Aaron Swartz~Driven to suicide or murdered?
While I was digging on Noah Glass, twitter’s forgotten founder, I came across the name Aaron Swartz. Aaron was one of the founders of reddit, the popular social media site. He was a genius computer programmer and a fierce believer in free speech and the free exchange of information on the internet.
I might be doing a lot of theorizing here but I’m seeing a pattern. If you are a young genius, computer type entrepreneur that believes in the free exchange of information and speech, the overlords must either control you or kill you and this why I believe Trump said this about Elon Musk, “I was worried about him because he’s one of our great geniuses and we have to protect our geniuses”. There is much more to this statement than we can even imagine.
At the age of 14, Aaron Swartz was instrumental in the development of the RSS, Really Simple Syndication, software that is used to manage what people read on the internet. At age 17, Aaron merged his company, Infogami with Reddit in 2005 earning him the title of co-founder of Reddit. A year later, Conde Nast, a global mass media company, purchased Reddit, for a substantial sum and Swartz received a big chunk of that money at a very young age making him a legend in the internet and programming world.
Like Elon Musk and Noah Glass, Swartz was a huge proponent of free speech on the Internet. This belief led Swartz, in Sept of 2010, to MIT where he downloaded JSTOR, (Journal Storage) a digital library containing digitized back issues of academic journals. Swartz believed everyone should have access to the journals contained in JSTOR so he decided to liberate them.
Glen Greenwald wrote a tribute piece to Aaron Swartz where he stated: “specifically, he committed himself to the causes in which he so passionately believed: internet freedom, civil liberties, making information and knowledge as available as possible.”
Downloading JSTOR was no small task and Swartz had to initiate over two hundred thousand download sessions in a single hour. This caused the JSTOR people to notice so to counter it they kept banning the offending IP address, Swartz would counter by creating another IP address. Swartz kept creating new IP’s and downloading until JSTOR took the unprecedented measure of blocking access to its data base for MIT’s entire campus. By October Swartz had downloaded 453,570 articles from 562 different journals over 1,256,249 sessions.
A video camera caught Aaron Swartz downloading JSTOR and once he was identified, JSTOR reached a settlement with him where he surrendered the downloaded data in June of 2011. Aaron’s goal was never to profit off the information, only to share it, for he believed everyone should have access to this sort of information.
On July 11, 2011, he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.
In September of 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, bringing his total felony indictments to 13. Many people thought this was extremely excessive and voiced their disgust. Swartz faced a maximum of 50 years imprisonment and $1 million in fines.
The prosecutor offered Swartz a deal of 6 months if he pled guilty to all 13 counts, a deal which Swartz adamantly refused. He didn’t want to live the rest of his life stigmatized as a convicted felon. He wanted a jury trial to expose the prosecutions unjust persecution.
The attorney general seeking to destroy Aaron Swartz was Carmen Ortiz, an Obama appointee, and her pursuit of Aaron Swartz was one of the most aggressively waged battles over how the internet is used and who controls the information that the public gets to see on the internet. They wanted to control “free speech”.
Huffington post reported that "Ortiz faced significant backlash for pursuing the case against Swartz, including a petition to the White House to have her fired” signed by more than 50,000 people.
The Obama White House declined.
On January 13, 2013, Aaron’s girlfriend, Taren Kaufman, found him hung in his apartment, he was only 26 years old. There was no suicide note. This is where it gets murky, suspicious, and sad. Why on earth did he commit suicide?
Did a relentless government administration drive him to it? Or did a relentless government administration “suicide” a man they saw as a huge obstacle in their pursuit of a controlled internet?
At the funeral, his friend Lawrence Lessig, categorized the AG as a “bully”. Lessing later wrote: “Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.
A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to 'justice' never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled 'felons'."
His father, Robert Swartz said “Aaron was killed by the government” and his family wrote this statement after his death:
“Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles."
After Aaron’s death, his father endorsed Aaron’s law.
“Aaron Swartz's Father Praises 'Aaron's Law' Proposal”
“Six months after prominent Internet activist Aaron Swartz killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment, his father endorsed new legislation designed to reform the federal law that U.S. prosecutors used to threaten Aaron with 35 years in prison.”
Author:
Sam Gustin
Source Link:
http://business.time.com/2013/06/27/aaron-swartzs-father-praises-aarons-law-prop…
While we shouldn’t condone what Aaron Swartz did was it really worth tormenting him to death? Or was he “suicided” by the desperate overlords because Aaron was a brilliant man who could not be controlled? Either way the Obama administration was responsible for his death. This is a prime example of how far these despots will go to keep control of their version of the truth.
Quinn,
Thank you for this, and your previous articles. You are reporting relevant topics that build a pattern. Your articles are what Paul Harvey would call, "The rest of the story."
Government is the enemy of free speech and individual liberty. The Obama regime's abuse of power ended the life of the brilliant Aaron Swartz...murder by government.
Thank you!
What a brilliant article Quinn. I'm deeply touched. No way that young man would take his life without leaving a note to his parents and girlfriend.
It's disgusting, how these monsters behave!