Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:18, 16 March 2013

Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz at a Creative Commons event on December 13, 2008
Born	Aaron H. Swartz (1986-11-08)November 8, 1986 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	January 11, 2013(2013-01-11) (aged 26) Brooklyn, New York City, U.S.
Cause of death	Suicide, by hanging
Occupation(s)	Software developer, writer, Internet activist
Website	aaronsw.com rememberaaronsw.com

Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist.

Swartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py and the social news site Reddit, in which he was an equal partner after a merger with his Infogami company. Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and later worked with the activist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz. He was also a contributing editor to The Baffler.

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by a federal special agent on state breaking-and-entering charges, in connection with the systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR. Federal prosecutors eventually charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of up to 35 years in prison, a fine of more than $1 million, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.

On January 11, 2013, two years after his initial arrest, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.

Life and works

Swartz was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Susan and Robert Swartz. His father founded a software company, and from an early age, Swartz immersed himself in the study of computers, programming, the Internet, and Internet culture. At age 13, he won the ArsDigita Prize, a competition for young people who create “useful, educational, and collaborative” noncommercial websites. The prize included a trip to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and meetings with Internet notables. At age 14, Swartz was a member of the working group that authored the RSS 1.0 web syndication specification, a lesser-used offshoot of an earlier RSS version. Yahoo! News correspondent Virginia Heffernan said of Swartz, “he agitated without cease—or compensation—for the free-culture movement.” Swartz attended North Shore Country Day School, a small private school in Winnetka, Illinois.

W3C

Swartz served on the RDF Core working group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and authored RFC 3870, defining the RDF/XML Internet media type.

Markdown

Swartz was co-creator, with John Gruber, of Markdown, a simplified markup standard derived from HTML, and author of its html2text translator. Markdown remains in widespread use.

Infogami and Reddit

He later attended Stanford University, but he left after a year. Instead he founded the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator’s first Summer Founders Program.

Through the Y Combinator program, Swartz started the wiki platform Infogami (later used to support the web.py and Open Library sites), but he felt he needed co-founders to proceed. Y-Combinator organizers suggested that Infogami merge with Reddit, which it did in November 2005. While Reddit initially found it difficult to make money from the project, the site later gained in popularity, with millions of users visiting it each month. In late 2006, after months of negotiations, Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast Publications, owners of Wired magazine. Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco to work on Wired. The move to Wired did not work out well for Swartz as he was fired soon after.

In September 2007, Swartz joined with Simon Carstensen and launched Jottit. In 2010–11, he was a research fellow at Harvard University′s Edmond J. Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption.

Swartz was also the creator of the web.py Web application framework.

Activism

In 2008 Swartz founded Watchdog.net, “the good government site with teeth,” to aggregate and visualize data about politicians.

Swartz was a co-founder of Demand Progress, an advocacy group that organizes people online to “take action by contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word” about civil liberties, government reform, and other issues.

Author Cory Doctorow, in his novel, Homeland, “dr on advice from Swartz in setting out how his protagonist could use the information now available about voters to create a grass-roots anti-establishment political campaign.” In an afterword to the novel, Swartz himself wrote, “These tools can be used by anyone motivated and talented enough.… Now it’s up to you to change the system.… Let me know if I can help.”

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

Swartz was involved with a campaign to prevent the passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which sought to combat Internet copyright violations but was criticized on the basis that it would have made it easier for the U.S. government to shut down web sites accused of violating copyright.

Following the defeat of the bill, Swartz was the keynote speaker at the F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012 event in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2012. His speech was titled “How We Stopped SOPA” and he informed the audience:

This bill … shut down whole websites. Essentially, it stopped Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups.…

I called all my friends, and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with an online petition opposing this noxious bill…. We … 300,000 signers…. We met with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with them…. And then it passed unanimously.…

And then, suddenly, the process stopped. Senator Ron Wyden … put a hold on the bill.

He added, “We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom.” He was referring to a series of protests against the bill by numerous websites that was described by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as the biggest in Internet history, with over 115,000 sites altering their webpages. Swartz also presented on this topic at an event organized by ThoughtWorks.

Misplaced Pages

Swartz volunteered as an editor at Misplaced Pages, and in 2006, he ran for the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Directors, but was unsuccessful. Also in 2006, Swartz wrote an analysis of how Misplaced Pages articles are written, and concluded that the bulk of the actual content comes from tens of thousands of occasional contributors, or "outsiders", each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site, while a core group of 500 to 1,000 regular editors tend to correct spelling and other formatting errors. According to Swartz: "The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around."

His conclusions, based on the analysis of edit histories of several randomly selected articles, contradicted the opinion of Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales, who believed the core group of regular editors were providing most of the content while thousands of others contributed to formatting issues. Swartz came to his conclusions by counting the total number of characters added by an editor to a particular article—while Wales counted the total number of edits. Swartz's analysis is described on his blog post and was part of his bid to be elected to Wikimedia's Board of Directors.

Library of Congress

Around 2006, Swartz acquired the Library of Congress's complete bibliographic dataset: the library charged fees to access this, but as a government document, it was not copyright-protected within the USA. By posting the data on Open Library, Swartz made it freely available. The Library of Congress project, unlike the PACER or JSTOR cases, was met with approval by the Copyright Office.

Wikileaks

On December 27, 2010, Swartz filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn about the treatment of Bradley Manning, alleged source for Wikileaks. On January 21, 2013, Russia Today reported that Wikileaks had released a statement (via Twitter) claiming that Swartz “assisted Wikileaks” and had been in contact with Julian Assange in 2010-11.

Investigations and prosecution

PACER

In 2008, Swartz downloaded and released about 2.7 million federal court documents stored in the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

The Huffington Post characterized his actions this way: “Swartz downloaded public court documents from the PACER system in an effort to make them available outside of the expensive service. The move drew the attention of the FBI, which ultimately decided not to press charges as the documents, were, in fact, public.”

PACER was charging 8 cents per page for information that Carl Malamud, who founded the nonprofit group Public.Resource.Org, contended should be free, because government-produced documents are not covered by copyright. The fees were “plowed back to the courts to finance technology, but the system a budget surplus of some $150 million, according to court reports,” reported The New York Times. PACER used technology that was “designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems … put the nation’s legal system behind a wall of cash and kludge.” Malamud appealed to fellow activists, urging them to visit one of 17 libraries conducting a free trial of the PACER system, download court documents, and send them to him for public distribution.

After reading Malamud’s call for action, Swartz used a Perl computer script running on Amazon cloud servers to download the documents, using credentials belonging to a Sacramento library. From September 4 to 20, 2008, it accessed documents and uploaded them to a cloud computing service. He released the documents, to Malamud’s organization.

On September 29, 2008, the GPO suspended the free trial, “pending an evaluation” of the program. Swartz’s actions were subsequently investigated by the FBI. The case was closed after two months with no charges filed. Swartz learned the details of the investigation as a result of filing a FOIA request with the FBI and described their response as the “usual mess of confusions that shows the FBI’s lack of sense of humor.” PACER still charges per page, but customers using Firefox have the option of saving the documents for free public access with a plug-in called RECAP.

Writing in arstechnica, Timothy B. Lee, who later made use of the documents obtained by Swartz as a co-creator of RECAP, has offered some insight into discrepancies in reporting on just how much data Swartz downloaded and released

In a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few days before the offsite crawl was shut down, Swartz guessed he got around 25 percent of the documents in PACER. The New York Times similarly reported Swartz had downloaded "an estimated 20 percent of the entire database." Other media outlets have repeated the figure ever since. Unfortunately, neither is accurate. PACER has more than 500 million documents, so the 2.7 million documents Swartz downloaded accounts for less than one percent of the database.

Nevertheless, the Swartz corpus proved valuable.

At a 2013 memorial for Swartz at the Internet Archive, his collaborator Carl Malamud recalled their work with PACER:

When we brought in 20 million pages of … court documents from behind their … PACER pay wall, we found infested with privacy violations: names of minor children, names of informants ….
We sent our results to the Chief Judges of 31 District Courts … and they redacted those documents and … yelled at the lawyers that filed them and the Judicial Conference changed their privacy rules.... Was the merciless JSTOR prosecution the revenge of embarrassed bureaucrats...?

JSTOR

JSTOR is a digital repository that archives content from journal articles, manuscripts, GIS systems, and scanned plant specimens and disseminates it online. Swartz was a research fellow at Harvard University, which provided him with a JSTOR account. Additionally, visitors to MIT’s “open campus” were authorized to access JSTOR through its network.

According to state and federal authorities, over the course of a few weeks in late 2010 and early 2011 Swartz downloaded a large number of academic journal articles from JSTOR through MIT’s computer network. The authorities say Swartz downloaded the documents through a laptop connected to a networking switch in a controlled-access wiring closet. According to press reports, the door to the closet was kept unlocked.

Arrest and state charges

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested near the Harvard campus by two MIT police officers and a U.S. Secret Service agent on state charges of breaking and entering a building with intent to commit a felony. State prosecutors dismissed the charges eleven months later, after Swartz was indicted in federal court.

According to attorney Harvey Silverglate, lawyers familiar with the case told him the Middlesex County District Attorney had planned to resolve Swartz’s trespassing case with a “stern warning” and “continuance without a finding.” As he explained to CNET’s Declan McCullagh

Under such a disposition, the charge is held in abeyance (“continued”) without any verdict (“without a finding”). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested.

“Tragedy intervened,” Silverglate wrote in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, “when Ortiz’s office took over the case to send a message.’”

Federal indictment and prosecution

On April 13, 2011, Swartz's former partner, Wired journalist Quinn Norton, testified before a federal grand jury investigating Swartz. She penned an article, Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation, detailing her experiences in the case.

On July 19, 2011, the grand jury's indictment was unsealed. It charged Swartz with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. According to the indictment, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT’s computer network, which ran a script named “keepgrabbing.py”, allowing him to “rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR.” Prosecutors in the case said Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.

Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all counts, and was released on $100,000 unsecured bail. After his arrest, JSTOR released a statement saying that though it considered Swartz’s access to be a “significant misuse” committed in an “unauthorized fashion,” it would not pursue civil litigation against him, while MIT did not comment on the proceedings.

The New York Times wrote of the case: “A respected Harvard researcher who also is an Internet folk hero has been arrested in Boston on charges related to computer hacking, which are based on allegations that he downloaded articles that he was entitled to get free.”

David Segal of Demand Progress, a group Swartz co-founded, said, “This makes no sense. It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.” Segal later said his comments referred to general principles and not to the specifics of the allegations against Swartz. “I know him as a person who cares deeply about matters of ethics and government,” said Segal, “I don’t know about the matter of what has been alleged.”

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Stephen Heymann and Scott Garland were the lead prosecutors, working under the supervision of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz. The case was brought under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 to enhance the government’s ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality. “f convicted on these charges,” said Ortiz, “Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.”

Later, the prosecution filed a superseding indictment. If convicted at trial, Swartz remained at risk of being sentenced to the prison term and fine Ortiz announced after the initial indictment. George Washington University Professor Orin Kerr, writing on the legal blog Volokh Conspiracy, opined that the risk of a maximum sentence in Swartz’s case was not high.

Plea negotiations

Swartz’s attorney, Elliot Peters, said prosecutors told him, two days before Swartz’s death, that “Swartz would have to spend six months in prison and plead guilty to 13 charges if he wanted to avoid going to trial.” Peters later filed a complaint with the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility, stating that if Swartz didn't plead guilty, Heymann "threatened that he would seek for Mr. Swartz to serve seven years in prison," a difference in duration Peters asserts went "far beyond" the disparity encouraged by the plea-bargain portion of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

Andy Good, Swartz’s initial lawyer, told The Boston Globe, “The thing that galls me is that I told Heymann the kid was a suicide risk. His reaction was a standard reaction in that office, not unique to Steve. He said, ‘Fine, we’ll lock him up.’ I’m not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I’m saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless.”

Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. “JSTOR signed off on it,” he said, “but MIT would not.”

Shortly before Swartz’s death, JSTOR announced that it would make “more than 4.5 million articles” available to the public for free. The service was capped at three articles every two weeks, readable online only, with some downloadable for a fee.

After his death, Ortiz’s office dismissed the charges against Swartz. She said, “This office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case.… his office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct—a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting.… At no time did this office ever seek—or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek—maximum penalties under the law.”

On January 12, 2013, Alex Stamos, a computer forensics investigator employed by the Swartz legal defense team, posted an online summary of the expert testimony he had been prepared to present in the JSTOR case, had Swartz lived to see trial. He wrote

If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were “wrong,” I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as “inconsiderate.” In the same way it is inconsiderate … to check out every book at the library needed for a History 101 paper. It is inconsiderate to download lots of files on shared wifi … but none of these actions should lead to a young person being hounded for years and haunted by the possibility of a 35-year sentence.

Prosecutory rationale and response

U.S. Attorney Ortiz asserted after the 2011 indictment that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

Tim Wu, professor at the Columbia Law School wrote in the The New Yorker, “The prosecutors forgot that, as public officials, their job isn’t to try and win at all costs but to use the awesome power of criminal law to protect the public from actual harm.”

On January 15, 2013, GWU’s Orin Kerr wrote, on Volokh Conspiracy, “The charges brought here were pretty much what any good federal prosecutor would have charged.” James Boyle, professor of law at Duke University, replied in a January 18 column in The Huffington Post: “I think that of Orin’s argument is—very uncharacteristically—rather one-sided.  I think that … he tends … to minimize or ignore facts.” On January 20, Kerr, again writing on Volokh Conspiracy, proposed a revision of the CFAA, including the elimination of penalties for merely exceeding authorized access.

John Dean (former White House counsel) commented on the legal blog justia.com, “These are not people who are conscientiously and fairly upholding our federal laws. Rather, they are typically authoritarian personalities who get their jollies from shamelessly beating up on unfortunate people like Aaron Swartz.”

Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, both defended Swartz and challenged the scope of the law under which he was prosecuted.

Death, funeral and memorial gatherings

External videos
Aaron Swartz Memorial at The Great Hall of Cooper Union, (transcript)
Aaron Swartz Memorial at the Internet Archive, (partial transcript)
DC Memorial: Darryl Issa , Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Alan Grayson

On the morning of January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment by his partner. A spokeswoman for New York’s Medical Examiner reported that he had hanged himself. No suicide note was found.

Swartz’s family and partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, created a memorial website on which they issued a statement, saying, “He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place.”

Days before Swartz’s funeral, he was eulogized by his friend and sometime attorney, Lawrence Lessig, who called Swartz’s prosecution an abuse of proportionality.

government needs to why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept.

On the same day, in another eulogy for Swartz, author Cory Doctorow wrote, “Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.”

Swartz’s funeral services were held on January 15, 2013, at Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois. Tim Berners-Lee, co-creator of the World Wide Web, delivered a eulogy at the service.

The same day, The Wall Street Journal published a story based in part on an interview with Stinebrickner-Kauffman. She told the Journal that Swartz lacked the money to pay for a trial and “it was too hard for him to … make that part of his life go public” by asking for help. He was also distressed, she said, because two of his friends had just been subpoenaed and because he no longer believed that MIT would try to stop the prosecution.

On January 19, hundreds attended a memorial at the Great Hall at Cooper Union. Speakers included Ben Wikler, Open Source advocate Doc Searls, Creative Commons’ Glenn Otis Brown, journalist Quinn Norton, OK Go singer Damian Kulash, Yale Professor emeritus Edward Tufte, Givewell’s Holden Karnofsky, author Tom Chiarella (also reading for David Foster Wallace), Roy Singham of ThoughtWorks, David Isenberg of Freedom to Connect, David Segal of Demand Progress, and Swartz’s partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman.

On January 24, there was a memorial at San Francisco’s Internet Archive with speakers including Journalist Danny O’Brien, Aaron’s partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Lisa Rein, EFF senior technologist Seth Schoen, Peter Eckersley, O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, Molly Shaffer van Houweling, Alex Stamos, Internet law attorney Cindy Cohn, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, and public domain advocate Carl Malamud.

On February 4, a memorial was held in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill. Speakers included Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Darrell Issa, Alan Grayson and Jared Polis. Other lawmakers in attendence included Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Jan Schakowsky. “Stick it to the man,” said Issa. “Access to information is a human right.”

An MIT/Boston memorial took place on March 12, 2013 at the MIT Media Lab.

Swartz was the subject of a detailed profile by Larissa MacFarquhar for the New Yorker in March 2013.

Aftermath

U.S. v. Swartz: Post-dismissal motion and complaint

Now representing Swartz's estate, his lawyers have also asked the Federal District Court for Massachessets to "lift the protective order on his files so that evidence in the case can be public". They have also submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility, accusing Stephen Heymann of prosecutorial misconduct.

Family response and criticism

Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy, 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.

On January 12, Swartz’s family and partner issued a statement, criticizing the prosecutors and MIT.

Speaking at his son’s funeral, Robert Swartz, an intellectual property consultant to MIT’s Media Lab, said, “ was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.”

After Mitch Kapor posted the statement on Twitter, Carmen Ortiz’s husband, Tom Dolan, replied, criticizing the Swartz family: “Truly incredible that in their own son’s obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6-month offer.” This comment triggered a backlash of criticisms including one from Charlie Pierce, political blogger for Esquire: “The glibness with which her husband and her defenders toss off a ‘mere’ six months in federal prison, low-security or not, is a further indication that something is seriously out of whack with the way our prosecutors think these days.”

In the press

The Huffington Post reported that “Ortiz has faced significant backlash for pursuing the case against Swartz, including a petition to the White House to have her fired.” Other news outlets reported similarly.

MSNBC contributor Chris Hayes criticized the prosecutors, saying “at the time of his death Aaron was being prosecuted by the federal government and threatened with up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for the crime of—and I’m not exaggerating here—downloading too many free articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR.” A week later, writing in The Times, David Aaronovitch took an opposite view, pointing out that JSTOR was the product of philanthropy: a way of providing public access to academic journals while affording compensation to academic publishers for their intellectual property rights. He decried the “reckless” behavior of a generation which “cannot be persuaded—yet—that copyright matters” and was “unaware of its own power.”

The Associated Press reported that Swartz’s case “highlights society’s uncertain, evolving view of how to treat people who break into computer systems and share data not to enrich themselves, but to make it available to others.”

Chris Soghoian, a technologist and policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “Existing laws don’t recognise the distinction between two types of computer crimes: malicious crimes committed for profit, such as the large-scale theft of bank data or corporate secrets; and cases where hackers break into systems to prove their skillfulness or spread information that they think should be available to the public.”

Kelly Caine, a professor at Clemson University who studies people’s attitudes toward technology and privacy, said Swartz “was doing this not to hurt anybody, not for personal gain, but because he believed that information should be free and open, and he felt it would help a lot of people.”

Reuters news agency called Swartz “an online icon” who “help to make a virtual mountain of information freely available to the public, including an estimated 19 million pages of federal court documents.”

Gawker noted the extensive coverage of Swartz's prosecution and suicide within the press, writing "The suicide of a 26-year-old computer genius is the kind of story magazines were made to cover: complex but instantly engaging, offering a window into an unusual world." in an article entitled "Which Long Magazine Profiles of Aaron Swartz Should You Bother to Read".

Open Access

In 2002, Swartz stated that when he died he wanted all the contents of his hard drives made publicly available.

A long-time supporter of Open Access, Swartz once wrote

The world’s entire scientific … heritage … is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.
… The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

Supporters of Swartz responded to news of his death with an effort called #pdftribute to promote Open Access. Scholars posted links to their works, accompanied by the hashtag #PDFtribute.

Swartz's death prompted calls for more open access to scholarly data. Jennifer Chan wrote an opinion piece for U.S. News & World Report arguing that “bringing knowledge to the public should be the central mission of academia.” Slate’s Farhad Manjoo made a similar proposal in his article, “How MIT Can Honor Aaron Swartz: Fight to make academic journals open to everyone.”

Attacks and hacks

Two days after Swartz’s death, members of Anonymous hacked two websites on the MIT domain, replacing them with tributes to Swartz that called on members of the Internet community to use his death as a rallying moment for the open access movement. The banner included a list of demands for improvements in the US copyright system, along with a 2008 essay by Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.

On the night of January 18–19, MIT’s e-mail system was taken out of action for ten hours.

On January 22, e-mail sent to MIT was redirected by hackers Aush0k and TibitXimer to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology. All other traffic to MIT was redirected to a computer at Harvard University that was publishing a statement headed “R.I.P Aaron Swartz”, with text from a 2009 posting by Swartz accompanied by a chiptunes version of The Star-Spangled Banner. MIT regained full control after about seven hours.

In the early hours of January 26, the United States Sentencing Commission website, ussc.gov, was hacked by Anonymous. The home page was replaced with an embedded YouTube video, Anonymous Operation Last Resort.

On February 23, Cambridge police received an 18-minute message, via an Internet-to-phone relay service, about a gunman barricaded inside an MIT building. Police searched room-to-room and, after a three-hour campus lockdown, declared the message a hoax. On February 26, MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech, reported law-enforcement radio traffic suggesting police were concerned that a gunman could be targeting MIT staff, including MIT President L. Rafael Reif, to retaliate for Swartz’s death. On February 27, MIT Executive Vice President Israel Ruiz e-mailed the MIT community, saying the caller had “indicated that the alleged gunman was retaliating against people involved in the suicide.” The Boston Herald observed that “the email contradicts initial statements by Cambridge police, who said … they did not believe Swartz’s death had anything to do with the hoax.”

MIT investigation

MIT maintains an "open campus" policy along with an "open computer network." In the wake of Swartz's death, MIT appointed professor Hal Abelson to lead an internal investigation of the school's choices and role in the prosecution. As part of the investigation, MIT has created a website where members of the MIT community can pose questions or make comments.

In his Slate article, Manjoo said, "If MIT truly wants to atone for joining the federal case against Swartz … it should pledge to spend its money, prestige, and moral authority to launch a multiuniversity campaign to free every scholarly article from behind pay-wall archives like JSTOR."

Petition to the White House

After Swartz's death, more than 50,000 people signed an online petition to the White House calling for the removal of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, "for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz." A similar petition has been submitted for prosecutor Stephen Heymann.

Congress

Several members of the U.S. House of Representatives—Republican Darrell Issa and Democrats Jared Polis and Zoe Lofgren—all on the House Judiciary Committee, have raised questions regarding the government’s handling of the case.

Polis called the charges against Swartz “ridiculous and trumped up,” while referring to Swartz as a “martyr.” Speaking at a February 4 memorial for Swartz on Capitol Hill, Issa opined

Ultimately, knowledge belongs to all the people of the world... Aaron understood that … Our copyright laws were created for the purpose of promoting useful works, not hiding them.

Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren issued a statement saying “ advocacy for Internet freedom, social justice, and Wall Street reform demonstrated … the power of his ideas ….” Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, questioned, “On what basis did the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts conclude that her office’s conduct was ‘appropriate’?” and “Was the prosecution of Mr. Swartz in any way retaliation for his exercise of his rights as a citizen under the Freedom of Information Act?”

House Oversight Committee investigation

Issa, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, announced that he would investigate the Justice Department’s actions in prosecuting Swartz. In a statement to the Huffington Post, Issa praised Swartz’s work toward “open government and free access to the people.” Issa’s investigation has garnered some bipartisan support.

On January 28, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Issa and ranking member Elijah Cummings published a letter to Attorney General Holder, questioning whether prosecutors intentionally added felony counts to increase the amount of time Swartz faced in prison. Indeed, the former four felony counts on July 14, 2011, jumped to 13 counts on Sept. 12, 2012. Their letter read, in part

It appears that prosecutors increased the felony counts by providing specific dates for each action, turning each marked date into its own felony charge, and significantly increasing Mr. Swartz’s maximum criminal exposure to up to 50 years imprisonment and $1 million in fines.

On February 20, Boston University's WBUR reported that Ortiz is expected to testify at an upcoming Oversight Committee hearing about her office's handling of the Swartz case.

On February 22, U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General Steven Reich conducted a briefing for congressional staffers involved in the investigation. They were reportedly told that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in prosecutorial decision-making. Some are reported to have been left with the impression that prosecutors believed Swartz had to be convicted of a felony carrying at least a short prison sentence in order to justify having filed the case against him in the first place.

On March 6, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder testified that the case was a "a good use of prosecutorial discretion." Swartz's partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, issued a statement in reply. She repeated her claims of prosecutorial misconduct saying

Steve Heymann engaged in serious prosecutorial misconduct on multiple occasions. Public documents show that he instructed the Secret Service to seize and hold evidence without a warrant, violating the Fourth Amendment. He then lied to the judge about that fact in written briefs. And he withheld exculpatory evidence from Aaron's lawyers for over a year, despite both a legal and ethical obligation to turn it over.

Of Holder, she wrote: "The Department of Justice is not interested in admitting their errors, even when an out of control US Attorney's office has cost this country one of our best and brightest. The DOJ is only interested in covering their asses."

Amendment to Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Zoe Lofgren has introduced a bill, Aaron's Law, to exclude terms of service violations from the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and from the wire fraud statute. Lawrence Lessig wrote of the bill, “This is a critically important change... The CFAA was the hook for the government’s bullying... This law would remove that hook. In a single line: no longer would it be a felony to breach a contract.” The ACLU has called for reform of the CFAA "to remove the dangerously broad criminalization of online activity". The EFF also has a campaign to reform CFAA. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's inaugural Chair lecture as the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School was entitled Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age; Lessig dedicated the lecture to Swartz.

Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) is a bill that would mandate earlier public release of taxpayer-funded research. FASTR has been described "The Other Aaron's Law".

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced the Senate version, while the bill was introduced to the House by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) and Kevin Yoder (R-Kans.) Sen. Wyden wrote of the bill: "The FASTR act provides that access because taxpayer funded research should never be hidden behind a paywall."

Publications

• Swartz, Aaron; Hendler, James (2001), "The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City", Proceedings of the Second Annual Digital Cities Workshop, Kyoto, JP: Blogspace {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help).
• Swartz, Aaron (2002). "MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems. 17 (1). UMBC: 76–77. doi:10.1109/5254.988466. ISSN 1541-1672. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Gruber, John; Swartz, Aaron (2004), Markdown definition, Daring Fireball {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help).
• Swartz, Aaron (July 2008). "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto".
• Swartz, Aaron (2009). Building Progammable Web Sites. Santa Clara, Cal.: Morgan & Claypool. ISBN 1598299204. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Swartz, Aaron (Interviewee) (2009?). We can change the world (Video). YouTube. {{cite AV media}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Swartz, Aaron (Speaker) (May 21, 2012). Keynote address at Freedom To Connect 2012: How We Stopped SOPA (Video). D.C.: YouTube.

Notes

References

1. Cai, Anne (January 12, 2013). "Aaron Swartz commits suicide". The Tech. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
2. "Introduction: Aaron Swartz". Retrieved January 13, 2013.
3. "Remembering Aaron Swartz". Creative Commons. Retrieved March 1, 2013.
4. "official site". Web.py. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
5. Swartz, Aaron. "Sociology or Anthropology". Raw Thought. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
6. Swartz, Aaron (May 13, 2008). "Simplistic Sociological Functionalism". Raw Thought. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
7. ^ Seidman, Bianca (July 22, 2011). "Internet activist charged with hacking into MIT network". Arlington, Va.: Public Broadcasting Service. was in the middle of a fellowship at Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, in its Lab on Institutional Corruption
8. A.A. (September 28, 2012). "Rogue downloader faces additional felony charges". Chronicle of Higher Education. D.C. p. A18. According to the original indictment, Swartz was working as a research fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics ….
9. Summers, John (January 12, 2013). "Aaron Swartz, 1986–2013". The Baffler. Retrieved January 18, 2013.
10. ^ Gerstein, Josh (July 22, 2011). "MIT also pressing charges against hacking suspect". Politico. alleged use of MIT facilities and Web connections to access the JSTOR database … resulted in two state felony charges for breaking into a 'depository' and breaking & entering …, according to local prosecutors.
11. ^ Commonwealth v. Swartz, 11-52CR73 & 11-52CR75, MIT Police Incident Report 11-351 (Mass. Dist. Ct. nolle prosequi Dec. 16, 2011) ("Captain and Special Agent Pickett were able to apprehend the suspect at 24 Lee Street.… He was arrested for two counts of Breaking and Entering in the daytime with the intent to commit a felony ….").
12. ^ Hak, Susana (January 26, 2011). "Compilation of December 15, 2010–January 20, 2011" (PDF). Hak–De Paz Police Log Compilations. MIT Crime Club. p. 6. Jan. 6, 2:20 p.m., Aaron Swartz, was arrested at 24 Lee Street as a suspect for breaking and entering …. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
13. ^ Kirschbaum, Connor (August 3, 2011). "Swartz indicted for JSTOR theft". The Tech. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
14. ^ "Indictment, USA v. Swartz, 1:11-cr-10260, No. 2 (D.Mass. Jul. 14, 2011)" (PDF). MIT. July 14, 2011. Retrieved January 23, 2013. Superseded by "Superseding Indictment, USA v. Swartz, 1:11-cr-10260, No. 53 (D.Mass. Sep. 12, 2012)". Docketalarm.com. September 12, 2012. Retrieved January 23, 2013.
15. ^ US Attorney's Office District of Massachusetts (July 19, 2011). "Alleged Hacker Charged With Stealing Over Four Million Documents from MIT Network". Press release. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
16. ^ Thomas, Owen (January 12, 2013). "Family of Aaron Swartz Blames MIT, Prosecutors For His Death". Business Insider. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
17. "Aaron Swartz, internet freedom activist, dies aged 26". BBC News. January 13, 2013. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
18. "Aaron Swartz, Tech Prodigy and Internet Activist, Is Dead at 26". Time. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
19. ^ "Aaron Swartz dies at 26; Internet folk hero founded Reddit". Los Angeles Times. January 12, 2013.
20. ^ Swartz, Aaron. "How to get a job like mine". Just the facts, sir. Jottit. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
21. Holzner, Steven. "Peachpit" (article). Retrieved December 11, 2010.
22. Heffernan, Virginia (January 12, 2013). "Aaron Swartz, 1986–2013: a computer hacker who is now a political martyr". Yahoo! News. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
23. "Reddit co-creator Aaron Swartz dies from suicide". Chicago Tribune. January 13, 2013.
24. "RDFCore Working Group Membership". W3. December 1, 2002. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
25. RFC 3870: Application/rdf+xml Media Type Registration, IETF
26. Gruber, John. "Markdown". Daring Fireball. Retrieved January 23, 2013.
27. "Markdown". Aaron Swartz: The Weblog. March 19, 2004.
28. Singel, Ryan (September 13, 2005). "Stars Rise at Startup Summer Camp". Wired.com Condé Nast. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
29. ^ Swartz, Aaron (2007). "Introducing Infogami". Infogami. CondeNet.
30. "A passion for your users brings good karma: (Interview with) Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit.com". StartupStories. November 11, 2006.
31. ^ Singel, Ryan (July 19, 2011). "Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles". Wired. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
32. Swartz, Aaron (November 27, 2007). "Sick". Raw Thought. Blog.
33. Lenssen, Philipp (2007). "A Chat with Aaron Swartz". Google Blogoscoped. Archived from the original on April 27, 2010. Retrieved May 11, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
34. ^ Matthews, Laura (July 19, 2011). "Who is Aaron Swartz, the JSTOR MIT Hacker?". International Business Times. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
35. Grehan, Rick (August 10, 2011). "Pillars of Python: Web.py Web framework". InfoWorld. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
36. Klein, Sam (July 24, 2011). "Aaron Swartz vs. United States". The Longest Now. Weblogs at Harvard Law School. He founded watchdog.net to aggregate … data about politicians – including where their money comes from.
37. "Our Mission" (blog). Demand Progress. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
38. ^ Sleight, Graham (February 1, 2013). "'Homeland,' by Cory Doctorow". The Washington Post. As Doctorow made clear in his eloquent obituary, he drew on advice from Swartz in setting out how his protagonist could use the information now available about voters to create a grass-roots anti-establishment political campaign.… One of the book's two afterwords is by Swartz.
39. ^ Wagner, Daniel; Verena Dobnik (January 13, 2013). "Swartz' death fuels debate over computer crime". Associated Press. JSTOR's attorney, Mary Jo White — formerly the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan — had called the lead Boston prosecutor in the case and asked him to drop it, said Peters.
40. ^ Swartz, Aaron (May 21, 2012). "How we stopped SOPA" (video). Keynote address at the Freedom To Connect 2012 conference. New York: Democracy Now!. he 'Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act' … was introduced on September 20th, 2010 ….  And it began being called PIPA, and eventually SOPA.
41. ^ Goodman, Amy (January 14, 2013). "Freedom to Connect: Aaron Swartz (1986–2013) on Victory to Save Open Internet, Fight Online Censors". democracynow.org. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
42. "Bill Killed: SOPA death celebrated as Congress recalls anti-piracy acts", Russian Times, January 19, 2012
43. Swartz, Aaron (August 16, 2012). "How we stopped SOPA" (video). Speech at ThoughtWorks New York. Yahoo!.
44. ^ Swartz, Aaron (September 4, 2006). "Who Writes Misplaced Pages?". Raw Thought. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
45. Blodget, Henry (January 3, 2009). "Who The Hell Writes Misplaced Pages, Anyway?". Business Insider. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
46. F, G (January 13, 2013), "Commons man: Remembering Aaron Swartz", The Economist
47. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HAw1i4gOU4&t=22m06s
48. Leopold, Jason (January 18, 2013). "Aaron Swartz's FOIA Requests Shed Light on His Struggle". The Public Record. Retrieved January 23, 2013. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |work= (help)
49. "FOI Request: Records related to Bradley Manning". Muckrock. Retrieved January 23, 2013.
50. "WikiLeaks reveals association with Aaron Swartz". Russia Today. January 21, 2013. Retrieved January 23, 2013.
51. ^ Lee, Timothy B.,The inside story of Aaron Swartz’s campaign to liberate court filings, arstechnica, 8 February 2013. Retrieved 8 March 2013.
52. Will Wrigley. "Darrell Issa Praises Aaron Swartz, Internet Freedom At Memorial". Huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved February 21, 2013.
53. ^ Schwartz, John (February 12, 2009). "An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy". The New York Times. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
54. ^ Singel, Ryan (October 5, 2009). "FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records". Wired. Condé Nast. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
55. Johnson, Bobbie (November 11, 2009). "Recap: Cracking open US courtrooms". The Guardian. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
56. Malamud, Carl (January 24, 2013). "Aaron's Army". Speech at Memorial for Aaron Swartz. Public.Resource.Org. he bureaucrats who ran the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts … called the FBI ….  They found nothing wrong.…  Was the merciless JSTOR prosecution the revenge of embarrassed bureaucrats … because the U.S. Senate called them on the carpet?
57. "Terms and Conditions of Use". JSTOR. New York: ITHAKA. January 15, 2013. JSTOR's integrated digital platform is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to … scholarly materials: journal issues …; manuscripts and monographs; …; spatial/geographic information systems data; plant specimens; …
58. Granick, Jennifer, Towards Learning from Losing Aaron Swartz: Part 2, The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School blog, 15 January 2013. Retrieved 26 January 2013.
59. ^ Lindsay, Jay (July 19, 2011). "Feds: Harvard fellow hacked millions of papers". Boston. Associated Press. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
60. ^ "JSTOR Statement: Misuse Incident and Criminal Case". JSTOR. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
61. ^ Carter, Zach; Grim, Ryan; Reilly, Ryan J (January 12, 2013). "Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer, Found Dead Amid Prosecutor 'Bullying' In Unconventional Case". Huffington Post.
62. ^ Cohen, Noam (January 20, 2013). "How M.I.T. ensnared a hacker, bucking a freewheeling culture". The New York Times. p. A1. 'Suspect is seen on camera entering network closet' .…  Within a mile of MIT … he was stopped by an MIT police captain and Pickett.
63. Peters, Justin (February 7, 2013). "The Idealist: Aaron Swartz wanted to save the world. Why couldn't he save himself?". Slate. N.Y.C. 6. The superseding indictment … claimed that Swartz had 'contrived to break into a restricted-access wiring closet at MIT.'  But the closet door had been unlocked—and remained unlocked even after the university and authorities were aware that someone had been in there trying to access the school's network.
64. ^ MacFarquhar, Larissa (March 11, 2013). "Requiem for a dream: The tragedy of Aaron Swartz". The New Yorker. N.Y.C. wrote a script that instructed his computer to download articles continuously, something that was forbidden by JSTOR's terms of service.…  He spoofed the computer's address….  This happened several times.  MIT traced the requests to his laptop, which he had hidden in an unlocked closet.
65. Lipinski, Pearle and Joseph Maurer, Police Log (12/19-2/5), The Tech, 18 February 2011 (Volume 131, Issue 6). Retrieved 24 January 2011.
66. Singel, Ryan (February 27, 2011). "Rogue academic downloader busted by MIT webcam stakeout, arrest report says". Wired. N.Y.C. Swartz is accused … of stealing the articles by attaching a laptop directly to a network switch in … a 'restricted' room, though neither the police report nor the indictment a door lock or signage indicating the room is off-limits.
67. ^ McCullagh, Declan, Swartz didn't face prison until feds took over case, report says, cnet, 25 January 2013. Retrieved 7 February 2013. Cite error: The named reference "return" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
68. ^ Silverglate, Harvey (January 23, 2013). "The Swartz suicide and the sick culture of the DOJ". Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. Archived from the original on January 24, 2013. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
69. ^ Norton, Quinn, Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation, The Atlantic, March 2013. Retrieved 8 March 2013.
70. Editor's Note to Quinn Norton's Account of the Aaron Swartz Investigation, The Atlantic, March 2013. Retrieved 8 March 2013.
71. Bilton, Nick (July 19, 2011). "Internet Activist Charged in Data Theft". Boston: Bits Blog, The New York Times Company. Retrieved July 19, 2011. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
72. Lundin, Leigh (July 31, 2011). "The Thief Who Stole Knowledge". Computer Crimes. Criminal Brief.
73. ^ Schwartz, John (July 19, 2011). "Open-Access advocate is arrested for huge download". The New York Times.
74. ^ Lessig, Lawrence (January 12, 2013). "Prosecutor as bully". Retrieved January 12, 2013.
75. Peterson, Josh. "Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz commits suicide at age 26". The Daily Caller. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
76. "Demand Progress statement". Commondreams.org. July 19, 2011. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
77. Poulsen, Kevin (January 12, 2013). "Aaron Swartz, Coder and Activist, Dead at 26". Wired.
78. McCool, Grant (July 30, 2012). "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: The 1980s-Era Hacking Law Out Of Step With Today's Internet, Analysts Say". Huff Post Tech. Reuters. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
79. Sims, Nancy (October 2011). "Library licensing and criminal law: The Aaron Swartz case". College & Research Libraries News. 72 (9). Association of College and Research Libraries: 534–37. ISSN 0099-0086. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
80. "US Government Ups Felony Count in JSTOR/Aaron Swartz Case From Four To Thirteen". Tech dirt. 2012‐9‐17. Retrieved January 12, 2013. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
81. ^ Orin Kerr (January 16, 2013). "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz Part 2: Prosecutorial Discretion". Retrieved January 16, 2013.
82. "Mass. lawyer: told federal prosecutors Swartz suicidal". Associated Press. January 14, 2013. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
83. "Letter from Elliot R. Peters to Robin C. Ashton, Counsel, Office of Professional Responsibility" (PDF). January 28, 2013. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
84. ^ Cullen, Kevin (January 15, 2013). "On humanity, a big failure in Aaron Swartz case". Boston Globe.
85. "Net activist found dead before trial". 3 News NZ. January 14, 2013.
86. "Many JSTOR Journal Archives Now Free to Public". Library Journal. January 9, 2013. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
87. "Register & Read". About. JSTOR. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
88. Landergan, Katherine (January 14, 2013). "US District Court drops charges against Aaron Swartz - MIT - Your Campus". Boston.com. Retrieved January 23, 2013.
89. United States v Swartz, 1:11-cr-10260, 106 (D. Mass. filed Jan. 14, 2013).
90. Laura Smith-Spark (January 17, 2013). "Prosecutor defends case against Aaron Swartz". CNN. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
91. Ortiz, Carmen M. (January 16, 2013). "Statement of United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz Regarding The Death of Aaron Swartz". US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
92. Stamos, Alex (January 12, 2013). "The truth about Aaron Swartz's "crime"". Unhandled Exception. The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT's JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent.
93. Tim Wu (January 14, 2013). "HOW THE LEGAL SYSTEM FAILED AARON SWARTZ—AND US". The New Yorker. Retrieved January 19, 2013.
94. Lauerman, John. "MIT's Embrace of Web Freedom Clashes With Hacking Case". Bloomberg. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
95. "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 1: The Law)". The Volokh Conspiracy. November 25, 2009. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
96. Boyle, James (January 18, 2013). "The Prosecution of Aaron Swartz: A Reply to Orin Kerr". Huffington Post. In his descriptions of the facts, the issues surrounding prosecutorial discretion, and even sometimes of the law he tends to stress evidence against Aaron …
97. "Proposed Amendments to 18 U.S.C. 1030". Volokh.com. January 20, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
98. "Dealing With Aaron Swartz in the Nixonian Tradition: Overzealous Overcharging Leads to a Tragic Result". verdict.justia.com. January 25, 2013. Retrieved January 26, 2013.
99. "Towards Learning from Losing Aaron Swartz: Part 2". Cyberlaw.stanford.edu. January 15, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
100. "With the CFAA, Law and Justice Are Not The Same: A Response to Orin Kerr". Cyberlaw.stanford.edu. January 14, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
101. ^ Kemp, Joe; Trapasso, Clare; Mcshane, Lawrence ‘Larry’ (January 12, 2013). "Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and online activist, hangs himself in Brooklyn apartment, authorities say". The New York Daily News. Retrieved January 12, 2013. The 26-year-old Swartz was facing trial next month in a controversial computer-hacking case. He left no note before his apparent Friday morning suicide inside the seventh-floor apartment on Sullivan St., police sources said
102. ^ "Co-founder of Reddit Aaron Swartz found dead". News. CBS. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
103. Schwartz, John (January 12, 2013). "Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide". The New York Times. Retrieved January 13, 2013. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
104. Gustin, Sam (January 14, 2013). "MIT orders review of Aaron Swartz suicide as soul searching begins". Time. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
105. Lessig, Lawrence (January 12, 2013). "Prosecutor as bully". Lessig Blog, v2. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer.… y obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer ….
106. Doctorow, Cory (January 12, 2013), "RIP, Aaron Swartz", Boing Boing
107. Gallardo, Michelle (Janurary 15, 2013). "Aaron Swartz, Reddit co-founder, remembered at funeral". ABC News. Retrieved January 15, 2013. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
108. "Aaron Swartz Memorial Ice Cream Social Hour – Free Software Foundation – working together for free software". Fsf.org. Retrieved January 18, 2013.
109. "Aaron Swartz Tribute: Hundreds Honor Information Activist". Huffingtonpost.com. January 19, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
110. ^ Ante, Spencer; Anjali Athavaley; Joe Palazzolo (January 14, 2013). "Legal case strained troubled activist". Wall Street Journal. p. B1. With the government's position hardening, Mr. Swartz realized that he would have to face a costly public trial….  He would need to ask for help financing his defense….
111. Hsieh, Steven, Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?, Rolling Stone, 23 January 2013. Retrieved 26 January 2013.
112. Peltz, Jennifer (January 19, 2013). "Aaron Swartz Tribute: Hundreds Honor Information Activist". Associated Press. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
113. Fishman, Rob (January 19, 2013). "Grief And Anger At Aaron Swartz's Memorial". Buzzfeed. Retrieved January 26, 2013.
114. "Memorial for Aaron Swartz | Internet Archive Blogs". Blog.archive.org. Retrieved January 18, 2013.
115. "Aaron Swartz DC Memorial". Aaronswartzdcmemorial.eventbrite.com. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
116. Henry. "Aaron Swartz Memorial in Washington DC". Crookedtimber.org. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
117. ^ Gross, Grant, Lawmakers pledge to change hacking law during Swartz memorial, InfoWorld, 5 February 2013. Retrieved 5 February 2013.
118. ^ Carter, Zach (February 5, 2013). "Aaron Swartz Memorial On Capitol Hill Draws Darrell Issa, Elizabeth Warren". The Huffington Post. Retrieved February 5, 2013.
119. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman (March 13, 2013). "TarenSK: MIT Memorial Service". Retrieved March 15, 2013. including links to video of the ceremony/speeches.
120. http://tech.mit.edu/V133/N12/swartz.html
121. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/aaron-swartz-prosecutorial-misconduct_n_2867529.html
122. http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/HeymannOPRletter.pdf
123. ^ "Remember Aaron Swartz". Tumblr. Archived from the original on January 13, 2013. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
124. Guy, Sandra (January 15, 2013). "Aaron Swartz was 'killed by government,' father says at funeral". Chicago Sun-Times. Swartz's father … said that at a school event, 3-year-old Aaron read to his parents while all of the other parents read to their children.
125. Murphey, Shelly, US attorney’s husband stirs Twitter storm on Swartz case, The Boston Globe, January 16, 2013.. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
126. Pierce, Charles P. (January 17, 2013). "Still More About The Death Of Aaron Swartz", Esquire. Retrieved January 18, 2013.
127. "Tom Dolan, Husband of Aaron Swartz's Prosecutor", Huffington Post, 2013‐1‐15, retrieved January 16, 2013 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
128. McCullagh, Declan, Prosecutor in Aaron Swartz 'hacking' case comes under fire, CNet, January 15, 2013.. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
129. Stout, Matt, Ortiz: We never intended full penalty for Swartz, The Boston Herald, January 17, 2013.. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
130. Barnes, James, Hacker's suicide linked to 'overzealous' prosecutors, The Global Legal Post, 15 January 2013.. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
131. "The brilliant mind, righteous heart of Aaron Swartz will be missed". MSNBC. January 13, 2013 10h19. Retrieved 2013-01-14. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
132. Aaronovitch, David (January 17, 2013). "Even if everything's free, there can be a price". The Times. p. 23. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
133. Dobuzinskis, Alex; P.J. Huffstutter (January 13, 2013). "Internet activist, programmer Aaron Swartz dead at 26". Reuters. That belief — that information should be shared and available for the good of society — prompted Swartz to found the nonprofit group Demand Progress.
134. http://gawker.com/5988392/
135. "Aaron Swartz". Economist.com. January 19, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
136. Swartz, Aaron (2008). "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" (PDF). Internet Archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web.  We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
137. "PDF Tribute". Retrieved January 15, 2013.
138. Cutler, Kim-Mai. "PDF Tribute to Aaron Swartz Attracts Roughly 1,500 Links To Copyright-Protected Research". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
139. Musil, Steven. "Researchers honor Swartz's memory with PDF protest". CNet News. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
140. Staff, Slate V (January 14, 2013). "Aaron Swartz death: #pdftribute hashtag aggregates copyrighted articles released online in tribute to internet activist". Slate. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
141. Chan, Jennifer, To Honor Aaron Swartz, Let Knowledge Go Free, U.S. News and World Report, 1 February 2013. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
142. ^ Manjoo, Farhad (January 31, 2013). "How MIT can honor Aaron Swartz: Fight to make academic journals open to everyone". Slate.
143. "Anonymous hacks MIT Web sites to post Aaron Swartz tribute, call to arms". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
144. Joanna Kao; Ethan A. Solomon (January 16, 2013). "Anonymous hacks MIT". The Tech. Retrieved January 21, 2013.
145. Murphy, Samantha (July 22, 2011). "'Guerilla activist' releases 18,000 scientific papers". MIT Technology Review. In a 2008 'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,' Swartz called for activists to 'fight back' against services that held academic papers hostage behind paywalls.
146. Kao, Joanna (January 19, 2013). "MIT email was down for 10 hours last night, Mystery Hunt temporarily affected". Tech Blogs. MIT. A mail loop caused by a series of malformed email messages led to an exhaustion of system resources ….
147. Aush0k (January 22, 2013). "R.I.P Aaron Swartz". . Archived from the original on January 23, 2013. hacked by aush0k and tibitximer {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
148. Swartz, Aaron (August 2, 2009). "Life in a world of pervasive immorality: The ethics of being alive". Raw Thought: Aaron Swartz’s Weblog. Is there sense in following rules or are they just another example of the world's pervasive immorality?
149. Kao, Joanna (January 23, 2013). "MIT DNS hacked; traffic redirected". The Tech. MIT. p. 1. From 11:58 a.m. to 1:05 p.m., MIT's DNS was redirected … to CloudFlare, where the hackers had configured servers to return a Harvard IP address …. By 7:15 p.m., CloudFlare removed the 'mail.mit.edu' record, which referred to the machine … at KAIST.
150. Reported by Sabari Selvan. "United States Sentencing Commission(ussc.gov) hacked and defaced by Anonymous | Hacking News | Security updates". Ehackingnews.com. Retrieved January 29, 2013.
151. "Hackers take over sentencing commission website". Associated Press. January 26, 2013.
152. Aarons ArkAngel (January 26, 2013). "Anonymous Operation Last Resort: Anonymous hacked USSC.GOV" (Flash video). YouTube.
153. "Anonymous hackers target US agency site". BBC News. January 26, 2013. 'Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed,' the statement said.
154. ^ Revealed: Gunman hoax that forced MIT to go on lockdown was REVENGE for suicide of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, The Daily Mail, 28 February 2013. Retrieved 14 March 2013.
155. ^ Schworm, Peter; Adams, Dan; Lotan, Gal (February 24, 2013). "Report of gunman at MIT a hoax". Boston Globe. p. B1. Archived from the original on February 24, 2013. Police would not describe the contents of the threat ….  Authorities said there was no indication the hoax was related to Aaron Swartz. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
156. Kao, Joanna (February 26, 2013). "Saturday report of a gunman on campus a hoax: Tip said gunman was after Reif in retaliation for Swartz death; Alerts to students delayed". The Tech. MIT. p. 1. Police radio traffic suggested that the gunman had a long rifle and body armor … and that he was going after MIT President L. Rafael Reif and school staff in retaliation for the death of Aaron Swartz. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
157. Ruiz, Israel (February 27, 2013). "E-mail to MIT community members" (Press release). MIT. The caller identified the alleged gunman by name … a member of MIT's staff. This person was later … found not to be connected to the incident….  The caller indicated that the alleged gunman was retaliating against people involved in the suicide of Aaron Swartz.
158. Zaremba, John (February 28, 2013). "MIT gun hoax caller cited Swartz: Claimed staffer sought revenge for hacker suicide". Boston Herald. The email contradicts initial statements by Cambridge police, who said Saturday they did not believe Swartz's death had anything to do with the hoax. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
159. "MIT to Conduct Internal Probe on its Role in Aaron Swartz Case - TalkLeft: The Politics Of Crime". TalkLeft. January 14, 2013. Retrieved January 29, 2013.
160. "Swartz' death fuels debate over computer crime". Usatoday.com. January 14, 2013. Retrieved January 29, 2013.
161. Smith, Gerry (January 15, 2013). "Aaron Swartz Case 'Snowballed Out of MIT's Hands,' Source Says". Huffington Post. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
162. Reif, L. Rafael (January 13, 2013). "President Reif writes to MIT community regarding Aaron Swartz" (Press release). MIT News Office. Retrieved January 31, 2013.
163. "MIT Prof Announces Plans for Swartz Review". Blogs.bostonmagazine.com. January 24, 2013. Retrieved February 21, 2013.
164. "Petition: "Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz."". Wh.gov. January 12, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
165. Smith, Gerry (January 13, 2013). "Were The Charges Against Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Too Severe?". Huffington Post.
166. "Fire Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann". Wh.gov petition. January 12, 2013. Retrieved January 29, 2013.
167. Glenn Greenwald. "Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk". Guardian. Retrieved January 29, 2013.
168. "Convicted hacker Stephen Watt on Aaron Swartz: 'It's just not justice'". VentureBeat. January 25, 2013. Retrieved January 29, 2013.
169. ^ Sasso, Brendan. "Lawmakers slam DOJ prosecution of Swartz as 'ridiculous, absurd'". Hillicon Valley. The hill. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
170. ^ "Darrell Issa Probing Prosecution Of Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer Who Killed Himself". Huffingtonpost.com. January 15, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
171. http://www.cornyn.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=74c0afb3-1bc2-49f5-9150-0a8f004ef438 (pdf)
172. Pearce, Matt (January 18, 2013). "Aaron Swartz suicide has U.S. lawmakers scrutinizing prosecutors". latimes.com. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
173. "John Cornyn Criticizes Eric Holder Over Aaron Swartz's Death". Huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
174. "Top senator scolds Holder over Reddit founder's suicide". Washington Times. January 18, 2013. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
175. Zetter, Kim. "Congress Demands Justice Department Explain Aaron Swartz Prosecution | Threat Level". Wired.com. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
176. ^ "Issa letter to Holder on Aaron Swartz case" (PDF). Retrieved February 1, 2013.
177. Boeri, David and David Frank, Ortiz Under Fire: Critics Say Swartz Tragedy Is Evidence Of Troublesome Pattern, WBUR, 20 February 2013. Retrieved 24 February 2013.
178. ^ Reilly, Ryan J., Aaron Swartz Prosecutors Weighed 'Guerilla' Manifesto, Justice Official Tells Congressional Committee, Huffington Post, 22 February 2013. Retrieved 2 March 2013.
179. ^ Masnick, Mike, DOJ Admits It Had To Put Aaron Swartz In Jail To Save Face Over The Arrest, techdirt, 25 February 2013. Retrieved 2 March 2013.
180. McVeigh, Karen, Aaron Swartz's partner accuses US of delaying investigation into prosecution, The Guardian, 1 March 2013. Retrieved 2 March 2013.
181. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130306/13444122220/holder-doj-used-discretion-bullying-swartz-press-lacked-discretion-quoting-facts.shtml
182. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130308/01330322250/aaron-swartzs-partner-accuses-doj-lying-seizing-evidence-without-warrant-withholding-exculpatory-evidence.shtml
183. Musil, Steven (November 30, 2011). "New 'Aaron's Law' aims to alter controversial computer fraud law". Internet & Media News. CNET. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
184. Greenberg, Andrew ‘Andy’ (April 18, 2012). "'Aaron's Law' Suggests Reforms To Computer Fraud Act (But Not Enough To Have Protected Aaron Swartz)". Forbes. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
185. "Help Protect The Next Aaron Swartz". Aclu.org. January 11, 2013. Retrieved February 7, 2013.
186. "Reform Draconian Computer Crime Law". Action.eff.org. Retrieved February 7, 2013.
187. Video of Lawrence Lessig's lecture, Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age
188. Lawrence Lessig. "the next words: A Lecture on Aaron's Law". Lessig. Retrieved February 21, 2013.
189. "Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review – A summary of Lawrence Lessig's Chair Lecture at Harvard Law School". Harvardcrcl.org. January 14, 2013. Retrieved February 21, 2013.
190. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/02/16/1596891/fastr-open-access-aaron-swartz/
191. http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-bill-makes-taxpayer-funded-research-available-to-the-public
192. "...there was a third cofounder of Reddit, who was...", Today I learned..., Reddit

External links

• Official website
• Misplaced Pages user page (2004–2013)
• Twitter profile (@aaronsw)
• Remembrances (2013– ), with obituary and official statement from family and partner
• The Aaron Swartz Collection at Internet Archive (2013– ) (podcasts, e-mail correspondence, other materials)
• Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
• Filmography
• Posting about Swartz as Misplaced Pages contributor (2013), at The Wikipedian
• Case Docket: US v. Swartz

Template:Persondata

• 1986 births
• 2013 deaths
• Activists who committed suicide
• American computer businesspeople
• American computer programmers
• American technology writers
• Businesspeople from New York
• Businesspeople in information technology
• Businesspeople who committed suicide
• Copyright activists
• Internet activists
• People from Chicago, Illinois
• Programmers who committed suicide
• Stanford University alumni
• Suicides by hanging in New York
• WikiLeaks
• Writers who committed suicide
• American Jews