"Web activist Aaron Swartz takes own life" by Evan Allen | Globe Correspondent, January 12, 2013
Web entrepreneur and political activist Aaron Swartz, who made headlines in 2011 when he was charged with hacking into MIT’s network and mass downloading millions of documents from a subscription-based archive, committed suicide in Brooklyn Friday, according to a statement from his family and partner.
I paid for my printed paper and web access, and I've been run through hoops for it.
Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment Friday, according to the statement and the New York Medical Examiner’s Office.
If that is what really happened. Can't trust the paper or authorities on that stuff anymore.
Related: Globe Making Web Grow Dark
It has for a gleaming star of genius, and we are all the lesser for it.
“We are in shock and have not yet come to terms with his passing,” said Swartz’s family in the statement. The family said they were grateful for their time with him.
“Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable — these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter,” the statement said.
Yeah, those guys always seem to meet with an ill-fate, be it a plane crash, suicide, or lone-nut gunman.
Eulogies for the young man flooded social media Saturday.
“Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep,” read a tweet from the account of Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web.
Swartz was an activist for free information on the Internet. At age 14, he helped develop RSS, a system that quickly distributes updated Web pages to other websites or people.
Oh, do WE EVER OWE HIM a DEBT of GRATITUDE!
According to his online biography, he was the cofounder of online news site Reddit and the founder of nonprofit political action group Demand Progress.
In July 2011, Swartz was charged in US District Court in Boston with hacking into the archive system JSTOR on MIT’s network in 2010 and downloading more than 4 million articles, some of which were only available for purchase.
I PAID for this microphone, Mr. Bu.... oh, sorry, bit of a telling flashback there when you think about it.
Authorities said Swartz planned to distribute the information free on file-sharing websites. At the time, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Honestly, isn't that a LITTLE STEEP when ALL HE DID was SHARE INFORMATION?!?!
I mean, it is NOT LIKE he LIED about WARS that have KILLED MILLIONS, or STOLE TRILLIONS in LOOTING SCHEMES!
According to court documents, Swartz pleaded not guilty to the charges on Sept. 24, 2012. A spokeswoman for the US Department of Justice declined to comment on what will happen with the case pending against Swartz.
In their statement, Swartz’s family slammed his prosecution. “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” reads the statement. “It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.
Yes, ONCE YOU COME INTO CONTACT WITH IT you FIND THAT OUT RIGHT QUICK! Of course, they are WORKING FOR YOU, dear citizen -- and don't you dare question that anywhere but the nebulous region of the blogosphere.
“The US 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, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.”
I've noticed they are quite good at that. Solving real crimes is where they have the problem.
Swartz’s family said he used his skills as a programmer and technologist “to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place.”
Yes, and even if it disappeared overnight as many in government may want sometimes, the knowledge will never be erased. I will never go back to believing,
In a statement on Saturday, MIT encouraged anyone at the college affected by Swartz’s death to contact the campus Mental Health Services.
I guess I'm a little aggravated judging by my commentary this morning.
“MIT is saddened to learn of the death of Aaron Swartz,” read the statement. “This loss of a gifted young person, 26 years old, is a tragedy.”
Rings kind of hollow to me.
In remembrances posted online, Swartz’s friends recalled an intense thinker who could have changed the world.
Hey, maybe it was a suicide; however, I keep growing more suspicious when I read stuff like that.
“Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues,” wrote Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, activist, and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, who said he had known Swartz since Swartz was 14 or 15.
“I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.”
Gee, and who wouldn't have liked that?
Swartz’s funeral will be held Tuesday in Illinois, where he grew up. He will be remembered at Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Ill., according to his family, who have set up a memorial website at rememberaaronsw.com.
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"MIT will investigate its role in Aaron Swartz case; School, US criticized after hacker’s suicide" by Evan Allen | Globe Correspondent, January 14, 2013
The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Sunday that the university will launch a “thorough analysis” of MIT’s involvement in the federal hacking case against computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide Friday.
Swartz’s trial for mass-downloading subscription-based documents from an archive system on MIT’s network was scheduled to begin in April. He faced up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Since Swartz’s death, MIT and the federal government have come under scathing criticism by supporters, and by his family, who released a statement Saturday saying MIT and the US attorney’s office in Massachusetts contributed to Swartz’s death because of “intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”
At a sedate gathering Sunday afternoon attended by a handful of people in a hallway outside the Office of the General Counsel at MIT, supporters of Swartz sat in a circle discussing open-source issues.
MIT president L. Rafael Reif said Swartz was admired by many in the MIT community, even though he had no formal affiliation with the university.
“It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy,” Reif wrote in a letter to the university community.
“Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT,” he wrote....
The Department of Justice could not be reached Sunday and declined to comment on Saturday.
In July 2011, Swartz, who acknowledged battling depression, was charged in US District Court in Boston with hacking into the archive system JSTOR on MIT’s network during 2010 and downloading more than 4 million articles, some of which were only available for purchase.
Prescription drugs possibly involved?
Authorities said Swartz planned to distribute the information free on file-sharing websites. At the time, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
According to court documents, Swartz pleaded not guilty Sept. 24. The case will be dismissed as a result of Swartz’s suicide, his attorney Elliot Peters said in an e-mail Sunday night.
The death of Swartz, a much-loved figure for his staunch belief that information should be free and open for all on the Internet, has rocked the hacking and wider online community.
I AGREE!
In an e-mail, Peters said it was right that MIT was looking into its role in the case.
“[MIT] invited the feds into the situation. The feds then took it over and blew it all out of proportion. . . . In reality, it is unlikely any crime had been committed,” he wrote. “Aaron simply was not a criminal. He was a computer prodigy, an Internet freedom activist, and a sensitive, thoughtful 26-year-old young man. For this case to have contributed in any way to his taking his own life is truly tragic.”
***********************
JSTOR released a statement on its website expressing sorrow about Swartz’s suicide.
“The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into
from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to
the world’s body of scholarly knowledge,” the statement read. “At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly
literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information
entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content.”
Hey, look, I'm all for copyright protections and everything else; however, we are talking about fair use and educational purposes here. There shouldn't be a price on public information.
Btw, you are welcome to take anything or everything you see on this blog, dear reader.
What didn't make my printed paper but made the web:
MIT’s website was down for a few hours Sunday night, and a spokeswoman said she had no information about it. By late evening, several subdomains of the university’s website had been turned into a memorial page for Swartz. The hacker collective Anonymous took responsibility for the action.
Well, you know what that means, right?
Nearly 10,000 people had signed an online petition at We the People — the White House petition-gathering site — by Sunday night urging the Obama administration to remove US Attorney Carmen Ortiz in Massachusetts for “overreach” in Swartz’s case.
Also see: Right to petition White House no laughing matter
Not now.
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And then the questions began because he also questioned Geithner and the Secret Service took over the investigation. Is it possible he was on Obama's kill list?
RELATED: CARTOON – REMEMBER AARON SWARTZ (1986-2013)
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"Aaron Swartz’s prosecution too harsh, critics say; US attorney under fire" by Jenna Russell | Globe Staff, January 14, 2013
The computer crimes allegedly committed by 26-year-old hacker Aaron Swartz became the focus of intense debate by legal experts and Internet activists Monday, three days after Swartz committed suicide while facing federal prosecution and possible jail time for downloading massive numbers of scholarly articles.
The death of the young activist, widely described as a computer prodigy, abruptly ended the case brought against him by the US attorney in Massachusetts, while sparking anguished criticism of the prosecution and the 25-year-old law at its center, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
In the most recent plea negotiations, Swartz’s lawyer said Monday, the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz remained insistent on prison time of four to six months, far less than the 35 years and $1 million fine allowed under federal law but more than Swartz was willing to accept.
Family members called his death “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.” His mentor, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, urged shame on “bullying” prosecutors. And friends and colleagues called for more proportional penalties....
Ortiz’s office continued to decline to comment on the case Monday. A trial had been set to begin in April against the one-time wunderkind, who at 14 helped develop RSS — a groundbreaking technical advancement in how online content is distributed — and went on to help create the social news site Reddit.
The key federal charges against Swartz — wire fraud; computer fraud; unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer — stemmed from his alleged efforts beginning in September 2010 to gain access to an academic database and rapidly download enormous numbers of academic articles normally provided to subscribers in limited quantities.
According to the government’s indictment last fall, Swartz, then a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, used the computer network at MIT to sign in as guest user “Gary Host” and access the scholarly database, known as JSTOR. Well known in Internet circles as an activist for unfettered information access, Swartz may have intended to make the contents widely available for free — but he never got the chance.
Hmmmmmmmm?
After the MIT network detected his efforts and tried to block him, the indictment alleges, Swartz sidestepped them in a series of high-tech maneuvers, ultimately bypassing the guest registration process by entering an MIT computer closet and wiring his laptop directly into the network. Eventually MIT installed a camera in the closet and in January 2011, prosecutors said, he was caught.
MIT said Sunday that it will investigate its involvement in the case, “in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took,” according to a statement by president L. Rafael Reif.
According to the indictment, the user’s agreement for the database prohibits the use of automated programs to download content, and makes clear that violation of the rules could lead to prosecution. But some hacker advocates say it is unconstitutional to criminalize the violation of a private user agreement. In addition, they argue, the federal law is not specific about what constitutes unauthorized access.
Meanwhile, the spy spooks hacking the internet and delivering viruses like Stuxnet, etc, and the government-run(?) pornography sites flourish. What Gauss, I mean, gall.
“There are cases where people try to use creative theories to punish behavior that is not really hacking, which is what the law” was intended to target, said Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, a nonprofit organization that advocates for legislative reform. “It’s difficult to assess his case, because we only have the indictment. . . . There are a lot of questions in his case that never got answers.”
And now we never will.
But Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in a lengthy essay posted online Monday that a detailed analysis shows that the charges against Swartz were fair. For instance, he said, Swartz used false pretenses to obtain articles that JSTOR did not want him to have. He also said that Swartz clearly exceeded his authorized access.
“None of the charges involved aggressive readings of the law or any apparent prosecutorial overreach,” Kerr wrote. “All of the charges were based on established case law. Indeed, once the decision to charge the case had been made, the charges brought here were pretty much what any good federal prosecutor would have charged.”
What about using computers to generate stock trading activity to bolster commissions and s***? Where are the charges there?
But Kerr acknowledged in an interview that the proposed penalties might be a different story. “There was reason to bring criminal charges, but it’s hard to know if the prosecution abused its discretion in terms of a plea offer,” he said.
Leaders of JSTOR had not pushed for Swartz’s federal prosecution, and said in a statement they “regretted being drawn into [the case] from the outset,” given that their “mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge.”
Then why are you limiting access to an elite few?
At the heart of Swartz’s refusal to strike a deal with the government, his lawyer said, was prosecutors’ insistence on felony charges.
Prosecutors offered him two options that “never really changed” during the two years the case went on, said Peters: Swartz could plead guilty to all 13 felony charges and the government would argue for a six-month prison term while Swartz’s lawyers argued for less time; or Swartz could plead guilty to all 13 felonies and accept a sentence of four months. A fine was never specifically discussed as part of the plea agreement.
“I said, how about a misdemeanor and probation, and they said, it will never happen,” Swartz’s lawyer, Elliot Peters, said in an interview Monday. “They said they would never resolve the case without the opportunity to seek a prison sentence.”
Swartz’s response was consistent, Peters said: “He was like, forget it — I’m not going to agree to go to prison and I don’t think I’m a felon.”
But Swartz was scared, his lawyer said, “and I was scared for him, because although I thought we could win — I really did — there’s always a risk, and I wanted to avoid exposing him to that risk.”
The risk is a tampered jury in a kangaroo court, something that happens far to often in important cases here in AmeriKa.
The government last offered the plea deal on Wednesday, said Peters, when the lawyer spoke with prosecutors in preparation for a pretrial hearing. Again, the lawyer said, he appealed to them to “resolve the case in a way that doesn’t destroy his life.” But the offer did not change, and the lawyer did not relay it to Swartz. Two days later, Swartz was dead, found by his girlfriend in their Brooklyn apartment.
Wouldn't she be considered a suspect during at least a cursory examination for foul play? That always happens with those who find the body, and is it also not very odd that there has not even been a question raised regarding the possibility?
I'm sorry, but I no longer accept received wisdom from an agenda-pushing organ known for deception, distortion, obfuscation, and omissions.
His case has become “a lightning rod for people who recognize there are serious problems in the way we prosecute computer crimes,” said Hofmann, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It strikes people, that he was a brilliant, constructive person who made the Internet better. . . . He’s no longer around to make those contributions, and the world will be worse for it.”
You know, Steve Jobs did the same thing and now he is dead.
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"Aaron Swartz’s short life was absorbed in a cyber world; Harnessed rare skill, drew strength from ideals" by Akilah Johnson | Globe Staff, January 15, 2013
Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, a father-figure and friend to Swartz for more than a decade, and others who knew him best say Aaron Swartz grew into a multifaceted intellectual. He not only could build open-source software to help grass-roots organizers launch campaigns, he also immersed himself in reading history — recently on the US Mint — and delivered a trenchant critique on his website about political and economic theory in the “Batman” film trilogy.
I saw some of that and I'm sorry, I didn't read it as a suicide note. I saw it more as a critique of that agenda-pushing pos. And I hate to say it, but looking more and more like the kid had to be rubbed out.
Swartz, who took his own life Friday at age 26 while facing federal charges for hacking into an archive system on MIT’s network, never sought riches or fame, they said. “He did nothing for money. He did everything for changing the world,” Lessig said.
Yet, even some supporters say they did not always agree with Swartz’s means in his quest to ensure information be free and open to all on the Internet....
Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Swartz’s girlfriend, said even as Swartz faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine for the theft of millions of scholarly articles from MIT, he turned his attention to defeating two antipiracy bills: the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, which critics said would give the government too much power to censor the Internet.
We owe him for that, too? And then the government cracked down on him and now he is dead because of depression? And cui bono?
Swartz had also lately taken up unfair sentencing practices in the war on drugs. Swartz interviewed experts and read policy papers, trying to generate solutions.
“He was so happy when he was working on that, so alive and energetic,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman said. “That was the kind of thing he wanted to be doing. He didn’t want to be asking people for money to be funding his legal defense.’’
He may very well have been down, but I'm sorry, it's a stretch to suicide.
Btw, who is this woman? Could she possibly be an agent aimed at the fine young man? Of course, government has never used sex as a cover or done anything nefarious in that direction so what am I thinking?
Swartz, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, was 14 when he helped build RSS, computer software that allows for the distribution of updated Web pages to other Internet sites. The software is considered a major development for the Internet.
He helped me get the word out and accumulate hits!
Four years later, he merged his start-up with Reddit.com, a popular site that allows users to vote for their favorite news stories of the day, and he dropped out of Stanford University.
Swartz was a slip of a man who moved to New York just after the federal indictment for his hacking at MIT. For the last nine months, he developed grass-roots organizing software at Thoughtworks.com, a development company that believes in bringing about societal change through information technology.
I think we have won. No one -- at least, those that care enough (and even those that don't) -- no longer believe authority and government. They may not hassle it, but that doesn't mean they are buying in.
Roy Singham, founder and chairman of Thoughtworks.com, said Swartz understood [that] material created by academics who were not paid or were funded by taxpayer money, he explained, should be accessible to the public without cost.
Oh, I so, so agree and would go even further. Anything in the public realm no matter what the source should be free, especially if I paid for that Globe, Mr. Bush!
Swartz was known to suffer from depression, writing in 2007 on his blog Raw Thought that he had been sick, suffering from a depressed mood, and more recently writing a series of “pieces on getting better at life” that he called Raw Nerve.
But Lessig pleaded in his own online post: “Please don’t pathologize this story.”
“Of course he was depressed,” Lessig said later during a telephone interview, his voice brimming with emotion. “But, was he depressed for a real reason or was this pathological? I think it was a real reason.’’
On Friday, Stinebrickner-Kauffman said, Swartz remained in bed in the Brooklyn apartment they shared, saying he was tired.
“I really tried everything I could think of to get him out of bed,” she said by phone. “I opened the curtains, played music, tickled him, and eventually it got to the point of throwing water on him.”
But Swartz told her he planned to rest for the remainder of the day.
“I was really worried about him. He was in a really difficult place,” said Stinebrickner-Kauffman, 31, who had been Swartz’s girlfriend for about a year and a half. She went to work but was preoccupied and thinking about Swartz.
Why didn't you just call in sick if you were really worried? If telling the truth she seems to be indicating that he wasn't so low as to commit suicide.
She texted him several ideas during the day, but he did not respond. Sometime during the day, he hanged himself.
Did he?
Later on I got to thinking that the kid was really the next Nader, and what I remember about the unreasonable man is GM did throw women at him.
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I will also state this for the record, readers: perhaps the Globe accounts of the story are 100% accurate and factual. The unfortunate aspect is that they have lied about so many things for so long that even if they told God's own truth I wouldn't believe them. If they said the sky was blue on a sunny day I would get out of my chair and go check. As for Swartz's suicide, we will likely never know what happened, and I certainly do not expect to find the truth in my newspaper no matter what it is.
Also see: On humanity, a big failure in Aaron Swartz case
That's because we aren't dealing with human beings when you deal with the system and its supporters anymore:
"US attorney’s husband stirs Twitter storm on Swartz case" by Shelley Murphy | Globe Staff, January 16, 2013
US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz, already under fire after the suicide of a prominent computer hacker that her office was prosecuting, came under more criticism Tuesday when her husband rushed to her defense on Twitter with postings critical of the 26-year-old man’s family.
In one tweet posted late Monday, on the eve of Aaron Swartz’s funeral, Thomas J. Dolan, an IBM executive who married Ortiz in July 2011, wrote: “Truly incredible that in their own son’s obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6-month offer.”
Dolan was referring to a purported offer by prosecutors to recommend a six-month prison term for Swartz, who faced up to 35 years if he agreed to plead guilty to felony charges for using MIT’s computer network to download massive numbers of scholarly articles.
The tweets drew profanity-laced vitriol on Twitter against Dolan and Ortiz, with calls for her to resign and him to be fired.
If they were honorable people they would resign.
“That was so morally devoid. Bad call,” one of the tweets said. “Absolutely despicable,” said another.
And another said: “Wow — @tomjdolan gets the award for Most Tin-Eared Guy on Twitter. . . . I get it’s his wife, but . . . .”
By Tuesday afternoon, Dolan had abruptly deleted his Twitter account. At the same time, Swartz’s father, according to the Chicago Sun Times and Associated Press, was telling mourners at his funeral in a Chicago suburb that his son “was killed by the government.”
He was BULLIED to DEATH by the same government that constantly decries bullying in our society! Or maybe his dad is a conspiracy truther.
Ortiz maintained her silence on the Swartz case and declined to comment on the posts by her husband, who could not be reached. A spokeswoman for Ortiz said Tuesday, “We want to respect the family’s privacy today and we don’t think it’s appropriate to be discussing this right now.”
Swartz, a computer prodigy-turned-cyberactivist who acknowledged battling depression, helped create Reddit and RSS, a groundbreaking technical advancement in how online content is distributed.
He committed suicide in his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment Friday after his lawyers contended that federal prosecutors in Ortiz’s office said they would not agree to a plea deal unless it called for Swartz to plead guilty to felony charges and serve four to six months in prison. Swartz had rejected the plea offer, his lawyer said, and was slated to stand trial in April.
John Summers of Cambridge, a friend of Swartz and editor of The Baffler magazine, said he was disgusted by Dolan’s tweets and the government’s handling of the case and called on Ortiz to offer a public apology.
“I don’t know what world Carmen Ortiz and her husband are living in, but they are not living in our world,” he said.
None of the elite and their servants are.
Swartz never profited from the material he downloaded, was “financially ruined’’ by the federal case, and still needed $100,000 for his defense, said Summers.
“He was looking at entering federal prison and being branded a felon, which would change his life for doing something that is at best the equivalent of trespassing,” he said.
During a press conference Tuesday on an unrelated event, Governor Deval Patrick said he did not want to comment on whether an investigation of Ortiz was warranted because he did not know enough about the case against Swartz.
“I only know what I’ve read in newspaper and see on the news,” Patrick said. “I can only imagine that his family and friends are devastated, and I send them my condolences.”
Never a good place to get to the truth about anything. On the other hand, if you are into deception, distortion, obfuscation, and elitist insults, you'll love it.
Swartz was indicted in July 2011 on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He was accused of using MIT’s computer network while he was a fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics to download academic articles normally provided to subscribers in limited quantities from an online archive system provided by JSTOR.
During the funeral service, Robert Swartz said his son was “hounded by the government,” the Sun Times reported. “He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.”
In defending his wife on Twitter, Dolan was responding to Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp. and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who posted a link to Swartz’s obituary on Saturday that included a statment from the young man’s family.
“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” the family wrote. “It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US 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.”
What is controversial about that?
Btw, if you have noticed, US government is very good at prosecuting "crimes" that have no victim (think drug war). Crimes that have victims, like mortgage-backed security swindles and fraudulent foreclosures, not so good.
In an e-mail to the Globe, Kapor said he posted the link to the obit “because I thought his suicide was a tragedy and the people who went after him did so with very poor judgment.”
Kapor said he does not know Dolan.
After defending his wife with his reply to Kapor’s tweet, Dolan did not respond to the attacks sent his way.
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