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Aaron Swartz — news, coverage & facts — IJR

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Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013), also known as AaronSw, was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; and the Python website framework web.py. Swartz helped define the syntax of the lightweight markup language format Markdown, and was a co-owner of the social news aggregation website Reddit until it was fully sold in 2006 and contributed to its development until he left the company in 2007. He is often credited as a martyr and a prodigy, and much of his work focused on civic awareness and progressive activism.

After Reddit was fully sold to Condé Nast Publications in 2006, Swartz became more involved in activism, helping launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009. In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet and setting it to download academic journal articles from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison, but would have been forced to plead guilty to federal felonies. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment. In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Contents

PACER

In 2008, Swartz downloaded about 2.7 million federal court documents stored in the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) database managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. The Huffington Post characterized his actions this way: "Swartz downloaded public court documents from the PACER system in an effort to make them available outside of the expensive service. The move drew the attention of the FBI, which ultimately decided not to press charges as the documents were, in fact, public."

PACER was charging eight cents per page for information that Carl Malamud, who founded the nonprofit group Public.Resource.Org, contended should be free, because federal documents are not covered by copyright. The fees were "plowed back to the courts to finance technology, but the system [ran] a budget surplus of some $150 million, according to court reports," reported The New York Times. PACER used technology that was "designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems ... putting the nation's legal system behind a wall of cash and kludge." Malamud appealed to fellow activists, urging them to visit one of 17 libraries conducting a free trial of the PACER system, download court documents, and send them to him for public distribution.

After reading Malamud's call for action, Swartz used a Perl computer script running on Amazon cloud servers to download the documents, using credentials belonging to a Sacramento library. From September 4 to 20, 2008, it accessed documents and uploaded them to a cloud computing service. He released the documents to Malamud's organization.

On September 29, 2008, the GPO suspended the free trial, "pending an evaluation" of the program. Swartz's actions were subsequently investigated by the FBI. The case was closed after two months with no charges filed. Swartz learned the details of the investigation after filing a FOIA request with the FBI, and described their response as the "usual mess of confusions that shows the FBI's lack of sense of humor."

At a 2013 memorial for Swartz, Malamud recalled their work with PACER. They brought millions of U.S. District Court records out from behind PACER's "pay wall", he said, and found them full of privacy violations, including medical records and the names of minor children and confidential informants.

We sent our results to the Chief Judges of 31 District Courts ... They redacted those documents and they yelled at the lawyers that filed them ... The Judicial Conference changed their privacy rules. ... [To] the bureaucrats who ran the Administrative Office of the United States Courts ... we were thieves that took $1.6 million of their property.

So they called the FBI ... [The FBI] found nothing wrong ...

A more detailed account of his collaboration with Swartz on the PACER project appears in an essay on Malamud's website.

Writing in Ars Technica, Timothy Lee, who later made use of the documents obtained by Swartz as a co-creator of RECAP, offered some insight into discrepancies in reports on how much data Swartz downloaded: "In a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few days before the offsite crawl was shut down, Swartz guessed he got around 25 percent of the documents in PACER. The New York Times similarly reported Swartz had downloaded "an estimated 20 percent of the entire database". Based on the facts that Swartz downloaded 2.7 million documents while PACER, at the time, contained 500 million, Lee concluded that Swartz downloaded less than one percent of the database.

Arrest and prosecution

On the night of January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested near the Harvard campus by MIT Police and a Secret Service agent, and arraigned in Cambridge District Court on two state charges of breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. On July 11, 2011, he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer.

On November 17, 2011, Swartz was indicted by a Middlesex County Superior Court grand jury on state charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny, and unauthorized access to a computer network. On December 16, 2011, state prosecutors filed a notice that they were dropping the two original charges, and the charges listed in the November 17, 2011, indictment were dropped on March 8, 2012. According to a spokesperson for the Middlesex County prosecutor, this was done to avoid impeding a federal prosecution headed by Stephen P. Heymann, supported by evidence provided by Secret Service agent Michael S. Pickett.

On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines. During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes. Swartz and his lead attorney rejected the deal, opting instead for a trial where prosecutors would be forced to justify their pursuit of him.

The federal prosecution involved what was characterized by numerous critics (such as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean) as an "overcharging" 13-count indictment and "overzealous", "Nixonian" prosecution for alleged computer crimes, brought by then U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz. Swartz died by suicide on January 11, 2013. After his death, federal prosecutors dropped the charges. On December 4, 2013, due to a Freedom of Information Act suit by the investigations editor of Wired magazine, several documents related to the case were released by the Secret Service, including a video of Swartz entering the MIT network closet.

Funeral and memorial gatherings

Swartz's funeral services were held on January 15, 2013, at Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, delivered a eulogy. He is buried at Shalom Memorial Park in Arlington Heights. The same day, The Wall Street Journal published a story based in part on an interview with Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. She told the Journal that Swartz lacked the money to pay for a trial and "it was too hard for him to ... make that part of his life go public" by asking for help. He was also distressed, she said, because two of his friends had just been subpoenaed and because he no longer believed that MIT would try to stop the prosecution. For donations in his memory, Swartz's family recommended GiveWell, an organization Swartz admired, had collaborated with, and made his sole beneficiary in his will.

Several memorials followed. On January 19, hundreds attended a memorial at the Cooper Union, speakers at which included Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, open source advocate Doc Searls, Creative Commons' Glenn Otis Brown, journalist Quinn Norton, Roy Singham of ThoughtWorks, and David Segal of Demand Progress. On January 24, there was a memorial at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco (video) at which Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Alex Stamos, Brewster Kahle, Peter Eckersley, and Carl Malamud spoke. On February 4, a memorial was held in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill; speakers included Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Darrell Issa, Alan Grayson, and Jared Polis. Other lawmakers in attendance included Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Jan Schakowsky. Harvey Silverglate was a featured speaker at a Demand Progress rally in Swartz's memory. A memorial also took place on March 12 at the MIT Media Lab. On February 2, 2025, a statue of Swartz was unveiled at the Internet Archive building in San Francisco. This was organized by Pablo Peniche and Lisa Rein. The statue stands in the building's lobby.

Congress

Three members of the U.S. House of Representatives—Republican Darrell Issa and Democrats Zoe Lofgren and Jared Polis—all on the House Judiciary Committee, raised questions about the government's handling of the case. Calling the charges against him "ridiculous and trumped up", Polis called Swartz a "martyr" whose death illustrated the need for Congress to limit the discretion of federal prosecutors. At a memorial for Swartz on Capitol Hill, Issa said:

Ultimately, knowledge belongs to all the people of the world. ... Aaron understood that. ... Our copyright laws were created for the purpose of promoting useful works, not hiding them.

Senator Elizabeth Warren issued a statement saying that Swartz's "advocacy for Internet freedom, social justice, and Wall Street reform demonstrated ... the power of his ideas". In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Senator John Cornyn asked, "On what basis did the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts conclude that her office's conduct was 'appropriate'?" and "Was the prosecution of Mr. Swartz in any way retaliation for his exercise of his rights as a citizen under the Freedom of Information Act?"

Issa, who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, announced that he would investigate the Justice Department's actions in prosecuting Swartz. In a statement to The Huffington Post, he praised Swartz's work on "open government and free access to the people". Issa's investigation garnered some bipartisan support. On January 28, 2013, Issa and ranking committee member Elijah Cummings published a letter to Holder asking why federal prosecutors had filed the superseding indictment. On February 20, WBUR reported that Ortiz was expected to testify at an upcoming Oversight Committee hearing about her office's handling of Swartz's case. On February 22, Associate Deputy Attorney General Steven Reich conducted a briefing for congressional staffers involved in the investigation. They were told that Swartz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto played a role in prosecutorial decision-making. Congressional staffers left this briefing believing that prosecutors thought Swartz had to be convicted of a felony carrying at least a short prison sentence in order to justify having filed charges against him.

Excoriating the Department of Justice as the "Department of Vengeance", Stinebrickner-Kauffman told the Guardian that the DOJ had erred in relying on Swartz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto as an indication of his beliefs by 2010. She said, "He was no longer a single issue activist. He was into lots of things, from healthcare to climate change to money in politics." On March 6, Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the case was "a good use of prosecutorial discretion". In response, Stinebrickner-Kauffman issued a statement repeating and amplifying her claims of prosecutorial misconduct. Public documents, she wrote, reveal that Heymann "instructed the Secret Service to seize and hold evidence without a warrant... lied to the judge about that fact in written briefs... [and] withheld exculpatory evidence... for over a year", violating his legal and ethical obligations to turn such evidence over to the defense. On March 22, Senator Al Franken wrote in a letter to Holder that "charging a young man like Mr. Swartz with federal offenses punishable by over 35 years of federal imprisonment seems remarkably aggressive—particularly when it appears that one of the principal aggrieved parties ... did not support a criminal prosecution."

In 2013, Lofgren introduced a bill, Aaron's Law (H.R. 2454, S. 1196), to exclude terms of service violations from the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and from the wire fraud statute. Lessig wrote of the bill, "this is a critically important change.... The CFAA was the hook for the government's bullying.... This law would remove that hook. In a single line: no longer would it be a felony to breach a contract." Professor Orin Kerr, a specialist in the nexus between computer law and criminal law, wrote that he had been arguing for precisely this sort of reform of the Act for years. The ACLU also called for reform of the CFAA to "remove the dangerously broad criminalization of online activity". The EFF mounted a campaign for these reforms. Lessig's inaugural Chair lecture as Furman Professor of Law and Leadership was titled Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age; he dedicated the lecture to Swartz. The Aaron's Law bill stalled in committee. Brian Knappenberger alleges this was due to Oracle Corporation's financial interest in maintaining the status quo.

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) is a bill that would mandate earlier public release of taxpayer-funded research. FASTR has been described as "The Other Aaron's Law". Senators Wyden and Cornyn introduced the Senate version in 2013, 2015 and 2017, while the bill was introduced to the House of Representatives by Lofgren, Mike Doyle, and Kevin Yoder. Wyden wrote of the bill, "the FASTR act provides that access to taxpayer funded research should never be hidden behind a paywall." The legislation did not pass, but it prompted more open access on the part of the US government. Shortly after the bill's introduction in 2013, the Office of Science and Technology Policy directed "each Federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government".

Since 2013, Aaron Swartz Day has been celebrated on his birthday, November 8, with hackathons and livestreamed talks related to the many issues Swartz was passionate about, such as open access and progressive politics and economics. Past speakers include Chelsea Manning, Barrett Brown, Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Cory Doctorow, Cindy Cohn, Jason Leopold, and Brewster Kahle.