To supporters, Swartz was protagonist for a cause

Since his suicide, friends and admirers have cast free-information activist Aaron Swartz as a martyred hero hounded to his death by the government he antagonised. One newspaper columnist - alongside an image depicting Swartz at his computer, his head encircled by a golden halo - even compared him to an Internet-age Martin Luther King Jr.But those closest to the 26-year-old Swartz say the hacker prodigy wasn't out to be a hero. Rather, he was a painfully shy young man who felt passionately that government and big business had hijacked the Web and hoped to make a difference.In the end, they say, Swartz failed to fully appreciate the threat he embodied to some.

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