Lessig Blog, v2 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. 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. 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. In a column soon after, I rued the demise of Napster, the music-sharing service, but remained hopeful bordering on confident that the Internet would thwart the growing attacks on openness and sharing. Aaron, in a beyond-productive decade, put a lot of interesting things on his agenda. I get wrong.
Aaron Swartz's embattled prosecuting attorney releases first statement, says conduct was 'appropriate' US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz is breaking the silence on her office’s prosecution of Aaron Swartz. After extending her sympathy to those affected by Swartz's death, Ortiz acknowledges that there was no evidence that the 25 year-old's efforts to mass-download public journal articles from the JSTOR repository was for personal financial gain. "At no point did this office ever seek... maximum penalties under the law." Ortiz adds that "at no time did this office ever seek - or ever tell Mr. At the time of his death, Swartz was facing a total of 13 felony charges, carrying a maximum penalty of over 30 years in jail and $1 million in fines. The full text of the statement can be found below: January 16, 2013STATEMENT OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEY CARMEN M.
Aaron Swartz's Legal Troubles Were Getting Worse in the Days Before His Suicide Though mental health experts caution that there is rarely ever one lone reason for suicide, information is emerging about how legal troubles were mounting for Internet activist Aaron Swartz in the weeks before his suicide on Friday. The Wall Street Journal's Spencer E. Ante, Anjali Athavaley, and Joe Palazzolo report this morning that lawyers defending him on 13 felony counts, including wire and computer fraud for breaking into and downloading MIT's academic journal database JSTOR, had failed to reach a plea bargain deal with Assistant U.S. Though The Journal cautions "the reasons why someone might take as drastic a step as killing himself are complex and rarely boil down to a simple trigger," Swartz's family, friends, and supporters on the Internet have blamed the criminal justice system for pushing Swartz's case too far. In addition to the stresses of the criminal case, Swartz worried about the financial burdens, too, his girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman told The Journal.
My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved | Technology 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. 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." When he was 20, he carried me through my divorce. He read to me and Ada compulsively; he read me a whole David Foster Wallace book. He loved my daughter so much it filled the room like a mist. More than anything, together we loved the world, with the kind of love that grips and tears. We were destroyed by the investigation, and by enduring so much together in the five years of the difficult love affair of difficult people.
RIP, Aaron Swartz Click for ongoing posts about Aaron, his memorial service, his death, and the malicious prosecution brought by the DoJ against him 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? My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. 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. 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. Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. Goodbye, Aaron.
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. 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. Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded articles. Swartz knew all of this.
The Aaron Swartz Hacking Case Has Been Dismissed By The US District Court The US District Court in Massachusetts has dismissed the case against Aaron Swartz. Swartz committed suicide on January 11 after an investigation into his involvement in the theft of digital documents from JSTOR, a journal archive. US Attorney for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz noted: In support of this dismissal, the government states that Mr. Information on his memorial service is available here. Marcia Hofmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that this case is an example of draconian informations security laws gone horribly wrong: Over the past two years, Aaron was forced to devote much of his energy and resources to fighting a relentless and unjust felony prosecution brought by Justice Department attorneys in Massachusetts. Please remember that there are sources of help if you’re troubled including Reddit, The Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and those close to you.
“É crucial estarmos vigilantes” Publicamos a íntegra da entrevista que o hacker Aaron Swartz, morto na sexta-feira, deu ao Link em 2012 Por Tatiana de Mello Dias Publicamos a íntegra da entrevista que o hacker Aaron Swartz, morto na sexta-feira, deu ao ‘Link’ em 2012 SÃO PAULO – “A maneira como empresas controlam sutilmente as alavancas da democracia é uma das coisas mais importantes e assustadoras que estão acontecendo hoje”, escreveu Aaron Swartz ao Link em 2012. —- • Siga o ‘Link’ no Twitter, no Facebook, no Google+ no Tumblr e também no Instagram Swartz cometeu suicídio última sexta-feira, aos 26 anos. Como você aprendeu a programar? Como você conheceu Tim Berners-Lee (o criador da World Wide Web)? Qual foi o seu papel na criação do RSS 1.0? FOTO: Reprodução/Mashable Você também trabalhou com Lawrence Lessig, que rasgou vários elogios para você. O que você aprendeu com ele? Nos últimos anos, nós vimos várias leis duras antipirataria surgirem no mundo. O que mudou na sua vida desde que você foi acusado?
mment: How the government breaks up British families This is the story of Andy, a man who has had his family torn apart by the government. Despite being a British citizen, Andy didn't make enough money to be able to live with his wife, so his children had to be separated from their parents. It's not really a story about Andy – it's about us and the kind of country we want to live in, but Andy's story typifies it pretty well. You will have heard of the Conservative aspiration for tax breaks for married couples. It's in the coalition agreement and the midterm review. The government is very keen to show how pro-family it is. Last year, Theresa May did something fundamentally different with the immigration system. Andy fell into that category. Andy had also been diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis the year before and felt more confident with British healthcare if there was another occurrence. This entirely natural approach to life was clear evidence of suspicious activity in the broken mindset of the UK Border Agency (UKBA).
aaronsw Jasmina Tesanovic at 3:35 am Tue, Apr 1, 2014 • 3 Recently I saw a movie on the life and death of Aaron Swartz, who is nowadays often called a martyr for the freedom of the Internet. People, nations and governments like martyrs. They love them, they need them. Martyrs are part of our bipolar, black and white society constructed from good and bad guys, who always do good and bad deeds. Read the rest Cory Doctorow at 9:00 am Wed, Mar 26, 2014 • 2 Before he died, Aaron Swartz wrote a tremendous afterword for my novel Homeland -- Aaron also really helped with the core plot, devising an ingenious system for helping independent candidates get the vote out that he went on to work on. Here is Noah's reading (MP3), released as a CC0 file that you can share without any restrictions. Cory Doctorow at 10:00 am Tue, Jan 28, 2014 • 1 Susan writes, "Over 22K game developers from all over the world (72 countries) came together this past weekend (January 24-26) at the annual Global Game Jam (GGJ).
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.
Two Days Before MIT and Cambridge Cops Arrested Aaron Swartz, Secret Service Took Over the Investigation The public story of Aaron Swartz’ now-tragic two year fight with the Federal government usually starts with his July 19, 2011 arrest. But that’s not when he was first arrested for accessing a closet at MIT in which he had a netbook downloading huge quantities of scholarly journals. He was first arrested on January 6, 2011 by MIT and Cambrige, MA cops. According to a suppression motion in his case, however two days before Aaron was arrested, the Secret Service took over the investigation. On the morning of January 4, 2011, at approximately 8:00 am, MIT personnel located the netbook being used for the downloads and decided to leave it in place and institute a packet capture of the network traffic to and from the netbook.4 Timeline at 6. According to the Secret Service, they get involved in investigations with: Significant economic or community impactParticipation of organized criminal groups involving multiple districts or transnational organizationsUse of schemes involving new technology