Hi,

January 11th marks the seventh anniversary of the passing of our
co-founder, Aaron Swartz, and it has become our tradition to use this date
as an opportunity to remember him and to take some time to reflect on the
work that we carry forward, in some substantial part in his name.

As many of you know, Aaron took his own life seven years ago -- while
suffering under the obscene threat of more than 50 years in prison for
allegedly using MIT's open campus internet network to download too many
academic articles from the cataloging service JSTOR, to which he had
legitimate access. The pressure of this circumstance, contrived by
glory-hungry prosecutors, was too much for him -- at the age of 26 -- to
bear.

[ [link removed] ]Here is a collection of tributes to Aaron from the days following his
passing.

[ [link removed] ]Here is an obituary of Aaron written at the time by Glenn Greenwald.

As I consider the impact he has had on me, so many members of my
community, and people across the world, it is extraordinary to realize
that Aaron has now been gone for substantially longer than I knew him. We
hope that he would be proud of the work that he helped spur at Demand
Progress, just a small corner of his expansive legacy, but through which
he has touched the lives of dozens of staffers, millions of activists
alongside whom we have worked, and an untold number of people whose
circumstances we hope that we have bettered through our advocacy for civil
liberties, democracy, economic justice, and broader social justice. 

I've noted over the years that while the public consciousness understands
Aaron to have been foremost a technologist and internet freedom activist
-- and that these were important aspects of his legacy -- he ought not be
essentialized as such. Even in those seeming halcyon days of the internet
of a decade or two ago -- rife with naive boosterism of "disruption" and
"innovation" -- Aaron saw through thin conceptions of cyber-utopianism. He
understood that securing the internet as a tool of liberation and for
justice would require an unending fight against the impulses of both
authoritarians in government and prospective corporate hegemons who even
then were conspiring to lock up key online spaces and functions and
leverage them for private benefit of scales never before seen. His
prescience grows ever more evident.

Moreover, Aaron cared as much about broader social and economic justice as
he did online rights as such. In fact, we founded Demand Progress as an
economic justice outfit before internet freedom called upon us because
efforts to control the internet -- through government censorship regimes,
mass corporate and government surveillance, and the warping of information
flows towards the end of private profit -- were not being confronted by
sufficient popular force. 

With each passing year, as our organization has grown more robust and
expanded its work, and as it has become more clear that internet freedom
fights are economic justice and social justice fights, we have been able
to make Demand Progress more reflective of Aaron's broad, rich,
ideological and philosophical impulses — and of our designs when we
founded the institution.

Below is a (non-exhaustive) accounting of some of our accomplishments from
over the last year or so. We are ever grateful to Aaron and to all of you
for helping to make this possible.

-David and the Demand Progress team

P.S. [ [link removed] ]If you would like to support our work as we carry these fights
into 2020, please click here.

 

We are confronting corporations that have too much power over our economy
and our government:

* Demand Progress has remained at the forefront to efforts to defend net
neutrality principles: Last spring we helped to secure passage through
the House of the Save the Internet Act, which would codify strong net
neutrality rules that are analogous to those that were repealed by
Trump’s FCC a couple of years ago.

* We are attacking Silicon Valley's extraordinary power over the
economy, our government, and our broader society — foremost through
the Freedom From Facebook effort which we co-chair and which has
helped spur forth demands that big tech be broken up. We are also
helping to lead burgeoning efforts to confront the power of Amazon and
Google.

* We have co-led efforts to buck up a regulatory state that has for too
long been subservient to the industries over which it is supposed to
have authority. For instance, we are working to wake the Federal Trade
Commission out of its decades-long stupor and encouraging it to
confront monopoly power, and have helped ensure that progressive
regulators are installed at key federal agencies.

* We are among a handful of groups preparing to make sure that if a new
administration takes power in 2020 that the executive branch will be
staffed with progressive decision makers who are willing to reorient
the economy so as to make it serve the needs of the broad American
public.

  

We are pushing a more progressive foreign policy and national security
vision:

* Demand Progress has been at the forefront of efforts to urge Congress
to assert its authority over war-making. 

* Organizing alongside more than 100,000 of you, we helped to spur the
House and Senate to, for the first time, pass a War Powers Resolution
— specifically to end US involvement in the ongoing Saudi-led war on
Yemen. (Trump vetoed this resolution, but our efforts have begun to
lead to a scaling back of US support for the war.)

* These efforts helped to till the soil for this month’s ongoing attempt
to pass a War Powers Resolution to constrain the Trump
Administration’s drive towards war with Iran. The WPR passed the House
this week and will soon be taken up by the Senate. (We have organized
more than 100,000 people to speak out against war with Iran over the
last year.)

* We have co-led efforts to block the upcoming re-authorization of the
Patriot Act unless substantial reforms are secured — and last spring
we completely reoriented the conversation about these authorities by
helping to break the news that the NSA had ceased the collection of
telephone metadata. 

 

We are making our government more democratic and progressive:

* We helped secure the passage of National Popular Vote legislation in
Colorado, Delaware, New Mexico, and Oregon, bringing a system by which
the President would be elected by popular vote to the brink of
enactment across the country.

* We have cultivated, alongside a couple of key allied organizations, a
slate of more than 150 motivated, progressive candidates for key
staffer positions in the new Congress — and dozens of them have since
secured jobs on the Hill, supporting the Squad and other progressive
lawmakers. They are hard at work helping organizations and activists
implement a progressive legislative agenda.

* And once great staff is in place, we need to make sure that Congress
is a place where they want to work: We've helped get the House and
Senate to commission a study of Congressional staff pay and retention,
including a review of whether staff are paid appropriately and get
equal pay for equal work.

* We were at the center of coalitions helping usher new and progressive
members of Congress onto the most powerful committees. For instance,
most of the Squad now serves on the House Financial Services
Committee, where we’ve had the opportunity to work with them to
confront the big banks and interrogate Mark Zuckerberg over his
efforts to create a new currency.

* We proposed -- and saw the House adopt -- an array of new rules that
will make governance better. For instance, they instituted an Office
of Whistleblower Ombudsman to help protect whistleblowers who want to
communicate with Congress, created a committee to oversee the
modernization of key Congressional functions, and are studying
re-establishing the Office of Technology Assessment, a legislative
branch agency that historically provided advice to Congress on
technology matters.

* We have helped ensure that Congress will become more transparent: The
Library of Congress began publishing its Congressional Research
Service Reports online and is publishing a calendar for all House and
Senate committee hearings and bill markups, including links to video
of the proceedings. We oversaw passage of the Open Government Data
Act, which requires federal agencies to make data open by default and
conduct regular inventories of public data assets.

 

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.

[ [link removed] ]Please consider making an ongoing or one-time contribution to Demand
Progress to help power our work in 2020.

 
----------

PAID FOR BY DEMAND PROGRESS (<a href="[link removed]">DemandProgress.org</a>) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Contributions are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. Join our online community on <b><a href="[link removed]">Facebook</a></b> or <b><a href="[link removed]">Twitter</a>.</b>

You can unsubscribe from this list at any time: [link removed]