Friday "would have been his 38th birthday," reports the EFF, which remembers Aaron Swartz as "a champion of digital rights who believed deeply in keeping the internet open..."
The official Aaron Swartz Day website marked the occasion with a special podcast “with those who continue to work around issues he cares about,” with an appearance by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.
The first speaker was Ryan Shapiro, co-founder of the national security transparency nonprofit Property of the People. The website Aaron Swartz Day calls him "the researcher who discovered why the FBI had such an interest in Aaron in the years before the JSTOR fiasco."
Do you really know what happened to Aaron Swartz?
The FBI has the power to collect vast amounts of data and communications during its investigations. So the FBI's data warehouses are full of things unrelated to its work.
You'd think the FBI would throw away anything not related to an investigation. You are wrong. The FBI keeps what they have, because you never know: the obscurities you discovered yesterday might be useful today.
That's pretty much what happened to Aaron Swartz, according to with documents published by Gizmodo's Dell Cameron.
Nearly two years before the first known US government investigation into the activities of Reddit co-founder and renowned digital activist Aaron Swartz, the FBI obtained his email data in a counterterrorism probe that ensnared students at a US university, according to a secret document first published by Gizmodo.
Email data belonging to Swartz, who was not the target of the counterterrorism investigation, was simply recorded and stored by the FBI.
The data collected came from the University of Pittsburgh. It was part of a data collection from an FBI terrorism investigation. Swartz was never the target of this Al-Qaeda investigation, but the information obtained remained in FBI data warehouses, even though the FBI had no reason to keep data it didn't need.
So when the FBI began looking into Swartz's activities, it found his email address in cached data it had obtained from the university in 2007 when it was investigating Al-Qaeda. This apparently happened in 2008, at a time when the FBI was trying to determine whether Swartz had broken any laws by releasing millions of court documents from PACER.
And while Aaron had nothing to do with it, the investigation left a code from International Terrorism Investigation in the FBI database file forever.
