Aaron Swartz Died for Piers Morgan's Sins

By Greg Palast for Vice.com

This is the tale of two geniuses.

Aaron Swartz

In 2000, Aaron Swartz, aged 14, had just released his astonishing invention, RSS, to ease the flow of information and news around the Internet. Around the same time, one of Piers Morgan’s stringers hacked into the phone of Sir Paul McCartney’s wife and stole some highly personal, and highly valuable, information – the type of gossip used to sell Morgan’s grotty little scandal sheet, The Daily Mirror, the cornerstone of a $20 million fortune based on tittle and titties.

Electronic burglary for profit is a crime in the UK and USA both. But Piers is serving time on prime time, on CNN.

Aaron Swartz was charged for the crime of attempting to liberate documents from JSTOR computers.  JSTOR holds a monopoly on university research papers, sequestering information crucial to the public which paid for it.  For his selfless act of civil disobedience, Aaron faced 35 years in prison.  Instead, only 26 years old, Aaron chose suicide.

And Piers? There was the little matter of him using restricted information to defraud the stock market. Two of Morgan’s influential financial columnists would make recommendations to the rubes reading The Mirror. Piers bought the stocks just before they were boosted in his paper. Morgan pocketed tens of thousands of pounds. His co-conspirators, the reporters, got jail time. Not Piers. He admitted to the profiteering and walked away with a fine.

So how did Piers get through US immigration when surrounded by a cloud of criminality? Easy: Morgan’s a “genius.”

Piers Morgan, Ed Victor and Louis B. Susman at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel

The US embassy gave him a rare O-1 work permit, known as the “Genius Visa” for “the individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts…”.

Odd that, genius or not. US laws, especially the mellifluously titled, “Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act” of 1996, bar work visas to those who have admitted to “the essential elements of a crime” including fraud and white collar felonies.

How?

The US Embassy can exercise its discretion on visas. And no one is more discrete than the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Mr. Louis Susman, whose credentials are listed as former Vice-Chairman of Citibank and “prolific fundraiser for [the] Democratic Party”. Susman’s embassy did a thorough review of Piers’ visa. (Here is a photo of Ambassador Susman with Piers at the CNN launch party of Morgan’s show.)



What does “genius” Morgan have to do with the horror of the arrest and death of Aaron Swartz?

Read the full story at Vice.com.

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