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Aaron Swartz killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment Friday. His girlfriend found Swartz\u2019s body hanging from a belt, sources said.<\/p>\nAaron Swartz killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment Friday. His girlfriend found Swartz\u2019s body hanging from a belt, sources said.<\/p>\n
The 26 year old internet activist was facing federal charges for allegedly hacking into MIT’s journal archives.<\/p>\n
Swartz was a wizardly computer prodigy,\u00a0a savant who designed his first website at age 13, and at 14, helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users. The RSS program, that alerts users to new blog posts and\u00a0allows users to subscribe to online information, is nearly ubiquitous.\u00a0He later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available.<\/p>\n
Aaron founded Demand Progress, an Internet group that was\u00a0instrumental in fights to keep the internet open and free, and in the battle to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act.\u00a0His long list of influential efforts includes the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Wikipedia and the Recap collection of legal documents. Aaron\u00a0was a flash point in the debate over whether information should be made widely available, in the face of governments and corporations that argued that some information must be kept private for security or commercial reasons.<\/p>\n
Aaron Swartz dropped out of High School after just one year, and was admitted to Stanford as a sociology major, but dropped out after a year there as well, citing the academic apathy of his fellow undergrads. He\u00a0would become\u00a0an Internet folk hero<\/span><\/a>,<\/span><\/strong> a cyber Robin Hood,\u00a0pushing to make much Web content free and open to the public.\u00a0Swartz\u00a0co-founded a company that merged with Reddit, a user-generated social news site, one of the most highly trafficked news sites in the world. He had\u00a0a financial windfall in 2006 when Reddit sold to Conde Nast\u2019s Wired Digital.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Swartz’s legal troubles began two years ago when prosecutors accused him of\u00a0downloading <\/a><\/strong><\/span>millions of scientific journals from MIT and “JSTOR” – a subscription-only scientific and literary journal storage repository. Aaron was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to\u00a0JSTOR, and was due to stand trial in April. The charges included wire fraud and computer fraud, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines, punishments that friends and family say haunted him and led to his suicide.\u00a0Swartz had pleaded not guilty to the charges.<\/p>\n To clarify: Aaron was being threatened with 35 years in prison and one million dollars in fines for\u00a0downloading too many free articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR.<\/p>\n Mr. Swartz neither hacked nor stole anything. He had legitimate access to the JSTOR database\u00a0and every right to download its documents. He just downloaded more than JSTOR would have liked. It’s like taki<\/span>ng too many of those free food samples at Costco or borrowing too many library books. Probably shouldn’t do it, but nothing to threaten someone with their adult life in prison over. The papers he “stole” were free (you can’t steal FREE), and intended to be widely disseminated.<\/p>\n According to the indictment, Mr. Swartz broke into a computer-wiring closet on the M.I.T. campus; when retrieving a computer he connected, he hid his face behind a bicycle helmet, peeking out through the ventilation holes. What Aaron allegedly actually<\/em> did was use a simple computer script to use MIT\u2019s network to download academic articles from the database – virtually the entire library – with the alleged intent of making them freely available.\u00a0At the time, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.<\/p>\n JSTOR declined to press charges or pursue prosecution, but federal prosecutors – led by Massachusetts US District Attorney Carmen Ortiz <\/span><\/strong>– dropped a staggering 13 count felony indictment on Aaron for his alleged actions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Carmen Ortiz<\/a>, <\/strong>who is reportedly considering a run for MA governor – ensuring that Mitt Romney won’t go down in the annals of State history as their dumbest – went after Aaron with alarmingly disproportionate zeal. Perhaps she needed\u00a0to make a name for herself by bagging a whale and this looked like the perfect opportunity, because despite the fact that both so-called “victims” wanted no part of any prosecution and stated that no damage was done, Carmen Ortiz\u00a0brought five ridiculous charges against Aaron Swartz. When Aaron’s lawyer tried to do what any lawyer would do and try to have the charges dropped, Ortiz added eight more charges.<\/em> To those who don’t watch TV crime procedurals, this is called “PILING ON”. \u00a0Ortiz knew she couldn’t get a conviction for this non-crime, so she piled on more charges – hoping to terrify the young man into pleading guilty.<\/p>\n The law under which Aaron was being prosecuted is the outdated\u00a0Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,<\/a><\/strong> enacted in\u00a01986. 1986 – <\/em>the same year Microsoft went public, Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault, and the NEW YORK METS WON THE WORLD SERIES.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Prosecutors have a lot of discretion over what to charge under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and how to value the loss, and Carmen Ortiz went whole hog. In 2010,\u00a0Dan Kennedy<\/a> <\/strong>reported how Ortiz’s office regularly ran roughshod over the constitutional rights of Americans and made a mockery of the basic principle that even the most loathsome speech needs the highest degree of protection. Ortiz has shown herself to be a prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly and recklessly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants, regardless of their guilt. She herself ought to be prosecuted for negligence and wrongdoing in pursuing a non-proportional sentence.<\/p>\n Aaron and Carmen had very different views on his alleged crime. Aaron clearly viewed his distributing of academic papers as an unadulterated good, spreading knowledge, Carmen Ortiz compared his actions to using a crowbar to break in and steal someone\u2019s money under the mattress. She opted to\u00a0condemn Aaron to serious prison time rather than, say, something tantamount to\u00a0trespassing.<\/p>\n Mr. Swartz outlined his views on his blog<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn\u2019t immoral \u2014 it\u2019s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.\u00a0We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that\u2019s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In his 26 years, Aaron Swartz did more for the world than Carmen Ortiz will in her lifetime. Respected as a great programmer and a provocative thinker, an advocate for open access and the freedom of information online, a voracious reader who posted his reviews on his blog, which he wrote beautifully and prolifically. Carmen Ortiz’s record boasts a litany of prosecutions for tax evasion, gambling rings and bad check writing. Unlike Carmen Ortiz, Aaron Swartz made things. He dreamed up and built new things that changed the flow of information around the world.\u00a0At 19, he volunteered to upload the archive of a defunct magazine he loved, Lingua Franca. In 2005, he contacted the writer Rick Perlstein, offering to create a Web page for him after reading a book of his he liked.\u00a0\u201cI smelled a hustle, asking him how much it would cost, and he said, no, he wanted to do it for free,\u201d Mr. Perlstein\u00a0wrote in The Nation<\/span><\/a> <\/strong>over the weekend. \u201cI thought: \u2018What a loser this guy must be. Someone with nothing better to do.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Mr. Perlstein wrote \u201cNixonland” – a favorite book of mine – and he became close friends with Aaron Swartz. Unlike Carmen Ortiz, blinded by political ambition, he had no agenda.<\/p>\n Judicial and executive malfeasance doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are those jobs – lawyer and CEO come to mind – that disproportionally attract rotten people. We encourage them by measuring, say, their gross profits, or their conviction rate, instead of how wise and just they are. Then we are surprised by the appalling nature of the system. In the end it takes a malevolent executing instrument to make things like this happen to victims who can’t possibly defend themselves.<\/p>\n Even all these years after Al Gore created the Internet, the question of how aggressively government ought to dog those who believe in the “freeing” of information is as abstruse as ever.\u00a0It may seem a recondite subject, but now that he is dead, Aaron Swartz will come to symbolize this tedious debate.\u00a0The belief that Aaron Swartz described\u00a0in a treatise<\/span><\/a><\/strong> in 2008, that information is power and should be shared, is under legal assault.\u00a0America’s intellectual-property system is a travesty, a cancer that\u00a0has metastasized and is laying waste to the information-based economy that brought us so much hope and prosperity in the 1990’s. We’ve\u00a0become a Patent Republic.<\/p>\n Like all worthwhile humans, Aaron Swartz was complicated and given to bouts of melancholy. He wrote openly about his struggle with depression in a 2007 post titled\u00a0\u201c<\/span>Sick<\/span><\/a>.<\/span>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Surely there have been times when you\u2019ve been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it\u2019s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak\u2013the things you\u2019ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn\u2019t come for any reason and it doesn\u2019t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don\u2019t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Carmen Ortiz\u2019s cynical calculation must have caused Aaron enormous grief and confusion. In my own long boring battle with depression, I’ve come to realize that the greater the ability to empathize, the greater the capacity for depression. There is something very powerful in confronting lack of humanity in others. It really levels one to its weakest link. Carmen Ortiz, like those Texas prosecutors who doggedly go after men who have been proven to have been wrongly convicted, just to save face, will always be part of the system rather than an instigator of change and betterment.<\/p>\n Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Law professor who founded Creative Commons to advocate greater sharing of creative material online, said that boxing in Mr. Swartz with an aggressive case and little ability to mount a defense \u201cmade it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In a 2007 blog entry, Aaron Swartz wrote:<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a moment, immediately before life becomes no longer worth living, when the world appears to slow down and all its myriad details suddenly become brightly, achingly apparent”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The last post he wrote on that blog, in November, was a detailed analysis of the final installment of the \u201cBatman\u201d series.\u00a0Having given his readers a spoiler alert,\u00a0he ended the post<\/span><\/a><\/strong> by writing: \u201cThus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it\u2019s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/9752879-large1.jpg\" "\\"9752879-large\\"")
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