Aaron Swartz
termops cultureprivacy
The programmer and activist who co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification as a teenager, helped build Reddit and the Creative Commons technical infrastructure, co-created SecureDrop, and led the campaign that stopped the SOPA copyright bill - and who took his own life in 2013 at twenty-six while facing federal charges.
The charges followed his bulk download of academic articles from JSTOR over the MIT network. JSTOR declined to pursue it; prosecutors did not, bringing multiple counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with a threatened sentence out of all proportion to the conduct. His death turned the CFAA's elasticity from a researchers' grievance into a public scandal, produced repeated attempts at reform known as Aaron's Law, and remains the strongest argument in the field for prosecutorial restraint. Note: this entry touches on suicide; the topic is handled here only as historical record.
Also known as: rss author, jstor case, securedrop, guerilla open access