I discovered his legacy after his death-by
warrant suicide.
He will be remembered as an Internet martyr,
especially if this free-speech battle
continues to rage, as it has.
I can however see that he was working with
other good folks, like some of those I follow
(see below). I always like it when like-
minded people get together to fight
the impossible fight against the
unseen oppressors of free speech.
I'm just an interested bystander. These
folks are doing the hard work:
Checkitout: Naked
capitalism
Aaron
Swartz’s Politics
Aaron
Swartz was my friend, and I will always miss him. I think it’s important that,
as we remember him, we remember that Aaron had a much broader agenda than the
information freedom fights for which he had become known. Most people have
focused on Aaron’s work as an advocate for more open information systems,
because that’s what the Feds went after him for, and because he’s
well-understood as a technologist who founded Reddit and invented RSS. But I
knew a different side of him. I knew Aaron as a political activist interested in health care, financial corruption, and
the drug war (we were working on a project on that just before he died). He
was a great technologist, for sure, but when we were working together that was
not all I saw.
In
2009, I was working in Rep. Alan
Grayson’s office as a policy advisor. We were engaged in fights around the health care bill that eventually
became Obamacare, as well as a much narrower but significant fight on auditing the Federal Reserve that
eventually became a provision in Dodd-Frank. Aaron came into our office to intern for a few weeks to learn about
Congress and how bills were put together. He worked with me on organizing
the campaign within the Financial Services Committee to pass the amendment sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan
Grayson on transparency at the Fed. He helped with the website NamesOfTheDead.com, a site dedicated to
publicizing the 44,000 Americans that die every year because they don’t
have health insurance. Aaron learned about Congress by just spending time
there, which seems like an obvious thing to do. Many activists prefer to keep
their distance from policymakers, because they are afraid of the complexity of
the system and believe that it is inherently corrupting. Aaron, as with much of
his endeavors, simply let his curiosity, which he saw as synonymous with
brilliance, drive him....
