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Anonymous hackers target US agency site
A video statement was embedded on the website for the United States Sentencing CommissionRelated Stories
Hackers claiming to be from the activist group Anonymous have hacked a US government website in response to the death of Aaron Swartz.
Activists embedded a video statement on the homepage of the United States Sentencing Commission, an agency of the US government.
The statement referred to the death of Mr Swartz, an internet activist who apparently killed himself in January.
“Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed,” the statement said.
“Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win.”
Mr Swartz, who was 26, was facing hacking charges and is believed to have taken his own life.
His federal trial was due to be held next month. If found guilty, he could have faced up to 35 years in prison.
Following his death, Mr Swartz’s family released a statement blaming “intimidation” and “prosecutorial overreach” from the criminal justice system.
‘Operation last resort’The attack on the website was scheduled to begin at midnight eastern standard time, according to documents that appear to have been posted online by Anonymous activists.
Later on Saturday the website was not functioning.
Aaron Swartz took his own life two weeks agoThe USSC is responsible for issuing sentencing guidelines for US federal courts.
The hackers, who had labelled the attack “Operation Last Resort”, said the site was chosen for symbolic reasons.
“The federal sentencing guidelines… enable prosecutors to cheat citizens of their constitutionally-guaranteed right to a fair trial, by a jury of their peers [and] are a clear violation of the 8th amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishments,” the video statement said.
The statement also suggested the hackers had sensitive information relating to a number of US judges that may be made public.
There have been numerous attacks by hackers operating under the Anonymous banner in recent months.
On Thursday two British men were jailed after taking part in an attacks on payment services including Paypal, organised by Anonymous.
Government websites of the UK and other countries have also been the subjects of attacks.
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Hackers take over sentencing commission website – A government website has been taken down after being hijacked today by the hacker-activist group Anonymous. The group says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.
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Hackers take over sentencing commission website »
A government website has been taken down after being hijacked today by the hacker-activist group Anonymous. The group says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death…
Sid Harth10:30 AMEditAaron Swartz, 26, no More@elcidharth.comAdd a comment…New! Chat with the people in your circlesYou can now chat with the people in your circles (who also have you in their circles). Change which circles you can chat with by choosing Privacy Settings from the chat menu. Learn more©2013 Google – Terms – Map data © 2013 : Terms of Use – Content Policy – Privacy – English (United States) / Set region – Create a pageCBS/AP/ January 26, 2013, 9:37 AMHackers take over gov’t website to avenge Swartz
This screenshot shows the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission after it was hijacked by the hacker-activist group Anonymous, early Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013, to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.” / AP Photo
WASHINGTON The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.
The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”
The message read in part:
Citizens of the world,
Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the “discretion” or prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain.”The hackers say they’ve infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.
Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors.
- Hundreds honor activist Aaron Swartz in NYC
- U.S. Attorney defends office’s conduct in Aaron Swartz case
- Reddit co-founder’s death fuels debate over computer crime
- Online activist, programmer Aaron Swartz dies
Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.
By mid-morning Saturday the website was offline.
© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
- Copyright © 2013 CBS Interactive Inc.
All rights reserved.
No, Anonymous Doesn’t Have Access to U.S. Warheads
If you were skimming the news this morning, we could understand why you might be confused and thinking that the hacking collective Anonymous has access to real U.S. warheads. Stop worrying, they don’t. 
They allege they do have sensitive information about the Justice Department, though. The group took over the United States Sentencing Service website early Saturday. The site has been taken down now, but The Verge pointed out you can still see the defaced-by-Anonymous version through this Google cache.
According to the lengthy note left on the site, the attack was carried out in the name of Aaron Swartz, the hacker and activist who committed suicide two weeks ago:
“Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed. Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was not to play.”
Anonymous claims to have hacked multiple government websites and accumulated a wealth of sensitive information they plan to release in “warheads,” a fancy, terrifying-at-first word they’re using to call document dumps. The first one is/was called U S – D O J – L E A – 2013 . A E E 256, and it was supposed to be available to download on the Sentencing Service website, but clicking the alleged link only ever returned an error message.
So, yeah, no missiles. Only sensitive government information:
The contents are various and we won’t ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Any media outlets wishing to be eligible for this program must include within their reporting a means of secure communications.
Each “warhead” is named for a Supreme Court judge. The attack seems to have been months in the making, if the note left by the hackers is to be believed. They said they only “wound down” the attack in the two weeks since Swartz’s death.
There are demands. The hackers who carried out the attack want “reform of outdated and poorly-envisioned legislation,” “reform of mandatory minimum sentencing,” and “a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused,” if the Justice Department wants their information to stay private.
This isn’t the first time Anonymous has become involved with the fallout from Swartz’s death. They were able to keep the Westboro Baptist Church from protesting Swartz’s funeral with an extremely successful social media campaign. But we suspect the prosecutor defending the decision to seek jail time in Swartz’s complicated case drew the attention of the hacking group.
What happens next is anyone’s guess. There are immediate questions like, do they actually have any sensitive information? Are they bluffing? The FBI told CNN they’re already looking into it. A criminal case has been opened. Whether or not they find anything, or traces of anyone, will be interesting to see.
Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at connorbsimpson@gmail.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
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SiDevilIam • 5 minutes ago Aaron Swartz, 26, no More@elcidharth.com
,,,and I am Sid Harth@elcidharth.com - 0
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PBALABAMA • 14 minutes ago I hope the FBI can hunt these people down and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Reasonable people can agree there are poorly envisioned laws, need for review of sentencing guidelines, and yes, I could agree to some proportionality in relation to harm done, but this is not the way to go about it. Vigilante justice is often worse than what they are trying to fix.
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Operation Last Resort: “Anonymous” retaliation for Swartz death
Photo: AnonymousWEST PALM BEACH, Fl, January 26, 2013 – The United States Sentencing Commission site is now offline, thanks to a cyber attack by hackers known as “Anonymous.”
Late Saturday, hackers replaced the content of the government web site with a message to the world, lamenting “…the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the “discretion” of prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain.”
The missive goes on to explain, “Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed. Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was not to play.”
Aaron Swartz was the Internet prodigy who helped create RSS when he was only 14 years old and went on to help develop social networking site Reddit. Two weeks ago, the 26-year-old Swartz hanged himself. Although he suffered from bouts of depression, friends and family say Swartz killed himself because federal prosecutors were hounding him. Swartz was an open-Internet activist and had downloaded thousands of documents from the pay sites JSTOR and PACER to give all users free access.
According to the Anonymous statement, “After much heavy-hearted discussion, the decision was upheld to engage the United States Department of Justice and its associated executive branches in a game of a similar nature, a game in which the only winning move is not to play.”
The group also included a threat. It said, “Through this websites and various others that will remain unnamed, we have been conducting our own infiltration. We did not restrict ourselves like the FBI to one high-profile compromise. We are far more ambitious, and far more capable. Over the last two weeks we have wound down this operation, removed all traces of leakware from the compromised systems, and taken down the injection apparatus used to detect and exploit vulnerable machines.
We have enough fissile material for multiple warheads. Today we are launching the first of these. Operation Last Resort has begun…”
The clear indication is that the group will step-up hacking efforts against numerous sites, and that none are safe from the reach of the hackers.
This is the second attack by Anonymous in tribute to Swartz. Two days after his death, they hacked two websites belonging to MIT, replacing content with tributes to Swartz. It also used the sites to call for open access for the Internet.
“Hacking” has graduated from annoying but harmless computer intrusions into “Cyberterrorism,” with countries around the world increasing efforts to protect against unauthorized access to government computer systems.
Former FBI director Robert Mueller said in 201, “The risks are right at our doorsteps and in some cases they are in the house” and Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar said, “Every major company in the U.S. and Europe has been penetrated — it’s industrial warfare.” A former head of the Homeland Security division in charge of preventing cyber attacks says he worries terrorists could use a program to shut down utilities, including power grids, or target nuclear missiles.
Cyberterrorism became a reality in 2007, when former Soviet republic Estonia was attacked and brought to a temporary standstill.
The Stuxnet virus brought cyberattacks to a new level. When discovered in 2010, it was more complex and dangerous than any previously known virus. That virus targeted Iran’s nuclear program, causing extensive damage while covering its tracks. The virus represented a new form of cyber attacks because it not only took down computer systems, but caused physical damage to items affiliated with computers. The damage was so substantial that Iran took all its government computers off the Internet.
The Sutxnet code is now readily available for hackers to access and use for nefarious purposes.
The US government is likely to view the most recent Anonymous action as cyberterrorism. From a government point of view, Anonymous is now making direct threats to the US government, demanding open access or retribution.
“Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Any media outlets wishing to be eligible for this program must include within their reporting a means of secure communications.
We have not taken this action lightly, nor without consideration of the possible consequences. Should we be forced to reveal the trigger-key to this warhead, we understand that there will be collateral damage. We appreciate that many who work within the justice system believe in those principles that it has lost, corrupted, or abandoned, that they do not bear the full responsibility for the damages caused by their occupation.
It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated.”
The target of the Anonymous threats is closely-held Internet information. The group, like Swartz, wants open access for all information.
Their statement says:
“However, in order for there to be a peaceful resolution to this crisis, certain things need to happen. There must be reform of outdated and poorly-envisioned legislation, written to be so broadly applied as to make a felony crime out of violation of terms of service, creating in effect vast swathes of crimes, and allowing for selective punishment. There must be reform of mandatory minimum sentencing. There must be a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused, and consideration of motive and mens reason.” “The inalienable right to a presumption of innocence and the recourse to trial and possibility of exoneration must be returned to its sacred status, and not gambled away by pre-trial bargaining in the face of overwhelming sentences, unaffordable justice and disfavourable odds. Laws must be upheld unselectively, and not used as a weapon of government to make examples of those it deems threatening to its power.”Unfortunately for Anonymous, the US government takes threats seriously, and the group is likely to face the full force of government wrath if caught. In 2011, the Obama administration pushed for stronger cybersecurity laws, including a doubling of the maximum sentence for potentially endangering national security to 20 years in prison. Lawmakers want hacking categorized as “organized crime” and say they should face the same penalties as hard core criminals.
Note the case of Alberto Gonzalez, a computer hacker who used his skills to use SQL injection to place “backdoors” in corporate computer systems which ultimately allowed him to steal credit card numbers. From 2005 to 2007, he stole thousands of credit card numbers. Mr. Gonzalez is now serving 20 years in a federal prison.
Anonymous is incredibly good at what it does, and many believe their skills will make them invulnerable to capture and detection.
However, one former FBI officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity noted, “It just takes one person to tell us something. That is how we will get them. Either they will make a mistake because of their huge egos, or someone will talk. But watch. We will get them.”
In the meantime, Anonymous appears set to continue their operation. The end of their statement warns, “This time there will be change, or there will be chaos… “
Their considerable computer skills certainly suggest they have the power to bring that chaos.
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Anonymous hackers avenge the death of computer prodigy Aaron Swartz by infiltrating US Justice Department website.
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Anonymous avenges death of computer prodigy Aaron Swartz [Al Jazeera]
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| Hackers sympathetic to the late computer prodigy Aaron Swartz claimed to have infiltrated the website of the US Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission, and said they planned to release government data.The Sentencing Commission site, http://www.ussc.gov, was shut down early on Saturday after the hacking claim.Identifying themselves as Anonymous, a loosely organised group of unknown provenance associated with a range of recent online actions, the hackers voiced outrage over Swartz’ suicide on January 11.
In a video posted online, the hackers criticized the government’s prosecution of Swartz, who had been facing trial on charges that he used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer networks to steal more than four million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service. Swartz had faced a maximum sentence of 31 years in prison and fines of up to $1m. The FBI is investigating the attack, according to Richard McFeely, of the bureau’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. “We were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation,” McFeely said in an emailed statement. “We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person’s or government agency’s network.” |
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Carmen Ortiz
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The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (January 2013) |
| Carmen Ortiz | |
|---|---|
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| United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts | |
| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office 2009 |
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| Preceded by | Michael Sullivan |
| Personal details | |
| Born | January 5, 1956 (age 57) New York City, New York, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse(s) | Tom Dolan |
| Residence | Milton, Massachusetts |
| Alma mater | George Washington University Law School |
| Occupation | Attorney |
Carmen Milagros Ortiz (born January 5, 1956)[1] is the current United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. In 2009, she was nominated to the position by President Barack Obama.[2] Ortiz is both the first woman and the first Hispanic to serve as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. She succeeded Michael Sullivan in that position, with Michael J. Loucks serving in the interim following Sullivan’s resignation.[3] Noteworthy prosecutions by her office include those of Whitey Bulger, Tarek Mehanna, Russ Caswell, and Aaron Swartz.
Contents |
Early life and education
Born in New York City to Puerto Rican immigrant parents, Ortiz grew up in East Harlem. Ortiz says that watching the television show Perry Mason as a child inspired her to become a lawyer.[4] After graduating from The Saint Agnes School in 1974,[5] Ortiz received her B.B.A at Adelphi University in 1978 and worked in her family’s gift shop while attending Adelphi.[1] Ortiz later earned her J.D. at George Washington University Law School in 1981.[5] In the summer of 1980, Ortiz interned at the Public Integrity Section of the United States Department of Justice with Eric Holder, who later become U.S. Attorney General.[6] She also worked on judicial reform in Guatemala with Harvard professor, former Watergate prosecutor, and former deputy attorney general Philip Heymann.[7]
Legal career
From 1981 to 1983, Ortiz was an attorney with the United States Department of Justice Criminal Division. Ortiz also was a hostess at an Arlington, Virginia restaurant from 1981 to 1982.[1] Ortiz served as Assistant District Attorney in Middlesex County, Massachusetts in two stints: 1983 to 1988 and 1991 to 1994.[1] In 1988, Ortiz went into the private sector with the Braintree law firm Marinelli & Morisi, where she would work until 1989. Ortiz also coordinated the Center for Criminal Justice at Harvard Law School from 1988 to 1991.[1] In 1990 she served on a commission appointed by NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue that investigated allegations of sexual harassment against members of the New England Patriots.[8] In 1997, Ortiz became an Assistant U.S. Attorney.[9]
United States Attorney
In May 2009, Senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry recommended Ortiz to President Obama for the vacant United States Attorney position in the District of Massachusetts.[8] On September 18, Obama officially nominated Ortiz for the position.[2] On November 5, the United States Senate confirmed her appointment by unanimous consent.[8]
Ortiz is both the first woman and the first Hispanic to serve as United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.[9][10]
Carmen Ortiz is the lead prosecutor of mobster Whitey Bulger. On July 6, 2011, Bulger was arraigned in Federal court. He pleaded not guilty to 48 charges, including 19 counts of murder, extortion, money laundering, obstruction of justice, perjury, narcotics distribution and weapons violations.[11]
Ortiz also led the prosecution of Bulger’s girlfriend Catherine Greig. In March 2012, Greig plead guilty to conspiracy to harbor a fugitive, identity fraud, and conspiracy to commit identity fraud. On June 12, 2012, she was sentenced to 8 years confinement in a Federal penitentiary.[12]
On March 23, 2012, Ortiz’s office secured grand jury indictments against former state Probation Commissioner John J. O’Brien and two of his former deputies, Elizabeth Tavares and William Burke III, for their involvement in running a sham hiring system in which friends and family members of legislators and politically connected job seekers were hired over more qualified applicants. Each faces one count of racketeering conspiracy and 10 counts of mail fraud for sending rejection letters to applicants they knew they were never going to consider. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison on each of the 11 counts. Ortiz said the indictments are “one step in an ongoing investigation.”[13][14]
Carmen Ortiz led the prosecution of American pharmacist Tarek Mehanna, who was accused of, among other crimes, translating and posting online materials described by prosecutors as Al Qaeda propaganda.[15] Mehanna’s lawyers argued that Mehanna never tried to join an armed group and never tried to hurt anyone, and that his internet activities are protected under the U.S. First Amendment.[16] In April 2012, Mehanna was sentenced in federal court in Boston on four terrorism-related charges and three others related to lying to FBI and other U.S. federal officials.
Motel Caswell confiscation case
Ortiz’s office sought to confiscate the Motel Caswell in Tewksbury, Massachusetts from its owner, Russ Caswell, under civil forfeiture law that allows for the seizure and forfeiture of properties connected to crimes, even though Caswell himself had never been charged with any crime. Ortiz’s spokeswoman stated that “The government believed that this was an important case, not only for the town of Tewksbury, which has been plagued for decades by the criminal activity at Motel Caswell, but because of the important deterrent message it sends to others who may turn a blind eye to crime occurring at their place of business.” The property had been the location of fifteen drug crimes between 1994 and 2008, which Caswell said is small considering that he rents about 14,000 rooms per year.[17][18][19][20] On January 24, 2013, U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Dein sided with Caswell.[21][22]
Aaron Swartz prosecution and suicide
Ortiz was the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the Aaron Swartz case. Swartz was an American computer programmer and Internet activist who also helped to create the website Reddit. In 2011, he was arrested by federal authorities and accused of computer hacking and wire fraud.[23][24][25] In a 2011 press release, Ortiz wrote, “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.” [26] Swartz subsequently committed suicide in 2013, [27][28] prompting critics to petition the White House to remove her from office for “overreach”.[29][30][31][32]
Recognition
In 2011, the Boston Globe named her “Bostonian of the Year” for her prosecution of “corruption and white-collar crime”.[33] Boston magazine labeled her third most powerful person in Boston in 2012 for her successful corruption prosecutions of former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives Salvatore DiMasi, former state Senator Dianne Wilkerson, and former Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner.[34]
Personal life
Ortiz has two daughters and is married to IBM executive Thomas J. Dolan; her first husband, Michael Vittorio Morisi, died in 2000.[35]
Ortiz reportedly considered a campaign for the Governor of Massachusetts, but she denied interest in such a run.[36]
References
- ^ a b c d e Bagley, Steve (October 2, 2009). “http://www.mainjustice.com/2009/10/02/meet-carmen-ortiz/”. Main Justice. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
- ^ a b “President Obama Nominates Michael Moore, Carmen Ortiz and Edward Tarver to be US Attorneys”. The White House. September 18, 2009. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
- ^ Vennochi, Joan (June 23, 2011). “Power hitter”. The Boston Globe. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
- ^ Terrero, Nina (March 1, 2012). “Celebrating Women: Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz”. NBC Latino. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
- ^ a b Lambert, Lane (February 5, 2010). “Q&A: New US Attorney Carmen Ortiz on her life and career”. The Patriot Ledger. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
- ^ Helman, Scott (December 30, 2011). “Bostonian of the Year: Carmen Ortiz”. Boston Globe. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
- ^ Day, Michael (January 15, 2013). “Aaron Swartz’s Unbending Prosecutors Insisted on Prison Time”. Daily Beast. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
- ^ a b c Saltzman, Jonathan (November 6, 2009). “Carmen Ortiz confirmed as US attorney for Massachusetts”. The Boston Globe. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
- ^ a b “Meet the U.S. Attorney”. US Attorney’s Office – District of Massachusetts. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
- ^ Aaron Swartz’s Unbending Prosecutors Insisted on Prison Time, The Daily Beast, Jan 15, 2013, retrieved 17 January 2013
- ^ Janelle Lawrence; Chris Dolmetsch (July 6, 2011). “James “Whitey” Bulger Pleads Not Guilty to 48 Charges in Boston Court”. Bloomberg. Retrieved September 30, 2011. “James “Whitey” Bulger, the Boston mobster arrested in California last month after 16 years on the run, pleaded not guilty to 48 charges including racketeering, extortion, money laundering, obstruction of justice, perjury and weapons violations.”
- ^ “Girlfriend gets 8 years for hiding ‘Whitey’ Bulger”. CNN. June 12, 2012.
- ^ “John O’Brien of Quincy among three indicted in Probation Department scandal”. The Patriot Ledger. March 25, 2012. Retrieved January 21, 2013.
- ^ Andrea Estes; Scott Allen; Milton J. Valencia (March 23, 2012). “3 indicted in ongoing Probation Department probe”. The Boston Globe. Retrieved January 21, 2013.
- ^ Crimaldi, Laura (12 April 2012). The Daily Star (Lebanon).
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/International/2012/Apr-12/170089-us-man-sentenced-in-plot-to-help-al-qaida.ashx#axzz1sHfpJRr4
. Retrieved 17 April 2012. - ^ Ariosto, David (12 April 2012). “Man gets 17½-year prison term in Massachusetts terror case”. CNN. Retrieved 17 April 2012.
- ^ Boeri, David (November 14, 2012). “Tewksbury Motel Owner Fights Move By Government To Seize Property”. WBUR. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
- ^ Lavoie, Denise. “Tewksbury Motel Owner Fights To Prevent Government From Seizing Motel”. CBS Boston. CBS Local Media. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
- ^ Sullum, Jacob (November 20, 2012). “Federal drug law beats up the innocent”. Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
- ^ Lavoie, Denise (December 29, 2011). “Mass. budget motel fights forfeiture by feds”. The Boston Globe. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
- ^ Finucane, Martin (January 24, 2013). “Judge declines to seize Tewksbury motel”. The Boston Globe. Retrieved January 24, 2013.
- ^ Lips, Evan (January 24, 2013). “Judge backs Caswell Motel in federal forfeiture case”. The Lowell Sun. Retrieved January 24, 2013.
- ^ Kirschbaum, Connor (August 3, 2011). “Swartz indicted for JSTOR theft”. The Tech. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
- ^ “Police Log”. The Tech. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. February 18, 2011. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
- ^ Bilton, Nick (July 19, 2011). “Internet Activist Charged in Data Theft”. Boston: Bits Blog, The New York Times Company. Retrieved January 17, 2011.
- ^ US Attorney’s Office District of Massachusetts (July 19,2011). “Alleged Hacker Charged With Stealing Over Four Million Documents from MIT Network”. Press release. Retrieved January 17, 2013. “United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said, ‘Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.’”
- ^ Kennedy, Dan (January 13, 2012). “Aaron Swartz, Carmen Ortiz and the American System of Justice”. The Huffington Post. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
- ^ Carter, Zach; Grim, Ryan; Reilly, Ryan J.. “Carmen Ortiz, U.S. Attorney, Under Fire Over Suicide Of Internet Pioneer Aaron Swartz”. The Huffington Post. Retrieved 15 January 2013.
- ^ White House Must Respond to Petition to Remove U.S. Attorney in Aaron Swartz Case | Threat Level | Wired.com
- ^ Aaron Swartz’ Death Fuels MIT Probe, White House Petition to Oust Prosecutor – ABC News
- ^ Anonymous hacks MIT sites to post Aaron Swartz tribute, call to arms – The Washington Post
- ^ Petition Against Aaron Swartz Prosecutor – Business Insider
- ^ “Bostonian of the Year: Carmen Ortiz – The Boston Globe”. Boston Globe. December 30, 2011. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
- ^ “The 50 Most Powerful People in Boston”. Boston magazine. March, 2012. Retrieved 15 January 2013.
- ^ “For US attorney, Bulger trial is latest high-profile case”. The Boston Globe. 2011-07-25. Retrieved 2013-01-15.
- ^ Zaremba, John (January 4, 2013). “Carmen Ortiz rules out gov, Senate run”. Boston Herald. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
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Business Day Technology
A Data Crusader, a Defendant and Now, a Cause
Aaron Swartz in 2009. One person remembered him as a “a complicated prodigy.”
By NOAM COHEN
Published: January 13, 2013
At an afternoon vigil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Sunday, Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old technology wunderkind who killed himself on Friday, was remembered as a great programmer and a provocative thinker by a handful of students who attended.
Related
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Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide (January 13, 2013)
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The Lede Blog: Remembering Aaron Swartz (January 12, 2013)
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Bits Blog: In Swartz Tribute, Hackers Attack M.I.T. Site (January 14, 2013)
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Opinionator | The Stone: What is a ‘Hacktivist’? (January 13, 2013)
And he was recalled as something else, a hero of the free culture movement — a coalition as varied as Wikipedia contributors, Flickr photographers and online educators, and prominent figures like Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and online vigilantes like Anonymous. They share a belief in using the Internet to provide easy, open access to the world’s knowledge.
“He’s something to aspire toward,” said Benjamin Hitov, a 23-year-old Web programmer from Cambridge, Mass., who said he had cried when he learned the news about Mr. Swartz. “I think all of us would like to be a bit more like him. Most of us aren’t quite as idealistic as he was. But we still definitely respect that.”
The United States government has a very different view of Mr. Swartz. In 2011, he was arrested and accused of using M.I.T.’s computers to gain illegal access to millions of scholarly papers kept by Jstor, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals.
At his trial, which was to begin in April, he faced the possibility of millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison, punishments that friends and family say haunted him for two years and led to his suicide.
Mr. Swartz was a flash point in the debate over whether information should be made widely available. On one side were activists like Mr. Swartz and advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Students for Free Culture. On the other were governments and corporations that argued that some information must be kept private for security or commercial reasons.
After his death, Mr. Swartz has come to symbolize a different debate over how aggressively governments should pursue criminal cases against people like Mr. Swartz who believe in “freeing” information.
In a statement, his family said in part: “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 M.I.T. contributed to his death.”
On Sunday evening, M.I.T.’s president, L. Rafael Reif, said he had appointed a prominent professor, Hal Abelson, to “lead a thorough analysis of M.I.T.’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present.” He promised to disclose the report, adding, “It pains me to think that M.I.T. played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”
M.I.T.’s Web site was inaccessible at times on Sunday. Officials there did not provide a cause, but hackers claimed responsibility.
While Mr. Swartz viewed his making copies of academic papers as an unadulterated good, spreading knowledge, the prosecutor compared Mr. Swartz’s actions to using a crowbar to break in and steal someone’s money under the mattress. On Sunday, she declined to comment on Mr. Swartz’s death out of respect for his family’s privacy.
The question of how to treat online crimes is still a vexing one, many years into the existence of the Internet.
Prosecutors have great discretion on what to charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law cited in Mr. Swartz’s case, and how to value the loss. “The question in any given case is whether the prosecutor asked for too much, and properly balanced the harm caused in a particular case with the defendant’s true culpability,” said Marc Zwillinger, a former federal cybercrimes prosecutor.
The belief that information is power and should be shared freely — which Mr. Swartz described in a treatise in 2008 — is under considerable legal assault. The immediate reaction among those sympathetic to Mr. Swartz has been anger and a vow to soldier on. Young people interviewed on Sunday spoke of the government’s power to intimidate.
“Using certain people as poster children for deterring others from doing that same action, ultimately it won’t work,” Jennifer Baek, a third-year student at New York Law School, said by telephone, referring to Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been charged with multiple counts in the leaking of confidential documents, and Mr. Swartz. Ms. Baek, a member of the board of Students for Free Culture, said the comments on blogs and discussion boards she had visited since Mr. Swartz’s death showed that “people aren’t afraid to say this is what the injustice was.”
The ingredients for trouble perhaps lay in Mr. Swartz’s personal and direct approach to solving problems. As one mentor, Cory Doctorow of the popular Web site Boing Boing, wrote in tribute, he was highly impressionable and sought after and was forgiven by those he worked with and worked for.
A permanent “kid genius,” Mr. Swartz had often put his skills to the task of making information more accessible. At 14 he was a co-creator of RSS, a tool that allows online content to be distribute, and then made a tidy sum as one of the creators of the social-news site Reddit, now part of Condé Nast.
But even before, and certainly after, he crusaded for open access to data. His projects include a range of influential efforts like the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Wikipedia and the Recap collection of legal documents.
He also began more traditional projects for subjects he took an interest in. At 19, he volunteered to upload the archive of a defunct magazine he loved, Lingua Franca. In 2005, he called up the writer Rick Perlstein to offer to create a Web page for him after reading a book of his he liked.
“I smelled a hustle, asking him how much it would cost, and he said, no, he wanted to do it for free,” Mr. Perlstein wrote in The Nation over the weekend. “I thought: ‘What a loser this guy must be. Someone with nothing better to do.’ ” Mr. Perlstein writes that he ended up becoming friends, and he sent chapters of his next book, “Nixonland,” to Mr. Swartz before he showed them to anyone else.
Mr. Swartz outlined his views in the manifesto: “It’s 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’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.”
And he said the stakes were clear: “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s 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.”
Still, even many of his allies concede that Mr. Swartz’s passion for free information may have taken him too far in the Jstor downloads. According to the government’s indictment, in September 2010 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. At the time, he was a student at nearby Harvard.
Some would say that perhaps a punishment for trespassing would have been warranted, but the idea that he could have seen serious prison time was infuriating. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Law professor who founded Creative Commons to advocate greater sharing of creative material online, called the prosecution’s case absurd and said that boxing in Mr. Swartz with an aggressive case and little ability to mount a defense “made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.”
E.J. Hilbert, a former cybercrimes investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that the broader issues around such activist transgressions raise many complex questions that are subject to “a lot of discretion from prosecutors.” He added that the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts has long been renowned for a particularly aggressive pursuit of cybercrimes.
Jstor, for its part, declined to pursue the case and posted a note over the weekend describing Mr. Swartz as “a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the Internet and the Web from which we all benefit.”
Michael McCarthy, a 30-year-old animator from Providence who was also at the M.I.T. vigil, said Mr. Swartz was let down by the university. “If places like M.I.T. aren’t safe for people to be a little miscreant in their quest for truth and understanding, then we’re in a lot of trouble,” he said.
It’s unclear how much the impending case contributed to Mr. Swartz’s decision to take his own life. Years back, he wrote about his struggle with depression in his blog, Raw Thoughts.
The last post he wrote on that blog, in November, was a detailed analysis of the final installment of the “Batman” series.
Having warned his readers that he was about to reveal the conclusion of the movies, he ended the post by writing: “Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide.”
Jess Bidgood and Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.
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- Anonymous hacks MIT after Aaron Swartz’s suicide
Anonymous hacks MIT after Aaron Swartz’s suicide
Hacktivist group defaces university pages after the school promises a full investigation into MIT’s role in events leading up to the Internet activist taking his life.
January 13, 2013 9:34 PM PST
Anonymous’ message on an MIT page (click for larger image).(Credit: Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET)Just hours after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pledged an investigation into its role in events leading up to the suicide of Aaron Swartz, online hacktivist group Anonymous defaced the school’s Web site.
Swartz, a Reddit cofounder who championed open access to documents on the Internet, committed suicide on Friday. The 26-year-old was arrested in July 2011 and accused of stealing 4 million documents from MIT and Jstor, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. He faced $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison if convicted.
Related stories
After MIT President L. Rafael Reif issued a statement this afternoon promising a “thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present,” Anonymous targeted at least two MIT Web sites. Lacking the loose-knit group’s usual feisty language, the message posted on the Web site was a call for reform in the memory of the late Internet activist.
After calling the prosecution of Swartz “a grotesque miscarriage of justice” and “a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for,” Anonymous outlined its list of goals under a section reservedly labeled “Our wishes:”
- We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
- We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
- We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
- We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.
CNET has contacted MIT for comment on the apparent hacking and will update this report when we learn more.
Critics of the prosecutors in the case say the feds were unfairly trying to make an example out of Swartz. “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” Swartz’s family said in a statement released yesterday. “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.”
CNET has also contacted the U.S. Attorney’s office and will update this report when we hear back.
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- Corporate and legal
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- Anonymous,
- hacker,
- suicide,
- Aaron Swartz
Steven Musil
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. Before joining CNET News in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers. E-mail Steven.
Researchers honor Swartz’s memory with PDF protest
Links to hundreds of articles appear on Twitter in tribute to the Internet activist who committed suicide Friday.
January 13, 2013 9:33 AM PST
Internet activist Aaron Swartz.(Credit: Daniel J. Sieradski /CC: Flicker)In a tribute to Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide Friday, researchers have begun posting PDFs to Twitter to honor his campaign for open access.
Swartz, 26, had faced $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison for allegedly stealing 4 million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jstor, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. The authorities claimed that he broke into a restricted-access computer wiring closet at MIT and accessed that network without authorization.
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The PDF campaign was born out of a desire to honor Swartz’s memory and his battle for open access to documents on the Internet, said Micah Allen, a researcher in the fields of brain plasticity, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive science.
“A fitting tribute to Aaron might be a mass protest uploading of copyright-protected research articles,” Allen wrote yesterday on Reddit. “Dump them on Gdocs, tweet the link. Think of the great blu-ray encoding protest but on a bigger scale for research articles.”
As of Sunday morning, it appeared that hundreds were participating in the protest/tribute, posting links to thousands of documents on Twitter using the hashtag #pdftribute, the creation of which Allen attributed to Eva Vivalt and Jessica Richman.
“It gives us some action to take in response to our sorrow and frustration about Aaron’s death,” Richman told CNET. “I had met him several times and have friends that knew him well. It’s a tragic loss.”
The original #pdftribute tweets.(Credit: Jessica Richman)In a tweet this morning, Vivalt said the campaign was attracting growing attention.
I caved & got a TweetReach report for #pdftribute. We’re getting over 500 tweets/hr, >2.5 million impressions! (Too many to count.)
Eva Vivalt @evavivalt News of Swartz’s suicide came only days after Jstor announced this week that it would make “more than 4.5 million articles” publicly available for free.
35 comments
Join the conversation! Add your comment
- Whatever. Of course the family and others want to blame the government for his suicide. But in the end he took his own life because he was mentally ill. Genius or not he did himself in, not anyone else.
- Posted by lkrupp (1489 comments )
- January 13, 2013 9:54 AM (PST) Like (5) Reply Link Flag
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- When are you going to do us the favor? Can I help?
- Posted by Bucky4U (187 comments )
- January 13, 2013 10:01 AM (PST) Like (4) Link Flag
- Mentally Ill ??? ! Please..
Just another young miss guided thief. Let Reddit be his lasting tribute as they continue on his work of slander and false innuendos.
Erect a statue of him and put it outside the Reddit headquarters. Where the millions of miss guided hackers of the world can come and pay homage.
Perhaps a bronze statue like Joe Paterno.
- Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )
- January 13, 2013 10:47 AM (PST) Like (3) Link Flag
- What. Journals are to blame for this, they made his life hell and all he wanted was to improve the lives of others by opening up journals to everyone. It is PUBLICLY FUNDED RESEARCH, it needs to be OPEN.
- Posted by okaythenxq (10 comments )
- January 13, 2013 11:04 AM (PST) Like (4) Link Flag
- @okaythenxq,
“Improve the lives of others”
_____
He wanted to pimp it off as some modern day Watergate conspiracy. You people feed off this horse-s–t. And you believe your own b.s.
Helping to make the lives better for others is feeding starving children. Not breaking and entering and stealing and then trying to pass it off as some great wordily good.
You young people need to put the pipe down, get some fresh air and get off the junk food. With the types we have today who create UFO sites like Reddit this world is doomed for sure.Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 11:13 AM (PST) Like (5) Link Flag
- @okaythenxq This guy publicly talked about his depression for many years, claiming it was for no reason and had no cure, basically saying his depression was a disease. So when a guy like that finally gets the courage to do it, you don’t blame whoever else was in his life at the time. Many activists manage to not kill themselves over far more serious battles. Made his life hell? Oh please, go talk to Chinese dissidents about having your life made hell. Did you forget he broke into private property? He could have avoided the attention by not breaking the law, he could have made his point another way. Very sad that his suicide is being used as a weapon.
- Posted by JackieBoBackie (1 comment )
- January 13, 2013 11:19 AM (PST) Like (3) Link Flag
- The fact that he was facing a potential 50 year sentence is disproportionate to me. But he committed a crime, and should not be honored or regarded for that. And the fact that he took his own life proves he had a mental illness.
- Posted by d20_9999 (10 comments )
- January 13, 2013 11:46 AM (PST) Like (2) Link Flag
- @d20_9999,
Disproportionate, oh yeah, it’s called making an example to curtail the epidemic you people like to call ‘justified’.
And so now everything in America is conveniently labeled under ‘mental illness’. How sweet.Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 11:58 AM (PST) Like Link Flag
- The question is whether he committed suicide to be a martyr for his cause or if he could not deal with the repercussions of breaking the law. He might have convinced himself of something along the lines of being a martyr. In the end, only a huge social movement n tech around his death will tell. Somehow, I doubt that will happen
- Posted by Flyguy29 (2298 comments )
- January 13, 2013 11:59 AM (PST) Like (1) Link Flag
- @Flyguy29,
Is there a movie in the making here ? Um, directed no doubt bu Quentin Tarantino.
(beam me up Scotty)Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 12:10 PM (PST) Like Link Flag
- 10% of Americans are on anti-depressent prescription medication, add in the number of undiagnosed, and you have a nation of depressed people.
Ironically it takes a nation of depressed people to think 50 years and 14 felonies is the appropriate sentence for such a tiny infraction as what Aaron did.
I think he was wrong, and deserved 6 months in jail for a misdemeanor crime – but we aren’t a country that understands scale or the idea of taking a reasonable response.
The government is to blame for what it did – which is engage in one absurdity after the next.
Aaron is responsible for his part in it. All-in-all its a tragedy that we lost Aaron and still have the same idiots in power, if only it had been the other way around.Posted by roblearns (1182 comments )January 13, 2013 7:11 PM (PST) Like (1) Link Flag
- Swartz had every legal right to access JSTOR and JSTOR was backing down on any prosecution.
This happened because A holes like Orrin Hatch are bought and paid for by the RIAA and the MPIAA, he’s the head of the judiciary committee but he can’t tell the difference between copyright infringement and checking out a library book.
How did Hatch get away with breaking into the Senate computer and stealing email and documents from democrats in MemoGate?
This was after Hatch made computer intrusion a crime punishable by a term of up to life in prison. What a hypocrite!Posted by Bucky4U (187 comments )January 13, 2013 9:58 AM (PST) Like (4) Reply Link Flag
- He did not have any right to access JSTOR from a broken into computer network wiring closet. Not even in the slightest. Breaking into someone elses private property is a crime no matter what the reason for doing so.
- Posted by dennisheadley (590 comments )
- January 13, 2013 10:08 AM (PST) Like (6) Link Flag
- @dennisheadley MIT has admitted that he was a “guest” and the license agreement for access included “guests”. He was entitled to manual access, and automated it because that was his nature. He automated everything.
The crime he was accused of, properly put, was “automating access to information he was legally entitled manual access to.” The offerred punishment was up to 50 years in federal prison – more than we give for multiple murder – and the cost of defending himself was according to the prosecutor on average $1.5 million his family didn’t have.
They were going to impoverish his family and throw him in federal pound-me-in-the-? prison for the rest of his life for accessing information he was legally entitled to in the wrong WAY.
Posted by symbolset (919 comments )January 13, 2013 10:11 PM (PST) Like Link Flag
- There is something seriously wrong with a society that imposes more prison time for the theft of material than homicide. America the beautiful.
- Posted by kingtas (1 comment )
- January 13, 2013 10:02 AM (PST) Like (6) Reply Link Flag
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- Elsevier and Nature should be in prison instead for restricting free access to publicly funded papers.
- Posted by okaythenxq (10 comments )
- January 13, 2013 11:02 AM (PST) Like (2) Link Flag
- Aaron helped to defeat the SOPA bill. This put a prosecutorial target on his back. Aaron was the type of person who changes the world. Our government knew this and wanted him to disappear.
How long would most people last under the pressure of defending themselves against the massive power of the empire we now live in?Posted by marymmac (1 comment )January 13, 2013 10:13 AM (PST) Like (3) Reply Link Flag
- Yeah, that’s why he commits suicide, which is the aliment expression of what ever guilt you are feeling or worried about.
And we haven’t even mention how cowardly..
We now have two distinct categories for those under 40, ‘hipsters & fraudsters’ and amazingly both are interchangeable.Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 11:05 AM (PST) Like (1) Link Flag
- RIP
- Posted by BadaBoom212 (2 comments )
- January 13, 2013 10:28 AM (PST) Like (2) Reply Link Flag
- may his family and friends find peace.
- Posted by sarai1313 (1664 comments )
- January 13, 2013 10:52 AM (PST) Like (2) Reply Link Flag
- Common Criminal, nothing else. Calling him an “Activist” is like calling bin’ Laden a “Freedom Fighter.”
~ MPosted by Nadrakas (60 comments )January 13, 2013 12:21 PM (PST) Like (4) Reply Link Flag
- The prosecutor’s going to be busy Monday filing charges against all these people on Twitter. She wanted a high-profile case for her gubernatorial campaign anyway.
- Posted by Kasar99 (210 comments )
- January 13, 2013 12:44 PM (PST) Like Reply Link Flag
- I have just finished reading the entire court record (or at least the parts which are not under seal). It is clear that Aaron believed he had the right to do what he did and wanted the governments evidence that he did it struck from the record. It seems likely that his lawyers told him this approach was unlikely to succeed.
Aaron’s mental health issues aside, there is a pattern of not being willing to take responsibility for one’s own actions and then bearing the consequences. Like a professional athlete or a Hollywood star this young man seems to have been shielded from “reality: by well meaning friends who in sum were doing more harm than good.
Aaron’s legal defense seems to be “but in my moral system this was a good thing.” And it is exactly that defense strategy which demands a vigilant NO from the government. Having one’s own moral code may play well to the Internet blog/twitter set, but if one is not prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences when that moral code conflicts with society’s all that awaits is disaster.
The lesson from this is to stop coddling “genius, talent, or fame”. These people are just that — people — and they too must learn to deal with the real world. Aaron Swartz should be a lesson to Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen.
The government, MIT, and Carmen Ortiz have done NOTHING WRONG here. The tragedy is Aaron’s. The loss is of Aaron. And the blame game needs to stop. Aaron did this to himselfPosted by LissackMichael (7 comments )January 13, 2013 1:28 PM (PST) Like (2) Reply Link Flag
- “Having one’s own moral code may play well to the Internet blog/twitter set, but if one is not prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences when that moral code conflicts with society’s all that awaits is disaster.”
_____
Spot on !
In summary youth = idealism & immaturity..Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 1:53 PM (PST) Like Link Flag
- Not every dish is kosher.
sand..which.
It is written, Do not make your belly your god.
Calculus, for all!
“You gotta try this stuff, man… It will change
how your see your world…”
Math, can become an unhealthy addiction, this is true.
For intelligence, is not to be confused with wisdom.
Khabbalah, for the inner cities?Posted by i_Rena (322 comments )January 13, 2013 3:26 PM (PST) Like Link Flag
- It is written,
For the love of money is the root of all evil:
which while some coveted after, they have erred
from the faith, and pierced themselves through
with many sorrows.
1 Timothy 4:6, kjv.
OF means ‘from’ or ‘belonging to’… The love of
money… What can I get with this quarter?…
What can I get with this technology?… What can
I get with this cow, or these magic beans?..
“She’s got options, now I want options too!”
Options, they can distract you, from what is truly
important… Now what a godly person desires, and
what another desires, may be very different objectives,
goals, wants, etc… What do you desire to do with
your money, or your technology, or your magic beans?
During the fifties, some desired a “bite to eat” but
were told that they were not allowed in their restaurant
because of their skin colour – and also maybe because
they were not wearing a shirt.
A sandwich, is it not a good thing? Whereas if you are
denied entry into ‘organized crime’ because you are not
Irish, should you protest that?
“One’s own moral code”, but perhaps one should consider
another?.. The Law of Moses was given unto the Hebrews,
and not another group of people. For example, the
commandment is, Love thy neighbour as thyself… But,
your enemy is not your neighbour… Some wish technology
to enslave others, while others see technology as a means
to deliver fresh water to places infested with diseases
such as malaria.
That said, a moral right is a different concept from a
legal right. Robin Hood was doing that which was illegal,
but was he doing that which was morally correct? Green
Arrow, he seems to rob from the poor to give to the rich.
But sometimes, the poor are a murderous, covetous lot, whereas
the rich desire to build public libraries with quality books,
and not that “bestseller crepe papier”. Algebra, for all!!
Very Robin Hood, non?Posted by i_Rena (322 comments )January 13, 2013 3:22 PM (PST) Like Reply Link Flag
- “Robin Hood was doing that which was illegal,
but was he doing that which was morally correct?”
_____
In the movies anything can be rationalized, that’s why they are often refereed to as ‘fantasy’.
In reality that fantasy can be ‘made to look legitimate’, because it’s popular to hate those who have more then you do.
Politically it falls under being a Socialist or Capitalist. Ironically often enough these young people who entertain suck lofty ideals grow up in a household ripe with greed and shady business practices.
The evidence of that are those who where protesting over the last few years camp out in parks while blogging on their Apple computer while pretending to be ruffing it out in the wild.
Hiding behind their anger of a 5 figure school debt a worthless college degree but proclaiming their dissatisfaction and Corporate American greed.
Smoking dope and whispering sweet nothings, because even the young stoner knows in his/her heart that love stinks.Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 3:54 PM (PST) Like Link Flag
- To GEVO-E — we get it, enough already. And it’s misguided, not miss guided, unless you are referring to something or someone else.
The citizens who fought in the Revolutionary War were breaking the law, and so were those who fought for civil rights in the south. Keeping academic and scientific research locked up and charging upwards of $30 for access to some of the articles makes no sense in times we call the “information age”. JSTOR must agree if they have decided to make millions of articles public.
The most ludicrous thing of all is the idea that what Swartz did was a felony punishable by millions of dollars in fines and 50 years in prison. Really. Pedophiles and rapists walk the streets and drug dealers are released by the dozens when our prisons get overcrowded. Apparently a copyright deserves more protection than a human being. Someone needs to hit the reset button.Posted by Excelsior1985 (1 comment )January 13, 2013 4:31 PM (PST) Like (1) Reply Link Flag
- I doubt you get anything. He took the easy way out because he could no longer rationalize his faulty belief system. However, the idiot should have stayed alive. Because in a couple of weeks he won’t even be an after thought.
Where as he could have become a poster child behind bars teaching the harden criminals how to perfect their game. (while keeping his virgin a– in tack)Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 4:40 PM (PST) Like Link Flag
- Sounds like marymmac, kingtas, buckyu, d20_9999, okaythenxq, and excelsior1985 have invited the rest of us to just come into their homes and take whatever we deem “free” from their computers?
Really?
Hypocrites.
If this happened to them, they would be running to the prosecutor’s office and demanding justice faster than a speedy modem.
Rightfully so, they would feel violated, have costly repercussions they’d expect to be compensated for, and would be worried about what was to come from someone having accessed their stolen information.
Lastly, I find the family’s blaming MIT and the prosecutor as irresponsible as their son’s behavior. At least that sheds some light on how such a “bright and promising individual” could be so void of the concept of what’s right and what’s wrong — ironically, a concept my truly “bright and promising” children knew by the age of five. - Posted by jaajmom (2 comments )
- January 13, 2013 6:22 PM (PST) Like (1) Reply Link Flag
- Of course it’s a sorrowful thing when anyone gives up his/her life – for any reason. Was there any OTHER way? I’d bet there was, life is too precious to give up, with the exception of for one’s country in a wartime battle. He got publicity, would he have known? No. Was it a suicide? Who knows?
Family members I feel sorry for you. All of ‘us’ know and feel alike I’m certain.Posted by davi546 (2 comments )January 13, 2013 7:26 PM (PST) Like Reply Link Flag
- US Attorney Carmen Ortiz is interested in furthering her own political career by prosecuting cases that make the news and adding as many charges as possible. There is a petition at whitehouse.gov to remove her from her appointed position:: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
- Posted by injuntrouble (40 comments )
- January 13, 2013 8:21 PM (PST) Like Reply Link Flag
- Be aware, GEVO was told to put down this man’s work. It is also his job to change anyone’s mind that may think about finishing what Swartz’s started.
Suicide. Don’t think so. The government does not want people that look for answers because they end up getting those answers.
….go get the truth. It will not be given to you.Posted by qwertycommander (1 comment )January 13, 2013 9:04 PM (PST) Like Reply Link Flag
- What truth ?! Yours, mine or theirs ?
For the truth be told he wasn’t as clever as he thought, to risk his own death over what, searching for some ‘grand conspiracy’ that doesn’t exists except on sites like Reddit where the average user of those types of sites are as confused as the inventor is.
Look at his death in another way, a sad commentary..Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 9:58 PM (PST) Like Link Flag
- “In short, Aaron Swartz was not the super hacker breathlessly described in the Government’s indictment and forensic reports, and his actions did not pose a real danger to JSTOR, MIT or the public. He was an intelligent young man who found a loophole that would allow him to download a lot of documents quickly. This loophole was created intentionally by MIT and JSTOR, and was codified contractually in the piles of paperwork turned over during discovery.
If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were “wrong”, I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as “inconsiderate”. In the same way it is inconsiderate to write a check at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library needed for a History 101 paper. It is inconsiderate to download lots of files on shared Wi-Fi or to spider Wikipedia too quickly, but none of these actions should lead to a young person being hounded for years and haunted by the possibility of a 35 year sentence. The proper place for this dispute was the civil justice system where MIT and JSTOR settled with Aaron, and at the time charges were filed JSTOR spoke out publicly against them. No equivalent statement was made by MIT.”Posted by un-biased_user (2 comments )January 13, 2013 9:13 PM (PST) Like Reply Link Flag
- Yes, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
He was ‘scared to death’, quite literally. Over as you say little to do about nothing.
The public has a right to know what. For there is really not much to know. It’s a sad thing when one realize that disillusionment of what ever it may be.
Hail your hero while the parents seek out that sharp lawyer at 30% off the top.
Make a real contribution out there people.Posted by GEVO-ES44AC (29 comments )January 13, 2013 9:52 PM (PST) Like Link Flag
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MIT regrets any role in tragedy
MIT has initiated an investigation into its response to alleged hacking by the late Aaron Swartz, whose suicide Friday prompted Internet freedom advocates to accuse U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s office of prosecutorial bullying over Swartz’s alleged cyber-theft of academic documents.
“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote yesterday. “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”
Reif ordered an “analysis” of decisions that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made after Swartz’s alleged hacking of its network in 2010.
Court documents filed the day Swartz hanged himself in his New York apartment indicate federal prosecutors and Swartz’s lawyers were preparing to face off in a Jan. 25 evidentiary hearing over whether a Secret Service search of his seized laptop should be admissible. Prosecutors were expected to argue that Swartz effectively abandoned the laptop when he placed it in a wiring closet at MIT to allegedly steal information remotely.
Swartz faced up to 30 years in prison. Civil libertarians argued prosecutors never should have pursued the case against Swartz.
“This is bullying from people with real power,” said Cambridge civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, who contended that Swartz broke no federal laws and was acting in pursuit of principle, not profit.
Instapundit.com’s Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, said Swartz’s case shows why prosecutors should be held accountable for overreaching in their charges: “Right now, there’s basically no downside for a prosecutor who does that. They need to have skin in the game, just like the defendant does.”
Swartz’s family has blamed his suicide on an aggressive prosecution. Swartz, 26, co-founder of the news discussion site Reddit.com, had written about the experience of depression on his blog in 2007 — several years before the federal case — as well as in a 2007 short story that ends in the main character stepping out into traffic. His Twitter feed, however, appeared upbeat in recent months, focusing on current topics, such as the minting of a trillion-dollar coin and the computer industry, without apparent references to his federal case or depression.
Efforts to reach Swartz’s lawyers yesterday were unsuccessful. Ortiz’s office, citing the family’s loss, declined to comment. While Swartz faced a hefty sentence, former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan said first-time nonviolent offenders likely get much lesser penalties, even just probation.
“This happens rarely,” Sullivan said of Swartz’s suicide. “When it does, I have to tell you, my experience is those people close to the investigation feel a deep sense of sadness, as well.”
Many JSTOR Journal Archives Now Free to Public
For more on this development, see Gary Price’s post on INFOdocket.com.
The archives of more than 1,200 journals are now available for limited free reading by the public, JSTOR announced today. Anyone can sign up for a JSTOR account and read up to three articles for free every two weeks.
This is a major expansion of the Register & Read program, following a 10-month test, during which more than 150,000 people registered for access to an initial set of 76 journals. The new additions bring more than 4.5 million articles from nearly 800 scholarly societies, university presses, and academic publishers into the Register & Read offerings.
“Our goal is for everyone around the world to be able to use the content we have put online and are preserving,” said Laura Brown, JSTOR Managing Director. “We have a deep commitment to test new approaches that expand access, while also sustaining the JSTOR online library and preserving this content long into the future. Register & Read is still an experiment for us, but we are thrilled by its initial success and are excited about this next step in its development.”
The move follows others designed to increase access to JSTOR and other scholarly content for the unaffiliated: JSTOR already offers free access to public domain journal content, as well as free access for Wikipedia’s top 100 editors, and an alumni access program. Meanwhile, SAGE is offering alumni access at no additional charge. Udini, ProQuest’s solution for individual access, is also targeting the alumni audience.
Some have expressed concerns about Register & Read, on the scores of privacy and accessibility. JSTOR’s vice president of marketing and communications, Heidi McGregor, tells LJ that accessibility is not a concern: a screen reader will pick up text that asks visually impaired uses to contact JSTOR for a readable copy. McGregor also says JSTOR does not store any credit card information or sell personal information to anyone.
Libraries on the Ballot
About Meredith SchwartzMeredith Schwartz (mschwartz@mediasourceinc.com) is News Editor of Library Journal.
Comments
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Anonymous (Don’t prosecure me either, please)_ says:Thank you for dropping charges against Aaron Swartz.
Now — why are you holding these government-funded no-market-value articles, many out of copyright, behind your paywall?
Dripping out a little bit of crippled access is not what we are looking for.
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speaking my mind says:You do nothing but stop science. One day companies and people like you will not exist, and you will be remembered as nothing more than the people in the beginning of the internet age hoarding information.
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what i think says:this is correct
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Sid Harth says:Aaron Swartz, 26, no More@elcidharth.com
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Ron says:Schwartz kills Swartz? Hope you sleep well tonight Meredeath…
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Liz says:Too little, too late, JSTOR.
It’s ridiculous that only individuals who pay tuition should have access to knowledge. It’s elitist.
I can see why Aaron Swartz wanted to freely share the work of scholars with the public. It might not be legal but I support the effort to provide access for everyone to work that is often done at public expense (at state-supported universities).
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Kurt Steinbach says:I paid tuition when I was in college, but not all articles were available to us, only what our University (of Memphis) could afford to subscribe to. If the article that I needed or wanted to use for a paper was not available to me, I could not read it and could not use it. I was in a teacher education program and could not access articles from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Columbia (Teacher’s College), University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Rutgers University, and other top institutions of higher learning. If you want to know why our public schools are not the best it is because our teachers do not have access to the best research and the best and most current knowledge to enable them to be the best. They have to pay for it, and a handsome price we have to pay at that. Capitalism is a system that holds people back from doing their best. It is a failed system. Any system that leaves millions of at the starving and homeless while those at the top have millions is a failed system that perpetuates failure, not success!
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Sid Harth says:
The laws made in the United States against piracy, be it intellectual or Hollywood music giants throwing J Street lobbyists at the drafting of such laws are nonsensical, to start with. I believe in limited rights to those seeking (further) knowledge hidden behind these laws.
Lucky for me, I have not received any summons from the major media for lifting there articles to be used on my blogs.
I respect academic research and their value to the society. Either they do it or get hacked. Your choice.
Government does it. DARPA is nothing but government funded program for young and creative hackers. Why not anyone complaining about it?
CIA is known for all kinds of funny activities, including but not limited to hacking into foreign governments’ secret vaults. All kept super secret from us.
How come?
…and I am Sid Harth@elcidharth.com -
Roger Morgan says:The “Register & Read” program is nearly worthless for research because it’s limited to articles more than 3 years old. You get to read a whopping 3 articles every 2 weeks (you can’t download them, just read them) and they are all guaranteed to be out-of-date, in fields where research is active.
Copyright Library Journal © 2013
MIT to probe its role in Aaron Swartz’s suicide
Protests continue online with the MIT website inaccessible
January 13, 2013, 11:18 PM — The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is conducting an inquiry into its role in the legal struggles that are believed to have lead to the suicide Friday of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.
The institute’s website was also inaccessible for a while late Sunday, apparently after protesters launched an attack on the site.
The Internet pioneer and computer programming prodigy faced a variety of charges in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, including computer intrusion, wire fraud and unlawful collection of information stemming from allegations that he used the MIT network to steal millions of scholarly articles and documents from the JSTOR database of scholarly articles between September 2010 and January 2011.
He allegedly intended to distribute the documents and articles through file-sharing sites. If convicted, he could have been hit with a 35-year jail sentence and a US$1 million fine.
“Although Aaron had no formal affiliation with MIT, I am writing to you now because he was beloved by many members of our community and because MIT played a role in the legal struggles that began for him in 2011,” MIT president L. Rafael Reif said in a statement on Sunday.
Reif said he had asked Hal Abelson, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the institution, to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that it first noticed unusual activity on its network in fall 2010 up to the present.
“I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it,” Reif said.
MIT did not immediately respond to a request for information on whether its website was under attack. Messages on Twitter by hacker group Anonymous and whistle-blower site WikiLeaks said the site had been brought down in protest against Swartz’s death.
Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death, his family and partner said in a statement. 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, the family said. Unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles, according to the statement.
Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims it might have had against him in June 2011, the not-for-profit service said in a statement on its website.
John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John’s e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com
Swartz’ death fuels debate over computer crime
NEW YORK (AP) — Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz, who was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment Friday, struggled for years against a legal system that he felt had not caught up to the information age. Federal prosecutors had tried unsuccessfully to mount a case against him for publishing reams of court documents that normally cost a fee to download. He helped lead the campaign to defeat a law that would have made it easier to shut down websites accused of violating copyright protections.
In the end, Swartz’s family said, that same system helped cause his death by branding as a felon a talented young activist who was more interested in spreading academic information than in the fraud federal prosecutors had charged him with.
The death by suicide of Swartz, 26, was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” his family said in a statement Saturday.
Swartz was only the latest face of a decades-old movement in the computer science world to push more information into the public domain. His case highlights society’s uncertain, evolving view of how to treat people who break into computer systems and share data not to enrich themselves, but to make it available to others.
“There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands,” Swartz said in a 2012 speech about his role in defeating the Internet copyright law known as SOPA. Under the law, he said, “new technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we’d always taken for granted.”
Swartz faced years in prison after federal prosecutors alleged that he illegally gained access to millions of academic articles through the academic database JSTOR. He allegedly hid a computer in a computer utility closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloaded the articles before being caught by campus and local police in 2011.
“The government used the same laws intended to go after digital bank robbers to go after this 26-year-old genius,” said Chris Soghoian, a technologist and policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy and technology project.
Existing laws don’t recognize the distinction between two types of computer crimes, Soghoian said: Malicious crimes committed for profit, such as the large-scale theft of bank data or corporate secrets; and cases where hackers break into systems to prove their skillfulness or spread information that they think should be available to the public.
Swartz was an early advocate of freer access to data. He helped create Creative Commons, a system used by Wikipedia and others to encourage information sharing by helping people to set limits about how their work can be shared. He also helped create the website Reddit and RSS, the technology behind blogs, podcasts and other web-based subscription services.
That work put Swartz at the forefront of a vocal, influential community in the computer science field that believes advocates like him should be protected from the full force of laws used to prosecute thieves and gangsters, said Kelly Caine, a professor at Clemson University who studies people’s attitudes toward technology and privacy.
“He was doing this not to hurt anybody, not for personal gain, but because he believed that information should be free and open, and he felt it would help a lot of people,” she said.
Plenty of people and companies hold an opposing view: That data theft is as harmful as theft of physical property and should always carry the same punishment, said Theodore Claypoole, an attorney who has been involved with Internet and data issues for 25 years and often represent big companies
“There are commercial reasons, and military and governmental reasons” why prosecutors feel they need tools to go after hackers, Claypoole said. He said Swartz’s case raises the question of, “Where is the line? What is too much protection for moneyed interests and the holders of intellectual property?”
Elliot Peters, Swartz’s attorney, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the case “was horribly overblown” because JSTOR itself believed that Swartz had “the right” to download from the site. Swartz was not formally affiliated with MIT, but was a fellow at nearby Harvard University. MIT maintains an open campus and open computer network, Peters said. He said that made Swartz’s accessing the network legal.
JSTOR’s attorney, Mary Jo White — formerly the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan — had called the lead Boston prosecutor in the case and asked him to drop it, said Peters, also a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who is now based in California.
Reached at home, the prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, referred all questions to the spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston, Christina Dilorio-Sterling. She did not immediately respond to an email and phone message seeking comment.
Swartz’s trial was set to begin in April, with an early hearing scheduled for later this month. He was charged with two sets of crimes: fraud, for downloading the articles illegally from JSTOR; and hacking into MIT’s computer network without authorization, Peters said.
Peters said Swartz “obviously was not committing fraud” because “it was public research that should be freely available;” and that Swartz had the right to download from JSTOR, so he could not have gained unauthorized access.
As of Wednesday, the government took the position that any guilty plea by Swartz must include guilty pleas for all 13 charges and the possibility of jail time, Peters said. Otherwise the government would take the case to trial and seek a sentence of at least seven years.
JSTOR, one alleged victim, agreed with Peters that those terms were excessive, Peters said. JSTOR came over to Swartz’s side after “he gave the stuff back to JSTOR, paid them to compensate for any inconveniences and apologized,” Peters said.
MIT, the other party that Swartz allegedly wronged, was slower to react. The university eventually took a neutral stance on the prosecution, Peters said. But he said MIT got federal law enforcement authorities involved in the case early and began releasing information to them voluntarily, without being issued a subpoena that would have forced it to do so.
Swartz’s father, Bob, is an intellectual property consultant to MIT’s computer lab, Peters said. He said the elder Swartz was outraged by the university’s handling of the matter, believing that it deviated from MIT’s usual procedures.
In a statement emailed to the university community Sunday, MIT President L. Rafael Reif said he had appointed a professor to review the university’s involvement in Swartz’s case.
“Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT,” Reif said in the letter.
Claypoole, the legal expert, said there will always be people like Swartz who believe in the free flow of information and are willing to “put their thumb in the eye of the powers that be.”
“We’ve been fighting this battle for many years now and we’re going to continue to fight it for a long time,” he said.
For Swartz’s family, the matter was clearer-cut, said Peters, his lawyer.
“Our consistent response was, this case should be resolved in a way that doesn’t destroy Aaron’s life and takes into account who he really is, and what he was doing.”
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
ArsTechnica
Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents
Internet pioneer and information activist takes his own life
Aaron Swartz faced decades in prison for downloading academic articles.
by Timothy B. Lee – Jan 12 2013, 2:10pm EST
Aaron Swartz was easy to pick out of a crowd. I met him only once, at a 2010 gathering of legal academics organized by Larry Lessig at Harvard. In a room full of suits Aaron wore a Google App Engine T-Shirt.
Unfortunately, Aaron’s penchant for defying social convention may have been his undoing. He was arrested in 2011 for scraping articles from the academic archive JSTOR. Facing hacking charges that could put him in prison for decades, Aaron took his own life on Friday.
Aaron accomplished more in his 26 years than most of us will accomplish in our lifetimes. At the age of 14, Aaron helped develop the RSS standard. He was an early member of the team that created reddit, which was sold to Condé Nast (Ars’ parent company) before Aaron turned 20. Now independently wealthy, Aaron threw himself into political activism.
Aaron had long been acquainted with legal scholar and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig. When Lessig shifted his focus from copyright reform to institutional corruption, Aaron became an enthusiastic supporter of Lessig’s new cause. He joined the Safra Center for Ethics, which Lessig directed, as a fellow.
In late 2010, Aaron became incensed about a copyright proposal that would eventually become the Stop Online Piracy Act. He founded a group called Demand Progress, which became a key rallying point in the fight against SOPA. He and the team he assembled spent 2011 raising awareness about the problems with the legislation, building momentum for the January 18, 2012 protest that decisively killed it.
Guerilla open access
Aaron was passionate about public access to information and offended by public information being locked behind paywalls. One paywall that particularly irked Aaron was on PACER, the website the US judiciary uses to distribute public court records. The courts charged seven cents (eventually raised to 10) per page to access legal briefs, judicial opinions, scheduling orders, and other documents essential to understanding the judicial process.
So when the courts started a pilot program to allow free access to PACER from 17 libraries around the country, Aaron sprung into action. He visited one of the libraries and reverse-engineered the authentication process the library’s computers used to bypass the paywall. Then he spun up some cloud servers and, using credentials purloined from one of the libraries, began scraping documents from PACER. He got more than 2 million documents before the courts noticed what was happening and shut the pilot program down. When I was in grad school at Princeton, some colleagues and I used the documents Aaron obtained as the foundation of RECAP, a Firefox extension to liberate court documents and store them in a public archive.
Aaron was also outraged about the high prices charged for access to scholarly publications. In a 2008 manifesto, he denounced the legacy system of academic publishing in which scholarly knowledge is locked up behind paywalls. “We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access,” he wrote.
In the fall of 2010, Swartz engaged in a bit of Guerilla Open Access himself, logging onto MIT’s network to scrape millions of academic papers from the JSTOR database. When MIT administrators booted his laptop off the Wi-Fi network, he entered an MIT network closet and plugged his laptop directly into the campus network.
The stunt got the attention of federal prosecutors, who arrested him and charged him with multiple counts of computer hacking, wire fraud, and other crimes. The feds ratcheted up the charges further in September. If convicted on all charges he could have spent more than 50 years in prison.
We don’t know the details of Aaron’s death or why he might have taken his own life. In a comment on hacker news, Aaron’s mother wrote, “thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful.”
It’s hard to imagine his looming prosecution wasn’t a factor. In an anguished Saturday blog post, Lessig describes Aaron’s predicament. 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.”
Whether or not it contributed to his suicide, the federal government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Aaron shouldn’t have plugged his laptop into MIT’s network without permission, but that’s not the sort of crime that deserves a multi-year, to say nothing of multi-decade, prison sentence. We should pay tribute to Aaron’s memory by reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prevent such disproportionate prosecutions from happening in the future.
National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255
Mourning Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist And Free Information Advocate
Jan 13, 2013 6:30 PM EST
Aaron Swartz, internet activist, co-creator of RSS and Reddit, was found dead on Friday from an apparent suicide. He was 26 years old.
This weekend the internet mourned the loss of one of its folk heroes. Aaron Swartz, a co-creator of RSS and an early employee of popular link-sharing site Reddit, was found dead in his New York apartment on Friday. Collaborators, mentors, and friends—including co-editor of Boing Boing Cory Doctorow and professor and founder of Creative Commons Lawrence Lessig—wrote moving memorials to the genius who everyone seems to have concluded died far too young.
At age 14, Swartz helped create RSS, a method of syndicating content on the web. Doctorow, who met him around this time, remembers him having the intellect of an adult. “In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.” Doctorow adds that he also had to remember Swartz needed to have adult supervision when he traveled.
Shortly there after he would go on to work with Lessig in an organization called Creative Commons, Swartz’s first foray into copyright law and the question of how “free” information should be. In 2005 Swartz started a company called Infogami that quickly merged with the popular news site Reddit. At the time Reddit’s team was living in a 3-bedroom apartment—Swartz told an interviewer he slept in a cupboard. He would leave shortly after the company was bought by Condé Nast in 2006.
In 2008, following his belief that information should be free, Swartz downloaded and released 20 million documents from a court database called PACER, about 20 percent of the database. The FBI mounted an investigation, but no charges were brought. At the time, Swartz is quoted as saying, “I think its pretty silly they go after people who use the library to try to get access to public court documents.”
Three years later, in 2011, Swartz wouldn’t be so lucky. In July of that year he gained illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription database of academic papers, through M.I.T.’s networks and downloaded 4.8 million documents. At the time of his death Swartz was being prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for breaking into the JSTOR database and downloading documents. He was facing potential penalties of 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. Many, including Swartz’s family and girlfriend, believe that Swartz’s taking of his own life was related to these charges. Others believe that the charges did not match the crime, and that Swartz was being over-prosecuted. In a statement, the family says his apparent suicide was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.” Also, Alex Stamos, Swartz’s expert witness in the JSTOR trial, wrote a piece saying that Swartz’s actions did not justify the charges brought against him.
On Sunday, M.I.T. president L. Rafael Reif wrote in a statement that “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.” He also announced that he’s asked Professor Hal Abelson to investigate M.I.T. involvement in the case.
In a statement, the family says his apparent suicide was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”
In addition to a torrent of posts remembering Swartz (dutifully collected here by Mathew Ingram, a senior writer at GigaOm, a technology website), there have been some moving tributes. On Reddit, the site he helped start, many users posted a simple period as a moment of silence a thread announcing the news of his death. These is also a new White House online petition calling for the removal of the U.S. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz for over-prosecuting Swartz’s case— although it’s not clear that Ortiz is to blame. But perhaps the most positive tribute of all, also started on Reddit, involves academics and researchers voluntarily uploading their copyright-protected articles and tweeting a link to the articles with the hashtag #pdftribute.
This past week, JSTOR announced that they would be making some journals available for limited free reading by the public.
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Sam Schlinkert is the Social Media Coordinator at Newsweek & The Daily Beast.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Comments (18)
Aaron Swartz, 26, no More@elcidharth.com
Edit (2 minutes)
Anyone out there really believe it was suicide.
Never heard of him.
.
Reddit’s Swartz final performance piece entailed a chair, a length of rope and an overhead pipe. A suicide nation claps. A thief almost always commits self-murder.
Carl: We need to see why the govt was hounding Aaron and threatening him with 30 years in jail when they ignore HSBC’s money laundering and the crimes of people in suits.
Such a loss
So sad! So young!
he resisted bilderberg
How many times is the Beast going to post this article
” In a statement, the family says his apparent suicide was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.””
Ridiculous. His suicide was the result of you not teaching him not to steal. He was a thief and when called to answer for his actions he offed himself. The only people to blame in this death are the thief and the people who raised him to be a thief.
@Kamadulski I created an account simply to call you an idiot. You troll.
@Billygoatgruff
Have a special place in your heart for thieves do you?
I’m not a troll or an idiot, just someone who creates intellectual property for a living and isn’t about to shed a tear over a dead thief.
@Kamadulski That is a disgusting comment.
@Kamadulski No he didn’t steal. He simply released documents to the public. there was no reason to prosecute him; shame on the Justice Department and MIT for pushing this young person over the edge.
Yea right he was murdered
RIP
Genius sometimes rests on a very shaky platform.
© 2012 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
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2012 November : वसुधैव कुटुंबकम
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To the extent possible under law, Cory Doctorow has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to “RIP, Aaron Swartz.”
Update: Go read Lessig: “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.”
My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I’m still digesting it — I suspect I’ll be digesting it for a long time — but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.
I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.
But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. He would only eat white food. We’d go to a Chinese restaurant and he’d order steamed rice. I suggested that he might be a supertaster and told him how to check it out, and he did, and decided that he was. We had a good talk about the stomach problems he faced and about how he would need to be careful because supertasters have a tendency to avoid “bitter” vegetables and end up deficient in fibre and vitamins. He immediately researched the hell out of the subject, figured out a strategy for eating better, and sorted it. The next time I saw him (in Chicago, where he lived — he took the El a long way from the suburbs to sit down and chat with me about distributed hash caching), he had a whole program in place.
I introduced him to Larry Lessig, and he was active in the original Creative Commons technical team, and became very involved in technology-freedom issues. Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible standards he held them (and himself) to.
This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it’s a testament to Aaron’s intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for this. Many of us “grown ups” in Aaron’s life have, over the years, sat down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by Aaron’s disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a disappointment in himself and the world.
Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber.
The post-Reddit era in Aaron’s life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he’d be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.
He also founded a group called DemandProgress, which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress’s work was one of the decisive factors in last year’s victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that was only the start of his ambition.
I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother to get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be used by committed, passionate candidates who didn’t want to end up beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here’s what he wrote back:
First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he can do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run and plugs them into a web app he’s made for managing their campaigns. It has a database of all the local reporters, so there’s lots of local coverage for each of their campaign announcements.
Then it’s just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list. Once it’s done people you know, it has you go after local activists who are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited, it does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the while, it’s doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for all these things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are recruited, it just keeps getting better and better at figuring out what will persuade people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built into a larger game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive, with you always trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.
Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is calculating the optimal places to hold events around the district. The press database is blasting them out — and the press is coming, because they’re actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they’re much more like standup or the Daily Show — full of great, witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they’re so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events. And a big part of all of them getting the people there to pull out their smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting more people hooked on the game.
He doesn’t talk like a politician — he knows you’re sick of politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don’t trust a word he says — and you shouldn’t! But here’s the difference: he’s not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you know how you can tell? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers — just the kind of thing the current corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover up and that only he is going to fix.
(Obviously shades of Sinclair here…)
also you have to read http://books.theinfo.org/go/B005HE8ED4
For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad for him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the user how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions. Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a free personality test? That’s what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn’t like, …) Since it’s random, whichever group scores closest to you on the political questions must be most affected by the ad. Then they’re bought at what research shows to be the optimal time before the election, with careful selection of television show to maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on Nielsen data.
anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this… hope you’re well
This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book. Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.
Somewhere in there, Aaron’s recklessness put him right in harm’s way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.
Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.
This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it’s at least credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step.
But Aaron was also a person who’d had problems with depression for many years. He’d written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.
I don’t know if it’s productive to speculate about that, but here’s a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you’ll think about, too. I don’t know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don’t know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.
Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn’t solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.
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. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan — all of these have a chance of bringing you back from those depths. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.
I’m so sorry for Aaron, and sorry about Aaron. My sincere condolences to his parents, whom I never met, but who loved their brilliant, magnificently weird son and made sure he always had chaperonage when he went abroad on his adventures. My condolences to his friends, especially Quinn and Lisa, and the ones I know and the ones I don’t, and to his comrades at DemandProgress. To the world: we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.
Goodbye, Aaron.
(Image: IMG_9892.JPG, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from quinn’s photostream)
Cory Doctorow
Lessig on the DoJ’s vindictive prosecution of Aaron Swartz
Cory Doctorow at 11:21 am Sat, Jan 12
Larry Lessig’s remembrance of Aaron Swartz, the young activist who took his life last night, is beautiful and angry, and expresses an important insight into the vindictive, disgusting behavior of the Department of Justice (and the complicity of MIT) in hounding Aaron:
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?
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.
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.
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.
Quinn Said
The off hours thoughts, snippets of investigation, and the accounting of too many projects.
My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved.
Posted by quinn on January 12, 2013 Leave a comment (68) Go to comments
We used to have a fight about how much the internet would grieve if he died. I was right, but the last word you get in as the still living is a hollow thing, trailing off, as it does, into oblivion. I love Aaron. I loved Aaron. There are no words to can contain love, to cloth it in words is to kill it, to mummify it and hope that somewhere in the heart of a reader, they have the strength and the magic to resurrect it. I can only say I love him. That I will always love him, and that I known for years I would. Aaron was a boy, not big, who cast a shadow across the world. But for me, he will always be that person who made me love him. He was so frustrating, and we fought. But we fought like what we were: two difficult people who couldn’t escape loving each other.
On the last day I saw him, he grabbed me in the rain while my car was blocking the road and held me and said “I love you.” I don’t know if I said it back. Not that time. I had always told him. Sometimes I told him when he didn’t have it in him to say. I’d say “I love you, and you love me, too” and he would just hold me.
When he was 20, he carried me through my divorce. We promised each other a year. I apologized so many times: that I was better than what he was getting, that he got me destroyed. Still, what a year. Later, I tried to take care of him while he was being destroyed, from inside and out. I struggled so hard, but not as hard as he did. I told him, time and again, that this was his 20s. It would be better in his 30s. Just wait. Please, just hold on.
He read to me and Ada compulsively; he read me a whole David Foster Wallace book. He read Robert Caro to me, countless articles, blog posts, snippets of books. Sometimes, he would call, just read, and hang up. He loved the Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, and the three of us read it together many times. We loved George Saunders. We loved so many things together.
He loved my daughter so much it filled the room like a mist. He was transported playing with her, and she bored right into his heart. In his darkest moments, which I couldn’t reach him, Ada could still touch him, even if only for a moment. And when he was in the light, my god. I couldn’t keep up with either of them. I would hang back and watch them spring and play and laugh, and be so grateful for them both.
More than anything, together we loved the world, with the kind of love that grips and tears. We were fearsome creatures, chained to our caring, chained to other people.
We were destroyed by the investigation, and by enduring so much together in the five years of the difficult love affair of difficult people. In the end he told me he needed to get away from me. I let him go, and waited for the day he’d come back. I knew that one day we’d have a day to be together again, though probably not as lovers. Together, as something that doesn’t have a word. He went on to another relationship, and I know he touched her like he did me, because that’s how he touched people.
A part of me died with him. A part will always be with him.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.–W. H. Auden
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Sorry for the loss, and thanks for sharing as beautifully as you did. He clearly lives on here and elsewhere.
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Sad. This guy sounds like he was a genius.
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Editor’s Note: See our blog for a summary of The Tech’s coverage on Aaron Swartz.
Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11, according to his uncle, Michael Wolf, in a comment to The Tech. Swartz was 26.
“The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” confirmed Swartz’ attorney, Elliot R. Peters of Kecker and Van Nest, in an email to The Tech.
Swartz was indicted in July 2011 by a federal grand jury for allegedly downloading millions of documents from JSTOR through the MIT network — using a laptop hidden in a basement network closet in MIT’s Building 16 — with the intent to distribute them. Swartz subsequently moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he then worked for Avaaz Foundation, a nonprofit “global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere.” Swartz appeared in court on Sept. 24, 2012 and pleaded not guilty.
The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, founded Infogami which later merged with the popular social news site reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”
Online activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide, relative says
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By Michael Martinez, CNN
updated 6:17 PM EST, Sat January 12, 2013 |
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- NEW: Swartz was found Friday evening after he committed suicide by hanging, ME’s office says
- Swartz helped pioneer the Internet’s icons of RSS and Reddit at a young age
- He then became an aggressive Internet activist, landing him in legal trouble
- He dropped out of Stanford after a year because “kids seemed profoundly unconcerned”
Share your thoughts on CNN iReport.
(CNN) — Aaron Swartz, an Internet savant who at a young age shaped the online era by co-developing RSS and Reddit and later became a digital activist, has committed suicide, a relative told CNN Saturday.
Swartz’s body was found Friday evening in Brooklyn, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman with the New York medical examiner’s office. The 26-year-old had hanged himself.
A prodigy, Swartz was behind some of the Internet’s defining moments, soaring to heights that many developers only dream of. At the same time, he was plagued by legal problems arising from his aggressive activism, and he was also known to suffer depression, a personal matter that he publicly revealed on his blog.
Technology activist Cory Doctorow met Swartz when he was 14 or 15, Doctorow said on his blog.
“In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society,” Doctorow wrote.
“But Aaron was also a person who’d had problems with depression for many years,” Doctorow blogged. He added that “whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn’t solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever.”
At age 14, Swartz co-wrote the RSS specification.
He was later admitted to Stanford University, but dropped out after a year because, as he wrote in a blog post, “I didn’t find it a very intellectual atmosphere, since most of the other kids seemed profoundly unconcerned with their studies.”
What he did next was help develop Reddit, the social news website that was eventually bought by heavyweight publisher Conde Nast in 2006.
Swartz then engaged in Internet digital activism, co-founding Demand Progress, a political action group that campaigns against Internet censorship.
But he pushed the legal limits, allegedly putting him on the wrong side of the law.
In 2011, he was arrested in Boston for alleged computer fraud and illegally obtaining documents from protected computers. He was later indicted from an incident in which he allegedly stole millions of online documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He pleaded not guilty in September, according to MIT’s “The Tech” newspaper.
Two years earlier, the FBI investigated him after he released millions of U.S. federal court documents online. The alleged hacking was significant because the documents came from the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, which typically charges a fee, which was 8 cents a page in 2009.
No charges were filed in that case, but on October 5, 2009, he posted online his FBI file that he apparently requested from the agency. He redacted the FBI agents’ names and his personal information, he said.
In that file, the FBI said more than 18 million pages with a value of about $1.5 million were downloaded from PACER in September 2008 to Swartz’s home in Highland Park, Illinois.
“As I hoped, it’s truly delightful,” he wrote of his FBI file.
Swartz, who completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption, frequently blogged about his life, success and personal struggles. In some instances, he wrote about death.
“There 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,” he wrote in a 2007 post titled “A Moment Before Dying.”
On November 27, 2007, he blogged about “depressed mood.”
“Surely there have been times when you’ve 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’s worth going on,” he wrote.
“Everything you think about seems bleak — the things you’ve 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’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either.
“At best, you tell yourself that your thinking is irrational, that it is simply a mood disorder, that you should get on with your life. But sometimes that is worse. You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms,” he wrote.
People we’ve lost in 2013: The lives they lived
CNN’s David Ariosto and Brittany Brady in New York contributed to this report.
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Gerald Spencer • 7 hours ago A pity that such intelligence leaves us so soon.
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Business Day Technology
Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26
Michael Francis McElroy for The New York TimesAaron Swartz in 2009.
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: January 12, 2013 158 Comments
Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.
Related
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The Lede Blog: Remembering Aaron Swartz (January 12, 2013)
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
He was 26.
An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz had apparently hanged himself, and that Mr. Swartz’s girlfriend had discovered the body.
At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.
Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”
Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”
The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.
Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.
But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.
The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.
The government abruptly shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account of the events, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”
Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.
When an article about his Pacer exploit was published in The New York Times, Mr. Swartz responded in a blog post in a typically puckish manner, announcing the story in the form of a personal ad: “Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times.
The federal government investigated but decided not to prosecute.
In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.
Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”
Mr. Swartz did not talk much about his impending trial, said Quinn Norton, a close friend, in an interview on Saturday. But when he did, she said, it was clear that “it pushed him to exhaustion. It pushed him beyond.”
Mr. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Swartz’s actions at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never have been considered a criminal activity.”
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz on BoingBoing.net, a blog he co-edits. In an e-mail, he called Mr. Swartz “uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.”
“The world was a better place with him in it,” he said.
Of the indictment, he said, “The fact that the U.S. legal apparatus decided he belonged behind bars for downloading scholarly articles without permission is as neat an indictment of our age — and validation of his struggle — as you could ask for.”
Mr. Swartz, he noted, had a habit of turning on those closest to him, saying that “Aaron held the world, his friends, and his mentors to an impossibly high standard — the same standard he set for himself.” He added, however, “It’s a testament to his friendship that no one ever seemed to hold it against him (except, maybe, himself).”
In 2007, Mr. Swartz wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from the emotion of sadness. “Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t 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.” When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.” Earlier that year, he gave a talk in which he described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career.
On Wednesday JSTOR announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis.
Lawrence Lessig, who heads the Safra Center at Harvard and had worked for a time on behalf of Mr. Swartz’s legal defense, noted in an interview that Mr. Swartz had been arrested by the police in Cambridge, Mass., two years ago this month. That arrest led to the eventual federal indictment and financial ruin for Mr. Swartz, who had made money on the sale of Reddit to Condé Nast but had never tried to turn his intellect to making money. “I can just imagine him thinking it was going to be a million-dollar defense,” Mr. Lessig said. “He didn’t have a million dollars.”
In an online broadside directed at prosecutors, Mr. Lessig denounced what he called the federal “bullying,” and wrote, “this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.”
Still, Mr. Lessig said, he had seen Mr. Swartz just weeks before, at a Christmas party at his home, and before that, at Thanksgiving. “He seemed fine,” he said.
Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 12, 2013
A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the police who arrested Mr. Swartz, and when they did so. The police were from Cambridge, Mass., not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus force, and the arrest occurred two years before Mr. Swartz’s suicide, but not two years to the day.
158 Comments
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- sas
- nyc
a brilliant young hero of internet freedom; how could he not become an enemy of the state!
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 6:42 p.m.
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- A.G. Alias
- St Louis, MO
What a sad loss for the world of a great genius who wanted to fight the culture of profiteering! He could have done so much for the betterment humanity.
If his depression had something to do with his suicide, it is still sadder. He could have been helped. Sometimes, a person of his caliber can be too fragile, and extremely difficult, if not impossible to receive sufficiently appropriate timely help.
Living alone is too risky, especially for such fragile geniuses.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
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- JoeReader
- NYC
He clearly was in a bad spot – but talented industrious people generally persevere. The failure is our poor understanding and ability as a society to effectively treat depression and prevent suicide. That’s how we failed him.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
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- Hakuna Matata
- San Jose
Most scholarly articles are written with government (i.e. public) support yet those articles are blocked to the public behind pay walls. Even worse, libraries of government institutions have to pay huge sums to have access to these articles. The system is clearly broken. Mr. Swartz took the actions he did not for personal gain (unlike Wall Street Bankers) but to make a statement and I am sad that a US attorney decided to go after Mr. Swartz yet DOJ does nothing to prosecute Wall Street bankers. I am eagerly waiting for US attorney Carmen M. Ortiz to prosecute Wall Street felons.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
- Recommended18
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- Thus Spake the Dancing Scorpion
- Arizona
He was a super great techie who got caught up in the destructive web of nonsense of the oligarchs. I urge all readers of this to find and read a copy of CRACKS IN THE CONSTITUTION BY FERDINAND LUNDBERG.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
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- pvolkov
- Burlington, Ontario
The loss of this brilliant man is sad because he seems to have exhibited symptoms of bipolar illness and should have been treated. Perhaps being so intelligent distracted from the possibility of such emotional imbalance or he refused to recognize the symptoms, or if he did would not want to be on medications which could cause interference in his work and thought processes.
Many bipolar people are highly intelligent but hampered by the illness which causes severe depression. It is indeed a great and possibly unnecessary loss.- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:53 p.m.
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- tomjoad
- New York
Perhaps making an “internet diagnosis” is rather presumptive on your part.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 6:16 p.m.
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- Thus Spake the Dancing Scorpion
- Arizona
@tomjoad
Do say…maybe “making an “internet diagnosis”‘ is not presumptive at all.
Just how would YOU know, anyway?
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- Sergio Georgini
- Baltimore
I find it interesting that so many people think creators of intellectual property should have to share their work with the public for free and that, somehow, the government drove Mr Swartz to kill himself by investigating his actions. Yes, his suicide was terrible, but many others have faced legal action and have not ended their lives. We can never know what was in his mind, but it seems to me that his death was more about his depression and less about his legal struggles.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:53 p.m.
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- Frank Knarf
- Idaho
What many of us think is that works of intellectual property that have been funded by our tax dollars should not be hidden behind paywalls.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 6:15 p.m.
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- molly
- san diego
Mr. Georgini:
As the victim of a terrible financial crime which has left me in poverty, as one who watched the Department of Justice make excuse after excuse for not prosecuting, as one who could not afford access to the PACER system when I desperately needed it, I weep to think of the loss of someone so enormously gifted as Mr. Swartz.
I have suffered from depression all my life ….and can say with 70 years of experience of it, that gifted people who also have a deep yearning for social justice who are also depressive are almost always profoundly affected when they look out on a world that is overwhelmingly venal and vindictive.
And the world he was looking at was about to crucify him. Should he have broken into a closet? Likely no. Should the federal government have hounded him…so threatened they were by the free exchange of information….
In Ms. Ortiz perhaps we have a bureaucrat who smelled the scent of a career-booting prosecution.
And she was let loose to use her god-awful bad judgment…perhaps with a wink and a nod from powerful forces 9 (including such vaunted institutions as MIT).(MIT, ironically, received billions (yes billions) in donations from a man whose name still festoons some of their buildings, who worked hand-in-glove with Bernard Madoff.)
I salute the young who want a better world for all.
Let us not forget that it is the young who take risks for the greater good…and not, in this case, for the almighty dollar.- Jan. 12, 2013 at 6:16 p.m.
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- Ernie
- Bayside, NY
Clearly, you did not really read this article, nor did you research what Swartz is accused of “stealing.”
Swartz was accused of committing “felonious acts” by downloading court documents (the Pacer case), and academic research papers (the JSTORE case), not from pirating copyrighted media like novels and movies.
His position was that court records and academic research that is funded by public and taxpayer money should be freely available on the Internet. In any case, the authors of the articles in JSTORE are academics who do not receive royalties from the distribution of their articles.
I suggest you read the article again.
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- Padfoot
- Portland, OR
I just downloaded a 1975 article from JSTOR, legally via my institution’s subscription. Having said this, I have no idea why an article that old should not be freely available to the public.
As long as barriers exist to accessing information, people will try to tear down the walls. Unfortunately, in today’s USA, we have more freedom to guns than we do to information. RIP Mr. Swartz.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:33 p.m.
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- Andreas
- Denver
Having the feds come down on you must be overwhelming to say the least; combining this battle with that of depression makes for a lethal concoction. I suspect he may not have been able to see his life going down any other path.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:33 p.m.
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- Luxomni
- Bucks County
I can just visualize the hand-slapping, back-slapping and joy at the Department of Just-us right now.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:56 p.m.
- Recommended4
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- HKGuy
- NYC
I guess Billy Joel was right: Only the good die young.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:33 p.m.
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- bikegeezer
- moabut
The guys who blew up the world economy with credit default swaps and toxic mortgages labeled triple A. Nobody went to jail. The banks that forged tens of thousands of documents that threw people out of their homes. Nobody went to jail. HSBC which laundered money for drug cartels and terrorist organizations. Nobody went to jail. And this guy was indicted? Eric Holder and the “Justice Department” is a corrupt organization.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:33 p.m.
- Recommended55
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- Frank Knarf
- Idaho
And the entire corrupt system breeds contempt for the law.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 6:15 p.m.
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- Sean
- Talent, Or
Bikegeezer,
+1
Holder et al must be some of the worst “Justice” Dept leaders we’ve seen in a long time. If I were Obama, I’d be looking at issuing a public apology, followed by some mass firings, and a pledge to never let this happen again.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 6:25 p.m.
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- Dagmar20
- Los Angeles
So the Federal government and the Obama administration go after this guy and Martha Stewart, but not one banker has been prosecuted, even though the banks fixed rates and LAUNDERED DRUG MONEY???
There is something wrong with our country.
RIP, Aaron.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:33 p.m.
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- Hanna
- NYC
Just FYI, Martha Stewart was prosecuted under the Bush administration.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
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- RTW
- California
Do you think that Ms. Ortiz’s statement about stealing would also cause her to go after the Wall Street Banks, the corporations with assets moved off shore…after all “stealing is stealing.”
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:33 p.m.
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- Mike
- Chicago, IL
It’s rather obvious that this prosecution was in retaliation for his work as executive director of Demand Progress, a website that focuses on policy changes for civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform in the US.
Google “Demand Progress” and see for yourself.
Some of the campaigns featured on the Demand Progress site are:
Oppose Protect-IP
Tell Facebook: Stop Censoring Political Speech
Tell The DOJ: Investigate Goldman Sachs
Tell Your Lawmakers: Shut Down The New Debtors’ Prisons
Let the PATRIOT Act Expire
Protect Whistleblowers at Big Banks
Many say the lawsuit is unfounded because MIT allows guests access to JSTOR – and Swartz, who was undertaking a fellowship at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics at the time of downloading, was a guest.
The case has also been deemed highly controversial because it wasn’t JSTOR – the alleged victim in the case – which referred Swartz to the federal government, according to the company’s vice president of Marketing and Communications, Heidi McGregor. She says JSTOR was content once it reclaimed the works from Swartz.
“We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed,” the company said in its statement on the prosecution.
- Jan. 12, 2013 at 5:32 p.m.
- Recommended17
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Breaking News From NPR Aaron Swartz, Reddit Cofounder And Online Activist, Dies At 26
by Melisa Goh
Aaron Swartz co-authored RSS and founded the company that later became the social media website Reddit.
Boston Globe via Getty Images
He was 14 when he co-authored RSS and founded the company that later became the social media website Reddit. On Saturday, Internet activist Aaron Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, authorities say. He was 26.
A spokesperson for the New York medical examiner says Swartz killed himself, and news of his death was confirmed by an uncle through a post on MIT’s paper The Tech.
Swartz’s Web savvy took him from Internet entrepreneur to online activist, co-founding Demand Progress, a group that campaigns for progressive public policy — in particular fighting against Internet censorship.
His crusades boosted his status as something of a folk hero, but also led to skirmishes with the law. In 2009, CNN reports, he was investigated by the FBI after releasing millions of U.S. federal court documents online: “No charges were filed in that case, but on October 5, 2009, he posted online his FBI file that he apparently requested from the agency.”
Then, as The New York Times reports:
“… in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.
“Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.”
Just Wednesday, JSTOR announced that the archives of more than 1,200 of its journals would be available to the public for free.
Online tributes are blooming as news of Swartz’s death spreads. One friend and colleague, Lawrence Lessig, lashed prosecutors in the case for “bullying” Swartz. Some, like Boing Bong’s Cory Doctorow delve openly into the depression his friend battled for years – a subject Swartz himself shared publicly. Many have simply taken to Reddit, the forum Swartz fathered, to remember him and explore their loss.
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kathleen wagner • a few seconds ago VERY SAD! I AM VERY SURPRISED THAT THERE ARE STILL SO MANY PEOPLE OUT THERE WHO STILL DON’T SEEM TO KNOW THAT DEPRESSION IS A SERIOUS BRAIN DISEASE. OFTEN EVEN MEDICATIONS DON’T WORK. IT IS A HORRIBLE DISEASE TO LIVE WITH. SOME PEOPLE CAN HAVE IT MOST OF THEIR LIVES AND AT SOME POINT THEY JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE. THIS IS NOT FEELING DOWN OR BLUE OR SAD FOR A WHILE. THIS IS AGAIN, A TRUE BRAIN DISEASE THAT NEEDS MORE UNDERSTANDING AND COMPASSION ALONG WITH MORE TREATMENT OPTIONS.
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Christopher Aguirre • an hour ago Good night sweet Internet activist, and a flight of Reddit Aliens sing thee to thy rest.
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Dina Johns • 25 minutes ago There must be some kind of suicide gene-as if some people were compelled to it. A friend of mine committed suicide when she was only 40. She seemed to have everything going for her including social and financial success. Why such a drastic measure for people who seem to be at the top of their game when so many people endure unconscionable suffering yet maintain a strong will to live?
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Hardy Boi • 35 minutes ago this is a bummer
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Godfrey Grosstackle • 41 minutes ago Don’t mess with the Feds, they’ll get you in the end.
Private Manning, are you listening?
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- ©2012 NPR
Prosecutor as bully
(Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.)
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.
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:
Please don’t pathologize this story.
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.
First, of course, Aaron brought Aaron here. As I said when I wrote about the case (when obligations required I say something publicly), if 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Fifty years in jail, 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.
One word, and endless tears.
12 January 2013 · 207 Comments and 3785 Reactions
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SiDevilIam • a few seconds ago Aaron Swartz, 26, no More@elcidharth.com
Also on Lessig Blog, v2
- Hello SiDevilIam
Online activist Swartz dies; faced trial on accusations of stealing electronic journal archive
By Associated Press, Updated: Saturday, January 12, 5:42 PM
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Aaron Swartz, Tech Prodigy and Internet Activist, Is Dead at 26
Aaron Swartz, the brilliant young software programmer and Internet activist who inspired awe and reverence from some of the leading figures in the technology world, died in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday, his family said in a statement. New York City’s chief medical examiner ruled the death a suicide by hanging. Swartz was 26 years old.
A computer prodigy, Swartz co-authored an early version of the popular Internet RSS software at age 14 and would later become an early leader of Reddit, the social website that has become a locus of Internet activism. A passionate advocate for social justice, Swartz founded the group Demand Progress, which played a crucial role in convincing the U.S. Congress to back down from controversial anti-piracy legislation last year.
“Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter,” his family said in a statement. “Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place.”
Swartz believed deeply that information — particularly that which might benefit society — should be made available for free to the public. In 2011, Swartz was indicted on federal data theft charges for breaking into the M.I.T. computer system and allegedly downloading 4.8 million documents from the subscription based academic research database JSTOR. He was facing 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. Swartz pleaded not guilty. His trial was set to begin this April.
(MORE: Reddit Co-Founder Aaron Swartz Indicted for Data Theft, Could Face 35 Years in Prison)
In 2008, Swartz wrote a program to download some 20 million pages of legal documents from PACER, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, which charges 10 cents per page for access. Working with other activists, Swartz sought to make the documents available to the public at no charge. The government cracked down on this effort but did not file charges.
Swartz’s efforts to “liberate” information from JSTOR and PACER made him a hero — indeed a legend — among Internet activists. Swartz was an early leader at Reddit, the giant online activist hub that has become a potent force in Internet politics. Reddit was sold to publishing giant Condé Nast in 2006. He later founded the group Demand Progress, which would play a key role in the epic 2011 battle between Internet activists and the entertainment industry over controversial anti-piracy legislation. (TIME Warner, parent company of TIME, supported the legislation, which was ultimately defeated.)
Swartz, who studied at Stanford University for one year before dropping out, would later become a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, where he worked with Lawrence Lessig, the renowned law professor and activist. Over the years, Swartz worked with Lessig on several major projects, including Creative Commons and Rootstrikers.
“He was brilliant, and funny,” Lessig wrote in a blog post Saturday. “A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think?”
(MORE: SOPA Protests Gain Steam as Web Activists Flex Growing Clout)
Swartz wrote candidly and movingly about his struggles with depression and other illnesses. In a 2007 blog post, he described lying in bed for weeks at a time. “Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel,” Swartz wrote. “Everything gets colored by the sadness.”
In a statement, Swartz’s family criticized the way the federal government has handled the JSTOR case. “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” his family wrote. “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.”
News of Swartz’s passing prompted an outpouring of grief in the technology and Internet community on Saturday. “Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues,” Cory Doctorow, co-founder of the technology site BoingBoing, wrote in a heartfelt tribute to Swartz. “I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.”
Tim Berners-Lee, who is considered the founder of the World Wide Web, wrote on Twitter. “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”
Swartz’s family and friends have set up a memorial page here.
elcidharth
Reddit Co-founder Aaron Swartz commits Suicide Last Photos and Family Official Statement here
Perhaps if he knew he was facing TWO years as a possible sentence he would not have taken his life. But THIRTY years ! Well, that is depressing to everyday think of spending 30 full years in prison. And of course, murderers, rapists, and bank robbers often get sentenced to 10 and are out in 4 or 5 years.
Hundreds of thousands of “weed smokers” are in jail for ten years.
What a country we live in ! Whose in charge of common sense.
We need of Department of Common Sense run by people who have majored in Logic
Aaron Swartz
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This article is about a person who has recently died. Some information, such as the circumstances of the person’s death and surrounding events, may change as more facts become known. |
| Aaron Swartz | |
|---|---|
 Swartz in 2008 |
|
| Born | November 8, 1986 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | January 11, 2013 (aged 26) Brooklyn, New York |
| Cause of death | Suicide |
| Occupation | Software developer, writer, Internet activist |
| Website | |
| aaronsw.com | |
Aaron H. Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, and Internet activist. Swartz co-authored the “RSS 1.0″ specification of RSS, and built the website framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. Although frequently attributed as a co-founder of Reddit, the claim is disputed by Reddit’s original founders.[1][2][3]
He also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2010 he was a member of the Harvard University Center for Ethics. He founded the online group Demand Progress (which recently voiced its support for Richard O’Dwyer) and later worked with US and international activist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR, which became the subject of a federal investigation.[4][5]
On January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment; he is believed to have hanged himself.[6]
Contents |
Life and works
Swartz in 2002 (age 15) with Lawrence Lessig at the launch party for Creative Commons
Swartz’s family lived in Highland Park, Illinois. His father founded a software company, and from a young age Swartz was interested in computing, frequently studying computers, the Internet and Internet culture.[7] When he was 13, Swartz was a winner of the ArsDigita Prize, a competition for young people who created “useful, educational, and collaborative” non-commercial Web sites. The prize included a trip to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and meetings with Internet notables. At the age of 14 Swartz was collaborating with experts in networking standards as a member of the working group that authored the RSS 1.0 Specification.
He later attended Stanford University, but left after one year, stating, “I didn’t find it a very intellectual atmosphere, since most of the other kids seemed profoundly unconcerned with their studies.”[7] Instead he founded the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator‘s first Summer Founders Program.[8]
Through the Y Combinator program, Swartz started the wiki platform Infogami (later used to support the web.py and Open Library sites), but felt he needed co-founders to proceed. Y-Combinator organizers suggested that Infogami merge with Reddit[9][10], which was finalized in January 2006[11]. While Reddit initially found it difficult to make money from the Reddit project, the site later gained in popularity, with millions of users visiting it each month. In late 2006, after months of negotiations, Reddit was sold to CondéNet, owners of Wired magazine.[7] Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco to work on Wired, but grew unhappy with the set-up[7] and in January, 2007, he was asked to resign from his position.[12] Swartz described himself as being ill and suffering from a constant depressed mood throughout 2007.[13] In September, 2007, Swartz joined with Simon Carstensen and launched Jottit. In 2010–2011 he was a fellow at Harvard University‘s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.[14]
Swartz was also the creator of the web.py Web application framework,[15] and co-founded Demand Progress,[14] a progressive advocacy group that organizes people via email and other media for “contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word” about targeted issues.[citation needed]
Controversies
PACER
Swartz with designer Nicholas Felton in 2009
In 2009, Swartz downloaded and publicly released approximately 20% of the PACER database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.[16][17] He had accessed the system as part of a free trial of PACER at 17 libraries around the country, which was suspended “pending an evaluation” as a result of Swartz’s actions. Those actions brought him under investigation by the FBI, but the case was closed two months later with no charges being filed.[17]
JSTOR
On July 19, 2011, Swartz was charged by U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, in relation to downloading roughly 4 million academic journal articles from JSTOR.[18] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT’s computer network, which allowed him to “rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR.”[19] Prosecutors in the case claim Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.[20]
Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all accounts, and was released on US$100,000 unsecured bail.[21][22] Prosecution of the case continued, with charges of wire fraud and computer fraud, carrying a potential prison term of up to 35 years and a fine of up to $1 million.[23][24] After Swartz’s arrest, JSTOR put out a statement saying it would not pursue civil litigation against him.[21][25]
On September 7, 2011, JSTOR announced it had released the public-domain content of its archives for public viewing and downloading. According to JSTOR, it had been working on making those archives public for some time, but the controversy had some effect on its planning “largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions about our motivations.” In the end, JSTOR claimed that such concerns did not stop it from continuing with the initiative.[26]
Swartz in 2012 protesting against SOPA
The case tested the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1984 to enhance the government’s ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality.
The government, however, has interpreted the anti-hacking provisions to include activities such as violating a website’s terms of service or a company’s computer usage policy, a position a federal appeals court in April said means “millions of unsuspecting individuals would find that they are engaging in criminal conduct.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in limiting reach of the CFAA, said that violations of employee contract agreements and websites’ terms of service were better left to civil lawsuits.
The rulings by the 9th Circuit cover the West, and not Massachusetts, meaning they are not binding in Swartz’s prosecution. The Obama administration declined to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.[27][28]
Death
Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment on January 11, 2013. A spokeswoman for New York’s Medical Examiner reported that Swartz had hanged himself.[29][30]
Publications
- Swartz, Aaron (Jan–Feb 2002.). “MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service”. IEEE Intelligent Systems 17 (1): 76–77. doi:10.1109/5254.988466. ISSN 1541-1672.
- Swartz, Aaron and Hendler, James “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City”, Proceedings of the Second Annual Digital Cities Workshop, Kyoto, Japan, October 2001.
- Gruber, John and Swartz, Aaron. Markdown definition, December 2004.
References
- ^
ATTN @nytimes Steve Huffman & I founded @reddit. We acquired Aaron Swartz's company infogami 6mos after we launched.—
Alexis Ohanian (@kn0thing) July 19, 2011 - ^
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_there_was_a_third_cofounder_of_reddit_who_was/c0x40yz
- ^
https://plus.google.com/+AlexisOhanian/posts/9NUWmu2c9pq
- ^ Kirschbaum, Connor (August 3, 2011). “Swartz indicted for JSTOR theft”. The Tech. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^ “Police Log”. The Tech. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. February 18, 2011. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21001452
- ^ a b c d Aaron, Swartz. “How to get a job like mine”.
https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
. jottit (Aaron Swartz). Retrieved 12 January 2013. - ^ Singel, Ryan (September 13, 2005). “Stars Rise at Startup Summer Camp”. Wired.com Condé Nast Publications. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^
http://web.archive.org/web/20071224194042/http://infogami.com/blog/introduction
- ^
http://web.archive.org/web/20070823200504/http://startupstories.com/2006/11/29/passion-for-your-users-will-come-back-alexis-ohanian-co-founder-of-reddit/
- ^
http://web.archive.org/web/20071224194042/http://infogami.com/blog/introduction
- ^ Lenssen, Philipp (2007). “A Chat with Aaron Swartz”. Google Blogoscoped. Google Inc. Archived from the original on April 27, 2010. Retrieved May 11, 2010.
- ^ Aaron, Swartz. “Sick”. Aaron Swartz. Retrieved 12 January 2013.
- ^ a b Matthews, Laura (July 19, 2011). “Who is Aaron Swartz, the JSTOR MIT Hacker?”. International Business Times. International Business Times, Inc.. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
- ^ Grehan, Rick (August 10, 2011). “Pillars of Python: Web.py Web framework”. InfoWorld. IDG. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^ Schwartz, John (February 12, 2009). “An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy”. The New York Times (The New York Times Comapny). Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^ a b Singel, Ryan (October 5, 2009). “FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records”. Wired (Condé Nast Publications). Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^ Bilton, Nick (July 19, 2011). “Internet Activist Charged in Data Theft”. Boston: Bits Blog, The New York Times Company. Retrieved July 19, 2011.
- ^ Lundin, Leigh (July 31, 2011). “The Thief Who Stole Knowledge”. Computer Crimes. Criminal Brief.
- ^ Lindsay, Jay (July 19, 2011). “Feds: Harvard fellow hacked millions of papers”. Associated Press. Retrieved July 20, 2011.
- ^ a b Schwartz, John (July 19, 2011). “Open-Access Advocate Arrested for Huge Download”. The New York Times (The New York Times Company). Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^ District of Massachusetts. “United States v. Aaron Swartz”. The Internet Archive/RECAP. 1:11-cr-10260. Archived from the original on December 18, 2012 (and ongoing). Retrieved January 3, 2013.
- ^ Sims, Nancy (October 2011). “Library licensing and criminal law: The Aaron Swartz case”. College & Research Libraries News (Association of College and Research Libraries) 72 (9): 534–537. ISSN 0099-0086. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
- ^ “US Government Ups Felony Count In JSTOR/Aaron Swartz Case From Four To Thirteen”. techdirt. Retrieved 12 January 2013.
- ^ “JSTOR Statement: Misuse Incident and Criminal Case”. JSTOR. Retrieved 12 January 2013.
- ^ Brown, Laura (September 7, 2011). “JSTOR–Free Access to Early Journal Content and Serving “Unaffiliated” Users”. JSTOR. ITHAKA. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
- ^ Kravets, David (09.18.12). “Feds Charge Activist with 13 Felonies for Rogue Downloading of Academic Articles”. Wired. Retrieved 12 January 2013.
- ^ David Kravets (12-08-10). “DOJ Won’t Ask Supreme Court to Review Hacking Case”. Wired. Retrieved 2013-01-12.
- ^ “Co-founder of Reddit Aaron Swartz found dead”. CBS News. Retrieved 12 January 2013.
- ^ Lessig, Lawrence (January 12, 2013). “Prosecutor as bully”. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
External links
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