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. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.Anyone who looks to the internet for information and the free exchange of ideas has lost perhaps their biggest ally. Aaron Swartz, computer prodigy and frontline warrior in the fight against internet censorship, has died at the age of 26. The cause of death was suicide by hanging in his apartment in Brooklyn, New York. One could make a compelling case, though, that Swartz was bullied to death by the U.S. justice system.There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
Aaron Swartz, The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Swartz helped develop the RSS (Rich Site Summary) web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as on blog sites like Daily Kos - at the tender age of 14, and went on to found Infogami, which developed into the open-source social news and information site, Reddit. But more than anything Swartz was the social conscience of the internet, a tireless and talented hacker who poured his energy into issues like network neutrality, copyright reform and freedom of information. Among countless causes, he developed the Internet Archive’s free public catalog of books, OpenLibrary.org, and founded Demand Progress, a non-profit group that spearheaded the successful grassroots campaign that shot down the proposed pro-censorship Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Swartz’Guerilla Open Access Manifesto is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the open-culture movement.
Swartz, by his own admission, suffered from bouts of depression, but looming over his head was a federal criminal trial on hacking and fraud charges scheduled to begin next month in Boston. Swartz was charged following a bold stunt in which he downloaded millions of academic journal articles from the JSTOR subscription database with plans to release them to the public. Swartz was all about pushing the limits of intellectual freedom; perhaps this time he pushed them a bit too far.
MIT had a subscription to the JSTOR database, so Aaron brought a laptop onto MIT’s campus, plugged it into the student network and ran a script called keepgrabbing.py that downloaded one article after another. When MIT tried to block the downloads, Swartz secretly wired his laptop to the network from inside a university networking closet and left it there hidden under a box. The laptop was discovered by MIT staff, and Swartz was soon after arrested by campus police.
JSTOR elected not to press charges (on its own initiative the company has now begun offering limited free access to its archive), but MIT, who lost nothing but face, did, and the case was picked up by Massachusetts Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann, the aggressive cybercrime prosecutor who won a record 20-year prison stretch for TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez. Heymann pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, and won indictments against Swartz on 13 counts of wire fraud, computer intrusion and reckless damage, charges that carry a potential punishment of 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. After 18 months of pre-trial motions, the case was set for jury trial beginning April 1.
The suicide of Aaron Swartz is not simply a personal tragedy but a tragedy for all who use the internet to learn, inquire or communicate. Who can say what brilliant innovations Swartz’ selfless efforts might have brought forth over the next half century or so, what essential battles Swartz might have fought on our behalf in the name of unrestricted internet and freedom of information?
But Swartz’ death is also most assuredly the product of a criminal justice system rife with selective enforcement, powerful intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. When the punishment for computer “crimes” such as those with which Swartz were charged is greater than that for convicted murderers and rapists, and when white collar and financial sector criminals such as those who effectively looted the U.S. economy into recession go without prosecution of any kind, there is something fundamentally twisted about our justice system. A justice system with no concept of justice is no system at all.
Aaron Swartz’ commitment to intellectual freedom and social justice was total, and defined his abbreviated life. He fought for a more democratic, open and accountable political system, and he devoted his visionary gifts to developing projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He strove to make the internet and, by extension, the world a place of fairness and equal access to all.
Rest in peace, Aaron Swartz. We owe it, each of us does, to ourselves and to future generations to pick up as best we can the banner he's dropped and keep his struggle, his vision alive.