'You are powerful': Remembering Aaron Swartz

Endless Thread

WBUR

Reddit, Technology

4.2 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amory and Ben honor the legacy of internet activist Aaron Swartz with two people familiar with his life and work: documentary filmmaker Brian Knappenberger (The Internet's Own Boy) and Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Swartz died by suicide ten years ago this week, on January 11, 2013, at the age of 26.

Transcript

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0:34.4	Emily, I feel like you and I have both discovered that we were both kind of working on the news in the news at the time that Aaron Swartz died in 2013.
0:57.4	Yeah, it felt really close to home at the time because he had connections to MIT. He was a research fellow at Harvard.
1:05.4	Yeah.
1:06.4	And I was working on a daily local news show that covered the Boston area, but also Massachusetts.
1:13.4	And I remember it being so sad the way any news like this is.
1:20.4	But there was so much else packed into it because there was, I don't know if it was politicized so much as just it was, it was very chaotic and charged because the state attorney general had people thought that maybe she had played a role in his suicide just that the pressure that he was under at the time contributed to it.
1:45.4	So it was so sad and complicated.
1:50.4	Swartz was a computer programmer and entrepreneur who also became really vocal and politically active around progressive causes online.
1:58.4	He organized against the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA, which had a lot of people thinking it would be bad for certain kinds of online innovation.
2:07.4	But he was arrested in 2011 by police at MIT for what would become charges of breaking and entering wire fraud and violations of what is called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
2:20.4	Swartz was at the time advocating for making more academic research public and free to taxpayers.
2:27.4	And what he was doing at MIT was connected with his activism on that front.
2:32.4	The thing Swartz contributed to in his 26 years of life is like a what's what of some of the most important tools on the internet and the web today.
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