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

It's all propaganda now

[SuperKendall]

Everyone else may have agendas and fail in their full diligence, but Fox fails INTENTIONALLY since its inception

If you claim Fox News is propaganda, without saying CNN is propaganda, MSNBC is propaganda, the NYT is propaganda, then how can we respect your hyper-partisan views?

Here's a hint: It's all propaganda now. Most journalism now is driving you to think a certain way, providing facts that fit a narrative and omitting ones that do not.

Until you realize that you yourself are just another tool of propaganda by denouncing a single source and implying the others are reliable.

P.S. Fox News was not any more designed as propaganda than any of the other news sources, it evolved like the rest of them to where we are now. To claim there is any difference between what Fox is doing and what CNN is doing is what I take exception at. You cannot label them differently.

What matters is now, not then

[SuperKendall]

It doesn't matter to me what the origins may have been; it matters what things are.

I find it pretty stupid to judge the starting point of organizations that were founded decades ago against the more recent Fox News, which was formed when outlets were already turning partisan and was just a bit ahead of the curve.

I'm not dealing in whataboutism; I deal in simple hard truths. And that is that Fox News is no more partisan now than any major news outlet (except possibly the Wall St Journal).

I also find it telling that you hide behind the AC mask to critique others... obviously that makes your opinion on the subject worth quite a bit less than mine.