Hacker's memorial —

Anonymous defaces MIT website with memorial for Aaron Swartz

MIT site temporarily calls Swartz prosecution "miscarriage of justice."

Visitors to the MIT website last night were greeted with a message from Anonymous about Aaron Swartz, calling the government's prosecution of the late open access activist a "grotesque miscarriage of justice."

It was run-of-the-mill website vandalism rather than a serious attack impacting MIT's back-end security. CNET caught a screenshot of the defacement while it was still online:

The "YourAnonNews" Twitter account reported "#MIT Owned by #Anonymous," and used Pastebin to provide the full text of the message that was temporarily on the MIT website. "Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for—freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it—enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing—an ideal that we should all support," the message stated.

Ars' Timothy B. Lee also used the phrase "grotesque miscarriage of justice" to describe the government prosecution of Swartz in an article on Saturday.

In its message on the MIT site, Anonymous also called for the "reform of computer crime laws and the overzealous prosecutors who use them," and a "reform of copyright and intellectual property law."

Swartz, 26, committed suicide Friday. He had been indicted for logging into MIT's network to gain access to the JSTOR database and download millions of academic journal articles. MIT announced yesterday that it will investigate its own involvement in the process that led to his legal battle. "It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy," MIT President Rafael Reif wrote.

Anonymous also claimed it will target the Department of Justice. The DOJ's website was reportedly offline for a little while Sunday night, but is back up.

Channel Ars Technica