When the leader of a computer crime ring was sentenced in Boston to 20 years in prison for his role in one of the country’s largest-ever hacking cases in 2010, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz vowed publicly to “use all available resources” to investigate and prosecute cyber criminals no matter where in the world the crime is committed.
Just months later, federal prosecutors under Ortiz’s leadership didn’t have to look far to build the controversial hacking case against entrepreneur and political activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged in 2011 in Boston federal district court with the unauthorized use of a university’s networks to download millions of articles from the online archive of scholarly literature at the nonprofit JSTOR.
