More on Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz Laid to Rest with an Action Plan For Us | Crooks and Liars

In New York on Saturday, a public memorial was held for Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide last week. Among the remembrances of Aaron’s genius, his commitment to progressive causes, his idealistic beliefs of making this a better world, there was also an action plan laid out by his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman:

“Aaron was targeted by the FBI,” said ThoughtWorks chairman Roy Singham, Swartz’s employer before his death. “After PACER, they targeted him. He was strip-searched. Let’s not pretend this wasn’t political,” he argued before being interrupted by applause.

Swartz’s partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman framed her call to action in terms of Swartz’s beliefs: “Aaron believed there was no shame in failure. There is deep, deep shame in caring more about believing you’re changing the world than actually changing the world.”Stinebrickner-Kauffman, also an activist, named five targets for action:

Hold the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office accountable for its actions in prosecuting Aaron;

Press MIT to ensure that it would “never be complicit in an event like this again”;

“All academic research for all time should be made free and open and available to anybody in the world”;

Pass and strengthen “Aaron’s Law,” an amendment to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that would narrow prosecutorial discretion for computer crimes;

Advocate for fundamental reform of the criminal justice system.

“His last two years were not easy. His death was not easy,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman said. Still, she urged the audience to “think big and think tiny… ‘The revolution will be A/B tested,'” referencing three of Swartz’s favorite maxims. “Look up and not down.”

Aaron Swartz Laid to Rest with an Action Plan For Us | Crooks and Liars

I continue to be outraged by the prosecutorial over reach in the Swartz case. I consider the “crime” for which he was accused to be little more than an example of trying to make public files available at no cost, something that should be policy across the United States. For instance, in Arkansas, there are fees for accessing the laws of the state online so without money I am just supposed to wonder what the law of the state are.

He was a hero in pursuit of making the Internet a source of genuine information rather than a fee making machine for public institutions to make money off public research and public scholarship. We, the people, paid for this research. We should be able to see it. Public laws should be accessible without fees. We are citizens, not turnips to be squeezed.

James Pilant

From around the web –

From the web site, Playable, The Weblog of Dean Groom: (This one needs to be read in full. It’s excellent. JP)

I read that information pioneer Aaron Swartz has took his own life last week at the age of 26. Swartz helped develop RSS at the age of 14 and founded Reddit among other things. His website is still open if you want to read from the source. To me he stands no less significant in information and computing science than any working at Bletchley Park during the second world war. Certainly, his story is far more relevant in high-school classrooms than what is currently in ‘the text’ book.

From the web site, PrisonMovement’s Weblog:

The internet trailblazer and activist, who had already contributed such things to the web as an early version of the RSS feed and Reddit, stood up and joined the vanguard in this movement. He co-founded the organization, Demand Progress, which was instrumental in leading the largest online protest in the history of the Internet against SOPA and PIPA. Thanks to this effort, on January 18^th, 2012, tens of thousands of websites blacked out, and ultimately, SOPA and PIPA were defeated by this online grassroots activism.

Today, that same internet is “blacked out” with remembrances and obituaries of Aaron Swartz, who took his life over the weekend. And in each of those remembrances, Aaron is described as a spark that made things happen. And for the rest of us who still believe, as Aaron did, in a free and open internet and a compassionate and just nation (a message he often espoused on our show, The Big Picture), we can only hope he provides the same sort of spark in death that he did in life.

From the web site, Hip Is Everything: