Free Republic

BOSTON — The man accused of killing three people during a notorious New England crime spree has died, surrounded by the prison walls he’s been staring at since 2001. Gary Lee Sampson was convicted in the murders of two Massachusetts men, Jonathan Rizzo and Phillip McCloskey, during carjackings in 2001 and for the killing of a New Hampshire man, Robert Whitney. The Bureau of Prisons shows Sampson, inmate number 23976-038, died on December 21 at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. In a statement, the BOP said “For safety, security and privacy reasons, this office does not...

Anonymous, a band of online vigilante activists, has turned its ire on the U.S. Department of Justice, threatening to release secret, internal documents the group hacked in memory of Aaron Swartz, the Internet prodigy who committed suicide before his federal trial. “With Aaron’s death we can wait no longer. The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration. The time has come to give this system a taste of its own medicine,” read part of the message and video posted on the U.S. Sentencing Commission website, which the activist...

US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz stated that the Boston Marathon Bombing “was not a religious crime…it was a political crime” at a press conference on Friday. Ortiz said, “Make no mistake, the defendant claimed to be acting on behalf of all Muslims. This was not a religious crime. And it certainly does not reflect true Muslim beliefs.

BOSTON (AP) — A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles. Aaron Swartz, 24, of Cambridge, was accused of stealing the documents from JSTOR, a popular research subscription service that offers digitized copies of more than 1,000 academic journals and documents, some dating back to the 17th century. In an indictment released Tuesday, prosecutors say Swartz stole 4.8 million articles between September 2010 and January after breaking into a computer wiring closet on MIT's campus. Swartz, then a student at the...