker group Anonymous briefly hacked into the pages of MIT’s Web site and vowed to target the Department of Justice.
“Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice,” the hacker group said in a statement.
A fierce defender of public Web freedom, Swartz also founded Demand Progress, which fought government attempts to place restrictions on Internet use.
Swartz’s funeral will be tomorrow in his native Illinois, at the Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park.