Aaron Swartz, 26 years old, is one of the many I.T. professionals who helped stop a bill called SOPA which would violate the first amendment and sensor access to particular websites at the government's discretion using the "copyright" violation excuse.

He is one of the unsung heros of Internet freedom and now he is dead.

He committed suicide. (really?) I'm skeptical.

How we stopped SOPA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Fgh2dFngFsg#!


Aaron Swartz’s Suicide Prompts MIT Soul-Searching.

http://business.time.com/2013/01/14/mit-orders-review-of-aaron-swartz-suicide-as-soul-searching-begins/


Anonymous hacks MIT after Aaron Swartz's suicide

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57563752-93/anonymous-hacks-mit-after-aaron-swartzs-suicide/


Internet prodigy, activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide

(really?)

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/12/us/new-york-reddit-founder-suicide/index.html

Will Aaron Swartz’s Suicide Make the Open-Access Movement Mainstream?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/01/13/aaron_swartz_s_suicide_may_make_the_open_access_movement_mainstream.html

The news that Internet folk hero Aaron Swartz tragically ended his own life shook the Web this weekend, bringing sorrow to online activist circles—but also signaling a hardening of resolve among those who worked alongside him.

At 14, Swartz co-authored the RSS 1.0 specifications. He went to become a co-founder of activist organizations Demand Progress and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee as well as an early Reddit co-owner and a Harvard University Center for Ethics fellow. He was involved somehow in almost every digital rights issue, but had a particular knack for freedom of expression, open government, and open access and freedom of information activism.

Congress Demands Justice Department Explain Aaron Swartz Prosecution


he two leaders of a congressional committee have sent a letter to the Department of Justice demanding a briefing on why the department chose to so fervently pursue charges against coder and internet activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this month.

The committee leaders asked the Justice Department to explain what factors influenced its decision to prosecute Swartz and whether his advocacy against the Stop Online Piracy Act played any role in that decision.

The 26-year-old Swartz was found dead on Jan. 11 this year of an apparent suicide. His death has been attributed in part to the increasing money pressures he faced over his upcoming trial, scheduled for April, and his fear of spending time in prison.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, and ranking minority leader Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) wrote in their Jan. 28 letter that it appeared that prosecutors had intentionally bulked up the felony counts against Swartz in order to increase the amount of time in prison he would face.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/doj-briefing-on-aaron-swartz/

Anonymous Hijacks Federal Website Over Aaron Swartz Suicide
Sat, Jan 26, 2013 12:49 PM EST

Activists from the hacker collective known as Anonymous assumed control over the homepage of a federal judicial agency this morning.
In a manifesto left on the defaced page, the group demanded reform to the American justice system and what the activists said are threats to the free flow of information.

The lengthy essay largely mirrors previous demands from Anonymous, but this time the group also cited the recent suicide of Reddit co-founder and activist Aaron Swartz as has having "crossed a line" for their organization. Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison on computer fraud charges.
Prosecutors said he had stolen thousands of digital scientific and academic journal articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of disseminating them for free.

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/anonymous-hijacks-federal-website-threatens-doj-document-dump-174943824--abc-news-politics.html


Anonymous says Swartz was "killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win - a twisted and distorted perversion of justice - a game where the only winning move was not to play."
"There must be a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused," it reads, also mentioning recent arrests of Anonymous associates by the FBI.

In their statement, the hackers say they targeted the homepage of the Federal Sentencing Commission for "symbolic" reasons.

The group claimed that if their demands were not met they would release a trove of embarrassing internal Justice Department documents to media outlets. Anonymous named the files after Supreme Court justices and provided hyperlinks to them from the defaced page.

As of press time the commission's site had been taken offline but an earlier attempt by CNN to follow the files' links yielded dead-ends, mostly offline sites.

The file names use an ".aes256? suffix, denoting a common encryption protocol. The same system was used to encrypt the Wikileaks Afghan war documents before their release.

Aaron Swartz' Death Fuels MIT Probe, White House Petition to Oust Prosecutor

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has launched an internal probe of the events leading up to the suicide of internet activist Aaron Swartz, who was facing federal charges for allegedly hacking into the school's journal archives.

"It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy," MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a statement. "Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT."

Swartz' legal troubles began two years ago when prosecutors said he illegally downloaded millions of scientific journals from MIT and JSTOR, a journal storage repository. Swartz, 26, had been an advocate for open access and the freedom of information online.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/aaron-swartz-death-fuels-mit-probe-white-house/story?id=18210596

As horrible as his death might have been, there may yet be some good that will come of it. Whether Aaron was "suicided" or driven to suicide matters little; what has become clear is the totalitarian objective of information control in what has become a surveillance state. The incident has awakened many and has only speeded the awakening of the sleeping giant called "The People."

The UN has declared Internet access a human right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f79AEPKkOSQ

He left no note. I am not sure I buy the story that he hung himself.

Who hangs them self? That seems so painful.

a hero? another lawbreaker that killed himself rather than face jailtime... i don't see much hero there...

State Dept 'Doesn't Understand what the Internet is'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFsXQXxw0Vs

He was not a lawbreaker. He harmed NO ONE.

I don't believe he killed himself.

He was instrumental in stopping a bill that would sensor the Internet.

Yes he is a hero.

The prosecution of Aaron Swartz was malicious and uncalled for. JSTOR decided not to press charges and urged the US to drop the case.

Information should be free. That's my opinion. One day it will be. That's my dream.




US court drops charges on Aaron Swartz days after his suicide


A federal court in Massachusetts has dismissed the hacking case against Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on January 11 while facing decades behind bars and a $1 million fine.
The dismissal follows an investigation into Swartz's involvement in the theft of content hosted on JSTOR, a digital archive used by universities and other research institutions. Swartz, who was living in New York City at the time of his death, had accessed JSTOR through the Massachusetts Institute of Techn

Though JSTOR decided not to press charges – and even urged the US government to drop the case – MIT went ahead with a civil suit. As a result, Swartz faced serious legal consequences, which observers believe led to his suicide last week.

According to a Huffington Post report, Swartz's defense team suspected federal attorneys were using Swartz as an example to show how serious they could be with online crime cases.
US attorney Stephen Heymann pursued Swartz because the case "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper," Swartz's lawyer Elliot Peters said.

http://rt.com/usa/news/swartz-suicide-court-drops-charges-997/

Stephen Heymann rot in hell.

Aaron Swartz’s Unbending Prosecutors Insisted on Prison Time

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/15/aaron-swartz-s-unbending-prosecutors-insisted-on-prison-time.html

Swartz faced tough U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and her assistant Stephen Heymann, who rejected any deal that did not involve a prison sentence—which may have helped drive the cyber programmer to despair.

___________

What a jerk.

Aaron Swartz is fighting for Internet freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of access to information, education etc. and this Attorney Stepehn Heymann wants to put him in jail.

I see a lot of bad karma headed in his direction.

If he did it wouldn't surprise me cause a lot of geniuses do that.

Aaron Swartz’s Death Should Change America’s Absurd Legal System

Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s death quickly became a cause célèbre for the open information movement, but what if we took the lesson of overzealous prosecutors and reformed our justice system?

Few journalists were familiar with Aaron Swartz before the 26-year-old activist and programmer took his own life last Friday. But there he was, nestled between a photograph of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler at the Golden Globe Awards and an article on Federalism, on the front page of The New York Times, a primer for those non-Internet types on how a troubled genius, through the act of hanging himself, had transmuted into a “cause” and an Internet martyr.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/15/aaron-swartz-s-death-should-change-america-s-absurd-legal-system.html?obref=obinsite

Even before his tragic suicide, Swartz was something of hero to his comrades in the open-access movement, which demands, as he wrote in a 2008 manifesto, that “information locked up by [academic] publishers” should be freely exchanged, unfettered by profit-motivated corporations. The inventor of RSS 1.0, a popular method of aggregating news stories, and the co-founder of the hugely influential website Reddit, he eschewed the big paydays of Silicon Valley for the comparatively ascetic life of a “hacktivist” who agitated for the “liberation” of information, copyright statutes be damned.


While WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sucked up the media oxygen, Swartz labored in relative obscurity—until he was arrested in 2011 for illegally downloading 4.8 million scholarly articles from the subscription-only archive JSTOR through an M.I.T. computer, with the intention of setting them free into the wilds of the Internet. While JSTOR refused to “pursue further action,” the United States attorney would aggressively prosecute Swartz on charges carrying a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison.

Read the rest:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/15/aaron-swartz-s-death-should-change-america-s-absurd-legal-system.html?obref=obinsite

why was he facing life in prison then? because he broke the law, plain and simple...why don't you post how he was instrumental in stopping this "bill"?

If you would read the links I posted you can hear all about it.

He was facing prison because he was being made an example of by some gung ho prosecutor named Stephen Heymann who insisted on jail time and trumped up the charges to increase the time.

[[[Banksters literally steal billions of dollars from people (for themselves) and they end up with a fine, no jail time.]]]

He simply downloads information to give it away and they want to put him in jail for 35 years? That's malicious.

They wanted to make an example out of him. How dare anyone stand in the way of a bill that will sensor the Internet and put an end to free speech?

Read the links before you shoot off your mouth.

He was a hero even before he died.

He is an activist fighting for free speech and free Internet and they didn't like him for it. They want to control everything.

He committed no real crime. A crime requires a victim.

The punishment does not fit the crime. He was targeted because someone didn't like how his petition and website literally stopped the bill that would have censored the Internet for any bogus copyright claim.

Congress and the legislators do not understand the Internet or cyberspace. When documents were stolen and posted to wikileaks they demanded that the documents "be returned."

LOL that is so funny.

Once something is released out there in cyber space, being copied over and over and over to people's computers... there is no way it can be returned.

And these are the people who think they can control and regulate the Internet. They are idiots. A ten year old knows more about the Internet than most of those old coots do.


State Dept 'Doesn't Understand what the Internet is'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFsXQXxw0Vs

i see you don't understand what a crime is either...

No, you don't understand the rule of law.

A crime requires a victim.

What you think are 'laws' are uniform commercial codes. UCC.

There are so many of them, you are probably breaking a few in every hour of every day.