Reddit co-founder 'driven to death'

Aaron Swartz, an internet genius who co-developed Reddit and RSS, has taken his own life. He was 26.

THE family of a Reddit co-founder who committed suicide weeks before he was to go on trial on charges that he stole millions of scholarly articles is blaming prosecutors for his death.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday night, his family and authorities said.

His death has sparked grief and anger from online rights advocates.

"Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way," wrote Peter Eckersley from the California-based activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

David Moon of Swartz's anti-internet censorship group Demand Progress said the hacktivist "refined advocacy for the progressive and open-information movement".

Swartz, 26, had been due to stand trial in April for allegedly breaking into a closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to plug into the computer network and download millions of academic journal articles from the subscription-only JSTOR service.

Internet activist Aaron Swartz had been due to face trial on hacking charges in a few weeks. Picture: AP Photo/The New York Times, Michael Francis McElroy

He had written openly about suffering periodically from depression, but friends and family suggested the looming trial contributed to his suicide and accused MIT and prosecutors of being over-zealous in pursuing their case.

MIT president Rafael Reif expressed shock and grief at Swartz's death, and tapped computer science and engineering professor Hal Abelson to lead a "thorough analysis" of MIT's involvement in the JSTOR case.

"I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many," Reif said in a statement.

"It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy."

Swartz had fought to make online content free to the public and as a teenager helped create RSS, a family of web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users.

In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in an attempt to make them freely available.

He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.

In a statement released on Saturday, Mr Swartz's family in Chicago expressed not only grief over his death but also bitterness toward federal prosecutors pursuing the case in Massachusetts against him.

"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 US Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death," they said.

Elliot Peters, Swartz's California-based defence attorney and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, told The Associated Press case "was horribly overblown" because Mr Swartz had "the right" to download from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitised copies of articles from more than 1000 academic journals.

Mr Peters said even the company took the stand that the computer crimes section of the US Attorney's office in Boston had overreached in seeking prison time for Mr Swartz and insisting - two days before his suicide - that he plead guilty to all 13 felony counts. Mr Peters said JSTOR's attorney, Mary Jo White - the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan - had called Stephen Heymann, the lead Boston prosecutor in the case.

"She asked that they not pursue the case," Mr Peters said.

Mr Heymann did not immediately respond to an email from the AP seeking comment.

A zealous advocate of public online access, Mr Swartz was extolled by those who believed as he did. He was "an extraordinary hacker and activist," the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit digital rights group based in California wrote in a tribute on its home page.

"Playing Mozart's Requiem in honour of a brave and brilliant man," tweeted Carl Malamud, an internet public domain advocate who believes in free access to legally obtained files.

Mr Swartz co-founded the social news website Reddit, which was later sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against internet censorship.

He apparently struggled at times with depression, writing in a 2007 blog post: "Surely there have been times when you've been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. ... You feel worthless. ... depressed mood is like that, only it doesn't come for any reason and it doesn't go for any either."

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, faculty director for Safra Centre for Ethics where Swartz was once a fellow, wrote: "We need a better sense of justice. ... The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labelled a 'felon.'"

Before the Massachusetts' case, Mr Swartz aided Mr Malamud in his effort to post federal court documents for free online, rather than the few cents per page that the government charges through its electronic archive, PACER. Mr Swartz wrote a program in 2008 to legally download the files using free access via public libraries, according to The New York Times. About 20 per cent of all the court papers were made available until the government shut down the library access.

The FBI investigated but didn't charge Mr Swartz, he wrote on his website.

Three years later, Mr Swartz was arrested in Boston. The US government accused Mr Swartz of using MIT's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles from JSTOR.

Prosecutors said Mr Swartz hacked into MIT's system in November 2010 after breaking into a computer wiring closet on campus. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.

JSTOR didn't press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Mr Swartz, and some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Mr Swartz, a fellow at Harvard's Safra Centre for Ethics, was a guest.

Experts puzzled over the arrest and argued that the result of the actions Mr Swartz was accused of was the same as his PACER program: more information publicly available.

The prosecution "makes no sense," Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said at the time. "It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library."

Mr Swartz faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.

JSTOR announced this week that it would make more than 4.5 million articles publicly available for free.

Mr Swartz's funeral is scheduled for Tuesday in Highland Park, Illinois

If you or someone you know may be at risk of suicide contact Lifeline 13 11 14, beyondblue 1300 22 46 36, or Salvo Care Line 1300 36 36 22.

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