Aaron Swartz's father blames 'government' at son's funeral

HIGHLAND PARK, Illinois (AP) - Aaron Swartz's father said on Tuesday at the Internet freedom activist's funeral that the government was to blame for his son's death from an apparent suicide.

"He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles," Mr Robert Swartz said at the memorial service in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Swartz, 26, was found dead in his New York apartment on Friday. He was facing a potentially lengthy prison sentence after being indicted in Boston in 2011 for allegedly gaining access to academic articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The charges carried a maximum penalty of decades in prison.

Mr Robert Swartz said his son was "hounded by the government, and MIT refused him." World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, faculty director of the Safra Center for Ethics, where Swartz was once a fellow, both spoke at the funeral.