Anonymous Stops Westboro Baptist Church from Picketing Aaron Swartz Funeral

At this point, we should've already known.

Following the suicide of Reddit and RSS co-creator Aaron Swartz Friday - news that sent virtually the entire tech world into existential angst, and vocal grieving for the tragic loss of the Internet rights activist - the Westboro Baptist Church promptly announced it would picket his funeral. Lucky for supporters of common human decency, the hacktivists in Anonymous successfully scared the hate group enough to back down from protesting.

The Westboro Baptist Church announced its plans to protest Swartz's funeral in a press release Sunday thoughtfully titled, "GOD H8S Cyber Criminal THUGS."

"Cyber criminals are the latest face of this nation's and this world's raging at God and His Servants at WBC," reads the Westboro press release, via Twitter account @WBCSays. "Now the gloves are off, cyber rebels! ... We will picket the funeral, the LORD willing, so that in that Great Day of His Wrath, your blood is not on our hands."

After the announcement, Anonymous vowed to block any efforts made by the hate group to disrupt Swartz's funeral in a video uploaded to YouTube by user ChannelZeroYT11, which is apparently Anonymous-controlled, according to the Huffington Post.

"Before discussing the operation, there is something that needs to be said to Aaron's family and his friends: We're sorry," says the Anonymous statement in the video. "It is likely that our continuous condemnation and attacks against this cult is the very reason Aaron is being targeted by them. We would do anything to stop them from attending Aaron's services. Aaron deserves peace and we will not allow this cult to overpower what should be the media's focus, the monsters at DOJ who ruthlessly targeted your son."

When members of Anonymous showed up to shield the funeral proceedings from the Westboro Baptist Church, the group was nowhere to found. According to a tweet from Anonymous' mouthpiece account @YourAnonNews, police were notified by the Westboro Baptist Church's lawyer that they would not be attending the funeral.

The 26-year-old Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment Friday. Swartz faced 30 or more years in prison for hacking charges. While working as a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center, Swartz downloaded 4.8 million academic papers from JSTOR, an academic database. MIT and JSTOR have an arrangement allowing free access to the database on MIT's network, but Swartz's pace of downloading reportedly killed JSTOR's servers leading to MIT being blocked from accessing the database for several days, according to the indictment against him. JSTOR alleged Swartz hid a laptop in a computer utility closet at MIT and downloaded the articles before being caught by campus and local police in 2011.

Swartz and JSTOR settled their dispute over the incident, but MIT brought in the authorities to investigate further, which led to his prosecution. Ever since, MIT's cooperation with police has been controversial at the school.

As Anonymous mentioned in its video statement, this isn't the first time the hackers have actively antagonized the Westboro Baptist Church for its deplorable behavior. Anonymous revealed the personal information of numerous alleged members of the church in December, and called on its members to derail WBC's plan to picket the funerals of Sandy Hook School Shooting victims.