Wednesday must-reads

• At Aaron Swartz's funeral, his father said Swartz was "killed by the government," the Chicago Sun Times reported. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said he planned to investigate the Justice Department's prosecution of Swartz. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) announced on Reddit that she would introduce "Aaron's Law" to change the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Lofgren had earlier spoken with ars technica about the 2013 tech policy agenda. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also praised Swartz, as the Huffington Post noted. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) had expressed his sorrow about the news of Swartz's death on Twitter.

  Curious thing about Darrell Issa's outspokenness on Swartz's death: “Had he been a journalist and taken that same material that he gained from MIT, he would have been praised for it. It would have been like the Pentagon Papers,” Issa is quoted as saying. TechPresident escapee Nancy Scola observes:

  It's a particularly curious statement given that Issa was an original co-sponsor of the Research Works Act, which have limited federal agencies' abilities to require free public access to papers based on their funded work.

• More commentary, reporting and analysis on the the legal case came from Kevin Cullen, Reuters, NPR, the Huffington Post and Ben Huh, who wrote that "The case against Aaron Swartz was like sending someone to jail for checking too many books out of the library." As Buzzfeed profiled prosecutor Carmen Ortiz, her husband criticized Swartz's family on Twitter. Daniel Lathrop from the Dallas Morning News posted the full court file of the Swartz case.

• The New York Times and the Rockland County Times reported on how New York state's new gun law, signed yesterday, restricts public access to information about gun permits. New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal criticized the bill, saying it "also revokes automatic public access to gun permit records – a wild over-reaction to a Westchester newspaper’s decision to publish the names of all local holders of gun permits. Publishing those names seemed to have no legitimate journalistic purpose, but closing off public records is not the right response."

  Democratic Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti voted for the bill even though he had concerns about its First Amendment implications. The New York World undertook a deeper analysis of the Journal News' gun data.

• Former Obama for America National Field Director Jeremy Bird and Battleground States Director Mitch Stewart have founded a new consulting firm called 270 strategies. Related: Democratic polling firms Anzalone Liszt Research and Grove have merged.

• Pierre Omidyar has launched the Democracy Fund which will invest in "in social entrepreneurs working to ensure that our political system is responsive to the public and able to meet the greatest challenges facing our nation."

• The White House is raising the signature limit on We the People petitions to 100,000 in 30 days, after already having once increased the threshold from 5,000 to 25,000.

• Data.gov has launched alpha.data.gov, a reorganized — and very slick-looking — window into the data published by the United States government.

• Facebook unveiled its new Graph Search function yesterday, and noted as an example that it could help users find music liked by Obama or Romney supporters.

• Philadelphia's new Director of Civic Technology Tim Wisniewski says his job is to work with outside developers to encourage the creation of new software based on city government data.

• Also in Philly: PlanPhilly has launched a new web application called License to Inspect that tracks city property violations and construction permits among with other data.

• For Personal Democracy Plus subscribers, Sam Roudman traces how the Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics was able to repurpose a Chicago app that maps free vaccination locations within about a day.

• A Honolulu Code for America fellow tells Next American City:

  I didn’t know anything about cities. [Laughs.] Before the fellowship, I might have thought about City Hall as this big, bureaucratic black hole of inefficiencies. And then when you go there, you realize that, my god, there are real people there with real challenges. A lot of people are trying to do the very best they can. It’s true that there are of course government workers who are just there for the job security. But a lot more than that are people are trying make things happen, and be helpful as best they can. It’s the system that what really needs to be shaken up in a big way.

Around the web

• Former White House CTO Aneesh Chopra, a Democrat, and technology entrepreneur Pete Snyder, a Republican, lead their rivals in fundraising in the race for Virginia Lt. Governor.

• A judge ruled that the AFP and the Washington Post had improperly used images a photojournalist had posted to Twitter.

• The Guardian reported on new digital efforts being planned for the U.S. Postal Service led by Paul Vogel, its president of digital solutions.

• Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy (D) issued a press release announcing that he had more Twitter followers than Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.)

• A new study examines attitudes toward the ethics of file sharing, copyright and media consumption habits in the U.S. and Germany.

• Public Knowledge says AT&T is exempting its own services from its data cap.

• NASA has launched its second annual international Space Apps challenge.

• StarWars.com replied to the White House's announcement it would not pursue creation of a Death Star.

• New York City Council Speaker and leading mayoral contender Christine Quinn proposed "that we move all of our 1,700 schools from a system of textbooks to a system of tablets." New York teachers can now report suspected cheating cases online.

• Next week's State of the Net conference features a panel titled "Post-Petraeus: Privacy, Passion, Probable Cause?"

• Uber is now set to launch in Washington D.C.

• Govtech wrote about a new public high-speed outdoor WiFi service in Amherst, Mass, the fastest in the state.

• An Israeli company is helping to bring fast wireless broadband service to residents and workers living on the North Slope of Alaska, one of the remotest and harshest places on earth, the Times of Israel reported.

• An unexplained technical glitch keeps directing people with missing cell phones to one man's home in Las Vegas.

• Atlantic Cities used the Google Ngram viewer to analyze the usage of terms related to urban planning.

• Paul Rosenzweig has published a new book "Cyber Warfare: How Conflicts in Cyberspace are Challenging America and Changing the World."

International

• The Guardian profiled the online activism network Avaaz.org, which is polling its members in an effort to redefine its priorities.

• The German government is proposing a law that would restrict workplace surveillance of employees, but critics say loopholes would remain.

• Chinese search engine company Baidu is partnering with France Telecom to develop a mobile browser targeted to Africa and the Middle East.

• Twitter reached a deal with a Turkish wireless company to let its customers post tweets from their handsets at no charge.

• Government websites in the Philippines were hacked in ongoing protest against the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.

• The name Pirate Party has reportedly been banned in Russia due to the name's association with maritime or riverside robbery as defined by Russia's criminal code, which, the Justice Ministry says, does not reflect the party's "e-democracy" agenda.

• Syrian rebels posted video online of a bombing at Aleppo University.

• UN Dispatch noted that Apple's mapping service appeared to have pulled in joke street names in Kabul such as "Bad Money" that Afghani students and amateur mappers had initially uploaded to OpenStreetMap.

• Australians who collaborate in the digital transcription of Australian archival records can earn points toward copies of the Archives' publications, posters and files.

• The Guardian has released a complete index of all its datasets with the help of ScraperWiki.

• The British government is launching a "paperless NHS" effort to implement digital health records. Britain is also instituting an online system to be used in hospitals to help identify children who may be the victim of abuse

• A consortium of news agencies are calling for a judicial review of copyright changes proposed by the British government.

• British officials are searching databases from the Royal Mail and the Student Loans Company to try and track down missing voters.

First POST has been corrected to fix a formatting error that wrongly implied a story about Democratic Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti was mentioned in a New York Times editorial.