Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of well known news aggregation website Reddit. com and developer of the RSS web feed format was a big thinker who fell in love with all things tech from a very young age, having only been 13 years of age when he started work on developing RSS and 19 when Reddit was born. The web itself is filled with traces of Swart’s innovative work, but he later became more and more heavily involved in work relating to social justice and political activism in an effort to harness the internets true potential, but it was this later work which would get him noticed by the FBI and other such law enforcement agencies. Swartz was arrested by the MIT police on January 6th of 2011 for state breaking-and-entering charges, after systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. This lead to talk of Swartz being slapped with a $1 million fine and the possibility of serving a 35 year prison sentence. It was this legal battle which resulted in Swartz taking his own life at the age of 26.
