Aaron Swartz Died 12 Years Ago After a Vicious Government Campaign to Stop Him
Aaron's mother a few days ago:
Aaron's father 12 years ago:
WE have long worked hard to ensure this site remains censorship-free and censorship-resistant (not the same thing). We adopted IPFS, Gemini Protocol, text-based daily bulletins and more. Daniel Pocock has been subjected to various censorship attacks and he generally prevailed as his site is still running and he still blogs. Around 2021 if not 2020 our Webhost, who had received threats because we reposted Pocock's articles, told us to stop reposting him. It was a cascade of blackmail (companies like Tiger Computing Ltd threatening Webhosts; ours took the threats seriously).
After we moved to another Webhost we caught up with Pocock's blogs and reposted all the relevant material. Tiger Computing Ltd (close to GCHQ) didn't try the same again. We are free to publish things as we please and as see fit.
We are still working hard to secure this, making information easily available even when the Internet is very slow due to external factors. We're ensuring that all pages (no matter the section) are served in less than a tenth of a second.
Aaron Swartz's Web site is still online after all those years, unlike Groklaw [1, 2], which essentially shut down the same year Swartz died (just months later).
Knowledge is hard if not impossible to kill, but some still try to have a go at it. It nearly always fails. For every dead site another one comes to life, reproducing if not publishing similar/same facts.
Many articles have been written already about the life (and death) of Swartz. Some of those are offline (dead sites, lost pages etc.) but enough remain alive, unlike Swartz. They immortalise some of his main messages. Much can be said about Debian suicides and accidents. There may be similarities there and people get censored for merely bringing up the subject and trying to hold rich people like Mark Shuttleworth accountable.
In Russia, an opposition figure died last year after several failed attempts. Many other opposition figures die there and nobody talks about them; almost nobody knows their names, either.
The Aaron Swartz story is a reminder of the importance of having verifiable/verified information out there for the general public to see. Wikileaks did the same until its key people got 'paralysed' (Swartz was among them; he was involved); the site hasn't published anything significant in ages. Now it is not considered a "threat" anymore, so they let Assange go back to Australia, trying to undo the damage caused by anxiety trauma (he already had a mild stroke, according to his family). His online friend (in New Zealand), Kim Dotcom, recently suffered a serious stroke. They won't have to send him abroad if he just dies in New Zealand. It was a “serious stroke”, not a mild one like Assange's. So he might not survive.
History is full of dead activists like Joe Hill. As my wife put it 10 days ago: "We need more people to expose injustices in the world, not just in the tech industry but in any form of activism. If you know something is wrong and you don't (or didn't) do anything about it, then there is something very wrong. We all live in the same planet - I do my share... you should do yours as well. Don't be a parasite and don't just be a passive contented citizen, always playing on the 'safe side' of things. It doesn't make you good, you are not better than a greedy and wealthy sociopaths if you stay quiet. Don't be a loser like them... you are better than them." █