aaron swartz bak
<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aaronswartz817</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8/17 bak capt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">issa</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.businessinsider.com/darrell-issa-slams-carmen-ortiz-2013-2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cornyn</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">john lewis</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">heymann (vs ortiz?</font><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">) another suicide but stole credit cards TJ maxx (greed, break system financail ?]</span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.businessinsider.com/darrell-issa-slams-carmen-ortiz-2013-2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream">http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">2013/03/11</span>/requiem-for-a-dream</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American Chronicles</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">March 11, 2013 Issue</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Requiem for a Dream</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aaron Swartz was brilliant and beloved. But the people who knew him best saw a darker side.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He could not deal with people talking about him. It’s taken me some time since he died to get used to talking about him because I was under such strict instructions not to. But he fucked up something really major. He made a really dumb, bad decision. And it’s my right now to ignore all the other things that I thought were dumb, too. Maybe if I hadn’t felt I couldn’t talk about him to other people this wouldn’t have happened. I’m not going to let those preferences that led, in one way or another, to him killing himself guide my life anymore. I reject them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron Swartz’s girlfriend</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">there is suicide as a philosophical question: does suicide make sense as an answer to suffering? No, he didn’t think it did.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alec Resnick, a friend</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">a doctor relative last night told me that he’d had some very painful experiences with patients with ulcerative colitis committing suicide. Apparently co-morbidity with depression is common. I’ve been thinking about it a lot for the last twelve hours. I know during the scare in 2007 he had gotten very, very sick from his U.C. He definitely didn’t seem depressed right before his death, nor for a long time previously. He wasn’t doing normal depressed-people things (like withdrawing from friends and family), let alone suicidal-people things (like giving away his stuff). However, he did commit suicide, which weighs pretty heavily on the other side of the scale. My doctor relative told me that some of his ulcerative-colitis patients seemed to be doing much better until the moment when they suddenly committed suicide, and that there’s some speculation that U.C. can alter liver functioning, which in turn can cause other medicine to cause impulsive behavior like suicide.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ben Wikler, a friend</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i looked back at my e-mails and I was almost always the one who didn’t continue the conversation. He would always say something nice. And most of the time I didn’t respond. It made me feel like a dick.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Matt Stoller, a friend</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i told alec that Aaron was a bit too calm before Christmas. I told Alec that I thought he might try to kill himself. It was like he had one too many options. It was on the table.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Quinn Norton, an ex-girlfriend</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i’ll tell the following story, which is perhaps the best way I can describe what may have happened. Last Wednesday, I went to say Kaddish for Aaron and I got a call from a friend of mine who wanted to come see me, so I didn’t get lunch. He came and he stayed until about three-thirty, four o’clock. By that time, I didn’t want anything to eat, it was too late to go out for lunch. I had to work for a while. The last few weeks have been the hardest weeks of my life, and I think I’ve managed poorly but O.K. But because I was so hungry I was feeling increasingly bad, and I went home and thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown, which for me never happens. I will get depressed, as we all do, and I’m certainly very depressed right now, but I can sort of manage and see my way through. I said to Susan, “I’m really not feeling well and I sort of think I’m losing it.” I got something to eat and I still was feeling very crummy, and then I had dinner and I still didn’t feel well at all, and then I went to sleep and woke up in the morning and started feeling better again. I seemed to have righted the ship. So part of me thinks that maybe something happened, with all the other things that were going on, that just put him in some dissociated frame of mind. There were times when Aaron would—where he would, all of a sudden, not be himself, for a short period of time. That’s the best explanation I have. Whether it’s correct or not I have no idea and I never will.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Swartz, Aaron Swartz’s father</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• • •</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his apartment in Brooklyn on January 11th. He was twenty-six, but he had been well known as a computer programmer for many years. At the age of <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">fourteen, he helped to develop the RSS software that enables the syndication of information over the Internet. At fifteen, he e-mailed one of the leading theorists of Internet law, Lawrence Lessig, and helped to write the code for Lessig’s Creative Commons, which, by writing alternatives to standard copyright licenses, allows people to share their work more freely. At nineteen, he was a developer of Reddit, one of the world’s most widely used social-networking news sites.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After Reddit was sold, to Condé Nast, he turned away from money-making start-ups and became a political activist. He spoke often at technology conferences and activist gatherings, and was admired in both those worlds. Since his death, he has become a hero to programmers who have not turned away from money but wish they had, and to those who believe that governments are crushing what was once the freedom of the Internet. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When Anonymous hacked the State Department Web site on February 17th, they declared, “Aaron Swartz this is for you.”</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Two years ago, he was indicted on multiple felony counts for downloading several million articles from the academic database jstor. It is not clear why he did this. He may have wanted to analyze the articles, or he may have intended to upload them onto the Web, so they could be accessed by anyone. It is clear that he did not anticipate the astonishing severity of the legal response. He did not consider his jstor action an act of civil disobedience for which he was prepared to sacrifice a portion of his life in prison. It was not a project that was particularly important to him. There had been a time when he cared deeply about copyright issues, but he had moved on.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since his death, his family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes. They have done this because it is what he would have wanted, and because it is a way to extract some good from the event.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> They tell people that the experience of being prosecuted is annihilatingly brutal, and that prosecutors can pursue with terrible weapons defendants who have caused little harm. One of the corollaries of this message is that Swartz did not kill himself; he was murdered by the government. But this claim is for public consumption, and the people closest to him do not really believe it</span>. They believe that he would not have killed himself without the prosecutors, but they feel that there is something missing from this account—some further fact, a key, that will make sense of what he did.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite his public presence, he was small and frail and shy and often sick, and people wanted to protect him. He was loved intensely, as a child is loved. Because he hated people talking about him, he kept his friends apart. He was different with different people, and with the same people at different times, so his story is fractured, and some of the pieces contradict one another. This is partly because he was young, and was changing, as most people change between the ages of fourteen and twenty-six.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He kept a blog for most of his life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So here I am. We’re somewhere over a dark patch in the middle of the country and I’m in the window seat in the last row in the plane. The guy in front of me’s leaning all the way back, but I’m in the last row so my seat doesn’t go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep. . . . But that’s not the problem. (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prose creates a strong illusion of presence—so strong that it is difficult to destroy it. It is hard to remember that you are reading and not hearing. The illusion is stronger when the prose is online, partly because you are aware that it might be altered or redacted at any moment—the writer may be online, too, as you read it—and partly because the Internet has been around for such a short time that we implicitly assume (as we do not with a book) that the writer of a blog post is alive.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">No, the problem is that I am terribly, almost unbearably thirsty. . . . I am so thirsty that it’s beginning to feel like there’s no water around to hydrate my brain so my neocortex is shrivelling up. . . . But I guess that’s not really the problem either. The problem, the real problem I suppose, is that I can’t ask for anything to drink. (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He did not cope well with situations of this sort. His girlfriend Taren always dealt with taxi-drivers, with waitresses. He hated feeling that he was in a position of power over someone, and he hated asking for help.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I’m afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job. (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This wasn’t a simple matter of humility. Having power over other people made you into something he disdained. Being a boss wasn’t just immoral; bosses were stupid. They were shallow and cared about dumb things and didn’t understand technology. They had no idea what was going on. They thought they were important, but they were just puppets.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was an imposing room, wood paneling and a window opening on to a picturesque view of the water. An ornate light fixture hung from the ceiling, illuminating the mahogany desk, neatly organized with boxes OUT and IN, with a stack of paper, with a pad for writing on. There was no computer. He didn’t need a computer. A computer would have ruined the look. (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But it was even more complicated than that, because another part of not imposing on people like waitresses or flight attendants or really any normal person was not revealing the gap between them and himself.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most people, it seems, stretch the truth to make themselves seem more impressive. I, it seems, stretch the truth to make myself look worse. At CodeCon the other day, all sorts of people asked me what I was working on these days. I could have said “I’ve been put in charge of Roosevelt Labs, a center to write cool software with political implications.” Or I could have said “I’m writing a book about how the world really works.” But instead I say, “Oh, nothing, just focusing on schoolwork.” . . . The other night, when [redacted] asked me why I switched from computer science to sociology, I said it was because Computer Science was hard and I wasn’t really good at it, which really isn’t true at all. The real reason is because I want to save the world. Maybe I didn’t say that because it sounds sort of crazy. (2005)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He didn’t think of his blog as published writing, exactly, nor was it a private journal, since it was accessible to anyone. It was something in between. He wrote about things in his blog that he didn’t tell his friends—about his depressions, about his ulcerative colitis. It was not clear who he imagined his readers to be. Once, a friend of his related an anecdote that he’d published on his blog (involving a crush he’d had on a girl) to a group of people; he was horrified and asked how the friend could have revealed something so private.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This, I suppose, is the actual problem: I feel my existence is an imposition on the planet. . . . Normally, I just sit in my quiet little room and do the small things that bring me pleasures. I read my books, I answer email, I write a little bit. (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He read constantly and, at the end of each year, published a list, with commentary, of the books he’d read. Many years, there were more than a hundred. He read a lot of sociology, some history, some economics; not much fiction, with the exception of George Saunders and David Foster Wallace.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I’m not such a nuisance to the world, and the kick I get out of living can, I suppose, justify the impositions I make on it. But when life isn’t so fun, well, then I start to wonder. What’s the point of going on if it’s just trouble for us both? My friends will miss me, I am told. . . . But even so, I feel reticent. Even among my closest friends, I still feel like something of an imposition, and the slightest shock, the slightest hint that I’m correct, sends me scurrying back into my hole. (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He meant that literally. In one of the apartments he shared, he slept in a closet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I know, I know, I’m wrong, I’m wrong to feel this way. My friends love me. . . . Indeed, at this very moment, two of my very favorite people to hang out with are actually fighting—fighting!—over the supposed privilege of having me live with them. “I just want to point out,” one says, “that I have never tickled you.” “I just want to point out,” replies the other, “that I have never gotten you to attach clothespins to your face.” (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He hated people talking about him, but he liked being written about in the press, and quoted coverage in his blog.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by the New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they “liberated” millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times. (2009)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is possible to construct a path through Swartz’s life to his decision, in the fall of 2010, to download the jstor articles; the path begins years ago, and consists of a series of experiences that may have obscured, for him, the potential for disaster.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hypothetical: Let’s say you’ve committed a crime and, for whatever reason, don’t want to be convicted for it. (Maybe you don’t believe it should be a crime, maybe the punishment is excessive, maybe you’ve repented. It doesn’t really matter.) The law’s safeguards protect you from being convicted unless the government can prove you committed the crime. The government puts you on the stand and asks you if you did it. . . . Is it immoral to plead the fifth and not answer? (2004)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Five or six years ago, at an education and democracy meet-up, he asked if anyone was going to be in Washington, D.C., and could pick up some files: he was compiling a report about the relation between candidates’ wealth and their electoral success, and, while successful candidates’ financial disclosure records were available on the Internet, unsuccessful candidates’ records, while public, were not online. If you wanted to see them, you were supposed to make paper copies in a library, but he wanted digital files so he could analyze the data. Alec Resnick was planning to be in D.C. and volunteered for the task. Resnick spent a couple of days in a library attempting to steal the files in digital form, got caught, lied about it, and was held there for most of the night by the police. He wasn’t put out by the experience—the police had been very nice about it, he said. Swartz found the story endearing and hilarious, and he and Resnick became close friends.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2008, Carl Malamud, a freedom-of-information activist, put the word out that the pacer (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) database, which normally charged eight cents a page for public documents with no copyright, was offering a free trial of its services at seventeen libraries. Malamud called on activists to go to these libraries, download the files, and post them free on the Web. Swartz went to a library in Chicago and downloaded twenty per cent of the database before he was discovered and pacer called off the trial. He was investigated by the F.B.I.: it conducted surveillance on his parents’ house, near Chicago, and compiled a detailed dossier on him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Case ID #: 288A-WF-238343 (Pending)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Synopsis: To set lead to locate Aaron Swartz.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">. . . House is set on a deep lot, behind other houses on Marshman Avenue. This is a heavily wooded, dead-end street, with no other cars parked on the road making continued surveillance difficult to conduct without severely increasing the risk of discovery.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The investigation was very frightening, but ultimately he was not charged, and by the time he obtained a copy of his F.B.I. file he had come to regard the whole episode as amusing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A few years ago, he downloaded a significant portion of the articles on the Westlaw legal-research database in order to analyze their sources of funding, in the hope of determining whether economic interests affected their conclusions. He gave the data to a Stanford law student, and she published an article in the Stanford Law Review based on his findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At M.I.T., hacking, broadly understood, was a tradition. It was taken to be part of the culture that led to technological innovation and was rarely punished, even if it resulted in considerable annoyance and expense to the hackee. When, for instance, students stole a three-ton cannon from Caltech in 2006, showing false work orders to campus security officers, and transported it across the country to M.I.T., this was widely celebrated.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>For all these reasons, when he decided to download the jstor articles through the network at M.I.T., it was not entirely unreasonable of him to suppose that, if he was caught, this would be regarded as a prank.</b> He did not try very hard not to get caught—he bought the laptop he used with Quinn Norton’s credit card. “We fought about this during the investigation, because I am much more careful,” Norton says. “I work with hackers and I’ve watched their lives be destroyed.” Norton is a journalist who covers Internet culture. She is thirteen years older than Swartz and dated him on and off for four years. “I said, ‘If you’d told me what you were doing, I would have found you real hackers, and there would have been one smoking jstor server and you would have what you wanted and they would not know what happened.’ He really hated when I said that. Because he was doing an M.I.T. hack, and this whole idea that if you’re going to do something criminal, I’ll find you real criminals to help you . . .”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He did not hack into the M.I.T. system—he didn’t have to. M.I.T.’s network is open to anyone on campus, whether or not they are part of the university, so anyone on campus has access to jstor, too. He wrote a script that instructed his computer to download articles continuously, something that was forbidden by jstor’s terms of service.</span> When this violation was detected, and requests coming from his computer were denied, he spoofed the computer’s address, fooling the jstor servers into thinking that subsequent requests were coming from somewhere else. This happened several times. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">M.I.T. traced the requests to his laptop, which he had hidden in an unlocked closet, and installed a hidden camera there that recorded him entering the closet, covering his face with a bike helmet. He was arrested after leaving the closet. The police took away his shoes and put him in a cell. Soon after his arrest, he returned the data he had taken, and jstor considered the matter settled. M.I.T., however, coöperated with the prosecution, despite many efforts, internal and external, to dissuade it.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. AARON SWARTZ, Defendant</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Description of Offense Charged:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">18 USC 1343 Wire Fraud</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">18 USC 1030(a)(4) Computer Fraud</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">18 USC 1030(a)(2) Theft of Information From a Computer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">18 USC 1030(a)(5)(B) Recklessly Damaging a Computer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">18 USC 981. 982, 1030 & 28 USC 2461 Forfeiture</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">18 USC 2 Aiding and Abetting</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, told Swartz’s lawyer, Elliot Peters, that if Swartz pleaded guilty to all counts he would spend six months in jail; if he lost at trial, it would be much worse. “He said the value of what was taken from JSTOR was two million dollars, and under the sentencing guidelines that would equate to a sentence in the neighborhood of seven years,” Peters says. “And I said, ‘What he took from jstor wasn’t worth anything! It was a bunch of, like, the 1942 edition of the Journal of Botany!’ The idea that Aaron should be sentenced the same way as someone who tries to beat someone out of two million dollars in a security-fraud scam? Someone who steals money from people?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Swartz grew up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago.</b> His father designed computer software and consulted on intellectual-property issues; his mother stayed home. He taught himself to read at three and was reading novels by the time he was in kindergarten, so his parents sent him to an elementary school for gifted children. When he was very small, his family was part of a Reform congregation, but when he was six or seven his father came to feel that Reform theology didn’t make sense to him, and moved the family to a Chabad Lubavitch synagogue. Swartz attended services there when he was young, but when he grew older he decided he didn’t believe in God and stopped going. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He hated high school, and wanted to drop out after ninth grade. His father had hated high school, too, had found it excruciatingly dull, so he wasn’t going to force his son to go through it. “Aaron was very, very fragile and very sensitive, and that amplified his difficulties,” his father says. So he dropped out of high school and spent his time taking classes at a local college and studying on his own.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He went to Stanford, but he thought the students were shallow. “He was a bit distressed and confused by all the high jinks that one sees as an undergraduate,” his father says. “You know, people running around in the fountains. He didn’t like people who did things that were just silly, that seemed to have no purpose.” He didn’t want to go back to college after freshman year, so he didn’t. The normal rules didn’t apply to him. He shook them off.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One effect of this upbringing was that he never internalized any notions about what he was supposed to be doing or not doing as a young person. (When he was thirteen, he wanted to become part of the World Wide Web Consortium but was turned down. Undaunted, he read through the rules of the consortium and found that every member was allowed to send a delegate. He looked through the lists to find somebody who hadn’t sent a delegate, and he found one—the HTML Writers Guild. He e-mailed the group and asked if he could participate in a W3C work group as its delegate, and it had no objection.</span>) He also never learned to do anything that he didn’t want to do. “College is very important in that you’re forced to study stuff you’re not interested in,” his father says. But he hated the bureaucracy of it, the dumb rules, the pointless assignments. “He just rejected that. It was like getting him to eat vegetables.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He disliked all vegetables and refused to eat them except in extremely expensive restaurants, such as Thomas Keller restaurants. He had ulcerative colitis, a serious digestive disorder similar to Crohn’s disease; <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">he also thought that he was a “supertaster,” experiencing sensations of taste more intensely than regular people. Partly for these reasons, he ate only foods that were white or yellow. He ate pasta, tofu, cheese, bread, rice, eggs, and cheese pizza. He was phobic about fruit and wouldn’t touch it</span>. He rarely drank alcohol and was careful to stay hydrated. He went through four humidifiers in his apartment in Brooklyn. He said that he left San Francisco because the air-conditioning was bad. He was a supertaster in matters other than food: things always seemed much better or worse to him than they did to other people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I recently had to sit through a performance of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. . . . At first it was simply boring, but as I listened more carefully, it grew increasingly painful, until it became excruciatingly so. I literally began tearing my hair out and trying to cut my skin with my nails (there were large red marks when the performance was finally over). (2006)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I’ve hired a lot of very talented programmers, and one of the things I discovered was that the people who didn’t graduate from college couldn’t finish projects,” his father says. “Because when you go to college, there’s all sorts of stupid stuff you have to do in order to get through.” “He had thousands of pages of notes about different things,” Quinn Norton says. “Books he was reading, books he was writing, theories he had. He started writing a bunch of different books. One was a novel, there were books on social theory—he didn’t finish any of them.” “He was freed of all the disciplining experiences of life,”<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Lawrence Lessig says. “His parents got him out of school early, which was great because it allowed him to become somebody who wasn’t the product of puberty in a public school. But it was bad in the sense that it gave him a confidence about his own judgment, which is dangerous.”</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The summer after his freshman year at Stanford, he was given money by Y Combinator, an “incubator” firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to start a company, Infogami, and after some time he merged his company with another Y Combinator start-up, Reddit. He moved into an apartment in Cambridge with his co-founders and worked on the site. It was extremely difficult, socially, but the site was successful. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After two years, Reddit was sold to Condé Nast, where it became a part of Wired Digital. On the morning after Halloween, 2006, he logged into his bank account to see whether the money from Condé Nast was there. It was: there were many more digits in his balance than there had been the day before. He ran downstairs to an A.T.M. and printed a slip with his balance.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This whole kind of, like, ‘He never did anything for the money’—he loved making money!” Quinn Norton says. “He didn’t get involved with Reddit and sell it to Condé Nast because he doesn’t give a shit about money. But it was never what he was going to live for, that’s absolutely true. He was making plenty of money as a teen-ager—it was really fun. When Google AdWords came out, he wrote a script that let you explore what kinds of ads you would get if you were going to do Google ads. You would interact with the ads, and every time you clicked on one he would get paid.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fun money was one thing, but this was life-changing money. After the sale of Reddit, he put up a story on his blog that he’d written the year before, titled “Mr. Millionaire.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I lean back in my chair and laugh. “Three million?” I say, turning serious. “Please, I could find three million in my fucking couch.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A homeless man asks Mr. Millionaire for change and Mr. Millionaire collapses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I can’t take it,” I sob. “I’m not cut out for this world. I don’t want to be in this world. I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want to be me.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He moved to San Francisco to work at Wired’s office, which was a condition of the sale. He hated San Francisco. It was too loud. The people were shallow. Walking around was terrifying.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">gangs of leering indigents sitting on every streetcorner</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He couldn’t stand his new job.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn’t take it. By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He found the restrictions of corporate life intolerable—he could run only approved programs on his computer, he was outraged by the rules in the employee manual.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I’m liking it already!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After a couple of months at Wired Digital, he went on a trip to Europe. Then his ulcerative colitis flared up painfully, and he hid out in Cambridge and considered suicide. He didn’t tell anyone in the office why he was gone so long. Half annoyed and half worried, his boss checked his blog and found a story about a person named Aaron who got fired from his job and committed suicide. A Reddit co-founder called the Cambridge police, who tracked him down to Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, where he was writing his blog. A few days later, he was fired. Swartz was incensed by this episode, and so was his mother. “I had to endure several phone conversations with Aaron’s immediate boss . . . (your typical crawled-out-from-under-a-rock, lying-to-cover-his-ass middle manager), who expressed to me his great concern for Aaron’s welfare and then turned around within minutes and fired him!” his mother wrote on her blog. “I say good riddance to bad corporate rubbish. . . . Barely 20, he has other projects he wants to begin, books he wants to write, classes he wants to take. We wish him only the best and send him all our love.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the last years of his life, he decided that he disliked programming, that computers were awful in many ways, and that there were things more interesting than freedom of information. He would have liked to give up computers altogether. In the summer of 2009, he spent a month offline—no computer, no phone; mostly he just sat in his apartment and read—and he always described this month as the happiest of his life. But whenever Taren suggested that he do it again, or do something else that would make him happy—go for a hike, move to Boston—he would say that he didn’t care about being happy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He became a political activist. He did not abandon his old issues entirely—he campaigned to prevent passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act, sopa. But he never felt as strongly about any new idea as he had once felt about them.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> He would adopt a cause, only to become dissatisfied, deciding that it wasn’t important enough, or was too unlikely to succeed, and he would move on to something else. He wanted to live an ethical life, but he was neutral about how he should do that.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“There was not a cause that was dear to his heart,” Holden Karnofsky, a friend and a co-founder of the charity evaluator GiveWell, says. “There wasn’t. Except for the big one: ending suffering, maximizing human empowerment, making the world an awesome place—that is what he cared about. I think any cause that you can come up with that’s smaller than that, like freedom, you could find a situation in which Aaron would go against that for the broader cause.” “He was disturbed by things he felt were wrong,” his father says. “To the extent that he felt that the world was unjust or unfair, that bothered him. And if a font was wrong that bothered him, too.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>He became absorbed by the process of change.</b> How should you word a petition or design a Web site or dramatize an outrage so as to entice the most people to become involved or donate money? How does Congress work? How do you get a bill passed? (He spent some time interning in the office of Representative Alan Grayson, of Florida, because his friend Matt Stoller worked there.) How did Robert Moses acquire so much power from a position that officially had almost no power at all? He came to believe that the<b> influence of money in American politics was so enormous a problem that possibly little else could be solved until that was</b>. Then again, there were always other countries: in conversation with an Australian friend, he decided that it would be ridiculously easy to “take over Australia,” but that since the country had only twenty million people it wasn’t worth it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The irrationalities of power fascinated him, but he found the irrationalities of activism exasperating.</b> Most activists, in his experience, would launch big campaigns about big issues and do things that they guessed would be beneficial, like running television ads or sending out direct mail, but they never did the work to figure out whether what they were doing was actually changing policy. He couldn’t stand that there were so many bad, inefficient nonprofits out there, eating up donor money. When a business was based on a bad idea, it failed, but nonprofits never failed—they just kept on raising cash from people who wanted to believe in them. He imagined himself travelling around the country as judge and executioner, closing down hundreds of ineffective N.G.O.s. He imagined building one giant global organization that could replace the little ones that existed now. He warned Taren that if she went around starting new groups she should be aware that they might take the oxygen away from his future organization. It frightened her a bit when he talked like this—it felt megalomaniacal and unstable—so she tended to avoid the subject.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The trick in the short term, he thought, was to launch micro-campaigns on a local level, where you could test various strategies and see what worked and what didn’t. You needed tight feedback loops that would enable you to measure concrete results, so you had to design tactics that could be subjected to controlled experiments.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From: Aaron Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Date: Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 2:17 pm</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To: Ben Wikler</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here’s an idea Taren and I were discussing last night. . . . Taren’s mom apparently helped pass a bill that created a revolving credit fund for switching schools to geothermal in Indiana. It’s a great environmental program, it saves money for the schools, and it creates local jobs. And once you have a bill like this written you could—boom, boom, boom—make it a meta-campaign and pass it in all sorts of cities around the country. . . . Maybe we can bubble about it in person sometime! Bubble bubble bubble!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He was trying to figure out how to maximize his lifetime impact on over-all human welfare,” Wikler says. “He sent me a year before he died an essay that he didn’t publish where he walked through six major strategies.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“How to Save the World, Part 1”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s needed is not another think tank of grand policy plans, but more of a just-in-time policy development shop: a group that has its finger on the pulse of what’s moving through Congress right now and can devise small amendments and little technical corrections.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The financial-regulation bill that passed in 2010, for instance, contained a provision that shareholders with five per cent of a corporation’s stock could add names to the ballot for members of the board—the idea being to avoid a board that was handpicked by the C.E.O. But the White House removed a crucial “s” from the end of the word “shareholders”—thus insuring that only a single shareholder who owned at least five per cent of the stock (and many corporations have no such shareholders) could add names to the ballot, not a group of shareholders banding together. Swartz and others submitted a petition objecting to the removal of the letter “s.” The final bill scrapped the five-per-cent requirement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How could you manipulate the law’s incentive structure to induce people to behave better? He and Matt Stoller worked for months on a paper evaluating every drug and alcohol policy they could find.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From: Aaron Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Date: Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 10:31 am</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To: Holden Karnofsky</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You eliminate the drinking age and create a do-not-drink list, which people get added to if they’re caught drinking-and-driving or whatever. Then when you buy beer or wine at a restaurant or store, they check to see if you’re on the list.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He thought a lot about institutions and how they molded beliefs. He became obsessed with management theory. One of his favorite books was “Moral Mazes,” by Robert Jackall, an anthropological study of several large corporations, which examined how the structure of the corporations created a corporate morality. </span>A case he liked to cite: the tale of the General Motors plant in Fremont, California. The workers there were among the worst in the country—when they weren’t going on strike or sabotaging production, they were selling drugs and sex on site. G.M. closed the plant; a few months later Toyota reopened it and rehired the very same workers. But first it took them to Japan to see the Toyota way of working: managers and workers weren’t antagonists—when a problem arose, rather than punishing the worker closest to it the managers conferred with him to figure out a solution. When the workers returned to the U.S., they were one of the best workforces in the country. Lesson: if you understand management, you can design organizational machines that will yield better people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He knew that it was crucial to understand people in order to lead and guide them.</span> His past failures in this regard rankled. In 1999, he had started a site based on the same idea as Wikipedia, before Wikipedia existed, but, since it never attracted any contributors, nothing came of it. He created watchdog.net, which was similar to change.org, before change.org, but nothing came of that, either. Why did Wikipedia and change.org become two of the most popular Web sites in the world while his Web sites were failures? He had previously believed that if you came up with a great idea people would use it. But he realized now that you couldn’t expect people to come to you; you had to pull them in.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2007, he and a friend went around to colleges in the Bay Area and asked students what they were doing there. Mostly, the friend asked, since he was too shy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just watching random conversations with random people was a thoroughly rewarding experience. I felt as if it was some essential task of humanity that I had heretofore neglected.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the conversations that he reported in a blog post, the college students explained what they were studying and what they hoped to do afterward with their degrees.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I am not sure what to say to these people. I understand the paths their lives are on and I see the flaws in the institutions in which they reside, but I have trouble imagining how I can fix things for them, as people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In concert with his technocratic tendencies and ambition, I sometimes accused him of shuffling along the edge of a slippery slope at whose foot you could find a terrifying crossbreed of Robert Moses, Cass Sunstein, and Frederick Winslow Taylor,” Alec Resnick says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Any of these guys look like the Peeping Tom?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He wasn’t an unfeeling technocrat, though. It was just that the lives of working-class people were utterly foreign to him, including as they did many situations that he would have found unbearable. He couldn’t deal with waitresses because the thought of waiting on tables was to him unfathomably humiliating. “I remember him watching a video about a woman who is working at Burger King and living in a trailer and he would just watch it and cry,” Quinn Norton says. “He had a tremendous and in some ways pathological capacity for compassion.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Q thinks the most important thing is how it feels to be poor. The problem isn’t so much that they don’t have money, but that they’re made to feel bad because of it. Welfare is thus a bad idea because it just makes the poor feel worse. . . . My first reaction to this was that the poor were wrong: it wasn’t their fault they were poor, they were just the losers in a rigged game. But, of course, they don’t know the game is rigged and things they don’t know can’t make them feel better. (2009)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Norton grew up poor; her father was a drug addict who was sent to San Quentin when she was seventeen. Because she knew what it was like to be poor, Swartz found her arguments hard to counter, but they were terribly frustrating. He believed that there were objective facts about what made people’s lives better, and that these were the facts that mattered. He disliked any analysis that attributed social consequence to amorphous, subjective, unmeasurable, unfixable causes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I think the essential fight of his life was to never be satisfied that he’d figured out the fight of his life,” Ben Wikler says.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> “He was constantly trying to figure out how to be more effective and what he should be working on. He had a beautiful willingness to change his mind completely.</span>” It is a vertiginous thing to have so much freedom—to be always self-skeptical, always testing the reasons for your beliefs, always prepared to abandon them for something better. If you can do anything you want, then every day becomes an existential problem—an empty space of possibility that has no ceiling but also no walls and no floor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Much more than any particular thing he did, the self-reflection and self-doubt,” Alec Resnick says. “Being willing to say, ‘All of these things are bad, but we can work on making something better.’ To be preoccupied by the ethical ramifications of your actions, and to strip away most of the limits on how, ethically, you can behave.” To think continuously about changing the world is to spend your life looking at what is bad in it. To be attached to the world is to be attached to the world as it is, and not for any reason, because reasons can always be countered. To consider the world from first principles, to think about how well it would work if everything were different, is to be ready to throw away everything you know. Radical idealism and a sense of limitless possibility are the brighter facets of absolute rejection.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2004, a software developer named Nick Bradbury wrote a post about how much money he was losing because people were pirating his software. People justified stealing software on the ground that they were stealing from rich corporations, he wrote, but most of the time they were stealing from people like him. Swartz thought this was stupid.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“On Piracy, or, Nick Bradbury Is an Amazing Idiot”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nick has no innate right to have people pay for his software, just as I have no right to ask people to pay for use of my name. Even if he did, most people who pirate his software probably would never use it anyway, so they aren’t costing him any money and they’re providing him with free advertising. . . . Yes, piracy probably does take some sales away from Nick, but I doubt it’s very many.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The next day he wrote a follow-up post.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stealing is wrong. But downloading isn’t stealing. If I shoplift an album from my local record store, no one else can buy it. But when I download a song, no one loses it and another person gets it. There’s no ethical problem. The evidence that downloading hurts sales is weak, but even if downloading did hurt sales, that doesn’t make it unethical.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Libraries, video rental places, and used book stores (none of which pay the artist) hurt sales too. Is it unethical to use them?</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2008, he and a few others wrote a screed that they posted online: the “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.” The prosecution planned to use this as evidence of his intent to distribute the jstor articles.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. . . . Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. . . . We can fight back. Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is commonly assumed that the debate over what Swartz did, and, more generally, the debate over whether information does or does not want to be free, is between hacker culture and copyright culture, young people and old people, but this is not true. On the Hacker News site in the fall of 2012, many commenters disagreed with what he’d done, and argued with his supporters on the site that in a nation ruled by laws it was not O.K. for one person to just go and break a law he felt was unjust.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">encoderer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ok, so he’s like Gandhi.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gandhi spent several years in prison. He believed in his cause and made that sacrifice. Man up, aaronsw.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">shmulkey18</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Exactly. Mr. “<b>Demand Progress</b>” needs to understand that we are a nation of laws, and that those who knowingly break those laws will be—and should be—punished. And no, this is<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> not a case of civil disobedience. If it was, Swartz would have publicly violated the law </span>(rather than attempting to conceal the crime) in order to draw attention to its putative unfairness. Aaron Swartz is a spoiled brat. I hope that they throw the book at him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Shortly after Swartz was arrested, the prosecutors subpoenaed Quinn Norton, his then girlfriend. They thought she would know his plans. In those first weeks, both of them were more worried about her going to jail than him, because if the prosecutors asked her for her laptop’s password she would have to refuse. She wrote about hackers, criminal and otherwise, and her laptop contained confidential source material going back years. She also had a seven-year-old daughter whom Swartz loved very much. When prosecutors first offered a plea bargain, he told her that if she wanted him to take it he would, and she almost said yes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">His family was horrified. There was concern that he would commit suicide if he went to prison. His first lawyer told the prosecutors he felt that Swartz was a suicide risk; the prosecutors told him that he’d be safe in jail. His father, though he thought that his son could survive prison, couldn’t abide the idea of the felony conviction.</span> “It was so foreign to me that a son of mine should be branded a felon,” he says. “I mean, do you have a brother? Can you imagine your brother going to jail and being a convicted felon? It’s just so completely out of our—out of our whole conception, and you know, maybe, if I can imagine someone in your family does something really terrible and you can see that there is no way out, but he wasn’t guilty.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“He wanted to make the world better from inside the system, and they don’t let felons work in the White House,” Quinn Norton says. “He said those exact words to me. My dad didn’t last very long with his felony conviction. It’s like being a fucking leper, and for somebody who wanted to move in the circles of American political power it was the end of all those dreams. I knew it was a really dangerous period, I knew this was all going through his head.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• • •</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...there was what happened with Quinn, which I think had to be very devastating to him. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Quinn got her own attorney, who told her to coöperate with the prosecutor. There are interviews which I’ve now read with the Secret Service where they say she coöperated fully with them; she signed a proffer saying that she would tell them everything she knew in return for immunity. And we were going out of our minds. We were trying to tell her to stop, and she wouldn’t. Her attorney was a former federal prosecutor, and that’s what he recommended. But, to me, I—I don’t know. To me, that’s not an acceptable answer. She described her grand-jury testimony as being (which it was) largely not helpful to the prosecutor. But her betrayal of Aaron, in my mind, had to be devastating—was, was really quite something, even though she came around and Aaron said—you know, Aaron defended her.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When I go see a big pile of rocks, I want to be entertained.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">you get a lawyer and your lawyer says you can’t take any notes or talk to anybody about what’s happening. You don’t know how much you’re being watched. You could be arrested at any point. You know they can do any trick, they can lie to you, they are perfectly allowed. They can show up at your door for no reason. I did not understand what was going on at all. I think I made some really poor choices about how to deal with that at the time, but I had no idea. I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Quinn Norton</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">we never liked her. I’ll say that, too. Other people can perhaps give you a clearer picture of her, but I’m not dispassionate in this regard. I feel comfortable explaining the facts, but my feelings—my feelings are sufficiently—are sufficient that I don’t think I want to go into it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">he was an intensely private person, and they compelled me to hand over our chat logs. The degree to which he hated me the day that I had to hand over our chat logs. . . . It wasn’t my fault, and I tried to—I redacted a lot of stuff, but Steve Heymann got to go through years of our personal life together</span>. I don’t know if he was ever going to be able to forgive me for that. I was the one who turned over our lives to these people. He also didn’t want me to go to jail. There’s no point at which this is a clean story.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Quinn Norton</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While all this was happening, for several months in the first half of 2012, his mother was desperately ill. His father stopped working on the case completely to take care of her.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Then, in late fall<b>, two things changed.</b> First, Swartz realized that his<b> money was gone and he was going to have to start asking people</b> he knew to help him pay his lawyers. This was something he dreaded. <b>Second, while he had previously tried to keep the case quiet, in order to give M.I.T. a chance to reverse its stance without embarrassment, now he and others recognized that this strategy had failed.</b> Their new strategy entailed hiring a P.R. firm to stir up public outrage before the trial. For two years after his arrest, he had managed to get on with his work, avoiding the crushing weight of imposition and dependency—his father had spent more time on the case than he had. But now the case was his life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">we were talking about the money and about how much debt it was reasonable for him to go into around the case. I was saying, “You can get a half-million salary a year as a C.T.O. for some tech company.” And he said, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“I would rather sleep on friends’ couches for the rest of my life than take a job I don’t want.”</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>january 11th was a Friday.</b> I spent from noon to five-thirty sitting in my office in front of my<b> computer scrolling through these documents. We had really powerful evidence, we were really going to be able to go after these guys. I printed it all out, a big pile of stuff, I shoved it in my briefcase</b>, I leave my office, I get into my car, I drive home, I’m almost at home, and I get an e-mail from Bob which said “Aaron committed suicide.” And I pull over, and I call Bob, and he is completely destroyed, and trying to get an airplane reservation to go to New York, and he says “Aaron hung himself this afternoon, I’m trying to get to New York, I’ll call you later.” And so I just sat there, in the car.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Elliot Peters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i’m aaron’s defense lawyer, so I’m not going to sit here and say that he was a thief, because I don’t think he was a thief, and I was prepared to defend him with all my heart, but I also, you know, being a lawyer-advocate doesn’t mean that I can’t see the other side of this issue, so I’m not—</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Elliot Peters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i think it was just recognizing he was going to need other people, and that was too hard for him to accept. He couldn’t become dependent. To end it was the only way.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lawrence Lessig</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>on friday morning, he wasn’t interested in moving<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> I asked him what was wrong and he again said, “I’m still alive.” I said, “Love, I know this is really hard. But we’re going to win the case, and you’re going to be able to work on your project.” He said, “Stop lying to me</span>.” I said, “I’m not lying to you. I really believe that. You said it yourself, just a few days ago—it’s going to be a great year.” I opened the blinds. I got my laptop and turned on Pomplamoose—probably “If You Think You Need Some Lovin’.” He took the laptop and changed the song, without speaking, to “Fond Farewell.” I listened for a few minutes. I wondered whether he was trying to tell me that he was suicidal, but didn’t ask or say anything. I said, instead, maybe halfway through the song, “Enough of that.” I turned the music off.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I got a cup of water and came over to throw it on him. He picked up my laptop and held it in front of him as a shield. I kneeled next to him and tried a tickling strategy. He started kicking, lashing out with his legs, hard. I dodged most of them, but he caught me a couple of times. They were hard kicks, pretty violent. I got the cup of water again and threw it on him. He jumped up and filled a cup himself, and threw it on me.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then he ran over to the bathroom and started to close the door. I was afraid of what he would do in there alone, so I held the handle down, the door wouldn’t lock while the handle was down. We battled for a few minutes, him from the inside and me from the outside. Eventually he started winning, and I was scared. So I begged, “Please don’t lock the door. I’m afraid you’re going to hurt yourself.” He said, “But you’ll throw water on me!” I said, “I promise not to. Plus, I need to take a shower. Please let me in.” Then he gave up immediately and let me in.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At that point I felt like I should actually take a shower, so I did. Suddenly he started getting dressed. He did it quickly, and he put on his favorite outfit—a V-neck black T-shirt and the tan corduroy pants we’d bought together a few weeks before, so that he’d have something nice to wear for the trial. Then he put on his coat. I thought he was in a rush to head to the office so I got ready as quickly as I could. He said, I’m not coming. I said, really? Why did you put your coat on. He shrugged. I said, “O.K., I’ll stay here with you. I’ll take the day off. We can go for a hike or something.” He shook his head. “No, you go to the office. I need to be alone.” “If I leave you here, you won’t eat anything.” He thought about that for a second and said, “I’ll make some pasta.” “O.K., I’ll go, but only if you promise me two things: that you’ll eat something and that you won’t hurt yourself.” “I promise.” And then I left.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When I got to the office I looked up the song “Fond Farewell.” It wasn’t about suicide, it was about heroin addiction. I used that to reassure myself. I set up dinner for that evening with Ben, and tried texting Aaron about it. I noticed that the texts were showing up in the color they show up in when they’re not being received. That worried me a little bit but not overly—I thought maybe he was just sleeping or felt like he needed the day off.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is a moment, immediately before life becomes no longer worth living, when the world appears to slow down and all its myriad details suddenly become brightly, achingly apparent. (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the evening, she went home.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i was worried enough about Aaron that when I arrived at the building and while I was in the elevator, I got my phone out and plugged in my password and put it on the call screen so that if I needed to call 911 I’d be able to immediately. I felt silly doing so. It seemed like a crazy precaution to take. But I felt like it didn’t cost me anything to do it, I didn’t have anything else to do while in the elevator.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The room was dark. I looked for him in the bed, and then I saw him hanging from the window by his belt. I screamed and ran over to him. He was wearing the same clothes and still had his coat on. I called 911 and couldn’t remember our address. I was screaming, they thought I was saying Sterling Place instead of Sullivan Place. Finally they got it. I hung up and ran out into the hallway screaming. I hadn’t tried to get him down or even really touched him yet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Wear a helmet.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After a minute, I said, I have to help him! What if he’s still alive! I didn’t really believe that he was, but the analytical portion of my brain was saying, if there’s even the remotest chance that he’s savable now but won’t be in three minutes you have to do something now. I ran in and touched his face. He didn’t feel cold to the touch, he was probably warmer than room temperature, but he clearly wasn’t body temperature, either. I gave up and went back outside. I didn’t try to cut him down or anything, though I’m not sure why.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">taren called on Friday night, but I don’t answer the phone on Friday night. And Susan’s cell phone was ringing and that was very strange because she doesn’t get calls on her cell phone.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• • •</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aron,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I do not know you in person. I am just an year older than you. We have something in common which unites us—the internet. We belong here. This is our world where boundaries are torn apart. I cried. Literally cried reading about you. A part of mine wants to believe and write this—“Well staged Dark Knight!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shri Vignesh</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">21 Jan 2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The response to his death was immediate and astonishing. It was not just because he was young and he had killed himself. He represented many things to people. “If you look at 2011 to the present, there’s an incredible emotional rollercoaster about Internet freedom and the Arab revolutions,” Quinn Norton says. “The Internet was going to change everything, and at the end of 2011 you had Occupy. And then everything just got destroyed. 2012 was the year, globally, for the heightening of censorship and the heightening of surveillance, and then Aaron killed himself.<b> Aaron was so much the Internet’s boy, </b>and that so much exemplified this machine crushing our hopes.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right after he died, he started trending on Twitter in Bangalore. Someone painted a mural of him in Brooklyn, on a wall above a painting of Bradley Manning. At a conference in Europe, there was installation art of his face. His friends put up a Web site, Remember Aaron Swartz, and people posted on it from all over the world—from Germany, Bangladesh, Brazil, France, India, China, the Philippines, Venezuela, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Australia, Portugal. Very few of the people who posted had known him personally, or even heard his name before his death.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I read about Aaron from the News in China. . . . Hereby I translate my words: I have no words to express how deeply sorry I am to hear about the pass-away of a hero on our Internet: Aaron Swartz. One of his great work is RSS. He also did a lot of work to ensure fairly and freely sharing/using info online. May him rest in peace and find his freedom and happiness in heaven.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mei Zhao</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">15 Jan 2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A man named John Atkinson wrote a blog post titled “Why Am I So Upset About Aaron Swartz’s Suicide?” in which he asked himself why the death of someone he didn’t know, and had never heard of until his arrest, had affected him so profoundly, when most tragedies in the news—wars, natural disasters, school shootings—left him cold. “Aaron Swartz is what I wish I was,” he wrote. “I am a bright technologist, but I’ve never built anything of note. I have strong opinions about how to improve this world, but I’ve never acted to bring them to pass. I have thoughts every day that I would share with the world, but I allow my fears to convince me to keep them to myself. If I were able to stop being afraid of what the world would think of me, I could see myself making every decision that Aaron made that ultimately led to his untimely death. This upsets me immensely. I am upset that we have a justice system that would persecute me the way it did Aaron. I am upset that I have spent 27 years of my life having made no discernible difference to the world around me.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• • •</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">he was not a saint. He could be as petty as anyone. But the thing that makes a good life isn’t constantly being saintly—it’s just continuing to do shit. We spend so much time waiting to start to live. He always went big—he never looked for permission to go big. He assumed that he could talk to anyone he wanted, and he was right, and it wasn’t because he was super-special-genius-boy, it was because he tried.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Quinn Norton</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i can’t help but think that until I put the type of skin in the game that he did that maybe I shouldn’t mourn him, that maybe it’s even a little vulgar and self-serving.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alec Resnick</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">you know, a lot of people who knew him have nightmares. It’s very strange, I’ve never had a friend kill himself before and I’ve had a lot of nightmares.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Matt Stoller</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i fell in love with him because I fell in love with the way his existence suggested that I, too, could be Good. It felt like being grateful for a certain kind of faith. And, ultimately, when I feel low about Aaron’s death it feels a lot more like a crisis of faith than a breakup. I know many other folks who are my friends whom I deeply respect whose lives, at my most selfish, I would gladly trade to have Aaron back.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alec Resnick</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i had a nightmare. Aaron and I were living in a house together and someone started coming after us. I didn’t know who it was. It seemed if we could just fortify the house we’d be safe. We started blockading the doors with furniture, we were nailing two-by-fours over the windows. I paused in my dream to make breakfast, and when I turned around to take it to him, Aaron was dead.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">i don’t want to be here. It’s like he jumps off a bridge and he pulls me over with him. I can’t go back. I don’t know what I can do. Nothing ever has come close to this, in its effect. I am never lost. I’ve never been so lost. I don’t know what to do.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lawrence Lessig</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">there’s this passage in Gemara about whether the angel of death can make a mistake. Gemara is part of the Talmud, and so the—I think about that. You know, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to me. But I don’t know, I—I just think it’s not a question I’ll ever answer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• • •</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rabbi Joseph, when he came to the following verse, wept: </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But there is that is swept away without judgment. He said: Is there anyone who passes away before one’s allotted time?1—Yes, as in the story heard by Rabbi Bibi bar Abaye, who was frequently visited by the Angel of death. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Once the latter said to his messenger: Go, bring me Miriam, the women’s hairdresser! He went and brought him Miriam, the children’s nurse. Said he to him:2 I told thee Miriam, the women’s hairdresser. He answered: If so, I will take her back. Said he to him: Since thou hast brought her, let her be added.3 But how were you able to get her?4—She was holding a shovel in her hand and was heating and raking the oven. She took it and put it on her foot and burnt herself; thus her luck was impaired and I brought her. Said Rabbi Bibi bar Abaye to him: Have ye permission to act thus? He answered him: <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Is it not written: “There is that is swept away without judgment”?</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 I.e., although the person has committed no sin to merit shortening of life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 I.e., the Angel of death to his messenger.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3 I.e., to the dead.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4 Since it was not yet her time to die. ?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/15/tech/web/aaron-swartz-internet/index.html">http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/15/tech/web/aaron-swartz-internet/index.html</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph speakable" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/12/us/new-york-reddit-founder-suicide/index.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">Aaron Swartz </a>helped create the Internet.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph speakable" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Maybe not the Internet foundations of ARPANET and TCP/IP and Mosaic, the codes and packets and standards on which the whole thing is based. But he was a factor in fashioning some of the Web's upper floors. With his contributions to RSS coding and the Web application framework, Swartz made some of today's more expansive Internet possible.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph speakable" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But what Swartz also helped create was a philosophy of the Internet, one that remains the subject of great controversy almost 20 years into its life: the libertarian idea that information wants to be free.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Aaron was a genius," said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. "He was a technologist who was committed to open access to information, and committed to bringing about the changes he believed in."</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);">"Aaron was an embodiment of the Web, and a contributor to many of the aspects that made it great," said Matt Mullenweg, who founded the blogging platform WordPress, in a statement. "When I was young and getting into technology Aaron was even younger and</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> literally setting the standards for the Web with contributions to RSS 1.0 and Creative Commons. He inspired a generation to share online, to move to (San Francisco), to not be afraid to start things, and to break down barriers."</span></font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz died Friday of an apparent suicide in his apartment in Brooklyn, New York. He was 26.</font></div><div class="elembedded elembedded--standard" style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative; width: 780px; z-index: 0; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/14/tech/web/aaron-swartz-death-fallout/index.html?hpt=te_t1" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">Although Swartz's life was not without controversy</a> -- he faced federal charges that he illegally downloaded millions of scholarly papers from MIT -- his death has been met with an outpouring of tributes and grief.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A <a href="http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">Tumblr page</a> was set up for people to express their thoughts and condolences. Friends and commenters there described him as "inspiring," "enthusiastic," "a hero," "shy," "a great technologist" -- a bright, inquisitive, creative, challenging personality who deeply affected those he touched.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/15/opinion/weinberger-aaron-swartz/index.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Opinion: Why the Net grieves Aaron Swartz</font></a></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"Such a brilliant, disciplined, well-spoken guy with a great sense of humor, who probably knew as much about 'Star Wars' mythology and trivia as he did about programming computers," wrote a member of Chicago Force, a "Star Wars" fan club, noting the shock of club members in 1999 when they met with the budding Web developer and discovered he was just 12 years old.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Let his life be an inspiration to us all to keep fighting, to keep building a better world, where free expression and open standards become the norm for everyone," added Jan Zuppinger, who described himself as an "Internet Freedom Activist."</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down," said World Wide Web creator <a href="https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/290140454211698689" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">Tim Berners-Lee in a tweet</a>.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'I want something new, something worthwhile, something better'</font></span></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz was apparently committed to such activism from an early age. He was born in Chicago, the son of a software company founder, and showed both intellect and restlessness at an early age.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"My name is Aaron Swartz," he wrote on a blog when he was a teenager, according to an entry on the Tumblr. (The actual blog post appears to be unavailable.) "I'm a 9th grader at the North Shore Country Day School. In the summer of 2000, I finally realized that school wasn't working. I decided to do something about it. ... I'm tired of outdated teaching practices where the students don't learn anything. I'm tired of constantly being prepared for more preparation. I want something new, something worthwhile, something better."</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He would have been 13 at the time.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz never really gravitated to old-fashioned schooling; after his blog note, he mainly studied at home. He enrolled at Stanford in 2004 but only stayed a year, saying <a href="http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/01/13/aaron-swartz-prodigy-and-drop-out-takes-own-life/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">he didn't find </a><a href="http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/01/13/aaron-swartz-prodigy-and-drop-out-takes-own-life/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">"a very intellectual atmosphere" on the campus at the edge of Silicon Valley. He later became a fellow at Harvard University's Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.</a></font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Swartz was a prodigy. By the time he was 14, he had <b>co-written the specification for RSS -- originally Rich Site Summary, now Really Simple Syndication</b> -- a Web-publishing technology for delivering syndicated content from frequently updated sites, such as blogs or news websites. RSS allows Web consumers to receive the latest stories on a feed without having to constantly revisit their favorite pages.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">If you subscribe to a podcast -- or receive automatic updates from CNN.com -- you have Swartz to thank.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After leaving Stanford he created Infogami, which was later merged with<b> Reddit, the freewheeling social-news site where users vote their favorite stories onto the main page. Reddit, which was purchased by Conde Nast in 2006, has come under fire for its anything-goes ethos. </b>One popular Reddit moderator, who went by the name Violentacrez, was known for starting <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/18/us/internet-troll-apology/index.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">Reddit pages devoted to underage girls and violent fantasies</a>. When his identity became known via <a href="http://gawker.com/5950981/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">a Gawker article</a>, he was fired from his job.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz was long gone from Reddit by then -- he was let go just after the Conde Nast purchase -- but believed in the ethos of the site and the open Internet in general.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"(He) engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful s*-disturber," <a href="http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">wrote BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow</a>, a friend of Swartz's, in a tribute.[hmmn]</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of Swartz's desires was to make public information truly public -- that is, free and easily available.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There's a government-run system, <a href="http://www.pacer.gov/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">PACER</a>, that allows the public to access court records online. However, PACER charged a fee for accessing this public-domain information. As Doctorow observed, Swartz "singlehandedly liberated 20% of U.S. law" by moving the information onto a public site, spending "a small fortune" of his own money doing so.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Later, Swartz founded <a href="http://demandprogress.org/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">Demand Progress</a>, a group devoted to Internet activism. For all his success with programming, it's in this arena that he had the most impact, said Soghoian. Demand Progress was instrumental in fighting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, two bills that would have expanded government oversight in fighting Internet piracy and copyright violations at the possible expense of the free flow of information.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"He really, really believed that public information should be free and accessible to everyone," said Soghoian.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/14/technology/swartz-suicide-depression/index.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Suicide sparks talk about depression</font></a></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'This was not serious computer hacking'</font></span></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By the time SOPA and PIPA were shot down last year, Swartz had become entangled in another legal thicket surrounding free access to online data.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><a href="http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">According to federal prosecutors</a>, Swartz used MIT's computer networks to download more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, in 2010 and 2011. He was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud and other crimes, even though JSTOR declined to prosecute and urged the government to drop the case.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"What Aaron was accused of by the government (was) essentially a serious form of computer hacking," said Soghoian. If found guilty, Swartz could have been sentenced to up to 35 years in jail and a $1 million fine.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soghoian was one of many observers surprised at the severity of the charges.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"These are the kinds of things you'd assume the government would use in a serious hacking case -- identity theft, millions of credit card numbers stolen, hacking into protected government databases or corporate networks," he said. "Aaron was accused of downloading too many articles from a website that anyone connected to the MIT network could log into.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"This was not serious computer hacking and the government didn't appear to differentiate between those kinds of activities."</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Prosecutors saw it differently. When Swartz was indicted in July 2011, U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away."</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the wake of Swartz's death, critics have been quick to cast blame. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, an outspoken writer on Internet issues, titled <a href="http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">a blog post "Prosecutor as bully."</a></font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"From the beginning the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way," he wrote. "Somehow, we need to get beyond the 'I'm right so I'm right to nuke you' ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame."</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz's family was equally pointed.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death," <a href="http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.2s;">they said in a statement</a>.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Christina DiIorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice, declined to comment to CNN on Swartz's case, citing respect for his family.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soghoian, the ACLU's analyst, said he sees Swartz's death as a great loss. Swartz could have made a fortune as a start-up wizard or venture capitalist but instead he plowed what money he made into his activism, he said.</font></div><div class="zn-bodyparagraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 15px; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; line-height: 1.66667; margin-right: 0px; background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Aaron is seen as a hero. He spent a lot of time working to make the Internet a more open place," Soghoian said. "We lost a really important person who changed the Internet in a positive way, and we all lose out by his departure."</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">killswitch</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlvCjxiSuds</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">internet's own boy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvsxnOg0bJY</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lauri Love is a British activist facing extradition to the U.S. and decades in prison for protesting the persecution of U.S. internet activist Aaron Swartz. He needs our help!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RootsAction Education Fund and the Courage Foundation, based in the U.S. and Europe, respectively, are teaming up to support Love, who faces potential extradition in a hearing later this month.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Click here to help fund Love's legal expenses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Half of the proceeds raised will go to RootsAction Education Fund, and the other half will be a charitable donation to help fund Love's legal defense, to keep him from the exacerbation of illnesses that an extradition would certainly bring on. Donations are tax-deductible in the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lauri Love is a computer scientist from Stradishall in the UK who has a long history of political activism. He played a prominent role in the student and Occupy movements in Glasgow, Scotland, during 2011-2012. Love is facing potential extradition to the United States for his alleged involvement in #OpLastResort, the series of online protests that followed the persecution and suicide of Aaron Swartz.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Love is being pursued by the U.S. criminal justice system for allegedly protesting abuses by that same system, with prosecutors in three U.S. court districts accusing Love of hacking into various government websites.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Love's extradition hearing thus far has shown that justice would mean keeping him at home, and that any trial should happen in the UK. The U.S. must not be allowed to extradite without showing evidence, without proving damage, and for a crime allegedly committed on UK soil.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Click here to help make the difference needed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sarah Harrison, Courage's acting director, said: "With RootsAction's help, we can bring much needed attention to Lauri Love's case on both sides of the Atlantic. Remember that while awaiting a ruling, Lauri Love needs to prepare for trial in the U.S. and the UK, needing two legal teams to work together. Lauri has already taken a stand for the encryption rights of British citizens -- now it's our turn to take a stand for him."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) has seized Lauri's computers, held them for years, and attempted to force him to turn over encryption keys — all without charging him with a crime. Lauri has never been to the United States, but that's where he faces charges that could amount to a total of 99 years in jail.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In May, Judge Nina Tempia rejected the NCA's attempt to "circumvent" statutory safeguards in its grab for Lauri's keys. Lauri refused to provide his keys in order to take a stand for encryption nationwide, as an NCA victory would have set a dangerous precedent for Britons' information security.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then in June, Lauri's extradition hearing heard testimony from his parents, doctors, and professors who warned about the mental health risks Lauri would face in a U.S. prison. Lauri has Asperger Syndrome and depression, and in the U.S. he'd likely be thrown into solitary confinement, an ocean away from his support network, and without proper medical attention. Witnesses also testified to the good work Lauri is currently doing in the UK, as Chief Hacking Officer for My Hacker House, where he puts his computer skills to socially helpful use.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Judge Tempia will issue her ruling on Lauri's extradition on September 16. Her decision will finally test the "forum bar," enacted in the UK in an attempt to rectify problems with the US-UK extradition treaty, which has historically been one-sided, sending vulnerable defendants to the United States without a need to demonstrate a prima facie case. Lauri argues that, if he has allegations to answer, he should be able to face them in the United Kingdom, where he lives and where digital activsts face much smaller sentences than they do in the U.S.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lauri Love said: “Computer trials in the U.S. are Sisyphean. Because I'm facing three separate indictments, with decades of jail looming over my head on each one, they can force me into a plea deal in one jurisdiction, sentence me to several years, close that case and then do it all over again. In the UK there's at least a sense of proportionality to the alleged offense." </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.c-span.org/video/?409990-4/justin-peters-discusses-idealist</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JUNE 11, 2016</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Book Discussion on The Idealist Justin Peters talked about his book, The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.amazon.com/Idealist-Aaron-Swartz-Culture-Internet/dp/1476767726</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A smart, lively history of the Internet free culture movement and its larger effects on society—and the life and shocking suicide of Aaron Swartz, a founding developer of Reddit and Creative Commons—from Slatecorrespondent Justin Peters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aaron Swartz was a zealous young advocate for the free exchange of information and creative content online. He committed suicide in 2013 after being indicted by the government for illegally downloading millions of academic articles from a nonprofit online database. From the age of fifteen, when Swartz, a computer prodigy, worked with Lawrence Lessig to launch Creative Commons, to his years as a fighter for copyright reform and open information, to his work leading the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), to his posthumous status as a cultural icon, Swartz’s life was inextricably connected to the free culture movement. Now Justin Peters examines Swartz’s life in the context of 200 years of struggle over the control of information.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In vivid, accessible prose, The Idealist situates Swartz in the context of other "data moralists" past and present, from lexicographer Noah Webster to ebook pioneer Michael Hart [typed bible into pjt Gutenberg by hand in caps?!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/business/michael-hart-a-pioneer-of-e-books-dies-at-64.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">] to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In the process, the book explores the history of copyright statutes and the public domain; examines archivists’ ongoing quest to build the “library of the future”; and charts the rise of open access, copyleft, and other ideologies that have come to challenge protectionist IP policies. Peters also breaks down the government’s case against Swartz and explains how we reached the point where federally funded academic research came to be considered private property, and downloading that material in bulk came to be considered a federal crime.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Idealist is an important investigation of the fate of the digital commons in an increasingly corporatized Internet, and an essential look at the impact of the free culture movement on our daily lives and on generations to come.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">review: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/books/review/the-idealist-aaron-swartz-and-the-rise-of-free-culture-on-the-internet-by-justin-peters.html?r=0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On a late autumn day in 2010, Aaron Swartz, an open-information advocate and early partner at the website Reddit, sneaked into a basement closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and surreptitiously connected his laptop to the school’s high-speed Internet network. Using the school’s credentials, he gained access to JSTOR, a database of academic journals, and began to illegally download thousands of files. Once a promising entrepreneur, Swartz had eschewed the traditional Silicon Valley career path for an unorthodox campaign of radical public-interest activism. He believed that the five million documents behind the JSTOR paywall were a common good and that they needed to be liberated by guerrilla action.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz’s caper was detected, and he was soon apprehended. The documents he downloaded were never released. On Jan. 11, 2013, facing 13 felony charges and a statutory maximum of 95 years in prison, Swartz hanged himself in his New York City apartment. He was 26 years old.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz’s suicide brought media attention, particularly after his father accused prosecutors of hounding his son to death. Of the numerous profiles of Swartz that followed, the best was written by Justin Peters, a correspondent for Slate, who offered a nuanced portrait of this brilliant but immature technologist. Now, almost three years to the day after Swartz’s death, Peters returns with a biography titled “The Idealist.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Drawing on blog posts, family interviews and other resources, Peters captures Swartz flawlessly. A child of privilege in a house full of computer technology, Swartz makes for a precocious teenage crusader, cultivating friendships with the lawyer and political activist Lawrence Lessig and the World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. Almost immediately, Peters sets up Swartz as a convincing agent of destiny.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then — and this is unforgivable — Swartz disappears from his own book. For more than a hundred pages, his name is not mentioned once. Instead, Peters gives us an eclectic examination of the evolution of copyright law, a history of the publishing industry and a primer on the Internet. Swartz’s actions require context, of course, but the writer who promises a dispatch from the digital frontier and instead delivers a cribbed history of the Post Office Act of 1792 has surely lost his way.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The moment Peters returns to Swartz — playing a card game on the steps of the Supreme Court as Lessig argues a copyright case inside — the book comes back to life. Just 15, he acts as a sort of mascot for the open-information movement. Dropping out of school, he embarks on a campaign of self-education and, after a year at Stanford, drops out again to start his own company.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His business career is brief. Joining the Reddit team after his project falters, Swartz contributes little but cantankerous comments. Nevertheless he’s an equity partner, and when the company is sold to Condé Nast on Oct. 31, 2006, he receives a substantial windfall. In one of the book’s best passages, Peters describes the lucky kid on Halloween: “He had dressed as a dot-com millionaire, his costume consisting of a steady gaze and an angry expression.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His colleagues remain in Silicon Valley to pursue their careers; Swartz returns to Boston to diagram the plot of “Infinite Jest.” Preferring the company of progressive activists to venture capitalists, he drafts research papers on congressional corruption and founds a political advocacy organization. Soon he’s taking direct action. The book excels as it nears its climax — Peters leads us through a foot chase, through Swartz’s accidental betrayal by his girlfriend and finally to his last supper at a Lower East Side gastro pub. He handles Swartz’s suicide and its aftermath with a delicate and respectful touch.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By the end of “The Idealist,” Peters has dropped the pretension of neutrality and taken up Swartz’s crusade. This is fine, I think — it wouldn’t be a good biography if it didn’t have a point of view. But in the final pages, as Peters dons the sports coat of the history lecturer and draws a lame comparison between Aaron Swartz and Noah Webster, he disappoints once again. It’s the whole book in microcosm: superb when it focuses on its subject, unnecessary when it veers away.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">THE IDEALIST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Justin Peters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">337 pp. Scribner. $28.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aaron</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His dad software (UNIX-esque) and IP consultant, his granddaugater anit-nuke peace activist. Lonely in Highland Park suburbs (little boxes)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mix of bravado and despair, grownup child and childish adult, says Yang. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Built a working ATM in third grade, at thirteen created a sort of Wikipedia site (the Internet is not for advertuisitng) that led to aquaintance with Berners-Lee, dropped out of ninth grade</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> colitus and depression (Norton girlfriend 13 yrs sr?) but got more grounded the last year (hack- >electoral politics, mass mobilization,eg SOPA/PIPA avoid direct confrontation).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ill in 2007, fired, but he had lost interest )Sold Reddit to Conde Nast, but not impresed by Silicon Valley or Stanford</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2008 PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records, paywall 1988 Federal, raised fees from 7 to 10 cents per page, outcry led to limited program of access to 17 libraries, exploited by AS; Sacramento had $1.5 million in charges) 2.7 million legal docs downloaded (less than 1%), busted by the FBI (DOJ, foiad his file, posted, found it " truly delightful", but they declined to prosecute; terrified,(hmmn yang cites serveral close friends on fear, but brave; also cites S Levy on hacker theic: "{</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steven Levy, in his seminal book Hackers, neatly evoked the working principles that governed the hacker ethic: “Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things,” he wrote. “They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this.…Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them.…In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt. Rules that prevent you from taking matters like that into your own hands are too ridiculous to even consider abiding by.”"}end)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joe Lieberman said fees should just cover costs. took in 120 million after fee hike, estimated to cost 20.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> so clearly felt strongly about JSTOR (one of his pals groused?).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">downloaded 4.8 million JSTOR articles 9/2010, blocked so wrote a script and connected laptop directly to MIT network; weekend project, not his focus; he was working with Lessig;'s Center at Harvard, interested in economic inequality ans health care).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He returned the data, JSTOR said they did not want to prosecute, but MIT was less helpful. US Atty Mass: thief.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">{"faced up to $1 million in fines and up to 35 years in prison. The indictment was later amended to thirteen felony counts and as much as 50 years in prison. But those numbers are entirely notional; the plea-bargain phase settled on a reported offer of six to eight months if Swartz would plead guilty to thirteen felony counts. If he rejected the deal, as he did, the government would recommend a sentence as long as seven years, if he was convicted."}yang</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">his lawyers were making progress, friends and family were gearing up for a fight, : "The tagline would have been “Save Aaron,” the slogan accompanying it “Nerd does not equal criminal.”] Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman in Brooklyn. but he hated asking for defense money, deaded alwatys being a burden.(also a matter of pride?) But when it came to having to do something that he didn’t want to do, he couldn’t do it.” cf lessig attack with water and ticles to get him to work at crunch time when he didn't feel like it?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">{" “I swear to God that boy just wanted to live inside an episode of The West Wing,” she said. “He wanted to find the halls of power and do his earnest best to make everything a little bit better. And I just believed that was a dead end. And I felt like one of the tragedies of this whole story is that he proved me right.” Among the reasons Swartz turned down the plea bargains, Wikler told me, was that a felony would constrain him from having the kind of life he now wanted: “You can’t be secretary of Commerce,” he said, with a felony conviction. Early on, after his arrest but before his indictment, Swartz was offered an unusual deal—one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and three months in jail. He turned even that down."}yang speculates that skipping the sort of John Hughes high school humiliations and lessons did not serve him well.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">two years of negotiations, three months from trial when he hung himself at age 26 in his Brooklyn apartment (girlfriend was home?)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">yang" After two years of exhausting negotiations, which had taken him no closer to an acceptable plea bargain, Swartz was three months from the start of his trial when he preempted it, and his legal plight loomed large in the way all of those around him understood his death. “Aaron did not commit suicide,” said Robert Swartz, Aaron’s father, “but was killed by the government....” His closest friends and family were keen to reject any effort to “pathologize” Swartz’s condition, though he had himself described it as sickness. “Aaron was depressed because God is depressed,” said Lessig at his funeral. “Look at this world and what we have done—who wouldn’t be depressed?””]"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Issa:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">{In a statement to the Huffington Post, Issa praised Swartz’s work toward “open government and free access to the people.” Issa’s investigation has garnered some bipartisan support.[26]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On January 28, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Issa and ranking member Elijah Cummings published a letter to Attorney General Holder, questioning whether prosecutors intentionally added felony counts to increase the amount of time Swartz faced in prison.[27] Indeed, the former 4 felony counts on July 14, 2011, jumped to 13 counts on Sept. 12, 2012.[28] Their letter read, in part:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It appears that prosecutors increased the felony counts by providing specific dates for each action, turning each marked date into its own felony charge, and significantly increasing Mr. Swartz’s maximum criminal exposure to up to 50 years imprisonment and $1 million in fines.[28]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boston's WBUR has reported that US Attorney in charge for the Swartz prosecution, Carmen Ortiz, is expected to testify before the committee's upcoming probe into the handling of the Aaron Swartz case.[29]}</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wiki</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> He said attorneys familiar with the case had told him the Middlesex County District Attorney's office had planned for Swartz's case to be "continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner"...Boston's WBUR reported that Ortiz was expected to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's probe into the handling of the Aaron Swartz case.[33] The Department of Justice gave a private briefing about the case to the House Committee, and subsequently, in March 2013, Attorney General Eric Holderdefended Ortiz's aggressive prosecution before the Senate Judiciary Committee, terming it, "a good use of prosecutorial discretion."[51] wiki ortiz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">end aaron</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/life-inside-the-aaron-swartz-investigation/273654/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">33pp</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/the-inside-story-of-aaron-swartzs-campaign-to-liberate-court-filings/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Years before the JSTOR scraping project that led to Aaron Swartz's indictment on federal hacking charges—and perhaps to his suicide—the open-data activist scraped documents from PACER, the federal judiciary's paywalled website for public access to court records. (The acronym PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, which may sound like it's straight out of 1988 because it is.) Swartz got 2.7 million documents before the courts detected his downloads and blocked access. The case was referred to the FBI, which investigated Swartz's actions but declined to prosecute him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A key figure in Swartz's PACER effort was Steve Schultze, now a researcher at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Schultze recruited Swartz to the PACER fight and wrote the Perl script Swartz modified and then used to scrape the site.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Until recently, Schultze has been quiet about his role in Swartz's PACER scraping caper. But Swartz's death inspired Schultze to speak out. In a recent phone interview, Schultze described how Swartz downloaded gigabytes of PACER data and how that data has been put to use throughout the last four years. Schultze told us he hopes the outrage over Swartz's death will provide momentum for legislation to finish the job Swartz and Schultze started almost five years ago: tearing down PACER's paywall.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the interest of full disclosure: Schultze and I were colleagues at Princeton while I was in grad school there from 2009 to 2011. With another Princeton graduate student, Harlan Yu, we created RECAP, a Firefox extension that helps PACER users share documents they purchase both with each other and the public. And Carl Malamud, who played a key role in our story, provided financial support for some of my PACER-related research during this period.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The thumb drive corps</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The documents in PACER—motions, legal briefs, scheduling orders, and the like—are public records. Most of these documents are free of copyright restrictions, yet the courts charge hefty fees for access. Even as the costs of storage and bandwidth have declined over the last decade, PACER fees have risen from seven to 10 cents per page.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facing criticism that high fees limit public access, the US courts announced a pilot project in 2007 to provide free PACER access to users at 17 libraries around the country. Schultze and other open government activists saw the announcement as an opportunity to liberate documents from the PACER system.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schultze began working on a Perl script to automate the process of downloading documents from PACER. He envisioned a "thumb drive corps" of volunteers going into libraries, plugging in thumb drives containing his script (packaged as a Windows executable), and using the library's free access to download millions of PACER documents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schultze developed and tested the script using a personal PACER account, paying for every document he downloaded. The nearest library participating in the PACER program was more than a hundred miles from his home in the Boston area, so he would need help from volunteers around the country to put the plan into action.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the summer of 2008, Schultze told Swartz, also in the Boston area at the time, about the PACER scraping scheme. "He said what Aaron would always say: 'show me the code,'" Schultze told Ars. "So I showed him the code. He said, 'Oh, I don't really like Perl. I'm not a Perl programmer.' Then he took my Perl code and made a whole bunch of great improvements."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This is not how we do things”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schultze and Swartz conferred with open government advocate Carl Malamud, who offered to provide server space to store the gigabytes of data they hoped to liberate. For the documents to be useful, they needed to capture not only the PDFs themselves but also docket files that contain key metadata such as filing dates and document descriptions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steve Schultze's version of the Perl script Swartz used to liberate 2.7 million documents from PACER.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steve Schultze</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In early September, Swartz e-mailed Malamud to discuss an alternative approach: instead of sending volunteers to libraries, they could crawl PACER directly from Malamud's server. Malamud was skeptical. "The thumb drive corps is based on going to the library and using their access," he noted. "Do you have some kind of magic account or something?"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz asked a friend to go to a Sacramento library that was participating in the program. After the librarian logged the friend into the library's PACER account, the friend extracted an authentication cookie set by the PACER site. Because this cookie wasn't tied to any specific IP address, it allowed access to the library's PACER account from anywhere on the Internet. But Swartz admitted to Malamud that he didn't have the library's permission to use this cookie for off-site scraping.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"This is not how we do things," Malamud scolded in a September 4 e-mail. "We don't cut corners, we belly up to the bar and get permission."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Fair enough," Swartz replied. "Stephen is building a team to go to the library."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But without telling Malamud or Schultze, Swartz pushed forward with his offsite scraping plan. Rather than using Malamud's server, he began crawling PACER from Amazon cloud servers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I thought at the time he was actually in the libraries" downloading the documents that were accumulating on his server, Malamud told Ars in a phone interview. In reality, Swartz merely had to dispatch a volunteer to the library once a week to get a fresh authentication cookie. Swartz could do the rest of the work from the comfort of his apartment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Access denied</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It took a while for the courts to figure out what was happening. "The way the library trial was set up was that the courts would continue to track usage but would simply never bill the libraries for the usage that occurred," Schultze told us.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz started his downloading in early September. On September 29, court administrators noticed the Sacramento library racked up a $1.5 million bill. The feds shut down the library's account.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I thought at the time he was actually in the libraries."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Apparently PACER access at the main library I was crawling from has been shut down, presumably because of the crawl," Swartz told Schultze and Malamud in an e-mail that day.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The courts issued a vague statement about suspending the program "pending an evaluation." A few weeks later, a court official revealed law enforcement had been called to investigate the suspected security breach. Malamud told us that after Swartz fessed up, Malamud grilled him to understand whether any laws had been broken. Malamud believes the fact that neither PACER nor the library had terms of service prohibiting offsite downloading made it likely Swartz's actions were within the law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Malamud thought they would be in an even stronger position if they could demonstrate the value of the data Swartz extracted, so he began an intensive privacy audit. For most of October, Malamud worked around the clock searching for documents containing Social Security numbers and other sensitive information. Out of the 2.7 million documents Swartz downloaded—about 700GB of data in all—Malamud discovered about 1,600 with privacy issues. He then sent a report to court administrators disclosing the poorly redacted documents he had found and encouraging the courts to examine the rest of the documents in PACER to ferret out similar privacy problems.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Malamud and Swartz wanted to tell their side of the story to the public, so they began talking to a reporter at the New York Times. The result was an article in February 2009 explaining the issue and Swartz's actions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"This was part of how Aaron approached things," Schultze told us. His PACER activities were "a project to liberate the documents but also an effort to make public the problems that existed to hopefully solve the larger policy problem."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Both the FBI and the Department of Justice investigated the case. They identified Swartz via his ownership of the Amazon servers used to crawl PACER. Both agencies dropped the case by April 2009. Later that year, Swartz made an open records request for his own FBI file and gleefully posted it online, calling it "truly delightful."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">p2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tear down this wall</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few days before the offsite crawl was shut down, Swartz guessed he got around 25 percent of the documents in PACER. The New York Times similarly reported Swartz had downloaded "an estimated 20 percent of the entire database." Other media outlets have repeated the figure ever since. Unfortunately, neither is accurate. PACER has more than 500 million documents, so the 2.7 million documents Swartz downloaded accounts for less than one percent of the database.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nevertheless, the Swartz corpus proved valuable. Malamud's privacy audit helped to publicize the need for more rigorous privacy protections in the e-filing system. When Schultze, Harlan Yu, and I began work on RECAP, we pre-loaded it with Swartz's documents so at least some cases would be pre-populated with documents. Swartz's documents also served as the basis for some of my own privacy research.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz, Malamud, and Schultze always saw the PACER scraping project primarily as a way to pressure the judiciary to provide free public access to the full PACER database. Ever since 2008, Schultze has made PACER a major focus of his work, writing extensively about the case for tearing down PACER's paywall.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schultze believes the courts are breaking the law by charging 10 cents a page for public documents. As then-senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) pointed out in a 2009 letter, the 2002 E-Government Act, which authorizes PACER fees, permits them to be charged only "to the extent necessary" to cover the costs of providing the service. In its legislative report, the Senate committee behind the bill stated it "intends to encourage the Judicial Conference to move from a fee structure in which electronic docketing systems are supported primarily by user fees to a fee structure in which this information is freely available to the greatest extent possible."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet PACER fee collections appear to have dramatically outstripped the cost of running the PACER system. PACER users paid about $120 million in 2012, thanks in part to a 25 percent fee hike announced in 2011. But Schultze says the judiciary's own figures show running PACER only costs around $20 million. Schultze believes this massive disparity is inconsistent with the court's mandate to charge PACER fees only "to the extent necessary" to run the PACER system.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And even the $20 million figure may overstate the cost of running PACER. "We don't know what is included in these line items because the courts have never told us," Schultze said. "But the PACER system is run extremely inefficiently. It has individual servers in each district, individual staff for each district, and privately leased network connections."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schultze believes costs could be slashed if the courts moved to a modern cloud-based hosting platform. Indeed, he notes, the General Services Administration (GSA) has already developed a streamlined process for government agencies to lease cloud computing resources.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The GSA has even granted some hosting providers "FISMA level 2 security certification," Schultze points out, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to use them for its applications. "If it's good enough for DHS, it's good enough for the courts," Schultze argued.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The PACER system is run extremely inefficiently.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schultze believes the courts could shift their servers to the cloud with minimal technical changes. "They would just start up a new virtual machine for every court. Each court could continue to administer their own PACER instance. There's no complicated engineering required."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Schultze believes the judiciary's Amazon bill could be as little as $1 million per year, or less than one percent of what the courts are currently charging. Malamud is less optimistic, given the inherent inefficiencies of government bureaucracies. But he believes an efficient PACER system shouldn't cost more than $10 million.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Interestingly, the executive branch pays the courts millions of dollars every year in PACER fees. The Department of Justice alone pays the courts about $4 million per year for access to public court documents. Schultze believes the money Congress currently allocates for executive branch agencies to pay PACER fees would be sufficient to fund the entire PACER system. That would allow the judiciary to eliminate PACER fees to private users.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Open PACER</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enlarge / The Administrative Office sees no need for change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When we contacted the Administrative Office of the courts for comment, they stressed that "fully 95 percent of all PACER fees come from just five percent of all users. Court opinions are free, and 65 to 75 percent of active PACER users don't exceed $15 of use in a quarter, and therefore are not charged. In addition, academic researchers, pro bono lawyers, and indigent users can apply for exemptions."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Schultze doesn't believe waivers address the problems with PACER's fee system. "Obtaining a waiver requires filing a separate request with each court, which may grant and revoke the waiver at its discretion," Schultze noted in an e-mail. "Many classes of individuals are not even eligible to apply, including the media."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a practical matter, the major obstacle to opening PACER likely hinges on finances. The judiciary tells Ars that in addition to financing PACER itself, PACER fees go to pay for "electronic case filing and about a half-dozen other information technology categories" in what it calls its "public access program." In other words, PACER has become a cash cow for the judicial branch, generating $100 million in profits the court has plowed into non-PACER IT projects.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's understandable the courts wouldn't want to give up that revenue in an era of austerity. But for Schultze, that revenue stream isn't a good enough reason to restrict public access to public documents. He drafted the Open PACER Act to mandate the paywall's elimination.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"My bill is one page," Schulze told us. "It does two things. First, it repeals the court's ability to charge for access to electronic public records. Second it mandates that they provide electronic public records to the public for free."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In recent weeks, Schultze made multiple trips to DC to lobby for the proposal. He hasn't found a sponsor yet, but he's optimistic he'll find one soon. "I've been talking to potential sponsors in both the House and the Senate," Schultze said. "There are many members of Congress that see government transparency as a high priority. I expect that those are the members that will sponsor the bill."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Several members of Congress stopped to pay their respects at a memorial service for Swartz held in DC on February 4. Among the speakers was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), an influential Republican who has championed open government. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a reform-minded Democrat, also spoke. At times, the event took on the tone of a political rally.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So far, most of the legislative attention in the wake of Swartz's death has focused on "Aaron's Law" to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But Schultze believes tearing down the PACER paywall should also be a priority. After all, public access to information was a central theme of Swartz's life. Opening PACER would be another fitting tribute to his memory.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Correction: This article originally stated that the Government Accountability Office had developed a streamlined process for cloud computing. In fact, the process was developed by the General Services Administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/the-inside-story-of-aaron-swartzs-campaign-to-liberate-court-filings/2/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">not berners</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Timothy B. Lee </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://nymag.com/news/features/aaron-swartz-2013-2/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ny mag</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New York Magazine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The precocious coder, hacker visionary, and “pirate” was already a tech legend by the time he’d turned 17. But in the weeks since his suicide last month, at 26, his friends and comrades have tried to turn him into something else—a martyr.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Wesley Yang Published Feb 8, 2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Years before he hanged himself in his Crown Heights apartment, the hacker, writer, and activist Aaron Swartz used to debate with his then-girlfriend Quinn Norton whether the Internet would mourn him if he died. It was Swartz’s stubborn belief that no one would notice or care if he died young, as he often thought he was fated to do. Like many young men of great promise and fluctuating moods, Swartz was an unstable compound of self-effacement and self-regard—among the most empowered, well-connected young people in America, yet convinced that his very existence was a burden to others, even those who loved him. Back when Aaron was 20 and the journalist Norton was 33, before they had crossed over into a complicated romantic affair, Norton brought Swartz with her to a tech event in Berlin, where he and her ex-husband, the tech writer Danny O’Brien, played a game in which they tried to “kill” themselves on Wikipedia, seeing how long they could remain dead before some volunteer editor restored them to life. Neither could remain dead for more than ten minutes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is a category of young person able to do things like contribute to the building of the Internet in their teens, or sell their tech start-ups for millions of dollars when they are 19, or rally a million opponents to a major piece of legislation when they are in their twenties. Usually such people are not the same young people who write on their blogs that they are too frightened to ask for a glass of water on a plane, or that “even among my closest friends, I still feel like something of an imposition, and the slightest shock, the slightest hint that I’m correct, sends me scurrying back into my hole.” Swartz was preternaturally adult when he was still a child and still a precocious child after he had grown to adulthood—“so vulnerable and fragile,” his friend Ben Wikler said. “He put up shields in all the wrong places.” He had done more in 26 years than most of us will do in a lifetime, but often avowed to others, and most of all himself, that he had done nothing of any worth at all.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By the time he was 17, Swartz had already secured a permanent legacy written in code. When he was 13, he was co-authoring a version of RSS, a system that allows streaming of news from across the Internet onto a single reader; in his later teens he helped to build and sell Reddit, a news message board that has grown into one of the world’s most heavily trafficked sites, and created the coding backbone of the Creative Commons licenses that allow artists and writers to claim or waive certain rights to control their works or share them online—the coin of the realm for a growing community of progressive activists known as the copyleft movement, devoted to building an economy of culture based on sharing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But he was also an ailing person in great physical and emotional pain—a sufferer from ulcerative colitis and suicidal depression, which he described so vividly on his blog (once with enough specificity that a Reddit colleague had the police break down Swartz’s door). Norton spent much of 2010 keeping Swartz away from suicide, telling him, she told me, “This, the way this feels, this is gonna calm down. Like when you get a little bit older, this is gonna be okay. It’s not ever gonna go away completely, but it’s gonna be something you can manage.” As he confessed on his blog in late 2007, he was not merely ailing, he was also ashamed to bear the stigma of his illnesses, and the shame made it difficult to treat both of his conditions. “To some degree I was kind of like, ‘Stop making me deal with this,’?” Norton told me. “?‘Stop making me the only one who knows.’?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The progressive activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, who began dating Swartz in the summer of 2011, after he and Norton had broken up and just before the federal indictment for hacking MIT’s JSTOR academic-article database that would define the last year of his life, knew a more securely grounded boyfriend than Norton had—one who was beginning to learn that “direct confrontation was often not the best way,” that participating in electoral politics might be more effective than in-the-shadows hacktivism, and who was doing the dishes for the first time in his life. He had assured her that the depressive episodes described in his blog were a thing of the past, and she says that nothing in his conduct gave her cause to doubt it. The first time she ever worried about his depression, she told me, was on the morning of January 11—the day she would discover him hanging from his belt in the apartment they shared.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The sanctification of Aaron Swartz began immediately—first online, then off. He had become a millionaire from the sale of Reddit to Condé Nast, but then turned his back on Silicon Valley for good to become an intellectual adventurer, teaching himself economics, sociology, history, and psychology by dropping into the lives of experts, as he well understood that any minimally informed admirer can do. He still worked on projects to organize and make available information online, but was increasingly intent on finding the secret to mobilizing masses to political action. Swartz was one of the early catalysts for the campaign that stopped the Internet regulation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (and its corollary, the Protect Intellectual Property Act), which its opponents believe would have effectively allowed private companies to censor the Internet. During this campaign, which was waged while Swartz was still facing indictment, he emerged as a leader who occupied a position of unusual credibility and authority. And it was this transition, from a builder of platforms for machines that do precisely what you tell them to do to freelance scholar-activist poised to intervene in the messier realm of democratic politics on behalf of Internet culture, that made so many think of him, even at 26, as the kind of person who, as the writer and activist Cory Doctorow wrote when he died, “could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At his funeral in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, where he was born and raised, the hundreds of mourners were a mix of members of family and Aaron’s far-flung networks, including some towering figures who had known Aaron since he was a chubby kid. There was Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, and the Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, eminence among Internet legal theorists, each channeling the cosmic sorrow and worldly rage already circulating online before a packed crowd of mourners clad in black, the men wearing kippahs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, there was remembrance of the person Swartz had been, full of adoration and tenderness and a kind of exasperated love for how preternaturally wise he could be and how mundanely stupid. Then there was remembrance of the circumstances under which he died—as an accused felon prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney of Massachusetts for the crime of downloading too many (4.8 million) academic articles from an online archive hosted by MIT, an extravagant gesture motivated by the cause of using technology to liberate culture from corporate ownership. After two years of exhausting negotiations, which had taken him no closer to an acceptable plea bargain, Swartz was three months from the start of his trial when he preempted it, and his legal plight loomed large in the way all of those around him understood his death. “Aaron did not commit suicide,” said Robert Swartz, Aaron’s father, “but was killed by the government.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In rhetorical salvos like these, at the funeral in Highland Park and at the vigils held in Cambridge and New York and San Francisco and Washington, D.C., Swartz emerged as a human repository of the Internet’s virtues and its unrealized fantasy of social transformation. Again and again, his friends made the point that Swartz’s open-access activism was merely the prologue to his truly immodest ambition to “hack the whole world,” and to realize his dream of “a world without any injustice or suffering of any kind.” His closest friends and family were keen to reject any effort to “pathologize” Swartz’s condition, though he had himself described it as sickness. “Aaron was depressed because God is depressed,” said Lessig at his funeral. “Look at this world and what we have done—who wouldn’t be depressed?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I’ve heard a lot of people talk about Aaron’s impossibly high standards and youthful enthusiasm and naïve brilliance,” said his friend and executor, Alec Resnick. “I can’t help but think that the whole point of people like Aaron is to show us how low and base and hidebound our expectations are.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those expectations were largely formed by his early life as a young prodigy raised among idealists. One day, when he was 3 years old, as Robert Swartz recounted to the funeral audience, Aaron asked his mother: “What was this ‘Free Family Entertainment in Downtown Highland Park’?” “She asked him, What was he talking about?” A volley of laughter issued from the audience. “He said, ‘Mom, it says here on the refrigerator.’ He had taught himself to read.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He built a working ATM in the third grade—it distributed coupons and tracked student accounts. He created a Wikipedia-like site at 13, leading to introductions to Berners-Lee and others who shared the view on Internet advertising he shared then with the Chicago Tribune: “That’s not what the Internet was made for,” he said. “It was based on open standards and freedom, not ads.” He dropped out of high school after the ninth grade, and spent his days in conversation with grown-up technologists, missing out on the numbing busywork and status anxiety that fills the days of American high-school students—depicted so memorably in the Highland Park films of John Hughes. “High school had been the most unpleasant experience of my life,” said his father, who was supportive of Aaron’s decision. “If things come easily to you, and you understand things quickly, you spend a lot of time in school bored out of your mind.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Swartz is a compact, robust man with a ruddy face; he was a longtime owner of a small tech company and is now an intellectual-property consultant to, among other places, the MIT Media Lab. The company—which produced a Unix-like operating system—was named after his father, an entrepreneur and a nuclear-disarmament and peace activist who founded the Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In interviews, Aaron Swartz described his childhood as lonely and his suburb as a place without a center. In one of his early blog posts, Swartz had described Highland Park, not uncharitably, as one of the places where the parents were educated and well-meaning, and had looked upon the struggles for justice of the sixties with sympathy, though they did not themselves participate. It was a perfect place from which to escape into cyberspace; at a vigil at Cooper Union, Norton recounted a memory of Swartz singing Pete Seeger’s “Little Boxes” to her daughter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After e-mailing Lawrence Lessig a suggestion on how to design certain Creative Commons licenses in 2002, Swartz went to work with him on it, beginning one of the many long and complicated mentor relationships that seemed to fill Aaron’s life. He enrolled briefly at Stanford University, incubator of tech entrepreneurs, despite never having finished high school (he was rejected from Berkeley), but left after a year for Paul Graham’s unstructured tech think tank Y Combinator, having found Stanford intellectually unchallenging. By day four, Swartz had already concluded that Stanford was a kind of “libertarian nightmare world.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the winter of 2007, after spending time with Norton in Berlin, Swartz’s colitis flared up. He holed up in Boston for a week, awol from Reddit, which he had already stopped treating like a serious commitment—he was fired when he eventually did show up at the offices in San Francisco. That week in Boston, he posted a fictional account of a suicide, which described among other things his hatred for his chubby boy’s body.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2009, Swartz took a monthlong vacation from the Internet—one of the first he had ever experienced. He wrote about it on his blog, which, when it wasn’t summarizing a social-scientific controversy, or criticizing the work or motivations of previous collaborators, was exploring the conflicted inner life he was so good at keeping from others.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I am not happy,” he wrote. “I used to think of myself as just an unhappy person: a misanthrope, prone to mood swings and eating binges, who spends his days moping around the house in his pajamas, too shy and sad to step outside. But that’s not how I was offline. I loved people—everyone from the counter clerk to the old friends I bumped into on the street.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Toward the end of the post, Swartz reflected on the extraordinary life he has lived, one made possible by the Internet, and his willingness to seize its possibilities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I realize it must seem like the greatest arrogance to think one could escape life’s mundane concerns, like asking to live on a cloud, floating above the mere mortals,” he wrote. “But it was that arrogance that made me think I could contribute to adult mailing lists when I was still in elementary school, that arrogance that made me think someone might want to read my website when I was still just a teen, that arrogance that had me start a company as a college freshman. That sort of arrogance—not bragging, but simply inwardly thinking I could do more than was expected of me—is the only thing that’s gotten me anywhere in life. ”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“One of the things that makes him the Internet’s boy is he was already living in the future that I hope we get to,” said Norton. “Where everybody has the permission to act and be important and where hierarchies don’t prevent people from doing things or believing in themselves and just having a fucking life. We get a huge number of messages that we are not allowed in the world. We occupy social laws of living, and we are not allowed to leave them. And all we ever have to do is walk out. And I think one of the most extraordinary, moving parts of Aaron’s life, his story, is that he just didn’t accept the limits that we put on ourselves.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a blog post a few months later, Swartz engages in a brief philosophical inquiry into how a person can live a moral life. “The conclusion is inescapable: we must live our lives to promote the most overall good. And that would seem to mean helping those most in want—the world’s poorest people.” He would go on to specify which moral actors he found the most admirable. “Our rule demands one do everything they can to help the poorest—not just spending one’s wealth and selling one’s possessions, but breaking the law if that will help,” he wrote. “It seems like these criminals, not the average workaday law-abiding citizen, should be our moral exemplars.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz was a fellow at the Lessig-headed Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard in September 2010 when he allegedly began the batch download that would lead to his arrest and indictment. Over the course of several weeks, the indictment claimed, Swartz engaged in a game of digital cat and mouse as first JSTOR, then MIT sought to block his access to its network, causing JSTOR on two separate occasions to block all access to MIT computers for several days. Starting in November of that year, Swartz bypassed the wireless registration and plugged directly into the network from a closet on campus, hiding the laptop under a box and running a script to discover and download articles continuously.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The indictment alleged that Swartz was attempting to download the archive for the intention of sharing it online—perhaps carrying forward the agenda of the Open Access movement, which protested the locking away behind a paywall of academic articles. (He had taken a strong position on this issue with the online publication of the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, a polemic written by Swartz and a small group of collaborators.) It charged him with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He faced up to $1 million in fines and up to 35 years in prison. The indictment was later amended to thirteen felony counts and as much as 50 years in prison. But those numbers are entirely notional; the plea-bargain phase settled on a reported offer of six to eight months if Swartz would plead guilty to thirteen felony counts. If he rejected the deal, as he did, the government would recommend a sentence as long as seven years, if he was convicted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whether any of this constituted a crime that ought to have been one of society’s priorities to punish depends on one’s perspective. No harm had come of it besides a few days of hassle for the MIT IT staff, and, as is always true of digital reproduction, taking copies of JSTOR’s archive left JSTOR with perfect copies of its own. JSTOR eventually made peace with Swartz when he returned the data, and the organization publicly announced it had no further wish to see him prosecuted. Though there were many efforts by the Swartzes to extract a similar statement from MIT, none came.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The analogy his supporters used to describe the crime was “checking out too many books from the library.” The U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts put it differently: Swartz was a thief. It was the latest skirmish in a battle over which analogies would control the digital world—the resort to analogies being a sign both of how rudimentary the legal concepts that govern the Internet are and how slow a consensus is to form about a new medium.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This was a battle fought along many fronts; in legal journals and academic symposia, where a cadre of activists who nurtured Swartz in their midst tried to build a new consensus about who should and should not control the circulation of ideas; in the everyday practices of a hundred million Internet users, who had grown inured to sharing music and videos online; in the offices and laboratories of software and media companies, where the latest copy-protection schemes are devised in an ever-escalating arms race with those intent on undoing them; in the corridors of Congress, where lobbyists from the various media, old and new, seek advantage for their industries by shaping laws that reflect their economic interests; and in courtrooms, where those unlucky enough to be caught flouting the laws face prosecution for doing what the rest of us habitually do on the Internet—copy for free. Though its opponents had a stronger hold on the levers of power, the copyleft believed it possessed an unbeatable trump card: the future, in the form of everyone’s children, who had grown up without any encumbrances on “content.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz was one of those children, and his interventions began at the margins where the public right to information was unambiguous. In 2008, Swartz exploited a limited opening in the pacer court-document archive to download and release millions of records. The FBI investigated him but ultimately declined to prosecute.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At a memorial, Swartz’s friend Carl Malamud confessed that he wondered if his own hot criticisms of JSTOR—he had tweeted that charging $20 for a six-page article was “morally offensive”—had incited Aaron to take undue risks in hacking it. When I spoke to him a week later, Malamud still hadn’t answered the question for himself. I asked why he had said that he sometimes feels guilty.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Because the boy got in trouble and he killed himself,” he said. “Did I encourage him to do JSTOR? There were quite a few of us banging the table about this. Did we incite him to do this, and could we have done more once he was arrested? I don’t know. I ask the questions, and I can’t answer them. I can’t look in somebody else’s head and figure out what he was thinking. I could second-guess myself and ask what I did wrong, and I hope folks at JSTOR and MIT are doing the same. This was a tragedy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Malamud described Swartz as having been “terrified” by the FBI investigation into the pacer download. Resnick recalls him worrying that the FBI was going to break down his door at any moment. And yet it didn’t seem to deter him—he continued to plot and carry out hacktivist assaults on databases designed to withhold information behind a fairly steep paywall. As the law professor Orin Kerr pointed out to me on the phone, here was the truly puzzling juncture in the data-liberation career of Aaron Swartz. “Many people would take being investigated by the Feds and let off without charges as an occasion to become more cautious and not to see it as a green light to do even more,” he said. “I would have told him not to do it, or else to do it if he wished, but to be aware that if he got caught, he was going to be prosecuted and he was going to face jail time.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz, connected to the leading legal lights of the Internet, almost certainly knew that already. Even more perplexing was that, by all accounts of those who knew his thinking best, Swartz had been drawing back from hacker activism even before the JSTOR incident. He had shifted his focus to economic inequality and health care.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This was emphatically not what he was spending his time thinking about,” his friend Resnick said of the JSTOR hack. “At best it was a weekend project, which unfortunately went very wrong.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I asked Malamud how terrified Swartz could have been if the pacer episode didn’t stop him from even a casual hacking of JSTOR. “I think he was still terrified, but he was also brave. He saw this as something that was right to do, and so he did it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The moralistic language spoken by the Open Access movement—with its invocations of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks—may seem slightly perplexing to those of us raised with the common-sense view that works of science, art, and culture circulate in our society through institutions that fund them by charging fees to the public to access them. But the partisans of the open Internet were informed by a different experience and set of ideals than the rest of us, those of a techno-utopia that really existed and has been continuously under siege ever since John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist turned Internet visionary, co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and declared the independence of cyberspace as a self-regulating realm of perfect freedom beyond the reach of any territorial government’s laws.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That Swartz was a self-described hacker mattered greatly to his legal fate—through constant repetition in the media, many have come to associate the term with criminality, the breaching of restrictions on access, the stealing of secrets, even acts of espionage and cyberwarfare. But in the term’s original incarnation at MIT, the hacker was a kind of monastic devotee of the computer who practiced a new kind of ethics calibrated to explore the new world it was creating.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steven Levy, in his seminal book Hackers, neatly evoked the working principles that governed the hacker ethic: “Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things,” he wrote. “They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this.…Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them.…In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt. Rules that prevent you from taking matters like that into your own hands are too ridiculous to even consider abiding by.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The book describes all the hacker rule-breaking that unfolded in the MIT artificial-intelligence labs, with hackers crawling through the vents, stealing and making unauthorized copies of keys, to get access to the tools they needed for their explorations. Administrators at MIT have been dealing with, and indulging, such spirited rule-breaking for decades. MIT hacks usually involve some inventive mischief in the physical world, such as affixing parlor furniture to the underside of a campus archway, or stealing the Caltech cannon and transporting it across the country. No one is arrested or imprisoned for what everyone understands is an exercise of the high spirits of brilliant young men who earn their indulgence by being members of a technological elite at an elite institution. MIT hackers breach security to test their powers, to repay the insult of keeping them out, and never for base personal gain, never in order to steal credit-card numbers like some computer-enabled foreign thug. And yet the laws that keep out the Russian mob invariably end up prohibiting much of what the hackers do. And therein lies the tension: between the rules that can and should govern elite cadres of monastic devotees of knowledge in itself and the rules that can be applied to society at large. The sharing ethos confined to the MIT artificial-intelligence lab was a great boost to technological progress; but released into the world, it has produced waves of innovation and disruption about which it takes a nearly religious faith to trust that they will all result in outcomes that will be better for everyone.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When I met Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman in Brooklyn, she broke down only once during an hour-long conversation, when we came to the subject of what happened to Swartz’s case on the day he died. Just that afternoon, his attorney, Elliot Peters, was making a consequential discovery. There had been a puzzling 34-day delay between the arrest and the request for a warrant to search Swartz’s laptop—longer than the prosecution is allowed. And information that Peters recently received from the U.S. Attorney’s office was strengthening his bid to suppress the searches from that laptop in court. “We were all excited about this,” said Peters, “and I was already thinking of how I was going to cross-examine them, when I got this e-mail from Bob Swartz saying Aaron had committed suicide.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If only Aaron had waited another week or so,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman said, her face crumpling into tears. The family and their intimate supporters were gearing up for a public fight. The tagline would have been “Save Aaron,” the slogan accompanying it “Nerd does not equal criminal.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Stinebrickner-Kauffman had already begun to sense the “aversion and cringing” that overtook Swartz when he had to start asking people for money. His fear of being a burden on others, his horror of being made the center of attention, were interfering with his preparation for his own defense.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In order to defend himself, he would have had to confess to everyone that he had made a boneheaded miscalculation that had made him into the imposition on everyone’s time and money that he always feared that he was. He would have to admit that the ailing, depressed, imperfect shadow side of him was just as real as the brilliant, precocious, successful, morally exemplary side that everyone was celebrating.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I remember talking to him about this; I told him that for someone with such clear vision about so much, one blind spot he had was how much he mattered,” said Wikler. “Aaron took his life in another small room with bare white walls. He couldn’t hear our voices at that moment.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He had this thing about not being able to bring yourself to do things you don’t want to do,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman said. “Everybody has to do things that they don’t want to do. And we all know that it’s really annoying and maybe even painful. But those kind of things were even harder for him than for most people.” Swartz had said that he would rather spend the rest of his life without a fixed residence, sleeping on other people’s couches, than work at an office job that he did not want to take. “He occupied a higher plane where everything was thinking and writing and doing and meeting with people who were really interesting and smart. And he filled as much of his life as possible with that, far more than anybody else I know. But when it came to having to do something that he didn’t want to do, he couldn’t do it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the end, he didn’t want to be the martyr he has become. The suicide that eventually thrust him into that role was also an attempt to evade it, by evading trial. A weekend side project on an issue he didn’t even care that much about anymore was keeping him firmly ensnared in the past, and might even blot out the new life he was entering.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I used to tell him the most important thing was never to get caught,” said Norton. “I know these people and I know what they are capable of.” Toward the end of their relationship, Swartz and Norton began to part company on their view of the American political system, which Norton saw as irredeemably fallen and which Swartz had come to believe was preferable to others, in part because it allowed technocratic elites like himself to play an outsize role. “I swear to God that boy just wanted to live inside an episode of The West Wing,” she said. “He wanted to find the halls of power and do his earnest best to make everything a little bit better. And I just believed that was a dead end. And I felt like one of the tragedies of this whole story is that he proved me right.” Among the reasons Swartz turned down the plea bargains, Wikler told me, was that a felony would constrain him from having the kind of life he now wanted: “You can’t be secretary of Commerce,” he said, with a felony conviction. Early on, after his arrest but before his indictment, Swartz was offered an unusual deal—one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and three months in jail. He turned even that down.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">François de La Rochefoucauld once observed that it’s not enough to have great virtues; one must use them with economy. As I listened to the tributes to Aaron Swartz in Highland Park and New York and online, this aphorism came to mind. Swartz had skipped out on the lessons taught by the American high school—the lessons in cynical acquiescence, conformity, and obedience to the powers that be. He was right to think these lessons injure people’s innate sense of curiosity and morality and inure them to mediocrity. He was right to credit his “arrogance” for the excellence of the life he lived. But if nothing else, these lessons prepare people for a world that can often be met in no other way; a world whose irrational power must sometimes simply be endured. This was a lesson that he contrived never to learn, which was part of what made him so extraordinary. It was Swartz’s misfortune, and ours, that he learned it too late, from too unyielding a teacher. It cannot serve society’s purpose to make a felon and an inmate out of so gifted and well-meaning a person as Aaron Swartz, and thus he was a victim of a grave injustice. But it bears remembering that the greater injustice was done to Aaron Swartz by the man who killed him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the wake of the prosecution and subsequent suicide of Aaron Swartz, lawmakers have proposed to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Representative Zoe Lofgren has drafted a bill that would help "prevent what happened to Aaron from happening to other Internet users".[40] Aaron's Law (H.R. 2454, S. 1196[41]) would exclude terms of service violations from the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and from the wire fraud statute, despite the fact that Swartz was not prosecuted based on Terms of Service violations.[42]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition to Lofgren, Representative Darrell Issa and Representative Jared Polis—all on the House Judiciary Committee, raised questions about the government's handling of the case. Polis called the charges "ridiculous and trumped up," while referring to Swartz as a "martyr."[43] Issa, also chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced that he is investigating the actions of the Justice Department's prosecution.[43][44]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As of May 2014, Aaron's Law was stalled in committee, reportedly due to tech company Oracle's financial interests.[45]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v.Aaron_Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In United States of America v. Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz, an Americancomputer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist, was prosecuted for many violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act(CFAA), after downloading a great many academic journal articles over the MIT computer network from a source for which he had an account as a Harvard research fellow. Facing imprisonment, Swartz committed suicide, and the case was consequently dismissed.[1][2][3]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 Background</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 Arrest, charges and indictments</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3 Federal prosecution</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3.1 Plea negotiations</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3.2 Federal prosecutory rationale and responses</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3.2.1 About the prosecution</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3.2.2 About the law</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3.3 Reactions, complaints and post-dismissal motions</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4 Notes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5 See also</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6 References</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7 External links</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">..</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Federal prosecution[edit]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On April 13, 2011, as part of their investigation, federal authorities interviewed Swartz’s former partner, Wired journalist Quinn Norton; she penned an article, "Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation," detailing her experiences in the case.[34][35]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I mentioned ... a two-year-old public post on ... Aaron's blog. It had been fairly widely picked up by other blogs. I couldn't imagine that these people who had just claimed to have read everything I'd ever written had never looked at their target's blog, which appeared in his FBI file, or searched for what he thought about "open access." They hadn't.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So this is where I was profoundly foolish. I told them about the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. And in doing so, Aaron would explain to me later (and reporters would confirm), I made everything worse.[34]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On July 19, 2011, the July 11th federal indictment[1][7][24] was unsealed, charging Swartz with two counts of fraud and two counts related to accessing and damaging a protected computer.[1][25] According to the indictment, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT’s computer network, which ran a script named "keepgrabbing.py",[1][7] allowing him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR."[1][36] Prosecutors in the case said Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.[1][15]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all counts, and was released on $100,000 unsecured bail.[37] After his arrest, JSTOR released a statement saying that though it considered Swartz’s access to be a "significant misuse" committed in an "unauthorized fashion," it would not pursue civil litigation against him;[16][37] MIT did not comment on the proceedings.[38]...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet Hacktivist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS,[3] the organization Creative Commons,[4] the website framework web.py[5] and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami.[i]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz's later work focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.[6][7] He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010 he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig.[8][9] He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after systematically downloading academic journal articles fromJSTOR.[10][11] Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[12] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.[13]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swartz refused a plea bargain under which he would serve six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn, New York apartment, where he had hanged himself.[14][15]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In June 2013, Swartz was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.[16][17]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 Life and works</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.1 W3C</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.2 Markdown</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.3 Infogami, Reddit, Jottit</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.4 Activism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.4.1 Stop Online Piracy Act</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.5 Wikipedia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.6 Tor2web</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.7 Library of Congress</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.8 PACER</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.9 Wikileaks</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1.10 DeadDrop</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 JSTOR</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2.1 Arrest and prosecution</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3 Death, funeral and memorial gatherings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4 Aftermath</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.1 Family response and criticism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.2 In the press and the arts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.2.1 The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.3 Open Access</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.4 Hacks</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.5 MIT and the Abelson investigation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.6 Petition to the White House</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.7 Congress</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.7.1 Congressional investigations</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.7.2 Amendment to Computer Fraud and Abuse Act</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.7.3 Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4.8 Commemorations</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5 Publications</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6 Notes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7 References</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8 Further reading</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9 External links</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aaron Swartz prosecution[edit]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Main article: Aaron Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Issa, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, announced that he is investigating the Justice Department’s actions in prosecuting Swartz’s case.[25] In a statement to the Huffington Post, Issa praised Swartz’s work toward “open government and free access to the people.” Issa’s investigation has garnered some bipartisan support.[26]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On January 28, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Issa and ranking member Elijah Cummings published a letter to Attorney General Holder, questioning whether prosecutors intentionally added felony counts to increase the amount of time Swartz faced in prison.[27] Indeed, the former 4 felony counts on July 14, 2011, jumped to 13 counts on Sept. 12, 2012.[28] Their letter read, in part:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It appears that prosecutors increased the felony counts by providing specific dates for each action, turning each marked date into its own felony charge, and significantly increasing Mr. Swartz’s maximum criminal exposure to up to 50 years imprisonment and $1 million in fines.[28]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boston's WBUR has reported that US Attorney in charge for the Swartz prosecution, Carmen Ortiz, is expected to testify before the committee's upcoming probe into the handling of the Aaron Swartz case.[29]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prosecution of Aaron Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Main article: United States v. Aaron Swartz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ortiz's office prosecuted computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. In 2011, Swartz was arrested for unauthorized, bulk downloading of free articles from internet archive JSTOR, in violation of the JSTOR's terms of use.[36][37][38] In a 2011 press release announcing Swartz's indictment on federal charges, Ortiz said "stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." [39]After State Prosecutors dropped their charges, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The prosecution brought by Ortiz involved what was characterized by numerous critics such as former White House Counsel John Dean as "overcharging" and "overzealous" prosecution for the alleged computer crimes.[33][40]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In all, prosecutors charged Swartz with 13 felony counts, despite the fact that both MIT and JSTOR had chosen not to pursue civil litigation; he faced 30 years' imprisonment.[41] Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013,[42][43] before the case came to trial. More than 60,000 people petitioned the White House to remove Ortiz from office for "overreach."[44][45][46][47] On January 15, 2013, following his suicide, all charges against Swartz were dropped.[42][43]The next day, Ortiz issued a statement saying that her office had never intended to seek maximum penalties againstAaron Swartz.[48]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly published an op-ed piece by Massachusetts criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate about the case. He said attorneys familiar with the case had told him the Middlesex County District Attorney's office had planned for Swartz's case to be "continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner."[49][50]"Under such a disposition," Silverglate later told CNET's Declan McCullagh, "the charge is held in abeyance ("continued") without any verdict ("without a finding"). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested. But then the feds took over...."[50] "Tragedy intervened," Silverglate wrote, "when Ortiz's office took over the case to send 'a message.'"[49]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boston's WBUR reported that Ortiz was expected to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's probe into the handling of the Aaron Swartz case.[33] The Department of Justice gave a private briefing about the case to the House Committee, and subsequently, in March 2013, Attorney General Eric Holderdefended Ortiz's aggressive prosecution before the Senate Judiciary Committee, terming it, "a good use of prosecutorial discretion."[51]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In January, 2015, two years after Swartz’s death, the White House declined the petition.[52]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boston Marathon bombings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div></div>