Skip to main content

Aaron Swartz’s family claims harsh justice system contributed to his death

The family of Internet activist Aaron Swartz claimed on Saturday that an overly harsh justice system contributed to his untimely death. Swartz, 26, was found hanged inside his Brooklyn apartment on Friday.

The Reddit co-founder and RSS co-creator, who by his own admission struggled with depression, was due to stand trial in February over allegations that he stole almost five million scholarly articles from Journal Storage (JSTOR) – via the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) computer network – with the intention of making them available to the public. If found guilty, he may have faced a lengthy prison term.

Related Videos

On Saturday his family and partner released a statement praising Swartz’s “insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance”.

It continued, “We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.”

Strong words, however, were reserved for the US justice system and MIT. “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” it said.

‘Harsh’

“Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death,” the statement continued. “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.”

It closed with the words, “Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.”

Following the announcement of his death on Friday, tributes have been pouring in for Swartz, who was a strong supporter of freedom of information on the web and co-founder of the digital activist outfit Demand Progress, a group which helped to block the controversial House of Representatives SOPA bill last year.

Digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation described him as “extraordinary” and said he “did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way.”

Long-time friend Cory Doctorow said in a post on Boing Boing that even at 14 years old, Swartz had “a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.”

Swartz’s funeral will take place on January 15 in Highland Park, Illinois, where he grew up.

[Image: Sage Ross]

Editors' Recommendations

Here’s how I tracked down the people selling my data, then stopped them
Man using Optery on laptop

Keeping your data private online often feels like walking through a minefield. One wrong step and BOOM! -- heaps of your personal information are suddenly in the wrong hands. For this reason, most of us go the extra mile to ensure our data doesn’t get compromised. We dial up privacy settings to the max, block web trackers, and maybe even browse in incognito mode. But I hate to break it to you: You’ve likely blown up all of that minefield a while ago.

The harsh truth is that there’s a good chance that shady “data brokers” are already trading your identity for pennies on the web, even if you've been super-careful online in the past, like me. I consider myself more privacy-minded than most, but despite all my years of treading softly on the web and locking down my data beneath layers of authentication, I recently discovered that many of my personal details were being collected and traded.

Read more
Will Google ever lose its throne as king of search? Here are its main contenders
Person using Google on a laptop.

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.

Today, Google is synonymous with the web -- but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.

Read more
Amazon to pay customers up to $1,000 in damages for defective items
Amazon logo on the headquarters building.

Amazon will soon start paying customers up to $1,000 if a defective item sold through its site by a third-party merchant causes property damage or personal injury.

The new policy will come into effect on September 1, 2021, and is designed to give shoppers on the online marketplace greater confidence when placing orders with third-party sellers.

Read more