Anonymous Hacks U.S. Sentencing Commission Site After Swartz Death

The death of Aaron Swartz, as many of you already know, is something that has Anonymous upset, and today the hacker collective is doing something about it. Two weeks after Swartz committed suicide, Anonymous has taken over the U.S. Sentencing Commission's website, leaving a message for visitors and threatening to release government documents it has uncovered. At the time of this writing, the U.S. Sentencing Commission hasn't made a statement about the attack.

The message said that "a line was crossed" with the death of Swartz and lambasted the current state of the justice system in the United States, claiming "law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain." In the time since Anonymous took over the website, the U.S. government has taken it offline. There's no word on when the website will return, but you can bet that the government will be looking for the hackers who carried out this attack.

Those who did hack into the U.S. Sentencing Commission's website need to tread carefully, because lately we've been seeing quite a few hackers get arrested for their actions. Just yesterday, a group of Anonymous hackers were arrested for their involvement in the attacks on PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa. Still, Anonymous members have never seemed too concerned about the repercussions of their actions in the past – they just want to get their message across.

Anonymous is upset over the treatment of Aaron Swartz, who allegedly downloaded millions of papers from JSTOR. Swartz was facing a fine of as much as $1 million and could have been hit with 35 years of jail time. These penalties were seen by many as extreme, and after his passing, we're seeing blowback from a lot of Internet activists. Stay tuned for more information.

[via CBSNews]