The Tragic Demise of Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz, an Internet freedom activist, was found dead in his apartment on Friday January 11, 2013. His body was discovered by his girlfriend. The cause of his death was suicide by hanging. He was only 26 years old. Aaron Swartz was born on November 8th, 1986 in Chicago, Illinois. He was the son of Susan and Robert Swartz. His father founded a software company and Aaron took interest in the internet at a young age. Swartz was the winner of the ArsDigital Prize at the age of 13. He was also a volunteer editor for Wikipedia. Swartz was known as one of the co-founders of Reditt.com. In 2009, Swartz was acussed of downloading 20% of PACER's database to the public. The FBI investigated him but no charges were filed against him. JSTOR pressed charges of their own against Swartz in July 2011. He was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. Before the death of Aaron Swartz, JSTOR announced that they would make "more than 4.5 million articles" available to the public for free, but capped at three articles every two weeks. He was still going to be prosecuted in spite of this announcement. If convicted, Swartz would have had to pay 1 million dollars in fine and serve 35 years in prison. Due to him being an activist, Swartz fought for internet freedom. He wanted information on the internet to be free to the general public. The thoughts of prison and the fine caused him to take his own life. With net neutrality, Everything on the Internet should be open to the public. The pulic has the right to know what's going on. If people don't want the public to see certain things, they should not put them on the internet where hackers might get them. Efforts made to make any information pulic should still happen. It might get rid of hacking problems. The inequality between current laws and abilities with technology is something to be concerned about. Technology changes over the years and people develop new abilities with them. If people are able to do certain things with technology, they could get into trouble without knowing it. The laws and technical abilities should be equal to one another