Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

COVER STORY:
Aaron Swartz

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity -Aaron Swartz an 13th when a firestorm of was a housemaker. Fascinated by discussion ignited the web world machines and technology from about death of 26 year old internet early age, Swartz built websites activist and computer programmer for himself,his family and for Aaron Swartz. A preternaturally adult people interested in the ups and when he was still a child and managing down of case against Microsoft. partner of powerhouse social news site Swartz felt strongly that his high Reddit, will always be known for his school North Shore Country Day great contribution to the internet and didn't meet his needs. He even his activism. Aaron has been heralded launched a blog just before he across the globe as a 'defender of web started ninth grade called freedom' and a champion of free Schoolyard Subversion. information , a genius technologist Seriously, who really cares how and a deliberative progressive. At the long the Nile river is, or who was time of his death, the 26-year-old the first to discover cheese, he Swartz had been pursued by the wrote. How is memorizing that Department of Justice for two years. ever going to help anyone? He was charged in July 2011 with Instead, we need to give kids accessing MIT's computer network projects that allow them to without authorization and using it to exercise their minds and discover download 4.8 million documents from things for themselves. Instead of the online database JSTOR. His stuffing them with 'knowledge' we actions, the government alleged, need to give them the power to violated Title 18 of the U.S. Code, and find out what they want to know. carried a maximum penalty of up to 50 At age 14, Swartz withdrew from

Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz at the launch party for Creative Commons at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, 2001

years in jail and $1 million in fines. He wanted to save the world but he cannot save himself. A prolonged indictment, a h a r d - l i n e p r o s e c u t o r, a d e a d bodythese are the facts of the case. They are outnumbered by the questions that Swartz's family, friends, and supporters are asking a month after his suicide. Why was MIT so adamant about pressing charges? Why was the DOJ so strict? Why did Swartz hang himself with a belt, choosing to end his own life rather than continue to fight?

North Shore Country Day. While accompanying his father on a business trip to MIT ,Swartz participated in ArsDigita contest in which teenagers competed to build useful, noncommercial websites. Swartz entered the contest in 2000 and was honored as a finalist for his entry, The Info Network, an encyclopedia that anyone could edit. (This was months before Wikipedia launched in 2001.)

RSS ,W3C,CC:

Childhood:
Born in the city of Chicago ,he grew up in Highland Park, Illinois. His father was a computer consultant and his mother

RSS or rich site summary is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works.In the year 2000,Swartz joined a working group devoted

to RSS. The news-reading technology had originally been developed by Netscape, but the company lost interest in maintaining it, leading online tinkerers to pick up the slack. As of 2000, two groups of programmers wanted to take RSS in two different directions. One of them was a group affiliated with the Semantic Web, which moved to rewrite the standard to include metadata that was easier to parse. Swartz aligned himself with this crowd, and helped work on a standard called RSS 1.0. Swartz served on the RDF Core working group at the World Wide Web Consortium and authored RFC 3870, defining the RDF/XML Internet media type. In 2001, Lawrence Lessig an American academic and political activist came up an idea of organization he'd call Creative Commons. Lessig wanted to reform copyright laws by giving content creators more options for licensing their workallowing them to specify, for instance, that anyone could use a photo non-commercially, or that people could adapt it without having to ask permission. Lessig hired Lisa Rein, a writer and archivist, to help create the Creative Commons licensing metadata. She in turn suggested that Swartz, whom she knew from the Semantic Web community, should be the one to supervise the site's metadata implementation. By 2004, Swartz had helped launch Creative Commons, worked on the RSS 1.0 standard, created and maintained a popular blog, and had a hand in countless other large and small projects.

Infogami, a platform that would help people build structured, data-driven, content-rich websites. It was a logical conceptual progression from the Semantic Web projects Swartz had been steeped in, and it became one of eight businesses to be funded that year. Swartz had trouble attracting investors and had no experience building something this ambitious from the ground up. Around the same time, two other Y Combinator participants Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman desperately needed help for their own startup, a social news site called Reddit. So infogami merged with reddit in November 2005. But Swartz got some working issues with Reddit. Swartz's quest for personal fulfillment made for an unpleasant work environment. With Huffman serving as Reddit's sole full-time engineer, it was unclear whether the site would succeed. But in October 2006, 16 months after Reddit was founded, Cond Nast, owners of Wired magazine purchased the company for an undisclosed sum. The whole Reddit team along with Swartz moved to San Francisco to work with the Wired. The move to Wired did not work out well for Swartz as he was fired soon after.

Other creations:
After leaving Reddit Swartz worked on another startup, Jottit in the year 2007, with his old Infogami partner Simon Carstensen. He also helped the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle launch Open Library, an ambitious effort to create a landing page for every book in existence. He was also the creator of web.py Web Application Framework. Swartz helped found a group called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which was devoted to electing progressive candidates to Congress. He got a Sunlight Network g ra n t t o s t a r t a s i t e c a l l e d Watchdog.net in 2008, which gathered information about voting records and campaign finance and gave its users tools to manipulate and present that data themselves .Swartz was a co-founder of Demand Progress, an advocacy group that organizes people online to take action by

Infogami,Reddit:
In 2004, Swartz enrolled at Stanford University. But Stanford seemed to to him more like return to everything he hated about school. With a curiosity to do something different Swartz founded

by contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word about civil liberties, government reform, and other issues.

Activism against SOPA and PIPA :

SOPA or Stop Online Piracy Act was promoted as a bill that would protect intellectual property by empowering law enforcement to shut down (and possibly arrest the proprietors of) websites that streamed or hosted copyrighted material without authorization. SOPA was making its way through the Senate in 2010 before Sen. Ron Wyden (senior United States Senator for Oregon) killed the bill in committee. That bill was rewritten and resubmitted to the Senate in 2011 under a different name: the PROTECT IP Act, or PIPAthe sister legislation to SOPA. As soon as it was introduced it gained support from media corporation and the US chamber of commerce. But online activists quickly seized on the legislation. Before his arrest, Swartz had gone to Providence, R.I., to volunteer on the congressional campaign of a young city councilman named David Segal. They lost the election but forged a friendship. Now, Segal and Swartz joined to create Demand Progress, an organization designed to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing, and grassroots lobbying. Swartz made speeches, brought other organizations into the fight, and built tools that made it easy for citizens to contact lawmakers and register their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. Facing tremendous external pressure, Congress backed down in January 2012. SOPA and PIPA were dead. At a conference in Washington, D.C., about the lessons of the SOPA fight. Bills like SOPA and PIPA would return. Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: The enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians' eyes hasn't been put out.

There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren't a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that. Even some of the biggest companies, some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which their little competitors could get censored. We can't let that happen. Several people close to the SOPA protests believe that, without Swartz's involvement, the bills might have passed.

Wikimedia:
Aaron joined Wikipedia in August 2003 and he made his last edit just the day before he died. His complete list of articles included fairly important ones like Civil Liberties in the United States, also created articles on political figures, writers, lawyers and government officials. He wrote an analysis on how Wikipedia articles are written and he concluded that most of the articles comes from the outsiders who contribute while the members of core group editors only do some spelling checks and formatting contradicted the opinion of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Wales believed that core editors were contributing the main content while the outsiders did the work of formatting. Swartz's analysis is described on his blog post and was part of his bid to be elected to Wikimedia's Board of Directors but he was unsuccessful in the elections.

Open library :

Swartz was the architect of Open Library, a project of the Internet Archive. The goal of Open Library is to create a web page for every book ever published. The site now has millions of records, some accompanied by e-books for download or borrowing. Swartz apparently obtained all of the Library of Congress's bibliographic data in 2006, and posted this data for which the Library of Congress normally charged fees in Open Library.

free copies during a a search in the fee-based online law database PACER, and to help building up a free alternative database at the Internet Archive.

JSTOR Controversy:
JSTOR or a short form used for 'Journal Storage' is a digital library founded in year 1995 by William G. Bowell. It provides full-text searches of more than a thousand journals. More than 7,000 institutions in more than 150 countries have access to JSTOR. JSTOR is not a repository of noncopyrightable government documents. Though users with subscription access to JSTOR can grab its contents for free, it is a paid servicemajor research institutions pony up as much as $50,000 annually for accessthat houses journal articles that are mostly under copyright. Authorized users can theoretically download as much as they want from JSTOR for free. Swartz connected to the MIT wireless network as a guest and ran a script on his machine that allowed him to grab a huge amount of articles. According to the government's indictment against Swartz, these rapid and massive downloads and download requests impaired computers used by JSTOR to provide articles to client research institutions. JSTOR detected something was amiss and blocked Swartz's IP address. He acquired a new one and began again. JSTOR then went ahead and blocked a range of MIT IP addresses. Swartz then decided to pre-empt any wireless IP bans by hard-wiring his Acer laptop directly into MIT's network. MIT had an 'open door' policy , where anyone can access to almost any part of the campus. At 12:30 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2011, Aaron Swartz entered Room 16-004t to retrieve his laptop and external hard drive, which he had hidden beneath a box. By that point, the closet was under surveillance. Soon after the source of the downloading was discovered

PACER Controversy:
Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is an electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from f e d e ra l a p p e l l a t e , d i s t r i c t a n d bankruptcy courts, and the PACER Case Locator via the Internet. PACER is provided by the federal Judiciary in keeping with its commitment to providing public access to court information via a centralized service. PACER's contents are all public records, and anyone can access them via the Web for a small fee (now 10 cents per page). Carl Malamud , an open government activist was against this concept of paying money for every page as he thought they were non copyrightable government products. So for a time period when these data were made available to download for free at select libraries, it appealed Swartz and he loaded a script onto a library c o m p u t e r, w h i c h a u t o m a t i c a l l y downloaded PACER records every three seconds and uploaded them to a cloud server. Though it he downloaded about 20% of the PACER's database which he donated to Malamud's opengovernment site Public.Resource.Org. Though they'd done nothing illegal, the PACER stunt earned Swartz and Malamud some FBI attention. Swartz later acquired his FBI file, which indicated that agents had surveilled his parents' Highland Park home. The FBI's investigation of this incident eventually ended without charges. Swartz continued to promote free public access to PACER documents by working with RECAP which it is a software which allows users to automatically search for

, Swartz was arrested. But after his JSTOR hack, the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto became invested with meaningthe prosecutors entered the manifesto as evidence of Swartz's intent to redistribute the downloaded articles. The government's indictment alleges that Swartz stole a major portion of the total archive in which JSTOR had invested and intended to distribute these articles through one or more filesharing sites. Swartz's friends and family unanimously dispute that allegation. The lead prosecutor was Stephen Heymann, a man who was not inclined to look kindly on Swartz's case. Swartz was charged under Section 1030, Title 18 of the U.S. Code, otherwise known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984. (He was also charged under sections 2, 981, 982, 1343, and 2461.) During his own indictment he along with David Segal created Demand Progress, an organization designed to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing, and grassroots lobbying. Swartz made speeches, brought other organizations into the fight, and built tools that made it easy for citizens to contact lawmakers and register their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. Facing tremendous external pressure, Congress backed down in January 2012. SOPA and PIPA were dead. And although JSTOR had declined to prosecute, the government with MIT's tacit backing continued to pursue charges against Swartz. While this Swartz became a contributing editor at the Baffler, the newly revived, pro-labor journal. He was using his own money to fight the charges, and he needed a cash infusion. The indictment filed on September 12 2012 went on to charge that Swartz had contrived to access

MIT's network without authorization from a switch within that closet and access JSTOR's archive of digitized journal articles through MIT's computer network. But Alex Stamos, an independent expert retained by Swartz's defense team argued that Swartz's access to MIT's network had in fact been authorized, by virtue of MIT's lax attitude toward network security. But , the indictment continued, had also contrived to use this access to download a substantial portion of JSTOR's total archive onto his computers and computer hard drives, and avoid MIT's and JSTOR's efforts to prevent this massive copying, efforts that were directed at users generally and at Swartz's illicit conduct specifically. But these charges, too, were disputable. Stamos argued that prosecutors had also provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT's JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent. Swartz hired Elliot Peters, a partner at the San Francisco firm Keker & Van Nest, in October 2012. As the weeks went by, he only became more optimistic about Swartz's chances. On Dec. 14, Peters and prosecutor Stephen Heymann appeared before Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, who set an evidentiary hearing for Jan. 25, 2013. A few days later, prosecutors released 170 megabytes of new evidence that made Swartz's defense team even more hopeful. Included in this trove were communications between Heymann and law enforcement, extending to the time before Swartz's arrest. Peters was confident that this new information strengthened his position. The case s c h e d u l e d t o g o t o

to trial on April 1, barring further delays would continue. On Thursday, Jan. 10, the day after this latest failure to secure a plea deal, Stinebrickner Kauffman (his girlfriend) was coming back to New York City from a retreat upstate. Swartz texted her, asking when she was going to be home but not explaining why. When she arrived, he jumped out from behind the door and yelled, Surprise! Though StinebricknerKauffman was feeling tired, Swartz was in high spirits, and insisted that they go meet some friends at a Lower East Side bar called Spitzer's Corner. Swartz treated himself to two of his favorite foods: macaroni and cheese and a grilled cheese sandwich. The mac and cheese was mediocre, but Swartz and Stinebrickner-Kauffman agreed that the grilled cheese sandwich was among the best they had ever eaten. On the morning of Jan. 11, one week after he'd insisted it would be a great year, Swartz woke up despondentlower than Stinebrickner-Kauffman had ever seen him. I tried everything to get him up, she says. I turned on music, I opened the windows, I tickled him. Eventually he got up and got dressed, and StinebricknerKauffman thought he was going to come with her to her office. But instead, Swartz said he was going to stay home and rest. He needed to be alone. And I asked him why h e h a d g o t t e n d r e s s e d , s a y s Stinebrickner-Kauffman. But he didn't answer. That afternoon, Peters started reading through some of the evidence that the prosecution had handed over in late December. As he read, he became more and more excited about Swartz's chances at the Jan. 25 suppression hearing. If we had won that motion and suppressed the fruits of their search, they wouldn't have had a lot of the evidence they had planned to use at trial, he says. I ran down the hall, saying 'Look at this! Look at all this!' Peters put the new evidence in his briefcase and got in his car. As he drove, he got a call from Bob Swartz. Aaron had committed suicide.

Repercussion of Aaron Swart'z death:

After his death on 12th January Swartzs

After his death on 12th January Swartz's family criticized the prosecutor and MIT . His father, Robert Swartz said Aaron did not commit suicide but was killed by the government. Someone who made the world a better place was pushed to his death by the government. Stinebrickner Kauffman, Swartz's partner, said There's nothing Aaron would want more than for us to take this moment and change the world, she said, calling for the community Swartz was a part of to continue rallying for justice without him. If the community can combine forces and further his advocacy, she said, prosecutors can stop going after innocent young people like Aaron. Tim Berners Lee, developer of world wide web said, I have no met anyone else so ethical. He knew by writing code . . . he could change the world. Lawrence Lessig, an academic and political activist who knew Aaron Swartz for over a decade, called the government's attempt to prosecute his friend pointless and an example of idiocy during the service. Elliot Peters, Swartz' attorney in the JSTOR case, said his client's peers are now without someone whose passion for freedom and fairness and a mistrust for power was unmatched. Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, who works for Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, has faced criticism over his handling of the case. MIT president Rafael Reif announced an investigation into the school's involvement in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. He's appointed MIT professor Hal Abelson, a founding director of Creative Commons, who worked with Aaron,to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. As Swartz was a supporter of Open Access , after his death people have started posting links which are in support to Open Access After Swartz's death, Anonymous hacked MIT's website and replaced.

the homepage with a memorial for Swartz. The U.S. Sentencing Commission's homepage also was replaced with a Swartz tribute. These defacements expressed disgust for a justice system that would have sentenced Swartz to up to 50 years in prison for advocating for free access to information.