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" COMMON MAN (Comes to the center of the stage, having taken off his mask): I&amp;#039;m breathing . . . Are you breathing too? . . . It&amp;#039;s nice, isn&amp;#039;t it? It isn&amp;#039;t difficult to keep alive, friends. Just don&amp;#039;t make trouble or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that&amp;#039;s expected.  \u2014Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons, Act II. The Boston Globe went long this morning on the death by suicide of Aaron Swartz \u2014 most of which, ironically, is behind the newspaper&amp;#039;s paywall \u2014 including a close examination of the relentless breaking-a-butterfly-on-a-wheel pursuit of the young activist by the office of United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz up here in Boston, as well as a deep look into the complicity in that pursuit by the administration at MIT. Kevin Cullen, the best cityside columnist in America now that Breslin&amp;#039;s hung &amp;#039;em up, weighed in as well. If it was beyond scandalous that Aaron Swartz was facing prison time for downloading a bunch of obscure academic treatises, it is beyond tragic that he is now dead. Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment last Friday, and while we will never know for sure why, many who know him best say that prosecutors bullied him to the grave. At the least, prosecutors lacked proportionality and basic humanity and they tried to imprison an emotionally vulnerable young man who didn&amp;#039;t make a penny from his alleged crimes.  (Ortiz is still considered something of a political comer here in the Commonwealth (God save it!). Good luck running for office, Carmen, with every hacker in the known universe targeting every campaign you ever run for the rest of your life. Local media writer Dan Kennedy detailed how there&amp;#039;s been more than a whiff of the authoritarian surrounding Ortiz&amp;#039;s whole career as a prosecutor, specifically in regards to free speech.) I spent a long time thinking about this case. I needed to disentangle the personal from the political in the death of someone I did not know. I needed to understand, at least feebly, what it was that Swartz did in his life and his activism. I needed to try to understand, at least feebly, what it was that Swartz did and why so many people decided to break so much rock in his pursuit. I came to only two conclusions. The first is that every government ever conceived has taken as a kind of internal imperative that the governed out there cannot be trusted with too much information. Of course, the Founders said a lot of brave things about how an informed populace is necessary to the survival of self-government. Jefferson said he&amp;#039;d prefer newspapers without a government rather than the reverse. John Adams talked about the &amp;quot;indisputable, indefeasable, divine&amp;quot; right of the people to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge...of the conduct and characters of their rulers.&amp;quot; Once in high political office, however, even these guys behaved the way that rulers always behave. Too much information dispersed too widely may be essential to self-government, but it also can be a threat to the public order, and we cannot have that, even if later generations will cast us in marble and make HBO miniseries about how great we are. There is no longer any question that the current administration has decided that the people have an &amp;quot;indisputable, indefeasible, divine right&amp;quot; to only that information which the administration sees fit to release. It has pursued leakers with a vigor that would have impressed the late Egil (Bud) Krogh, except using U.S. Attorneys and not Cuban burglars for hire. It has slapped Bradley Manning into what passes in the 21st Century for a dungeon. It has made a cartoon villain out of the WikiLeaks phenomenon, and out of Julian Assange in particular. I believe that part of the reason that it has adopted the laughable &amp;quot;Look forward and not back&amp;quot; legal strategy as regards to the people guilty of torture, and as regards to the people who wrecked the economy, is that it doesn&amp;#039;t want the detailed information about either of those scandals released to the public, which cannot be trusted to behave itself properly. And this administration pursued Aaron Swartz not because he downloaded information, but because he dispersed it. It was the dissemination of the information that brought down on him the abandoned wrath of Carmen Ortiz and her superiors in Washington. It was because Aaron Swartz told us what he knew. There has been some talk about how what happened in this case us somehow a function of the new culture of the Internet. I think that answer is correct as far as it goes, but I&amp;#039;m not sure it goes anywhere near far enough. Power has sought to stifle inconvenient speech since John Peter Zenger was a child, and the vigor of that pursuit increased proportionally with the speed of dissemination. This is because, at its root, the government&amp;#039;s reaction to that speech is invariably panic. As more information becomes more easily available, the more frantic and unreasoning the panic. It should not be necessary to point out that the coming of the Internet has thrown this dynamic into hyperdrive. It seems to have blossomed into a kind of full-blown paranoia about this strange new world and the awesome power it contains to disrupt the public order and to frighten all the horses. And it&amp;#039;s not just the government who feels this way, either. Corporations live in bunkered dread against the unwashed hordes of the Intertoobz as well. And you don&amp;#039;t have to wear a Reynolds Wrap fedora to wonder whether or not the government cracked down on Aaron Swartz because some of America&amp;#039;s giants of industry were fearful that they might be next after JSTOR. When the government and the corporate world share a dread over something the rest of us value, and they act in concert against it, then very bad things can happen to self-governing republics. Which brings me to my second conclusion \u2014 Aaron Swartz ran facefirst into a law-enforcement and prosecutorial culture that we have allowed to run amok for far too long. It began with drugs. It intensified with the &amp;quot;war on terror.&amp;quot; Preventive detention \u2014 though they don&amp;#039;t call it that \u2014 has been mainstreamed, due process sacrificed to efficiency. Investigation without cause has been normalized in our daily lives, through mandatory drug testing and roadblocks and a dozen other ways we barely think about any more. Personal privacy has been rendered less important than official secrecy in the general scheme of things. We want \u2014 nay, demand convictions, and all barriers to them be damned. Back when rogue prosecutor Mike Nifong went crazy and ginned up a rape prosecution against several members of the Duke lacrosse team, there was a great deal of horror at how &amp;quot;the system&amp;quot; could have gone so horribly wrong. But it didn&amp;#039;t. It just got aimed for once at people with the financial and social wherewithal to fight back. There are minor-league Mike Nifongs in every precinct house and every federal law-enforcement operation and every DA&amp;#039;s office and all throughout the branch offices of the Department Of Justice. There are &amp;quot;Duke rape cases&amp;quot; happening every day in alleys and on streetcorners of every city, and on the dusty backroads on the outskirts of nowhere. They are there because we want them to be there. The cases happen because we want them to happen. Aaron Swartz ran into this culture here in Boston and now he&amp;#039;s dead, and people are angry at how the system operated in this case. They should be, but they should be angry not because the system failed, but because the system worked. It operated in exactly the way we have said as a society we want it to operate every time we cheer for &amp;quot;terrorist&amp;quot; arrests based on evidence produced by agents of the FBI. It operated in exactly the way we have said as a society it should operate every time we support warrantless wiretaps, or undercover provocateurs, or the denial of counsel to defendants who scare us the most. Our conduct, all of us, is accessorial to his death. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17173/the-case-of-aaron-swartz/?click=news>