An amazing wunderkid RIP!
Andrea Peterson from the Washington Post writes the following about the death of Aaron Swartz,
A year ago today, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment. Swartz was a true child of the Internet: a programming wunderkind who helped create the popular online syndication protocol RSS at just age 14 and a prodigious activist for Internet freedom issues who led the charge against the broad online copyright-enforcement proposals SOPA and PIPA in 2012. He also killed himself in the midst of a lengthy legal battle over charges related to his bulk-downloading of documents from an academic database while connected to MIT's network. Several of those charges were based on a cybercrime law dating back to 1986.
Peterson also writes about some of the charges in the case
The alleged facts of the case were a little more complex than that analogy -- court documents say Swartz used a pseudonym on the MIT guest network and bulk-downloaded documents from the academic database JSTOR using a Python script, changing his IP and MAC addresses after being blocked and eventually hard-wiring a laptop into an MIT network closet.
A young man twenty-six years of age felt that he could not go on how sad and tragic is that, no answer will ever help us understand and no answer will ever suffice. Can you imagine being 26 and feeling like the whole world is on your shoulders-not being able to see your future, he must have felt so alone.
Aaron Swartz Speaking about the NSA.
“It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax that they don’t even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is,” Swartz says of the NSA in the documentary clip. “If the answer is, ‘Oh, we’re spying on so many people we can’t possibly even count them,’ then that’s an awful lot of people.” He adds that the fact that the agency can’t put any number on the amount of people their surveillance reaches is “scary.” So Aaron Swartz spoke about the NSA and it is very "scary" yes very scary.
Prison time for Aaron.
At the time of his death, Swartz was facing up to 50 years in prison for downloading academic journal articles from MIT’s servers. As the Washington Post’s Andrea Peterson pointed out today, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which dates back to 1986 and it seen as outdated by many of Swartz’s allies, remains unchanged one year later.
h/t Mediaite
It seems like it was just yesterday that Aaron left this world, we will never know the reason, so much sadness for a young life cut short yet it still brings us back to the question why, just why? Time moves on and we will never know...we still ask Why!