One of the most remarkable things about the suicide of Aaron Swartz is just how quickly it exploded out of the tech world and into the mainstream press and latched onto latent anger at the tactics of federal prosecutors. It was no surprise to see someone like law professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend and mentor to Swartz, write a post called "Prosecutor as Bully" soon after the news broke:

The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it. Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.

Techies like Jennifer Granick of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society quickly chimed in with doubts about cybercrime prosecutions more broadly, using the Swartz case as their example:

Cybercrime is a serious problem. National security and economic interests, not to mention privacy and fraud prevention, are at stake. But those very real problems, the rhetoric associated with them, and the financial resources that follow, have been used to justify a legal regime which as often than not is used against whistleblowers, disloyal employees, and activists... If money, prestige and jobs are going to go to the offices that get the most cybercrime convictions, we aren't going to get what we are paying for. We need more data and scholorship here. We need to figure out why US Attorney's Offices, and Massachusetts, New Jersey and the Central District of California in particular, are pursuing so many troubling cases.

Activists like Marcia Hofmann of the EFF pointed out how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) lends itself to such problems:

The CFAA's vague language, broad reach, and harsh punishments combine to create a powerful weapon for overeager prosecutors to unleash on people they don't like. Aaron was facing the possibility of decades in prison for accessing the MIT network and downloading academic papers as part of his activism work for open access to knowledge. No prosecutor should have tools to threaten to end someone's freedom for such actions, but the CFAA helped to make that fate a realistic fear for Aaron.

Lawmakers soon got in on the act. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) took to reddit to solicit comments on her proposed tweaks to the CFAA, saying:

The government was able to bring such disproportionate charges against Aaron because of the broad scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the wire fraud statute. It looks like the government used the vague wording of those laws to claim that violating an online service’s user agreement or terms of service is a violation of the CFAA and the wire fraud statute. Using the law in this way could criminalize many everyday activities and allow for outlandishly severe penalties.

Such sentiments spread quickly into less tech-focused venues. Columbia law professor Tim Wu, for instance, the man who coined the term "network neutrality," wrote a piece for The New Yorker in which the prosecutors again came in for a shellacking:

In our age, armed with laws passed in the nineteen-eighties and meant for serious criminals, the federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz approved a felony indictment that originally demanded up to thirty-five years in prison. Worse still, her legal authority to take down Swartz was shaky. Just last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a similar prosecution. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a prominent conservative, refused to read the law in a way that would make a criminal of “everyone who uses a computer in violation of computer use restrictions—which may well include everyone who uses a computer.” Ortiz and her lawyers relied on that reading to target one of our best and brightest... The prosecutors forgot that, as public officials, their job isn’t to try and win at all costs but to use the awesome power of criminal law to protect the public from actual harm... Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life.

Even those who didn't write extensively about technology began taking up the cry. Soon the "prosecutorial overreach" argument made its way into Slate, where Emily Bazelon expanded it even further to critique the US federal prosecution system more generally.

Prosecutors persuaded of their own righteousness, and woodenly equating downloading a deliberately unprotected database with stealing, lose all sense of proportion and bring in the heavy artillery when what’s in order is a far more mild penalty. I’d like to tell you that the prosecutorial overreach that took place in Swartz’s case rarely happens. But that’s not true. There are many principled prosecutors who only bring charges they believe they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But there are also some who bring any charge they can think of to induce a defendant who may be guilty of a minor crime to plead guilty to a major one. These cases usually are hard to call attention to: They’re not about innocence, easy and pure. They’re about the muddier concept of proportionality. If any good at all can come from Swartz’s unspeakably sorrowful death, maybe it will be how this case makes prosecutors—and the rest of us—think about the space between guilt and innocence.

Dale Cooper, who bills himself as a "porn performer and writer," wrote a piece for the Huffington Post in which he went beyond federal prosecutors to the Obama administration that oversees them.

I believe that the prosecution for the United States threatened Swartz's emotional and physical well-being, and, faced with a court battle that he could not possibly finance with his own personal wealth, he took his own life. Ortiz bullied Swartz. Her office should be held responsible in some way for his death. By extension, the Obama administration, in refusing to intercede, should be held accountable, as well. This administration has made the policing of information and "protection" of intellectual property a priority, appointing many trademark hawks and keeping an unnerving record of prosecution of whistleblowers in an attempt to stymy government leaks. The disproportionate charges for Swartz's alleged actions are symptomatic of an administration that has chosen to make an example of specific individuals (such as Bradley Manning), to be heads on pikes on the White House lawn.

The Atlantic's Clive Crook, a well-known writer on politics and economics, also got interested in the case and drew the same broad lessons from it. He ended with a powerful plea for reform of the entire method of plea bargaining:

Assume what Swartz did was simple, selfish, unmitigated theft, as the prosecutors appear to think. Even on that ethically brainless view, the charges and threatened penalties were so disproportionate as to be quite unhinged. But here's the point: Under the present dispensation, they're actually rational. That's why Swartz's family is right to impugn the wider criminal-justice system. By and large, American prosecutors no longer fight their cases at trial. The new dispensation is justice by plea bargain. The more savage the penalties prosecutors can threaten, the more likely the defendant (guilty or innocent) is to speed things along by pleading guilty and accepting a light penalty. According to the Wall Street Journal, Swartz was offered the choice of pleading guilty and going to jail for six to eight months, or else going to trial and taking his chances. The multiple counts and their absurdly savage sentences are best seen, just as the family said, as instruments of intimidation. The prosecutor's bottom line, apparently, was that Swartz had to go to jail. In my conception of criminal justice, the prosecutor's role is to establish guilt, not pass sentence. Juries have already been substantially dispensed with in this country. (By substantially, I mean in 97 percent of cases.) If prosecutors are not only going to rule on guilt unilaterally but also, in effect, pass sentence as well, one wonders why we can't also dispense with judges.

Even Andrew Sullivan, one of the best-known political bloggers in the country, has picked up the case and is now hammering away at it with the voice of moral outrage. For Sullivan, what's at stake is nothing less than the broadest of issues: how the "justice" doled out to the powerful can differ from that dispensed to everyone else:

They demurred on prosecuting war criminals (hey, they're all government buddies and what's a few prisoners tortured to death among friends?), but they sure as hell hounded Aaron Swartz to his death. It really speaks to how justice is so often these days a weapon of the powerful, not a defense for the powerless.

Not every commenter has agreed that prosecutors overreached; take for instance a fascinating piece by law professor and former Department of Justice lawyer Orin Kerr in which he largely defends the basic approach to the case while still bashing the CFAA. (The anger has been palpable enough, however, that US Attorney Carmen Ortiz issued an unusual statement defending her office and its approach.)

But it's remarkable just how quickly one young geek's death has mobilized even national political columnists—who by this point must have seen just about everything—into an outrage that grew beyond Swartz and has quickly opened up a national conversation about justice and about how we seek it.