Hi,

Today we mark the 8th anniversary of the tragic passing of my cofounder at
Demand Progress, the activist and technologist Aaron Swartz. 

Aaron took his own life, at the age of 26, while being threatened with
decades in prison, accused of having violated the antiquated Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act by downloading too many academic articles from the
JSTOR cataloging service, using the avowedly open campus network at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A New York Times article about that
tragedy and Aaron’s life [ [link removed] ]may be found here. Many of his writings are
still accessible [ [link removed] ]on his blog.

Much has changed since I first started drafting this email a couple of
weeks ago.

It’s impossible to know exactly what is in another’s mind — let alone
would be if one fast forwarded 8 years into the future. (Aaron has now
been gone for longer than I knew him.)

But I’m of course confident that Aaron would be horrified, though I’d
imagine not surprised, by the events of recent days and weeks and years.
While most famous for his chops as a technologist and Internet freedom
activist, he was also a staunch advocate for economic and racial and
broader social justice, a critic of the media — and even of Big Tech years
before broader awareness of the industry’s predations took hold. The very
existence of Demand Progress is but one manifestation of many of these
sentiments.

The crises wrought by a fraying social contract (which of course was
insufficiently equitable to begin with) and by electoral and media systems
that are incentivized to promote discord, even when this means trafficking
in falsehoods and stoking racism and other resentments, are horrifying to
witness, but not entirely unforeseeable — especially for a systemic
thinker like Aaron with such a global perspective.  

As we transition into a new administration, a priority for Demand Progress
has been ensuring the Biden team understands the possibilities and dangers
at hand, shuns the subservience to corporations and elites that has
defined governance even under Democrats in recent decades, and holds the
Trump administration accountable for serious crimes. We must press this
new administration to rise to the moment by advancing an agenda that
forwards justice and betters peoples’ lives, while entrenching structural
reforms that decrease the likelihood of slippage or reaction. 

Aaron was also a staunch civil libertarian and opponent of surveillance by
governments and corporations — powers that are increasingly intertwined. I
have to imagine that in the aftermath of last week he'd be rightly
preoccupied with the likelihood of a crackdown on speech and privacy
rights — and with the ways in which even the left might unintentionally
play into this possibility. The post-9/11 climate in which any hyped-up,
ostensible computer law infraction could be seen as a grave security
threat — and a potential career-making case for prosecutors — was part of
the context through which the government viewed Aaron's alleged
downloading of journal articles, and which led it to stack up charges
against him entailing up to decades in prison.

One of the first matters Aaron and I worked on under the Demand Progress
banner was to push back against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in
2011. We failed, but a couple years later, just a few months after Aaron's
death, Edward Snowden would precipitate a new line of interrogation into
government spying practices through his revelations that essentially all
people in America were being surveilled as part of one ongoing,
all-encompassing, ostensible investigation into potential terrorism. The
part of the Patriot Act under which this activity was taking place —
Section 215 — expired earlier this year, and I'm confident it would have
been reauthorized but for Demand Progress’s efforts. 

Now there's reason to worry that the horrific riot last week will be
leveraged to justify that reauthorization — and moreover to expand
surveillance even further. Biden and others are calling for a domestic
terror statute that wouldn’t have made it any easier to disrupt last
week's happenings — these plans were made in plain sight on the open web —
and would lead to a more restrictive environment for the political
dissidents and members of racial, religious, ethnic, and other minority
communities against whom such powers are typically and disproportionately
wielded. 

We’ll keep on fighting against this, in Aaron’s name and alongside so many
of you. Thank you for supporting our efforts through your activism and
your generous donations. Below is a brief non-exhaustive accounting of
some of our work over the last year or so. We hope it makes you, and would
make Aaron, proud.

-David and the Demand Progress team.

P.S. [ [link removed] ]If you would like to support our work as we carry these fights
into 2021, please click here.

—

We have pushed back against outsized corporate power and fought for
economic justice:

* We have pressed the incoming Biden administration to staff up with
progressives — not people who are likely to prioritize the wants of
corporations — and to push a bold agenda.
* We have helped to identify and recommend hundreds of potential
progressive staffers for the incoming administration and to work in
Congress.
* We have helped to make the case that Big Tech has accumulated far too
much power over speech, the economy, and governance — and that the
dominant platforms must be regulated and broken up.
* As the pandemic and attendant fallout hit, we fought for an aggressive
stimulus that provided for the wellbeing of everyday people and small
businesses — and minimized needless giveaways to large corporations
that are likely to lead to further consolidation and greater
inequality.
* We helped push for more affordable broadband for millions of Americans
that rely on the internet for critical services, particularly during
the pandemic.

We have worked to keep the national security state in check and end the
so-called Endless Wars:

* We opposed the extension of major provisions of the Patriot Act —
which have now been defunct for 10 months or so — and we helped
uncover a previously unknown online dragnet surveillance program and
precipitate a broader interrogation of mass government surveillance
programs.
* We have continued to make the case that it’s time to end the post-9/11
wars, and elevate Congress’s War Powers authorities to serve as a
check on war-making by the president. We’ll be working with allies to
initiate a new push to end the war in Yemen over the coming weeks.

We have worked to ensure strong public institutions, especially Congress,
can engage appropriate governance and be resilient in the face of undue
corporate influence:

* We've long called for Congress to enact continuity of governance
plans, and helped lead efforts to make sure Congress could continue to
function and provide critical oversight of the executive branch even
through the pandemic — through mechanisms like remote hearings and
voting when necessary. 
* We have been the leading group delving into the failings of the US
Capitol Police, which has made us the only source of info in light of
the attack on the Capitol last week.
* We successfully pushed for the continuation of a committee focused on
modernizing Congress.
* The House of Representatives has created and fully staffed an Office
of the Whistleblower Ombuds, which trains members offices in taking in
whistleblower complaints. 

Thank you for taking a moment to remember Aaron with us, to consider his
legacy, and to learn more about the work we carry forth in his name.

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