The difficulty Assange's supporters have is that, on the one hand they're convinced he's innocent, and on the other they don't think he should risk facing the charges.  This leaves the necessity of convincing everyone that the charges were falsely brought so as to lay an extradition trap for him.

I just find that very unlikely.

Bolingbroke - I didn't say Assange is guilty of rape. I said he is charged with rape. Which is correct. That is exactly as black and white as I made it out to be. 

Whether he is guilty of rape is unknown. 

And I also said that he seems to be a jerk. If he did the things he is accused of doing, then that's what he is, even if a court rules that his actions are not rape. Here's a report from someone who knew him about Assange's allegedly jerky behavior. 

Esther Dyson points out that sometimes you have to be a jerk to stand up for principle.

Steve Jobs, who I admire enormously, was also a jerk. 

Assange's personal character failings, whatever they may be, have no bearing on the rightness of his cause. 

@Mitch - 

Agreed that suicide is a complex subject. None of us has the right to speculate what confluene of events and spirit led to this tragedy. I've lost too many friends to suicide. I've also see others walk up to the precipe and just as inexplicably pull back. I can explain neither.

The work he did on PACER is certainly public information. Much, but not quite all of the JSTOR content is publicly funded research. The White House recently took important steps to make this kind of information available for free.

Mitch as black and white as you would like to make it, it is far from that, keeping in mind that Ardin after the suppossed rape held a party for Assange and let him continue to stay in her apartment, if anything the actions of someone who is very quick to forgive and forget.

If Swartz had been accused of similiar crimes and more importantly to boot had rubbed the wrong way the patriots among us would we have this small but unmistakable step towards digital canonization. But while writing this I see that Swartz might've had aided and abetted the "jerk" himself, I hope none of that rubs off and sullies his reputation.

Bolingbroke: Of course what Assange is charged with doing is rape. 

From the Sydney Morning Herald, Did he or didn't he? The murky politics of sex and consent.

The Crown Prosecution Service presented the four Swedish Prosecution Service accusations: two were of a specific Swedish crime called ''ofredande'', or misconduct (misleadingly translated as molestation), one being that the defendant ''pushed his erect penis against the complainant's back, thus violating her sexual integrity'', the other for unsafe sex ''against the complainant's explicitly stated wish''. There is one charge of sexual assault, which alleges that Assange had sex with Wilen while she was asleep, and the most serious charge is that he held Ardin down with his body weight, forced her legs open, and had sex with her.

The last accusation would qualify as a reasonable rape charge anywhere, the ''morning glory'' almost nowhere; the other two depend on the detailed nature of the accusation, none of which has seen the light of day - the unsafe sex charge for example, does not allege non-consent, simply an earlier expression of opposition to the practice. Even with later consent, this can still count as a crime in Sweden.

In other words, the charges are that he twice had sex with women without their consent, once forcibly. Sounds like rape to me. 

Mitch rather than throw around the term "rape" why not do a little digging see what the real charges are - more like having "unprotected sex" rather than rape.  Yeah it's a different country with their own very different laws.

Hey but rape is so much easier to deal with and the reactions are so more kneejerk and politically correct. Julian may have committed rape and ergo he's a jerk, case closed and make sure your flag pin is on straight.

And none of the guys on this board would be in trouble if they had lived in Sweden? 

It's important to clear up a couple of misconceptions about Aaron Swartz. They're not in this blog, but they seem to come up whenever he'd discussed:

- We don't know that the criminal prosecution drove him to kill himself. Suicide is a complicated thing and we don't know what the proximate cause was for his behavior. On the other hand, being the focus of a criminal investigation would not have been a positive force on Aaron's psyche. 

- Some people equate what Swartz did with music or movie piracy. There's an important distinction: Pirated music and movies are privately owned. The information Swartz accessed was public and (I believe) taxpayer funded. 

The Obama Administration has not been a friend to open governmentm, despite the President's lip service to the principles. I'm not surprised that he -- or more likely his campaign staff -- is looking to keep his re-election software a secret. 

The rape charges pending against Assange cloud his public reputation. 

Put in plain English: The guy seems to be a jerk, and possible rapist. 

But that doesn't mean he's wrong about secrecy on the Internet. 

Aaron's death is certainly a big blow to the industry. But we hope that the legacy would go on. Controling the software content is one of the biggest challanges that we are facing thesedays. We are greatly indebted to the people of his stature for giving us new dimensions in thinking. Unrestricted , free flow of information has benefited a huge percentage of people making it accessible on the finger tips world over. Most of the people who are exploiting it lay their hands on open sources products.