REST IN PEACE AARON SWARTZ
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.
