The first part of secret service documents about Aaron Swartz was released during the legal battle to publicly share the 14,500 pages the US authorities have collected in the investigation of the online activist. The 104-page file published earlier this week included the report of Aaron’s suicide, evidence documents and even a memorandum of an interview with an unidentified acquaintance.

Aaron Swartz was federally indicted on as many as thirteen charges, such as computer fraud, theft of data and wire fraud. It all started from downloading lots of articles from the JSTOR database of the MIT computer network. Aaron was facing up to $1 million in fines and 35 years prison time for those charges and decided to take his life under the pressure of investigators in the beginning of this year.

The published papers prove that the secret service was really interested in a document penned by the young genius and others calling for open information – the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Some people believe this paper was used to establish “malicious intent” in the US authorities’ case against Swartz.

It can be seen that a considerable portion of the released pages are evidence logs revealing the equipment seized by the authorities or handed over by Aaron – personal computers, storage equipment and even earnings statements from Google and Harvard University. It became clear that Aaron was present for at least one search of his Cambridge apartment, because a February 2011 document read that “while the search was conducted, the young man made statements to the effect of, what took you so long, and why didn't you do this earlier?” It should be noted that almost every published page is redacted to obscure names of investigators or people interviewed by the officials about Aaron.

In the meantime, the released files don’t mention groups that have impeded the release of the papers – JSTOR and MIT. Those groups are looking for approval to get an advance review of the papers, following a court order for the documents to be released. Although it’s unusual for a private entity to interfere in a request for government files, MIT has released its own report on Aaron a few weeks ago. The court case was initiated by the request of Poulsen for the files to be released. His lawyers are currently in discussion with the two groups’ legal teams.

The US authorities claimed that it will take half a year to process all the papers, which will be released on a rolling basis.