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Aaron Swartz Day was founded, in 2013, after the death of Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist.

Aaron Swartz Day has these combined goals:

1. To draw attention to what happened to Aaron, in the hopes of stopping it from happening to anyone else.
   • This includes clarifying that, although Aaron was a hacker, he didn’t hack MIT.
2. To provide a yearly showcase of many of the projects that were  started by Aaron before his death.
   • SecureDrop
   • Open Library
3. To provide a yearly showcase of new projects that were directly inspired by Aaron and his work.
   • A few Aaron-inspired examples from this event include:
     1. The Pursuance Project (by Barrett Brown & Steve Phillips)
     2. Open Archive (by Natalie Cadranel)
     3. Jason Leopold’s Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA) activism (article from 2013)

As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; the website framework web.py; and Markdown, a lightweight markup language format. Swartz was involved in the development of the social news aggregation website Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007. He is often credited as a martyr and a prodigy, and his work focused on civic awareness and activism. After Reddit was sold to Condé Nast Publications in 2006, Swartz became more involved in activism, helping launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009. In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment. In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.