What a year we just went through concerning digital freedoms. After starting so sadly with the tragic death of a young digital polymath, 2013 saw the rise of a sequence of other heroic figures who risked their lives to defend our rights.
Aaron Swartz’s suicide shook up the whole community. It awakened the feeling that we could no longer remain passive in the face of growing abuse by governments and big industries. It seemed each week was marked by travesties perpetrated either in the name of security or of “intellectual property” — two of the most formidable obstacles to liberty in this early 21st century.