Thursday, January 17, 2013. New York City – A public memorial service to remember Aaron Swartz, open to all. Speakers include Edward Tufte, Stinebrickner-Kauffman, David Segal, Quinn Norton, Ben Wikler, Roy Singham, Doc Searls, David Isenberg and other friends. Please spread the word!
The Great Hall of The Cooper Union. Manhattan, New York City.
The Great Hall is located in The Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues.
Saturday, January 19, 2013 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (EST).
Friends and family have issued a statement and created a memorial page: www.rememberaaronsw.com
You can also SIGN A PETITION TO DEMAND JUSTICE FOR AARON on DemandProgress.org
On Saturday, Democracy Now! will provide a special live stream of the public memorial service for pioneering computer programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz. Friends and family will gather at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City to celebrate Swartz’s life and work.
Stream live from 4-6pm EST.
Speakers include: Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, David Segal, Ben Wikler, Roy Singham, Doc Searls, Edward Tufte, David Isenberg, Holden Karnofsky, Tom Chiarella, and other friends. OK Go’s Damian Kush will be performing at the service.
Watch Democracy Now!’s coverage of Swartz right here. For some of the causes that were important to him, please visit www.democracynow.org
Published on Monday, 1/14/2013.
Democracy Now: “Today we remember the pioneering computer programmer and cyber activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life Friday at the age of 26. As a teenager, Swartz helped develop RSS, revolutionizing how people use the Internet, going on to co-own Reddit, now one of the world’s most popular sites. He was also a key architect of Creative Commons and an organizer of the grassroots movement to defeat the controversial House Internet censorship bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Senate bill, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Swartz hanged himself just weeks before the start of a controversial trial. He was facing up to 35 years in prison for sneaking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading millions of articles provided by the subscription-based academic research service JSTOR. We hear Swartz in his own words and speak to Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, a longtime mentor and friend. “There are a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do, because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal,” Lessig says. “He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives.” Lessig also echoes the claims of Swartz’s parents that decisions made by prosecutors and MIT contributed to his death, saying: “This was somebody who was pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government.”
Published on Monday, 1/14/2013.
Democracy Now: “Cyber activist and computer programmer Aaron Swartz took his life on Friday at the age of 26. We air an address of Swartz’s from last May where he speaks about the battle to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA — a campaign he helped lead. “[SOPA] will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: The enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared,” Swartz said. “Next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen.”
Published on Thursday, 1/17/2013.
Democracy Now: “Outrage is growing over the U.S. Justice Department’s prosecution of the 26-year-old who committed suicide last week just weeks before he was to go on trial. Pioneering computer programmer and cyber activist Aaron Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted for using computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download millions of academic articles provided by the nonprofit research service JSTOR. As the chief prosecutor Carmen Ortiz defends her actions, we speak to Swartz’s partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and computer security consultant Alex Stamos, who would have been the chief expert witness at Swartz’s trial. We invited representatives from the U.S. attorney’s office and MIT to join us, but they declined.”
The Great Hall of The Cooper Union has stood for more than a century as a bastion of free speech and a witness to the flow of American History and ideas. When the hall opened in 1858, more than a year in advance of the completion of the institution, it quickly became a mecca for all interested in serious discussion and debate of the vital issues of the day.
The Great Hall was the platform for some of the earliest workers’ rights campaigns and for the birth of the NAACP, the women’s suffrage movement and the American Red Cross. To the Great Hall’s podium has come a pageant of famous Americans — rebels and reformers, poets and presidents. Before they were elected, Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama all spoke there. Besides Woodrow Wilson, only one incumbent president has spoken in the Great Hall: William Jefferson Clinton, who, on May 12, 1993, delivered a major economic address on reducing the federal deficit. And, during the past century’s times of tremendous upheaval, it was through meetings in Cooper’s famous auditorium that the politics and legislation necessary to build a humane city took shape.
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