By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Since his suicide, friends and admirers have cast free-information activist Aaron Swartz as a martyred hero hounded to his death by the government he antagonized. One newspaper columnist _ whose piece on Swartz was accompanied by a photo showing him at his computer, his head encircled by a golden halo _ even compared him to an Internet-age Martin Luther King Jr.
A federal prosecutor criticized over criminal charges against an Internet activist who killed himself in New York says her office's handling of the case was "appropriate."
The Republican National Committee chairman rebuked top Democratic spokesmen for personal attacks that go beyond the pale, including suggestions that Senate candidate Sharron Angle wants her political opponents to die and that he roots for U.S. defeat in Afghanistan.
"This crime had no victims. He wasn't ever intending to profit in ANY way, not one penny," said Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian who had communicated with Swartz online over the years. "It was really just a political act to protest a system in pursuit of a noble cause. ... I mean, the idea that he needs to be locked up in a prison as a menace to society is just obscene."
"I think when you engage in civil disobedience, you make a calculation about the price that you're likely to have to pay," Greenwald, a former litigator, said in a telephone interview from his home in Brazil.
