Aaron Swartz was arrested and prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for illegally accessing and downloading academic files from JSTOR – but committed suicide before any trial. He has since become a cause célèbre for protests against the CFAA and in favor of greater openness and sharing on the internet (although he had long been an active campaigner for the latter).
The Swartz estate has since sought the release of previously sealed documents pertaining to his prosecution. The government agreed to this ‘subject to specific limitations’. MIT and JSTOR also want to review material pertaining to their role, and in particular to limit the names of people questioned by law enforcement together and details of their network security. The estate for its part requested full disclosure of the documents, quoting “the presumptive right of the public to access criminal proceedings as a reason favoring disclosure of the contested materials.”
United States District Judge Nathanial Gorton ruled yesterday to allow the disclosure of the agreed documents, but also allowed the interventions of the government and MIT/JSTOR. He ruled, “that no presumptive right of access extends to most of the discovery materials at issue and will therefore afford the claimed interest of the estate little deference.” With no ‘presumptive right’, the judge instead exercised his own views on the situation.
His conclusion is that knowing ‘who’ said ‘what’ will add little to an understanding of what happened: “a minor concern considering that the content within those documents will be largely unaltered.” He also noted that parties involved in the prosecution had already suffered from and been threatened by activist supporters of Swartz. “Most troubling,” he noted, “in February, 2013 an unidentified individual called MIT and reported that a armed gunman was on campus seeking to harm the president of MIT in retaliation for its involvement in the events surrounding Swartz's death.” Although a hoax, “MIT's campus was locked down for several hours while law enforcement searched for evidence of a gunman.”
The result is a compromise: “the Court will allow the estate's motion, in part, and enable it to disclose discovery materials in its possession after redaction of the identity of individuals and sensitive network information.” Proposals from the two sides on how this should be achieved are required by 27 May. “Even without names,” notes Joe Mullin in Ars Technica, “the soon-to-be-released documents should shed plenty of new light on what happened behind the scenes during the contentious Swartz prosecution.”