Coder and information activist Aaron Swartz took his life on Friday, and in the wake of his death the outpouring of grief from the tech community is palpable. While Swartz wrote publicly about depression, many have speculated that his legal troubles compounded the sense of hopelessness that drove him to take his own life. On Saturday afternoon, Swartz's family and his partner released a statement corroborating that idea:
Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.
The family said that Aaron's funeral will be held in Highland Park, IL, on Tuesday January 15.
Alex Stamos, the CTO of Artemis Internet and an expert witness who was working with Swartz's attorneys to testify in the the April US vs. Swartz trial, also wrote a long post detailing what he knew of the case. The Feds accused Swartz of logging on to MIT's network illegally and using that access “to download a major portion of JSTOR's archive onto his computers.” The Department of Justice officially accused him of wire fraud, computer fraud, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, among other charges.
But for all those grandiose claims, expert witness Stamos wrote, “I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.”
Stamos goes on to write that MIT runs an “open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to.” In addition, he wrote, MIT did not require users of its network to agree to any terms of use, nor did JSTOR take any steps to prevent large-scale downloads of its PDFs.
“Aaron did not 'hack' the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of 'hack,'” wrote Stamos. “Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them.” Stamos wrote that Swartz also did nothing to cover his tracks either. (The complaint issued by the US Grand Jury alleges that Swartz covered his face with a bicycle helmet while entering and exiting the closet in which he downloaded the JSTOR files from MIT's network.)
Stamos concluded, “If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were 'wrong,' I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as 'inconsiderate.' In the same way it is inconsiderate to write a check at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library needed for a History 101 paper.” Sadly, Stamos will not have the chance to make his testimony.
Swartz's family noted that memories of him can be posted, and donations in his memory can be made here.
National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255
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