Popular hackers group Anonymous has hacked the website of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Web sites. They defaced the website and wrote a deface message to tribute Internet activists Aaron Swartz. This deface happened just after the MIT president wrote a letter to students and other college staff members saying that it would look into the role MIT played in Swartz’s case.
“Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, 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 – enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing – an ideal that we should all support,” Deface page reads.
Swartz committed suicide on Friday who was arrested in July 2011. He was accused of stealing 4 million documents from MIT and Jstor. He also faced $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison if convicted.
“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many,” Reif, MIT president wrote. “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”
We are looking to get response from MIT officials and will report soon.
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