Cory Doctorow: Aaron Swartz and Hacktivism

At the age of three, he taught himself how to read. At the age of 14 he helped developed RSS, the innovation that allows websites to gather content from other sites. From there, he joined Creative Commons, co-founded Reddit, and founded DemandProgress.org. Sadly, in early 2012, Aaron Swartz took his own life after facing upwards of 35 years in a federal penitentiary for downloading millions of files from JSTOR, an online journal storage archive. He was 26 years old. Cory Doctorow, a friend of Aaron's, sits down with Steve Paikin to talk about the life, work, and hopes of Aaron Swartz, and the bigger battle that his death underscores: those that see the potential of a free and open internet to transform society for the better and those that seek to regulate it.