In this blog post, we will be revisiting the untimely and sad death of the genius computer programmer Aaron Swartz who was one of the founders of the popular social media platform Reddit. He died exactly this month 11 years ago aka on 11th January 2013 and we will be re-visiting what exactly caused his death and what we can learn from it.

Background

Aaron Swartz had been a genius from his early days and was well-known as a prodigy. Born in Highland Park, near the state of Chicago in the United States, he was the eldest child in a Jewish family. However, he was an atheist. From an early age, Swartz was really into computers and created a website known as "The Info network" at the age of 12 which is a user-generated encyclopedia. He had also become a member of the "working group" that authored the "RSS 1.0 web syndication specification" and a year later he had also involved himself with the "Creative Commons" organization. After finishing high school, he enrolled in a few courses at Lake Forest College after which in the year 2005 when he was 18, he enrolled himself at Stanford where he dropped out in his first year.

Entrepreneurial Pursuits

At Stanford, Swartz had applied to the prominent fund YCombinator's first "Summer Founders Program" where he came up with an idea to work on a startup named Infogami which solved problems in the CMS space and could be used to create rich and visually stunning websites that could also act like a wiki for structured data and had dropped out of Stanford to pursue this further.

He had also created web.py, a Python web application framework as he was unhappy with the currently available systems using the Python Programming language, and this framework was used heavily to build Infogami.

After this, in the early fall of 2005, Aaron Swartz and his co-founders started working on Reddit where he re-wrote the currently used LISP codebase to Python and web.py. Although Infogami's platform was abandoned as it had failed to find further funding, the software used for it was used as a base for many more projects built by Swartz and several others.

Infogami had finally been merged with Reddit and as a result, Swartz became the co-founder of Reddit after a little bit of initial struggle, Reddit's popularity increased in 2005-2006. And, the LLC which Swartz operated under was called 'Not a Bug' which had both Reddit and Infogain [now merged with Reddit] under it. This LLC had slowly been acquired by Condé Nast Publications [The owner of The Wired Magazine] in the year of 2006 and Swartz moved to San Francisco where he worked on Reddit for Wired. However, Swartz was slowly asked to resign from the company and he departed as Reddit's co-founder as he found corporate office life to not work for him and the company not like working for him.

However, in the year of 2007, Swartz along with Infogami's co-founder Simon Castensen launched a new firm named 'Jottit' in an attempt to create a Markdown-driven content management system that works using Python after this in the year of 2008, he founded Watchdog[.]net, to aggregate and visualize data about politicians.

The Beginning of Dark Times

In the year of 2008, Aaron Swartz downloaded about 2.7 million Federal Court documents stored in the PACER [Public Access to Court Electronic Records] which is a database managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. These documents as they were expensive were now being made available publicly for free which caused the FBI to press charges against Aaron Swartz. The PACER cost about 8 cents per page for information on the Federal government and the fees that were received for downloading these documents were used to finance technology for the government. Still, the system ran on a budget surplus of about $150 million according to various sources which Swartz managed to download for free through a Perl computer script running on Amazon Cloud servers with credentials belonging to a library in Sacramento.

The Illegal Download

After this move, in the year of 2010 on September the 25th, Aaron Swartz used JSTOR, a digital repository to download a large number of academic journal articles through MIT's computer network over a few weeks between late 2010 and early 2011 and he had a JSTOR account as Swartz was a research fellow at Harvard and this credential was given out to them.

On September 25th, the IP address as a part of the MIT network that Swartz used began sending hundreds of PDF download requests every minute to JSTOR thus making the site very slow. Shortly after this, the IP address was blocked and from another IP address, more PDF download requests were caused resulting in a temporary block at the firwwall level at MIT.

According to the authorities at MIT, Swartz downloaded the documents from a laptop connected to a networking switch in a controlled access wiring closet at MIT, and the door of it was kept unlocked. When this was discovered, a video camera was placed in the room to record Swartz, and his computer was left untouched. The recording stopped once Swartz was correctly identified but, instead of pursuing a civil lawsuit against him, JSTOR settled with him in June 2011 by asking him to surrender the downloaded data.

The Arrest

On the night of January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested near Harvard Campus by MIT Police and a secret service agent and in the Cambridge district court was prosecuted against 2 state charges of breaking the institution with an intent to commit a felony. He was after this indicted by a federal grand jury on the charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a computer with protected access and recklessly damaging a protected computer.

However, these charges were dropped after some time in the same year in December and this was done to prevent a federal prosecution.

On September 12, 2012, the federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding 9 more felony counts, increasing his criminal record, and thus Swartz's maximum criminal exposure was punished with 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines. After a plea, Swartz's sentence was recommended to be reduced to 6 months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes. This deal however was rejected by Swartz and his attorney where they opted for a trial instead where prosecutors would be forced to justify their pursuit of him.

The end

After this, within 6 months, Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013, and after his death, the federal prosecutors had no option but to drop his charges. Finally, due to the Freedom of Information Act on December 4, 2013, by The Wired Magazine, several documents related to the case were released by the Secret Service including a video of Swartz entering the MIT network closet.

Swartz had hanged himself and was discovered by his girlfriend in his Brooklyn Apartment without any suicide note Swartz's family and his partner created a website memoriating him on which they issued a statement saying that "He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the internet and the world a fairer, better place."

According to Aaron's family, his death was caused mainly by bad practices in the criminal justice system which is filled with intimidation as a procedure and criticized its prosecutorial overreach and also criticized MIT saying that the institution had contributed to his untimely death.

After his death, over 50,000 people signed an online petition for the removal of Ortiz who used his influence for the prosecution of Swartz, and a similar petition was also formed to oust the prosecutor Stephen Heymann. However, in the year of 2015 just 2 years after these petitions were formed, the White House declined both of them.

In the year of 2013, Aaron Swartz was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame and a hackathon was also held in Swartz's memory around the date of his birthday in the year of 2013 a second annual hackathon on the weekend of November 8-10 was held across the world. , Notable Turkish-Dutch Artist Ahmet Ogust commemorated Swartz's death through a work entitled "Information Power to People" which depicted his his bust.

Aaron Swartz Day has also been celebrated every year where people organize hackathons and talks related to issues Aaron was passionate about like Open Access and every year notable speakers take part in it and a documentary named "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" had also been released exactly a year later of his untimely death.

Learnings

The reason for Aaron Swartz's illegal download of the documents that had restricted access to the internet from MIT and the library was that Aaron believed that information should not be locked behind free doors and should be readily available to anybody at any time. But, he was shot down by lawmakers who prosecuted him for trial against a variety of crimes which led to him taking his own life at the end. This marks the ending of a tale of a genius programmer who created or impacted some significant parts of the web like "The Creative Commons License", "Reddit" and so much more who was unjustly according to a lot of people taken down or silenced by the lawmakers in the USA.