18 Facts About Quinn Norton

Quinn Norton was born on May 1973 and is an American journalist and essayist.

Quinn Norton's work covers hacker culture, Anonymous, Occupy movement, intellectual property and copyright issues, and the Internet.

Quinn Norton sporadically sat in on classes at University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Santa Barbara but was never formally enrolled.

Quinn Norton began her professional life as a technologist when she worked as a SysAdmin and web programmer.

Quinn Norton's focus was initially on technology but eventually grew to encompass internet activism.

Quinn Norton's work has appeared in Wired, where she spent a year embedded with Occupy Wall Street.

Quinn Norton contributed regularly to the Wired blog, Threat Level, which focused on digital security.

Quinn Norton wrote articles for Maximum PC magazine for five years and has published in The Guardian, ProPublica, Gizmodo, and O'Reilly Media publications such as Make magazine.

Quinn Norton was a long-time participant at O'Reilly's Foo Camp.

Quinn Norton has spoken extensively on various aspects of technology, history and culture.

The hire drew sharp criticism focused on tweets Quinn Norton wrote between 2013 and 2017, particularly use of slurs referring to gay people and her defense of her friendship with Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and white supremacist known as weev.

Quinn Norton said her friendship with Auernheimer had been an effort to discourage his racism.

Quinn Norton describes herself as an anarchist and a queer activist.

On March 3,2011, Norton was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury regarding an investigation of her then-partner Aaron Swartz that led to the case United States v Swartz.

Quinn Norton ultimately accepted a proffer agreement with the prosecutor, whereby she shared information about the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, which defendant Aaron Swartz either wrote or co-wrote.

Articles in The Atlantic and in New York Magazine indicate that in 2011 Quinn Norton was pressured by prosecutors to offer information or testimony that could be used against Aaron Swartz in his trial for fraud for downloading thousands of academic articles from behind a paywall, but that she denied having information that supported prosecutors' claims of criminal intentions on Swartz's part.

Quinn Norton dated computer programmer and activist Aaron Swartz for roughly three years, from 2007 until early 2011.

In 2016, Quinn Norton moved to Luxembourg to live with the man she eventually married in 2017.