It was the right moment then, for the New Yorker to launch Strongbox, an open-source drop box for leaked documents, co-created by late technologist and open-data activist Aaron Swartz with Wired editor Kevin Poulsen.

"With the risks now so high – not just from the U.S. government but also the Chinese government that is hacking newsrooms in the West – it's crucial that news outlets find a secure route for sources to come to them," said Poulsen on Thursday.

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To rally greater awareness and express anger at the CFAA and the proposed HR 11 bill, Anonymous Wednesday are leading a so-called "Twitter storm" -- an online protest in which Twitter users are invited to use hashtags and themed tweets in unison. The cyber-demonstration, scheduled for 5 p.m. EST, asks Twitter users to post messages decrying the CFAA with the hastag #ReformCFAA (which protest participators aim to get trending). In a Pastebin post announcing the Twitter storm, Anonymous stated, "Beginning Wednesday April 3rd we will attempt to influence the decision makers on the House Judicial Committee the strengthening the provisions of the CFAA is not what we the people want."

Anonymous also posted a number of sample Tweets that users can repost, including:

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As noted here, following Swartz's death, Rep. Zoe Lofgren proposed legislation, “Aaron’s law,” which aims to stop the government bringing disproportionate charges in cases like Swartz’s. The draft cybersecurity bill circulating on Capitol Hill since last weekend, unlike Lofgren's, appears to expand the CFAA, not limit it. TechDirt called the proposed bill "so bad that it almost feels like the Judiciary Committee is doing it on purpose as a dig at online activists who have fought back against things like SOPA, CISPA and the CFAA."

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The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced on Tuesday that the school will voluntarily release public documents related to the prosecution of the free-information activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself in January as he faced trial on hacking charges.

The email announcement by MIT president L Rafael Reif came in response to a request on Friday by lawyers for Swartz's estate to have the US district court in Boston make the documents public. The university has come under fire for what critics say is its compliance with federal prosecutors in the legal case against Swartz. Supporters of Swartz have painted him as a zealous advocate of public online access, a martyred hero hounded to his death by the government he antagonized.

To prosecutors, the 26-year-old Swartz was a thief whose aims to make information available didn't excuse the illegal acts he was charged with: breaking into a wiring closet at MIT and tapping into its computer network to download millions of paid-access scholarly articles, which he planned to share publicly. Swartz was facing possibly decades in prison after being indicted in Boston in 2011 when he hanged himself in his Brooklyn, New York, apartment.

The documents will be released at the same time as an internal analysis of MIT's role in the Swartz case is made public. No date has been set for the release of that analysis, which is being conducted by professor Hal Abelson. The documents will have MIT employees' names blacked out in order to protect their safety, Reif wrote. The university will also black out information that might open it to further hacking attacks.

"In the time since Aaron Swartz's suicide, we have seen a pattern of harassment and personal threats," Reif wrote. "In this volatile atmosphere, I have the responsibility to protect the privacy and safety of those members of our community who have become involved in this matter in the course of doing their jobs for MIT, and to ensure a safe environment for all of us who call MIT home."

Swartz's family said his death was "the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach". Federal prosecutors have defended their pursuit of the case and say Swartz was offered a deal under which he would have spent just four to six months in prison. Charges were dropped after Swartz's death.

A lawyer for Swartz's estate welcomed Reif's decision, but questioned MIT's need for secrecy and worried that documents with names blacked out would be "incomprehensible and impossible to follow". "It's long overdue that they've agreed to release something," San Francisco-based attorney Elliot Peters said. "But I don't see the reason to redact. I am not aware of any threats having been made to anybody at MIT. I don't know why that's a concern."

Lawyers for Swartz's estate said in their filing on Friday that "the public has an important and clearly established interest in receiving the information necessary to understand the events that led to Aaron Swartz's arrest and indictment."

Peters said: "It would show what happened and show the role MIT had in this."

The lawyers asked that names remain in the documents if released. "Redaction of these individuals' names would merely add a layer of confusion and opacity to the documents without any additional privacy benefit," they wrote.

MIT's computer system has been hacked a number times since Swartz's death. The campus was placed into lockdown last month when someone called to report a gunman in a university building. MIT later said the gunman report was a hoax apparently prompted by Swartz's death.

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In a letter (made public Wednesday) to an internal Justice Department ethics unit from January 2013, Swartz’s lawyers argue that Heymann engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by "withholding key evidence from Swartz’s defense team and overreaching in his attempt to coerce Aaron into waiving his right to trial." A press release regarding the letter to the ethics unit noted:

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The panel included Taren Stinebricker-Kauffman, Swartz's partner for the last year and a half of his life, a period in which Swartz faced prosecution on charges that he had illegally downloaded as many as four million documents from the online academic archive JSTOR, Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, Timothy Wu, a Columbia law professor, Jennifer Lynch from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others who had worked with Swartz and shared his values.

The panelists attacked Swartz's legacy from different angles, but their message was clear. Yes, the legal system is broken. Yes, the political system is broken. Yes, progressive change is incredibly hard. But change is still possible and small steps count.

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I have written at some length about how federal grand juries have been used as fishing expeditions to indict activists, breeding distrust and despair around those investigated or called as witnesses. Norton's essay published in the Atlantic Monday on being a "reluctant witness" in the federal prosecution against Swartz bears out this point with a painful and important personal account.

Norton details the mind-set that had her agree to cooperate with the government's questioning ("the mechanics of snitching") with little understanding of what her testimony might mean for Swartz's case:

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We can also probably agree that Aaron Swartz, the brilliant technologist who committed suicide facing trumped up federal charges, who long advocated for free access to scientific research, would have been pleased with the announcement. And it's fair to say, as some commentators already have, that increased support for Swartz's open data activism since his death helped prompt the government announcement. A White House website petition calling for free access to federally funded research had garnered 65,000 signatures.

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The legal system is such that it was up to Preska herself to step down -- she opted against it, and Hammond will appear in court in April with the judge presiding. The same judge denied the activist bail (he has been held in a Manhattan federal prison for over a year, regularly placed in solitary confinement) and told the defendant that he could face life in jail for his alleged involvement in the hack.

On the same morning Judge Preska announced that she would not be stepping down from the case, Hammond released a statement of his own through his lawyers. The tract decries the criminal justice system's treatment of cyber activists, condemns government's persecution of dissent, and above all celebrates the work of the late Aaron Swartz.

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The FOIA'd files, which became unclassified following the 26-year-old technologist's death, tell how the FBI began watching Swartz once he was suspected of downloading millions of records from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database -- a different case from the Justice Department's pursuit of Swartz over downloading academic articles from JSTOR.

"I remembered a macabre fact," wrote Wright on obtaining the FBI file, "upon death every American’s FBI file becomes unclassified with certain exceptions." The blogger added that "overall the files tell you more about the FBI than they do Swartz," noting how the FBI highlighted a host of Swartz's banal online activity:

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What exactly Anonymous has in store for this evening is not detailed in the communiqué, nor is it clear whether hackers could indeed disrupt the feeds screening President Obama's speech online. However, the communiqué took the opportunity to decry the president for some of the worst civil liberties and privacy abuses perpetuated by his administration and to renew the hackers' tribute to the late Aaron Swartz.

The message reads:

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Swartz was an amazing human being who fought tirelessly for our right to a free and open Internet. He was much more than just the “Reddit guy.” I encourage people to read about his legacy to understand how important he was towards the movement of hacktivists and whistleblowers.

The Swartz mural follows the more controversial Bradley Manning (of WikiLeaks fame) work that first appeared on the street in late 2011. At the time, BAMN explained that he considered himself more of a weekend warrior when it comes to street art, and he said, his “first interaction with street art was through Poster Boy. I liked the idea of a loose collective participating in political art.”

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"The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product," a Fed spokeswoman told Reuters, adding that individuals effected by the hack had been contacted and that "exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system," she said.

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This week, Issa and top House Oversight Democrat Elijah Cummings, D-Md., sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder posing questions about Swartz's prosecution. The letter was explicit in asking whether political motivations influenced the decision to pursue felony charges against the open-data activist, while JSTOR -- the purported victim of his actions -- had no interest in pressing charges.

The letter asked, among more general questions about reasons behind the decision to prosecute, "Was Mr. Swartz's opposition to SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] or his association with any advocacy groups considered?"

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Anonymous also claims to have distributed encrypted government files through the hacked website, threatening to release the decryption codes (revealing the as yet unknown information held on the stolen files) if the government fails to comply with demands to reform flawed cybercrime laws -- the laws under which Swartz was persecuted. The released files were named after Supreme Court justices. "A line has been crossed" with the zealous pursuit of charges against Swartz, the hackers' statement noted.

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The idea, which has already been tested by local governments, is to hold local events for which public data and code is released to volunteering technologists who are invited to design programs and apps deemed useful for the wider community. In Philadelphia, for example, a public hackathon event led to the development of a smartphone app with a public transport schedule.

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With a gala and launch party at his New Zealand home, the hacker celebrated Mega's launch exactly one year after the New Zealand authorities raided the mansion and shuttered Megaupload. According to reports, the party even featured a spoof raid re-enactment.

Dotcom said half a million users registered for Mega in its first 14 hours, the AP reported. Mega, which Dotcom has dubbed "the privacy company," functions similarly to cloud storage platforms like Dropbox but with encryption and decryption of files as standard. This not only offers privacy for users, but protection for the company itself. Only users hold the keys for decoding files; Mega can't see the content of the shared files and thus, according to DotCom, can't be held liable (as he was for copyright infringing materials shared over MegaUpload).

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At the funeral, Swartz's father, Robert Swartz, said, “Aaron did not commit suicide — he was killed by the government. And [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] betrayed all its basic principles,” and the family has called the death "The product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

At the time of his death, Swartz was facing 13 felony charges stemming from his use of an MIT network to download thousands of articles from the nonprofit digital academic library JSTOR. The charges had increased from an original four charges: Wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information from a computer and recklessly damaging a computer, according to Techdirt.

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Unlike Swartz, James left a note. "I have no faith in the 'justice' system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control." He had been incarcerated for cybercrimes as a teenager. Meanwhile Swartz's family and partner directed some blame for his suicide last week at "a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

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