The court ordered the Secret Service to publish the case of Aaron Schwartz

The US Federal District Court instructed the US Secret Service to publish "thousands" of pages related to the case of Aaron Schwartz, an Internet activist and hacker who committed suicide in January, writes Mashable.

This decision was the result of a lawsuit filed by Wired editor Kevin Poulsen, who earlier this year, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), filed a request with the Secret Service for a case. When the US Department of Homeland Security, which reports to the Secret Service, denied his request, Poulsen filed a lawsuit.

“The defendant must immediately submit to the claimant all the relevant documents that he has collected and must continue to provide additional relevant documents on a permanent basis, which he has at his disposal,” Judge Collin Kollar-Kotelli wrote in a court decision, as reported by Poulsen in a Wired report.
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The secret service launched an investigation into Aaron Schwartz after he downloaded millions of scientific articles from the JSTOR database in January 2011. He was accused of violating the law on computer fraud and abuse (CFAA) and he should have been brought to court when it became known that he had committed suicide.

Poulsen, who worked with Schwarz on the Strongbox project, a secure document transfer system for the New Yorker magazine, was not the only one denied in response to a case request. The Secret Service referred to the exemption in the Freedom of Information Act, which is provided for cases where a criminal investigation is ongoing.

However, after the death of Schwartz, when the investigation was already terminated, Poulsen’s request was still not satisfied. In May, the authorities acknowledged that the exception was no longer applicable in this case, but did not publish the materials. On May 23, they missed the deadline for responding to the lawsuit. Finally, last Wednesday, they asked for more time, claiming that they had just found new documents.

The new deadline is set for August 5, but the Secret Service was ordered to start issuing documents it already has. Poulsen promised to share them: “You will see them when I get them.”