Who was Aaron Swartz?

Aaron Swartz was a smart, talented young man facing a bright and promising future until he was charged with several federal crimes including eleven counts of the Computer fraud and abuse act. (CFAA) These eleven counts carried a hefty million dollar fine and about 35 years in prison.

What crime against humanity did Aaron commit? What horrible things must he have done to be charged so harshly and in turn be pursued so viciously by Federal Prosecutors? To put it simply… he wanted to share knowledge.

The professional life of Aaron Swartz

Aaron from the young age of 14 started working his magic in a very grown up world. He was involved in the creation of RSS ( Real Simple Syndication ) along with a group of successful (adult) professionals that had no idea of his age when the project began. His participation in this group labeled this young man a “tech celebrity” but Aaron was far from done making his mark on the world.

To speak on all of Aarons accomplishments this blog post would have to be a novel… so I will be speaking briefly on this aspect of his life. If you would like more information on the life of Aaron Swartz I would invite you to watch the free documentary on his life The Internet’s Own Boy or to read the book The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz which is a compilation of his writings with a beautiful Introduction written by Lawrence Lessig.

Aaron is widely known for helping to build the foundation of Reddit, for being the original architect of Creative Commons, for founding the online group Demand Progress and for instigating the most successful grass-roots, online campaign ever seen, the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA.

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”

— Aaron Swartz.

Aaron also worked on another project that would not only get him in some pretty steep legal trouble but unfortunately would eventually also cost him his life.

Aaron began to look at institutions that publish academic journals. These journals are a wealth of human knowledge online and largely paid for by taxpayer money or government grants, but unfortunately if you couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars a year or you weren’t affiliated with big western corporations or universities then you couldn’t gain access to these findings

Aaron was at a conference and asked JSTOR how much it would cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity. They said $200 million, and Aaron thought that was absurd. 

-Alec Resnick, Director, Sprout, Friends of Aaron

Aaron had been granted access to the JSTOR digital library through his work with Harvard which gave him the ability to download any of the articles on the JSTOR site but Aaron reportedly wrote a script to download multiple articles at once. He ran this script from a system inside Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) which eventually led to his arrest.

After Aaron Swartz was arrested and charged with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the CFAA, charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.

Federal Prosecution

Aaron surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all counts, and was released on $100,000 unsecured bail. After his arrest, JSTOR released a statement saying that though it considered Swartz’s access to be a “significant misuse” committed in an “unauthorized fashion,” it would not pursue civil litigation against him; MIT did not comment on the proceedings.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Stephen Heymann and Scott Garland were the lead prosecutors, working under the supervision of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz. Ortiz and the U.S. Attorneys office began to pursue Aaron’s case vigorously and viciously (More on this later) and after years of attacking Aaron and his family and friends on January 11, 2013, two years after his initial arrest, Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had reportedly hanged himself.

One of the brightest minds of our time snatched up and stolen from Humanity. But his work and his causes live on.