R.I.P. Aaron Swartz
by THE DEADLINE TEAM
Saturday January 12, 2013


Aaron Swartz, co-founder of social news website Reddit and a computer activist who opposed government regulation of the Internet, was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment.

A spokeswoman for New York’s Medical Examiner said 26-year-old Swartz hanged himself. He was found Friday.



Swartz’s death was confirmed by his attorney, Elliot Peters, in an email to MIT’s The Tech newspaper.

Swartz was a prodigy who as a young teenager helped create the programming code for the RSS news feeds used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for computer users.

He also directed the anti-censorship political action group Demand Progress and fought to keep online access to content free.



Arrested in 2011 and charged with stealing scientific journals from an archive at MIT, he had pleaded not guilty to charges including wire fraud and was scheduled to stand trial in federal court next month.

If convicted he could have faced a prison term of 50 years or more and up to $4 million in fines.

http://www.deadline.com/2013/01/aaron-swartz-found-dead-reddit-cofounder/

Very sad. Handsome, young and highly intelligent. He was probably terrified of going to prison.

Very sad. Handsome, young and highly intelligent. He was probably terrified of going to prison.

I read that he also struggled with depression.

I am sure I had him beat in the Depression category!!!!!!!

I read that he also struggled with depression.

Oh man, I didn't know he was younger than me! So sad. :( May he RIP.

Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer, Found Dead Amid Prosecutor 'Bullying' in Unconventional Case
01/12/2013


Open democracy advocate and internet pioneer Aaron Swartz was found dead Friday in an apparent suicide, flooding the digital spectrum with an outpouring of grief. He was 26 years old.

Swartz spent the last two years fighting federal hacking charges. In July 2011, prosecutor Scott Garland working under U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, a politician with her eye on the governor's mansion, charged Swartz with four counts of felony misconduct -- charges that were deemed outrageous by internet experts who understood the case, and wholly unnecessary by the parties Swartz was accused of wronging.

Swartz repeatedly sought to reduce the charges to a level below felony status, but prosecutors pressed on, adding additional charges so that by September 2012 Swartz faced 13 felony counts and up to half a century in prison.





Swartz had long lived with depression and a host of physical ailments, which made his accomplishments that much more astonishing. Barely a teenager, he codeveloped the RSS feed, before becoming one of the earliest minds behind Reddit.

Ortiz's office declined to comment for this article. Late on Saturday, Swartz's family issued a statement mourning the loss of their loved one's "curiosity, creativity" and "commitment to social justice."

They also put some of the blame for Swartz's death on federal prosecutors.



"Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy," the statement reads. "It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. 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."





That sentiment was echoed by Harvard University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend of Swartz, wrote a withering blog post attacking the Department of Justice for its misplaced zeal:

"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," Lessig wrote. "Aaron 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."





Swartz's friend Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, also pointed at the DOJ. "His last two years were hard, thanks to the U.S. Department of Justice, which engaged in gross prosecutorial overreach on the basis of stretched interpretations of the law," he told HuffPost.

"They sought felony convictions with decades of prison time for actions which, if they were illegal at all, were at most misdemeanors. Aaron struggled sometimes with depression, but it would have been hard not to be depressed in his circumstances. As Larry Lessig has rightly said, this should be a cause for great shame and anger."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/12/aaron-swartz_n_2463726.html

RIP

Shame that he couldn't man up and pay for what he did. RIP, you found you're way out

its more a shame that what he did probably wasn't even a crime and the "victims" in this case are advocating that there be no charges pressed for something that surely isn't a felony - this is just a case of an overzealous prosecutor trying to make a name for themself.

:rip:

its more a shame that what he did probably wasn't even a crime and the "victims" in this case are advocating that there be no charges pressed for something that surely isn't a felony - this is just a case of an overzealous prosecutor trying to make a name for themself.

:rip:


Some argue that it was MITs fault for not having security but yet again its not his place to exploit the lack of security to acces JSTOR and get all of those PDFs

he had every right to access the files (freely accessible publicly-funded research) - it was his method of downloading them that was the problem

the witch hunt by the feds was in retaliation to his actions that helped defeat the anti-copyright schemes they were trying to push through to make mega-conglomerates happy

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/18/3888528/after-aaron-swartz-how-antiquated-computer-laws-enable-the

Shame that he couldn't man up and pay for what he did. RIP, you found you're way out

This is where I'm at with it. I am sad he felt he had to take his life :(

he had every right to access the files (freely accessible publicly-funded research) - it was his method of downloading them that was the problem

the witch hunt by the feds was in retaliation to his actions that helped defeat the anti-copyright schemes they were trying to push through to make mega-conglomerates happy

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/18/3888528/after-aaron-swartz-how-antiquated-computer-laws-enable-the

It wasnt public. Yes it was publish but he got it from JSTOR and at the time JSTOR made people pay to use it and he hacked MIT to use their subscription