Documents Reveal Reddit Co-Founder Aaron Swartz Was Caught Up in Warrantless FBI Data Collection That Would Later Be Used Against Him

[steven36]

Shocking new documents obtained by Property of the People reveal that Reddit co-founder and famed digital activist Aaron Swartz was caught up in warrantless FBI email data collection which would later be used against him in an unrelated case.

 

Swartz is widely recognized as the face of everything wrong with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

 

 

In 2013, Swartz killed himself after being aggressively prosecuted for downloading academic articles from a subscription-based research website JSTOR – at MIT, his university – with the intention of making them available to the public. He was facing 35 years in prison for his efforts to open access to scientific publications to wider audiences.

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“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves,” Swartz wrote in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. “Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.”

 

The newly released documents reveal that in 2008, roughly five years prior to the case that would ultimately lead to him taking his own life, his emails were caught up in an investigation into al Qaeda.

Later that year, Swartz came under investigation by the FBI who were seeking to determine if he had violated any laws by downloading millions of court documents from PACER. The government ultimately did not press charges in that case because the documents were public.

However, according to the new report by Dell Cameron at Gizmodo, while the FBI was trying to build a case against the popular activist, they “began quietly building a profile of the oft-described technology ‘wunderkind,’ noting, for example, his involvement in the creation of the formatting language Markdown and RSS 1.0, and jotting down the various code frameworks that Swartz had helped to create and organizations that he had helped to found. Eventually, with all open source avenues exhausted, an FBI employee sat down at a computer terminal that, to most people, would appear plucked straight from the 1980s. The employee ran a search using the bureau’s automated case support system, a portal to the motherlode of FBI investigative files.”

 

When the FBI employee searched Swartz’ website domain name, it got a hit, which revealed that his domain was involved in an international terrorism investigation — specifically into al Qaeda.

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“That any information about Swartz was collected during an Al Qaeda investigation—only to be retrieved nearly two years later for totally unrelated purposes—adds a familiar and sympathetic face to a controversial procedure in intelligence gathering commonly referred to as a ‘backdoor search.’ That is, the FBI gathering information about Americans who are not accused of crimes, often without a warrant; storing that information in databases, sometimes for years; and later accessing it during the course of another investigation that ultimately has nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever. (Backdoor searches are most commonly associated with Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, an authority that was unavailable to the FBI at the time.),” Cameron reports.

 

Details of the terrorism case remain unknown, but it has become all too common to hear of innocent Americans having their information swept up in these investigations. It is possible that it was part of the FBI’s efforts to target anti-war activists.

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We just released new #FOIA lawsuit docs revealing FBI investigation involving #AaronSwartz years before previously known. Involves Al Qaeda, troubling civil liberties issues, & likely national security letters. Great coverage by @dellcam https://t.co/GfKPPyqb2l

— PropertyOfThePeople (@PropOTP) December 14, 2018

 

 

The warantless stockpiling of information that would later be used against him should concern everyone.

 

“Just as Aaron Swartz’s email was apparently picked up here, you could, for instance, have a reporter or some source information scooped up and mined later,” attorney Gabe Rottman, director of the Reporters Committee’s technology and press freedom project told Gizmodo. “And that’s a matter of great concern.”

 

 

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[straycat19]

It is obvious that the writer of this article has no law background whatsoever.  A warrant isn't required to have a person provide information, only a subpoena.  A subpoena doesn't even need to be signed by a judge or executed by law enforcement.  Any attorney can create a subpoena and any person over the age of 18 and not connected with the case can issue the subpoena.  So a warrantless access to data doesn't make it illegal.  That data could have very well been provided under a subpoena and stored.  Which isn't illegal.

 

Bunch of ignorant clowns trying to make a few bucks publishing on the internet when their actual medium should be toilet paper, just before they wipe and flush.

[steven36]

13 hours ago, straycat19 said:

It is obvious that the writer of this article has no law background whatsoever.  A warrant isn't required to have a person provide information, only a subpoena.  A subpoena doesn't even need to be signed by a judge or executed by law enforcement.  Any attorney can create a subpoena and any person over the age of 18 and not connected with the case can issue the subpoena.  So a warrantless access to data doesn't make it illegal.  That data could have very well been provided under a subpoena and stored.  Which isn't illegal.

 

Bunch of ignorant clowns trying to make a few bucks publishing on the internet when their actual medium should be toilet paper, just before they wipe and flush.

You can read the original report here  with the proofs .

 

FBI Secretly Collected Data on Aaron Swartz Earlier Than We Thought—in a Case Involving Al Qaeda

https://gizmodo.com/fbi-secretly-collected-data-on-aaron-swartz-earlier-tha-1831076900

 

What your talking about is not the point of it no way , your as about as ignorant as my Step dad is about the news  , The point is the FBI investigates someone  for something they didn't  even do on the internet  and  will use it against you years  latter on should concern anyone , if you ever get on there shit list they most likely have a bunch of info on you for something you didn't even do.. If it's legal  it should be made illegal they should not  be able to hold on peoples data  from  years ago and they did not even commit a crime,  it should not be on  there record and should be destroyed like the NSA was made to destroy a bunch stuff they had when they made the freedom act .

 

When I got arrested before  they only bring up past charges on me that i was found guilty of they don't bring up stuff the law investigated me for and it never went to court because i didn't do it .   So they should not  be able to use the data they got a subpoena for  some crime  they had no evidence for in another case latter on . They most likely used terrorism as and excuse to investigate this guy and they most likely knew he was not involved  because they wanted to shut him up so they abused there powers .And they waited tell years latter  tell they thought they had proof of  him messing up to pin him on something,  now they have his blood on there hands.  that's harassment .

 

Fact is i had a friend they watched for years for one thing and they never could catch him on it ,so as soon as he  got caught for anything they threw the book at him,  3 years in prison he got.

 

Good thing Trump cleaned up the FBI and most of them morons that worked for them when this happened are long gone by now.

 

[knowledge-Spammer]

alot of things done to him to  i watched this long time ago i think maybe u guys like to watch its sad how this all started with him

he was trying to do the right thing but just did it the wrong ways   but he was right  in what he did i think