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A little over a year ago, open Internet activist Aaron Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment. Swartz had been facing 35 years in prison and fines of up to $1 million for downloading academic journals from an MIT computer, and he took his life two days after a prosecutor turned down a proposed plea deal that would have kept him out of prison. 
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Internet activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicideon Jan. 11, 2013, igniting a firestorm of discussion over the Internet — where he was regarded as something of a folk hero — and triggering questions regarding the prosecution, MIT, and JSTOR’s involvement in United States v. Aaron Swartz.
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In perhaps the most painful moment in Brian Knappenberger’s Kickstarter-funded documentary “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” — and this is a movie with lots of painful moments — freelance writer Quinn Norton struggles to explain how and why she wound up talking to federal prosecutors about Swartz, the technology wunderkind turned organizer and political activist who was also her ex-boyfriend. Norton’s role in the government’s persecution and prosecution of Swartz, which ended when he took his own life in his Brooklyn apartment just over a year ago, has been much discussed by those who have followed this tragic story, and it’s clear she feels torn up about it.
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One year ago this month, the young Internet freedom activist and groundbreaking programmer Aaron Swartz took his own life. Swartz died shortly before he was set to go to trial for downloading millions of academic articles from servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology based on the belief that the articles should be freely available online. At the time he committed suicide, Swartz was facing 35 years in prison, a penalty supporters called excessively harsh. Today we spend the hour looking at the new documentary, "The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz." We play excerpts of the film and speak with Swartz’s father Robert, his brother Noah, his lawyer Elliot Peters, and filmmaker Brian Knappenberger.
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A year after Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide, a new documentary brings to light the young computer prodigy’s earnest battle to bring online freedom of access to information for everyone.
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On January 11, 2013, federal prosecutors, in an aggressive campaign to bring high-profile convictions against hackers, finally broke the spirit of talented internet activist and technologist Aaron Swartz. Faced with 35 years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines, not to mention a long battle with depression, Swartz committed suicide. And with that, one of the great voices of internet activism fell silent.
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MIT University website defaced by Anonymous hackers in honor of Aaron Swartz
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The late Aaron Swartz is best-known for promoting an open internet and looser copyright laws. Now Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is invoking Swartz's legacy to fight political corruption.
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In January we lost Aaron Swartz, 26, to suicide. Or better, as the breadth of his work was wide and its depth, profound: In January we all lost Aaron Swartz to suicide.
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New paper by Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw and Benjamin Mako Hill: “Peer production is the most significant organizational innovation that has emerged from
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he jeans were a mistake,” says Lawrence Lessig, the superstar Harvard Law professor. The jeans were a mistake because it’s pouring rain and freezing cold, and despite the best efforts of a billowing green parka his legs are now encased in wet black denim, with another few hours of slogging ahead of him. “I had snow pants,” he says. “I should have just worn them.”
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PARK CITY, Utah – If there’s one takeaway from the documentary The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last week, it’s the overwhelming sense of what could have been. Prior to his death a year ago this month, Aaron Swartz was facing federal hacking charges, but he was also a strong voice in political activism online. He cofounded Demand Progress. He helped stop SOPA. He warned people about government spying. And, as the film demonstrates, he was a young man with an uncanny ability to explain fantastically complex technological and political topics in layman’s terms — one of the best-equipped people to explain why the very laws used to indict him were so outdated.
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A Q&A with the director of 'The Internet's Own Boy,' a documentary on Aaron Swartz.
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January 11th marked the first anniversary of Aaron Swartz’s death. As an inventor, a coder, and an activist, Swartz had an outsized impact on the world before he died at the age of 26. In his short life, he helped to shape the modern internet by developing RSS, Creative Commons licenses, and Reddit. But he also spent the last two years of his life fighting a legal case that stemmed from his copying millions of documents from a digital library. Depressed and facing 35 years in prison, Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment.
John Swaim's curator insight,
April 2, 2015 9:20 PM
I don't believe in heaven. If I did I wouldn't expect to spend an eternity there after doing nothing about leaving a hell on earth.
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On Jan. 18, 2013, one week after Aaron Swartz committed suicide, a group of his friends and admirers gathered in the lobby of the MIT Media Lab to commemorate Swartz’s life and mourn his death. On one side of the room, the event’s organizers had unfurled a homemade banner. For about an hour that night, I watched people approach the banner, grab a marker, and scribble their thoughts. The most memorable was a skinny kid in a sweatshirt and ugly sneakers, who scrawled, “We will continue.”
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The date is set: On Feb. 11, the Internet will finally formally protest the type of spying revealed by former National Security Agencycontractor Edward Snowden.
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Internet activist Aaron Swartz took his own life one year ago today. He was 26 years old and facing federal hacking and fraud charges for downloading millions of academic articles using MIT’s network. Before his passing, he was on outspoken advocate for freedom of information and a founder of Demand Progress, the nonprofit that invigorated a successful grassroots effort to fight the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012.
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Swartz took his own life last year after being hounded by federal prosecutors for more than a year over efforts to download large numbers of academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR. Although Swartz had legal access to the JSTOR database, the speed of his downloads violated the company's terms of service agreement. MIT alerted authorities to Swartz's activities and he was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Federal prosecutors led by Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann pressed for Swartz to agree to a plea bargain that would include prison time. JSTOR itself opposed the prosecution, but MIT refused to take the same position with prosecutors.
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Bob Swartz talks about grief over his son Aaron Swartz's death and the role MIT played in Aaron's suicide.
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Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University, wrote in The Nationthat the prosecution of hacktivists was part of "a war on knowledge" that extends beyond hackers to include Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who exposed government secrets. Manning is serving a 35-year sentence for Espionage Act violations. Snowden, in Russia on temporary asylum, has been charged with espionage and theft of government property.
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There is now a choice; never has it been more clear that we stand at a turning point in history, between the ongoing disaster of holding, and guarding, private wealth, and on the other hand openness, sharing, a public world in which the condition of individual advancement is the advancement of humanity - and the condition of the survival of humanity is the advancement of every human and harmony with the natural world.
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