Marcia Hoffman, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed. “It’s a great first step,” she told Forbes. “But if it’s trying to make sure what happened to Aaron can’t happen to someone else, it needs to do more.”
Investigating Carmen Ortiz
Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has told the Huffington Post that he is investigating the actions of the US Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts, led by Carmen Ortiz.
“I’m not condoning [Swartz’s] hacking, but he’s certainly someone who worked very hard,” Issa said. “Had he been a journalist and taken that same material that he gained from MIT, he would have been praised for it. It would have been like the Pentagon Papers.”
Swartz faced a theoretical maximum sentence of 35 years in prison. Issa told the Huffington Post that the sentence “does seem like it was an awful lot. I’ll make a risky statement here: Overprosecution is a tool often used to get people to plead guilty rather than risk sentencing.”
Ortiz’s tactics were also savaged by Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO). “The charges were ridiculous and trumped-up,” he told The Hill. “It’s absurd that he was made a scapegoat. I would hope that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.” Polis labeled Swartz a “martyr.”
Issa chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Lofgren, Issa, and Polis are all members of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department.
They were also three of the most prominent opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act. Swartz and the organization he founded, Demand Progress, helped to organize the grassroots opposition to the legislation. We interviewed Lofgren at CES last week.
The Obama administration is also facing grassroots pressure to fire Ortiz. A petition asking for Ortiz’s removal has attracted more than 35,000 signatures, easily clearing the 25,000 signatures needed for an official response from the White House.