Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. 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, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.

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

Swartz was involved in the development of the social news aggregation website Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007. 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. Internet Hall of Fame 2013 (posthumously)Īaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist.American Library Association James Madison Award 2013 (posthumously).

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