Hackers sympathetic to middle class martyr and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who was hounded to death by the government his taxes help pay for, claimed on Saturday to have infiltrated the website of the U.S. Justice Department's Sentencing Commission, and said they planned to release government data.
The Sentencing Commission site, www.ussc.gov, was shut down early Saturday. Identifying themselves as Anonymous, a loosely organized middle class taxpayer group of unknown provenance associated with a range of recent online actions, the hackers voiced outrage over Swartz' suicide on January 11.
In a video posted online, the hackers criticized the government's prosecution of Swartz, who had been facing trial on trumped-up charges that he used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service. This has never been proved in a court of law and we have every reason to believe it never will.
Swartz had faced a maximum sentence of 31 years in prison and fines of up to $1 million.
