Michael Francis McElroy/The New York Times
Aaron Swartz in 2009. One person remembered him as a “a complicated prodigy.”
At an afternoon vigil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Sunday, Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old technology wunderkind who killed himself on Friday, was remembered as a great programmer and a provocative thinker by a handful of students who attended.
And he was remembered as something else, a hero of the free culture movement — a broad coalition that can range from Wikipedia contributors, Flickr photographers and online educators to prominent figures like Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and online vigilantes like Anonymous. They share a belief in using the Internet to provide easy, open access to the world’s knowledge.
“He’s something to aspire toward,” said Benjamin Hitov, a 23-year-old Web programmer from Cambridge, who said he had cried when he first learned the news about Mr. Swartz. “I think all of us would like to be a bit more like him. Most of us aren’t quite as idealist as he was. But we still definitely respect that.”
The United States government has a very different view of Mr. Swartz. In 2011, he was arrested and accused of using M.I.T.’s computers to gain illegal access to millions of scholarly papers kept by Jstor, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals.
At his trial, which was scheduled to begin in April, he faced the possibility of millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison, punishments that friends and family say haunted him for two years and led to his decision to take his own life. They blame both the prosecutors and M.I.T. for not offering enough support to Mr. Swartz.
During his short life, Mr. Swartz became a flash point in the debate over whether information should be made widely available. On the one side were activists like Mr. Swartz and advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Students for Free Culture. On the other side were governments and private corporations who argued that some information must be kept private for security or commercial reasons.
In his death, Mr. Swartz has come to symbolize a different debate over how aggressively governments should pursue criminal cases against people like Mr. Swartz who believe in “freeing” information.
In a statement, his family said in part: “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office and at M.I.T. contributed to his death.”
On Sunday evening, the president of M.I.T., L. Rafael Reif, announced that he had appointed a prominent professor, Hal Abelson, to “lead a thorough analysis of M.I.T.’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present.” He promised to share the report with the M.I.T. community, adding, “It pains me to think that M.I.T. played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”
While Mr. Swartz viewed his making copies of academic papers as an unadulterated good, spreading knowledge, the prosecutor, who on Sunday declined to comment on Mr. Swartz’s death out of respect for his family’s privacy, compared Mr. Swartz’s actions to using a crowbar to break in and steal someone’s money under the mattress.
The question of how to treat online crimes is still a vexing one, many years into the existence of the Internet.
Prosecutors have great discretion on what to charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law cited in Mr. Swartz’s case, and how to value the loss. “The question in any given case is whether the prosecutor asked for too much, and properly balanced the harm caused in a particular case with the defendant’s true culpability,” said Marc Zwillinger, a former federal cybercrimes prosecutor.
