Aaron Swartz, who co-founded ‘Reddit’ and became an Internet folk hero for fighting to make online content free to the public, committed suicide Friday. He was 26. Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, said a statement released by his family and his girlfriend.
Swartz, who was accused of stealing nearly 5 million articles from an MIT archive and was set to be tried in February, was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment.
His parents and partner released a statement that read, in part: "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decision 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, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike J-STOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles."
Aaron Swartz began computer programming at the age of 12. By the time he was 14 he had co-authored the RSS internet syndication standard which allows internet users to aggregate content that interests them. Swartz was a Harvard University fellow studying ethics when he was charged in 2011 with stealing nearly 5 million articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He faced 13 felony charges, including wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.
Swartz pleaded not guilty, and his trial in federal court was scheduled to begin next month. If convicted, he could have faced decades in prison and steep fines.
In a tribute to Swartz the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group stated, "Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way."
On Saturday, American historian Rick Perlstein, who was a friend, called Swartz a philosopher as well as an activist. Swartz had also co-founded the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.
"He had this feeling for data and what it could do, how to master it instead of letting it master us," Perlstein told The Times. "He just insisted on and struggled to live a life of maximal authenticity and integrity."
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