The White House has rebuffed a 60,000-signature petition calling for the district attorney responsible for prosecuting hacktivist Aaron Swartz to be sacked.
Carmen Ortiz, US attorney for the District of Massachusetts, courted controversy after she brought charges against Swartz in 2011 for his downloading of five million documents from the academic library JSTOR. These charges are widely thought to have contributed to the hacktivist’s suicide in 2014.
A statement issued by the White House said: "Aaron Swartz’s death was a tragic, unthinkable loss for his family and friends. Our sympathy continues to go out to those who were closest to him, and to the many others whose lives he touched."
"As to the specific personnel-related requests raised in your petitions, our response must be limited. Consistent with the terms we laid out when we began [petitioning platform] We the People, we will not address agency personnel matters in a petition response, because we do not believe this is the appropriate forum in which to do so."
The petition accuses Ortiz of using her powers to "hound" Swartz, threatening him with "a ruinous trial, life in prison and the ignominy of being a convicted felon". The petition also highlights how JSTOR had not wished to press criminal charges against him.
Despite the wishes of JSTOR, the federal government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where the theft occurred, continued to press criminal and civil charges respectively, with Swartz being threatened by as much as thirty-five years in prison and a $1m (£660,000) fine.
"A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path," the petition said.
Earlier in his life Swartz had been a prodigious computer programmer, most notably helping to create the feed syndication technology RSS at the age of 14, and was also a prominent advocate for an open Internet.
Photo credit Sage Ross ©
