PHOTO: RIP AARON SWARTZ - REDDIT

Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist.     Swartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons,[6] the website framework web.py and the social news site Reddit.    In 2013, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Swartz became an equal partner in Reddit after its merger with his company, Infogami.    His later work focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.    In 2009, wanting to learn about effective activism, he helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.    In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig.    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 from JSTOR.    Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.
On January 11, 2013, two years after his initial arrest, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.  Swartz' family says the government MURDERED their son.
Carmen Ortiz's husband, Tom Dolan, replied, criticizing the Swartz family blaming the government for his death:
"Truly incredible that in their own son's obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6-month offer."  [six months in federal prison for doing NOTHING WRONG?!] 
This comment triggered widespread criticism; Esquire writer Charlie Pierce replied, "the glibness with which her husband and her defenders toss off a ‘mere’ six months in federal prison, low-security or not, is a further indication that something is seriously out of whack with the way our prosecutors think these days
Look what we lost?!  We lost a computer GENIUS because of this.  What do we have, a bunch of greedy, mediocre NOTHING liars/lawyers.  They should all be HUNG.  An eye for an eye.
 
Swartz was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1986, the eldest son of Susan and Robert Swartz.   His father had founded the software firm Mark Williams Company.  
Markdown
Swartz was co-creator, with John Gruber, of Markdown, a simplified markup standard derived from HTML, and author of its html2text translator. Markdown remains in widespread use.
Infogami, Reddit, Jottit
Swartz attended Stanford University.    After the summer of his freshman year, he attended Y Combinator’s first Summer Founders Program where he started the software company Infogami. Infogami’s wiki platform was used to support the Internet Archive’s Open Library project and the web.py web framework that Swartz had created,]
but he felt he needed co-founders to proceed further. Y-Combinator organizers suggested that Infogami merge with Reddit, which it did in November 2005.[34][36] Reddit at first found it difficult to make money from the project, but the site later gained in popularity, with millions of users visiting it each month.
In October 2006, Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast Publications, the owner of Wired magazine. Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco to work on Wired. Swartz found office life uncongenial, and he ultimately left the company.
In September 2007, Swartz joined with Simon Carstensen to launch Jottit.
Activism
In 2008 Swartz founded Watchdog.net, “the good government site with teeth,” to aggregate and visualize data about politicians.     In the same year, he wrote a widely circulated Open Access Guerilla Manifesto.
In 2009, wanting to learn about effective activism, Aaron helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.    He wrote on his blog, "I spend my days experimenting with new ways to get progressive policies enacted and progressive politicians elected."    Aaron led the first activism event of his career with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, delivering thousands of HEALTH CARE REFORM PETITIONS.
In 2010,  Swartz co-founded Demand Progress,  a political advocacy group that organizes people online to “take action by contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word” about civil liberties, government reform, and other issues.
During academic year 2010–11, Swartz conducted research studies on political corruption as a Lab Fellow in Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption.
Author Cory Doctorow, in his novel, Homeland, “dr[ew] on advice from Swartz in setting out how his protagonist could use the information now available about voters to create a grass-roots anti-establishment political campaign.”     In an afterword to the novel, Swartz wrote, "these [political hacktivist] tools can be used by anyone motivated and talented enough.... Now it’s up to you to change the system.... Let me know if I can help."  
Stop Online Piracy Act




Swartz in 2012 protesting against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)


Swartz was instrumental in the campaign to prevent passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which sought to combat Internet copyright violations but was criticized on the basis that it would have made it easier for the U.S. government to shut down web sites accused of violating copyright and would have placed intolerable burdens on Internet providers.     Following the defeat of the bill, Swartz was the keynote speaker at the F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012 event in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2012. His speech was titled “How We Stopped SOPA” and he informed the audience:

This bill ... shut down whole websites. Essentially, it stopped Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups....
I called all my friends, and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with an online petition opposing this noxious bill.... We [got] ... 300,000 signers.... We met with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with them.... And then it passed unanimously....
And then, suddenly, the process stopped. Senator Ron Wyden ... put a hold on the bill.


He added, “We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom.”     He was referring to a series of protests against the bill by numerous websites that was described by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as the biggest in Internet history, with over 115,000 sites altering their webpages.     Swartz also presented on this topic at an event organized by ThoughtWorks.  
Library of Congress
Around 2006, Swartz acquired the Library of Congress's complete bibliographic dataset: the library charged fees to access this, but as a government document, it was not copyright-protected within the USA. By posting the data on OpenLibrary, Swartz made it freely available.[   The Library of Congress project was met with approval by the Copyright Office.  
PACER
In 2008, Swartz downloaded and released about 2.7 million federal court documents stored in the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.[
 
The Huffington Post characterized his actions this way: "Swartz downloaded public court documents from the PACER system in an effort to make them available outside of the expensive service. The move drew the attention of the FBI, which ultimately decided not to press charges as the documents, were, in fact, public."
PACER was charging 8 cents per page for information that Carl Malamud, who founded the nonprofit group Public.Resource.Org, contended should be free, because federal documents are not covered by copyright.[63][64] The fees were "plowed back to the courts to finance technology, but the system [ran] a budget surplus of some $150 million, according to court reports," reported The New York Times. PACER used technology that was “designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems ... put[ting] the nation’s legal system behind a wall of cash and kludge.”    Malamud appealed to fellow activists, urging them to visit one of 17 libraries conducting a free trial of the PACER system, download court documents, and send them to him for public distribution. 
After reading Malamud’s call for action,  Swartz used a Perl computer script running on Amazon cloud servers to download the documents, using credentials belonging to a Sacramento library.    From September 4 to 20, 2008, it accessed documents and uploaded them to a cloud computing service.  He released the documents to Malamud’s organization.[64]
On September 29, 2008,[63] the GPO suspended the free trial, "pending an evaluation" of the program.[63][64] Swartz’s actions were subsequently investigated by the FBI.[63][64] The case was closed after two months with no charges filed.[64] Swartz learned the details of the investigation as a result of filing a FOIA request with the FBI and described their response as the "usual mess of confusions that shows the FBI’s lack of sense of humor."[64] PACER still charges per page, but customers using Firefox have the option of saving the documents for free public access with a plug-in called RECAP.[65]
Writing in Ars Technica, Timothy Lee, who later made use of the documents obtained by Swartz as a co-creator of RECAP, offered some insight into discrepancies in reporting on just how much data Swartz had downloaded: "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...." Based on the facts that Swartz downloaded 2.7 million documents while PACER, at the time, contained 500 million, Lee concluded that Swartz downloaded less than one percent of the database.[61]
Wikileaks
On December 27, 2010, Swartz filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn about the treatment of Bradley Manning, alleged source for Wikileaks.[66][67]
Strongbox[edit]
In 2011–2012, Swartz and Kevin Poulsen designed and implemented Strongbox, a system that allows anonymous informants to send electronic documents to reporters at The New Yorker without fear of disclosure.[68][69][70] It was introduced in 2013.[69]
JSTOR[edit]
Main article: United States v. Aaron Swartz
According to state and federal authorities, Swartz used JSTOR, a digital repository,[71] to download a large number[ii] of academic journal articles through MIT’s computer network over the course of a few weeks in late 2010 and early 2011. At the time, Swartz was a research fellow at Harvard University, which provided him with a JSTOR account.[72] Visitors to MIT’s "open campus" were authorized to access JSTOR through its network. The authorities said Swartz downloaded the documents through a laptop connected to a networking switch in a controlled-access wiring closet at MIT.[
Arrest and prosecution[edit]
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested near the Harvard campus by MIT police and a U.S. Secret Service agent. He was arraigned in Cambridge District Court on two state charges of breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony.
On July 11, 2011, Swartz was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer.]
On November 17, 2011, Swartz was indicted by a Middlesex County Superior Court grand jury on state charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny and unauthorized access to a computer network.[85][86] On December 16, 2011, state prosecutors filed a notice that they were dropping the two original charges;[14] the charges listed in the November 17, 2011 indictment were dropped on March 8, 2012.[87] According to a spokesperson for the Middlesex County prosecutor, the state charges were dropped in order to permit the federal prosecution to proceed unimpeded.[87]
On September 12, 2012, 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.[17][88][89][90]
After his death, federal prosecutors dropped the charges.
Family response and criticism



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 U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.



Speaking at his son's funeral, Robert Swartz said, "[Aaron] was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."


After Mitch Kapor posted the statement on Twitter, Carmen Ortiz's husband, Tom Dolan, replied, criticizing the Swartz family: "Truly incredible that in their own son's obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6-month offer."    This comment triggered widespread criticism; Esquire writer Charlie Pierce replied, "the glibness with which her husband and her defenders toss off a ‘mere’ six months in federal prison, low-security or not, is a further indication that something is seriously out of whack with the way our prosecutors think these days."