The Internet's Own Boy: Aaron Swartz.

They called him the Internet's Own Boy. There's no mystery as to why that was, either. For those who heard him speak, and listened to what he stood for, he was the embodiment of this generation's voice.

Today I'm going to tell the story of the late Aaron Swartz, how he fought for the freedoms of each person in America, and how we shunned him and left him to be outcast anyways.

Aaron came from a family of three brothers who were all notoriously and exceedingly bright for kids their age, and Aaron in particular, as his brother said, "learned how to learn at a very young age. He loved learning, and teaching, and reading.

He was a prodigy.

His parents introduced him to computers at the age of 2 and he fell in love with computers and the internet. He saw programming as a way to make things that otherwise couldn't exist.

At the age of twelve he created the theinfo.org where anyone could edit information that they thought was important or wrong, and could correct it.

He believed in high school that public education was a joke, and he started reading educational alternatives and origins. Aaron said that's what led him down a path of questioning; questioning his education system, questioning the facts they were regurgitating, and the government that built the system.

As a 15 year old, he helped write the creative commons (sort of a 'Some Rights Reserved' system) code for the Supreme Court Copyright case. Adults saw him as an adult.

He was a kid who wanted desperately to make the world a better place.

He went to Stanford but was not at home there. Odds are Swartz felt out of place at the time, however. He wanted to learn, he wanted to make people happy, but he was locked in a place of over-grown high schoolers and future 1%-ers.

So after a year he left and became a part of a Y-Combinator site, which would eventually merge with another Y-Combinator start-up site called Reddit.

He became more and more philosophical with his views. He said "It's no longer who has a voice, because everyone can have a voice now."

Aaron was miserable in an office space and stopped coming to work. He said on his first day at Wired, by lunch time he locked himself in the bathroom and cried. Eventually, he got himself purposefully fired, and it was a nasty break-up between Aaron and Alexis Ohanian and the reddit crew.

"I think you should always be questioning. I take this very scientific attitude. That everything you've been taught is up for questioning."

Swartz threw all his energy into a new set of public projects, such as OpenLibrary.org. He grew to believe more and more that corporations were being greedy with information.

Aaron Swartz fought for public access to the public domain. Seems like common sense, right? No, Americans will be fought day and night for public record. The government website PACER made public domain 10 cents a page, and was in fact illegal to do by the government.

So the Thumbdrive Corp became people who would take these public files and upload them to a third-party website.

Someone gave Swartz a copy of code that downloaded mass amounts of these Public Access documents at a time (the government had set up 22 libraries in the U.S. where PACER documents were free as a sort of compromise), and within a few hours Swartz had started uploading over 700 Gigabytes of these documents to this third-party site, that totaled out to about 20 million pages.

The FBI tried to come after Swartz and his family, and camped out around his house. So, the FBI was investigating someone making public documents that explain the law, on the grounds he may be committing a crime. Somehow.

He fought corporations who locked up papers and put a price on them. It enraged Swartz that there was human knowledge out there that only the likes of Google was allowed to have.

He ended up hacking into JSTOR's database in the MIT technical building as Gary Host. This registered the computer into the system as GHost_Laptop. Instead of using WiFi to access the database, he broke into an MIT closet and plugged his laptop directly in.

However, the authorities found his laptop and hard drive plugged directly into MIT's database, and instead of unplugging it installed a surveillance camera. Days later, they found Swartz while he was replacing a hard drive.

All of Aaron Swartz's areas including his apartment and Harvard office were searched by police, and a court case was given over to Stephen Heymann.

Swartz's arrest ate away at him, and he was constantly stressed and a nervous wreck.

Suddenly unprecedented amounts of activism took place. Time Magazine named Person of the Year "The Protester". Wikileaks was releasing unknown amounts of government files, Anonymous was getting it's feet off the ground, LulzSec was taking down the FEMA, UN's, and NATO's websites.

The U.S. government gave him a deal that if he spent 6 months in jail, a year on house arrest, and time in a half-way house, along with pleading a convicted felon, and they'd drop their case. 

Swartz wasn't a murderer, he wasn't trafficking drugs, he wanted to teach people for free. That's all he cared about. They wanted to take away his right to vote, his right to office, and make him spend time in jail.

On July 14th, 2011 Aaron Swartz was indited for four felonies, they strip searched him, and left him in solitary confinement. He faced up to 35 years in prison and fines of up to 1,000,000 dollars. 

JSTOR immediately dropped all prosecutions against Swartz, and that it was the U.S. government who wanted to prosecute. The U.S. government said they wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz, however, and still refused to drop the case.

MIT refuses to defend Aaron, and that infuriates the culture and students of MIT. Hacking was encouraged by MIT, that was their culture that they had created, but now they wouldn't defend it. They turned their back on their own kind.

Swartz founded Demand Progress against the SOPA bill. SOPA was a bill that was designed to get rid of online piracy, however, it was taking a sledgehammer to a problem that needed a scalpel.

SOPA got a long way without any expert getting involved, because Congress didn't want experts. They said they needed to "bring in the nerds".

Finally, the white house released a statement said that they did not support the bill.

Within 24 hours, all the major websites went black. The blacked out in defiance of SOPA; Reddit, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and anyone who was anyone on the internet. The internet had finally grown up and shown it's power. This was an extremely important moment for the people.

Aaron Swartz's prosecution was designed to be a message. It was a message to anyone like Swartz (Barrett Brown, any member of LulzSec, Anonymous) to let them know, to tell any informationalists, pro-democracy fighters, and the rebels,  'We know that you have the power, we know you're the opposition, and we know you can trouble the establishment. But don't.' This was the moment where the subculture became the power.

Aaron rejected their final plea deal and a trial date was set. The entire matter was weighing too heavily on this barely-a-man's shoulders. Keep in mind, all this had happened before Aaron Swartz had turned 26 years old. He became depressed, he became anxious, and he was scared.

It was too much for this man-of-a-boy. At 26 years old Aaron Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn Apartment. We lost one of the best and most creative minds of our generation.

Aaron Swartz had so much more to do with his life, and no matter who you were at the time, you lost a child.

The internet exploded.

He was the Internet's Own Boy, and it was his fight that killed him. Despite whether it was a gun wound to the head, he died fighting his battle. The outdated law that was accountable for most of Aaron's charges was reformed, and renamed "Aaron's Law".

Weeks later, a 14 year old kid with access to JSTOR files, while looks through them found a new way to detect Pancreatic Cancer. Normally, Pancreatic Cancer  is already too late to stop before it kills you. It's because of this database and this knowledge that Aaron fought for that progress is being made, and lives are saved.

Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

We are ruled by criminals.

Aaron Swartz was a hero.

So, yes I support Aaron Swartz. I support Edward Snowden. I support Bradley Manning. These are the people that are doing good. These are the people that are trying to make a true difference, and to make this hell of a world a better place.

Not Republicans. Not Democrats. They don't care about you, they don't want to help. Politics is all about money. These fighters want to help. That is why I support the Freedom of Information.

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it to themselves." -Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)