According to CBS News in a report made Jan. 26, 2013, hackers that go by name, Anonymous, committed a cyber crime and hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in order to avenge hacker and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz's suicide.
Swartz was accused of hacking into M.I.T.'s academic database and acquiring around 4 million scientific journals as well as academic papers. When Swartz was apprehended, he could not handle the pressure of the consequences and killed himself.
That being said, the commission's website was over run early Saturday by this message by Anonymous:
"Citizens of the world,
Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the "discretion" or prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain".
Later by mid-morning on Saturday, the site was taken down.
Of course, Swartz aim of his purpose was what he considered of good intentions. He considered himself an internet activist of sorts. Thinking that by hiding a laptop in the closet of the main computer closet on campus, he would be able to make documents available to those of the public and also had the right to know.
"There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands," Swartz said in a 2012 speech about his role in defeating the Internet copyright law known as SOPA. Under the law, he said, "new technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we'd always taken for granted".
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