Aaron Swartz's Tragic Fight to Free the World's Knowledge
- Aaron Swartz faced 35 years in federal prison for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR in an attempt to liberate knowledge from corporate paywalls.
- Despite helping to defeat the SOPA censorship bill Swartz was pursued relentlessly by prosecutors who refused to offer a plea deal without a felony conviction.
- Swartz committed suicide in 2013 which triggered a global debate on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and cemented his legacy as a martyr for internet freedom.
On a cold morning in January 2011 police at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology arrested a twenty four year old programmer named Aaron Swartz. His crime was not robbing a bank or selling state secrets but downloading millions of academic articles from a digital archive called JSTOR. Swartz was a technical prodigy who had helped architect the RSS web feed format and co founded Reddit before he was old enough to drink. Yet federal prosecutors viewed his actions through a draconian lens and charged him with thirteen felony counts. They threatened him with up to thirty five years in prison for what many tech experts considered a victimless act of civil disobedience.
The motivation behind the download was ideological rather than financial. Swartz was a fervent believer in the democratization of information and argued that the world’s scientific and cultural heritage should not be locked behind corporate paywalls. He famously penned the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto which called for a mass liberation of data to fight against the privatization of knowledge. He saw the current system as a moral failure where taxpayers funded research that they were subsequently forced to pay huge fees to read. His goal was to break this cycle by releasing the JSTOR archive to the public.
While under the crushing weight of the indictment Swartz managed to orchestrate one of the most significant political victories in internet history. He helped organize the massive online protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act which effectively killed legislation that would have introduced heavy handed censorship to the web. However his public success seemed to harden the resolve of the US Attorney’s office. Prosecutors refused to offer a plea deal that did not include a felony conviction. They insisted on making an example of him to deter future hackers despite the fact that JSTOR had declined to press charges.
The legal siege ultimately ended in tragedy. On January 11 2013 Aaron Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment after taking his own life just weeks before his trial was set to begin. His death sparked a global outcry regarding prosecutorial overreach and the outdated Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. While legislative attempts to reform these laws have stalled the movement Swartz ignited lives on through the expanded availability of open access research. He proved that a single individual could challenge the gatekeepers of information even if the price of that battle was his life.