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View Full Version : A Beautiful Mind - Activist Aaron Swartz



Sooz
1st February 2014, 08:02
Hi All,

This was published here today in Oz, mainstream media (Sydney Morning Herald, the Good Weekend Magazine).

A good piece on Aaron Swartz and an interesting read.

'.....Swartz's death brought dramatic focus to a global insurgency war in which information is power and the battlefield is the net. In the words of Glenn Greenwald - the former Guardian journalist who reported on much of the Edward Snowden disclosures on the reach of Washington's global and domestic spying network - this is a "war over how the internet is used and who controls the information that flows on it, and [Swartz's] real crime in the eyes of the US government [was that he] challenged its authority and those of corporate factions to maintain a stranglehold on that information."

....While at a conference of hackers held in Eremo, Italy, in 2008, Swartz was one of a group of activists who wrote what became known as the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Running to just 600 words, it begins: "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." It ends with this exhortation: "There is no justice in following unjust laws ... We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world."

and this...

"Aaron did not commit suicide, he was killed by the government," his father said at the time of his death.'

Read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/aaron-swartz-a-beautiful-mind-20140127-31hjr.html