Pierluigi Paganini
NDSS 2025 – EMIRIS: Eavesdropping On Iris Information Via Electromagnetic Side Channel
The ideals of Aaron Swartz in an age of control
January 11, 2026 
Today marks Aaron Swartz ’s death anniversary. His fight for open knowledge and digital rights continues as the forces he opposed grow stronger.
Today marks the anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz (Chicago, November 8, 1986 – New York, January 11, 2013), a figure whose life, work, and ideals continue to shape the internet, digital rights, and the very idea of knowledge as a public good. Remembering Aaron and his battles is our responsibility. His crusades are not over, and the forces he opposed have grown stronger, more subtle, and more pervasive.
Aaron Swartz was a prodigy who helped shape the modern web from a young age. He contributed to RSS, helped build Creative Commons, and played a key technical and philosophical role in Reddit’s early development. Aaron had an extraordinary ability to see how technical decisions translated into social consequences. For him, code was never neutral, a concept of peerless actuality, especially in the AI era.
What set Aaron apart, however, was not just his technical brilliance, but his moral clarity. He believed that access to knowledge was a fundamental right. In a world where academic research was locked behind expensive paywalls, Aaron saw an injustice so obvious that it demanded action. His famous Guerilla Open Access Manifesto was not the work of a reckless radical, but of someone deeply aware of history, inequality, and the asymmetry of power between institutions and individuals. “Information is power,” he wrote, “but like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”
Aaron’s decision to download and share academic papers was an act of civil disobedience, rooted in a long tradition that includes figures like Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. Yet the response he faced was disproportionate and devastating. The U.S. government pursued him aggressively, threatening decades in prison under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—a vague, outdated law that grants prosecutors enormous discretion. The pressure, psychological toll, and fear became unbearable. On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz took his own life at the age of 26.
His death was a failure of our society, exposing how legal and academic systems prioritized punishment over justice and targeted those challenging information monopolies.
Aaron Swartz’s legacy continues through the fight for open access, digital rights, and ethical technology. Groups like the EFF defend privacy and free expression, while Creative Commons promotes shared culture and knowledge. Open access has expanded via platforms like Sci-Hub, Open Library, and institutional mandates pushing research beyond paywalls. At the same time, trends that would have worried Swartz are growing: the concentration of power in a few tech giants, opaque algorithms shaping public discourse, and surveillance capitalism, where companies routinely collect and monetize personal data, making mass tracking and profiling a normalized practice.
Aaron Swartz’s legacy lives on through efforts to protect open access, digital rights, and ethical technology. Organizations like the EFF work to defend privacy, free speech, and innovation, while Creative Commons helps people share knowledge and culture freely. Open access to research has expanded thanks to platforms such as Sci-Hub and Open Library, as well as rules that require publicly funded studies to be made available outside paywalls. At the same time, trends that would likely have troubled Swartz are becoming stronger: more power concentrated in a few big tech companies, algorithms that quietly influence what people see and think, and “surveillance capitalism,” where companies collect and sell personal data at scale, turning widespread tracking into a normal practice.
Governments have increased their control over the digital world, often citing national security, child protection, or the fight against disinformation to justify widespread surveillance, weaker encryption, and content filtering. Laws similar to the CFAA still make many online activities illegal, discouraging security research, investigative journalism, and activism. Researchers and whistleblowers can face serious legal risks for revealing flaws or abuses that the public has a right to know about. Meanwhile, access to knowledge is again under strain: a small number of academic publishers continue to dominate and profit, and AI systems consume enormous amounts of human-created content without clear consent, credit, or fair return. This makes Aaron Swartz’s core question, “who owns knowledge?,” more urgent than ever. In this context, Aaron’s legacy is shaped not only by his brilliance but also by his humanity: those close to him described him as deeply sensitive to injustice, genuinely concerned for others and future generations, and committed to the belief that the internet could still be a force for good, even as he struggled with depression. His courage and vulnerability were inseparable.
Aaron Swartz showed that understanding systems gives us the power to challenge them, and that empathy gives us the reason to do so. His life asks us uncomfortable questions: when does obedience become complicity? When does neutrality become surrender?
Honoring Aaron Swartz today means more than remembering him. It means defending encryption, open access, and press freedom, challenging abusive laws, and building technology that serves people—not surveillance or control.
Aaron Swartz believed that another internet, and another society, was possible. That belief did not die with him. It lives on in every line of open-source code, every freely accessible paper, and every act of resistance against the enclosure of knowledge. We must continue to fight to ensure that his ideals live on as a lasting legacy.
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(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Aaron Swartz)
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