Hundreds Gather To Pay Tribute To Online Prodigy Aaron Swartz
NEW YORK (AP) -- Hundreds of friends and supporters of Aaron Swartz are gathered in New York City to pay tribute to the free-information activist and online prodigy who killed himself last week.
The 26-year-old Swartz hanged himself in his apartment in Brooklyn the month before he was to go on trial in Boston.
Federal prosecutors accused him of breaking into a computer wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 and tapping into the university's computer network to get millions of paid-access scholarly articles.
Swartz's family has blasted prosecutors' handling of his case, saying overreaching led to his death.
A grandson of activist folk singer Pete Seeger read a message from Seeger praising Swartz.
The statement said it was ``a tragedy for this brilliant young man to be so threatened that he hanged himself.''
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