Regardless of whether they physically hung him or not, Aaron Swartz was murdered by the state.
His crime was downloading information that he legally had an entitlement to access. He never hacked a computer system or broke a lock. He never even trespassed. JSTOR, the supposedly damaged party was happy to take a settlement and did so.
His actual crime was that he was a prominent and talented advocate against the government and surveillance industrial complex’s hostile takeover of the internet to be used entirely as method of propaganda and control.
After his death when there were some minor (ass covering) inquiries into the prosecution, congressional staffers told that the reason the FBI and intelligence connected people at MIT & in government went after him so extremely was cited as being due to the fact that he’d written the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto many years earlier - a short arguement in favour of open access that said that, if required, direct action may require breaking the law, specifically copyright law. This was used to frame him as a sort of information terrorist who might need to be dealt with before the open access movement grew beyond a small activist tech circle.
It was, of course, an absurd characterisation.
But he was a threat to an oppressive intelligence state that was trying to tighten it’s stranglehold on the internet while feeling increasingly paranoid following the exposures of war crimes by Wikileaks and other disclosures in previous years. He was an exceptionally talented coder, MIT research fellow, and believer in progressive American democratic activism. He’d built useful tools like the code for RSS, a successful social media company (Reddit, and look at what they’ve done with that since), and most importantly tools and organisations like Creative Commons for public good and Deaddrop for secure communication channels for journalists and whistleblowers. He was dangerous to the state precisely because he had done everything right, because they couldn’t publicly paint him as some cyber terrorist or technoextremist. He represented the things the state claimed to be for, claimed to encourage and value, rather than the corrupt, criminal, and oppressive reality.
After his death, numerous people in media and even government asked why the state refused to drop more than 10 felony charges against him. Or why both the government, MIT, and FBI kept refusing to release anything but a handful of mostly redacted documents about the investigation and prosecution.
It seems that this need to baselessly frame Aaron as some sort of radical extremist meant that as the case began to fall apart, they got increasingly desperate to simply forcibly take him ‘off the board’ one way or another. Backing down on anything less than jail time and a ruinous admission of felony guilt wouldn’t just be seen as an embarrassment, but counter suits and follow ups threatened to expose the fact that much of the investigation and prosecution hadn’t just been overreach, but also deeply corrupt and seemingly illegal.
In congressional hearings it was stated that
prosecutor Stephen Heymann "instructed the Secret Service to seize and hold evidence without a warrant… lied to the judge about that fact in written briefs… [and] withheld exculpatory evidence… for over a year
Naturally the hearings and enquiries went nowhere, as designed, despite numerous bi-partisan legislators’ concerns over government and prosecutorial actions and a growing movement of civil rights and open access groups campaigns.
Bills that would at least remove simply breaking Terms of Service from being (absurdly) and offence under the computer crimes and wire fraud laws looked promising, but stalled and were snuffed out in the legislature by the white house and the influence of CIA-front tech firm / US defence contractor Oracle.
Members of the government and prosecution after Aaron’s death public attacked and smeared his grieving family.
Reddit became the intelligence service controlled, bot-maintained, consent factory it is today. The open access movement was successfully beaten back. And both the surveillance state and it’s corporate partners in increasingly corporatizing or criminalising the internet. The state doubled down on prosecuting, imprisoning, and torturing whistleblowers and publishers of information. And increasingly any large enough app or site that cannot be tightly controlled by the state is banned or prosecuted.
He’d built useful tools like the code for RSS, a successful social media company (Reddit, and look at what they’ve done with that since)
It’s amazing how fed Reddit is. Even back then, when it was less embedded in culture, they couldn’t let the wrong people run it. Then you had organized right wing shit to install spez. I wonder how much money has gone into controlling such a silly site.
His actual crime was that he was a prominent and talented advocate against the government and surveillance industrial complex’s hostile takeover of the internet to be used entirely as method of propaganda and control.
Reddit was distinctly more libertarian (the Penn Jilet kind not the psycho kind) before he died. All the anti government stuff and the positive community vibes that were fostered on the site before all abruptly stopped when he died. It very visibly changed and I can remember the exact point it happened followed by the staff that were half-decent all quitting the company one by one.
Agreed. I don’t think it was his death per se, but it did feel like it represented a totemic shift at the time.
In the years of his harassment, grand jury, and eventually death you had Reddit becoming an independent subsidiary instead of being under Conde Nast, it being able to remake not just the site but their corporate structure, staff, and board of directors, the Digg migration that made it much more visible and mainstream, and some major early landmarks in it being used as a political tool like the AMA of Obama. Reddit still ostensibly opposed things like SOPA, but it was mostly due to concerns about being liable to the copyright whims of people like the MPAA.
This is a little more
but I’ve always wondered if the infamous RedditFindsTheBostonBomber disaster was an early experiment to test not just the idea of Reddit as an OSINT/surveillance analysis tool, but also as a test of its potential for information warfare in reaction to live events.Liberals in particular love to point to Ajit Pai being an early Trump appointment in 2017, the fact is that the state’s battle against net neutrality had been building for years, kicking into high gear around Aaron Swartz’s last year’s and the movement and general culture against it weakened considerably after his death.
It is sort of funny that this insane level of protection placed on intellectual property by the US tech industry is exactly why the Chinese are crushing the US in terms of innovation, since the Chinese basically have an open source economy while based on what I know, you can’t make anything in the US without having to pay 100 different patent holders.
You know how most of the important things and places and moments in human history all involved increasing the spread of information? From trade routes to the printing press to the radio to the data the LLM models themselves are scraping?
Well what if we stood on the neck of that exchange and held it close and prevented it spreading. Cuz rentseeking.
The tech bubble needs to crash before we start seeing great tech people again. There’s too much money in it. If you asked 100 computer science majors why they chose CS they would all tell you it’s for the money. And I get it, because it fucking sucks out there.
If you asked 100 computer science majors why they chose CS they would all tell you it’s for the money.
For real! I remember when I got my undergrad in CS I thought there would be a maybe a 50/50 split between dorks and check-chasers but it was more like 20/80. That was 10 years ago, I can only imagine it’s 1/99 these days. I’m sure there are some real turbo-nerds who want to make magic with the computer, but it’s like you said too much money on the table to NOT be a code-goblin for some MEGACORP.
It’s me I’m the turbonerd
Tech bubble or no, lib cultural hegemony hampers radical thought. We need slop about bad ass anti-imperial hackers robbing crypto markets, running over Nazis with hijacked Tesla swarms, and using FOSS to manage their polycules.
I’ve always said that if he hadn’t died he would have radicalised leftwards over time like many of the people here did.
"Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison.[18] Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment
That plea bargan would have required pleading guilty to 13 separate felonies, which were wild inventions anyway, since Swartz was a JSTOR account holder, downloading files that JSTOR made available to him under their own terms. He would have a very hard time getting a job as a felon, the plea bargain would have ruined his life.
80 terabytes of books? that’s like… every book
a guy i work with is convinced that Aaron Swartz found things he wasn’t supposed to find and that’s why he ultimately killed himself
not sure what he would be referring to though
Extremely unlikely.
Aaron didn’t hack any private databases or download random information wholesale. He downloaded academic articles from the JSTOR archive as he had a legal right to do so. It’s a paywalled but public system, archiving academic papers that have previously been published. There’s nothing secret about the research papers, they’ve just been ringfenced for profit.
The only difference between him and thousands of other students and research fellows (as he was) at MIT was that he wrote a piece of code - that importantly stayed on is laptop - to make the download requests for the PDFs incredibly quickly and efficiently, and to keep starting new sessions in case system admin tried to ban requests over concerns that it was some sort of DDOS attack (which they did). One of the MIT system admins even said in relation to the trial that it was just ‘an incredibly efficient bit of code, but not particularly subtle, never mind secretive’.
You can see my longer comment in this thread for why he was a threat to the surveillance state complex trying to control the internet, but it wasn’t because of some smoking gun or finding secret information.
His murder by the state (which it was, even if he hung himself after they hounded, threatened, and relentlessly prosecuted him without cause) has more in common with the way the state went after civil rights organisers in the past, than some sort of whistlerblower murder.
thanks i appreciate the extra info there… i was confused by what he was talking about and he didn’t offer any further explanation so I’ll chalk it up to another mysterious conspiracy floating around out in the ether
No problem, happy to help.
his failure to rate limit that autodownloader was so consequential
