The Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA), a law activists claimed would restrict freedom of speech online, was shelved
and activists claimed Jan. 18 as "Internet Freedom Day." This year,
plenty of the same issues that drove those protests — Internet censorship,
privacy and open access to information — will be brought up again.
Aaron Schwartz, the 26-year-old activist against Internet censorship,
privacy and open access to information, took his life a little more than a year
ago, after being charged with hacking into the library at MIT and downloading
millions of academic articles. Schwartz was
instrumental in developing RSS at the age of 14. In 2006, before he could
legally celebrate with a glass of champagne, Reddit, which he cofounded, was sold
to Conde Nast. He gradually became a prominent figure in Internet activist circles, both by
launching non-profits like Demand Progress and, after his death, bringing
attention to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — an amendment made to an
existing law in 1986 that allows federal prosecutors to charge
people for
“exceeding authorized access” to private computers, which includes
things as
seemingly minor as violating a website's terms of service contract. The
law made it possible for federal prosecutors to push for jail time for
Schwartz, even as JSTOR dropped its civil suit against him.While Schwartz may be gone, he has become a rallying point over the intervening years, filled with revelations about government data collection, massive corporate hacks, and increasingly invasive social networks.
"If Aaron were alive, he'd be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action," reads the website for "The Day We Fight Back," a campaign to protest against the scope of the NSA's electronic surveillance program.
"As a personal tragedy, his death was a wake-up call.”
Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who first met Schwartz in 2008
Schwartz' death prompted Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) to introduce Aaron's Law, a series of reforms to the CFAA. His suicide also brought attention to open access issues and a host of other Internet activist causes.
“In some ways, his message is still relevant because of what hasn't changed."
"One of the struggles when you’re talking about online rights and Internet freedom is making sure the right metaphor gets adopted — that email is like mail, and that mail should be private. If the wrong metaphor gets adopted and email is described like a postcard, or worse, like shouting in a crowded room, then you lose that privacy."
Brian Knappenberger, director of "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Schwartz," which will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 20.
The director said that Schwartz almost certainly would have been interested in the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and the battle over net neutrality, which was renewed this week after a U.S. district court invalidated regulations that forced telecom companies to treat all Internet traffic equally.
Schwartz was concerned about government surveillance issues long before it became a hot topic in the media, multiple people who knew him said, which made his premature death a big blow to the privacy activists — partly because of his skill at making complicated technical issues accessible to regular people, according to Higgins, the EFF activist.
"Part of Aaron's life was moving from the very technical to the very political. Aaron was the one who motivated me to shift my work from Internet freedom to focus on this issue of corruption."
Lawrence Lessig, director of Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics,where Schwartz was a fellow. On the anniversary of Swartz' death, Lessig began a walk across the entire state of New Hampshire in order to bring attention to political corruption ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
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