The ABC reports: Amidst many other farewells and epitaphs, a favourite Science Fiction author and digital activist of mine, Cory Doctorow, says:
Fellow technology activist Cory Doctorow met Swartz at age 14 or 15.
“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,” Doctorow wrote on the Boing Boing blog.
“But Aaron was also a person who’d had problems with depression. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever.”
Doctorow later wrote a blog claiming that the trial had contributed to Schwartz’s death.
Following the activist’s 2011 arrest, his anti-censorship group Demand Progress said the prosecution did not make sense.
“It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library,” the group’s executive director David Segar said in a statement at the time.
That’s so sad. John Quiggan has also written about him. http://johnquiggin.com/2013/01/13/more-than-a-hacktivist/ . For some reason this reminds me of the recent Whitehaven hoax. Particularly in the out of proportion reaction of the powerful and moneyed interests.