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Fight for the Future's Holmes Wilson sees "The Day We Fight Back" as a means of lighting a fire under the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would limit NSA surveillance. "We’ve got to start somewhere and sponsors won’t introduce the bill until they know they’ve got the votes to pass, so we’ve got a light a fire under this," said Wilson. "More broadly, there are so many different ways to fight back against the NSA, so a huge part of this is just getting people to start with all the information they’ve taken in over the past few months from the Snowden leaks, come up with something, and try something."In many ways, the SOPA blackout made the NSA protest movement possible. It was the moment that public consciousness rose against the monetized and heavily regulated internet. The campaign's success inspired many digital protests of the last several years (ACTA comes most immediately to mind). More recently, Swartz's legacy can be found embedded in last year's broad and aggressive NSA protest movement.Pre-SOPA, digital protests didn't have quite the same character or tenor. Coming at the end of a year dominated by Anonymous hacks and DDoS campaigns, it was the yin to the Anonymous yang of internet activism and direct action. As Swartz's Demand Progress co-founder David Segal said, the SOPA effort has become the benchmark of all digital protests. "I think that all digital protests—about online rights—are now compared to the SOPA effort," Segal said. "That set a standard to live up to which might literally never be beaten, and led to the development of new alliances and tactics which are very much in play here. Aaron was at the core of much of that.""I think that all digital protests—about online rights—are now compared to the SOPA effort. [It] set a standard to live up to which might literally never be beaten."
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A year on, Segal said that Swartz might not have understood how much he meant to people like Khanifar and Holmes, which makes his suicide all the more tragic. In that way, the melancholy of his suicide echoes that of Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace, who also didn't fully grasp how much people loved him. "Untold thousands across the globe care so much about what he did with his life, and see it as a path to follow," said Segal, who has been inundated with emails over the last 48 hours. "I've only been able to check but a minority of them; but even so, I've seen people announce memorials for him from as far away as India. And I think he's had a particular effect on other technologists, helping more of them look at the world, and their work, through a politicized lens.""Nobody really jumps out as filling Aaron's role. He carved out a spot in the world that is difficult for anyone to step into."
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