Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide
출처 : 뉴욕타임즈 Published: January 12, 2013
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activist-dies-at-26.html?_r=2&
Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and who later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.
An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently hanged himself, and that a friend of Mr. Swartz’s had discovered the body.
At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.
Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”
Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew, who had written in the past about battling depression and suicidal thoughts, as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”
The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.
Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.
But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.
The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.
The government shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”
Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.
The federal government investigated but did not prosecute.
In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.
Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”
Founded in 1995, JSTOR, or Journal Storage, is nonprofit, but institutions can pay tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription that bundles scholarly publications online. JSTOR says it needs the money to collect and to distribute the material and, in some cases, subsidize institutions that cannot afford it. On Wednesday, JSTOR announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis.
Mr. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Swartz’s actions at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never have been considered a criminal activity.”
Mr. Swartz did not talk much about his impending trial, Quinn Norton, a close friend, said on Saturday, but when he did, it was clear that “it pushed him to exhaustion. It pushed him beyond.”
Recent years had been hard for Mr. Swartz, Ms. Norton said, and she characterized him “in turns tough and delicate.” He had “struggled with chronic, painful illness as well as depression,” she said, without specifying the illness, but he was still hopeful “at least about the world.”
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz on BoingBoing.net, a blog he co-edits. In an e-mail, he called Mr. Swartz “uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.”
“The world was a better place with him in it,” he said.
Mr. Swartz, he noted, had a habit of turning on those closest to him: “Aaron held the world, his friends, and his mentors to an impossibly high standard — the same standard he set for himself.” Mr. Doctorow added, however, “It’s a testament to his friendship that no one ever seemed to hold it against him (except, maybe, himself).”
In a talk in 2007, Mr. Swartz described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career. He also wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from sadness.
“Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.”
When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 12, 2013
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the police who arrested Mr. Swartz, and when they did so. The police were from Cambridge, Mass., not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus force, and the arrest occurred two years before Mr. Swartz’s suicide, but not two years to the day.
26살의 천재 개발자 / 인터넷 액티비스트 애런 스워츠 자살
10대 때 세계가 웹컨텐츠를 보는 방법을 바꾼 천재 개발자이자 인터넷 액티비스트였던 애런 스워츠(Aaron Swartz)가 26살의 나이에 스스로 목숨을 끊었습니다. 정보 공개와 자유화, 검열 반대를 외치던 이 영웅은 기소를 당해 35년 징역과 10억 원의 벌금형을 받은 상태였습니다.
애런 스워츠는 14살때 블로그 구독툴인 RSS를 만들어 전세계 정보의 흐름을 바꾸었습니다. 뉴스와 정보를 공유하는 빅히트 상품 Reddit, 사회문제에 대응하는 온라인 캠페인을 벌이는 Demand Progress 를 창시하기도 했습니다.
2008년에는 공공의 재산인 재판 기록이 대중에게 자유롭게 공개되어야한다는 믿음 아래 페이지당 10센트의 비용이 부과되지 않을 수 있도록 무료도서관계정을 통해 방대한 자료를 다운받아 PACER(Public Access to Court Electronics Records) 에서 무료공개하였습니다. 정부는 해당사건을 조사하였으나 결국 기소하지는 않았습니다.
2011년 애런 스워츠는 그보다 더 나아갔습니다. 유료 학술저널DB JSTOR를 공개하기 위해 MIT 네트워크를 해킹하였고, 480만개 자료를 다운 받았습니다. JSTOR는 비영리 기관이나 자료 수집과 공유 과정에서 생기는 비용 충당을 위해 멤버쉽비를 받고 있습니다.”지식과 정의에의 접근은 돈으로 환산되서는 안된다”는 활동가들과 “어떤 수단을 사용해서 무엇을 훔치든 훔치는 것은 훔치는 것이다.”는 법정의 입장이 팽팽했으나, JSTOR 는 소송을 끝까지 진행하지 않고 지난 수요일 1200개의 저널을 제한적으로 무료 공개하겠다고 발표했습니다.
애런 스워츠는 이 소송에 대해 잘 말하지 않았으나 매우 지쳐했습니다. 우울증외에도 만성적으로 아프던 그는 자신에게 들이대는 것만큼이나 엄격한 잣대를 주위 사람들과 세계에 들이대곤 했습니다. 2007년에는 자살을 생각했던 것을 고백하기도 했습니다. “신선한 공기를 쐬고 사랑하는 사람과 껴안아도 나아지지 않는다. 오히려 다른 사람만큼 행복할 수 없다는 것에 화가 나고 더 슬퍼진다. 머리과 몸을 관통하는 고통에 탈출구를 찾을 수 없다.”
지금 인터넷에서는 타협하지 않고 명민하며 조숙하던 이 천재에 대한 추모의 물결이 가득합니다.
