Michael Francis McElroy for The New York Times
Aaron Swartz in 2009.
Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped to develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment, an apparent suicide.
An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz had apparently hanged himself, and that Mr. Swartz’s girlfriend had discovered the body.
At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous software that allows users to subscribe to online information. Later, he became even more of an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.
Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy,” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”
Mr. Wolf, his uncle, said that he would remember Mr. Swartz as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”
The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.
Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
Mr. Swartz formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill known as SOPA, the Stop Piracy Act.
But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on Pacer — or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents. The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free since they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, he wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.
The government abruptly shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow, even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account of the events, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz, “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”
Mr. Swartz recalled, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while, and then called his mother.
When an article about his Pacer exploit was published in The New York Times, Mr. Swartz responded in a blog post in a typically puckish manner, announcing the story in the form of a personal ad: “Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times.” In the Pacer exploit, the federal government investigated but decided not to prosecute.
In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by means that included breaking into a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university computer network under a false account, federal officials said.
Mr. Swartz returned the hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But United States attorney Carmen M. Ortiz pressed on, saying that “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”
Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, Dies at 26
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Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, Dies at 26
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Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, Dies at 26
