Reddit co-founder commits suicide

[seyferjm]

http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/12/reddit-co-founder-aaron-schwartz-commits-suicide-at-age-26/

[MelissaWV]

That sucks.

[Lucille]

In July 2011, Schwartz was arrested for allegedly downloading and distributing more than 4 million documents — many in the public domain — from MIT and journal archiving service JSTOR.

He was charged in September 2012 with 13 counts of felony hacking.

Demand Progress had said at the time that the Justice Department’s indictment of Schwartz was like ”trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

He pled not guilty in September 2012, but still faced possible prison time, ZDNet reported, noting that his financial woes generated during his struggle against the Justice Department were no secret.

“Swartz’s suicide came two days after JSTOR announced it is releasing “more than 4.5 million articles” to the public,” ZDNet reported.

http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html


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 wonder if he was on suicide pills.

[pcosmar]

http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html


I wonder if he was on suicide pills.

Knowingly or unknowingly?

I wonder if he opened the wrong file.

[RonPaulFanInGA]

Probably saw all the craziness now on Reddit daily.

[Mach]

He was for Free Internet, and a genius.... he threatened the market.

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

He was for Free Internet, and a genius.... he threatened the market.
Suicide eh?

[anaconda]

I am always skeptical of the media reports. Sounds like an amazing guy and a great loss.

[liberty2897]

I consider keeping Internet censorship at bay to be one of the most important issues we have. Very sad loss for us all. Rest in peace.

[squarepusher]

Knowingly or unknowingly?

suicide pills distributed by psycologists and psychiatrists I think he meant


Probably saw all the craziness now on Reddit daily.

lol

[jmdrake]

Sad story. Sounds like this young man was brilliant. (Co-creator of RSS and co-founder of reddit). Sadder still that his "crime" of downloading academic journal articles from a subscription service to share them on file sharing networks was being prosecuted by the feds even though the owners of the content didn't want to prosecute. :( Whatever you think of IP, this is a travesty. Why prosecute a crime of "theft" when the victim doesn't want the prosecution to go forward?

http://news.yahoo.com/online-activist-programmer-swartz-dies-ny-193915205.html


NEW YORK (AP) — A co-founder of Reddit and activist who fought to make online content free to the public has been found dead, authorities confirmed Saturday, prompting 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.

He was pronounced dead Friday evening at home in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for New York's chief medical examiner. Police went to the apartment after receiving a 911 call from Swartz's girlfriend, who found him.

"Aaron's insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable_these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter," Swartz's family said in a statement Saturday. "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."

Swartz was "an extraordinary hacker and activist," the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international nonprofit digital rights group based in California wrote in a tribute on its home page.

He "did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way," the tribute said.

Swartz was a prodigy who as a young teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users. He co-founded the social news website Reddit, which was later sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.

But Swartz struggled with depression.

"Surely there have been times when you've been sad," he wrote in a 2007 blog post. "Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless."

Swartz wrote that "depressed mood is like that, only it doesn't come for any reason and it doesn't go for any either."

Among Internet gurus, Swartz was considered a pioneer of efforts to make online information freely available.

"Playing Mozart's Requiem in honor of a brave and brilliant man," tweeted Carl Malamud, an Internet public domain advocate who believes in free access to legally obtained files.

Swartz aided Malamud's own effort to post federal court documents for free online, rather than the few cents per page that the government charges through its electronic archive, PACER. In 2008, The New York Times reported, Swartz wrote a program to legally download the files using free access via public libraries. About 20 percent of all the court papers were made available until the government shut down the library access.

The FBI investigated but did not charge Swartz, he wrote on his own website.

Three years later, Swartz was arrested in Boston and charged with stealing millions of articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prosecutors said he broke into a computer wiring closet on campus and used his laptop for the downloads.

Experts puzzled over the arrest and argued that the result of the actions Swartz was accused of was the same as his PACER program: more information publicly available.

The prosecution "makes no sense," Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said in a statement at the time. "It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library."

Swartz pleaded not guilty to charges including wire fraud. His federal trial was to begin next month.

According to a federal indictment, Swartz stole the documents from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from academic journals. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.

He faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.

JSTOR did not press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Swartz, and some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics, was a guest.

Criticizing the government's actions in the pending prosecution, Harvard law professor and Safra Center faculty director Lawrence Lessig called himself a friend of Swartz's and wrote Saturday that "we need a better sense of justice. ... The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a 'felon.'"

Swartz's family blamed prosecutors for his suicide.

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy," the family statement said. "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."

JSTOR announced this week that it would make "more than 4.5 million articles" publicly available for free.

[presence]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPlhKP0nZII

[Lucille]

Reddit Co-Founder, Open Info Activist Bullied by DOJ Commits Suicide
http://reason.com/blog/2013/01/12/reddit-co-founder-open-info-activist-bul


If you’re using an RSS feed to help keep track of Hit & Run blog posts or the Reason 24/7 news feed, Aaron Swartz gets some of the credit. The young programmer helped developed them.
[...]
Swartz was a victim of bullying. Not from jocks of frat boys targeting a brilliant tech nerd for being too smart. Rather, he was being harassed by the government – the Department of Justice specifically – for his activism in trying to make academic journals and public court records freely available online:
[...]
Swartz did not profit from these activities whatsoever and JSTOR reportedly did not pursue any sort of justice for his intrusive but ultimately harmless hack. Nevertheless, federal prosecutors went after him, charging him with 13 federal counts. A trial was set for April. Alex Stamos was helping as an expert to prepare Swartz’s defense – Swartz faced the possibility of 35 years in prison – and details here the absurdity of the intensity of the DOJ’s efforts against the young man:
[...]
In June, I wrote about efforts by activists to open access to government-funded academic research. They filed a petition at the White House’s “We the People” site. It received more than 50,000 signatures, twice the threshold needed to get a response from the administration.

This past week, the White House responded to recent trollish petitions about seceding from the union, deporting Piers Morgan, and building a Death Star. Yet it still has not responded to the open access petition.

Family Of Aaron Swartz Blames MIT, Prosecutors For His Death
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/statement-family-aaron-swartz-2013-1#ixzz2HsBzg6Nn


In the statement, the family blamed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and federal prosecutors, who pressed criminal hacking charges which carried a potential sentence of more than 30 years in jail against Swartz for an incident in which he downloaded a large number of academic papers over MIT's network, for his death.

"Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy," they wrote. "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."

That echoes a criticism made by Swartz's friend Larry Lessig, the Harvard University professor and well-known authority on Internet law, who called the government prosecutor in the case a "bully" and said that Swartz had been "driven to the edge" by the government's aggressive handling of the legal case.

[tod evans]

Family Of Aaron Swartz Blames MIT, Prosecutors For His Death


Prosecutors are heartless bastards.

[cheapseats]

http://news.yahoo.com/online-activist-programmer-swartz-dies-ny-193915205.html

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy," the family statement said. "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."



People who wonder whether Conspiracy "Theorists" hurt the Liberty Moovement would better say SCREW YOU to people who say SUE 'EM to victims of Abuse of Power.

[itshappening]

Aaron was a Keynesian and lefty but said he liked Ron Paul on his blog and helped pass Audit the Fed

R.I.P

[Lucille]

Aaron Swartz – A Voice of Freedom Silenced
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/01/15/aaron-swartz/


To federal prosecutors, Aaron Swartz was a criminal they drove to suicide. His death has sent a tidal wave through the online community worldwide. The additional culprit in causing his death is none other than MIT – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Swartz was an accomplished hacker who was regarded as a digital prodigy and helped develop social-news site Reddit and the RSS feed, which is the technology that even allows our website to send updates to subscribers every time something is posted.

Swartz was found hanged on Friday in his Brooklyn, New York, apartment. While some people are spinning conspiracy theories because be was a champion of a free internet and not one of those dark figures who create viruses and try to track people for the government, he was being charged facing decades in prison for doing nothing but hacking into MIT computers causing no damage and doing nothing with anything. However, under US law, there is no requirement that you actually commit a crime, they charge conspiracy and argue you intended to do something you did not do,
[...]
Let me explain something that the American Press refuses to expose. The number of suicides among those charged by the Feds would shock the world. Their stories are never told and typically the government spins out the standard crap that they were overcome with remorse for their crimes. To set the record straight, the real criminals are never remorseful, are proud of what they did, and brag about their accomplishments in getting away with shit. The violent ones do to others what they fear themselves so you would be shocked to realize that the violent murderer is really more often than not a coward or just insane.
[...]
Often the people who prosecute like this are indistinguishabe from the criminal that enjoys inflicting pain on others – they are one in the same. The corruption with the SEC prosecution is off the wall as reported by Matt Taibbi in http://www.thelavinagency.com/blog-matt-taibbi-rolling-stone-expose-sec.html
[...]
Swartz’s suicide is NOT uncommon. This happens every day but you are just never told about it. To charge someone like Swartz and seek imprisonment for decades, is inhuman, an abuse of power, and just insane. Only 4% of the people in prison are there because of violence. There are people there for not paying their taxes on time, and even shooting a moose on federal property out of season no less traffic tickets.
[...]
Ashcroft altered the rules so a prosecutor is not credited for just a conviction, the person must go to jail. There are people sent to federal prison for traffic violations on federal property because of Ashcroft since a prosecutor cannot advance his career unless every person goes to prison. This is one reason the USA has more people in prison than Europe, Russia, and China combined while only 4% are for violence. It costs almost $35,000 a year to hold one person. It was Ashcroft who couldn’t wait to kill Timothy McVeigh who refused to appeal his death sentence preferring death to life in prison. People like Ashcroft actually think death is the worst penalty. It is life in prison being tormented every day by people like him that is far worse. Death is the escape and they do not understand that since most likely they are also cowards who fear death themselves. People like Ashcroft think they are justified relying on the old biblical testament advocating an eye-for-an-eye (lex talionis). They fail to realize conspiracy was not included and that was taken from the Hammurabi’s Legal Code of 1780BC the Babylonian law that was adopted from even earlier Sumerian. Didn’t Christ stop the stoning of a woman for adulatory? How can you forgive and turn the other check while reconciling the teachings of the New Testament with those of the old that relied on the lex talionis?

So for those seeking answers, blame your politicians who with every law they pass include a criminal prosecution. They even had that if you didn’t have healthcare insurance it was up to 5 years in prison in Obamacare. He was forced to take that out but not the fines. Look at every bill and you will see “fine or imprisonment or both” for failing to obey their latest incantation to oppress society. They can take decades away for nothing and that is precisely the threat, coupled with a 99% conviction rate, lacking real judges that influenced Swartz. They should have read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill where the state has no right to deprive the liberty of any citizen except for violence.

[angelatc]

I really fell sorry for the kid, but I don't like the implication that somehow the decision he made rests on anybody else's shoulders.

Suicide is a horrible, tragic event, but no matter how badly the government treated him, the decision to kill himself was a decision he alone made. Reality is that no sane person kills himself, and if we're blaming external forces for his insanity, then we might as well decide that bullies are guilty of murder when high school kids do the same thing.

I'm not ready to go there, because I don't believe it.

[KingNothing]

I really fell sorry for the kid, but I don't like the implication that somehow the decision he made rests on anybody else's shoulders.

Suicide is a horrible, tragic event, but no matter how badly the government treated him, the decision to kill himself was a decision he alone made. Reality is that no sane person kills himself, and if we're blaming external forces for his insanity, then we might as well decide that bullies are guilty of murder when high school kids do the same thing.

I'm not ready to go there, because I don't believe it.

I generally agree with this, but I also have sympathy for the victim here because that's certainly what he was --- a victim. He was a victim of an oppressive government that uses "soft" means to chill free speech and criticism.

And I do think we've got to be careful with the classification of those who commit suicide. Sure, the act itself falls entirely on the individual who decides to carry it out, but you've got to think that we as a society and as individual friends and family members can do more to help each other in times of distress.

[cheapseats]

...no sane person kills himself...


American Soldiers are committing suicide at a rate approaching ONE-A-DAY.

Define SANE.

[dannno]

Essentially democide.

[kahless]

I really fell sorry for the kid, but I don't like the implication that somehow the decision he made rests on anybody else's shoulders.

Suicide is a horrible, tragic event, but no matter how badly the government treated him, the decision to kill himself was a decision he alone made. Reality is that no sane person kills himself, and if we're blaming external forces for his insanity, then we might as well decide that bullies are guilty of murder when high school kids do the same thing.

I'm not ready to go there, because I don't believe it.

When you have hanging over your head for 2 years a threat of 30 years in prison and a multi-million dollar fine, what are the chances you are going to make rational decisions.

I do not agree with him taking his life however see him as a victim of Democide rather than suicide. This government has blood on their hands since they have to know in their position of power the risk they are taking with peoples lives and sanity when they make those sort of threats.

On a smaller scale I can relate to what he went through by simply being a divorced parent for many years. Hanging over my head for 20 years I had to live in fear that if I do not make enough money, through no fault of my own, I could end up in with the hardened criminals in the county jail. Living in fear of the possibility of getting beaten, raped and ending up with HIV, just because you cannot make enough money really does your head in. With them taking your license the fear was the cycle of being in and out of prison becomes perpetual since you lose your ability to earn.

[kahless]

Essentially democide.

At the same time. Great minds think alike.

[jtap]

...Reality is that no sane person kills himself...

There are a lot of people who are not depressed but don't want to live anymore for numerous reasons (terminal or unbearable health issues come to mind). It's their life and their liberty, why are they insane if they don't want to go on? I think you can be completely sane and commit suicide.

[KingNothing]

Living in fear of the possibility of getting beaten, raped and ending up with HIV, just because you cannot make enough money really does your head in. With them taking your license the fear was the cycle of being in and out of prison becomes perpetual since you lose your ability to earn.

Ahh, marriage! Matrimonial bliss!

[Matt Collins]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHGEWrfn6lc&feature=em-share_video_user

[angelatc]

Really, can't we get a rule about posting the same video only once? Or at least, once per day?

[tangent4ronpaul]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHGEWrfn6lc&feature=em-share_video_user


Really, can't we get a rule about posting the same video only once? Or at least, once per day?

First time I'd seen it. Where else is it?

As to what he said, I agree on info needing to be free, but at the same time "someone" paid some fairly big bucks to get that all scanned in. But I suspect that "someone" was a gvmt grant, so the taxpayer. The papers themselves were public domain, so most probably the product of taxpayer funded research. This is something that pisses me off to no end! Things produced at taxpayer expense are supposed to be the property of the people, but because of cronyism and election cycle bribes, certain companies are "gifted" exclusive rights to the peoples property and either don't market it to the public or charge out the nose for it. Cases in point: What used to be done by FBIS (now NTC and there was a earlier split before another agency did print and FBIS did broadcast. Well, that's now free to the gvmt but costs out the nose for a limited version to us mundanes. It's translations of foreign magazines, technical journals, manuals, broadcasts, etc. THe state department puts out some excellent language tapes, but once again, gifted to a private company. They changed a few words in the documentation to make it unique, and they copywrote it. The gvmt won't give you copies because they are available commercially. They are the most expensive language courses out there, so no one outside the gvmt basically uses them. NSA came up with a algorithm for trigrams and patented it, then gave it to a private company who promptly applied it only to massively parallel computing equipment you can't afford. A agency came up with an algorithm for looking at sat imagery and gifted it to a company that made equipment that scanned for breast cancer. It's not that that is bad, but rather, that the rest of us are denied from using it for other purposes.

Here is a piece from one of his former girl friends:

Quinn Said
The off hours thoughts, snippets of investigation, and the accounting of too many projects.
http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644

http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/us-three.jpg

My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved.

We used to have a fight about how much the internet would grieve if he died. I was right, but the last word you get in as the still living is a hollow thing, trailing off, as it does, into oblivion. I love Aaron. I loved Aaron. There are no words to can contain love, to cloth it in words is to kill it, to mummify it and hope that somewhere in the heart of a reader, they have the strength and the magic to resurrect it. I can only say I love him. That I will always love him, and that I known for years I would. Aaron was a boy, not big, who cast a shadow across the world. But for me, he will always be that person who made me love him. He was so frustrating, and we fought. But we fought like what we were: two difficult people who couldn’t escape loving each other.

On the last day I saw him, he grabbed me in the rain while my car was blocking the road and held me and said “I love you.” I don’t know if I said it back. Not that time. I had always told him. Sometimes I told him when he didn’t have it in him to say. I’d say “I love you, and you love me, too” and he would just hold me.

When he was 20, he carried me through my divorce. We promised each other a year. I apologized so many times: that I was better than what he was getting, that he got me destroyed. Still, what a year. Later, I tried to take care of him while he was being destroyed, from inside and out. I struggled so hard, but not as hard as he did. I told him, time and again, that this was his 20s. It would be better in his 30s. Just wait. Please, just hold on.

He read to me and Ada compulsively; he read me a whole David Foster Wallace book. He read Robert Caro to me, countless articles, blog posts, snippets of books. Sometimes, he would call, just read, and hang up. He loved the Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, and the three of us read it together many times. We loved George Saunders. We loved so many things together.

He loved my daughter so much it filled the room like a mist. He was transported playing with her, and she bored right into his heart. In his darkest moments, when I couldn’t reach him, Ada could still touch him, even if only for a moment. And when he was in the light, my god. I couldn’t keep up with either of them. I would hang back and watch them spring and play and laugh, and be so grateful for them both.

More than anything, together we loved the world, with the kind of love that grips and tears. We were fearsome creatures, chained to our caring, chained to other people.

We were destroyed by the investigation, and by enduring so much together in the five years of the difficult love affair of difficult people. In the end he told me he needed to get away from me. I let him go, and waited for the day he’d come back. I knew that one day we’d have a day to be together again, though probably not as lovers. Together, as something that doesn’t have a word. He went on to another relationship, and I know he touched her like he did me, because that’s how he touched people.

A part of me died with him. A part will always be with him.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

–W. H. Auden


← Goodbye, my love

==

-t

[RickyJ]

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.

I think he was killed. The feds knew if this went to trial that they would probably not get a conviction yet still wanted to make an example out of him. So they make him look really guilty by killing him and making it look like a suicide.

[tangent4ronpaul]

This is getting really weird! Talking about it on FOX now. The prosecutor apparently offered him a 6 month sentence. He died before saying yes or no.

-t

[Mach]

Seen this and it reminded me of him.

This is how people are thinking down the wrong path, this was not some special circumstance, it's just another day for gov, a public relations problem more than anything.



"Organized Stalking is a form of terrorism used against an individual in a malicious attempt to reduce the quality of a person's life so they will: have a nervous break-down, become incarcerated, institutionalized, experience constant mental, emotional, or physical pain, become homeless, and/or commit suicide. This is done using well-orchestrated accusations, lies, rumors, bogus investigations, setups, framings, intimidation, overt or covert threats, vandalism, thefts, sabotage, torture, humiliation, emotional terror and general harassment. It is a "ganging up" by members of the community who follow an organizer and participate in a systematic "terrorizing" of an individual." -- Mark M. Rich

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=organized%20stalking/

[timosman]

6860544


Here is an old article with a headline that would have made you roll your eyes back then (https://www.abeldanger.org/aaron-swartz-mit-satanic-child-porn/), but which now makes you wonder which is more likely – they wrote a ridiculous headline nobody would believe that just happened to touch on topics which are strangely current today, or they were telling the truth back then, and we were all unaware that every ridiculous claim they made was the truth. Headline is “Was Aaron Swartz Killed By An MIT Satanic Child Porn Ring? “ It implies Reddit Co-founder Aaron Swartz wasn’t under fire and committed suicide for stealing journal articles MIT didn’t even own, but rather he was killed because that media lab he broke into was hosting child-porn, and he may have stolen it to give it to someone. Now we know, Jeffrey Epstein was a huge contributor to their Media lab, and all around him are allegations of satanic child abuse and videography for purposes of blackmail. And suicide hangings, such as with Swartz seem to be a preferred method of execution by Cabal.

[Anti Globalist]

I never knew Reddit's co-founder died.