Anonymous hacked and defaced the website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their connection to the events that led to the alleged suicide of online activist Aaron Swartz.
The attack came hours after MIT president Rafael Reif said the school would investigate MIT's involvement in the events that led to the prosecution of Swartz, a Reddit co-founder who apparently killed himself last week.
Swartz was arrested July 2011 and was accused of stealing 4 million documents from MIT and Jstor. These journals and academic papers could have led to a possible conviction of 50 years in prison with a fine up to $4 million.
The Anonymous message said that the government's prosecution of Swartz was a ‘grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for – freeing the publicly funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it.'
Anonymous called for a reform of computer crime laws, intellectual and copyright property law and a renewal of commitment to a ‘free and unfettered internet'.
Kitguru says: Where Anonymous right in hacking the site?