Aaron Swartz

Prometheus of Information, Son of the Internet

“Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.”

A talented young prodigy of technology, being able to speak and disseminate ideas and innovations to the great pillars of technology industry in the age of 15.

Yet, he went beyond just aiming for money or effciency, but instead to promote justice, working towards the goal of an idealism world : where the rational information, especially academic information, could be accessed to the public freely.

At the age of 13, he wrote a website called "The Info Network" and won a big prize in a teenage programming competition. If we log in to the website page now, we will find that this website is remarkably similar to Wikipedia, where everyone can share knowledge and edit academic articles. This website appeared 5 years earlier than Wikipedia.

On the recommendation of Bernays Lee, he went to Stanford University for further studies. However, Swartz was not satisfied. He had hoped to find like-minded people in the legendary Stanford where "everyone is a genius," but the result was somewhat disappointing for him. His state is not much different from high school, he eats breakfast alone, reads alone, and doesn't talk to others.

"Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum."

One year later, he dropped out of school at the invitation of a renowned American incubator founder and began developing a website creation tool. The result is the Infogami website. Due to a shortage of manpower, the website merged with a social news website called Reddit shortly after its launch, and Swatz refactored the code for it.

During the summer before heading to Stanford, Swartz read a book called 'Understanding Power'. This book explores a series of political events and policies in the United States over the past 30 years

“

Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics — law, politics, the media — and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the media, my research found, didn’t really care much about that, preferring to focus on such things as posters and polls.

As I thought about this more, its implications struck me as larger and larger. But I still had no bigger picture to fit them in. The media was simply doing a bad job, leading people to be confused. We just had to pressure them to do better and democracy would be restored.

…

Reading the book, I felt as if my mind was rocked by explosions. At times the ideas were too much that I literally had to lie down. (I’m not the only one to feel this way — Norman Finkelstein noted that when he went through a similar experience, “It was a totally crushing experience for me. … My world literally caved in. And there were quite a number of weeks where … I just was in bed, totally devastated.”) I remember vividly clutching at the door to my room, trying to hold on to something while the world spun around.

“

In 2008, Swartz challenged the US government. PACER is a database that stores federal judicial records in the United States, and users need to pay 10 cents to view one page. Swatz believes that government documents belong to the public domain and do not have copyright, and every taxpayer should have free access to them. The authorities naturally ignored it. But most people overlook Swartz's hacking talent. He wrote a small program that downloaded 2.7 million judicial files in bulk from PACER's database and placed them on a public resource website for people to access for free.

In 2010, Swartz founded the "Progressive Society" with the aim of promoting civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform, as well as protecting and advocating for information disclosure. The most famous battle of the organization is undoubtedly opposing the "Prohibition of Online Piracy Act", which can arbitrarily cut off website funding and even allow Google to directly delete links.

"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."

On September 25, 2010, the traffic on a website called JSTOR surged without any warning. Servers frequently triggered alerts. Upon investigation, staff discovered that someone was using MIT's campus network to bulk download data from the site.

The downloader was Aaron Swartz. He believed that these materials should be shared with all of humanity and that everyone has the right to access them for free. Swartz hid an Acer laptop behind a cardboard box in a small basement server room in MIT's Building 16. He connected the computer to a switch and an external hard drive, then wrote a download script that would only stop when the hard drive was full.

However, on January 5, 2011, MIT located Swartz's computer. They could have confiscated it themselves and identified the downloader, keeping the situation under control. Instead, they chose to notify the authorities. That same day, U.S. Secret Service agents, accompanied by computer crime experts, arrived at the scene. To avoid tipping him off, they did not touch the computer but instead installed a hidden surveillance camera in the server room. Footsteps echoed through the empty corridor. Soon, Swartz, dressed in black, appeared in the camera's view. Eight minutes later, he turned off the lights and left the server room. Two days later, perhaps sensing something was amiss, Swartz walked into the server room wearing a bicycle helmet, picked up the computer, and left. That afternoon, campus police and Secret Service agents arrested Swartz on the street. Inside Swartz's hard drive, authorities found 4.8 million journal papers from JSTOR—caught red-handed.

Aaron Swartz was charged on July 19, 2011, for illegally downloading a large number of JSTOR academic journal articles from MIT. He was arrested by the federal government and faced a potential fine of up to one million dollars and a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison. After ensuring that these papers would not be publicly disseminated, JSTOR decided not to pursue legal action against Swartz. However, Massachusetts Attorney General Carmen Ortiz insisted on prosecuting Aaron Swartz, stating sternly: "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take files, data, or money."

Murderers, bank robbers, aiding terrorist groups in developing weapons of mass destruction, slave traders, and child sex abuse rings selling pornography all faced lighter sentences than Aaron. What has this world come to? Why was Aaron’s behavior deemed a felony? Because for the past eighteen months, Aaron resisted the label of a felon.

On January 11th, 2013, Swatz sas found to have commited suicide.

At the age of 26, without any last words, the life of a genius hacker abruptly came to an end at its most passionate moment.

Whether the government is the mastermind behind his suicide or not, the reasons for the government's prosecution against him are still ridiculous and a wrong decision; A shadowed law made Aaron Swartz fight to the death. Aaron Swartz hopes to liberate academic papers that should be made public, making them more convenient to use and share instead of becoming a tool for some people to make money.

Aaron worked hard to uphold information freedom and civil rights in his last moments of life, and there were many hackers who shared the same beliefs as Aaron. Such people existed in various industries, with their own unique thinking, yearning for freedom, hating dictatorship and authoritarianism, disdaining power and money, and obeying their own moral standards to seek welfare for all mankind

"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... 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?"