This is a great article by Sherrie. Thank you to Sherrie for writing this. I am re-posting so others can read what she has to say. Keep up the fight!
***********************************
Sherrie Questioning All
RIP: Aaron Swartz "Suicide" - Activist who stopped SOPA bill. Co-founded "Demand Progress"
It seems really odd to me that a 26 year old who was a huge activist and was instrumental in stopping SOPA. Aaron Swartz co founded "Demand Progress" and Reddit and created the RSS.
The NY Times says he hung himself and his girlfriend found him.
He supposedly committed suicide in New York on Friday, January 11, 2013.
Go to the link and see all the things they were working on. He was a major defender of truth and our freedoms.
Watch this video of a speech he made about activism and the SOPA bill. It includes how a Senator told him "The internet has to get under control... people are putting too much stuff on it, it is out of control! We have to get control of the internet and what people put on it!"
Does the guy in that video sound like someone who would commit suicide? Could he have been getting in the way too much? Working on something very big and had to be "murdicided?"
Here is a webpage he created about himself::
Aaron Swartz is the founder of Demand Progress, which launched the campaign against the Internet censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA) and now has over a million members. He is also a Contributing Editor to The Baffler and on the Council of Advisors to The Rules.Here is a wikipedia page on him.
He is a frequent television commentator and the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. He also served on the board of Change Congress, a good government nonprofit.
He has also developed the site theinfo.org. His landmark analysis of Wikipedia, Who Writes Wikipedia?, has been widely cited. Working with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at MIT, he helped developand popularize standards for sharing data on the Web. He also coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification, now widely used for publishing news stories.
His piece with photographer Taryn Simon, Image Atlas (2012), is has been featured in the New Museum. In 2007, he led the development of the nonprofit Open Library, an ambitious project to collect information about every book ever published. He also cofounded the online news site Reddit, where he released as free software the web framework he developed, web.py.
