The Internet’s Own Boy: Film on Aaron Swartz Captures Late Activist’s Struggle for Online Freedom. This is a rush transcript.
Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Park City TV in Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the largest festival for independent cinema in the United States. This is our fifth year covering some of the films here, and the people and topics they explore. Today, we spend the hour with the people involved in an incredible documentary that just had its world premiere here yesterday. The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz. (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. Aaron Swartz's Open-Source Whistleblower Project Lives On. Aaron Swartz speaking at a Stop SOPA/PIPA rally in January 2012 (Photo: Flickr / Creative Commons / gilly youner)Freedom of the Press Foundation will carry forward the work of the DeadDrop project, the "open-source whistleblower submission system originally coded by the late transparency advocate Aaron Swartz," the organization announced Tuesday.
FPF, which advocates for transparent and aggressive journalism to hold government accountable, will take over the system Swartz developed in collaboration with Wired investigative reporter Kevin Poulsen, and support media outlets that wish to use the program, which has been renamed 'SecureDrop.' "By installing SecureDrop, news organizations around the world can securely accept documents from whistleblowers, while better protecting their sources’ anonymity," Trevor Timm and Rainey Reitman announced in a blog post for the organization. When Swartz passed away, the project was nearly completed. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Swartz. From left to right: Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Swartz Today I want to tell you three American stories.
The first story is about one of the most celebrated American entrepreneurs of all time – Steve Jobs. When Jobs was a young adult he and his friend Steve Wozniak started a business centered around an innovative piece of technology. What Is RSS? RSS Explained - www.WhatIsRSS.com. What Is RSS. December 18, 2002 RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs.
But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way. RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. A brief history But coders beware. In the meantime, a third, non-commercial group split off and designed a new format based on what they perceived as the original guiding principles of RSS 0.90 (before it got simplified into 0.91). Aaron Swartz's FOIA Requests Shed Light on His Struggle.
Aaron Swartz at a 2008 Creative Commons panel.
(Photo: dsearls) UPDATE: On Friday, January 18, two days after the publication of this report, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking whether "the prosecution of Mr. Congresswoman introduces ‘Aaron's Law’ to honor Swartz. 10 Awful Crimes That Get You Less Prison Time Than What Aaron Swartz Faced. January 14, 2013 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The Prosecution of Aaron Swartz Paints Obama's Justice Department as Needlessly Cruel and Capricious. Photo Credit: SVLuma/Shutterstock.com January 15, 2013 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Excesses of federal prosecution. Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse. Whenever an avoidable tragedy occurs, it's common for there to be an intense spate of anger in its immediate aftermath which quickly dissipates as people move on to the next outrage.
That's a key dynamic that enables people in positions of authority to evade consequences for their bad acts. But as more facts emerge regarding the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the case of Aaron Swartz - Massachusetts' US attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant US attorney Stephen Heymann - the opposite seems to be taking place: there is greater and greater momentum for real investigations, accountability and reform.
It is urgent that this opportunity not be squandered, that this interest be sustained. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that - two days before the 26-year-old activist killed himself on Friday - federal prosecutors again rejected a plea bargain offer from Swartz's lawyers that would have kept him out of prison. Aaron Swartz - a Fighter Against the Privatization of Knowledge. 'Aaron was killed by the government' - Robert Swartz on his son's death. Published time: January 15, 2013 20:21 Edited time: December 24, 2013 12:45 Aaron Swartz (Reuters / Noah Berger) The father of information activist Aaron Swartz blames US prosecutors for his son’s death, RT’s Andrew Blake reports from an emotional Tuesday morning funeral outside of Chicago.
Aaron Swartz, 26, was found dead on Friday of a reported suicide. Swartz had been instrumental in designing software that aimed to make the Internet easy and open for everyone, and also co-founded both Reddit.com and Demand Progress — one of the most visited sites on the Web and an highly touted activism organization, respectively. But while friends, family and loved ones recalled Swartz’ compassion for technology and his utter selflessness during Tuesday’s service, those in attendance did not shy away from acknowledging the tremendous legal trouble that plagued the activist in recent years. “Aaron wanted so badly to change the world,” she said, more so than acquiring wealth or fame. Mr. Aaron Swartz: Did Reddit Co-Founder Kill Himself Due to Government Censorship and Harassment? In his honor, can Reddit stop censoring? As we noted last month: Reddit [is] censoring. Why We Should Remember Aaron Swartz. (An earlier version of this story ran online.)
The Internet is just an agreement, several languages we’ve all decided to have in common. The volunteer engineers who write these languages follow a principle they call “rough consensus running code.” There is no hierarchy, no owner, just consensus—smart and often cranky people eventually, reluctantly agreeing. When he was 14, Aaron Swartz convinced engineers decades older than himself that he could build rough consensus around a new standard called RSS. Then he did. In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz, 11/8/1986 - 01/11/2013, Requiescat in pace. A brief message from Anonymous. Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing — an ideal that we should all support.
Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron’s act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences. Our wishes We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.