Aaron Swartz
American computer programmer and internet-political activist (1986-2013) · United States · On the map · Developers · Died at 26
He built pieces of the early web - RSS, Markdown, Reddit - then turned that skill toward opening access to information the law said should stay locked. The prosecution that followed ended with his death at 26.
Busiest day 8 Nov
Read more often than usual, most of all on 8 November.
7.4 times the usual readers on 8 November. 12,434 readers on 8 November, against about 1,684 a day before the rise.
A life in dates
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Aaron Swartz was writing code that mattered by his teens: RSS at 14, the architecture behind Creative Commons, the markup language Markdown, the Python framework web.py. He co-owned Reddit and watched it sell to Condé Nast in 2006, left a year later, and pivoted hard toward activism - launching the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009, founding Demand Progress to fight censorship bills, taking a research post at Harvard's Safra Lab. In January 2011, MIT police arrested him for downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR through a guest account and an unlocked closet; federal prosecutors stacked eleven counts of computer fraud and wire fraud, a possible 35 years and a million-dollar fine. He refused a plea deal that required pleading guilty to felonies. Two days after prosecutors rejected his counter-offer, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26.
