Aaron Swartz: Hero or Villain?

If you're using the internet chances are you heard of this name or even used one of his creations. He helped develop RSS, the now-ubiquitous tool allowing users to self-syndicate information online and at 19 he was one of the builders of Reddit, yeah Reddit the social media site were you get the best, the funniest and the worst answers to any kind of question to post, which Conde Nast purchased and turned hi into a millionaire instantly. In 2008, he co-wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, which called for activists to "liberate" information locked up by corporations or publishers. In 2011, he successfully led a campaign to prevent the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill introduced to Congress that would have effectively legalized censorship on the Internet. By the age of 26, Aaron Swartz had already become a remarkable figure connecting the realms of technology and activism. Motivated by an insatiable curiosity, he believed that information was a priceless asset that everyone deserved access to, viewing it as a fundamental form of wealth. But all that wealth and fame was clouded when we was arrested for allegedly hacking the servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to steal millions of files from an online library of academic journals, and the federal government had, in the years since, been unrelenting in its quest to ensure that his punishment would be severe. Swartz is facing 35 years imprisonment if he is found guilty. On January 11th, almost exactly two years from the day he was arrested, Aaron Swartz ended his life by hanging himself in his Brooklyn apartment.

Aaron Swartz was a staunch advocate for the open access movement, which champions unrestricted access to global knowledge online, he was also a committed social activist. He was driven by a deep interest in the detrimental impact of significant financial influence on institutions and the inherent imbalance of power structures in contemporary society. He absorbed information swiftly and analyzed it eagerly, always seeking to understand the intricacies of the world and envisioning ways to improve it. He had a particular fascination with fonts, with Helvetica being among his favorites; he even selected restaurants based on the typography of their menus. Many considered him a genius. He taught himself to read at age three, and by elementary school he was building and programming an ATM for a class project. When he was 12 years old he built the Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia much like the Wikipedia before wikipedia was ever thought of. Around that time Swartz was invited to join the W3C – World Wide Web Consortium – a group founded by Berners-Lee, Swartz’s hero, dedicated to pushing the Web to reach it’s potential, simply put, Aaron was one of the people building the Internet. Swartz write the code for Creative Commons, a nonprofit that allows users to copyright their material in less-restrictive ways.

Swartz caught the attention of the government when he wrote a script designed to crawl through the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system, a government site that hold's court's electronic records and other public documents which charged at the time eight cents a page for court documents, he downloaded an estimated 20 percent of the database, or 19,865,160 pages of text this required months of work. In April 2009, an FBI agent contacted Swartz, interested in talking about the downloads. It turned out the agency had been investigating him for months, at one point conducting surveillance on his parents’ home. The investigation was eventually dropped – no laws, after all, had been broken – but Swartz was now on the government’s radar. 

In late 2010 and early 2011 Swartz Swartz connected a refurbished Acer laptop to MIT’s terminal in Building 16, logging in as a guest on a system he was familiar with, Aaron Swartz accessed JSTOR, an online repository of academic journals for which universities pay annual subscription fees reaching tens of thousands of dollars. Utilizing a script similar to the PACER crawler he had developed, Swartz started downloading a vast number of articles. Over the following three months, he devised methods to bypass efforts to restrict his access, ultimately connecting his laptop directly to the school's servers from a limited-access utility closet. By January 2011, he had amassed nearly 5 million documents from JSTOR's database. On the night of January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested near the Harvard campus by MIT Police and a Secret Service agent, and arraigned in Cambridge District Court on two state charges of breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. On July 11, 2011, he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
But what did Swartz downloaded? Is it state secrets, military secret? in the words of Swarts defense lawyer  Elliot Peters, described the material Swartz downloaded as "a bunch of, like, the 1942 edition of the Journal of Botany!" hardly a state secret or a secret at all. But in the prosecutions point of view State Prosecutor Ortiz declared "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar", the state is hell bent on getting Swartz come hell or high water. One of the most perplexing aspects of the case was that JSTOR, the entity most directly affected, chose not to pursue charges against Swartz once he returned the downloaded documents. Initially, this appeared to indicate that a swift resolution was imminent. MIT, with its renowned history of being understanding towards hacking culture, seemingly had no reason to proceed with the case. However, for reasons that remain unclear, the university allowed the case to proceed. Did it it connive with the prosecutor to turn Swartz, the Internet's own boy, the poster boy for the for the state's hardline stance against criminality? Although MIT admitted thru its own review of the incident had not supported charges against Swartz.

To understand Swartz and why is he hellbent on making public documents/data available thru open access, you have to read his "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" were the opening line reads "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations." Aaron Swartz wants to make information free for all to access without restrictions, which is against the most important principle for corporations that owns big data "profit"

Looking back, i think Aaron Swartz was correct and his activism was justified, with what's happening now, it's the state and big data who are stealing and selling our personal information and data to the highest bidder with no consequence whatsoever, but if you want to make public information/data available for free to the public they will come down on you with all the arsenal they have.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-brilliant-life-and-tragic-death-of-aaron-swartz-177191/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/02/aaron-swartz-hacker-genius-martyr-girlfriend-interview
https://news.mit.edu/2013/mit-releases-swartz-report-0730
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt