Darkness.
January 13th, 2013, 09:35 PM
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100374855
Friends, colleagues and admirers of Aaron Swartz, a digital activist and innovator, posted tributes to him online on Saturday, after an early-morning report of his death by The Tech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology student newspaper. An uncle, Michael Wolf, told The Times that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently committed suicide in New York on Friday.
Later on Saturday, his family and partner said in a statement posted on a memorial site dedicated to collecting memories of Mr. Swartz, "Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing."
In a blog post for Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow becoming friends with the young man shortly after Mr. Swartz helped create RSS as a 14-year-old. That post is illustrated by video of Mr Swartz describing his more recent efforts to battle against copyright law at a conference in Washington last year.
Another friend, the legal scholar and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig, wrote an angry post, describing the federal government's decision to indict Mr Swartz in 2011 - when he was charged with downloading 4.8 million articles and other documents from JSTOR, a nonprofit online service for distributing scholarly articles, and plotting to make them available online for free - as a kind of "bullying."
Even though, Mr. Lessig wrote, he disagreed with the concept of downloading copyrighted material and distributing it for free, he was appalled by the federal prosecution of his young friend. "Early on, and to its great credit," Mr. Lessig noted, JSTOR "declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. M.I.T., to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the "criminal" who we who loved him knew as Aaron."
He continued: "Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The "property" Aaron had "stolen," we were told, was worth "millions of dollars" - with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.
"Aaron had literally done nothing in his life "to make money." He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. 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? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying."
In their statement posted online Saturday evening, Mr. Swartz's family and partner did blame the government and M.I.T. for contributing to his decision to take his own life, writing:
"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 M.I.T. contributed to his death. The U.S. Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, M.I.T. refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles."
Tributes also appeared on Twitter, where Mr. Swartz had recently posted a note drawing attention to the campaign for the Treasury to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin to avoid a showdown over the debt ceiling.
John Schwartz, a New York Times correspondent, chronicled Mr. Swartz's fight to make more information available online. In 2009, he wrote an article and a Lede blog post about the young activist's efforts to "liberate" documents and records from federal databases. In 2011, he was again in touch with Mr. Swartz after his arrest by the federal government.
Below is the reporter's personal recollection of the young activist.
"Aaron Swartz made a deep impression on everyone he met - whether it was his obvious brilliance, his cutting wit or his ardent dedication to issues concerning the Internet, public rights and civil liberties."
Friends, colleagues and admirers of Aaron Swartz, a digital activist and innovator, posted tributes to him online on Saturday, after an early-morning report of his death by The Tech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology student newspaper. An uncle, Michael Wolf, told The Times that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently committed suicide in New York on Friday.
Later on Saturday, his family and partner said in a statement posted on a memorial site dedicated to collecting memories of Mr. Swartz, "Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing."
In a blog post for Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow becoming friends with the young man shortly after Mr. Swartz helped create RSS as a 14-year-old. That post is illustrated by video of Mr Swartz describing his more recent efforts to battle against copyright law at a conference in Washington last year.
Another friend, the legal scholar and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig, wrote an angry post, describing the federal government's decision to indict Mr Swartz in 2011 - when he was charged with downloading 4.8 million articles and other documents from JSTOR, a nonprofit online service for distributing scholarly articles, and plotting to make them available online for free - as a kind of "bullying."
Even though, Mr. Lessig wrote, he disagreed with the concept of downloading copyrighted material and distributing it for free, he was appalled by the federal prosecution of his young friend. "Early on, and to its great credit," Mr. Lessig noted, JSTOR "declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. M.I.T., to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the "criminal" who we who loved him knew as Aaron."
He continued: "Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The "property" Aaron had "stolen," we were told, was worth "millions of dollars" - with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.
"Aaron had literally done nothing in his life "to make money." He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. 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? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying."
In their statement posted online Saturday evening, Mr. Swartz's family and partner did blame the government and M.I.T. for contributing to his decision to take his own life, writing:
"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 M.I.T. contributed to his death. The U.S. Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, M.I.T. refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles."
Tributes also appeared on Twitter, where Mr. Swartz had recently posted a note drawing attention to the campaign for the Treasury to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin to avoid a showdown over the debt ceiling.
John Schwartz, a New York Times correspondent, chronicled Mr. Swartz's fight to make more information available online. In 2009, he wrote an article and a Lede blog post about the young activist's efforts to "liberate" documents and records from federal databases. In 2011, he was again in touch with Mr. Swartz after his arrest by the federal government.
Below is the reporter's personal recollection of the young activist.
"Aaron Swartz made a deep impression on everyone he met - whether it was his obvious brilliance, his cutting wit or his ardent dedication to issues concerning the Internet, public rights and civil liberties."