A Tribute to Aaron Swartz

‘There is a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on bittorrent like shoplifting from a movie store, or is it like loaning a video tape to a friend? Is reloading a web page over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in, or is it like the violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like the freedom of speech, or is it like the freedom to murder?’

- Aaron Swartz

At 26, Aaron Swartz apparently committed suicide. And no, unlike what the US Attorney’s office in Massachusetts might say, he was no hacker. He was a tireless campaigner for the freedom of information. Yes, he wrote code, co-authored major technological developments like the RSS 1.0, was the first coder and architect of the OpenLibrary.org, founder of Demand Progress which campaigned against Internet censorship bills such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in a broader quest for an informed and equitable civil society. He, like many others increasingly joining in, was an important voice in the Open Access (OA) movement, which campaigns for unrestricted access to peer reviewed scholarly journal articles through the Internet. After all, he argued, much of all that research was publicly funded through institutions. He believed that knowledge was nobody’s preserve, that no one has the right to sequester human knowledge behind paywalls set up by governments and corporations.

In an upside down world, a young genius who with many others in his generation is the reason why so many of us are connected through the Internet, was driven to suicide by his own government. Why? Because information is everything. You know it, I know it. Aaron Swartz knew this even better. And, dangerously enough, so did the US government.

In January 2011, he was arrested for downloading millions of articles from JSTOR, a non-profit organization and a digital library that offers scholarly content from over 1500 academic journals to institutions (albeit for a fee that runs into several thousand dollars for activation and continued subscription, money then shared with journal publishers, some of whom, like Elsevier made nearly $ 1.1 billion in profits in 2011) while signed in as a guest through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) server. Aaron had had a brush with the law once before when he similarly made PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) available during a free trial period. The feds had to drop the case against him because these documents were in fact in the public domain, and he was only making them accessible. In this case, subsequently JSTOR decided not to file charges when the material he had downloaded was returned to them. The MIT authorities kept a careful silence through all this. And, of their own independent accord, the US Attorney’s office continued to pursue the case with four felony counts which were pushed up to a total of thirteen felony counts, with several decades (upwards of 35 years) in prison and crippling fines to boot. For what? For doing something that is only akin to borrowing lots of books from the library which you even later return. Since that time a young man who was a doer, a fearless idealist, was wrapped up in the Kafkaesque mire of the US justice system that recognizes the power of open access to knowledge. We know this because, under US law, you will get far fewer years in prison for robbing a bank at gunpoint or even murder than you will for downloading rather too many articles through an authorized university network that in fact allows downloads.

This is not merely a case of partially-visioned legislation by politicians on technology, as some like to argue. This is not because hacking laws are ‘vague’ and could even cover perfectly mundane activities on the Internet. They are deliberately formulated with gallingly broad brushstrokes in order to precisely enable and widen access by the state and corporations to information while curtailing internet freedom for people who can use it as a tool of empowerment and organization. This is systematic targeting of a campaigner against laws that are increasingly dictated by a handful of corporations, who, even as the world is becoming increasingly digitized, are locking up the sum of the world’s knowledge by pushing for twisted legislation around copyright as justification for denying access.

In a fitting tribute to this selfless, brilliant, and honest crusader for the power of knowledge to the people, many academics the world over have made pdfs of their work available online. For those of us watching the stranglehold of corporations and colluding governments on our right to land, health, education, water, the urgency of also adding the unrestricted access to knowledge has now become an imperative. But for this Aaron Swartz did not have to die.