Aaron Swartz

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Aaron Swartz
Born Aaron H. Swartz[1]
(1986-11-08)November 8, 1986
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died January 11, 2013(2013-01-11) (aged 26)
Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Cause of death Suicide by hanging
Occupation Software developer, writer, hacker Internet activist
Website
aaronsw.com

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

Swartz was a member of the RSS-DEV Working Group that co-authored the "RSS 1.0" specification of RSS,[2] and built the Web site framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. He also built Infogami, a company that merged with Reddit in its early days, through which he became an equal owner of the merged company.[i] Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2010 he was a member of the Harvard University Center for Ethics. He cofounded the online group Demand Progress (known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act) and later worked with U.S. and international activist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz.

On January 6, 2011, as a result of a federal investigation, Swartz was arrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR.[3][4] Swartz opposed JSTOR's practice of compensating publishers, rather than authors, out of the fees it charges for access to articles. Swartz contended that JSTOR's fees limited access to academic work produced at American colleges and universities.[5][6]

On the morning of January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.[7][8][9]

Contents

[edit] Life and works

Swartz in 2002 (age 15) with Lawrence Lessig at the launch party for Creative Commons

Swartz was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Susan and Robert Swartz.[10] His family was Jewish.[11] His father founded a software company, and from a young age Swartz was interested in computing, ardently studying computers, the Internet and Internet culture.[12] When he was 13, Swartz was a winner of the ArsDigita Prize, a competition for young people who created "useful, educational, and collaborative" non-commercial Web sites. The prize included a trip to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and meetings with Internet notables. At the age of 14 Swartz was collaborating with experts in networking standards as a member of the working group that authored the RSS 1.0 Specification. Writing in Yahoo! News, Virginia Heffernan said about Swartz, "he agitated without cease—or compensation—for the free-culture movement."[13] Swartz attended North Shore Country Day School, a small private school in Winnetka, Illinois.[14]

[edit] Infogami and Reddit

He later attended Stanford University, but left after just one year.[12] Instead he founded the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator's first Summer Founders Program.[15]

Through the Y Combinator program, Swartz started the wiki platform Infogami (later used to support the web.py and Open Library sites), but felt he needed co-founders to proceed. Y-Combinator organizers suggested that Infogami merge with Reddit,[16][17] which it did in November 2005.[16][18] 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 sold to Condé Nast Publications, owners of Wired magazine.[12] Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco to work on Wired, but grew unhappy with the set-up[12] and in January, 2007, he was asked to resign from his position.[19] Swartz described himself as being ill and suffering from a constant depressed mood throughout 2007.[20] In September, 2007, Swartz joined with Simon Carstensen and launched Jottit. In 2010–2011 he was a fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.[21]

Swartz was also the creator of the web.py Web application framework,[22] and co-founded Demand Progress,[21] a progressive advocacy group that organizes people via email and other media for "contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word" about targeted issues.[23]

[edit] Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

Swartz in 2012 protesting against Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

Swartz was significantly involved with a campaign to prevent the passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill that sought to monitor the Internet for copyright violations and would have made it easier for the U.S. government to shut down websites accused of violating copyright.[24]

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"[25] and he informed the audience:

"There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands... [Under SOPA], new technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we'd always taken for granted."[24]

Swartz said SOPA was killed by "the people themselves... 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."[25] He was referring to a series of protests against the bill by numerous websites which were described by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as the biggest in Internet history, with over 115 thousand sites altering their webpages.[26]

In his speech Swartz also described how close the Bill came to passing as a "bad dream". He added: "And it will happen again; sure, it will have another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way, but make no mistake, the enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politician's eyes has not been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who wanna clamp down on the Internet."[25]

Swartz also presented on this topic at an event organized by ThoughtWorks.[27]

[edit] Wikipedia

Swartz at 2009 Boston Wikipedia Meetup

Swartz volunteered as an editor at Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia 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,[28] 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."[29]

His analysis contradicted that of Wikipedia 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 unsuccessful bid to be elected to Wikimedia's Board of Directors.[30]

[edit] Legal problems

[edit] PACER

In 2009, he allegedly downloaded and publicly released approximately 20% of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. PACER was charging 8 cents a page for information that Swartz and others believed should be free because government-produced documents are not covered by copyright.[31] The fees were being used to finance new technology for courts, but the system had become a cash cow generating a surplus of $150 million.

The initiator of this effort was Carl Malamud who founded the nonprofit group, Public.Resource.org. Malamud claimed PACER used old technology that was 15 to 20 years out of date and "put the nation’s legal system behind a wall of cash and kludge" which separated citizens from what he called the “operating system for democracy.” Swartz read Malamud’s appeal for help and accessed the system as part of a free trial conducted by PACER at 17 libraries around the country, downloading 19,856,160 pages of text.[31][32]

As a result of his actions, on 29 September the Government Printing Office suspended the free trial "pending an evaluation" of the programme. Swartz was subsequently investigated by the FBI, but the case was closed two months later with no charges being filed. PACER still charges eight cents a page, but customers using Firefox have the option of donating documents into the public domain with a plug-in called RECAP.[32]

[edit] JSTOR

On July 19, 2011, Swartz was charged by Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer, in relation to downloading roughly 4 million academic journal articles from JSTOR.[33] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR."[34] Prosecutors in the case claim Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.[35]

Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all accounts, and was released on US$100,000 unsecured bail.[36][37] Prosecution of the case continued, with charges of wire fraud and computer fraud, carrying a potential prison term of up to 35 years and a fine of up to $1 million.[38][39] After Swartz's arrest, JSTOR put out a statement saying it would not pursue civil litigation against him,[36][40] though MIT remained silent on the proceedings.[41]

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Stephen P. Heymann and Scott L. Garland[42][43][44] pursued the criminal case against Swartz under U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz. The case tested the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1984 to enhance the government’s ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality.

Third parties have used various analogies to explain Swartz's alleged offense to a wider audience. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz justified the charges by stating "stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."[36] Journalist Chris Hayes summed up the situation by saying "You should also know that 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."[45] Demand Progress said the indictment was like "trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library"[46]

Shortly before Swartz's death, JSTOR announced that it would make "more than 4.5 million articles" available to the public for free[47]—but capped at three articles every two weeks, readable online only, with some downloadable for a fee.[48][49] This announcement did not affect the prosecution, ongoing before his death.

After Swartz's death, one of his lawyers revealed that the prosecutors "told him two days before Swartz’s death that Swartz would have to spend six months in prison and plead guilty to [all] 13 charges" in order to avoid trial.[50] At trial, he faced a total of 35 years imprisonment.[45]

Following his death, federal prosecutors in Boston dismissed the charges.[51][52]

[edit] Death

"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."

Statement by family and partner of Aaron Swartz[53]

On the morning of January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, apartment by his girlfriend.[54][55][8][9] A spokeswoman for New York's Medical Examiner reported that he had hanged himself.[56][54][54][55][8][9][57] At the time of his death, Swartz, if convicted, faced a maximum of $1 million in fines[56][9] and more than 35 years in prison[56][9] after the government increased the number of felony counts against him from 4 to 13.[58]

Swartz's father is an intellectual property consultant to MIT's computer lab. Elliot Peters, Swartz's attorney, said his father was "outraged by the university's handling of the matter, believing that it deviated from MIT's usual procedures".[24] The family and partner of Swartz created a memorial Web site 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."

Swartz was eulogized by his friend and sometime attorney, Lawrence Lessig, calling his prosecution an abuse of proportionality and noting, "the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a 'felon'."[57]

Alex Stamos is a computer forensics investigator employed by the Swartz legal defense as an expert witness. On January 12, 2013, Stamos posted a summary of the expert testimony he was prepared to present in the JSTOR case, concluding, "I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail."[59]

Swartz's funeral services were scheduled for January 15, 2013, at Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois.[60]

[edit] Public response

Supporters of Swartz responded with an effort called #pdftribute[61] to promote Open Access, a cause Swartz had long supported.[62][63] Members of Anonymous hacked a website on MIT's domain, replacing the title page with a tribute to Swartz, calling on members of the internet community to use Aaron's death as a rallying moment for the open access movement. The banner included a list of demands for improvements in the US copyright system, and included an essay attributed to Aaron, entitled Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.[64]

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." 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. The government used the same laws intended to go after digital bank robbers to go after this 26-year-old genius."[24]

Another commentator wrote that "His 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."[24]

Within three days, more than 26,000 people signed an online petition[65] to the White House calling for the removal of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, "for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz."[66]

[edit] Publications

[edit] Notes

^ Swartz is regularly attributed as a co-founder of Reddit, but the title is the source of controversy. After the merger of Infogami and Reddit, Swartz was an equal owner of parent company Not a Bug, Inc. along with Reddit co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Swartz was referred to as "co-founder" in the press, by investor/advisor Paul Graham (who recommended the merger), and in early comments by Ohanian.[67] By mid-2011, when Wired wrote a piece on Swartz's court case, Ohanian said he preferred to describe Swartz as a 'co-owner' rather than co-founder.[18] Wired used the latter title, commenting: "For lack of an accurate term for someone who joins a company early — but after launch — and who gets paid largely in equity, we use the term co-founder in this story."[18]

[edit] References

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  30. ^ Who Writes Wikipedia?
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  62. ^ Cutler, Kim-Mai. "PDF Tribute to Aaron Swartz Attracts Roughly 1,500 Links To Copyright-Protected Research". techcrunch.com. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/13/pdf-tribute/. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
  63. ^ Musil, Steven. "Researchers honor Swartz's memory with PDF protest". news.cnet.com. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57563701-93/researchers-honor-swartzs-memory-with-pdf-protest/. Retrieved 14 January 2013.
  64. ^ "Anonymous hacks MIT Web sites to post Aaron Swartz tribute, call to arms". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/anonymous-hacks-mit-sites-to-post-aaron-swartz-tribute-call-to-arms/2013/01/14/ff6f706c-5e44-11e2-9940-6fc488f3fecd_print.html. Retrieved 2013-01-13.
  65. ^ "White House.gov petition". Wh.gov. http://wh.gov/E3v1. Retrieved 2013-01-15.
  66. ^ Smith, Gerry (2013-01-13). "Were The Charges Against Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Too Severe?". Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/aaron-swartz-death-_n_2468879.html.
  67. ^ "...there was a third cofounder of Reddit, who was...", Today I learned..., Reddit, http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_there_was_a_third_cofounder_of_reddit_who_was/c0x40yz

[edit] External links

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