A judge ordered the Secret Service to start releasing "thousands" of pages pertaining to its file on Aaron Swartz, the Internet freedom activist and hacker who committed suicide in January.

U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the order following a lawsuit brought forth by Wired's investigations editor Kevin Poulsen, who requested Swartz's Secret Service file earlier this year. When his initial FOIA request was denied by the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service's parent agency, Poulsen filed suit.

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"Defendant shall promptly release to Plaintiff all responsive documents that it has gathered thus far and shall continue to produce additional responsive documents that it locates on a rolling basis," wrote Kollar-Kotelly in the order, according to Poulsen's coverage in Wired.

The Secret Service investigated Aaron Swartz after he downloaded millions of scholarly articles from the JSTOR database in January of 2011. For this action, Swartz was later charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and was about to face trial, when he committed suicide.

Poulsen, who worked with Swartz on Strongbox, the New Yorker's WikiLeaks-style secure document submission system, is not the only one who had his request denied. Others saw their own separate requests dismissed, with the Secret Service citing a FOIA exception used when there's a criminal investigation ongoing. Swartz's charges were dropped when he died, however, and his case was filed away.

Poulsen's request has been delayed repeatedly. In May, the government admitted the exception didn't apply anymore, but didn't release the file. And then the government also missed a May 23 deadline to respond to the lawsuit. Finally, last Wednesday, they asked for more time, arguing that they have just found new documents.

The new deadline is August 5, but the Secret Service has to start releasing the documents it has already found. Poulsen promised he'll share them. "You’ll see them here when I get them," he wrote.

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