John Cornyn again questions feds’ pursuit of late hacker-activist Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz in Miami Beach in 2009. He died Jan. 11, 2013 at age 26 in New York City. (Michael Francis McElroy/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON The pushback by some in the Republican Party against the Obama Administrations embattled defense of secrecy and surveillance is well-documented. Tea Party champion Rand Paul, with a strong libertarianism strain, has promised to file a class-action suit aimed at the National Security Administrations massive snooping operations.

Sen. Ted Cruz, another of the movements bannermen, has kept mostly quiet so far on many of the issues that have so riled up Paul and a small band of others.

But on Thursday a very different kind of Republican, Sen. John Cornyn, weighed in on a related issue, raising his own objections to what he called the reckless way in which the Department of Justice under President Obama has wielded its powers against individuals.

It was an interesting move for Cornyn, who as a former Texas Supreme Court justice and attorney general is about as conservative, as law-and-order as any senator in Washington.

He engaged the debate by evoking a name that hasnt been much discussed in Texas political circles, a name I first heard a year ago this Saturday.

I was sitting in funky little coffee shop in San Francisco trying to make sense of a piece of fiction that I had begun. I was on leave, and it was a year for trying new things. Across the table was a young guy in his late 20s looking like he had lost his iPad somewhere or dropped one of the gadgets that seemingly everyone in Northern California carried like ammunition. I asked him how he was. His response: Im just devastated by Aaron Swartzs death. I cant believe it.

Aaron Swartz. I had heard a report of his suicide at age 26 that morning on the way into the city from my home in Palo Alto, and seemingly alone in that tech-juiced city, hadnt recognized the name. Turns out, seemingly everyone I met that day and the next was reeling from the news.

Aaron was the computer wunderkind who as a teenager had emerged as kind of a hacker white knight and thinker that made the computerati take notice. One of his earliest achievements was to help write the code for what became RSS newsfeed software. His close mentors as a teen were MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the, well, the Internet, and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. The New Republic would write in a February obituary that Swartz was welcome on any e-mail thread or chat room populated by the worlds leading hackers before he could shave.

But of course all that had seemed like an eternity ago for Swartz in January of last year, when he killed himself. He had been pursued for two years or more by the Department of Justice for the crime of illegally downloading 4 million articles from an academic database and making them available to the public. Trouble was, none of the articles belonged to him. That Friday a year ago was the first day I had heard his name.