Who Killed Aaron Swartz? VT article.

[spiritguide]

Lead in...

”How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”—Bob Marley



“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”—Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 1863

On January 11, 2013, according to indoctrination organs of the criminal Syndicate calling itself the US government (a Syndicate comprised, for the most part, of big bankers, generals, spooks and, below them, their puppets in the White House and gubernatorial mansions, Congress and state legislatures, and almost the entire judiciary), Aaron Swartz, aged 26, killed himself.

Many on the internet have already traced Aaron’s tragic and untimely death directly to the Syndicate. I wish to add my voice to this growing chorus, placing this recent event in a somewhat larger context of historical scholarship.

In relating this story, the Syndicate’s propaganda organs conveniently forgot four crucial points:

1.The Syndicate had excellent reasons to wish Aaron dead.
2.As in most cases of covert Syndicate assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway), Aaron’s death was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.
3. The Central Institute of Assassinations (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Intimidations (FBI) can and do kill people while making the murder look like suicide.
4.In America, England, and most other countries, painstaking research by people like Kevin Barett, Jim Douglass, Jim Fetzer, Jim Garrison, David Helvarg, and William F. Pepper discloses an unmistakable pattern: influential friends of the people (and hence, enemies of the Syndicate) tend to die before they reach old age, often under bizarre circumstances. This pattern has an obvious corollary: when friends of the Syndicate dies prematurely, we can reasonably assume, with a high degree of probability, that the Syndicate killed them.
Let me expound on these four points, one at a time.

This is a thought provoking article to read. IMHO

Link... http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/01/13/who-killed-aaron-swartz/

[Hughe]

Fgh2dFngFsg

[Lifebringer]

His cry was heard in Heaven, and he is among the angels awaiting the time for truth and justice to prevail. Next month, 30 days from now, you will see the passing of Heavenly bodies and no one can deny the truth then. For the center shall align with us and the knowledge and quest for justice and not corruption to pass into the future to enslave, will weigh heavy and spur action.

It is in the Creator's hands, and OUR job is to be witnesses, awaken the sleeple, and call them out. WE are the ones who will be at their mercy, if WE don't step up to the plate. This birthing of peace after a gestation of earth history for rebirth of the spirit, will happen and the last past time, has ticked out in DEC 2012, so b'lieve it, it's here. For all we know, these citizen journalist of truth and freedom, one or two of them may be the last 2 witnesses.

PTW, I rebuke the in the Creator's name. Be gone from our presence, and bannished forever among those who wish for peace, justice and truth and walk in God's enlightened and loving ways. Ye though I walk through the valleys of the shadows of death, I will fear no evil, for they are with me, and are a staff for passage, and a light in our hearts and minds, filled with the loving grace.

Be gone from our children and the generations to come lives, forever in His name.

RIP Aaron, for it is but a moment in time, and you touched and reached and awoke so many. One so small in the cog of truth, has turned all the power and gears of justice on!
First Julian, now Aaron attacked for bringing the truth to the people who pay the research, development, taxes and use their money to make the country more comfortable on safe roads, breatheable air, drinking water. They destroy these resources, to have us pay for them on the shelf every storm.

Be gone spiritual and material "PARASITES OF SLIM" LEAVE THIS PLANET NOW!

[spiritguide]

If anyone deserves the American Freedom Medal it is this man! One vanguard among many defending our rights and educating us on noticing government abuses before they happen. Anyone involved with the internet whatsoever owes this person a great bit of gratitude for his valor to speak truth to the power freaks.

Thank you Aaron for being amongst us!

Definition reflecting his valor-
mar·tyr (märtr)
n.
1. One who chooses to suffer death rather than renounce religious principles.
2. One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.3.
a. One who endures great suffering: a martyr to arthritis.
b. One who makes a great show of suffering in order to arouse sympathy.
tr.v. mar·tyred, mar·tyr·ing, mar·tyrs
1. To make a martyr of, especially to put to death for devotion to religious beliefs.
2. To inflict great pain on; torment

[Bill Ryan]

-------

This article is so important, that with thanks and respect to spiritguide, who started this thread, I am formatting and re-posting it in full.

http://veteranstoday.com/2013/01/13/who-killed-aaron-swartz
Who Killed Aaron Swartz?

http://www.veteranstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/AaronSwartz4.jpg

On January 11, 2013, according to indoctrination organs of the criminal Syndicate calling itself the US government (a Syndicate comprised, for the most part, of big bankers, generals, spooks and, below them, their puppets in the White House and gubernatorial mansions, Congress and state legislatures, and almost the entire judiciary), Aaron Swartz, aged 26, killed himself.

Many on the internet have already traced Aaron’s tragic and untimely death directly to the Syndicate. I wish to add my voice to this growing chorus, placing this recent event in a somewhat larger context of historical scholarship.

In relating this story, the Syndicate’s propaganda organs conveniently forgot four crucial points:


The Syndicate had excellent reasons to wish Aaron dead.
As in most cases of covert Syndicate assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway), Aaron’s death was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.
The Central Institute of Assassinations (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Intimidations (FBI) can and do kill people while making the murder look like suicide.
In America, England, and most other countries, painstaking research by people like Kevin Barett, Jim Douglass, Jim Fetzer, Jim Garrison, David Helvarg, and William F. Pepper discloses an unmistakable pattern: influential friends of the people (and hence, enemies of the Syndicate) tend to die before they reach old age, often under bizarre circumstances. This pattern has an obvious corollary: when friends of the Syndicate dies prematurely, we can reasonably assume, with a high degree of probability, that the Syndicate killed them.

Let me expound on these four points, one at a time.


1. The Syndicate had excellent reasons to kill Aaron Swartz

In an online “manifesto” dated 2008, Aaron wrote (http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/internet-activist-programmer-aaron-swartz-dead-at-26/31152/): Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” He dedicated his life precisely to the goal of depriving the Syndicate of this power.
According to Wikipedia,
Swartz co-authored the “RSS 1.0″ specification of RSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS), and built the website framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Library). Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.
“Swartz’s (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/12/169235633/aaron-swartz-reddit-cofounder-and-online-activist-dead-at-26?sc=emaf) Web savvy took him from Internet entrepreneur to online activist, co-founding Demand Progress, a group that campaigns for progressive public policy — in particular fighting against Internet censorship. His crusades boosted his status as something of a folk hero.” Demand Progress had over one million members.

This figure of 1,000,000 is extremely important, for it shows, beyond all doubt, that, like John Lennon and President Kennedy, Aaron posed a real threat to the status quo. This threat is acknowledged by the Syndicate’s own indoctrination organs. For instance, National Propaganda Radio (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/12/169235633/aaron-swartz-reddit-cofounder-and-online-activist-dead-at-26?sc=emaf) put it thus:

“Swartz had an enormous following in the technology world” and was one of the “most influential figures in talking about technology’s social, cultural and political effect.” The independent Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://news.sky.com/story/1037210/aaron-swartz-family-blame-prosecutors-for-death) concurs: Swartz “did more than almost anyone to make the internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way.”

As well, Aaron spoke (http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/01/13/283254/us-kill-list-critic-found-dead-in-ny/) against US President Barack Obama’s “kill list” and cyber attacks against Iran.

Aaron was (http://www.aaronsw.com/) “a frequent television commentator and the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. He also served on the board of Change Congress, a good government nonprofit.”


2. Syndicate harassment

As mentioned, government assassinations of dissidents are often preceded by a campaign of terror, intimidation, slander-mongering, litigation, physical intimidation, and incarceration. Aaron’s “suicide” fits this pattern perfectly.

The Syndicate made it clear that Aaron was in its crosshairs. Thus, Syndicate members, especially “the Motion Picture Association of America and United States Chamber of Commerce, have stated their opposition to Demand Progress on numerous occasions, mainly in respect to their stance on internet censorship.”

In 2009, the FBI put him under “investigation” (a euphemism for harassment of activists) for publicly releasing 20% of United States Federal Court documents. The “case” was closed two months later, without filing any charges but not, of course, without making Aaron pay dearly for his idealism.

The entire exercise had nothing to do with breaking laws, or justice, but a warning: “Stop harassing us,” the Federal Bureau of Intimidation was telling him, “or else!” And yet, just like a tree standing by the waters, Aaron was not moved. Despite the extreme pressure he was under, Aaron Swartz (like Bradley Manning and many other unsung heroes) remained defiant and, in late October 2009, posted (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/12/169235633/aaron-swartz-reddit-cofounder-and-online-activist-dead-at-26?sc=emaf) his FBI file on the internet. With this single act of defiance, Aaron probably signed his own lynch warrant.

In connection with his public-spirited Open Library project, whose goal is “to create a free webpage for every book ever published” and to have as many books as possible freely available, Swartz allegedly downloaded four million restricted-access academic articles from the website of a non-profit organization called JSTOR, with the intention, according to the American government, of making these articles freely available to the world’s people (as, by the way, they would have been in any half-civilized society—can anyone imagine Archimedes or Aristarchus or Euclid or Sappho copyrighting their works?), for which “crime” he faced a potential 50(!) years behind bars. Swartz, moreover, denied the Syndicate’s allegations.

And, two days before his death, JSTOR, the organizational “victim” of Aaron’s theft, not only declined to press charges against him, but “announced that the archives of more than 1,200 of its journals would be available to the public for free.” Yet, that act of generosity and public spiritedness meant nothing to the Syndicate’s “justice” system, which continued to turn Aaron’s life into a living hell. And there is yet another curious aspect of this act. Most of us spend an entire lifetimes without ever accomplishing anything like it: cajoling a huge organization to place the public interest above its own. Are we to believe that, just two days after this momentous victory, instead of being jubilant, Aaron was depressed enough to hang himself?


3. Can the CIA or FBI kill you and make it look like a suicide?

The obvious answer is: sure they can. One quote, straight from the horse’s mouth, should suffice. Jim Marrs and Ralph Schuster cite (http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n2/deaths.html) a blood-curdling CIA document, a letter from an Institute consultant to a CIA officer. The letter states:
”You will recall that I mentioned that the local circumstances under which a given means might be used might suggest the technique to be used in that case. I think the gross divisions in presenting this subject might be:


bodies left with no hope of the cause of death being determined by the most complete autopsy and chemical examinations
bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate accidental death
bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate suicidal death.”


4. A Historical pattern: Influential enemies of the Syndicate (=friends of the people) tend to die prematurely. The only logical and unspeakable explanation for this pattern is this: These friends of the people have been killed by their own government

I have in front of me a rough draft of a book: License to Kill: The Decisive Role of Political Murders, Scandal-Mongering, and False-Flag Operations in American Politics, a compilation of hundreds of untimely deaths of potentially troublesome dissidents. This compilation conclusively uncovers a recurring pattern of assassinations. In fact, only a handful of influential friends of the people (e.g., Upton Sinclair, Pete Seeger) have so far survived to old age. I can’t reproduce the entire book here, for obvious reasons. Moreover, at the moment it only exists as a rough draft. In a few months, hopefully, readers can freely download the book and check this claim for themselves.

In the meantime, readers can, without too much trouble, examine on their own some of the most famous assassinations of the last 100 years or so and ask themselves: What do people like Judi Bari, Fred Hampton, assorted members of the Kennedy clan, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Louis McFadden, Phil Ochs, Karen Silkwood ,Walter Reuther, and Malcolm X have in common?

Another shortcut to grasping this diabolical aspect of our body politic is asking the converse question: How many friends of bankers, generals, and spooks have, in the same time period, been assassinated? (The answer, to my knowledge, is: ZERO).

All I’m saying has been discovered and re-discovered by hundreds of researchers, activists, and politicians. Here, let me give you the views of just two high-ranking officials.

First, a familiar quote from Woodrow Wilson (28th president of the United states)
“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
Second, Catherine Austin-Fitts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pudykXGTDtg) (Assistant Secretary of Housing in the George H. W. Bush’s Administration:
“I think at the heart of the matter, Max, is not that the banks are out of control; I think the heart of the matter is physical violence, because a lot of what has happened, particularly as I understand in the United States is you have people who are afraid to say no because the results of saying no is physical violence directed at them or their family. I mean we have had a lot of people murdered or assassinated, etc., etc.. So . . . yes, we have to say no, but the question is, how do we say no? And that’s why it comes down to shifting our money, but the reality is we have a force operating in the world, that is completely operating outside of the law and no one yet has come up with a way to stop it. We are talking about violent mobster operations.

“I hate to use a personal example, but I was a former Assistant Secretary of Housing. I had my own business in Washington, and I was helping the Department of Housing and Urban Development, essentially run things clean, and you had to get rid of the clean team to run the housing bubble and I was targeted, I was poisoned, I had dead animals left on my doorstep, and my home had been broken into and people trying to run me off the road. You know it was very, very violent and it went on for years. So people who try to run the government clean or run Wall Street clean are targeted, and literally have to fear for their lives. I mean, people have been dying, so you know, it’s a very, very dangerous situation and the challenge is, if you have people who can kill and physically harass with impunity, how do you run a governance process?

Conclusion

The bankers, generals, and spooks who comprise our invisible government had plenty of reasons to kill Aaron Swartz, especially because the internet—along with a well-armed citizenry—are the last remaining obstacles on the road to their totalitarian horizon. He was creative, idealistic, and unbendable. He was young and admired by many. If not checked, he might have slowed down the Syndicate’s attacks on the biosphere, freedom, peace, justice, free flow of information, and common decencies. So the invisible government probably did kill him. They did so either indirectly through constant harassment, as his loved ones publicly state (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/12/169235633/aaron-swartz-reddit-cofounder-and-online-activist-dead-at-26?sc=emaf), or, most likely, directly by hanging him and alleging that he hung himself.

All this raises a dilemma for those of us possessing both conscience and a functional brain: “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”

[EYES WIDE OPEN]

This makes me so, so angry.

[Spiral]

This makes me so, so angry.

Unfortunately thats exactly what they want, if you hate them you are bonded to them & their paradigm.


The obvious answer is: sure they can. One quote, straight from the horse’s mouth, should suffice. Jim Marrs and Ralph Schuster cite a blood-curdling CIA document, a letter from an Institute consultant to a CIA officer. The letter states:

”You will recall that I mentioned that the local circumstances under which a given means might be used might suggest the technique to be used in that case. I think the gross divisions in presenting this subject might be:

bodies left with no hope of the cause of death being determined by the most complete autopsy and chemical examinations
bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate accidental death
bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate suicidal death.”

They can also "remote influence" people into depression, suicide & even heart failure.

[PurpleLama]

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Demand Progress’s Aaron Swartz. Friends and family have issued a statement and created a memorial page, here.

We are conferring with Aaron's family, friends, and colleagues about several ways in which we might honor him and help ensure that the injustices that weighed so heavily on him are addressed. We will have more news to share in the coming days.

Aaron was a dear friend, and an ideological brother in arms. As others have spoken to at great length, he was indeed a passionate advocate for access to information and for a free and open Internet. He believed in these things for their own sakes, but moreover as means towards the even deeper end of building a world defined by social and economic justice.

He resisted the impulse to presume that he alone was responsible for his brilliance or should benefit therefrom, and he wasn’t a techno-utopian: He was a communitarian, somebody who was deeply aware of our world’s injustices and who understood the constant struggle that is necessary to even begin to remedy them. That’s why this organization exists.

We’ve worked closely with Aaron over the last two or three years, but have not known him for as long as have some others who’ve written profoundly moving tributes to him and his life’s work. We met him as a genius, but not as the boy-genius that Larry and Cory and many others knew, and we would suggest reading their pieces, which may be found at the bottom of our home page, for deeper insight into his personal and professional evolution.

We first encountered Aaron through our executive director’s unsuccessful run for Congress in 2010. Aaron became a fixture in the campaign office, rigging up cheap ways to do polling and robo-calls and helping give the uphill effort a fighting chance. But it was never about just one campaign: He was honing skills and tools he wanted to use to build capacity for much broader social movements that would create fundamental, structural change. He’d taken to calling himself an “applied sociologist.” He was trying to hack the world, and we were happy to help in what small ways we could.

That campaign work quickly transitioned into Demand Progress and Aaron’s conception of the initial petition in opposition to the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act, and then the ensuing 18 months of activism that helped bring down SOPA and PIPA. There are so many stories to tell about that effort: trudging around the halls of the Capitol, getting under the skin of intransigent senators, generally scrapping away as we struggled to build a movement against all odds. Many of them are best told by Aaron himself, here.

But Aaron’s legal troubles began approximately commensurate with the launch of that anti-COICA petition, and it was clear that his persecution by an institutionally corrupted criminal justice system weighed heavily on him throughout the last two years, and certainly more so of late.

As we noted above, we are working with Aaron’s friends, family, and colleagues to determine how best to pay tribute to him — it will surely entail engaging in political activism in service of making this world a more just one. We will be in touch with our members and the general public in the near future to offer suggestions about ways to move forward. Tragically, we’ll have to continue to stifle the visceral impulse to run our half-formed ideas by Aaron, to help us make them better ones.

In the meantime, Aaron had deep respect for GiveWell. Those seeking to donate in his name might consider giving to the charities they recommend.

This is an email sent out to those signed up with Demand Progress.

[Anchor]

I just want to copy this (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?54296-Aaron-Swartz-hero-of-the-internet-dies-at-26.&p=615598&viewfull=1#post615598)from the other Aaron Swartz thread.

Apparently this was a statement from the family:


Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. 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. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

The family said that Aaron's funeral will be held in Highland Park, IL, on Tuesday January 15.


How much prison time does a convicted rapist serve? Yet for what they were prosecuting him for, was effectively computer misuse.

They (the state, which he became an enemy of) dare not state the real reason. I am sure that the real reason was that Aaron wanted to circumvent the states control of academic information (via JSTOR) - its not even about money - its about knowing who is reading what. Aaron Swartz intended to remove that control.

IMO, Aaron Swartz was driven to suicide. He was driven to suicide by an aggressive and mean bunch of m*****f**c*rs. Tactics that are no stranger to Avalon.

Obviously, he was a hero. There is no question in my mind. From his work on RSS at the tender age of 14, and his many other actions - a hardcore "evolved" soul.

Information wants to be free. One day it will be, and actions like those taken by Aaron ensure that day gets nearer and nearer.

[Camilo]

I wish to share this communication I just received:

Dear All:


We are deeply saddened by the passing of Demand Progress’s Aaron Swartz. Friends and family have issued a statement and created a memorial page, here.

We are conferring with Aaron's family, friends, and colleagues about several ways in which we might honor him and help ensure that the injustices that weighed so heavily on him are addressed. We will have more news to share in the coming days.

You can click here to sign up for updates about how we intend to move forward.

Aaron was a dear friend, and an ideological brother in arms. As others have spoken to at great length, he was indeed a passionate advocate for access to information and for a free and open Internet. He believed in these things for their own sakes, but moreover as means towards the even deeper end of building a world defined by social and economic justice.

He resisted the impulse to presume that he alone was responsible for his brilliance or should benefit therefrom, and he wasn’t a techno-utopian: He was a communitarian, somebody who was deeply aware of our world’s injustices and who understood the constant struggle that is necessary to even begin to remedy them. That’s why this organization exists.

We’ve worked closely with Aaron over the last two or three years, but have not known him for as long as have some others who’ve written profoundly moving tributes to him and his life’s work. We met him as a genius, but not as the boy-genius that Larry and Cory and many others knew, and we would suggest reading their pieces, which may be found at the bottom of our home page, for deeper insight into his personal and professional evolution.

We first encountered Aaron through our executive director’s unsuccessful run for Congress in 2010. Aaron became a fixture in the campaign office, rigging up cheap ways to do polling and robo-calls and helping give the uphill effort a fighting chance. But it was never about just one campaign: He was honing skills and tools he wanted to use to build capacity for much broader social movements that would create fundamental, structural change. He’d taken to calling himself an “applied sociologist.” He was trying to hack the world, and we were happy to help in what small ways we could.

That campaign work quickly transitioned into Demand Progress and Aaron’s conception of the initial petition in opposition to the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act, and then the ensuing 18 months of activism that helped bring down SOPA and PIPA. There are so many stories to tell about that effort: trudging around the halls of the Capitol, getting under the skin of intransigent senators, generally scrapping away as we struggled to build a movement against all odds. Many of them are best told by Aaron himself, here.

But Aaron’s legal troubles began approximately commensurate with the launch of that anti-COICA petition, and it was clear that his persecution by an institutionally corrupted criminal justice system weighed heavily on him throughout the last two years, and certainly more so of late.

As we noted above, we are working with Aaron’s friends, family, and colleagues to determine how best to pay tribute to him — it will surely entail engaging in political activism in service of making this world a more just one. We will be in touch with our members and the general public in the near future to offer suggestions about ways to move forward. Tragically, we’ll have to continue to stifle the visceral impulse to run our half-formed ideas by Aaron, to help us make them better ones.


Sorry the links didn't post correctly.

[Cidersomerset]

RT touches on why ...........

The federal prosicutor was after him !!
To put him in prison for 35 years !


0ZNF51QlNTs

Published on 14 Jan 2013


On Friday, Aaron Swartz's body was found in his Brooklyn home where he committed suicide. Swartz, who was a co-developer of RSS and helped establish the online site Reddit, took his life after facing legal issues for his alleged involvement in a hacking case involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Swartz was being accused of taking documents from protected computers and was later indicted for stealing information from the MIT and it is believed that the Internet prodigy's legal troubles and history of depression lead him to take his own life. Marina Portnaya joins us to take a look back on Swartz's life.

[sleepy]

xxxxx xxxxxx

[CdnSirian]

article by a friend of his:
"To the extent possible under law, Cory Doctorow has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to "RIP, Aaron Swartz."

Update: Go read Lessig: "He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you."

My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I'm still digesting it -- I suspect I'll be digesting it for a long time -- but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.

I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with 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.


But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. He would only eat white food. We'd go to a Chinese restaurant and he'd order steamed rice. I suggested that he might be a supertaster and told him how to check it out, and he did, and decided that he was. We had a good talk about the stomach problems he faced and about how he would need to be careful because supertasters have a tendency to avoid "bitter" vegetables and end up deficient in fibre and vitamins. He immediately researched the hell out of the subject, figured out a strategy for eating better, and sorted it. The next time I saw him (in Chicago, where he lived -- he took the El a long way from the suburbs to sit down and chat with me about distributed hash caching), he had a whole program in place.

I introduced him to Larry Lessig, and he was active in the original Creative Commons technical team, and became very involved in technology-freedom issues. Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible standards he held them (and himself) to.

This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it's a testament to Aaron's intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for this. Many of us "grown ups" in Aaron's life have, over the years, sat down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by Aaron's disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a disappointment in himself and the world.

Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful ****-disturber.

The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.

He also founded a group called DemandProgress, which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress's work was one of the decisive factors in last year's victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that was only the start of his ambition.

I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother to get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be used by committed, passionate candidates who didn't want to end up beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here's what he wrote back:

First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he can do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run and plugs them into a web app he's made for managing their campaigns. It has a database of all the local reporters, so there's lots of local coverage for each of their campaign announcements.

Then it's just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list. Once it's done people you know, it has you go after local activists who are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited, it does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the while, it's doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for all these things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are recruited, it just keeps getting better and better at figuring out what will persuade people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built into a larger game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive, with you always trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.

Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is calculating the optimal places to hold events around the district. The press database is blasting them out -- and the press is coming, because they're actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they're much more like standup or the Daily Show -- full of great, witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they're so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events. And a big part of all of them getting the people there to pull out their smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting more people hooked on the game.

He doesn't talk like a politician -- he knows you're sick of politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don't trust a word he says -- and you shouldn't! But here's the difference: he's not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you know how you can tell? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers -- just the kind of thing the current corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover up and that only he is going to fix.

(Obviously shades of Sinclair here...)

also you have to read http://books.theinfo.org/go/B005HE8ED4

For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad for him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the user how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions. Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a free personality test? That's what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn't like, ...) Since it's random, whichever group scores closest to you on the political questions must be most affected by the ad. Then they're bought at what research shows to be the optimal time before the election, with careful selection of television show to maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on Nielsen data.

anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this... hope you're well

This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book. Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.

Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it's at least credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step.

But Aaron was also a person who'd had problems with depression for many years. He'd written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.

I don't know if it's productive to speculate about that, but here's a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you'll think about, too. I don't know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don't know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.

Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn't solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.

Depression strikes so many of us. I've struggled with it, been so low I couldn't see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never thought I would. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan -- all of these have a chance of bringing you back from those depths. Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.

I'm so sorry for Aaron, and sorry about Aaron. My sincere condolences to his parents, whom I never met, but who loved their brilliant, magnificently weird son and made sure he always had chaperonage when he went abroad on his adventures. My condolences to his friends, especially Quinn and Lisa, and the ones I know and the ones I don't, and to his comrades at DemandProgress. To the world: we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.

Goodbye, Aaron. "

from: http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html?utm_campaign=moreatbbmetadata&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=boingboing.net

[ketikoti]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130114/08161821656/why-did-secret-service-take-over-aaron-swartzs-case-two-days-before-he-was-arrested.shtml

Two days before his arrest, the Secret Service took over the investigations, a very unusual affair for someone who was downloading articles in the library.

[ketikoti]

January 15, 2013

Aaron Swartz, Hero and Martyr

Dear Laissez Faire Today Reader,

Jeffrey Tucker

My apologies for the sad tone of this piece, but a hero has fallen and we need to pay him tribute -- and make sure his death is not in vain.

Every turning point in the history of civilization has its champions and its opponents. The opponents of the digital age are those who use the power of the state to keep the population in a state of ignorance, even though the technology is at hand to universalize knowledge through digital networks. The main weapon they use is known as "intellectual property," even though the monopoly censorship they advocate has nothing to do with actual property.

The champions of the digital age are doing the opposite, breaking down the limits and working to spread enlightenment through peaceful means. They understand the astonishing power of computer networks to produce, reproduce, scale, and distribute unto infinity everything that can be rendered into digital form. Their work has set off the greatest migration in human history from the limits of the physical world to the unlimited possibilities embedded in global computer networks.

One such champion -- now a martyr for the cause of freedom -- was Aaron Swartz (1986-2013). He was the one of the brightest stars of his generation. That star took his own life in apparent frustration, depression, and fear over the ghastly hounding he was receiving from the U.S. Department of Justice. You might say that this David should have battled this Goliath to the death. But Aaron was only 26, a brilliant, kind, and sensitive young man whose passion was not war, but enlightenment. It was too much for him.

Born in Chicago, he showed astonishing promise at an early age. He came of age as the Internet opened to the world. He was winning prizes and meeting the greats at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of 13. At 14, he co-authored "Really Simple Syndication," an innovative means of assembling and distributing Web content that makes Web browsing easy. It powers the "app economy," makes reader programs work, and enables the content to be mixed and remixed all over the digital universe.

Aaron founded in Infogami, which later turned into Reddit, one of the Web's most popular sites for information sharing and content generation. As with most of his projects, Reddit pushes aside the gatekeepers and puts the tools of creation in the hands of users. He then founded openlibrary.org on the same principle: By devolving power to you and me and away from the big shots, we can create tools that serve humanity in unprecedented ways.

To Aaron, the digital economy was not really about running the world through code and technology. It was about empowering people themselves with the ability to contribute to the building of ever greater technologies in the service of humanity. As much as he loved code, his true affections were for the human mind and the way technology enables it to take flight as never before. He could never understand why government was in resistance. He was like a person in the Renaissance raised with the printing press, astonished at people who wanted to smash it.

He was so convinced that digits were powered by human minds that he even put it to the test in seeking the real power behind Wikipedia. He refuted the supposition of even co-founder Jimmy Wales that it was a relatively small number of editors who were the main content providers. He demonstrated that the main providers were millions of users themselves, thereby upending even what the owners and experts had supposed. (He was only 19 years old when he showed this.)

Aaron was facing a trial this coming April, with him on one side and the full power of the world's most heavily armed government on the other. The prosecution wanted him fined more than a million dollars and jailed for possibly 30-plus years. And what had he done? He hid a laptop in a closet at MIT and downloaded academic papers that are already available to millions around the world, with the apparent attempt to make them available even more broadly. That's all he did. For this, he was charged with wire fraud and computer fraud.

The database he had tapped into is known as JSTOR. It is a global archive of academic papers published over the last 100 years in all fields and disciplines. It allows students to search, assemble, cite, and study in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Bibliographies that once took months to assemble now take seconds. Research once available to a tiny number is now available to students and faculty the world over.

JSTOR is a mighty service, even a marvel, and there are good reasons to celebrate the company and its achievements. At the same time, there is something squirrely about the service. It is available only at superhigh subscription prices and allocated based on geographic IP address. If you are on campus, you can get the goods. If you are not and have no logins, you are out of luck. Outside the IP range, it's darkness.

Remember, we are talking about scientific research that is mostly tax-funded and from which the authors themselves receive no royalty or payment of any kind. Moreover, the subscription system is made profitable not because of the forces of free enterprise, but because the payments are made largely by public universities also living off taxpayers. The whole thing smacks of a kind of information feudalism. The scientists are the serfs. Those without access are cast into the outer darkness.

To its credit, JSTOR never lifted a finger against Aaron. They knew of his downloads, but never pressed charges. In fact, JSTOR has responded to his activism by gradually moving toward a more open policy. MIT can't say the same, but the real villain here was the federal government. "Stealing is stealing," barked U.S. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz, "whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars."

Except for one thing: That is completely false. Crowbars hurt people. Stealing dollars takes from one person to give to another. But Aaron didn't take anything away from anyone. Ortiz might not understand this, but when you download something, it doesn't actually remove it from the original server. It makes an exact copy. It can do this with no limit. That's the whole power of digital media.

The driving motivation in Aaron's mind was information liberation. We have the capacity -- right now in our times -- to create global libraries of all known things. What's stopping it is this antique institution known as copyright, an outright government privilege for monopolistic producers who use the violence of the state to stop peaceful sharing of knowledge. Aaron was offended by such limits in times when they are wholly unnecessary and cause unneeded human suffering.

Aaron didn't choose the path of piracy and underground hacking to disable the feudalism. He wasn't even particularly exercised about copyright itself. What he favored was freedom, free speech in particular. He sought constructive alternatives, which is why he was a great champion of Creative Commons, a system that uses existing copyright law, but allows writers and researchers to share their discoveries and creations with humanity, instead of having them smothered.

All that said, it wasn't his attempt to liberate JSTOR that caused the government to go after him. No, it was something far more specular. Aaron also founded Common Dreams as a vehicle for digital activism. Much to the astonishment of nearly everyone, he marshaled the power of global networks last year to beat back one of the most deadly pieces of legislation to ever be proposed by Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.

SOPA was at war with the whole idea of information sharing, which is to say the whole basis of modern economic life and cultural progress. It would have given the power to any private party to aggress against any distributor of information and to do so without warnings, hearings, or burdens of proof. Taken to its extreme, the legislation would have rolled back history to a pre-1995 state of being.

Because no one told him that he could not, Aaron used every innovation to stop it. Within a matter of weeks, Congress backed off in absolute fear of the global outrage that had been engendered by the educational materials that Aaron had distributed. What no one expected had happened. Even politicians in the pay of media moguls backed down.

It was beautiful. In doing this, Aaron not only stopped the leviathan state; he pointed to the possibility of something completely marvelous, a reinvention of the way that citizens take part in the political process. In other words, he was showing how computer networks themselves could be used to upend the power of the state as we know it. He was innovating a new form of restraining power and giving it back to people, doing for the business of civic affairs what he had already done with technology.

The establishment was insanely bitter about the defeat. Within days, the government took action against the popular file-sharing site Megaupload in a military-style hit against its founder's private estate, using SOPA-like powers that Congress had just denied the beast. It was as if the establishment was saying, "We don't care about Aaron and what he did. We want this power. We are going to use the power. The people have nothing to do with it."

Aaron's work pointed to a brighter future. The government never forgave him for this. This is why they hounded him. This is why they wanted to bankrupt him. This is why they wanted him behind bars. They wanted him brought low. They wanted him in an orange jumpsuit, eating old bread and groveling before the judges and wardens. And they would accept no compromise, despite his lawyers attempts to negotiate: Aaron must be captured and jailed.

He would not relent. He would not give up his dreams and let them be shattered by their lies, pomps, black robes, and prisons. Our hearts break -- deeply and profoundly -- at Aaron's decision to take his life. Maybe he saw it as a last cry for freedom. His having done so makes it impossible for them to make him a slave.

The state has taken from us an epic genius and humanitarian. What can come of this? Sometimes, the suffering and death of one great individual can shock society into dramatic change in a legal practice. Such people become martyrs, and their memories touch the conscience of everyone. We are overwhelmed by the sense of loss, and we vow to never see its like again.

"The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins." -- Soren Kierkegaard

Yours,

Jeffrey Tucker
The Laissez Faire Club


http://lfb.org/today/aaron-swartz-hero-and-martyr/ (http://lfb.org/today/aaron-swartz-hero-and-martyr/)

[Cidersomerset]

Online Robin Hood Aaron Swartz pushed to suicide by prosecutors?


FX6_6POGlcw

Published on 14 Jan 2013


At the age of 14, Aaron Swartz helped to develop RSS and created a company that later became
known as the website Reddit. The Internet genius was found dead on Friday after he allegedly
committed suicide and it is believed his alleged involvement in a hacking incident with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology pushed him over the edge. Swartz was seen as an
online Robin Hood, but his legal troubles and his ongoing battle with depression lead him to
end his life at the age of 26. RT's Kristine Frazao remembers the Internet activist

[Snookie]

Does anyone find it odd that he died on the 11th? They seem to like to do these things on 11 days. 911, 711, 311 etc...

I tend to agree with the conclusion of the VT article...he didn't commit suicide.

[Hughe]

The Truth about Aaron Swartz's "Crime" (http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/)



I did not know Aaron Swartz, unless you count having copies of a person's entire digital life on your forensics server as knowing him. I did once meet his father, an intelligent and dedicated man who was clearly pouring his life into defending his son. My deepest condolences go out to him and the rest of Aaron's family during what must be the hardest time of their lives.
<snip>
I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged by his attorneys last year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. Until Keker Van Nest called iSEC Partners I had very little knowledge of Aaron’s plight, and although we have spoken at or attended many of the same events we had never once met.

[Ellisa]

The way Aaron Swartz was treated makes me realise that perhaps Julian Assange was right to fight as hard as he has. The penalties for this type of 'crime' are way out of hand, when compared to other sentences that inflict actual injury and pain on others--- and what happened to the idea of having to prove guilt rather than the accused having to defend their innocence?

I think he probably was driven to suicide, he seems, even beforehand, to have had some fragility in his mental state (rather understandably), which makes the whole story even more reprehensible in my opinion.

[SilentFeathers]

Hmmmm?????


U.S. Secret Service documents show that the agency played a key role in the investigation of free-information activist Aaron Swartz and watched his case closely until he committed suicide.

Swartz died in New York City in January as he faced trial on charges he hacked into a Massachusetts Institute of Technology archive of scholarly articles with the aim of making the information freely available.

The documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show the Secret Service field office in Boston secured documents and electronic devices seized during a search of Swartz's home and research office at Harvard University.

Agents also joined local police who interviewed Swartz's associates, including a San Francisco woman who told them that he called her and asked her to call his lawyer to arrange bail.

A co-founder of Reddit and activist who fought to make online content free to the public, his death prompted an outpouring of grief from prominent voices on the intersection of free speech and the Web.

Aaron Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment weeks before he was to go on trial on accusations that he stole millions of journal articles from an electronic archive in an attempt to make them freely available. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.



Read more: http://www.myfoxny.com/Story/23124440/documents-show-secret-service-kept-tab-of-swartz#ixzz2btGA4btl