Who Killed Aaron Swartz?

Aaron Swartz in 2009. One person remembered him as a “a complicated prodigy.”

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”—Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 1863

1. The Syndicate had excellent reasons to wish Aaron dead.

2. As in most cases of covert Syndicate assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway), Aaron’s death was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.

3. The Central Institute of Assassinations (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Intimidations (FBI) can and do kill people while making the murder look like suicide.

4. In America, England, and most other countries, painstaking research by people like Kevin Barett, Jim Douglass, Jim Fetzer, Jim Garrison, David Helvarg, and William F. Pepper discloses an unmistakable pattern: influential friends of the people (and hence, enemies of the Syndicate) tend to die before they reach old age, often under bizarre circumstances. This pattern has an obvious corollary: when friends of the Syndicate dies prematurely, we can reasonably assume, with a high degree of probability, that the Syndicate killed them.

Swartz co-authored the “RSS 1.0″ specification of RSS, and built the website framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.

This figure of 1,000,000 is extremely important, for it shows, beyond all doubt, that, like John Lennon and President Kennedy, Aaron posed a real threat to the status quo.  This threat is acknowledged by the Syndicate’s own indoctrination organs.  For instance, National Propaganda Radio put it thus:

“Swartz had an enormous following in the technology world” and was one of the “most influential figures in talking about technology’s social, cultural and political effect.”  The independent Electronic Frontier Foundation concurs:  Swartz “did more than almost anyone to make the internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way.”

As well, Aaron spoke against US President Barack Obama’s “kill list” and cyber attacks against Iran.

Aaron was “a frequent television commentator and the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion.  From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.  He also served on the board of Change Congress, a good government nonprofit.”

As mentioned, government assassinations of dissidents are often preceded by a campaign of terror, intimidation, slander-mongering, litigation, physical intimidation, and incarceration.  Aaron’s “suicide” fits this pattern perfectly.

The Syndicate made it clear that Aaron was in its crosshairs.  Thus, Syndicate members, especially “the Motion Picture Association of America and United States Chamber of Commerce, have stated their opposition to Demand Progress on numerous occasions, mainly in respect to their stance on internet censorship.”

In 2009, the FBI put him under “investigation” (a euphemism for harassment of activists) for publicly releasing 20% of United States Federal Court documents.  The “case” was closed two months later, without filing any charges but not, of course, without making Aaron pay dearly for his idealism.

The entire exercise had nothing to do with breaking laws, or justice, but a warning:  “Stop harassing us,” the Federal Bureau of Intimidation was telling him, “or else!”  And yet, just like a tree standing by the waters, Aaron was not moved.  Despite the extreme pressure he was under, Aaron Swartz (like Bradley Manning and many other unsung heroes) remained defiant and, in late October 2009, posted his FBI file on the internet. With this single act of defiance, Aaron probably signed his own lynch warrant.

In connection with his public-spirited Open Library project, whose goal is “to create a free webpage for every book ever published” and to have as many books as possible freely available, Swartz allegedly downloaded four million restricted-access academic articles from the website of a non-profit organization called JSTOR, with the intention, according to the American government, of making these articles freely available to the world’s people (as, by the way, they would have been in any half-civilized society—can anyone imagine Archimedes or Aristarchus or Euclid or Sappho copyrighting their works?), for which “crime” he faced a potential 50(!) years behind bars.  Swartz, moreover, denied the Syndicate’s allegations.

And, two days before his death, JSTOR, the organizational “victim” of Aaron’s theft, not only declined to press charges against him, but “announced that the archives of more than 1,200 of its journals would be available to the public for free.”  Yet, that act of generosity and public spiritedness meant nothing to the Syndicate’s “justice” system, which continued to turn Aaron’s life into a living hell.  And there is yet another curious aspect of this act.  Most of us spend an entire lifetimes without ever accomplishing anything like it: cajoling a huge organization to place the public interest above its own.  Are we to believe that, just two days after this momentous victory, instead of being jubilant, Aaron was depressed enough to hang himself?

”You will recall that I mentioned that the local circumstances under which a given means might be used might suggest the technique to be used in that case. I think the gross divisions in presenting this subject might be:

- bodies left with no hope of the cause of death being determined by the most complete autopsy and chemical examinations

- bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate accidental death

- bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate suicidal death.”

On the day Aaron Swartz died, Michael Morell, a junior member of the invisible government, was the acting director of the Central Institute of Assassinations