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 may be found here. Many of his writings are still accessible 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. If you would like to support our work as we carry these fights into 2021, please click here.

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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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