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Aaron Swartz found out the hard way that you can't expect justice from the Department of Justice: what should the next Aaron Swartz do when facing decades in prison for information activism? 
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The majority of the wealth of human knowledge is owned by a few publishing companies that hoard information and make billions off licensing fees, although most scholarly articles and journals are paid for by taxpayers through government grants.
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Recently, I viewed the compelling documentary "The Internet's Own Son," about the life and untimely death of Internet activist, Aaron Swartz, and it hit home in a couple of unexpected ways. Not only was Swartz raised in a Jewish family in my hometown of Highland Park, Illinois, but coincidentally, we both grew up in the same house, 15 years apart. Aaron's parents, Susan and Robert Swartz, currently reside in the house I consider my own childhood home from 1970-1986. According to Zillow, the ravine-side Highland Park home last sold in 2000, so Swartz's family would have lived there from the time he was about 12 years old until the present.
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In January 2013, Aaron Swartz — hacktivist, inventor and prodigy — hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26. Since his death, the media has tended to interpret Swartz’s suicide as either a limited political critique or an ineffable personal problem. By some accounts, his death was a response to overzealous prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Others read his suicide as the final chapter of his lifetime battle against mental and physical illness. Both these assessments are problematic for their tendency to remember Swartz for the way he died rather than the way he lived.
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With detailed accounts of Swartz’s struggles and triumphs, in addition to photos and surveillance footage of the act that led to his arrest, The Internet’s Own Boy challenges viewers to look at life in the digital age with the conscious awareness of being held responsible for the Internet’s protection, as well as the preservation of Swartz’s legacy and the continuance of his fight for public access to information.
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From
rt
A filmmaker preparing to release a feature-length documentary about Aaron Swartz tells RT that he was amazed by the outpour of support that has helped make his forthcoming flick about the later computer prodigy possible.
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Aaron Swartz, a brilliant young programmer and political activist, lurked on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus for more than three months in late 2010 and the early days of 2011, allegedly downloading 4.8 million articles from an academic journal archive called JSTOR as the university and the archive tried to stop him. After MIT sought help from the police, Swartz was arrested and charged with federal computer crimes that could have put him in jail for years. He committed suicide in January 2013.
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From
rt
The recent anti-NSA, anti-surveillance protests were the latest manifestation of a burgeoning movement for freedom from mass surveillance and the liberation of information.
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One year ago this month, the young Internet freedom activist and groundbreaking programmer Aaron Swartz took his own life. Swartz died shortly before he was set to go to trial for downloading millions of academic articles from servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology based on the belief that the articles should be freely available online. At the time he committed suicide, Swartz was facing 35 years in prison, a penalty supporters called excessively harsh. Today we spend the hour looking at the new documentary, "The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz." We play excerpts of the film and speak with Swartz’s father Robert, his brother Noah, his lawyer Elliot Peters, and filmmaker Brian Knappenberger.
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Last year, Jeanne Spellman came to the first day of the N.H. Rebellion with her friend simply to honor Aaron
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6) The Internet's Own Boy:If “The Social Network” plays like a typical story of today’s technocracy -- one in which a young upstart uses his brilliance in service of gaining wealth and power -- “The Internet’s Own Boy” is the inversion of that story, an exception that, sadly, proves the rule. Aaron Swartz was an Internet pioneer whose love for computers and genius led him to develop an early version of Wikipedia at age 12; help create RSS at 14; in partnership with Lawrence Lessig, develop Creative Commons at 15; and by 19, co-found and sell Reddit for a small fortune. But instead of continuing to increase his personal wealth, Swartz turned to political activism, pushing for progressive policy change and fighting to keep the Internet an open, free source of information. “The Internet’s Own Boy” traces Swartz’s far-too-short life, from precocious young computer prodigy to government-pursued hacktivist. The film is a startling story of a talented visionary who, facing punishment that suggests the government decided to make a example of him at any cost, killed himself at just 26 years old.
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The story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life at the age of 26.
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The CFAA (U.S.C. § 1030), originally enacted in 1986, makes it a federal crime to “access a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access.” Dubbed informally as the “federal anti-hacking law,” the CFAA does not narrowly define what “without authorization” or “exceeding authorized access” means. In addition, punishments for violating CFAA are harsh, with up to five years in prison for a first offense. The CFAA’s combination of vague wording, sweeping scope and harsh penalties have generated heated controversy.
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Swartz, a lead developer of the web feed format RSS and social news site Reddit, was well on his way towards the type of accolades reserved only for the most influential in history when he decided to abandon the start-up world and instead dedicate his skills to online activism.
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Aaron Swartz's story is a complicated one, with many moving parts-it's no easy task to do them all justice with a single film. But The Internet's Own Boy, a new documentary that chronicles the late 26-year-old's internet activism, fight against the feds, and ultimate death, manages to sew them up into one seriously gripping thread.
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When Aaron Swartz committed suicide 18 months ago, news organizations reporting the story tended to identify him first and foremost as one of the founders of Reddit. That’s fundamentally inaccurate: Swartz wasn’t around when Reddit was created (he became a partner via a merger with a different company he founded, Infogami), and he only worked there for about a year before being fired, ultimately having little impact. More people have heard of Reddit than are familiar with RSS or Creative Commons, though, so Swartz’s actual accomplishments were glossed over in favor of a simpler, punchier story. The Internet’s Own Boy persuasively argues that a similar reductiveness lurked beneath the indictments that led Swartz to hang himself at age 26, with federal prosecutors deliberately ignoring the substance of his actions in order to make a harsh example of him that might deter other hacktivists. It’s the same outrageous nonsense that’s seen people hit with multimillion-dollar fines for illegally downloading two albums’ worth of songs, except this time it cost us one of our best and brightest—someone who wanted to change the world.
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Anyone with a glancing knowledge of the Internet’s recent history was shocked last year when Aaron Swartz—one of the web’s brightest flames to date—committed suicide at the age of 26. It’s widely accepted that the U.S. government hounded him to death, and The Internet’s Own Boy certainly takes that view. Despite heavy-handed moments, the film goes deeper than blanket assumptions, and shows how much we lost when that light went out.
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“Once I started questioning the school I was in,” Aaron Swartz says in one of many interviews he gave as the poster boy for a free internet. “I started questioning the society that built the school and the businesses the schools were training people for – and questioned the government that set up this whole structure.” Clearly, Swartz asked too many questions for comfort; as a prodigiously gifted coder, he was also disturbingly good at finding and distributing information he believed the public had a right to know. In January last year he hanged himself, under threat of a 35-year prison sentence and apparently exhausted by a two-year legal battle with US government prosecutors dedicated to rooting out hackers. He was only 26.
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“We can’t bring Aaron back, he can no longer be the tireless worker for good,” he said at a memorial service for his son held at MIT last spring. “What we can do is change things for the better. We can work to change MIT so that it . . . once again becomes a place where risk and coloring outside the lines is encouraged, a space where the cruelties of the world are pushed back and our most creative flourish rather than being crushed.”
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The main problem with hacktivism "remains with the legislators and officials who fail to see things in analog-equivalent terms," said Piratpartiet's Rick Falkvinge. "If getting documents to a reporter was OK in the pre-Internet age as part of our checks and balances on power, then it has to be OK in the digital age, too." Yet "many powerholders freak out at the slightest occurrence of pentesting." - See more at: http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/The-Rise-of-the-Ethical-Hacktivist-80042.html#sthash.T8g7Zkki.dpuf
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On Jan. 11, 2014, the internet observed the one year anniversary of the suicide of Internet Freedom activist, coding genius, and all-around beautiful human being Aaron Swartz. Swartz “became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public.” Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for legally accessing the MIT JSTOR archives and downloading 4.8 million academic documents. It’s not clear whether he broke the law, and he never shared the documents, but it’s clear from the ideals he espoused that he believed the accumulated knowledge of humanity should be accessible to all people, not just the Ivy League; that was enough for him to be made an example of. Schwartz hung himself in Jan. 2012.
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