Swartz, Aaron
===
uber1 7vNkVz
8/17 bak capt
PIX W/ DOUG AND LESSIG?
CORY DOCTOROW
LARRY ELLISON?
---
BTB 12 23
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-136561888/
part One: Christmas Hero Episode: Aaron Swartz
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-136561888/)
December 18, 2023 • 63 mins
==
---
docu I own boy
---
cory and lessig eulogy:
https://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html}:}:
To the extent possible under law, Cory Doctorow has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to "RIP, Aaron Swartz."
---
Update: Go read Lessig: "He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you."
---
My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I'm still digesting it -- I suspect I'll be digesting it for a long time -- but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.
I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.
But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. He would only eat white food. We'd go to a Chinese restaurant and he'd order steamed rice. I suggested that he might be a supertaster and told him how to check it out, and he did, and decided that he was. We had a good talk about the stomach problems he faced and about how he would need to be careful because supertasters have a tendency to avoid "bitter" vegetables and end up deficient in fibre and vitamins. He immediately researched the hell out of the subject, figured out a strategy for eating better, and sorted it. The next time I saw him (in Chicago, where he lived -- he took the El a long way from the suburbs to sit down and chat with me about distributed hash caching), he had a whole program in place.
I introduced him to Larry Lessig, and he was active in the original Creative Commons technical team, and became very involved in technology-freedom issues. Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible standards he held them (and himself) to.
This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it's a testament to Aaron's intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for this. Many of us "grown ups" in Aaron's life have, over the years, sat down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by Aaron's disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a disappointment in himself and the world.
Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber.
The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.
He also founded a group called DemandProgress, which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress's work was one of the decisive factors in last year's victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that was only the start of his ambition.
I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brotherto get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be used by committed, passionate candidates who didn't want to end up beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here's what he wrote back:
First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he can do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run and plugs them into a web app he's made for managing their campaigns. It has a database of all the local reporters, so there's lots of local coverage for each of their campaign announcements.
Then it's just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list. Once it's done people you know, it has you go after local activists who are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited, it does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the while, it's doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for all these things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are recruited, it just keeps getting better and better at figuring out what will persuade people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built into a larger game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive, with you always trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.
Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is calculating the optimal places to hold events around the district. The press database is blasting them out -- and the press is coming, because they're actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they're much more like standup or the Daily Show -- full of great, witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they're so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events. And a big part of all of them getting the people there to pull out their smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting more people hooked on the game.
He doesn't talk like a politician -- he knows you're sick of politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don't trust a word he says -- and you shouldn't! But here's the difference: he's not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you know how you can tell? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers -- just the kind of thing the current corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover up and that only he is going to fix.
(Obviously shades of Sinclair here...)
also you have to read http://books.theinfo.org/go/B005HE8ED4
For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad for him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the user how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions. Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a free personality test? That's what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn't like, ...) Since it's random, whichever group scores closest to you on the political questions must be most affected by the ad. Then they're bought at what research shows to be the optimal time before the election, with careful selection of television show to maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on Nielsen data.
anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this... hope you're well
This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book. Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.
Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.
Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.
This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it's at least credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step.
But Aaron was also a person who'd had problems with depression for many years. He'd written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.
I don't know if it's productive to speculate about that, but here's a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you'll think about, too. I don't know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don't know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.
Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn't solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.
Depression strikes so many of us. I've struggled with it, been so low I couldn't see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never thought I would. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan -- all of these have a chance of bringing you back from those depths. Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.
I'm so sorry for Aaron, and sorry about Aaron. My sincere condolences to his parents, whom I never met, but who loved their brilliant, magnificently weird son and made sure he always had chaperonage when he went abroad on his adventures. My condolences to his friends, especially Quinn and Lisa, and the ones I know and the ones I don't, and to his comrades at DemandProgress. To the world: we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.
Goodbye, Aaron.
---
---
cory asked netroots ppl what to do, all safe/ boring but AS 3 brillint pages went in book on tour while mourning
at stanford crunch # found // oil # opinion and law art'ls
https://www.c-span.org/video/?448143-1/depth-cory-doctorow
aaron s wrote pol plan, published year he died 2013?
(2014). *Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
https://www.c-span.org/video/?448143-1/depth-cory-doctorow
---
ref to blucoat
2013
In industry news, Palantir's co-founder says the company is worth $7-8B. Blue Coat receives more unwelcome scrutiny alleging complicity with censorship and repression. [changes name]Dell may be considering a leveraged buyout to "clear the decks" for a PC-killing USB-stick computer. Facebook's Graph search launches, and some see it as potentially disrupting Google.
Stylometrics—identification of anonymous writers on the basis of verbal quirks—remains in the news. (Will it enter the mainstream, or become this century's version of phrenology?)
Aaron Swartz's suicide prompts reassessment of US anti-hacking law.
==
...The reach of these technologies is astonishingly broad: governments can listen in on cell phone calls, use voice recognition to scan mobile networks, read emails and text messages, censor web pages, track a citizen’s every movement using GPS, and can even change email contents while en route to a recipient. Some tools are installed using the same type of malicious malware and spyware used by online criminals to steal credit card and banking information. They can secretly turn on webcams built into personal laptops and microphones in cell phones not being used. And all of this information is filtered and organized on such a massive scale that it can be used to spy on every person in an entire country.
This is a phenomenon that spans the globe and implicates dozens of corporations. Over the past year, and partly in response to the uprisings that have swept the Arab world, concerns about these exports have been amplified in media reports and by digital rights organizations, sparking a debate as to the appropriate course of action.
For example, Narus, a Boeing subsidiary, was revealed to have sold to Egypt sophisticated equipment used for surveillance. California’s BlueCoat Systems, Inc was found to have equipment being used in Syria.
Germany-based Trovicor has sold technology to a dozen Middle Eastern and North African countries, including Bahrain, dozens of activists were tortured before and after being shown transcripts of their text messages and phone conversations captured from this technology.
Cisco Systems is facing litigation in both Maryland and California based on its alleged sales of surveillance equipment to the Chinese to track, monitor and otherwise facilitate the arrest, detention, or disappearance of human rights activists and religious minorities who have been subjected to gross human rights violations. EFF has issued a petition calling on Cisco to stop aiding China's human rights abuses.
...
==
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/29/aaron-swartz-cory-doctorow-homeland_n_2568774.html
Doctorow’s new book Homeland is the sequel to his popular YA bookLittle Brother, which again features teenage activist Marcus Yallow, this time in a WikiLeaks-like plot as he is pursued by government agents and tries to find the courage to match his convictions.
For an afterword, bringing the fictional events of the book into their real world contexts, Doctorow turned to his friend, the activist Aaron Swartz. As has been heavily reported elsewhere, Swartz committed suicide earlier this month.
Below, we reprint Swartz’s powerful afterword in its entirety. First, we asked Doctorow about what it is like to read the stirring words of his late friend - especially its painful last line.
Why did you ask Aaron to write an afterword for Homeland?
When I finished the sequel to Little Brother, I knew right away that I wanted an afterword from Jake Appelbaum, who is one of the unsung heroes of government transparency and personal anonymity and who has been victimized by the US government for his work on WikiLeaks.
And I knew I wanted an afterword from Aaron Swartz, who had the best techno-activist instincts of anyone I knew, and who I’d know since he was a little kid, and who was also being savagely victimized by the US government for his principled work.
I’m devastated about what happened with Aaron. I asked him to write me a afterword in the form of a letter to a kid like himself, but who was 14 in the year 2013. What he gave me was a call-to-arms that made me want to rush to a barricade, and left no doubt that we both hoped for the same thing from this book: that it would inspire a generation of activists who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer when it came to freedom in the information age.
How important are the philosophies of his actions for the intended audience of your book? How would you summarize those philosophies?
Aaron didn’t care about the freedom of information. He cared — and I care — about the freedom of people. I don’t give a damn if ‘information wants to be free’ — but I’ll go to the wall for the people who use information to demand their freedom.
Aaron’s work — and the words he wrote for me — are clear on this.
The scientific documents he allegedly took from JSTOR were public knowledge in every sense but one. They were publicly funded, produced for public benefit, and were critical to the informed choice of the public. But they were not *accessible* to the public. It’s easy to understand why this offended Aaron. It offends the hell out of me.
Homeland is a book that is meant to give kids a sense of the wider questions of technology, one that gets them to understand that architecture is politics: the design of the technology they use constrains or enables the future they can build with it. Unless they seize the means of information, they will be penned in by it.
In my ideal world, the kid who closes the cover on Homeland will rush to a search engine and figure out proxies, free/open operating systems, freedom of information requests, local makerspaces, campaigns for political accountability like Rootstrikers — the whole package.
When I was a kid, you needed to know stuff to do stuff. You had to have the facts in order to act on them. Now all the facts are one search-engine query away, but unless you know that they’re there, you’ll never search for them. And unless you know how to think critically about the process by which those documents are indexed and ranked, you won’t be able to turn them into action.
The first step to seizing the means of information is to know that there is a means of information, that it matters, and that it can be yours.
How does it feel for you to read his afterword now?
It’s brutal.
I can’t read it without crying.
It fills me with dread and sorrow and hopelessness.
I’ve re-read it dozens of times since Aaron died, and every time I read it, I have to deliberately, through an act of will, recommit myself to the principles he sets out in it. And then I do, and I resolve to talk about Aaron and what he did and believed in, and never forget it.
*HOMELAND
Afterword by Aaron Swartz*
Hi there, I’m Aaron. I’ve been given this little space here at the end of the book because I’m a flesh-and-blood human and, as such, I can tell you something you wouldn’t believe if it came out of the mouth of any of those fictional characters:
This stuff is real.
Sure, there isn’t anyone actually named Marcus or Ange, at least not that I know, but I do know real people just like them. If you want, you can go to San Francisco and meet them. And while you’re there, you can play D&D with John Gilmore or build a rocket ship at Noisebridge or work with some hippies on an art project for Burning Man.
And if some of the more conspiracy-minded stuff in the book seems too wild to be true, well, just google Blackwater, Xe, or BlueCoat. (I myself have an FOIA request in to learn more about “persona management software,” but the Feds say it’ll take three more yearsto redact all the relevant documents.)
Now I hope you had fun staying up all night reading about these things, but this next part is important, so pay attention: what’s going on now isn’t some reality TV show you can just sit at home and watch. This is your life, this is your country — and if you want to keep it safe, you need to get involved.
I know it’s easy to feel like you’re powerless, like there’s nothing you can do to slow down or stop “the system.” Like all the calls are made by shadowy and powerful forces far outside your control. I feel that way, too, sometimes. But it just isn’t true.
A little over a year ago, a friend called to tell me about an obscure bill he’d heard of called the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act, or COICA. As I read the bill, I started to get more and more worried: under its provisions, the government would be allowed to censor websites it didn’t like without so much as a trial. It would be the first time the U.S. government was given the power to censor its citizens’ access to the net.
The bill had just been introduced a day or two ago, but it already had a couple dozen senators cosponsoring it. And, despite there never being any debate, it was already scheduled for a vote in just a couple days. Nobody had ever reported on it, and that was just the point: they wanted to rush this thing through before anyone noticed.
Luckily, my friend noticed. We stayed up all weekend and launched a website explaining what the bill did, with a petition you could sign opposing it that would look up the phone numbers for your representatives. We told a few friends about it and they told a few friends and within a couple days we had over 200,000 people on our petition. It was incredible.
Well, the people pushing this bill didn’t stop. They spent literally tens of millions of dollars lobbying for it. The head of every major media company flew out to Washington, DC, and met with the president’s chief of staff to politely remind him of the millions of dollars they’d donated to the president’s campaign and explain how what they wanted — the only thing they wanted — was for this bill to pass.
But the public pressure kept building. To try to throw people off the trail, they kept changing the name of the bill — calling it PIPA and SOPA and even the E-PARASITES Act — but no matter what they called it, more and more people kept telling their friends about it and getting more and more people opposed. Soon, the signers on our petition stretched into the millions.
We managed to stall them for over a year through various tactics, but they realized if they waited much longer they might never get their chance to pass this bill. So they scheduled it for a vote first thing after they got back from winter break.
But while members of Congress were off on winter break, holding town halls and public meetings back home, people started visiting them. Across the country, members started getting asked by their constituents why they were supporting that nasty Internet censorship bill. And members started getting scared — some going so far as to respond by attacking me.
But it wasn’t about me anymore — it was never about me. From the beginning, it was about citizens taking things into their own hands: making YouTube videos and writing songs opposing the bill, making graphs showing how much money the bill’s cosponsors had received from the industries pushing it, and organizing boycotts putting pressure on the companies who’d endorsed the bill.
And it worked — it took the bill from a political nonissue that was poised to pass unanimously to a toxic football no one wanted to touch. Even the bill’s cosponsors started rushing to issue statements opposing it! Boy, were those media moguls pissed...
This is not howthe system is supposed to work. A ragtag bunch of kids doesn’t stop one of the most powerful forces in Washington just by typing on their laptops!
But it did happen. And you can make it happen again.
The system is changing. Thanks to the Internet, everyday people can learn about and organize around an issue even if the system is determined to ignore it. Now, maybe we won’t win every time — this is real life, after all — but we finally have a chance.
But it only works if you take part. And now that you’ve read this book and learned how to do it, you’re perfectly suited to make it happen again. That’s right: now it’s up to you to change the system.
Let me know if I can help.
Aaron Swartz
==
==
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream
---
killswitch
trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlvCjxiSuds
internet's own boy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvsxnOg0bJY
==
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!
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.
Click here to help fund Love's legal expenses.
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 aretax-deductiblein the United States.
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.
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.
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.
Click here to help make the difference needed.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
==
http://www.c-span.org/video/?409990-4/justin-peters-discusses-idealist}:
---
JUNE 11, 2016
Book Discussion on The Idealist Justin Peters talked about his book, The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet.
https://www.amazon.com/Idealist-Aaron-Swartz-Culture-Internet/dp/1476767726
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.
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.
In vivid, accessible prose, The Idealist situates Swartz in the context of other "data moralists" past and present, fromlexicographer Noah Webster to ebook pioneer Michael Hart [typed bible into pjt Gutenberg by hand in caps?!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/business/michael-hart-a-pioneer-of-e-books-dies-at-64.html
]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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
THE IDEALIST
Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
By Justin Peters
337 pp. Scribner. $28.
---
aaron
His dad software (UNIX-esque) and IP consultant, his granddaugater anit-nuke peace activist. Lonely in Highland Park suburbs (little boxes)
mix of bravado and despair, grownup child and childish adult, says Yang.
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
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).
Ill in 2007, fired, but he had lost interest )Sold Reddit to Conde Nast, but not impresed by Silicon Valley or Stanford
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: "{
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)
Joe Lieberman said fees should just cover costs. took in 120 million after fee hike, estimated to cost 20.
so clearly felt strongly about JSTOR (one of his pals groused?).
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).
He returned the data, JSTOR said they did not want to prosecute, but MIT was less helpful. US Atty Mass: thief.
{"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
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?
{" “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.
two years of negotiations, three months from trial when he hung himself at age 26 in his Brooklyn apartment (girlfriend was home?)
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?””]"
Issa:
{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]
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:
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]
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]}:
--
wiki
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
---
end aaron
---
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/life-inside-the-aaron-swartz-investigation/273654/}:
33pp
--
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/the-inside-story-of-aaron-swartzs-campaign-to-liberate-court-filings/}:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thumb drive corps
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
“This is not how we do things”
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.
Steve Schultze's version of the Perl script Swartz used to liberate 2.7 million documents from PACER.
Steve Schultze
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?"
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.
"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."
"Fair enough," Swartz replied. "Stephen is building a team to go to the library."
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.
"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.
Access denied
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.
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.
"I thought at the time he was actually in the libraries."
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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."
p2
Tear down this wall
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
“The PACER system is run extremely inefficiently.”
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."
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.
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.
Open PACER
Enlarge / The Administrative Office sees no need for change.
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."
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."
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.
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.
"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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/the-inside-story-of-aaron-swartzs-campaign-to-liberate-court-filings/2/}:
not berners
Timothy B. Lee
---
http://nymag.com/news/features/aaron-swartz-2013-2/
ny mag
New York Magazine
The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz
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.
By Wesley YangPublished Feb 8, 2013
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.
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.
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.
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.’?”
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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?”
“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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
“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. ”
“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.”
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.”
Swartz was a fellow at the Lessig-headed Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvardin 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“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.
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.
==
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream
Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since
==
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]
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]
As of May 2014, Aaron's Law was stalled in committee, reportedly due to tech company Oracle's financial interests.[45]
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz
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]
- 1 Background
- 2 Arrest, charges and indictments
- 3 Federal prosecution
- 4 Notes
- 5 See also
- 6 References
- 7 External links
..
Federal prosecution
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]
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.
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]
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]
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]...
==
Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet Hacktivist.
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]
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.
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]
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]
In June 2013, Swartz was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.[16][17]
- 1 Life and works
- 2 JSTOR
- 3 Death, funeral and memorial gatherings
- 4 Aftermath
- 5 Publications
- 6 Notes
- 7 References
- 8 Further reading
- 9 External links
---
Aaron Swartz prosecution
Main article: Aaron Swartz
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]
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:
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]
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]
==
Prosecution of Aaron Swartz
Main article: United States v. Aaron Swartz
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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
In January, 2015, two years after Swartz’s death, the White House declined the petition.[52]
Boston Marathon bombings
:{:{==}:
GGL 4 26
AARon Swartz
American computer programmer and entrepreneur
Overview
Movies
Books
Image of MIT cleared in death of Aaron Swartz
Source: Tampa Bay Times
Image of Aaron Swartz - Wikipedia
Image of Aaron Swartz: hacker, genius… martyr? | Aaron Swartz | The ...
51:34
YouTube • oompaville
The Tragic Case of Aaron Swartz...
Aaron Hill Schwarz was a technological prodigy whose vision of informationational freedom would ultimately place him in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors.
Aug 27, 2025
Born
Nov 8, 1986
Highland Park, IL
Died
Jan 11, 2013
Brooklyn, New York, NY
Open Library
Aaron Swartz | Open Library
Aug 1, 2025
Aaron Swartz
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Aaron_Swartz
Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013), also known as AaronSw, was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, ...Read more
People also ask
What happened with Aaron Swartz?
What law did Aaron Swartz break?
Why was Aaron Swartz important?
What did Aaron Swartz download?
Aaron Swartz Inductee Biography
Internet Hall of Fame
https://www.internethalloffame.org › Inductees
Aaron Swartz was a computer programming prodigy and activist who played an instrumental role in the campaign for a free and open Internet.Read more
Aaron Swartz's Legacy
AAUP
https://www.aaup.org › issues › aaron-swartzs-legacy
by R Gould · Cited by 3 — The computer programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life at the age of twenty-six on January 11, 2013.Read more
Movies
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
2014
Killswitch
2014
War for the Web
The 51st State
2001
Steal This Film - Part One
2006
Steal This Film 2
2007
Entrapment
1999
The Fourth Protocol
1987
Matrix: Generation
2023
See more
Aaron Swartz Was No Criminal
Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP
https://www.keker.com › news › news-items › aaron-swa...
Nov 18, 2014 — I am a lawyer in San Francisco with a firm called Keker & Van Nest. I was one of Aaron's lawyers in his criminal case, in 2012 and early ...Read more
Short videos
0:25
Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) #reddit #tech #programming ...
Instagram · Be 99x ahead in Tech 🚀
0:52
The inspiring story of Aaron Swartz #shorts
YouTube · Independent Reserve
1:11
Aaron Swartz downloaded research papers → treated like a ...
Instagram · Bhagwat Shukla
0:52
Aaron Swartz : Co-Founder (Reddit) #tech
YouTube · Saksham Choudhary
0:05
Aaron Swartz was one of the most influential young minds of ...
Instagram · OLAMIDE STONE
2:16
Aaron Swartz: The Internet Champion Aaron Swartz, born in ...
TikTok · 2minutepeople
0:58
This Hacker Wanted to Change the World #shorts
YouTube · Sumsub
1:02
Saimir Dushaj | "Aaron Swartz "🥀 The Mind That Challenged ...
Instagram · Saimir Dushaj
0:48
#AllExclusiveus #Remember #World Aaron Swartz, CFP ...
Facebook · All Exclusive
0:59
Aaron Swartz could have been remembered as a tech ...
Instagram · Jyotika Verma
More short videos
Remember Aaron Swartz
Remember Aaron Swartz
http://www.rememberaaronsw.com
Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms ...Read more
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014 ...
Reddit · r/Documentaries
60+ comments · 2 years ago
1:45:00
Aaron was a Reddit co-founder, child prodigy, and transparency activist who committed suicide 11 years ago today.
Aaron Swartz on The Open Library
YouTube · The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
44.7K+ views · 7 years ago
1:03:53
Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit.com, spoke at the luncheon series about the Open Library. Thanks to new technology, the grand vision of a ...
10 key moments in this video
Requiem for a Dream - Aaron Swartz
The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com › Magazine › Aaron Swartz
Mar 3, 2013 — 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 ...Read more
Celebrating the Life of Aaron Swartz: Aaron Swartz Day 2024
Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org › deeplinks › 2024/11 › celebrating...
Nov 8, 2024 — Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet open. His life was cut short in 2013.Read more
In Memory of Aaron Swartz - Journal #41 - e-flux
e-flux.com
https://www.e-flux.com › journal › in-memory-of-aaro...
Aaron Swartz killed himself on Friday, January 11 in New York City. He was twenty-six years old. In his family's official statement, they say:.Read more
Books
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
2008
The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz's The Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work
2013
Raw Thought Raw Nerve: Inside the Mind of Aaron Swartz
---