Two thoughts:
What an amazing person. Here's a list of some of the stuff he worked on, in the decade-and-a-bit he was active (he was 26).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1"At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role in developing the RSS software that is still widely used to enable people to manage what they read on the internet. As a teenager, he also played a vital role in the creation of Reddit...
He became something of a legend in the internet and programming world before he was 18. His path to internet mogul status and the great riches it entails was clear, easy and virtually guaranteed: a path which so many other young internet entrepreneurs have found irresistible, monomaniacally devoting themselves to making more and more money long after they have more than they could ever hope to spend.
But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in devoting his life to his own material enrichment, despite how easy it would have been for him. As Lessig wrote: "Aaron had literally done nothing in his life 'to make money' . . . Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good."
"...he committed himself to the causes in which he so passionately believed: internet freedom, civil liberties, making information and knowledge as available as possible. Here he is in his May, 2012 keynote address at the Freedom To Connect conference discussing the role he played in stopping SOPA, the movie-industry-demanded legislation that would have vested the government with dangerous censorship powers over the internet."
"In 2008, Swartz targeted Pacer, the online service that provides access to court documents for a per-page fee. What offended Swartz and others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at public expense. Along with a friend, Swartz created a program to download millions of those documents and then, as Doctorow wrote, "spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain." For that act of civil disobedience, he was investigated and harassed by the FBI, but never charged."
Second thought: The FBI should be ashamed. The prosecutor should be ashamed. The judge should be ashamed. MIT should be ashamed for not speaking up. Everyone involved in a legal system that would do this to someone- headhunt them, bully them into suicide for a laughable non-crime, or probably no crime at all- has blood on their hands. Fuck you all. I hope you die before you kill any other good people.
"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."
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bullyAnd, for once, the comments are worthy and often correct.
"Aaron, Manning, Assange, Kyriakoy, Occupy, all persecuted, hounded, some tortured. For what? For speaking truth to power, for revealing corruption, war crimes. For liberating information.
Meanwhile, Yoo, Addington, Libby, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales go around signing book covers and giving lectures about national security. The murderers, torturers and torture apologists are celebrated. The whistleblowers crushed."
Once again, the western system of law shows itself to be a bad joke. Lock up the people working to improve humanity; throw away the key. Pardons for the murderers and thieves, if they're even prosecuted at all.
