Calls to Action on the Fifth Anniversary of the Death of Aaron Swartz (eff.org)

On the fifth anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz, EFF activist Elliot Harmon posted a remembrance: When you look around the digital rights community, it's easy to find Aaron's fingerprints all over it. He and his organization Demand Progress worked closely with EFF to stop SOPA. Long before that, he played key roles in the development of RSS, RDF, and Creative Commons. He railed hard against the idea of government-funded scientific research being unavailable to the public, and his passion continues to motivate the open access community. Aaron inspired Lawrence Lessig to fight corruption in politics, eventually fueling Lessig's White House run... It's tempting to become pessimistic in the face of countless threats to free speech and privacy. But the story of the SOPA protests demonstrates that we can win in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
He shares a link to a video of Aaron's most inspiring talk, "How We Stopped SOPA," writing that "Aaron warned that SOPA wouldn't be the last time Hollywood attempted to use copyright law as an excuse to censor the Internet... 'The enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared... We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do.'"

On the anniversary of Aaron's death, his brother Ben Swartz, an engineer at Twitch, wrote about his own efforts to effect change in ways that would've made Aaron proud, while Aaron's mother urged calls to Congress to continue pushing for reform to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

And there were countless other remembrances on Twitter, including one fro Cory Doctorow, who tweeted a link to Lawrence Lessig's analysis of the prosecution. And Lessig himself marked the anniversary with several posts on Twitter. "None should rest," reads one, "for still, there is no peace."

Comments

They could choose a better idol

[damn_registrars]

Swartz's ideals were right but his methods were pure idiocy. He could have downloaded all those papers at his desk and released them and he would not have faced anywhere near as much trouble. Instead he entered a wiring closet at the university library without permission and did his downloads there. Being as his office was already on the school's wired network it is unlikely he would have obtained the papers much slower from his office than from the wiring closet that he unlawfully entered.

He then made himself into a martyr by taking the coward's way out of the charges that were being brought against him.

The real lesson we should learn here is to watch out for signs of mental health disorders in those close to us. Afterwards people came forward and expressed concerns they had for him, though there was no record of him having sought treatment in his final months. It's a shame that he took his own life, but we really should take a look at the entirety of what he did to get himself into trouble (rather than cherry-picking it like some want us to) before we celebrate him.