On January 6, 2011, a young man with a laptop and a manifesto sat in a wiring closet beneath the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Building 16 and downloaded academic journal articles. Not classified government documents. Not financial records. Not trade secrets. Academic papers — the kind that describe the curvature of ribosomal RNA, the thermodynamics of ocean currents, the metaphysics of Hegel. He downloaded roughly 4.8 million of them from JSTOR, a nonprofit digital library that aggregates scholarly research and charges subscription fees for access. He intended, according to his own writings, to make them freely available to the world.

That young man was Aaron Swartz. He was twenty-four years old, a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification by age fourteen, a co-founder of Reddit, a key architect of the Creative Commons licensing framework, the founder of the progressive advocacy organization Demand Progress, and widely regarded as one of the most consequential technologists and civic activists of his generation. Within two years of that afternoon in the MIT wiring closet, Aaron Swartz would be dead — hanged in his Brooklyn apartment at age twenty-six, on January 11, 2013, after the United States Department of Justice spent more than eighteen months threatening him with thirty-five years in federal prison and $1 million in fines.

JSTOR had already settled with him. JSTOR explicitly said it did not want the prosecution to continue. The articles remained behind JSTOR's paywall — nothing was permanently taken. And yet United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann pressed forward with a thirteen-count federal indictment that transformed a civil dispute over terms of service into one of the most catastrophic examples of prosecutorial overreach in the history of the American legal system.

This is not ancient history. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — the blunt instrument Ortiz and Heymann wielded against Swartz — remains on the books, largely unchanged, still capable of turning any unauthorized computer access into a federal felony. The culture of prosecutorial aggression that killed Aaron Swartz is not a relic. It is a policy. And the legal system that enabled it has never been held to account.

Who Was Aaron Swartz?

To understand the gravity of what the federal government did to Aaron Swartz, you must first understand who Aaron Swartz was. He was not a hacker in the popular sense — not a thief, not a criminal, not a bad actor in any conventional meaning of the word. He was, by virtually every account from those who knew him, a genuine idealist who believed that access to human knowledge was a human right and that the privatization of publicly-funded research was a moral obscenity.

Born November 8, 1986, in Highland Park, Illinois, Swartz was a child prodigy who took to computers the way other children took to sports. By age thirteen he had co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification, a technical standard that would become the backbone of web syndication and is still used hundreds of millions of times daily. At fifteen he joined the working group that created Creative Commons. At nineteen he was a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics. At twenty he sold his share of Reddit to Condé Nast for a reported $10 million — and promptly became miserable at the corporate pace, left, and turned his attention to civic activism.

In 2008 Swartz published his "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto," a document that reads today like a moral indictment of the academic publishing industry. "Information is power," he wrote. "But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations." He called on those with access to academic networks to download research and share it with the world. He called it a moral imperative. The federal government would later call it a federal crime.

Swartz struggled throughout his life with depression, a fact he wrote about openly and without embarrassment. In a 2007 blog post he described lying on the bathroom floor, unable to move. He was twenty years old. "I have a lot of illnesses," he wrote. "I don't talk about it much, for a variety of reasons. I feel ashamed... I feel like people will think less of me." He was, in other words, a vulnerable human being — gifted, driven, profoundly committed to justice, and fighting his own internal darkness even as he tried to illuminate the world.

He was also the kind of person who walked MIT's open campus and connected a laptop to its network. Which, it turned out, was all it took to make him a federal criminal.

The Wiring Closet and the Wrath of the Government

In September 2010, Aaron Swartz began downloading academic articles from JSTOR using a guest account on MIT's network. JSTOR's terms of service limited the volume of downloads, and when the system detected automated mass downloading, it blocked the account. Swartz — operating under the screen name "Gary Host," a riff on "ghost" — registered a new account and resumed. MIT's network was open to the public; JSTOR's content was available to anyone using a MIT-affiliated connection. When JSTOR blocked his IP addresses, he spoofed new ones. When they blocked the MAC address of his laptop, he changed that too.

On January 4, 2011, MIT staff discovered a laptop and an external hard drive hidden in a basement wiring closet. They notified campus police, who notified the Secret Service. A camera was installed. Three days later, Aaron Swartz returned to retrieve his equipment. He was arrested on the spot by a Cambridge Police officer. He was twenty-four years old.

JSTOR, to its considerable credit, quickly reached a civil settlement with Swartz. The organization released a statement making clear that it had "no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter" and that it was satisfied with the return of the downloaded files. The articles remained behind JSTOR's paywall. Nothing was permanently taken, nothing was published, nothing was monetized. JSTOR's own spokesperson would later confirm that the organization did not support criminal prosecution.

None of that mattered to Carmen Ortiz.

On July 19, 2011, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts filed a federal criminal complaint against Aaron Swartz. He was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer — four counts that together exposed him to up to fifty years in prison and $1 million in fines. In November 2012, after plea negotiations collapsed, a superseding indictment added nine more counts. He now faced thirteen felonies and a potential thirty-five-year sentence.

The charging document described Swartz as someone who "intended to distribute" the articles on "file-sharing sites." There has never been any evidence that this was true. No articles were ever distributed. No file-sharing site ever received them. The indictment was, in the assessment of legal scholars across the political spectrum, a textbook exercise in prosecutorial overreach — stacking charges to maximize leverage rather than to reflect the actual conduct at issue.

"The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes, with one voice. The executors of the law cannot be personal judges. They have no right to carry it further."

The CFAA: A Loaded Gun Aimed at the Public

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was enacted in 1986, in the wake of the film WarGames and congressional panic about computer hacking. Its original scope was narrow: it targeted unauthorized intrusions into government computers and financial systems. Over three decades of amendments, however, the statute became something monstrous — a breathtakingly broad law that criminalizes any "unauthorized access" to any "protected computer," where "protected computer" is defined to include virtually any computer connected to the internet, and where "unauthorized" is never meaningfully defined.

This definitional vacuum is not an accident. Prosecutors love undefined terms. They give prosecutors discretion. And in the CFAA's case, that discretion allowed federal prosecutors to argue — and federal courts in some circuits to accept — that violating a website's terms of service constitutes "unauthorized access" and therefore a federal crime. Under this interpretation, checking your personal email from a work computer is potentially a federal felony. Using a friend's Netflix password is potentially a federal felony. Creating a fake name on a dating app is potentially a federal felony.

Legal scholars have warned about this interpretation for decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a bipartisan coalition of technology policy experts have called for CFAA reform repeatedly and consistently. Congress has repeatedly failed to act.

Aaron Swartz was not accused of breaking into a government computer system. He was accused of downloading too many academic articles from a server that MIT's own network made freely accessible to anyone who walked on campus. The theory of criminal liability under the CFAA required prosecutors to argue that Swartz's "authorization" to access JSTOR was effectively revoked when JSTOR began blocking his IP addresses — and that continuing to access the system after that point constituted unauthorized access.

This is the equivalent of arguing that a library patron who checks out books after being told he's checked out too many for one day has committed theft. The argument is, in the candid assessment of most legal scholars who analyzed it, an extraordinary stretch. But stretched arguments, backed by the full weight of the federal government and its nearly unlimited resources, are sufficient to destroy a human life.

Carmen Ortiz and the Politics of Prosecution

United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz was appointed by President Obama in 2009 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate. She was the first woman and first Latina to serve as U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, a fact her office highlighted prominently. She was widely regarded as politically ambitious, with her name floated as a potential candidate for governor of Massachusetts.

In the immediate aftermath of Swartz's arrest, Ortiz's office released a statement that exemplified the culture of performative toughness that infects American prosecutorial culture: "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer keyboard or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." It was a quote designed for headlines — punchy, morally certain, utterly divorced from the actual facts of the case. Aaron Swartz had not stolen anything. JSTOR had its articles. JSTOR was not pressing for prosecution. But Carmen Ortiz had a career to build and a press release to write.

Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann was assigned to lead the case. Heymann came with credentials: he had previously prosecuted the case against Albert Gonzalez, a high-profile hacker who stole credit card data from retailers, exposing tens of millions of consumers. The Gonzalez case was the kind of case that CFAA was designed for — actual theft, actual victims, actual financial harm at enormous scale. The Swartz case was nothing like the Gonzalez case. But Heymann brought the same prosecutorial energy to both.

According to multiple accounts, including reporting by The New Yorker and MIT Technology Review, Heymann was personally invested in the prosecution in ways that went beyond ordinary professional commitment. He reportedly viewed the case as an opportunity to make an example — to send a signal to the broader hacker and open-access communities that federal law would not tolerate their methods, however idealistic their motives. This is not prosecution. This is deterrence by destruction.

Swartz's legal team made repeated attempts to reach a plea agreement. Swartz's attorneys, including the experienced federal criminal defense lawyer Elliot Peters, proposed various arrangements — including a plea that would have allowed Swartz to avoid prison. Prosecutors reportedly refused to offer any deal that did not include prison time. The government's position, as reported by multiple sources close to the defense, was that Swartz needed to go to prison to send the right message.

The message they sent was different than the one they intended.

January 11, 2013

Aaron Swartz died by suicide in his Brooklyn apartment on January 11, 2013. He was found by his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. He was twenty-six years old. His trial had been scheduled to begin in April.

The response was immediate and global. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor and Creative Commons co-founder who had mentored Swartz, published a searing essay within hours calling the prosecution a "bullying" travesty. "He was killed by the government," Lessig wrote, in the raw anger of grief. "Stretched in ways that had already broken his eminently fragile will." Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, posted on Twitter: "Aaron is dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down." Scholars, technologists, and civil liberties advocates around the world poured out tributes and condemnations in equal measure.

Swartz's parents and partner released a statement that made the accountability question explicit: "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death."

Carmen Ortiz's response was studied and self-exculpatory. Her office released a statement defending the prosecution as appropriate given "the hacking of JSTOR's computer systems." The characterization — "hacking" — was disputed by virtually everyone familiar with the technical facts of the case. But prosecutors are never required to be accurate in their press releases. They are required only to win in court, and Aaron Swartz never got to court.

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

MIT's Complicity and the Abelson Report

Massachusetts Institute of Technology occupied an uncomfortable position in the Swartz prosecution. MIT's open network — which any member of the public could access by sitting in one of its many open campus spaces — was the mechanism through which Swartz accessed JSTOR. MIT did not directly press for prosecution. But MIT cooperated extensively with federal authorities and declined to publicly support Swartz, even after JSTOR had made clear it did not want the case to proceed.

The University of Chicago, Harvard, and other institutions with Swartz connections publicly supported him. MIT did not. This silence was noticed and condemned by a significant portion of MIT's own faculty and student body.

After Swartz's death, under enormous pressure from the campus community, MIT commissioned an independent review conducted by computer science professor Hal Abelson and two colleagues. The resulting "Abelson Report," released in July 2013, was a careful and largely damning document. It found that MIT had adopted a posture of "institutional neutrality" — which in practice meant declining to advocate for Swartz even when it could have. The report documented that MIT had continued to cooperate with prosecutors even after JSTOR had settled and after Swartz's legal team had explicitly requested that MIT take a more active stance in his defense.

The report did not call MIT's conduct criminal. It did not need to. The moral conclusion was plain: a great institution with the resources, reputation, and standing to intervene chose not to, and a twenty-six-year-old man is dead partly as a result.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif issued a statement upon the report's release acknowledging that "with the benefit of hindsight, I think MIT should have been more aggressive in asking the federal prosecutor" to consider a plea arrangement without prison time. This is institutional language for: we could have saved him, and we didn't try.

The Congressional Hearing: Theater Without Consequence

In the weeks following Swartz's death, Representative Darrell Issa, then chairman of the House Oversight Committee, convened hearings on the prosecution. Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat whose district includes Silicon Valley, introduced "Aaron's Law" — legislation that would have reformed the CFAA to ensure that merely violating a website's terms of service could not constitute a federal crime. Senator Ron Wyden introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

The hearings were pointed. Witnesses testified about prosecutorial overreach. Legal scholars explained the CFAA's constitutional deficiencies. Swartz's father, Robert Swartz, sat in the hearing room and watched politicians ask questions they had no intention of following up on.

Aaron's Law never passed. It has been reintroduced multiple times in subsequent Congresses and has never come to a floor vote. The CFAA remains on the books in substantially the same form that allowed Ortiz and Heymann to bring thirteen federal felony charges against a young man who downloaded academic articles. The DOJ Inspector General conducted no review of the Swartz prosecution. The Office of Professional Responsibility — the DOJ unit nominally responsible for investigating prosecutorial misconduct — conducted no public investigation. Carmen Ortiz left office in 2017 after failing to secure the Democratic gubernatorial nomination she had reportedly sought, her political ambitions shattered in part by the Swartz backlash but facing no professional consequences whatsoever. Stephen Heymann quietly continued his work at the U.S. Attorney's office.

No one was disciplined. No one was sanctioned. No one was held accountable for driving a twenty-six-year-old idealist into a noose.

The Doctrine of Prosecutorial Discretion — and Its Corruption

Prosecutors in the American legal system possess extraordinary and largely unreviewable power. The decision to charge, the decision of what to charge, the decision to offer or withhold plea deals — these are all exercises of "prosecutorial discretion," a doctrine that courts have consistently upheld as a near-absolute prerogative of the executive branch. Prosecutorial discretion exists for good reasons: a rigid system that required prosecution of every technical violation of every law would be unworkable and unjust.

But discretion is only as good as the character and values of the person exercising it. The Founders understood this. They designed a Constitution that assumed the worst about human nature and built institutional checks accordingly. The separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, the requirement of grand jury indictment for felonies — all of these were designed to create friction, to slow down the machinery of state power, to force government officials to justify themselves at multiple stages before they could destroy a citizen's life.

What the Founders could not have anticipated — or rather, what they feared and tried to prevent through the system of checks they created — was the degree to which prosecutorial power would accumulate, uncheckable, in the hands of individual federal attorneys whose incentives are shaped entirely by conviction rates, press releases, and political ambition. The Swartz prosecution was not an aberration. It was the expression of a system in which prosecutors face no meaningful accountability for overreach, no professional consequences for abusing their power, and no institutional pressure to consider proportionality.

When JSTOR — the victim — says it does not want prosecution, and the prosecution continues anyway, the purpose of the prosecution is no longer justice. It is domination. It is the demonstration of state power for its own sake. It is, in the language the Founders would have recognized, tyranny.

The Pattern: How Federal Prosecutors Manufacture Catastrophic Sentences

The mechanics of how the Swartz prosecution reached thirteen felony counts and a thirty-five-year exposure are worth examining carefully, because they reveal a system designed not to calibrate punishment to conduct but to manufacture pressure sufficient to force guilty pleas regardless of guilt.

Federal prosecutors routinely charge defendants with every count that can plausibly be argued, knowing that each additional count increases leverage in plea negotiations. Each charge carries its own potential sentence, and federal sentencing guidelines can stack those sentences in ways that produce theoretical exposures wildly disproportionate to the underlying conduct. A defendant facing thirty-five years for a non-violent, non-financially-harmful act involving academic articles is not facing justice. He is facing a coercive apparatus designed to make trial functionally irrational.

This is not a secret. Federal public defenders have been explaining this dynamic for decades. The plea rate in the federal criminal justice system hovers around 97 percent — meaning that for every hundred federal criminal defendants, only three choose to go to trial. Legal scholars overwhelmingly attribute this to the coercive power of charge-stacking and the "trial penalty" — the well-documented phenomenon whereby defendants who exercise their constitutional right to trial receive sentences dramatically longer than those who plead guilty.

Aaron Swartz had the resources to fight — a legal team, public support, financial backing from the technology community. Most defendants charged under the CFAA and similar statutes do not. They plead guilty to felonies they may not have committed, to charges that may not accurately describe their conduct, because the alternative is a dice roll that could end in decades in federal prison. This is the system. Aaron Swartz's death pulled back the curtain on it long enough for the country to see it clearly, and then the curtain fell back into place.

A Knowledge System Built on Paywalls — The Injustice That Swartz Challenged

It is impossible to fully understand the Aaron Swartz case without confronting the underlying injustice that motivated his actions. Academic research in the United States is overwhelmingly funded by taxpayers — through federal grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and dozens of other agencies. That research is conducted primarily at public and publicly-subsidized universities, by faculty who are employed at institutions that receive enormous federal support. The research is then published in academic journals, which charge universities enormous subscription fees for access — fees that, in aggregate, cost American universities billions of dollars annually. The same research that taxpayers funded is then sold back to them at prices that make it inaccessible to anyone outside an institutional subscription.

JSTOR in 2011 charged between $19 and $49 per article for individual access to research that, in many cases, had been created entirely with public money. A researcher in a developing country seeking access to the latest findings on malaria treatment, infectious disease prevention, or agricultural science faced the choice of paying fees that represented weeks of local wages or simply going without. A curious citizen wanting to read the peer-reviewed science behind a public health policy could not afford access to the evidence. This is not an edge case. This is the structure of the global knowledge economy.

Aaron Swartz believed this was wrong. He was right. The academic publishing industry has faced sustained criticism from researchers, librarians, policymakers, and open-access advocates for decades. The National Institutes of Health now requires that NIH-funded research be made publicly available within twelve months of publication. Many universities have adopted open-access policies. The movement toward open access has accelerated. But in 2011, when Swartz sat down in that MIT wiring closet, he was acting on a conviction that many of the most respected voices in science and technology shared: that knowledge locked behind paywalls is knowledge denied.

That conviction did not make what he did legal. But it makes the government's response — thirteen felony counts, thirty-five years, destruction of a human life — something other than justice.

The Swartz Case in the Context of Constitutional Accountability

The Framers of the Constitution were keenly aware of the danger posed by prosecutorial power. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 74, argued that the power of pardon existed in part because "the criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel." The point was not merely mercy — it was proportionality. Justice that does not calibrate its response to the actual gravity of the offense is not justice. It is force.

The Eighth Amendment prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishments" was designed with precisely this concern in mind. Scholars debate whether the Eighth Amendment applies to prosecutorial charging decisions — courts have generally held that it does not. But the principle animating the Eighth Amendment — that the state's response to any given offense must bear a rational relationship to the severity of that offense — is a foundational commitment of the American constitutional order, whether or not it has been operationalized in ways that constrain individual prosecutors.

The Swartz prosecution failed this test by any reasonable measure. The most celebrated academic theft prosecution in American history before Swartz was probably the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, in which Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of pages of classified government documents about the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration charged Ellsberg under the Espionage Act. The case was ultimately dismissed due to government misconduct — wiretapping, a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, attempted bribery of the trial judge. Ellsberg faced charges far more serious than Swartz's and had actually released classified national security documents to the press. Yet Ellsberg's case is remembered as a triumph of the First Amendment and a landmark of whistleblowing history.

Swartz downloaded academic articles. He is dead.

What Reform Demands: A Blueprint for Accountability

Aaron Swartz's death did not change the law. It should have. Here is what genuine reform requires:

1. Enact Aaron's Law. Congress must finally pass legislation amending the CFAA to remove terms-of-service violations from the definition of "unauthorized access." Violating a website's terms of service is a civil matter. It must not be a federal crime. The House and Senate should hold binding votes on this legislation in the current session, not defer it to another Congress.
2. Establish binding proportionality review for federal prosecutions. The Department of Justice should be required to conduct an internal proportionality review before filing charges in any case where the theoretical maximum sentence exceeds ten years and the alleged harm is non-violent. An independent senior attorney, separate from the prosecuting team, should be required to certify that the charges reflect conduct proportionate to the exposure.
3. Create a Prosecutorial Conduct Commission. The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility is toothless, underfunded, and primarily responsive to internal institutional pressures. Congress should establish an independent Prosecutorial Conduct Commission, with members appointed by the judiciary, the defense bar, and civil society, to investigate allegations of charging overreach, evidence suppression, and coercive plea practices.
4. Eliminate the trial penalty through sentencing reform. The documented disparity between sentences received by defendants who plead guilty and those who exercise their constitutional right to trial represents a structural coercion that undermines the entire premise of the adversarial system. Congress should instruct the U.S. Sentencing Commission to study and address this disparity, and should consider legislation capping the differential at a reasonable percentage.
5. Mandate open access for federally funded research. Congress should enact comprehensive open-access legislation requiring that all research produced with federal funding be made freely available to the public within six months of publication. The knowledge that taxpayers fund belongs to the public. This would eliminate the class of dispute that precipitated the Swartz prosecution and is morally required regardless of Swartz's case.
6. Require victim veto rights in non-violent prosecutions. When the primary victim of an alleged offense has settled with the defendant, declines to cooperate with prosecution, and affirmatively states it does not wish criminal charges to proceed, that position should create a rebuttable presumption against prosecution that prosecutors must overcome in writing with documented justification. The Swartz case is the paradigm case for this reform: JSTOR's explicit disavowal of the prosecution should have ended it.
7. Reform the CFAA definition of "protected computer." The current statute defines "protected computer" to include any computer connected to the internet. This definition, written in 1986 when fewer than one percent of Americans had internet access, is absurd in the modern context. A laptop, a smartphone, a home thermostat — all are "protected computers" under the current statute. Congress must narrow this definition to focus the CFAA on what it was actually designed to address: intrusions into critical infrastructure, financial systems, and government computers.
8. Require disclosure and review of charging decisions in cases resulting in defendant death. When a federal criminal prosecution is a contributing factor in a defendant's suicide or other death, the DOJ should be required to conduct and publicly release a review of the charging decisions made in that case, including communications between prosecutors about strategy, plea negotiations, and deterrence objectives. The public has a right to know when its government's actions contributed to a citizen's death.

Conclusion: The Reckoning That Never Came

Thirteen years after Aaron Swartz's death, the American legal system has processed his case and moved on. Carmen Ortiz is a private citizen. Stephen Heymann is presumably still practicing law. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is still on the books. Aaron's Law has never passed. The Abelson Report is an important historical document that no one in a position of power has acted on. The academic publishing industry remains largely as it was, though under greater pressure.

What has not changed is the fundamental architecture of prosecutorial power that killed Aaron Swartz. Federal prosecutors can still stack charges to manufacture coercive leverage. The CFAA can still be used to turn a terms-of-service violation into a federal felony. The trial penalty still coerces defendants into pleading guilty to charges they might beat at trial. The Office of Professional Responsibility still provides no meaningful accountability for charging overreach. The pattern that destroyed Aaron Swartz is intact and operational.

This is not merely an abstract policy failure. It is a daily reality for thousands of defendants who face the same coercive apparatus that Aaron Swartz faced — and who lack his resources, his public profile, and his ability to make the system's machinery visible to the watching world. They plead guilty. They go to prison. Their names do not become hashtags or congressional legislation. They simply disappear into a system that has never been required to explain itself.

The Founders built a system designed to control government power by distributing it, checking it, and subjecting it to accountability. What they could not have foreseen was the degree to which prosecutorial power would become the great exception to their design — unchecked, unreviewed, and largely immune from the consequences it inflicts on others. Aaron Swartz understood this. He wrote about it, thought about it, and tried in his short life to do something about it.

The least we can do is finish what he started.