<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><br><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);"><b>Resent-From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><a href="mailto:nettime@kein.org">nettime@kein.org</a><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Felix Stalder <<a href="mailto:felix@openflows.com">felix@openflows.com</a>><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: <nettime> RIP: Aaron H. Swartz (November 8, 1986 -- January 11, 2013)</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">January 13, 2013 9:21:21 AM GMT+00:00<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><b><br></b></font></div><div><br>[The prosecution of Swartz by the DOJ and the unwillingness of MIT<br>(which prides itself on its hacker tradition) to support him, shines<br>a light of another of the many layers of cooperation between the<br>security apparatuses and academia. See the statement of the family at<br>the end of this article.]<br><br><br>The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz<br><br>The internet freedom activist committed suicide on Friday at age 26,<br>but his life was driven by courage and passion<br><br>Glenn Greenwald<br><br><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1</a><br><br>Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer and internet freedom activist,<br>committed suicide on Friday in New York at the age of 26. As the<br>incredibly moving remembrances from his friends such as Cory Doctorow<br>and Larry Lessig attest, he was unquestionably brilliant but also<br>- like most everyone - a complex human being plagued by demons and<br>flaws. For many reasons, I don't believe in whitewashing someone's<br>life or beatifying them upon death. But, to me, much of Swartz's<br>tragically short life was filled with acts that are genuinely and, in<br>the most literal and noble sense, heroic. I think that's really worth<br>thinking about today.<br><br>At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role in developing the RSS<br>software that is still widely used to enable people to manage what<br>they read on the internet. As a teenager, he also played a vital role<br>in the creation of Reddit, the wildly popular social networking news<br>site. When Conde Nast purchased Reddit, Swartz received a substantial<br>sum of money at a very young age. He became something of a legend<br>in the internet and programming world before he was 18. His path to<br>internet mogul status and the great riches it entails was clear, easy<br>and virtually guaranteed: a path which so many other young internet<br>entrepreneurs have found irresistible, monomaniacally devoting<br>themselves to making more and more money long after they have more<br>than they could ever hope to spend.<br><br>But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in devoting his life<br>to his own material enrichment, despite how easy it would have been<br>for him. As Lessig wrote: "Aaron had literally done nothing in his<br>life 'to make money' . . . Aaron was always and only working for (at<br>least his conception of) the public good."<br><br>Specifically, he committed himself to the causes in which he<br>so passionately believed: internet freedom, civil liberties,<br>making information and knowledge as available as possible. Here<br>he is in his May, 2012 keynote address at the Freedom To Connect<br>conference discussing the role he played in stopping SOPA, the<br>movie-industry-demanded legislation that would have vested the<br>government with dangerous censorship powers over the internet.<br><br>Critically, Swartz didn't commit himself to these causes merely by<br>talking about them or advocating for them. He repeatedly sacrificed<br>his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values<br>and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their<br>enemies. That's what makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic.<br><br>In 2008, Swartz targeted Pacer, the online service that provides<br>access to court documents for a per-page fee. What offended Swartz and<br>others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court<br>documents that were created at public expense. Along with a friend,<br>Swartz created a program to download millions of those documents and<br>then, as Doctorow wrote, "spent a small fortune fetching a titanic<br>amount of data and putting it into the public domain." For that act of<br>civil disobedience, he was investigated and harassed by the FBI, but<br>never charged.<br><br>But in July 2011, Swartz was arrested for allegedly targeting JSTOR,<br>the online publishing company that digitizes and distributes scholarly<br>articles written by academics and then sells them, often at a high<br>price, to subscribers. As Maria Bustillos detailed, none of the<br>money goes to the actual writers (usually professors) who wrote the<br>scholarly articles - they are usually not paid for writing them - but<br>instead goes to the publishers.<br><br>This system offended Swartz (and many other free-data activists)<br>for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles<br>but did not compensate the authors, and worse, it ensured that huge<br>numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by<br>America's colleges and universities. The indictment filed against<br>Swartz alleged that he used his access as a Harvard fellow to the<br>JSTOR system to download millions of articles with the intent to<br>distribute them online for free; when he was detected and his access<br>was cut off, the indictment claims he then trespassed into an MIT<br>computer-wiring closet in order to physically download the data<br>directly onto his laptop.<br><br>Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded articles. He never<br>intended to profit even a single penny from anything he did, and never<br>did profit in any way. He had every right to download the articles<br>as an authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to violate the<br>company's "terms of service" by making the articles available to<br>the public. Once arrested, he returned all copies of everything he<br>downloaded and vowed not to use them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors<br>that it had no intent to see him prosecuted, though MIT remained<br>ambiguous about its wishes.<br><br>But federal prosecutors ignored the wishes of the alleged "victims".<br>Led by a federal prosecutor in Boston notorious for her overzealous<br>prosecutions, the DOJ threw the book at him, charging Swartz with<br>multiple felonies which carried a total sentence of several decades in<br>prison and $1 million in fines.<br><br>Swartz's trial on these criminal charges was scheduled to begin in<br>two months. He adamantly refused to plead guilty to a felony because<br>he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a convicted felon<br>with all the stigma and rights-denials that entails. The criminal<br>proceedings, as Lessig put it, already put him in a predicament where<br>"his wealth [was] bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the<br>financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking<br>the ire of a district court judge."<br><br>To say that the DOJ's treatment of Swartz was excessive and vindictive<br>is an extreme understatement. When I wrote about Swartz's plight last<br>August, I wrote that he was "being prosecuted by the DOJ with obscene<br>over-zealousness". Timothy Lee wrote the definitive article in 2011<br>explaining why, even if all the allegations in the indictment are<br>true, the only real crime committed by Swartz was basic trespassing,<br>for which people are punished, at most, with 30 days in jail and a<br>$100 fine, about which Lee wrote: "That seems about right: if he's<br>going to serve prison time, it should be measured in days rather than<br>years."<br><br>Nobody knows for sure why federal prosecutors decided to pursue Swartz<br>so vindictively, as though he had committed some sort of major crime<br>that deserved many years in prison and financial ruin. Some theorized<br>that the DOJ hated him for his serial activism and civil disobedience.<br>Others speculated that, as Doctorow put it, "the feds were chasing<br>down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley<br>Manning in the hopes of turning one of them."<br><br>I believe it has more to do with what I told the New York Times' Noam<br>Cohen for an article he wrote on Swartz's case. Swartz's activism,<br>I argued, was waged as part of one of the most vigorously contested<br>battles - namely, the war over how the internet is used and who<br>controls the information that flows on it - and that was his real<br>crime in the eyes of the US government: challenging its authority<br>and those of corporate factions to maintain a stranglehold on that<br>information. In that above-referenced speech on SOPA, Swartz discussed<br>the grave dangers to internet freedom and free expression and assembly<br>posed by the government's efforts to control the internet with<br>expansive interpretations of copyright law and other weapons to limit<br>access to information.<br><br>That's a major part of why I consider him heroic. He wasn't merely<br>sacrificing himself for a cause. It was a cause of supreme importance<br>to people and movements around the world - internet freedom - and he<br>did it by knowingly confronting the most powerful state and corporate<br>factions because he concluded that was the only way to achieve these<br>ends.<br><br>Suicide is an incredibly complicated phenomenon. I didn't know Swartz<br>nearly well enough even to form an opinion about what drove him to<br>do this; I had a handful of exchanges with him online in which we<br>said nice things about each other's work and I truly admired him. I'm<br>sure even his closest friends and family are struggling to understand<br>exactly what caused him to defy his will to live by taking his own<br>life.<br><br>But, despite his public and very sad writings about battling<br>depression, it only stands to reason that a looming criminal trial<br>that could send him to prison for decades played some role in this;<br>even if it didn't, this persecution by the DOJ is an outrage and an<br>offense against all things decent, for the reasons Lessig wrote today:<br><br> "Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame.<br>For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also<br>the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the<br>government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did<br>in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen',<br>we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with the hint, and<br>then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his<br>crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash<br>of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what<br>this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught<br>the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.<br><br> "A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I<br>have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person<br>is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only<br>call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if<br>you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United<br>States government behind you.<br><br> "For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the<br>financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even<br>those brought to 'justice' never even have to admit any wrongdoing,<br>let alone be labeled 'felons'."<br><br>Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a "justice" system<br>that fully protects the most egregious criminals as long as they are<br>members of or useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but<br>punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness those who lack<br>power and, most of all, those who challenge power.<br><br>Swartz knew all of this. But he forged ahead anyway. He could have<br>easily opted for a life of great personal wealth, status, prestige and<br>comfort. He chose instead to fight - selflessly, with conviction and<br>purpose, and at great risk to himself - for noble causes to which he<br>was passionately devoted. That, to me, isn't an example of heroism;<br>it's the embodiment of it, its purest expression. It's the attribute<br>our country has been most lacking.<br><br>I always found it genuinely inspiring to watch Swartz exude this<br>courage and commitment at such a young age. His death had better<br>prompt some serious examination of the DOJ's behavior - both in his<br>case and its warped administration of justice generally. But his death<br>will also hopefully strengthen the inspirational effects of thinking<br>about and understanding the extraordinary acts he undertook in his<br>short life.<br><br><br>-----------<br><br>UPDATE<br><br>From the official statement of Swartz's family:<br><br> "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the<br>product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and<br>prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the<br>Massachusetts US Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his<br>death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array<br>of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish<br>an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT<br>refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished<br>principles."<br><br>This sort of unrestrained prosecutorial abuse is, unfortunately, far<br>from uncommon. It usually destroys people without attention or notice.<br>Let's hope - and work to ensure that - the attention generated by<br>Swartz's case prompts some movement toward accountability and reform.<br><br><br><br><br><br>-- <br><br>-|- http://felix.openflows.com ------------------------ books out now:<br> |<br>*|Cultures & Ethics of Sharing/Kulturen & Ethiken des Teilens UIP 2012<br>*|Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa. transcript 2012<br>*|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studienv. 2009<br>*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions. Scheidegger&Spiess2008<br>*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society.Polity P. 2006<br>*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed Futura / Revolver, 2005<br> |<br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>