On the 10th anniversary of Aaron Swartz’s death
As a teenager, he helped develop the codes for the web standard RSS and the Creative Commons licenses, and later Aaron Swartz helped build the net culture forum Reddit. On January 11, 2013, the hacker and activist took his own life in New York.
Ten years have passed since the death of Aaron Swartz shook the net world. Swartz had been considered an Internet prodigy ever since he started attending computer conferences at 12, still accompanied by his parents. A year before his death, in January 2012, the hacker and net activist celebrated his greatest success to date.
After pressure from the Hollywood film industry in particular, the Obama administration had planned to drastically tighten copyright protection on the World Wide Web. With fellow members of his action platform Demand Progress (“We demand progress”), Aaron Swartz unceremoniously designed a website – as a resource for anyone who wanted to protest the plan. Charles Gregory from North Carolina was one of them: “On his website, I was able to find out the exact status of the legislation and the further timing. All I had to do was type in my zip code – and I got links and phone numbers to my local congressman. To my knowledge, nothing like this had ever been done before.”
Swartz set an avalanche rolling. Millions of people protested, Google, Facebook and Wikipedia temporarily went offline. More than 100,000 websites took part in the biggest protest in the history of the Internet. In the end, the law was off the table.
At that point, the public prosecutor’s office had already been investigating the net activist for a year. The accusation: he had downloaded from the science database JSTOR almost five million articles that were behind a paywall. To do so, he broke into a computer closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or M.I.T., he said.
“He ‘broke in’ in the sense that he turned the door handle. The door was not locked,” says Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig, considered Aaron Swartz’s mentor. Of course, he says, M.I.T. has an open network; guests also have free access. As a Harvard scholar at the time, Aaron was also entitled to access the JSTOR archive. “For members of the knowledge elite, students and professors, it’s free; the rest of the world has to pay. I didn’t see at the time how much this injustice bothered him.”
Lessig already knew Aaron Swartz when, at just 14, he helped develop the RSS standard, which made it possible to create a kind of press review from other websites. At 15, Swartz wrote the technical code of the Creative Commons licenses for Lawrence Lessig, providing one-click access to alternative copyright rules. At 19, Swartz became a co-founder of the Reddit platform and a millionaire by selling it. The money enabled him to pursue even more projects. Rüdiger Weis, a computer science professor at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, also teaches Swartz’s programming language Markdown:
„RSS and Markdown are among the most important formats for simple text representation. As a result, they have played a major role in the technical scene, as well as in the journalistic scene. In the case of Markdown, the importance will tend to increase in the coming years.“
Swartz also co-developed an encryption system that allows journalists to communicate securely with whistleblowers. The open-source system, called SecureDrop, is used by the New York Times and CNN, the Guardian, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Heise-Verlag, among others. Rüdiger Weis is certain: Swartz would have fought the current development – that Internet platforms are controlled by a few companies or even individuals; newspaper publishers are increasingly working with paywalls. And governments trying to regulate the content of platforms. Charles Gregory of North Carolina who wants to bring Swartz’s philosophy to a general audience shares this view:
"They are thinking in the old world way. Aaron said knowledge is not power: Shared knowledge is power. They do not see it. They think that's how you are safe - by control. “
Aaron Hillel Swartz was a new generation. He grew up in Highland Park, an affluent suburb of Chicago. Through his father, a software developer, he came into contact with computers at an early age. He was already reading novels in kindergarten, so his parents sent him to an elementary school for gifted children. Around this time, the family, which had belonged to a Reform congregation, moved to an Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue. Young Aaron attended services, but later described himself as an atheist. With his idealism to improve the world, he nevertheless corresponded to the Jewish he nevertheless complied with the Jewish commandment of a mitzvah, a good deed.
„He has also tried to use his good talents in the field of technology to create concrete solutions for all people, to greatly simplify a participation, a collection of information and also a publishing activity.“
… says computer science professor Rüdiger Weis. Aaron Swartz had indeed promptly returned the files downloaded from JSTOR, and the Science Archive subsequently waived prosecution. But the public prosecutor’s office continued to investigate. They considered the “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto” co-authored by Swartz in 2008 as evidence of his intention to make the JSTOR articles available to the general public. It was 2011, and Wikileaks had just published hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents leaked to them by Whitleblower Bradley Manning. Did the government want to make an example as a deterrent? Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison.
On January 11, 2013, his girlfriend found him in the Brooklyn apartment they shared – Aaron Swartz had hanged himself with his belt. He was 26 years old. Law professor Lawrence Lessig recalls, “Four days before Aaron died, I got an email from JSTOR that they were going to release all these journal articles to everyone in the world — that was exactly what Aaron had been fighting for. I didn’t have enough time to send him the email. I was traveling.” Lawrence Lessig sees above all the U.S. government at the time and the prosecution as responsible:
„ He was depressed when he saw all of his wealth gone [because the prosecutors had seized it, author's note]. And he recognized his parents would have to mortgage the house so he could pay a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist.“
After his death, federal prosecutors dropped the charges. Swartz was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. What exactly drove him to his death may forever remain his secret. He war buried according to Jewish rite. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, with whom Aaron Swartz had also worked, gave one of the eulogies. For people all over the world, the net activist became an icon after his death, a hero who put into practice what they themselves did not dare to do. There is even an opera about him. The fighter for a censorship-free Internet is also still a household name in the hacker and Internet community.
“Ten years have passed since then, which is already a high time for computing. But all the people who know his work have a great respect,” says Rüdiger Weis. And:
"The fact that Aaron Swartz has found a very simple way of representing things that really is so simple that you stand in front of it and marvel 'What's special about this now?' - that's a high art of computer science. Almost a kind of magic, to make systems that seem very simple at first glance, but are tremendously powerful.“