Freedom of Information Acts

When Aaron Swartz committed suicide in 2013, the 26-year-old Internet prodigy and activist was facing felony prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for illegally downloading thousands of academic journal articles from JStor, an online database. For Swartz, accessing the information was an act of defiance against a system that unjustly restricted it. He’s since become a martyr for the Free Internet movement, which advocates for a barrier-free Web. It only takes Justin Peters a dozen pages of his sympathetic biography of Swartz to trot out one of the movement’s best-known cliches and commandments, “Information wants to be free.” To Peters’s credit, he doesn’t let the idea go uncomplicated.

Swartz’s story has been told before, including in a long article Peters published on Slate mere weeks after his death. The precocious programmer had a hand in creating seminal Web products such as RSS, the technology underlying newsreaders like Flipboard, and he was one of the founders of the online message board Reddit. His radical tactics as an activist occasionally rubbed even those who agreed with him the wrong way. Still, many questioned why he faced imprisonment for a crime they likened to taking too many books out of the library.