14-01-2013, 09:21 PM
Technology's Greatest Minds Say Goodbye to Aaron Swartz
The technology community's brightest minds are memorializing Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old programmer and digital rights activist who committed suicide Friday months before his trial over computer fraud was set to begin.
A Prodigal Mind
Swartz was nothing short of a prodigy: at the age of 14, he helped develop the Real Simple Syndication (RSS) standard, paving the way to services such as Google Reader. He worked on the Open Library, which has a goal of putting one page online for every book ever published. He founded Infogami, which was eventually incorporated into Reddit before the sale to Conde Nast, a move that gave him the means to detach and take up various causes at his pleasure.
"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," wrote Harvard academic, activist and personal friend of Swartz Lawrence Lessig.
"He was a kind of 21st century, nerd renaissance man," wrote MSNBC's Chris Hayes in a blog post Sunday.
"Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder", wrote World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Political Activism
Developing code, however, was far from Swartz's only fixation. He was a dedicated believer in the open-source/open-code/open-web ideology, working on causes such as net neutrality and data liberation while also helping to bring about the Creative Commons content licensing structure. He founded Demand Progress, a digital rights group that played an instrumental role in defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act early last year.
"He had an astonishingly broad range of interests, from health care to political corruption," wrote technology policy reporter Timothy Lee in the Washington Post. "But Internet freedom and public access to information were two recurring themes in his life and work."
Swartz as Suspect
It was Swartz's dedication to that ideology, which Timothy Lee called "aggressive, perhaps even reckless," that contributed to his becoming the target of a federal hacking investigation.
It was Swartz's dedication to that ideology, which Timothy Lee called "aggressive, perhaps even reckless," that contributed to his becoming the target of a federal hacking investigation.
Swartz, having previously wrote an automated program to free court documents from a government paywall using libraries' credentials, used a similar tactic to "liberate" academic articles hosted and charged for by JSTOR. First, Swartz began downloading JSTOR articles en masse over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's wireless network. After MIT cut him off from wireless access, he sneaked into a network closet and plugged into the school's wired network, a move that was discovered by the school.
In July of 2011, Swartz was charged by the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts with computer fraud and other charges that in total carried a potential sentence of 35 years in jail and $1 million in fines. JSTOR later dropped its charges against Swartz (and has since said it "regretted being drawn into" the case), but MIT was less clear about its wishes (MIT's president, Leo Rafael Reif, said in a statement released Sunday that "it pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy. He also announced an internal investigation of MIT's involvement).
U.S. attorney Carmen M. Ortiz decided to go full steam ahead with the trial, which was expected to begin later this year.
The intensity of the charges against Swartz in combination with Ortiz's decision to proceed despite JSTOR's decision to drop the case became the subject of much controversy, which has only magnified since Swartz's death. Swartz's family in a statement blamed his suicide in part on "a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach" and on the U.S. Attorney's office's decision to pursue "an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."
Lessig also placed a share of the blame on "the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior" in a blog post entitled "Prosecutor as bully." An excerpt from Lessig's impassioned post:
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.
As a memorial to Swartz, some academics have been sharing their articles for free with the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.
Lessig did not, however, completely exonerate Swartz, instead arguing that "Aaron brought Aaron here" through his alleged actions.
"The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too," wrote Lessing. "But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine."
Struggle With Depression
Many commentators have pointed out that Swartz had been suffering from depression since at least 2007, when he wrote about his struggle with "depressed mood" in detail. Some believe Swartz's mental health played some role in his death.
"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," wrote Cory Doctorow, describing his own battle with depression in a moving tribute to Swartz.
The ultimate reason, or combination of reasons, for Swartz's death may never be fully understood. But Wired's's Kevin Poulsen put five simple words to the feeling shared by many this weekend: "His death is a tragedy."
The technology community's brightest minds are memorializing Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old programmer and digital rights activist who committed suicide Friday months before his trial over computer fraud was set to begin.
A Prodigal Mind
Swartz was nothing short of a prodigy: at the age of 14, he helped develop the Real Simple Syndication (RSS) standard, paving the way to services such as Google Reader. He worked on the Open Library, which has a goal of putting one page online for every book ever published. He founded Infogami, which was eventually incorporated into Reddit before the sale to Conde Nast, a move that gave him the means to detach and take up various causes at his pleasure.
"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," wrote Harvard academic, activist and personal friend of Swartz Lawrence Lessig.
"He was a kind of 21st century, nerd renaissance man," wrote MSNBC's Chris Hayes in a blog post Sunday.
"Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder", wrote World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Political Activism
Developing code, however, was far from Swartz's only fixation. He was a dedicated believer in the open-source/open-code/open-web ideology, working on causes such as net neutrality and data liberation while also helping to bring about the Creative Commons content licensing structure. He founded Demand Progress, a digital rights group that played an instrumental role in defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act early last year.
"He had an astonishingly broad range of interests, from health care to political corruption," wrote technology policy reporter Timothy Lee in the Washington Post. "But Internet freedom and public access to information were two recurring themes in his life and work."
Swartz as Suspect
It was Swartz's dedication to that ideology, which Timothy Lee called "aggressive, perhaps even reckless," that contributed to his becoming the target of a federal hacking investigation.
It was Swartz's dedication to that ideology, which Timothy Lee called "aggressive, perhaps even reckless," that contributed to his becoming the target of a federal hacking investigation.
Swartz, having previously wrote an automated program to free court documents from a government paywall using libraries' credentials, used a similar tactic to "liberate" academic articles hosted and charged for by JSTOR. First, Swartz began downloading JSTOR articles en masse over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's wireless network. After MIT cut him off from wireless access, he sneaked into a network closet and plugged into the school's wired network, a move that was discovered by the school.
In July of 2011, Swartz was charged by the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts with computer fraud and other charges that in total carried a potential sentence of 35 years in jail and $1 million in fines. JSTOR later dropped its charges against Swartz (and has since said it "regretted being drawn into" the case), but MIT was less clear about its wishes (MIT's president, Leo Rafael Reif, said in a statement released Sunday that "it pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy. He also announced an internal investigation of MIT's involvement).
U.S. attorney Carmen M. Ortiz decided to go full steam ahead with the trial, which was expected to begin later this year.
The intensity of the charges against Swartz in combination with Ortiz's decision to proceed despite JSTOR's decision to drop the case became the subject of much controversy, which has only magnified since Swartz's death. Swartz's family in a statement blamed his suicide in part on "a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach" and on the U.S. Attorney's office's decision to pursue "an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."
Lessig also placed a share of the blame on "the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior" in a blog post entitled "Prosecutor as bully." An excerpt from Lessig's impassioned post:
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.
As a memorial to Swartz, some academics have been sharing their articles for free with the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.
Lessig did not, however, completely exonerate Swartz, instead arguing that "Aaron brought Aaron here" through his alleged actions.
"The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too," wrote Lessing. "But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine."
Struggle With Depression
Many commentators have pointed out that Swartz had been suffering from depression since at least 2007, when he wrote about his struggle with "depressed mood" in detail. Some believe Swartz's mental health played some role in his death.
"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," wrote Cory Doctorow, describing his own battle with depression in a moving tribute to Swartz.
The ultimate reason, or combination of reasons, for Swartz's death may never be fully understood. But Wired's's Kevin Poulsen put five simple words to the feeling shared by many this weekend: "His death is a tragedy."
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass