2013-03-01

Author: scienceplease 2

Subject: Aaron Swartz facing trumped up charges - suicide

Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 2:09 pm (GMT 0)

Aaron Swartz was fighting against the curtailing of the internet by Government. He was found dead January, 11th, 2013. Wikipedia reports:

Quote:

On the morning of January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment by his partner.[97][98] A spokeswoman for New York’s Medical Examiner reported that he had hanged himself.[69][97][98][99] No suicide note was found.[100]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21001452

Quote:

Aaron Swartz, internet freedom activist, dies aged 26

Aaron Swartz Swartz developed RSS at an early age

Aaron Swartz, a celebrated internet freedom activist and early developer of the website Reddit, has died at 26.

The activist and programmer took his life in his New York apartment, a relative and the state medical examiner said. His body was found on Friday.

Mr Swartz began computer programming as a child, and at 14 co-authored an early version of the RSS specification.

Leading internet figures and friends paid tribute to Mr Swartz via tweets or blogs.

After leaving Reddit, Mr Swartz became an advocate of internet freedom, and was facing hacking charges at the time of his death.

He was among the founders of the Demand Progress campaign group, which lobbies against internet censorship.

The hacking charges relate to the downloading of millions of academic papers from online archive JSTOR, which prosecutors say he intended to distribute for free.

He denied charges of computer fraud at an initial hearing last year, but his federal trial was due to begin next month.

...

A spokeswoman for New York's medical examiner later confirmed to Associated Press news agency that Mr Swartz had hanged himself.

In a statement later on Saturday, Mr Swartz's family praised his "brilliance" and "profound" commitment to social justice and also expressed bitterness toward the prosecutors pursuing the case against him.

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach," the statement said.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee - the British inventor of the world wide web - commemorated Mr Swartz in a Twitter post: "Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep."

Reasonable article here on the court case:

http://news.yahoo.com/why-internet-incensed-suicide-activist-aaron-swartz-114000106.html

HOWEVER...

Many people suspect foul play. Aaron despite his acknowledge fights with depressions could have easily been "suicided" especially when considering no suicide note was found and the monumental pain-in-the-backside to US Goverment and Big Business. Aaron was part of the group that had blocked... SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA, and TPP!

Scott Creighton wrote

Quote:

Aaron Swartz did not take his own life. He was murdered in order to save the state the embarrassment of losing their trumped up trial against him. He faced a maximum of 6 months in jail, reduced to 3 for good behavior as is the law, not 35 years as the complicit press will tell you. (50 years mentioned in some papers).

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman spoke for others, saying "Aaron wanted so badly to change the world. He wanted it more than money. He wanted it more than fame. When things are hard - and he said it is the important things that are hard - you have to lean into the pain."

Does that sound like someone planning suicide?

http://www.chronicle.su/news/aaron-swartz-was-murdered/

Quote:

NEW YORK — After reports of Aaron Swartz’s apparent suicide circulated around the Internet this weekend, investigators found evidence of foul play. A former architect of Reddit, the online forum scandalized earlier this year by child pornography and “creepshots,” Aaron Swartz was widely known for his contributions to anti-copyright activism after stealing millions of files from MIT.

Hackers from Anonymous released a statement on Sunday, “Heavy-handed prosecutors raped the beautiful mind of Aaron Swartz. He later ‘killed himself.’ Are the draconian copyright laws selectively applied to those who threaten the inertia of entrenched power? Certainly. Will they use their sockpuppets and judicial torture system to make YOU kill yourself too? Of course. Will they kill you if you go too far?”

Chronicle Reporters also questioned Julian Assange, sick from months of exile in the Ecuadorean embassy, about the death of Aaron Swartz. “I am not convinced that Aaron Swartz was such a coward he committed suicide due to fear of prison,” said Mr. Assange. “Read his words, and decide for yourself, but I believe Swartz was murdered by a team of copyright assassins who made it all look like a simple suicide. Watch what you say, or you may end up like Aaron Swartz.”

Swartz gave a talk in 2008, mentioning his intention to “ download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.”

Quote:

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.

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.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

In the meantime... US Government makes research freely available online...

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/26/access_to_federally_funded_research_doesnt_honor_aaron_swartz/

And we still need to "Save the internet"...

http://www.savetheinternet.com/sti-home

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