The federal dossier on Aaron Swartz will be made public due to a United States District judge’s decision last week which compels the Secret Service to disclose the contents of its investigation into the late computer prodigy.
US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled on Friday that the
Secret Service must start sharing the intelligence it collected
on Swartz during the federal probe it wrapped up earlier this
year after the well-known coder and activist committed suicide.
The Secret Service was the main agency pursuing Swartz before he
was indicted on violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in
2011 for unlawfully downloading a trove of academic articles. He
hung himself in a New York City apartment in January while
awaiting trial.
Kevin Poulsen, a journalist for Wired, filed a Freedom of
Information Act shortly after Swartz’s death asking for the tome
of data that investigators accumulated during their pursuit.
But Poulsen wrote that while the criminal case against Swartz was
formally dismissed upon his death, in February the Secret Service
denied the FOIA request by citing an exemption covering sensitive
law enforcement records that remain integral in ongoing
investigations. That prompted Poulsen to file a lawsuit with the
help of Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney David Sobel
against the Secret Service’s parent agency, the US Department of
Homeland Security, which even still neglected to generate a
response – until now.
On Friday, Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote, “Defendant shall
promptly release to Plaintiff all responsive documents that it
has gathered thus far and shall continue to produce additional
responsive documents that it locates on a rolling basis.”
With that ruling, the DHS is being told to act fast. That
pressure couldn’t have come at a better time too, added Poulsen,
as just days earlier a Justice Department attorney wrote him to
say they’ve discovered “several thousand additional pages”
on Swartz and would need additional time to review them before
release.
Kollar-Kotelly’s has given the government until August 5 to
answer Poulsen’s lawsuit and provide a timetable detailing the
projected release of documents pertaining to the Swartz probe,
but in the interim the DHS must start sending over documents that
they’ve already processed. Meanwhile, Poulsen wrote that he will
publish documents obtained through his FOIA request on Wired.com
as they become available.
Before Swartz’s death earlier this year at age 27, he worked
alongside Poulsen in the Strongbox project unveiled in May by the
New Yorker. When the project was debuted, Poulsen described it as
an “open-source, anonymous inbox” that would provide “a
slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to
communicate” over the Internet. The Strongbox project has
since become all the more relevant since National Security Agency
leaked Edward Snowden exposed massive surveillance programs
operated by the US government only weeks later, which oddly
enough isn’t the only strange coincidence at play: during the
administration of President George W. Bush, Judge Kollar-Kotelly
presided over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and
issued a ruling in 2004 which allows the NSA to collect the
metadata of Americans’ online communications in 2004. Then in
2006, Judge Kollar-Kotelly signed another order in secrecy
approving the bulk collection of phone metadata – Section 215 of
the PATRIOT Act.
Snowden’s revelations about these programs as seen in recent
leaks published in the Guardian, Washington Post and other
outlets have since caused an international scandal that has left
the former NSA contractor seeking asylum to avoid felony charges
in the US.
Republished with permission from: RT