Look deep into the eyes of this amazing young man who believed in freedom of speech. He had the brain of a genius, money to sit on the beach doing nothing, yet he chose to fight for the rights of all to have free access to the Internet. His reward, was that the United States Government harassed him to the point that he killed himself at 26 young years of age.
Another victim, another disposable human life that our fraud of a democracy called the United States of Corruption has destroyed in the name of "justice". The cesspool of our disgusting legal system once again killing another innocent citizen and then hiding behind "the law".
Open democracy advocate and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz was found dead Friday in an apparent suicide, flooding the digital spectrum with an outpouring of grief. He was 26 years old.
Swartz spent the last two years fighting federal hacking charges. In July 2011, prosecutor Scott Garland working under U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, a politician with her eye on the governor's mansion, charged Swartz with four counts of felony misconduct, charges that were deemed outrageous by internet experts who understood the case, and wholly unnecessary by the parties Swartz was accused of wronging.
Swartz repeatedly sought to reduce the charges to a level below felony status, but prosecutors pressed on, adding additional charges so that by September 2012 Swartz faced 13 felony counts and up to half a century in prison.
Swartz had long lived with depression and a host of physical ailments, which made his accomplishments that much more astonishing. Barely a teenager, he co-developed the RSS feed, before becoming one of the earliest minds behind Reddit.
Every human being has a breaking point. This man was harassed endlessly by the arrogance of the law through a legal system that is dysfunctional, corrupt, and broken. He cracked under the pressure of a potential 30 plus years of a jail sentence that was insane on the part of the govt.
Rapists, murderers, child killers, corrupt Bankers are sentenced to much less than what was in store for him. This is unimaginable but true. How can this be???
His mistake was in believing that we live in a Democracy and that fighting back to keep our freedom is important for all of us. His beliefs are what brought the end of his life. Was he a coward for taking his own life, I think not. He was a brave man who finally gave up. A waste of a human life that held so much promise. RIP Aaron.
Late on Saturday, Swartz's family issued a statement mourning the loss of their loved one's "curiosity, creativity" and "commitment to social justice." They also put some of the blame for Swartz's death on federal prosecutors.
"Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy," the statement reads. "It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."
That sentiment was echoed by Harvard University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend of Swartz, wrote a withering blog post attacking the Department of Justice for its misplaced zeal:
"We need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior," Lessig wrote. "[Aaron] was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying."
Swartz's friend Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, also pointed at the DOJ. "His last two years were hard, thanks to the U.S. Department of Justice, which engaged in gross prosecutorial overreach on the basis of stretched interpretations of the law.They sought felony convictions with decades of prison time for actions which, if they were illegal at all, were at most misdemeanors. Aaron struggled sometimes with depression, but it would have been hard not to be depressed in his circumstances. As Larry Lessig has rightly said, this should be a cause for great shame and anger."
In the fall of 2010, Swartz downloaded millions of academic journal articles from the nonprofit online database JSTOR, which provides such articles free of charge to students and researchers. As a faculty member at Harvard University, Swartz had a JSTOR account, and downloaded the documents over the course of a few weeks from a library at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
JSTOR typically limits users to a few downloads at a time. Swartz's activities ultimately shut down JSTOR's servers briefly, and eventually resulted in MIT's library being blocked by JSTOR for a few days.
This was inconvenient for JSTOR and MIT, and a violation of JSTOR's Terms of Service agreement. Had JSTOR wanted to pursue civil charges against Swartz for breach of contract, it could have. But JSTOR did not, and washed its hands of the whole affair. In 2013, JSTOR made several million academic journals available to anyone, free of charge. Academic research is designed to be publicly accessible and is distinct from the research of private corporations, which assert aggressive intellectual property rights over activities they fund. Last June, Swartz told HuffPost that both JSTOR and MIT had advised prosecutors they were not interested in pursuing criminal or civil charges.
But the government pressed on, interpreting Swartz's actions as a federal crime, alleging mass theft, damaged computers and wire fraud, and suggesting that Swartz stood to gain financially. Federal prosecutors describe Swartz's downloading too quickly from a database to which JSTOR granted him and millions of other scholars free access as:
"Aaron Swartz devised a scheme to defraud JSTOR of a substantial number of journal articles which they had invested in collecting, obtaining the rights to distribute and digitizing," the indictment reads. "He sought to defraud MIT and JSTOR of rights and property." The prosecutors seem unaware that if an article is downloaded, the original copy remains with the owner.
The indictment also says that, "Swartz intended to distribute these articles through one or more file-sharing sites." JSTOR has just released 4.5 million articles to public this week.
The indictment does briefly acknowledge that Swartz had legal access to JSTOR's database. "Although Harvard provided access to JSTOR's services and archive as needed for his research, Swartz used MIT's computer networks to steal millions of articles from JSTOR." But the indictment does not note that Harvard and MIT have an explicit library sharing arrangement, granting scholars at one school access to many of the works and titles at the other. JSTOR has no specific academic allegiance. Its titles are available to all students at all universities at all times.
All 13 counts against Swartz rest on the idea that he stole or damaged JSTOR and MIT property.
The final count alleges that Swartz caused "reckless damage" to computer systems owned by JSTOR and MIT. While both JSTOR and MIT suffered interrupted service to JSTOR's archive as a result of Swartz's downloads, there was no permanent technical dysfunction.
The prosecution's case ultimately depended on whether or not breaking a Terms of Service agreement can be deemed a violation of the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the principal federal anti-hacking statute. While the law was designed to ban hackers from spreading viruses and stealing property, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that such activity includes violating Terms of Service agreements.
The Seventh Circuit's decision was widely mocked by Internet experts, who noted that nearly anyone could become criminally liable for reading blogs if a blog owner simply set up an outrageous terms of service agreement.
In addition, a more recent decision by the Ninth Circuit rejected the Seventh Circuit's reasoning in 2010, and the Obama administration chose not to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
Although JSTOR opposed prosecuting Swartz, MIT did not speak out against the prosecution's case as aggressively as JSTOR did. Swartz's family criticized the school on Saturday for failing to intervene.
"Unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles," the statement reads.
The FBI had investigated Swartz prior to the JSTOR incident in 2009, when Swartz wrote a script mass-downloading many U.S. court documents held in the pricey PACER database. Although court documents are in the public domain, PACER charges a premium for collecting the documents and making them searchable. Swartz paid PACER for mass downloads, then sent the documents to another free database.
The FBI monitored Swartz and then concluded that because the documents were in the public domain, no charges could be filed. After receiving several phone calls from the FBI, Swartz submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for his own FBI file. The agency was legally compelled to comply with the request, and Swartz published the file on his own blog in 2009.
On Saturday, WikiLeaks tweeted about Swartz: "The brilliant Aaron Swartz (@aaronsw), long time WikiLeaks friend, age 26, is dead after two years of harrassment by US prosecutors."
Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment Friday after apparently hanging himself.
In addition to earning the ire of PACER, the FBI and the office of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, Swartz wrote the programming for RSS 1.0, an extremely common and useful computer tool. He helped start Reddit and also helped launch Creative Commons, a special intellectual property license allowing anyone to use creative work, provided it is not sold for profit.
He was the founder of the progressive political advocacy group Demand Progress, which was extremely active during the legislative battle over the Stop Online Piracy Act. He co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, though he has not worked with the organization in some time. More recently, he was working with Matt Stoller, a writer and former aide to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), on a longterm project aimed at ending the drug war.
"What people saw in public was a fearless advocate of open information, who was nonetheless realistic about the limits to what open information could do without radical political reform," Farrell said.
He added: "He shared the urgent concern of his friend, [MSNBC host] Chris Hayes, to address what economic inequality was doing to this country. What many, many people saw in private was his extraordinary generosity with both time and resources. He had made enough money from the sale of Reddit to Conde Nast to live without working for several years, as long as he was reasonably frugal. So what he did, was to spend his life trying to figure out ways in which he could be helpful to people and causes he liked. Since his death, I've heard an outpouring of stories from people whom he helped set up websites for, read and critiqued work and so on. He combined technological brilliance with enormous amounts of energy, and a real understanding of politics."
MIT is now Investigating School's Role In Aaron Swartz Suicide.The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a statement on Sunday about the suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, announcing that the university will conduct an internal investigation into the school's role in Swartz's death.
"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. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy," MIT president L. Rafael Reif said in the statement. "Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT."
Wonderful, how responsible of MIT to wake up now when they did nothing at all to help stop the violence done to this man. Big deal, crocodile tears, hollow words, MIT is now investigating their own failure to do anything to help him. Too little, too late, all bull shit as they had ample time during the past few years to lend their prestige, power to support him.
This is another horrible tragedy about the corruption of our governments justice system in perpetrating the victimization by our so called "democracy" whose "puppets in power" do the dirty work of their masters such as Corporations, special interest groups, and those who have $ to corrupt the values of a Democracy. They murder us, hide their evil deeds and get away with doing it, because they can.
We DO KNOW that Aaron had a great deal of courage to go up against the Government, Organizations, Company's that have prostituted themselves in the name of 'justice', copyright "infringement" of public material, on the very Internet that was born using taxpayers dollars so that it was intended to give free public access to many things that have now become pay to use.
It is a mark of great courage for a young man like Aaron to do battle in the real world against evil people that want to to take away our freedom. He paid the ultimate price of doing that by being crushed into a deep dark hole of hopelessness, facing a 30 plus year prison sentence, with very little support from the virtual community that we are all part of.
Focus on the tragic loss and courage that it took for this man to fight the good fight for all of us and say RIP Aaron, you deserved better.That we are sorry that you saw no other way out, because you felt that you were alone.
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