Reddit Co-Founder Hangs Himself

Aaron Schwarz, an online activist who founded Reddit and helped create the RSS program at age 14, hanged himself in his Brooklyn, NY apartment.

[He faced] trial in February in a controversial computer-hacking case, committed suicide in his Brooklyn bedroom, cops said Saturday.

Swartz, 26, left no note before his Friday morning death in the seventh-floor apartment at a luxury Sullivan Place building, police sources said.

His girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, found Swartz’s body hanging from a belt just inside his bedroom window, sources said.

Swartz’s death, ruled a suicide by the city medical examiner, came two years to the day after his arrest on allegations of breaching a computer network to download millions of pages of documents kept at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…

He also founded Demand Progress, an Internet group that campaigns against Web censorship, and became known as a cyber Robin Hood — providing free Web content to one and all.

In 2008, he single-handedly made 20 million pages of federal court documents available, for free, before the government shut him down. The pages were typically sold for 10 cents apiece.

By: Cheston Catalano

Cheston Catalano is a Kentucky-based journalist whose work has been featured in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle. He is a long-time contributor to Liberaland.