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<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1</a><br>
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<div> <b>The Guardian 12 January 2013</b> </div>
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<div> <b><a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://oas.guardian.co.uk/5c/www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1/oas.html/655837688/Frame2/default/empty.gif/46784464696c4478324b6741436d4b61?x" target="_blank"><img moz-do-not-send="true" src="http://imageceu1.247realmedia.com/0/default/empty.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="1"></a></b> </div>
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<h1><font size="4">The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz</font></h1>
<p><b>The internet freedom activist committed suicide on
Friday at age 26, but his life was driven by courage
and passion</b></p>
</div>
</div>
<div> <b><span><span>Glenn Greenwald</span></span><br>
</b>
<div>
<div> <br>
<div>The internet activist Aaron Swartz, seen here in
January 2009, has died at the age of 26. Photograph:
Michael Francis Mcelroy/AP</div>
</div>
<div>
<p><b>(updated below)<br>
</b><br>
Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer and internet
freedom activist, <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activist-dies-at-26.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0" target="_blank">committed suicide on Friday</a> in
New York at the age of 26. As the incredibly moving
remembrances from his friends such as <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html" target="_blank">Cory Doctorow</a> and <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully" target="_blank">Larry Lessig</a> attest, he was
unquestionably brilliant but also - like most everyone
- a complex human being plagued by demons and flaws.
For many reasons, I don't believe in whitewashing
someone's life or beatifying them upon death. But, to
me, much of Swartz's tragically short life was filled
with acts that are genuinely and, in the most literal
and noble sense, heroic. I think that's really worth
thinking about today.</p>
<p>At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role in
developing the RSS software that is still widely used
to enable people to manage what they read on the
internet. As a teenager, he also played a vital role
in the creation of Reddit, the wildly popular social
networking news site. When Conde Nast purchased
Reddit, Swartz received a substantial sum of money at
a very young age. He became something of a legend in
the internet and programming world before he was 18.
His path to internet mogul status and the great riches
it entails was clear, easy and virtually guaranteed: a
path which so many other young internet entrepreneurs
have found irresistible, monomaniacally devoting
themselves to making more and more money long after
they have more than they could ever hope to spend.</p>
<p>But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in
devoting his life to his own material enrichment,
despite how easy it would have been for him. As Lessig
wrote: "Aaron had literally done nothing in his life
'to make money' . . . Aaron was always and only
working for (at least his conception of) the public
good." </p>
<p>Specifically, he committed himself to the causes in
which he so passionately believed: internet freedom,
civil liberties, making information and knowledge as
available as possible. <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1" target="_blank">Here he is</a> in his May, 2012
keynote address at the Freedom To Connect conference
discussing the role he played in stopping SOPA, the <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.salon.com/2012/01/18/chris_dodds_paid_sopa_crusading/" target="_blank">movie-industry-demanded legislation</a>
that would have vested the government with dangerous
censorship powers over the internet. </p>
<p>Critically, Swartz didn't commit himself to these
causes merely by talking about them or advocating for
them. He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even
his liberty, in order to defend these values and
challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that
were their enemies. That's what makes him, in my view,
so consummately heroic.</p>
<p>In 2008, Swartz <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html" target="_blank">targeted Pacer</a>, the online
service that provides access to court documents for a
per-page fee. What offended Swartz and others was that
people were forced to pay for access to public court
documents that were created at public expense. Along
with a friend, Swartz created a program to download
millions of those documents and then, as Doctorow
wrote, "spent a small fortune fetching a titanic
amount of data and putting it into the public domain."
For that act of civil disobedience, he was
investigated and harassed by the FBI, but never
charged.</p>
<p>But in July 2011, Swartz <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/us/20compute.html?" target="_blank">was arrested</a> for allegedly
targeting JSTOR, the online publishing company that
digitizes and distributes scholarly articles written
by academics and then sells them, often at a high
price, to subscribers. As <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing" target="_blank">Maria Bustillos detailed</a>, none
of the money goes to the actual writers (usually
professors) who wrote the scholarly articles - they
are usually not paid for writing them - but instead
goes to the publishers.</p>
<p>This system offended Swartz (and many other free-data
activists) for two reasons: it charged large fees for
access to these articles but did not compensate the
authors, and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of
people are denied access to the scholarship produced
by America's colleges and universities. The indictment
filed against Swartz alleged that he used his access
as a Harvard fellow to the JSTOR system to download
millions of articles with the intent to distribute
them online for free; when he was detected and his
access was cut off, the indictment claims he then
trespassed into an MIT computer-wiring closet in order
to physically download the data directly onto his
laptop.</p>
<p>Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded
articles. He never intended to profit even a single
penny from anything he did, and never did profit in
any way. He had every right to download the articles
as an authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to
violate the company's "terms of service" by making the
articles available to the public. Once arrested, he
returned all copies of everything he downloaded and
vowed not to use them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors
that it had no intent to see him prosecuted, though
MIT remained ambiguous about its wishes.</p>
<p>But federal prosecutors ignored the wishes of the
alleged "victims". Led by <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/12/30/bostonian_of_the_year_carmen_ortiz_2011/" target="_blank">a federal prosecutor in Boston</a>
notorious for her overzealous prosecutions, the DOJ
threw the book at him, charging Swartz with multiple
felonies which carried a total sentence of several
decades in prison and $1 million in fines.</p>
<p>Swartz's trial on these criminal charges was
scheduled to begin in two months. He adamantly refused
to plead guilty to a felony because he did not want to
spend the rest of his life as a convicted felon with
all the stigma and rights-denials that entails. The
criminal proceedings, as Lessig put it, already put
him in a predicament where "his wealth [was] bled dry,
yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial
help he needed to fund his defense, at least without
risking the ire of a district court judge."</p>
<p>To say that the DOJ's treatment of Swartz was
excessive and vindictive is an extreme understatement.
When I <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.salon.com/2011/08/19/surveillance_13/" target="_blank">wrote about Swartz's plight last
August</a>, I wrote that he was "being prosecuted by
the DOJ with obscene over-zealousness". Timothy Lee
wrote <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/feds-go-overboard-in-prosecuting-information-activist/" target="_blank">the definitive article in 2011</a>
explaining why, even if all the allegations in the
indictment are true, the only real crime committed by
Swartz was basic trespassing, for which people are
punished, at most, with 30 days in jail and a $100
fine, about which Lee wrote: "That seems about right:
if he's going to serve prison time, it should be
measured in days rather than years."</p>
<p>Nobody knows for sure why federal prosecutors decided
to pursue Swartz so vindictively, as though he had
committed some sort of major crime that deserved many
years in prison and financial ruin. <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing" target="_blank">Some theorized</a> that the DOJ
hated him for his serial activism and civil
disobedience. Others speculated that, as Doctorow put
it, "the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge
hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in
the hopes of turning one of them." </p>
<p>I believe it has more to do with what I told the New
York Times' Noam Cohen for <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/business/media/aaron-swartzs-web-activism-may-cost-him-dearly.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0" target="_blank">an article he wrote</a> on Swartz's
case. Swartz's activism, I argued, was waged as part
of one of the most vigorously contested battles -
namely, the war over how the internet is used and who
controls the information that flows on it - and that
was his real crime in the eyes of the US government:
challenging its authority and those of corporate
factions to maintain a stranglehold on that
information. In that above-referenced speech on SOPA,
Swartz discussed the grave dangers to internet freedom
and free expression and assembly posed by the
government's efforts to control the internet with
expansive interpretations of copyright law and other
weapons to limit access to information.</p>
<p>That's a major part of why I consider him heroic. He
wasn't merely sacrificing himself for a cause. It was
a cause of supreme importance to people and movements
around the world - internet freedom - and he did it by
knowingly confronting the most powerful state and
corporate factions because he concluded that was the
only way to achieve these ends.</p>
<p>Suicide is an incredibly complicated phenomenon. I
didn't know Swartz nearly well enough even to form an
opinion about what drove him to do this; I had a
handful of exchanges with him online in which we said
nice things about each other's work and I truly
admired him. I'm sure even his closest friends and
family are struggling to understand exactly what
caused him to defy his will to live by taking his own
life. </p>
<p>But, despite his public and <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick" target="_blank">very sad writings</a> about battling
depression, it only stands to reason that a looming
criminal trial that could send him to prison for
decades played some role in this; even if it didn't,
this persecution by the DOJ is an outrage and an
offense against all things decent, for the reasons
Lessig wrote today:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Here is where we need a better sense of justice,
and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is
not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the
prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the
government worked as hard as it could to
characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and
absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we
were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with
the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must
have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who
says that there is money to be made in a stash of
ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It
was clear what this was not, yet our government
continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11
terrorists red-handed.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>"For remember, we live in a world where the
architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at
the White House — and where even those brought to
'justice' never even have to admit any wrongdoing,
let alone be labeled 'felons'." </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a
"justice" system that fully protects the most
egregious criminals as long as they are members of or
useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but
punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness
those who lack power and, most of all, those who
challenge power.</p>
<p>Swartz knew all of this. But he forged ahead anyway.
He could have easily opted for a life of great
personal wealth, status, prestige and comfort. He
chose instead to fight - selflessly, with conviction
and purpose, and at great risk to himself - for noble
causes to which he was passionately devoted. That, to
me, isn't an example of heroism; it's the embodiment
of it, its purest expression. It's the attribute our
country has been most lacking. </p>
<p>I always found it genuinely inspiring to watch Swartz
exude this courage and commitment at such a young age.
His death had better prompt some serious examination
of the DOJ's behavior - both in his case and its
warped administration of justice generally. But his
death will also hopefully strengthen the inspirational
effects of thinking about and understanding the
extraordinary acts he undertook in his short life.</p>
<h2>UPDATE</h2>
<p>From the <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://soupsoup.tumblr.com/post/40373383323/official-statement-from-the-family-and-partner-of" target="_blank">official statement of Swartz's
family</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It
is the product of a criminal justice system rife
with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.
Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US
Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his
death. The US Attorney's office pursued an
exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying
potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an
alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike
JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own
community's most cherished principles."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This sort of unrestrained prosecutorial abuse is,
unfortunately, far from uncommon. It usually destroys
people without attention or notice. Let's hope - and
work to ensure that - the attention generated by
Swartz's case prompts some movement toward
accountability and reform.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<span>
<div style="display:block">
<div>
<div> <span></span>***<br>
<br>
<h1 class="entry-title">The Tech’s coverage of Aaron
Swartz</h1>
<div class="entry-meta"> <span class="meta-prep
meta-prep-author">Posted on</span> <a href="http://techblogs.mit.edu/news/2013/01/the-techs-coverage-of-aaron-swartz/" title="4:39 pm" rel="bookmark"><span class="entry-date">January 12, 2013</span></a> <span class="meta-sep">by</span> <span class="author
vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="http://techblogs.mit.edu/author/Joanna%20Kao/" title="View all posts by Joanna Kao">Joanna Kao</a></span>
</div>
<div class="entry-content">
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">26-year old Aaron
Swartz was an accomplished man — it’s not
difficult to see his influence on today’s web.
He co-authored the specification for RSS 1.0 at
age 14 and was a prominent internet activist
throughout his life. Hacker News went ablaze
with comments of support for his work.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">The Tech was
informed of Swartz’s suicide by his uncle
Michael Wolf and confirmed the news with his
lawyer early this morning. The Tech has covered
Aaron Swartz’s case since August 2011, and we’ve
compiled our coverage below.</span></p>
<p><strong>September 2010:</strong><br>
Swartz began mass downloading JSTOR documents
around September 24. JSTOR blocked his access for
the first time on September 26. This repeated on
October 2, December 26, and January 4. Swartz was
apprehended on January 6, 2011.</p>
<p><strong>July 11, 2011:</strong><br>
Swartz indicted on four counts by the Federal
District Court for wire fraud, computer fraud,
unlawfully obtaining information from a protected
computer, and recklessly damaging a protected
computer.</p>
<p><strong>August 3, 2011: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html" target="_blank">Swartz indicted for JSTOR
theft</a></strong><br>
In The Tech’s first article following Swartz’s
indictment and arrest, The Tech describes the
alleged events that led up to his indictment,
including details on the laptop Swartz used to
allegedly download 4.8 million documents from
JSTOR, the wiring closet that Swartz accessed in
the basement of Building 16 on MIT’s campus, his
arrest, and legal ramifications.</p>
<p><strong>November 18, 2011: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N53/swartz.html" target="_blank">Swartz indicted for breaking
and entering</a></strong><br>
Swartz was indicted a second time on November 17,
2011 for breaking and entering, larceny over $250,
and unauthorized access to a computer network. He
was indicted this time in the Middlesex Superior
Court — previously, he was indicted in the Federal
District Court.</p>
<p><strong>December 2, 2011: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N56/briefs.html" target="_blank">Swartz arraigned</a></strong><br>
Swartz was arraigned in Middlesex Superior Court
on November 30, 2011, where he pleaded not guilty.</p>
<p><strong>March 16, 2012: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N12/swartz.html" target="_blank">State drops charges against
Swartz; federal charges remain</a></strong><br>
Middlesex Superior Court dropped all six charges
against Swartz on March 8, 2012 — two counts of
breaking and entering, one count of larceny over
$250, and three counts of unauthorized access to a
computer system. The four federal charges against
Swartz remained — wire fraud, computer fraud,
unlawfully obtaining information from a protected
computer, and recklessly damaging a protected
computer.</p>
<p><strong>September 12, 2012</strong><br>
<span style="font-size: 16px;">The federal
indictment with four counts against Swartz was
superseded. The revised indictment was for
thirteen counts.</span></p>
<p><strong>September 24, 2012: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N40/graphics/aaronsw.html" target="_blank">Swartz arraigned on a
superseding indictment</a></strong><br>
Aaron Swartz pleaded not guilty to all 13 counts
during his arraignment on a superseding
indictment.</p>
<p><strong>October 19, 2012: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N46/swartz.html" target="_blank">Aaron Swartz asks court to
suppress data from MIT</a></strong><br>
According to a court document filed by Swartz and
his legal team on October 5, MIT provided the
Secret Service with details and logs of Swartz’s
activity on MIT’s network without a warrant or
subpoena. Swartz’s filings said that this release
violated MIT’s policy. MIT said that its actions
were necessary to “protect its network.”</p>
<p><strong>November 2, 2012: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N50/swartz.html" target="_blank">Swartz gets high-powered
attorneys</a></strong><br>
Swartz hired new legal representation — Keker and
Van Nest, a top law firm in San Francisco, to
represent him. Elliot R. Peters led his legal
team. Swartz was previously represented by Martin
Weinberg.</p>
<p><strong>November 20, 2012: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N55/swartz.html" target="_blank">Swartz hid behind helmet, but
only after he was already photographed</a></strong><br>
The government filed a response to several motions
by Swartz’s legal team to suppress evidence on
November 16. The government replied with 22
exhibits, including several photographs showing
Swartz as he entered Building 16 and his attempt
to cover his face with his helmet. The
government’s response attempted to justify the
FBI’s copying of Swartz’s RAM without a search
warrant.</p>
<p><strong>December 7, 2012: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N59/swartz.html" target="_blank">Aaron Swartz trial may be
delayed</a></strong><br>
Attorneys for Swartz asked the federal district
court to delay Swartz’s trial from February 4,
2013 to June and responded to the government’s
replies from November 16. At the status conference
scheduled for the following Friday, the judge
decided to have an evidentiary hearing for 3 hours
on January 25 and trial on April 1.</p>
<p><strong>January 11, 2013: <a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swartz.html" target="_blank">Aaron Swartz commits suicide</a></strong><br>
On January 12, 2013, The Tech published a short
article after hearing from Swartz’s uncle and
confirming Swartz’s suicide with his attorney
Elliot Peters. Upon hearing of his death, many
people posted on <a onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview',
'/out/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845']);" href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845">Hacker News</a> and <a onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview',
'/out/www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/16fgi6/cofounder_of_reddit_aaron_swartz_commits_suicide/']);" href="http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/16fgi6/cofounder_of_reddit_aaron_swartz_commits_suicide/">Reddit</a>
as well as in comments on the <a onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview',
'/out/www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activist-dies-at-26.html?hp&_r=0']);" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activist-dies-at-26.html?hp&_r=0">New
York Times article on Swartz’s death</a> and
other prominent blogs. Cory Doctorow, an author
and friend of Swartz, published a <a onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview',
'/out/boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html']);" href="http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html">remembrance
on BoingBoing</a>. Larry Lessig, a professor at
Harvard and friend, posted <a onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview',
'/out/lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully']);" href="http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully">Aaron
and prosecutorial bullying</a>. Swartz’s
girlfriend Quinn Norton wrote about him on her own
<a onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview',
'/out/www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644']);" href="http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644">blog</a>.<br>
</p>
<p>***<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully">http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully</a><br>
</p>
<h3 class="replace-type"><a href="http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully">Prosecutor
as bully</a></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ragesoss/3835494997/" title="Boston Wiki Meetup by ragesoss, on
Flickr"><3835494997_edc2e1dc12.jpg></a></p>
<p><span>(Some will say this is not the time. I
disagree. This is the time when every mixed
emotion needs to find voice.)</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>Since his arrest in January,
2011, I have known more about the events that
began this spiral than I have wanted to know.
Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer. He
shared with me what went down and why, and I
worked with him to get help. When my obligations
to Harvard created a conflict that made it
impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I
continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend,
no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that
friendship into doubt.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>The billions of snippets of
sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net
confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us.
But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain
I wish we could resist: </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span><strong>Please don’t pathologize
this story</strong>. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>No doubt it is a certain crazy
that brings a person as loved as Aaron was loved
(and he was surrounded in NY by people who loved
him) to do what Aaron did. It angers me that he
did what he did. But if we’re going to learn
from this, we can’t let slide what brought him
here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>First, of course, Aaron brought
Aaron here. <a href="http://mediafreedom.org/2011/07/larry-lessig-responds-says-swartzs-alleged-actions-crossed-ethical-line/">As
I said when I wrote about the case</a> (when
obligations required I say something publicly),
<strong>if</strong> what the government alleged
was true — and I say “if” because I am not
revealing what Aaron said to me then — then what
he did was wrong. And if not legally wrong, then
at least morally wrong. The causes that Aaron
fought for are my causes too. But as much as I
respect those who disagree with me about this,
these means are not mine. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>But all this shows is that if
the government proved its case, some punishment
was appropriate. So what was that appropriate
punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker
trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this
something completely different?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>Early on, and to its great
credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They
declined to pursue their own action against
Aaron, and they asked the government to drop
its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear,
and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed
to continue his war against the “criminal” who
we who loved him knew as Aaron.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>Here is where we need a better
sense of justice, and shame. For the
outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron.
It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s
behavior. From the beginning, the government
worked as hard as it could to characterize what
Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way.
The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told,
was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint,
and then the suggestion, that his aim must have
been to profit from his crime. But anyone who
says that there is money to be made in a stash
of <em><strong>ACADEMIC ARTICLES</strong></em>
is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what
this was not, yet our government continued to
push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists
red-handed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>Aaron had literally done nothing
in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate
Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work
building the RSS standard, to his work
architecting Creative Commons, to his work
liberating public records, to his work building
a free public library, to his work supporting
Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers,
and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and
only working for (at least his conception of)
the public good. 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.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>For remember, we live in a world
where the architects of the financial crisis
regularly dine at the White House — and where
even those brought to “justice” never even have
to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled
“felons.” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>In that world, the question this
government needs to answer is why it was so
necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a
“felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations,
that was what he was not willing to accept, and
so that was the reason he was facing a million
dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet
unable to appeal openly to us for the financial
help he needed to fund his defense, at least
without risking the ire of a district court
judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking
sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this
fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this
brilliant but troubled boy to end it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/17393320412/us-government-ups-felony-count-jstoraaron-swartz-case-four-to-thirteen.shtml">Fifty
years in jail</a>, charges our government.
Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so
I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our
time. That begins with one word: Shame. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>One word, and endless tears.<br>
</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>***<br>
</span></p>
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<h1 itemprop="name headline ">The inspiring
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<div class="caption" itemprop="caption">The
internet activist Aaron Swartz, seen here in
January 2009, has died at the age of 26.
Photograph: Michael Francis Mcelroy/AP</div>
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<div id="article-body-blocks">
<p><strong>(updated below)<br>
</strong><br>
Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer and
internet freedom activist, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activist-dies-at-26.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0">committed
suicide on Friday</a> in New York at the
age of 26. As the incredibly moving
remembrances from his friends such as <a href="http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html">Cory
Doctorow</a> and <a href="http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully">Larry
Lessig</a> attest, he was unquestionably
brilliant but also - like most everyone - a
complex human being plagued by demons and
flaws. For many reasons, I don't believe in
whitewashing someone's life or beatifying
them upon death. But, to me, much of
Swartz's tragically short life was filled
with acts that are genuinely and, in the
most literal and noble sense, heroic. I
think that's really worth thinking about
today.</p>
<p>At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role
in developing the RSS software that is still
widely used to enable people to manage what
they read on the internet. As a teenager, he
also played a vital role in the creation of
Reddit, the wildly popular social networking
news site. When Conde Nast purchased Reddit,
Swartz received a substantial sum of money
at a very young age. He became something of
a legend in the internet and programming
world before he was 18. His path to internet
mogul status and the great riches it entails
was clear, easy and virtually guaranteed: a
path which so many other young internet
entrepreneurs have found irresistible,
monomaniacally devoting themselves to making
more and more money long after they have
more than they could ever hope to spend.</p>
<p>But rather obviously, Swartz had little
interest in devoting his life to his own
material enrichment, despite how easy it
would have been for him. As Lessig wrote:
"Aaron had literally done nothing in his
life 'to make money' . . . Aaron was always
and only working for (at least his
conception of) the public good." </p>
<p>Specifically, he committed himself to the
causes in which he so passionately believed:
internet freedom, civil liberties, making
information and knowledge as available as
possible. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1">Here
he is</a> in his May, 2012 keynote address
at the Freedom To Connect conference
discussing the role he played in stopping
SOPA, the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/01/18/chris_dodds_paid_sopa_crusading/">movie-industry-demanded
legislation</a> that would have vested the
government with dangerous censorship powers
over the internet. </p>
<p>Critically, Swartz didn't commit himself to
these causes merely by talking about them or
advocating for them. He repeatedly
sacrificed his own interests, even his
liberty, in order to defend these values and
challenge and subvert the most powerful
factions that were their enemies. That's
what makes him, in my view, so consummately
heroic.</p>
<p>In 2008, Swartz <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html">targeted
Pacer</a>, the online service that
provides access to court documents for a
per-page fee. What offended Swartz and
others was that people were forced to pay
for access to public court documents that
were created at public expense. Along with a
friend, Swartz created a program to download
millions of those documents and then, as
Doctorow wrote, "spent a small fortune
fetching a titanic amount of data and
putting it into the public domain." For that
act of civil disobedience, he was
investigated and harassed by the FBI, but
never charged.</p>
<p>But in July 2011, Swartz <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/us/20compute.html?">was
arrested</a> for allegedly targeting
JSTOR, the online publishing company that
digitizes and distributes scholarly articles
written by academics and then sells them,
often at a high price, to subscribers. As <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing">Maria
Bustillos detailed</a>, none of the money
goes to the actual writers (usually
professors) who wrote the scholarly articles
- they are usually not paid for writing them
- but instead goes to the publishers.</p>
<p>This system offended Swartz (and many other
free-data activists) for two reasons: it
charged large fees for access to these
articles but did not compensate the authors,
and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of
people are denied access to the scholarship
produced by America's colleges and
universities. The indictment filed against
Swartz alleged that he used his access as a
Harvard fellow to the JSTOR system to
download millions of articles with the
intent to distribute them online for free;
when he was detected and his access was cut
off, the indictment claims he then
trespassed into an MIT computer-wiring
closet in order to physically download the
data directly onto his laptop.</p>
<p>Swartz never distributed any of these
downloaded articles. He never intended to
profit even a single penny from anything he
did, and never did profit in any way. He had
every right to download the articles as an
authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended
to violate the company's "terms of service"
by making the articles available to the
public. Once arrested, he returned all
copies of everything he downloaded and vowed
not to use them. JSTOR told federal
prosecutors that it had no intent to see him
prosecuted, though MIT remained ambiguous
about its wishes.</p>
<p>But federal prosecutors ignored the wishes
of the alleged "victims". Led by <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/12/30/bostonian_of_the_year_carmen_ortiz_2011/">a
federal prosecutor in Boston</a> notorious
for her overzealous prosecutions, the DOJ
threw the book at him, charging Swartz with
multiple felonies which carried a total
sentence of several decades in prison and $1
million in fines.</p>
<p>Swartz's trial on these criminal charges
was scheduled to begin in two months. He
adamantly refused to plead guilty to a
felony because he did not want to spend the
rest of his life as a convicted felon with
all the stigma and rights-denials that
entails. The criminal proceedings, as Lessig
put it, already put him in a predicament
where "his wealth [was] bled dry, yet unable
to appeal openly to us for the financial
help he needed to fund his defense, at least
without risking the ire of a district court
judge."</p>
<p>To say that the DOJ's treatment of Swartz
was excessive and vindictive is an extreme
understatement. When I <a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/08/19/surveillance_13/">wrote
about Swartz's plight last August</a>, I
wrote that he was "being prosecuted by the
DOJ with obscene over-zealousness". Timothy
Lee wrote <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/feds-go-overboard-in-prosecuting-information-activist/">the
definitive article in 2011</a> explaining
why, even if all the allegations in the
indictment are true, the only real crime
committed by Swartz was basic trespassing,
for which people are punished, at most, with
30 days in jail and a $100 fine, about which
Lee wrote: "That seems about right: if he's
going to serve prison time, it should be
measured in days rather than years."</p>
<p>Nobody knows for sure why federal
prosecutors decided to pursue Swartz so
vindictively, as though he had committed
some sort of major crime that deserved many
years in prison and financial ruin. <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing">Some
theorized</a> that the DOJ hated him for
his serial activism and civil disobedience.
Others speculated that, as Doctorow put it,
"the feds were chasing down all the
Cambridge hackers who had any connection to
Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one
of them." </p>
<p>I believe it has more to do with what I
told the New York Times' Noam Cohen for <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/business/media/aaron-swartzs-web-activism-may-cost-him-dearly.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0">an
article he wrote</a> on Swartz's case.
Swartz's activism, I argued, was waged as
part of one of the most vigorously contested
battles - namely, the war over how the
internet is used and who controls the
information that flows on it - and that was
his real crime in the eyes of the US
government: challenging its authority and
those of corporate factions to maintain a
stranglehold on that information. In that
above-referenced speech on SOPA, Swartz
discussed the grave dangers to internet
freedom and free expression and assembly
posed by the government's efforts to control
the internet with expansive interpretations
of copyright law and other weapons to limit
access to information.</p>
<p>That's a major part of why I consider him
heroic. He wasn't merely sacrificing himself
for a cause. It was a cause of supreme
importance to people and movements around
the world - internet freedom - and he did it
by knowingly confronting the most powerful
state and corporate factions because he
concluded that was the only way to achieve
these ends.</p>
<p>Suicide is an incredibly complicated
phenomenon. I didn't know Swartz nearly well
enough even to form an opinion about what
drove him to do this; I had a handful of
exchanges with him online in which we said
nice things about each other's work and I
truly admired him. I'm sure even his closest
friends and family are struggling to
understand exactly what caused him to defy
his will to live by taking his own life. </p>
<p>But, despite his public and <a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick">very
sad writings</a> about battling
depression, it only stands to reason that a
looming criminal trial that could send him
to prison for decades played some role in
this; even if it didn't, this persecution by
the DOJ is an outrage and an offense against
all things decent, for the reasons Lessig
wrote today:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Here is where we need a better sense of
justice, and shame. For the outrageousness
in this story is not just Aaron. It is
also the absurdity of the prosecutor's
behavior. From the beginning, the
government worked as hard as it could to
characterize what Aaron did in the most
extreme and absurd way. The 'property'
Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was
worth 'millions of dollars' — with the
hint, and then the suggestion, that his
aim must have been to profit from his
crime. But anyone who says that there is
money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC
ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It
was clear what this was not, yet our
government continued to push as if it had
caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>"For remember, we live in a world where
the architects of the financial crisis
regularly dine at the White House — and
where even those brought to 'justice'
never even have to admit any wrongdoing,
let alone be labeled 'felons'." </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed
by a "justice" system that fully protects
the most egregious criminals as long as they
are members of or useful to the nation's
most powerful factions, but punishes with
incomparable mercilessness and harshness
those who lack power and, most of all, those
who challenge power.</p>
<p>Swartz knew all of this. But he forged
ahead anyway. He could have easily opted for
a life of great personal wealth, status,
prestige and comfort. He chose instead to
fight - selflessly, with conviction and
purpose, and at great risk to himself - for
noble causes to which he was passionately
devoted. That, to me, isn't an example of
heroism; it's the embodiment of it, its
purest expression. It's the attribute our
country has been most lacking. </p>
<p>I always found it genuinely inspiring to
watch Swartz exude this courage and
commitment at such a young age. His death
had better prompt some serious examination
of the DOJ's behavior - both in his case and
its warped administration of justice
generally. But his death will also hopefully
strengthen the inspirational effects of
thinking about and understanding the
extraordinary acts he undertook in his short
life.</p>
<h2>UPDATE</h2>
<p>From the <a href="http://soupsoup.tumblr.com/post/40373383323/official-statement-from-the-family-and-partner-of">official
statement of Swartz's family</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Aaron's death is not simply a personal
tragedy. It is the product of a criminal
justice system rife with intimidation and
prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by
officials in the Massachusetts US
Attorney's office and at MIT contributed
to his death. The US Attorney's office
pursued an exceptionally harsh array of
charges, carrying potentially over 30
years in prison, to punish an alleged
crime that had no victims. Meanwhile,
unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for
Aaron and its own community's most
cherished principles."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This sort of unrestrained prosecutorial
abuse is, unfortunately, far from uncommon.
It usually destroys people without attention
or notice. Let's hope - and work to ensure
that - the attention generated by Swartz's
case prompts some movement </p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div></div></div></div></blockquote></body></html>