Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's Role in His Son's Death. Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz. Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist who was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS[3] and the Markdown publishing format,[4] the organization Creative Commons,[5] the website framework web.py[6] and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami. [i] He committed suicide while under federal indictment for data-theft, a prosecution that was characterized by his family as being "the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach".[7] Swartz's work also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.[8][9] He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism.
Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Life and works[edit] W3C[edit] Markdown[edit] MIT Moves to Intervene in Release of Aaron Swartz's Secret Service File | Threat Level. Lawyers representing MIT are filing a motion to intervene in my FOIA lawsuit over thousands of pages of Secret Service documents about the late activist and coder Aaron Swartz. I am the plaintiff in this lawsuit. In February, the Secret Service denied in full my request for any files it held on Swartz, citing a FOIA exemption that covers sensitive law enforcement records that are part of an ongoing proceeding.
Other requestors reported receiving the same response. When the agency ignored my administrative appeal, I enlisted David Sobel, a top DC-based FOIA litigator, and we filed suit. Two weeks ago U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the government to “promptly” begin releasing Swartz’ records. The government told my lawyer that it would release the first batch tomorrow. MIT argues that those people might face threats and harassment if their names become public. I’ll post MIT’s motion here once it’s filed. Update: MIT just filed seven documents in the case. Strongbox and Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment.
I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code—another word for action—and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate. There’s a growing technology gap: phone records, e-mail, computer forensics, and outright hacking are valuable weapons for anyone looking to identify a journalist’s source. Untitled. Demand Justice for Aaron Swartz. Demand Justice for Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz & JSTOR. Aaron swartz. Eye catchers / RIP... Aaron Swartz keynote at F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC on May 21 2012 - "How we stopped #SOPA" The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime” « Unhandled Exception. I did not know Aaron Swartz, unless you count having copies of a person’s entire digital life on your forensics server as knowing him.
I did once meet his father, an intelligent and dedicated man who was clearly pouring his life into defending his son. My deepest condolences go out to him and the rest of Aaron’s family during what must be the hardest time of their lives. If the good that men do is oft interred with their bones, so be it, but in the meantime I feel a responsibility to correct some of the erroneous information being posted as comments to otherwise informative discussions at Reddit, Hacker News and Boing Boing.
Apparently some people feel the need to self-aggrandize by opining on the guilt of the recently departed, and I wanted to take this chance to speak on behalf of a man who can no longer defend himself. I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged by his attorneys last year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. The facts: Like this:
Aaron Swartz’s Web Activism May Cost Him Dearly. Rogue Academic Downloader Busted by MIT Webcam Stakeout, Arrest Report Says | Threat Level. Hacker and activist Aaron Swartz faces federal hacking prosecution for allegedly downloading millions of academic documents via MIT’s guest network, using a laptop hidden in a networking closet. Swartz, 24, faces 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine under the indictment, announced last week, raising questions about his intentions, the vagueness of anti-hacking statutes and copyright as it applies to academic work. But the indictment (embedded below) also left one other question unresolved: How did Swartz get caught? The answer, it turns out, involves a webcam stakeout, the Secret Service and a campus-wide manhunt for a slender guy with a backpack riding a bike on MIT’s campus. Swartz, the founder of the activist group Demand Progress, was arrested by the MIT police on Jan. 6, charged with breaking and entering for allegedly entering a “restricted” networking room.
That arrest was first reported by Politico’s Josh Gerstein. Aaron Swartz Indictment Leading People To... Upload JSTOR Research To File Sharing Sites. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.
Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaplyas $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a checksum file to allow you to check for corruption. ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.
And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. RIP, Aaron Swartz (@aaronsw) Remember Aaron Swartz. Aaron is dead. from Tim Berners-Lee on 2013-01-12 (www-tag from January 2013) Remember Aaron Swartz by working for open society and against government abuses | Dan Gillmor. As we mourn Aaron Swartz, let’s save energy for some anger — and activism. Aaron, whose work was entirely about making our world a better place, died by his own hand. He was 26, and he had a history of depression. But the demons that carried him over the edge surely got a boost from the United States government, which was prosecuting Aaron in a manner that demonstrated contempt for the facts, fairness, and the justice system itself.
The case against Aaron, an object lesson of what happens when authority is cynically abused by the people in power, threatened more than Aaron’s liberty and his great work. It threatened us all. So amid my grief for Aaron, I’m angry — and committed to working for honorable enforcement of rational laws, and for values Aaron exemplified in his short life. Aaron had made his presence known early. I didn’t meet Aaron until 2002, at a World Wide Web conference in Hawaii, though I’d heard of him and his work. I get wrong. If I lived in Massachusetts, where the U.S. The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz | Glenn Greenwald.
(updated below)Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer and internet freedom activist, committed suicide on Friday in New York at the age of 26. As the incredibly moving remembrances from his friends such as Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig attest, he was unquestionably brilliant but also - like most everyone - a complex human being plagued by demons and flaws. For many reasons, I don't believe in whitewashing someone's life or beatifying them upon death. But, to me, much of Swartz's tragically short life was filled with acts that are genuinely and, in the most literal and noble sense, heroic. I think that's really worth thinking about today. At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role in developing the RSS software that is still widely used to enable people to manage what they read on the internet.
But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in devoting his life to his own material enrichment, despite how easy it would have been for him. Suicide is an incredibly complicated phenomenon. Which Long Magazine Profiles of Aaron Swartz Should You Bother to Read?