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Aaron Swartz would have been 36 by now.
The US state attempted to sentence him to 35 years in prison for transferring and sharing scientific articles from JSTOR. He was not convicted, he died. The state had incited his suicide.
Enabling access to knowledge was one of his main goals in life, as confirmed by many projects he undertook:
He and his colleagues started a digital library in 2007 openlibrary.org with the goal of becoming an open catalogue of all works that have ever been published. More than 2.5 million books are freely available on it today.
He helped with the development of RSS and Markdown and Creative Commons licensing, all of which today plays a central role in the creation and distribution of content on the Internet.
Aaron is also recognized as one of the co-founders of the Reddit network and is one of the authors of the Guerilla Manifesto for free access (pc. if/gmanzof).
Swartz also fought for transparency and against corruption and censorship. In addition to coordinating protests and actions against internet censorship, he set up a platform SecureDrop securedrop.org which enables anonymous and safe communication for whistleblowers.
Federal prosecutors wanted to make an example out of his case, so despite the lack of evidence they wrote an indictment demanding 35 years in prison and 1 million dollars in fines.
He was not convicted, days after prosecutors rejected his answering contract offer, Aaron died, they had killed him.

We would have sought to raise awareness of what was done to Aaron Swartz and initially didn’t include this next bit but, the seriousness of our situation means we can’t afford not to, given we genuinely feel that what they did to him is analogous to the situation we are in.
We implore every one of you to learn about the state retaliation we have been facing, it almost achieved with Rosa what they managed to do to Aaron less than a week ago. Had they been successful there they’d have finished me too, I can’t do this without her.
To learn more visit http://weareintolerant.online, search for #weareinnocent posts and please get in touch if somehow you still can’t choose a side.
We done talking to cops (to the limited extent we ever did) but will absolutely answer any question you ask.