What is a Hacktivist? – NYTimes.com
The untimely death of the young Internet activist Aaron Swartz, apparently by suicide, has prompted an outpouring of reaction in the digital world. Foremost among the debates being reheated — one which had already grown in the wake of larger and more daring data breaches in the past few years — is whether Swartz’s activities as a “hacktivist” were being unfairly defined as malicious or criminal. ..
I believe the debate itself is far broader than the specifics of this unhappy case, for if there was prosecutorial overreach it raises the question of whether we as a society created the enabling condition for this sort of overreach by letting the demonization of hacktivists go unanswered.more