Aaron Swartz

Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) 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; the website framework web.py; and Markdown, a lightweight markup language format.

In 1999, at age twelve, he created the website The Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia.

The site won the ArsDigita Prize, given to young people who create "useful, educational, and collaborative" noncommercial websites and led to early recognition of Swartz's nascent talent in coding.

At age 14, he became a member of the working group that authored the RSS 1.0 web syndication specification.

A year later, he became involved in the Creative Commons organization.

In 2005, he enrolled at Stanford University but left the school after his first year.

During Swartz's first year at Stanford, he applied to Y Combinator's first Summer Founders Program, proposing to work on a startup called Infogami, a flexible content management system designed to create rich and visually interesting websites or a form of wiki for structured data.

After working on it with co-founder Simon Carstensen over the summer of 2005, Swartz opted not to return to Stanford, choosing instead to continue to develop and seek funding for Infogami.

As part of his work on Infogami, Swartz created the web.py web application framework because he was unhappy with other available systems in the Python programming language.

In the early fall of 2005, he worked with his fellow co-founders of another nascent Y-Combinator firm, Reddit, to rewrite its Lisp codebase using Python and web.py.

Although Infogami's platform was abandoned after Not a Bug was acquired, Infogami's software was used to support the Internet Archive's Open Library project and the web.py web framework was used as the basis for many other projects by Swartz and many others.

When Infogami failed to find further funding, Y-Combinator organizers suggested Infogami merge with Reddit, which it did in November 2005, creating a new firm, Not a Bug, devoted to promoting both products.

As a result, Swartz was given the title of co-founder of Reddit.

Although both projects initially struggled, Reddit made large gains in popularity in 2005–2006.

After Reddit was sold to Condé Nast Publications in 2006, Swartz became more involved in activism, helping launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009.

In October 2006, based largely on Reddit's success, Not a Bug was acquired by Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired magazine.

Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco to continue to work on Reddit for Wired.

He found corporate office life uncongenial and ultimately was asked to resign from the company.

Swartz was involved in the development of the social news aggregation website Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007.

He is often credited as a martyr and a prodigy, and his work focused on civic awareness and activism.

In September 2007, he joined Infogami co-founder Simon Carstensen to launch a new firm, Jottit, in another attempt to create a Markdown-driven content management system in Python.

In 2008, Swartz founded Watchdog.net, "the good government site with teeth", to aggregate and visualize data about politicians.

That year, he wrote a widely circulated Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.

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.

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 December 27, 2010, he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn about the treatment of Chelsea Manning, alleged source for WikiLeaks.

His activism has been praised by digital rights groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

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 systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.

Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later 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, 35years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.

Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison.

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.

Aaron Swartz was born in Highland Park, 25 mi north of Chicago, into a Jewish family.

He was the eldest child of Susan and Robert Swartz and brother to Noah and Ben Swartz.

He was an atheist.

His father founded the software firm Mark Williams Company.

At an early age, Swartz immersed himself in the study of computers, programming, the Internet, and Internet culture.

He attended North Shore Country Day School, a small private school near Chicago, until ninth grade, when he left high school and enrolled in courses at Lake Forest College.