By Isolde Raftery, Staff Writer, NBC News

By Isolde Raftery, Staff Writer, NBC News

In the 24 hours since Aaron Swartz, a prodigy programmer turned Internet folk hero, hanged himself in his apartment in New York, his family and a close friend and mentor not only expressed destruction - they have been angry.


"Aaron's death is not only a personal tragedy," his family wrote in a statement. "It is a product of a criminal justice system rife with threats and prosecutors overreach."
Swartz, who helped to create RSS the age of 14, was indicted in 2011 on charges alleging he wrong downloaded more than four million articles from JSTOR, an online system for archiving academic journals. Swartz argued for openness - JSTOR costs more than $ 50,000 for an annual subscription University - but court records show that the federal government thought he had, among other crimes, committed wire fraud and computer fraud and illegally obtained information from a protected computer.
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JSTOR eventually backed Swartz. But his family's statement was unflinchingly critical of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Mass, the university where Swartz allegedly had registered a ghost computer to download the records:
Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. U.S. Attorney office led an unusually harsh variety of costs, potentially carrying over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, in contrast to JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and his own society's most cherished principles.
Swartz family described him as totally committed to social justice. He helped to defeat an Internet censorship bill and "he used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself, but to make the Internet and the world fairer, better place."
Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his apartment in New York on Friday, confirmed his family.
Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor who described himself as a mentor and close friend to Swartz, took to Tumblr to express their raw emotions. He wrote that Swartz actions may not have been ethical, but the government's response was too aggressive:
From the beginning, the government worked as hard as they could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. "Property" Aaron had "stolen", we were told, was worth "millions of dollars" - with hints, and then proposed that his aim must have been to make his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of scientific articles is either a fool or a liar. It was clear what it was, but our government continued to press as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists in the act.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office told Reuters that officials wanted to respect the family's privacy and did "not feel it is appropriate to comment at this time." Reuters and the Associated Press reported that they could not reach MIT for comment.
Lessig Swartz described as brilliant, funny, "one soul, one conscience, the source of a question I've asked myself a million times: What would Aaron be thinking?"
He ended his piece: "We need to get beyond the" I'm right I'm right to nuke the ethic that dominates our time. That begins with one word. Shame "