MIT drives Aaron Swartz to suicide, guards JSTOR for ivory tower and intel analysts only

RSS pioneer, Reddit cofounder and information activist Aaron Swartz, was found hanged this week. He was 26. Swartz was facing 35 years for hacking, aka liberating MIT research archives buried behind a pay-wall, often to the frustration of their own authors. You might think schools of higher learning are in favor of disseminating knowledge instead of confining studies in repositories. Aaron Swartz did. Swartz advocated for uninhibited access to information over the internet, in particular with scholarship often bought, paid for, and then buried by academic institutions. Swartz was charged with hacking into MIT’s JSTOR archives, in September 2011. They might have considered his motives, but instead pursued charges. MIT’s response to Swartz’s suicide was to direct anyone affected by his death to “Mental Health Services”.