White House petition response
The White House responds to a petition to fire two federal officials involved in the Swartz’s prosecution by refusing the request:
Aaron Swartz’s death was a tragic, unthinkable loss for his family and friends. Our sympathy continues to go out to those who were closest to him, and to the many others whose lives he touched. We also reaffirm our belief that a spirit of openness is what makes the Internet such a powerful engine for economic growth, technological innovation, and new ideas. That’s why members of the Administration continue to engage with advocates to ensure the Internet remains a free and open platform as technology continues to disrupt industries and connect our communities in ways we can’t yet imagine.
As to the specific personnel-related requests raised in your petitions, our response must be limited. Consistent with the terms we laid out when we began We the People, we will not address agency personnel matters in a petition response, because we do not believe this is the appropriate forum in which to do so.
Father: son ‘killed by the government’
Robert Swartz says during the service in Highland Park that his son was hounded by the government.
He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.
Swartz’s girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, said:
Aaron wanted so bad to change the world. He believed you had to see the world for how it really was to change it. With this [upcoming] trial and everything he was facing the last two years, I think [Aaron] fell into the pain. I love him, I miss him and I’ve learned so much from him.
Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the World Wide Web, and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, director of the Safra Center for Ethics where Swartz was once a fellow, also spoke at the funeral.
‘Made the Internet a thriving ecosystem’
The EFF offers a tribute to Swartz:
Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way,
‘A kid genius. A soul, a conscience’
Lessig writes a tribute to Swartz:
He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
‘He belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter’
Doctorow at BoingBoing writes:
I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.
This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so…. But Aaron was also a person who’d had problems with depression for many years. He’d written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.