- Born
- Died
- Birth nameAaron Hillel Swartz
- Aaron Swartz was born on November 8, 1986 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He died on January 11, 2013 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA.
- Parents
- RelativesBen Swartz(Sibling)Noah Swartz(Sibling)
- In January 2013, almost two years to the day after the federal government denied his attorney's second offer of a plea bargain, Swartz was found dead of a suicide by hanging in his Brooklyn apartment by his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. There was no suicide note found.
- Helped start the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to further the cause of effective online activism. The next year, he became a research fellow at Harvard's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption and founded the online group Demand Progress, which campaigned against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
- In January 2011, he was arrested by MIT police on breaking-and-entering charges for downloading academic articles. Federal prosecutors then charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The charges brought a total maximum penalty of $1 million in fines and thirty-five years in prison.
- Creator of Infogami, which was absorbed into social news website Reddit, and co-author of the RSS online news feed specification.
- Brother of Ben Swartz and Noah Swartz.
- Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
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