To HACKERS, activists and netizens everywhere, November 8 is known as Aaron Swartz day.
He was the boy genius who was instrumental in shaping the evolution of the modern internet. But his unflinching commitment to the ideals that underpin the online world ultimately brought about his tragic demise.
In San Francisco this weekend, a group called The internet Archive hosted a “hackathon” event to commemorate Swartz in which programmers and whistleblowers met to discuss and work on projects that promote “a free and open internet”. Incarcerated whistleblower Chelsea Manning was among those to pay respects sending a written statement to the conference in which she promoted the moral and ethical responsibilities of today’s programmers and coders.
Meanwhile countless people have shared messages of support and remembrance on social media celebrating the life of the young prodigy.
To them, he is one of the most important pioneers of the World Wide Web, and sadly, a martyr.
Swartz committed suicide in 2013 after being aggressively hounded by US prosecutors for illegally downloading academic journals from Boston University MIT. After refusing a plea deal involving a six-month jail term, he was facing 50 years in prison and a $US1 million fine at the time of his death.
Despite his immense influence, some fear that a major part of his legacy remains in jeopardy today.
Today, Aaron Swartz would've turned 29. Rest in peace; you will never be forgotten. via /r/picshttps://t.co/bZLCUaGXxY #pics
— Reddit Pics (@redditpicsbot) November 9, 2015
Today we remember our fallen brother, Aaron Swartz.#AnonFamily
— Anonymous (@AnonyOpNews) November 8, 2015
Almost 3 years since we lost Aaron Swartz, the void remains searing and irreplaceable. May he rest in peace.https://t.co/oDxXhucMif
— Firas Durri (@firasd) November 9, 2015
Aaron Swartz you have my solemn respect.
— Ian Pedro (@Fouzer_) November 8, 2015
Swartz was completely dedicated to ensuring that public information be kept in the public domain. Much of his adult life was spent campaigning against corporate and government monopolies creating financial barriers to public information.
At an early age, he realised the powerful potential of the internet in pooling the world’s resources. Alone in his bedroom, a 12-year-old Swartz created a website called theinfo.org in which people could write and edit entries on any subject under the sun. An idea that has effectively become Wikipedia, was conceived years earlier by young Swartz.
The amount of projects he would go onto to be involved in is staggering. As a teenager Swartz worked on the development of the web feed format RSS (Rich Site Summary) which is now commonly used by publishers to syndicate data.
Along with Lawrance Lessig, he developed the copyright system known as Creative Commons, used by sites such a Flickr to allow content producers to share their work. After merging his company Infogami with a start-up called Reddit, he developed the website framework web.py used for countless online projects.
He was on a mission to make the world work better. And a functional internet was the means to do so.
“On the internet everyone can have a channel, everyone has a way of expressing themselves, so what you see know is not a question of who gets access to the airwaves, it’s a question of who gets control of the ways you find people,” he said in 2007 interview.
There’s no question he was a visionary, but Swartz found himself frustratingly stuck between the revolutionary new platform for sharing information and the traditional gatekeepers who wanted to preserve their role.
In his early 20s, Swartz turned his attention to politics and tried to apply a hacker’s mentality to fix what he saw as bugs in the system.
He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010 he became a research fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption.
But his most famous work in politics came with a successful activism campaign that resulted in the failure of the controversial SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill in 2012. The bill aimed to crack down on copyright infringement but its detractors claimed it drastically curtailed online freedoms, and Swartz led the charge against it.
The campaign was lauded for its effectiveness and importance at the time. The day of the bill’s defeat has since been referred to as “internet freedom day” by campaigners.
It was just another feather in the cap for Swartz but concerns remain today that the legislation will be snuck into law by US policymakers.
The release of the text for the TTP trade agreement this month served to quell the more lofty concerns over the implications for internet freedoms but chapters dedicated to online copyright laws have validated the concerns of some.
Section J of the TTP, which addresses internet Service Providers “is one of the worst sections that impacts the openness of the internet,” said the digital rights group.
Likewise, the Electronic Frontier Foundation concluded on its website that TPP “upholds corporate rights and interests at the direct expense of all of our digital rights.”
#TPP Section J encourages ISPs to act as copyright police, gives them legal immunity to take down websites & content = SOPA-like censorship
— Evan Greer (@evan_greer) November 5, 2015
The changes to internet freedoms for Australia and the United States are unlikely to be dramatic according to most people’s reaction to the current text of the TTP, but the agreement does represent a shoring up of copyright laws and an increase in internet regulation.
Likewise a bill that successfully made its way through the US senate last week called CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act) has given the US a “backdoor” to current laws designed to protect the privacy of internet users. Ostensibly, the bill was designed to thwart cyber attacks but its critics say consumers will be the ones who lose out.
To internet users with a hacker mentality, it too represents a worrying incursion of the principles Swartz vigorously fought against during his short yet hugely meaningful life.
No comments:
Post a Comment