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Desrtopa comments on Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) - Less Wrong Discussion
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So, The Tech is reporting that Aaron Swartz has killed himself. No suicide note has surfaced, PGP-signed or otherwise. No public statements that I've been able to find have identified witnesses or method. Aaron Swartz was known for having many enemies. There's the obvious enemies in the publishing industry and the US attorneys office. Cory Doctorow wrote that he had "a really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors."
I'd like to raise the possibility that this was not a natural event. Most of this evidence can be adequately explained by how little time has passed, so we'll know more in a few days or weeks.
Strange side note: He had a PGP public key on his web page at http://www.aaronsw.com/pgp, retrievable from Wayback Machine, but the link went bad some time after Jul 28 2012. All other links on the site seem to be fine.
Additional side note: if your chance of being murdered ever goes past 0.01, state publicly that you don't believe in suicide and that any suicide note would definitely be cryptographically verifiable. If it ever goes past 0.05, set up a record-audio-to-Internet button that you can activate in under a second, then give your lawyer a signed message saying that any supposed suicide note which lacks a certain phrase is fake.
I don't know if the relevant news reports had been released at the time this comment had been posted, but the apparent method of Swartz's death was hanging.
When you narrow down the set of people who could be considered Aaron Swartz's enemies to those who could have him killed and have it reported as a suicide, who would benefit more from his apparent death by suicide than his being drained of funds and convicted of felony, and ask whether this is realistic behavior for the remaining members of that set, particularly when you consider that the individual in question had written about his struggles with depression and was facing the prospect of dramatically worsening life conditions, I think this sort of speculation is more naive than cynical.