Aaron Swartz

Early Life

Aaron Hillel Swartz was born on November 8, 1986, in Highland Park, Illinois, approximately 25 miles north of Chicago, into a Jewish family. He was the eldest child of Susan and Robert Swartz, whose father founded the software firm Mark Williams Company. Swartz attended North Shore Country Day School, a small private school near Chicago, through ninth grade, after which he left and enrolled in courses at Lake Forest College.

From an early age, Swartz immersed himself in computers, programming, and Internet culture. At age 12, in 1999, he created The Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia that won the ArsDigita Prize, awarded to young people who build useful, educational, and collaborative noncommercial websites. At 14, he joined the working group that authored the RSS 1.0 web syndication specification, and a year later became involved with the Creative Commons organization. In 2004, he enrolled at Stanford University but left after his first year.

Career

During his time at Stanford, Swartz applied to Y Combinator's inaugural Summer Founders Program with a startup called Infogami, a flexible content management system. Working with co-founder Simon Carstensen in the summer of 2005, he chose not to return to Stanford and instead continued developing the project. As part of that work, he created the web.py web application framework for Python, which he later used to help rewrite Reddit's Lisp codebase. When Infogami failed to secure further funding, Y Combinator facilitated a merger with Reddit in November 2005, forming a new firm called Not a Bug. As a result, Swartz received the title of co-founder of Reddit.

In October 2006, Not a Bug was acquired by Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired magazine, largely on the strength of Reddit's growing popularity. Swartz relocated to San Francisco to continue working on Reddit but found corporate office life uncongenial and was asked to resign in January 2007. He subsequently co-founded Jottit with Simon Carstensen in September 2007, another attempt at a Markdown-driven content management system built in Python.

During the academic year 2010–11, Swartz served as a Lab Fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig, where he conducted research on political corruption.

Activism and Notable Work

Following Reddit's acquisition, Swartz shifted increasing focus toward civic and political activism. In 2008, he founded Watchdog.net to aggregate and visualize data about politicians, and wrote the widely circulated Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. That same year, he downloaded approximately 2.7 million federal court documents from the PACER database — records he considered public property — and released them to the nonprofit Public.Resource.Org. The FBI investigated but filed no charges.

In 2009, Swartz helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and in 2010 co-founded Demand Progress, a political advocacy group focused on civil liberties and government reform. Demand Progress became particularly prominent for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). After the bill's defeat, Swartz delivered the keynote address at the F2C: Freedom to Connect 2012 conference in Washington, D.C., speaking on how the anti-SOPA campaign succeeded.

Swartz also participated in Wikipedia beginning in 2003 under the username AaronSw, and in 2006 published an analysis of how Wikipedia articles are written, concluding that the bulk of content came from occasional outside contributors rather than the core editorial group — a finding that contradicted the view of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Arrest and Prosecution

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by MIT Police and a Secret Service agent after connecting a laptop to MIT's network via an unlocked wiring closet and using it to bulk-download academic journal articles from JSTOR. Federal prosecutors, led by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, charged him with wire fraud and multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines and up to 35 years in prison. A superseding indictment filed in September 2012 raised his maximum criminal exposure to 50 years. Prosecutors offered a plea deal involving six months in a low-security prison in exchange for guilty pleas on 13 federal counts; Swartz and his attorneys rejected the offer. JSTOR itself settled with Swartz civilly in June 2011, with him surrendering the downloaded data.

The prosecution was widely criticized as overreaching, with commentators including former Nixon White House counsel John Dean characterizing it as overzealous.

Death and Recognition

Swartz died by suicide on January 11, 2013, in his Brooklyn apartment, two days after prosecutors rejected a counter-offer from his legal team. He was 26 years old. Federal prosecutors dropped all charges following his death. In 2013, Swartz was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.