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Title:
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Description:
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The cofounder of the social, news,
and entertainment website "Reddit"
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has been found dead.
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He certainly was a prodigy,
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although he never thought
of himself like that.
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He was totally unexcited
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about starting businesses
and making money.
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There is a profound sense of loss
tonight in Highland Park,
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Aaron Swartz's hometown
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as loved ones say goodbye
to one of the Internet's brightest lights.
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Freedom, Open Access, and computer
activists are mourning his loss.
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"An astonishing intellect," if you talk
to people who knew him.
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He was killed by the Government, and
MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.
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They wanted to make
an example out of him. Okay?
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Governments have insatiable
desire to control.
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He was potentially facing 35 years
in prison and a 1-million-dollar fine.
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Raising questions to prosecutorial zeal,
and I would say even 'misconduct.'
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Have you looked into that particular
matter and reached any conclusions?
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Growing up, you know,
I slowly had this process realizing
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that all the things around me
that people had told me
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were just the natural way of things were,
or the way things would be,
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they weren't natural at all.
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There were things that could be changed.
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And there were things, more importantly,
were wrong and should change.
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And once I realized that,
there was really kind of no going back.
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Welcome to story reading time.
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The name of the book
is "Paddington at the Fair."
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He was born in Highland Park
and grew up here.
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Aaron came from a family of three
brothers, all extraordinarily bright.
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"...Oh the box is tipping over..."
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[Boys screaming]
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So, we were all, you know,
not the best behaved children.
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You know, three boys, running
around all the time, causing trouble...
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"Hey, no, no, no!"
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- Aaron!
- What?
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But I've come to the realization Aaron
learned how to learn at a very young age.
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"One, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten!"
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- Knock, knock!
- Who's there?
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- Aaron.
- Aaron who?
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- Aaron Funnyman.
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He knew what he wanted
and he always wanted to do it.
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He always accomplished what he wanted.
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His curiosity was endless.
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"Here's a little picture of what the planets are. Each planet has a symbol.
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Mercury symbol, Venus's symbol, Earth symbol, Mars symbol, Jupiter symbol..."
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One day, he said to Susan, "What's this free family entertainment in downtown Highland Park?"
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"Free family entertainment in downtown Highland Park"
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He was three at that time.
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She said, "What are you talking about?"
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He said, "Look, it says here on the refrigerator."
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"Free family entertainment in downtown Highland Park"
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She was floored, and astonished that he could read.
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It's called "My Family Seder."
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"The Seder night is different from all other nights."
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I remember once, we were at the University of Chicago library.
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I pulled a book off the shelf that was from like 1900,
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And showed him saying "this is just a really extraordinary place."
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We all were curious children, but Aaron really liked learning and really liked teaching.
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"...We're going to learn the ABC backward."
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"Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T..."
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I remember, he came home from his first Algebra class
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and he was like, "Noah, let me teach you Algebra!"
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and I'm like, "What IS Algebra?"
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He was always like that.
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"Now you press the click button. There. Now it's got that."
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"Now it's in pink."
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When he was about two or three years old, and Bob introduced him to computers.
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Then he just took off like crazy on them.
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[Baby talk]
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We all had computers, but Aaron really took to them, really took to the Internet.
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- Working at the computer?
- Nah...
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"How come... Mommy, why is nothing working?"
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He started programming from a really young age.
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I remember the first program that I wrote with him was in BASIC
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and it was a Star Wars trivia game.
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He sat down with me in the basement, where the computer was
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for hours programming this game.
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The problem that I kept having with him was there was nothing that I wanted done,
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but to him, there was always something to do.
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Always something that programming can solve.
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The way Aaron always saw it is that programming is magic.
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You can accomplish these things that normal humans can't.
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Aaron made an ATM using Macintosh and a cardboard box.
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One year for Halloween, I didn't know what I wanted to be.
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And he thought it would be really really cool if I dressed up like his new favorite computer,
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which at that time, the original iMac.
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I mean, he hated dressing up for Halloween, but he loved convincing other people
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to dress up in things he wanted to see.
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"Host Aaron, stop, guys, come on, look at the camera!"
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"Spiderman looks at the Camera."
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He made this website called "The Info," where people can just fill in information.
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I'm sure someone out there know all about gold, gold leafing.
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Why don't they write about that on this website. And other people can come at later point,
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read that information and edit the information if they though it was bad.
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Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right?
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And this was before Wikipedia had begun, and this was developed by a 12-year-old
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in his room, by himself, running on this tiny server using ancient technology.
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And one of the teachers' response was like,
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"This is a terrible idea. You can't just let anyone author the encyclopedia.
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The whole reason we have scholars is to write these books for us.
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How could you ever have such a terrible idea?"
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Me and my other brother were like, "Aw, you know, Wikipedia is cool, but...
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we had that in our house like, 5 years ago."
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Aaron's website, theinfo.org, wins a school competition
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hosted by the Cambridge-based web design firm ArsDigita.
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We all went to Cambridge when he won the ArsDigita prize
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and we had no clue what Aaron was doing.
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It was obvious that the prize was really important.
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Aaron soon became involved with online programming communities,
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then in the process of shaping
a new tool for the Web.
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He comes up to me and is like, "Ben, there's this
really awesome thing that I'm working on."
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"You need to hear about it!"
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"Yeah, what is it?"
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"It's this thing called RSS."
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And he explains to me what RSS is.
I'm like, "Why is that useful, Aaron?"
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"Is any site using it?
Why would I want to use it?"
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There was this mailing list for people who are
working on RSS, and XML more generally,
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and there was a person on it named
Aaron Swartz who was combative but very smart,
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and who had lots of good ideas, and
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he didn't ever come to the
face-to-face meetings, and they said,
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"You know, when are you gonna come out
to one of these face-to-face meetings?"
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And he said, "You know, I don't think
my mom would let me. I've just turned fourteen."
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And so their first reaction was: "Well, this person,
this colleague we've been working with all year
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was thirteen years old while we were
working with him, and he's only fourteen now."
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And their second reaction was:
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"Christ, we really want to meet him.
That's extraordinary!"
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He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.
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What he was doing was to help build
the plumbing for modern hypertext.
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The piece that he was working on, RSS,
was a tool that you can use to get summaries
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of things that are going on on other web pages.
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Most commonly, you would use this for a blog.
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You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read.
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You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of
what's going on on those other pages
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to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on.
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Aaron was really young, but he understood
the technology and he saw that it was imperfect
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and looked for ways to help make it better.
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So his mom started bundling him on planes in Chicago. We'd pick him up in San Francicso.
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We'd introduce him to interesting people to argue with, and we'd marvel at his horrific eating habits.
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He only ate white food, only like steamed rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white
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and white bread, and so on...
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and you kind of marveled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,
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what appeared to be a small boy's mouth,
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and you'd think, this is a kid that's really going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy.
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Aaron, you're up!
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I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like dotcoms.
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You can't have companies that just sell dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones.
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But there's still a lot of innovation going on.
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I think that maybe if you don't see the innovation, maybe your head is in the sand.
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He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's
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sort of like, "I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you, I'm better than you,
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and I can tell you what to do."
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It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp.
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So you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems
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like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.
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I first met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat.
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He didn't just write code, he also got people excited about solving problems he got.
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He was a connector.
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The free culture movement has had a lot of his energy.
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I think Aaron was trying to make the world work. He was trying to fix it.
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He had a very kind of strong personality that definitely ruffled feathers at times.
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It wasn't necesarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world
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and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.
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Aaron got into high school and was really just sick of school.
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He didn't like it. He didn't like any of the classes that were being taught. He didn't like the teachers.
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Aaron really knew, like, how to get information.
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He was like, "I don't need to go to this teacher to learn how to do geometry.
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I can just read the geometry book,
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and I don't need to go to this teacher to learn their version of American history,
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I have, like, three historical compilations here, I could just read them,
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and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the Web."
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I was very frustrated with school. I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about,
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and they were domineering and controlling, and the homework was kind of a sham,
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and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busywork.
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And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education
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and how this educational system was developed,
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and, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things
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as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them,
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and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in,
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I questioned the society that built the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for,
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I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.
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One of the thing he was most passionate about was copyright, especially in those early days.
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Copyright has always been something of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers,
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but it wasn't an excessive burden. It was a reasonable institution to have in place
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to make sure that people got paid.
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What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system
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and this amazing new thing we were trying to build--the Internet and the Web.
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These things collided, and what we got was chaos.
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He then met Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig,
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who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court.
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A young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings.
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I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the Eldred--to see the Eldred argument.
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Why did you fly out here from Chicago, and come all this way to see the Eldred argument?
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That's a more difficult question...
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I don't know. It's very exciting to see the Supreme Court,
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especially in such a prestigious case as this one.
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Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet.
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It was called Creative Commons.
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So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people--creators--
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a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry.
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So if copyright is all about "All Rights Reserved", then this is a kind of a "Some Rights Reserved" model.
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I want a simple way to say to you, "Here's what you can do with my work,
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even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do."
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And Aaron's role was the computer part.
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Like, how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable
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and expressed in a way so that machines can process it?
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And people were like, "Why do you have this fifteen-year-old kid writing the specifications for Creative Commons?
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Don't you think that's a huge mistake?"
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And Larry is like, "The biggest mistake we would have done is not listening to this kid."
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He barely is not even tall enough to even get over the podium,
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and it was this movable podium so it was this embarrassing thing,
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where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face.
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When you come to our website here, and you go to "Choose License".
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It gives you this list of options, it explains what it means, and you've got three simple questions:
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"Do you want to require attribution?"
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"Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?"
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"Do you want to allow modifications of your work?"
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I was floored, just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult,
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and Aaron stood up there in front of a whole audience full of people, and just started talking
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about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons,
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and they were all listening to him, just...
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I was sitting at the back, thinking: he's just a kid, why are they listening to him?
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But they did...
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Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully.
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Though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work,
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the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.
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Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license.
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He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.
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Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:
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I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.
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I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.
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I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.
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Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time
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on things that won't have an impact.
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I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.
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I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.
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I want to make the world a better place.
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In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.
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He'd had ulcerative colitis which was very troubling, and we were concerned about him taking his medication.
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He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day,
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and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth,
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and made him feel different from any of the other students.
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Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship
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and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers
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who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters
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and I think it just made him bananas.
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In 2005, after only one year of college,
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Swartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.
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He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a website."
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And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure."
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So Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment...
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So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here.
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I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease
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'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.
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Aaron lived in what's now the living room and some of the posters are leftover from when Aaron lived here.
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And then the library...there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.
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Aaron's Y Combinator site was called "infogami", a tool to build websites.
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But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually
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merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.
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It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called "Reddit".
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There we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,
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and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,
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And it showed no signs of letting up.
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First we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on...It was just incredible.
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Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.
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There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flock to the site,
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and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.
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reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,
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so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,
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and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,
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there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home,
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and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well.
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It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.
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reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Condé Nast,
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who makes an offer to buy the company.
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Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions
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about like: "How do I store this money?"
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- Like a lot of money...
- Like a lot of money.
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Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.
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- And he's how old at the time?
- 19, 20.
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So it was in this apartment. They sat around
on what predated these couches,
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hacking on Reddit, and when they sold Reddit
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they threw a giant party, and then all flew
out to California the next day,
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and left the keys with me.
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It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start-up so we all presumed
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he was the richest person around
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but he said, "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little
shoebox-sized room. That's all I need."
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It was barely larger than a closet.
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The idea of him spending his money on
fancy objects just seemed so implausible.
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He explains it as, "I like living in apartments so I'm not going to spend a lot of money on a new place to live. I'm not gonna buy a mansion,
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and I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt,
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so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes.
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So it's really no big deal."
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What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic
flows on the internet,
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and what commands our attention.
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In the old system of broadcasting, you're
fundamentally limited by the amount of
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space in the airwaves. You could only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television
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or even with cable, you had 500 channels.
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On the Internet, everybody can have a channel.
Everyone can get a blog, or a MySpace page.
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Everyone has a way of expressing themselves.
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What you see now is not a question of who gets
access to the airwaves,
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it's a question of who gets control over the
ways you find people.
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You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, theses sort of gatekeepers that tell you
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where on the internet you want to go.
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The people who provide you your sources of news and information.
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So it's not only certain people have a license to speak, now everyone has
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a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard.
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After he started working in San Francisco
at Condé Nast, he comes into the office
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and they want to give him a computer with all
this crap installed on it
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and say he can't install any new things
on this computer,
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which to developers is outrageous.
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From the first day, he was complaining
about all the stuff.
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"Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first
day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.
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By lunchtime, I had literally locked myself
in a bathroom stall and started crying.
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I can't imagine staying sane with someone
buzzing in my ear all day
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Let alone getting any actual work done.
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Nobody else seems to get work done here either
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Everybody's always coming into our room to
hang out and chat, or invite us to play
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the new video game system that Wired is testing."
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He really had different aspirations that were politically-oriented,
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and Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture
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that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals.
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Aaron hated working for a corporation.
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They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron
is the only one who is not going to take it.
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And Aaron basically gets himself fired.
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By not showing up to work, ever.
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It was said to be a messy breakup.
Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman
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declined to be interviewed for this film.
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He rejected the business world. One of the really important things to remember about
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that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up
culture is that he was also leaving behind
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the things that had made him famous and well-loved, and he was at risk of letting down fans.
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He got to where he was supposed to be going, and had the self-awareness
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and the orneriness to realize that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck
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the single rose and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell,
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and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed,
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and he did get the rose in any event,
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he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool.
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The way Aaron always saw it, is that
programming is magic--
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you can accomplish these things that normal
humans can't, by being able to program.
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So if you had magical powers, would you use
them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?
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Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries
he had met as a child.
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The man who had invented the World Wide Web,
Tim Berners-Lee.
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In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on
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one of the most lucrative inventions of
the 20th century,
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but instead of profiting from the invention
of the World Wide Web, he gave it away for free.
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It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.
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Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.
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Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genius, who doesn't in any sense cash out.
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He's not at all interested in how he's going to figure out how to make a billion dollars.
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People were saying, "Ah, there's money to be made there,"
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so there would have been lots of little webs,
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instead of one big one,
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and one little web, and all sorts of webs doesn't work,
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because you can't follow links from one to the other.
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You had to have the critical masses--the thing was the entire planet,
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so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board.
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I feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is,
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to just kind of take what you're given, and you know, follow the things that adults told you to do,
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and that your parents told you to do, and that society tells you to do. I think you should always be questioning.
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I take this very scientific attitude, that
everything you've learned is just provisional,
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that it's always open to recantation or refutation or
questioning, and I think the same applies to society.
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Once I realized that there were real serious problems--fundamental problems--
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that I could do something to address, I didn't see a way to forget that. I didn't see a way not to.
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We just started spending a lot of time,
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just kind of as friends.
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We would just talk, for hours, into the night.
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I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me. I think to some degree,
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I was, like, this is a terrible idea, and impossible, and therefore I will pretend it is not happening.
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As my marriage was breaking down, and I was
really stuck without anywhere to go,
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we became roommates, and I brought my daughter over.
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We moved in, and furnished the house, and it
was really peaceful.
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My life had not been peaceful for a while, and really neither had his.
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We were extremely close from the beginning of our romantic relationship.
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We just...we were in constant contact.
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But we're both really difficult people to deal with. [laughs]
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In a very Ally McBeal discussion, he confessed he had a theme song, and I made him play it for me.
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It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple.
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I think it was just that sense of kind of being a little bit embattled that the song has,
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and it also had, like, this hopefulness to it.
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♪ By foot it's a slow climb, but I'm good
at being uncomfortable so I can't stop
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changing all the time ♪
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In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic
about life. Even when he didn't feel it,
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he could be tremendously optimistic about life.
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♪ Extraordinary machine ♪
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- What are you doing?
(Quinn) - Flicker has video now.
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Swartz threw his energy into a string of new
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projects involving access to public information,
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including an accountability website called
Watchdog.net,
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and a project called The Open Library.
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So, the Open Library Project is a website you can visit at openlibrary.org,
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and the idea is to be a huge wiki, an editable website with one page per book.
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So for every book ever published, we want to have a web page about it that combines
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all the information from publishers, from booksellers, from libraries, from readers
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onto one site, and then gives you links where
you can buy it, you can borrow it, or you can browse it.
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I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who
goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.
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That's the dream of Open Library, is building this website where both you can leap
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from book to book, from person to author, from subject to idea, go through this vast tree
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of knowledge that's been embedded and lost in big physical libraries, that's hard to find,
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that's not very well-accessible online. It's really important because books are our cultural legacy.
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Books are the place people go to write things down,
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and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary.
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How can you bring public access to the public domain?
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It may sound obvious that you'd have public access to the public domain,
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but in fact it's not true. So the public domain should be free to all, but it's often locked up.
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There's often guard cages. It's like having a national park but with a moat around it,
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and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain.
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One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in was bringing public access to the public domain.
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This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble.
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I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States.
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What I discovered was a puzzling system called PACER.
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Which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.
-
I started Googling, and that's when I ran
across Carl Malamud.
-
Access to legal materials in the United States is a ten billion dollar per year business.
-
PACER is just this incredible abomination
of government services. It's ten cents a page,
-
it's this most braindead code you've ever seen. You can't search it. You can't bookmark anything.
-
You've got to have a credit card, and these are public records.
-
U.S. district courts are very important; it's
where a lot of our seminal litigation starts.
-
Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists, students, citizens and lawyers
-
all need access to PACER, and it fights them every step of the way.
-
People without means can't see the law as readily as people that have that Gold American Express card.
-
It's a poll tax on access to justice.
-
You know, the law is the operating system of our democracy, and you have to pay to see it?
-
You know, that's not much of a democracy.
-
They make about 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system,
-
and it doesn't cost anything near that, according to their own records. In fact, it's illegal.
-
The E-Government Act of 2002 states that the courts may charge only to the extent necessary,
-
in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER.
-
As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges.
-
He started a program called The PACER Recycling Project,
-
where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for
-
to a free database so others could use them.
-
The PACER people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access,
-
and so they put together a system in 17 libraries across the country that was free PACER access.
-
You know, that's one library every 22,000 square miles, I believe, so it wasn't like really convenient.
-
I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Corps,
-
and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the PACER recycling site.
-
People take a thumb drive into one of these libraries, and they download a bunch of documents,
-
and they send them to me. I mean, it was just a joke.
-
In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Corps, there was a Wizard of Oz,
-
you know, the Munchkins singing, so a videoclip came up:
-
♪ We represent the lollipop guild...♪
-
But of course, I get this phone calls from Steve Shultze and Aaron, saying,
-
"Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps."
-
Around that time, I ran into Aaron at a conference.
-
This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.
-
So I approached him and I said,
-
"Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the PACER problem."
-
Shultze had already developed a program that could automatically download PACER documents
-
from the trial libraries.
-
Swartz wanted to take a look.
-
So, I showed him the code, and I didn't know what would come next,
-
but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference,
-
he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his
-
that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library, and to begin to test his improved code.
-
At which point the folks at the courts realized something is not going quite according to plan.
-
And data started to come in, and come in, and come in
-
and soon there was 760 GB of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.
-
Using information retrieved from the trial libraries,
-
Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the PACER system.
-
He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million Federal Court documents, almost 20 million pages of text.
-
Now, I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps exceed the expectations of the people
-
running the pilot access project, but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal.
-
Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to The New York Times about what happened.
-
They also caught the attention of the FBI, who began to stake out Swartz's parents' house in Illinois.
-
And I get a tweet from his mother, saying, "Call me!!"
-
So, I think, like, what the hell's going on here?
-
And so, finally I get a hold of Aaron and, you know, Aaron's mother was like, "Oh my God, FBI, FBI, FBI!"
-
An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway, trying to see if Aaron is in his room.
-
I remember being home that day, and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway,
-
and just driving back up. That's weird!
-
Like, five years later I read this FBI file, like, oh my goodness: that was the FBI agent, in my driveway.
-
He was terrified. He was totally terrified.
-
He was way more terrified after the FBI actually called him up on the phone,
-
and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.
-
He said he went home and lay down on the bed and, you know, was shaking.
-
The downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents.
-
Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result,
-
and the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges.
-
To this day, I find it remarkable
-
that anybody, even at the most remote podunk field office of the FBI
-
thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars was investigating people
-
for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public.
-
How can you call yourself a lawman,
-
and think that there could possibly be anything wrong in this whole world
-
with making the law public?
-
Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in.
-
Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology, and into a broader range of political causes.
-
I went into Congress, and I invited him to come and hang out and intern for us for a while
-
so that he could learn the political process.
-
He was sort of learning about new community and new sets of skills and kind of learning to hack politics.
-
It seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away until their whole bodies are dripping with sweat
-
faced with the knowledge that if they dare to stop, they won't able to put food on the table that night,
-
while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day just by sitting and watching TV.
-
But apparently the world is ridiculous.
-
So, I co-founded a group called "The Progressive Change Campaign Committee",
-
and what we try and do is we try to organize people over the Internet who care about progressive politics
-
and moving the country toward a more progressive direction
-
to kind of come together, join our e-mail list, join our campaigns
-
and help us to get progressive candidates elected all across the country.
-
The group is responsible for igniting the grassroots effort behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate.
-
He might have thought it was a dumb system but he came in and he said, "I need to learn this system,
-
because it can be manipulated like any social system."
-
But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat.
-
Aaron began to take a closer look at institutions that publish academic journal articles.
-
By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume you have access
-
to a wide variety of scholarly journals.
-
Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like
-
JSTOR and Thomson Isi to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read.
-
These scholarly journals and articles are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online,
-
and many have been paid for with taxpayer money or with government grants,
-
but to read them, you often have to pay again handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed-Elsevier.
-
These licenses fees are so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in United States,
-
don't have this kind of access. They are locked out from all of these journals.
-
They are locked out from our entire scientific legacy.
-
I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to The Enlightenment.
-
Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it's been scanned, digitized, and put in these collections.
-
That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists.
-
It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people,
-
but instead, it has been locked up and put online by an handful of for-profit corporations
-
who then try to get the maximum profit they can out of it.
-
So a researcher paid by the university or the people publishes a paper,
-
and at the very, very last step of that process, after all the work is done,
-
after all the original research is done--the thinking, the lab work, the analysis, after everything is done,
-
at that last stage, then the researcher has to hand over his or her copyright to this multi-billion dollar company.
-
And it's sick. It's an entire economy built on volunteer labor,
-
and then the publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream.
-
Talk about a scam. One publisher in Britain made a profit of three billion dollars last year.
-
I mean, what a racket!
-
JSTOR is just a very, very small player in that story
-
but for some reason, JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront.
-
He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing,
-
and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,
-
but I think they--at some point, Aaron asked the question,
-
"How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"
-
And they gave some--I think it was two hundred million dollars,
-
something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.
-
Working on a fellowship at Harvard, he knew users on MIT's famously open and fast network next door
-
had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR. Swartz saw an opportunity.
-
You have a key to those gates,
-
and with a little bit of shell script magic, you can get those journal articles.
-
On September 24, 2010,
-
Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop
-
on the MIT network, under the name "Garry Host".
-
The client name was registered as "GHost laptop".
-
He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking.
-
The JSTOR database was organized,
-
so it was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in JSTOR,
-
because it was basically numbered.
-
It was basically slash slash slash...number article 444024 and -25 and -26.
-
He wrote a Python script called keepgrabbing.py,
-
which was like, keeping grabbing one article after another.
-
The next day, GHost laptop begins grabbing articles,
-
but soon, the computer's IP address is blocked. For Swartz, it's barely a bump in the road.
-
He quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading.
-
Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps to try to interfere with this,
-
when they notice that this is happening,
-
and when the more modest steps don't work,
-
then at a certain stage, JSTOR just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database.
-
So there's a kind of cat-and-mouse game around
-
getting access to the JSTOR database.
-
Aaron, ultimately, obviously is the cat because he has more technical capability
-
than the JSTOR database people do in defending them.
-
Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings,
-
and he went, instead of going through WiFi, he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network
-
and just left it there with an external hard drive downloading these articles to the computer.
-
Unknown to Swartz, his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities.
-
They didn't stop the downloads.
-
Instead, they installed a surveillance camera.
-
They found the computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building.
-
They could have unplugged it. They could have waited for the guy to come back and said,
-
"Dude, what are you doing, you know, cut it out. Who are you?"
-
They could have done all that kind of stuff, but they didn't.
-
What they wanted to do was film it to gather evidence to make a case.
-
That's the only reason you film something like that.
-
At first, the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera
-
was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans.
-
But days later, it caught Swartz.
-
Swartz is replacing the hard drive. He takes it out of his backpack,
-
leans out of frame for about five minutes,
-
and then leaves.
-
And then they organized, like, a stakeout where, as he was biking home from MIT,
-
these cops came out from either side of the road,
-
or something like that, and started going after him.
-
He describes that he was pressed down and assaulted by the police.
-
He tells me that they--it's unclear that they were police that were after him.
-
He thought that someone was trying to attack him.
-
He does tell me they beat him up.
-
It was just devastating. The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution of anyone in our family or anything
-
was so foreign and incomprehensible, I didn't know what to do.
-
Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house, his apartment in Cambridge, in his office at Harvard.
-
Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police.
-
It had been taken over by the United States Secret Service.
-
The Secret Service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984,
-
but six weeks after the attack on 9/11, their role expanded.
-
[applause]
-
President Bush used The Patriot Act to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces".
-
The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists.
-
According to the Secret Service, they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact,
-
organized criminal groups, or use of schemes involving new technology.
-
The Secret Service turned Swartz's case over to the Boston U.S. Attorney's office.
-
There was a guy in the U.S. attorney's office who had the title:
-
"Head of the Computer Crimes Division or Task Force"
-
I don't know what else he had going,
-
but you're certainly not much of a "Computer Crimes Prosecutor" without a computer crime to prosecute,
-
so he jumped on it, kept if for himself, didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit
-
and that's Steve Heymann.
-
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,
-
but he can be seen here, in an episode of the television show "American Greed",
-
filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.
-
He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzales,
-
a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades.
-
Gonzales masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers,
-
the largest such fraud in history.
-
Here, Heymann, describing Gonzales, gives his view on the hacker mindset:
-
These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by.
-
They have an ego, they like challenge, and of course they like money and everything you can get for money.
-
One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzales case was a young hacker named Jonathan James.
-
Believing Gonzales' crimes would be pinned on him,
-
James committed suicide during the investigation.
-
In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,
-
Heymann's boss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusets, Carmen Ortiz, said this:
-
"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars."
-
It is not true. It's obviously not true.
-
I'm not saying it's harmless,
-
and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalize stealing of information,
-
but you got to be much more subtle
-
in trying to figure out exactly which kinds of harms are harmful here.
-
So the thing about a crowbar is, every time I break into a place with a crowbar,
-
I do damage. There is no doubt about it.
-
But when Aaron writes a script that says
-
download download download, a hundred times in a second,
-
there's no obvious damage to anybody.
-
If he does that for the purpose of gathering an archive to do academic research on it,
-
there is never any damage to anybody.
-
He wasn't stealing. He wasn't selling what he got or giving it away.
-
He was making a point, for as far as I could tell.
-
The arrest took its toll on Swartz.
-
He just wouldn't talk about it.
-
I mean, he was very stressed.
-
If you would thought that the FBI was going to come to your doorstep any day,
-
anytime you went down the hall, even to do your laundry,
-
and they'd break in into your apartment 'cause you left the door unlocked,
-
like...I'd be pretty stressed,
-
and it was clear, and so Aaron was always sort of like in a dour mood.
-
He wouldn't give off any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time,
-
because he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him.
-
It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism.
-
Time Magazine would later name, as their 2011 Person of the Year, "The Protester".
-
There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.
-
WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables,
-
Manning had been under arrest at the time,
-
it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak.
-
Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble that
-
has a lot of hackers in its ranks,
-
were going on various sprees of sorts.
-
If you compare that to what he did,
-
this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,
-
in a kind of private, professional matter.
-
It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system.
-
It just didn't belong there.
-
Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal
-
that involved three months in prison, time in an halfway house,
-
and a year of home detention,
-
all without the use of a computer.
-
It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.
-
Here we are: we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever
-
about what the government's case is,
-
and we have to make this immense decision
-
where the lawyer is pushing you to do this,
-
the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand,
-
and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small,
-
so whether you're guilty or not, you're better off taking the deal.
-
Boston has its own Computer Crimes Division,
-
lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need.
-
So, you know, you can imagine all sorts of cases that will be really hard to prosecute,
-
because you've got some criminals in Russia,
-
or you've got some people inside of a corporation
-
that are gonna five hundred dollar lawyers or seven hundred dollar-an-hour lawyers
-
sitting down against you, and then you've got this case with this kid,
-
which is pretty easy to prove that he did something,
-
and he's already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI,
-
so why not go as tough as you can against that guy?
-
It's good for you the prosecutor. It's good for the Republic,
-
'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types.
-
I was so scared.
-
I was so scared of having my computer seized.
-
I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being seized.
-
I had confidential material from sources from my previous work on my laptop,
-
and that is, above all, my priority--is to keep my sources safe.
-
I was so scared of what was going to happen to Ada.
-
Aaron told me that they'd offered him a deal,
-
and he finally just said that he would take it if I told him to,
-
and I say--I came real close to saying, "Take it."
-
He had these--he had developed, like, serious political aspirations
-
in the intervening time, between when, you know,
-
that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial start-up life,
-
and begun this new life that had come to this political activism,
-
and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony.
-
You know, he said to me one day, we were walking by the White House,
-
and he said to me, "They don't let felons work there."
-
And you know he really--he really wanted that to be his life.
-
He hadn't killed anybody. He hadn't hurt anybody.
-
He hadn't, like, stolen money.
-
He hadn't done anything that seemed felony-worthy, and...
-
there is this idea that there is no reason that he should be labelled a felon,
-
and taken away his right to vote in many states
-
for doing what he did. That's just outrageous.
-
It makes sense for him to be maybe fined a bunch of money,
-
or asked not to come back to MIT again.
-
But to be a felon? To face jail time?
-
Swartz turned down the plea deal.
-
Heymann redoubled his efforts.
-
Heymann continued to press us at all levels.
-
Even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's
-
Acer computer harddrive and USB drive,
-
the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.
-
Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR,
-
and just what did he plan to do with them?
-
The government claim was that he was planning to publish these.
-
We don't really know whether that was his real intention
-
because Aaron also had a history of doing projects where he'd analyze giant data sets of articles
-
in order to learn interesting things about them.
-
The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford,
-
he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.
-
In a project with Stanford law students,
-
Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.
-
He uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research
-
and favorable results.
-
He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies
-
giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles
-
which were then beneficial to, like, Exxon during an oil spill.
-
So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research.
-
Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.
-
In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.
-
That would have been completely okay.
-
If he were, on the other hand, intending to create a competitive service to JSTOR,
-
like, we're going to set up our own, you know,
-
access to the Harvard Law Review and charge, you know, money for it,
-
then, okay, now it seems like criminal violation
-
because you are commercially trying to exploit this material,
-
but it's kind of crazy to imagine that that was what he was doing.
-
So, but then there's the middle case: well, what if he was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world?
-
But depending on what he was doing, it creates a very different character
-
to how the law should be thinking about it. The government was prosecuting him
-
as if this was like a commercial criminal violation,
-
like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records, that it was that kind of crime.
-
I don't know what he was going to do with that database,
-
but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him
-
that he was going to analyze the data for evidence of corporate funding of climate change research
-
that led to biased results, and I totally believe that.
-
I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me,
-
and I thought maybe this was a way I could get out of this,
-
just exit the situation,
-
and I didn't want to live in fear of having my computer seized.
-
I didn't want to live in fear of having to go to jail on a contempt of court charge
-
if they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer.
-
When they came to me and said, "Steve wants to talk to you,"
-
that seemed reasonable.
-
They offered Norton what is know as a "Queen For A Day" letter or a proffer.
-
It allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case.
-
Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself,
-
for any information she revealed during the meeting.
-
I didn't like it. I told my lawyers repeatedly
-
that I didn't...this seemed fishy, I didn't like this, I didn't want immunity,
-
I didn't need immunity, I hadn't done anything,
-
but they were really, really stringent that there was--
-
they did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity.
-
[Interviewer] But just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal, a proffer.
-
Right, a proffer letter.
-
-In which you basically handed information to them in exchange for protection from prosecution.
-
-So, it wasn't handing information over. It was--at least that's not how I saw it--
-
it was just having a discussion, having an interview with them.
-
-Well, they're asking you questions...
-They're asking me questions.
-
-and they can ask about whatever they want...
-Right.
-
- and whatever they learn...
-I really...
-
-They can't have you prosecuted.
-Right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked.
-
I repeatedly--I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter.
-
I was ill. I was being pressured by my lawyers.
-
I was confused. I was not doing well by this point.
-
I was depressed, and I was scared, and I didn't understand the situation I was in.
-
I had no idea why I was in this situation.
-
I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong.
-
We went out of our minds.
-
Aaron was clearly very distraught about it. We were very distraught about it.
-
Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it.
-
We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys.
-
I was very unused to being in a room with large men, well-armed,
-
that are continually telling me I'm lying, and that I must have done something.
-
I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting
-
wasn't a crime.
-
I told them that they were on the wrong side of history.
-
I used that phrase. I said, "You're on the wrong side of history."
-
And they looked bored. They didn't even look angry. They just looked bored,
-
and it began to occur to me that we weren't having the same conversation.
-
I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know, why people would download journal articles,
-
and eventually--I don't remember what was around it--
-
I mentioned that he'd done this blog post, the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto".
-
This is the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto",
-
supposedly written in July, 2008 in Italy.
-
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."
-
"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,
published over centuries in books and journals,
-
is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."
-
"Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by."
-
"You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences,
-
liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends."
-
"But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground."
-
"It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were
-
the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew."
-
"But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative."
-
"Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy."
-
"There's no justice in following unjust laws."
-
"It's time to come into the light and, in a grand tradition of civil disobedience,
-
declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture."
-
The Manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people, and also edited by Norton.
-
But it was Swartz who had signed his name to it.
-
When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron and tell him everything I can remember about it,
-
and he gets very angry.
-
The things that I'd done shouldn't have added up that way.
-
I hadn't done anything wrong, and everything had gone wrong,
-
but I was never...
-
I'm still angry.
-
I'm still angry that you could try your best with these people to do the right thing,
-
and they'd turn everything against you.
-
And they will hurt you with anything they can.
-
And in that moment, I regret that I said what I did.
-
But my much larger regret is that we have settled for this.
-
That we are okay with this.
-
That we are okay with the justice system,
-
a system that tries to game people into little traps so they can ruin our lives.
-
So yeah, I wish I hadn't said that.
-
But I'm much, much angrier that this is where I am.
-
That this is what we, as a people, think is okay.
-
They used every method that I think they could think of
-
to get her to provide information which would be unhelpful to Aaron,
-
and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron,
-
but I don't think she had information that was helpful to the government.
-
Months go by, as Swartz's friends and family await a looming indictment.
-
In the meantime, Swartz was becoming a go-to expert on a series of internet issues.
-
[RT interviewer} ...a question to you then: Do you think that the internet is something
-
that should be considered a human right, and something that the government cannot take away from you?
-
Yes, definitely, I mean this notion that national security is an excuse to shut down the internet,
-
that's exactly what we heard in Egypt and Syria and all these other countries,
-
and so, yeah, it's true, sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up some embarrassing material
-
about what the U.S. government does, and people are going to be organizing to protest about it,
-
and try and change their government. You know, and that's a good thing,
-
that's what all these First Amendment Rights of free expression, of freedom of association are all about,
-
and so the notion that we should try and shut those down I think, just goes against very basic American principles.
-
A principle, I think, is one that our Founding Fathers would have understood.
-
If the internet had been around back then,
-
instead of putting "post offices" in the Constitution, they would have put "ISPs".
-
[RT interviewer] Well, it's definitely interesting to see how far...
-
Swartz meets activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and the two begin to date.
-
[Aaron] We need a massive global public outcry.
-
[Taren] If there's no massive global public outcry, it won't create any change.
-
-You know, four people in this city should cause a massive global public outcry.
-
-You know, we need a petition signer.
-
Without telling her specifics, he warned her he was involved in something
-
he called simply "The Bad Thing".
-
And I had sort of crazy theories, like, that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or something.
-
I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, actually, but...
-
So, sometime in probably late July, Aaron called me,
-
and I happened to pick up, and he said, "The Bad Thing" might be in the news tomorrow.
-
Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to read about it in the news?"
-
And I said, "Well, I want you to tell me."
-
Aaron said, "Well, I've been--I've been arrested
-
for downloading too many academic journal articles, and they want to make an example out of me."
-
And I was like, "That's it? That's the big fuss? Really? It just doesn't sound like a very big deal."
-
On July 14, 2011, federal prosecutors indict Swartz on four felony counts.
-
He gets indicted on the same day that two people in England who are part of LulzSec get arrested,
-
and a few other real hackers. And Aaron is just someone who kind of looks like a hacker,
-
enough that they can, you know, put his head on a stake and put it on the gates.
-
Aaron went to surrender, and they arrested him.
-
They then strip searched him,
-
took away his shoelaces, took away his belt, and left him in solitary confinement.
-
The District of Massachusetts United States Attorney's office released a statement
-
saying, "Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison,
-
to be followed by three years of supervised release,
-
restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to one million dollars."
-
He is released on one hundred thousand dollars bail.
-
The same day, the primary victim in the case, JSTOR,
-
formally drops all charges against Swartz, and declines to pursue the case.
-
JSTOR--they weren't our friends; they weren't helpful or friendly to us,
-
but they also were just kind of like, "We're not part of this."
-
JSTOR, and their parent company, ITHAKA, also sidestepped requests to talk with this film.
-
But at the time, they released a statement saying,
-
"It was the government's decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR's."
-
And so it's our belief that, with that, the case will be over.
-
That we should be able to get Steve Heymann to drop the case, or settle it in some rational way.
-
And the government refused.
-
[Narrator] Why?
-
Well, because I think they wanted to make an example out of Aaron,
-
and they said they wanted--the reason, why they wouldn't
-
move on requiring a felony conviction and jail time,
-
was that they wanted to use this case as a case for deterrence. They told us that.
-
[Interviewer] They told you that?
- Yes.
-
-This was going to be an example?
-Yes.
-
-He was going to be made an example?
- Yes.
-
Steve Heymann said that.
-
Deterring who? There's other people out there running around logging onto JSTOR,
-
and downloading the articles to make a political statement? I mean, who are they deterring?
-
It would be easier to understand the Obama administration's
-
posture of supposedly being for deterrence
-
if this was an administration that, for instance,
-
prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime
-
that this country has seen in the last hundred years.
-
The crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street.
-
When you start deploying
-
the non-controversial idea of deterrence
-
only selectively
-
you stop making a dispassionate analysis of law-breaking
-
and you started deciding to deploy law enforcement resources
-
specifically on the basis of political ideology,
-
and that's not just undemocratic, it's supposed to be un-American.
-
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel
-
that the straw that broke the camel's back
-
was a press release sent out by an organization Swartz founded called "Demand Progress".
-
According to the MIT account, Heymann reacted to the short statement of support,
-
calling it a "wild internet campaign" and a "foolish move"
-
that moved the case from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.
-
That was a poisonous combination: a prosecutor who didn't want to lose face,
-
who had a political career in the offing, maybe, and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them.
-
You spend how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library,
-
and then got your ass handed to you in court? No way!
-
I then moved to try to put as much pressure on MIT in various ways to get them
-
to go to the government, and request the government to stop the prosecution.
-
[Interviewer] What was MIT's reaction to that?
-
There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point.
-
MIT doesn't defend Aaron
-
which, to people inside of the MIT community, seems outrageous,
-
because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word.
-
At MIT, the idea of going and running around on roofs and tunnels that you weren't allowed to be in
-
was not only a rite of passage, it was part of the MIT tour,
-
and lockpicking was a winter course at MIT.
-
They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks.
-
MIT never stood up and took a position of saying to the Feds, "Don't do this."
-
"We don't want you to do this. You're overreacting. This is too strong."
-
...that I'm aware of.
-
They acted kind of like any corporation would. They sort of--they helped the government,
-
they didn't help us, unless they felt they had to, and they never tried to stop it.
-
MIT declined repeated requests to comment,
-
but they later released a report saying they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality,
-
and believed Heymann and the U.S. Attorney's office did not care what MIT thought or said about the case.
-
MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos.
-
You could argue that MIT turned a blind eye, and that was okay for them to do,
-
but taking that stance--taking that neutral stance, in and of itself--was taking a pro-prosecutor stance.
-
If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,
-
they started by selling a Blue Box, which was a thing designed to defraud the phone company.
-
If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen,
-
they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard,
-
which was pretty clearly against the rules.
-
The difference between Aaron and the people I just mentioned
-
is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place, he didn't just want to make money.
-
Swartz continues to be outspoken on a variety of internet issues.
-
You know, the reason the internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas,
-
and what we need to be focusing on is getting more information about our government, more accessibility,
-
more discussion, more debate, but instead it seems like what Congress is focused on is shutting things down.
-
Aaron thought he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people.
-
[RT interviewer] Flame can literally control your computer, and make it spy on you.
-
Welcome, Aaron. Good to have you back on the show here.
-
You know, just like spies used to in olden days, put microphones and tap what people were saying,
-
now they're using computers to do the same things.
-
[Narrator] Swartz's political activity continues,
-
his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy.
-
It was called "SOPA".
-
Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous overreach,
-
threatening the technical integrity of the Internet itself.
-
[Ekersley] And one of the first things I did was to call Aaron.
-
And I said, "Can we do a big online campaign against this?"
-
"This isn't a bill about copyright."
-
"It's not?"
-
"No," he said, "it's a bill about the freedom to connect."
-
Now I was listening.
-
And he thought about it for a while, and then said, "Yes."
-
And he went and founded Demand Progress.
-
Demand Progress is an online activism organization, we've got around a million and a half members now,
-
but started in the fall of 2010.
-
Aaron was one of the most prominent people in a community of people
-
who helped lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country.
-
SOPA was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies,
-
but what it did was basically take a sledgehammer to a problem that needed a scalpel.
-
If passed, the law would allow a company to cut off finances to entire websites without due process,
-
or even to force Google to exclude their links.
-
All they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement.
-
It pitted the titans of traditional media against a new and now far more sophisticated remix culture.
-
It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman,
-
and if they don't do their job of making sure that nobody on their site uses it for anything
-
that's even potentially illegal, the entire site can get shut down without even so much as a trial.
-
This was over the top, I mean, this was a catastrophe.
-
This bill poses a serious threat to speech and civil liberties for all who use the internet.
-
There were only a handful of us who said, "Look, we're not for piracy either,
-
but it makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet,
-
the domain name system and so much that makes it free and open in the name of fighting piracy,
-
and Aaron got that right away.
-
The freedoms, guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on
-
would be suddenly deleted.
-
New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights
-
we'd always taken for granted.
-
And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.
-
When SOPA was introduced in October, 2011, it was considered inevitable.
-
Our strategy, when it first came out, was to hopefully slow the bill down,
-
maybe weaken it a little bit but, even we
-
didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill.
-
Having worked in Washington, what you learn is that, typically in Washington,
-
the legislative fights are fights between different sets of corporate monied interests.
-
They're all duking it out to pass legislation, and the fights that are the closest
-
are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests,
-
and they're financially equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying.
-
Those are the closest ones.
-
The ones that aren't even fights, typically, are ones
-
where all the money is on one side, all the corporations are on one side,
-
and it's just millions of people on the other side.
-
I haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service.
-
There were more than forty United States senators on that bill as co-sponsors,
-
so they were already a long, long way to getting the
-
sixty votes to have it clear all the procedural hoops.
-
Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period.
-
Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal enormous support using traditional outreach,
-
combined with commonly used voiceover IP, to make it very easy for people to call Congress.
-
I've never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level
-
both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side.
-
Millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-SOPA petitions.
-
Congress was caught off guard.
-
There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill,
-
watching them insist they could regulate the internet,
-
and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them.
-
I am not a nerd.
-
I'm just not enough of a nerd...
-
Maybe we oughta ask some nerds what this thing really does. [laughter]
-
Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds...
-
[laughter]
-
Really?
-
[laughter]
-
"Nerds"?
-
[laughter]
-
You know, I think, actually the word you're looking for is "experts"...
-
[laughter]
-
to enlighten you so your laws don't backfire [audience laughter and applause]
-
and break the internet.
-
We use the term "geek" but we're allowed to use that because we are geeks.
-
The fact that it got as far as it did, without them talking to any technical experts,
-
reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town.
-
I'm looking for somebody to come before this body, and testify in a hearing and say, "This is why they're wrong."
-
There used to be an office that provided science and technology advice,
-
and members could go to them and say, "Help me understand X,Y,Z."
-
And Gingrich killed it. He said it was a waste of money.
-
Ever since then, Congress has plunged into the Dark Ages.
-
I don't think anybody really thought that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron.
-
It was worth trying, but it didn't seem winnable,
-
and I remember, maybe a few months later, I remember him just turning to me and being like,
-
"I think we might win this."
-
And I was like, "That would be amazing."
-
Calls to Congress continue.
-
When the domain hosting site Go Daddy becomes a supporter of the bill,
-
tens of thousands of users transferred their domain names in protest.
-
Within a week, a humbled Go Daddy reverses their position on SOPA.
-
When the Congress people that supported the record and movie industries,
-
realized that there was this backlash, they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit.
-
You could see the curve happening. You could see that our arguments were starting to resonate.
-
It was like Aaron had been striking a match and it was being blown out,
-
striking another one, and it was being blown out,
-
and finally he'd managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught,
-
and then it turned into this roaring blaze.
-
On January 16, 2012, the White House issued a statement
-
saying they didn't support the bill.
-
And then this happened:
-
I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy,
-
and we should deal with them in a serious way, but this bill is not the right bill.
-
When Jimmy Wales put his support toward blacking out Wikipedia,
-
the number five most popular website in the world,
-
this is a website that's seven percent of all of the clicks on anywhere on the internet.
-
Wikipedia went black.
-
Reddit went black.
-
Craigslist went black.
-
The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat out melted.
-
Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill
-
that they were promoting just a couple days ago.
-
Within 24 hours, the number of opponents of SOPA in Congress
-
went from this...
-
to this.
-
To see congressmen and senators slowly flip sides throughout the day of the blackout
-
was pretty unbelievable.
-
There was like a hundred representative swing.
-
And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this,
-
we had won.
-
The thing that everyone said was impossible,
-
that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream,
-
had happened.
-
We did it.
-
We won.
-
This is a historic week in internet politics--maybe American politics.
-
The thing that we heard from people in Washington, D.C., from the staffers on Capitol Hill was:
-
they received more emails and more phone calls on SOPA Blackout Day
-
than they'd ever received about anything.
-
I think that was an extremely exciting moment.
-
This was the moment when the internet had grown up, politically.
-
It was exhilarating because it's hard to believe it actually happened.
-
It's hard to believe a bill with so much financial power behind it
-
didn't simply sail through the Congress.
-
And not only did not sail through, it didn't pass at all.
-
It's easy sometimes to feel like you're powereless,
-
like when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell and nobody hears you.
-
But I'm here to tell you today, you are powerful.
-
[Crowd cheers]
-
So, yeah, maybe sometimes you feel like you're not being listened to, but I'm here to tell you that you are.
-
You are being listened to. You are making a difference.
-
You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.
-
[Crowd cheers]
-
Stop PIPA.
-
Stop SOPA.
-
[Crowd cheers]
-
Some of the biggest internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit
-
from a world in which their little competitors could get censored.
-
We can't let that happen.
-
For him, it was more important to be sure that you made a small change
-
than to play a small part in a big change.
-
But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change,
-
and so for him, it was kind of this proof of concept
-
like, "Okay, what I want to do with my life is change the world."
-
"I think about it in this really scientific way of measuring my impact,
-
and this shows that it's possible."
-
"The thing that I want to do with my life is possible."
-
"I have proved that I can do it,
-
that I, Aaron Swartz, can change the world."
-
For a guy who never really thought he had done much--which was Aaron--
-
was one of the few moments where you could really see
-
that he felt like he had done something good,
-
feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap.
-
Everyone said there was no way we could stop SOPA.
-
We stopped it.
-
This is three outrageously good victories, and the year isn't even over yet.
-
I mean, if there's a time to be positive, it's now.
-
You know, he wins at SOPA a year after he's arrested.
-
It's not unambiguously happy moments. There's a lot going on.
-
He's so attuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him.
-
The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous,
-
and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance,
-
Swartz was already concerned.
-
It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax
-
that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is.
-
And if the answer is: "Oh, we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them"
-
then that's an awful lot of people.
-
It'd be one thing if they said, "Look, we know the number of telephones we're spying on,
-
we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."
-
but they just came back and said, "We can't give you a number at all."
-
That's pretty--I mean, that's scary, is what it is.
-
And they put incredible pressure on him, took away all of the money he had made.
-
They, you know, threatened to take away his physical freedom.
-
Why'd they do it, you know? I mean, well, why are they going after whistleblowers?
-
You know, why are they going after people who tell the truth
-
about all sorts of things, I mean, from the banks, you know, to war, to just sort of government transparency.
-
So secrecy serves those who are already in power,
-
and we are living in an era of secrecy that coincides with an era where the government is doing, also,
-
a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional.
-
So, those two things are not coincidences.
-
It's very clear that this technology has been developed
-
not for small countries overseas, but right here, for use in the United States, by the U.S. government.
-
The problem with the spying program is it's this sort of long, slow expansion, you know,
-
going back to the Nixon administration, right,
-
obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush,
-
and Obama has continued to expand it, and the problems have slowly grown worse and worse,
-
but there's never been this moment you can point to and say,
-
"Okay, we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters..."
-
The prosecution, in my estimation of Aaron Swartz, was about sending a particular, laserlike message
-
to a group of people that the Obama administration sees as politically threatening,
-
and that is, essentially, the hacker, the information, and the democracy activist community,
-
and the message that the Obama administration wanted to send to that particular community was,
-
in my estimation, "We know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment,
-
and so we are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz
-
to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."
-
And the government said, "Oh, the legal opinions we're using
-
to legalize the spying program are also classified,
-
so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you."
-
You know, every time they can say, "Oh, this is another instance of cyberwar.
-
The cybercriminals are attacking us again. We're all in danger. We're all under threat."
-
They use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws.
-
[Interviewer] And so just to follow--personally, how do you feel the fight is going?
-
It's up to you!
-
-I know. It's just that we gotta, you know...
-
You know, there's sort of these two polarizing perspectives, right,
-
everything is great, the internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everything's going to be fantastic
-
or everything is terrible,
-
the internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying,
-
and controlling what we say.
-
And the thing is, both are true, right?
-
The internet has done both, and both are kind of amazing and astonishing
-
and which one will win out in the long run is up to us.
-
It doesn't make sense to say, "Oh, one is doing better than the other." You know, they're both true.
-
And it's up to us which ones we emphasize and which ones we take advantage of
-
because they're both there, and they're both always going to be there.
-
On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Swartz,
-
adding additional counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer, and computer fraud.
-
Now, instead of four felony counts, Swartz was facing thirteen.
-
The prosecution's leverage had dramatically increased,
-
as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines.
-
They filed a separate indictment to add more charges,
-
and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes,
-
and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law.
-
That theory, and much of the prosecution's case against Swartz
-
involved a law created originally in 1986.
-
It is called the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".
-
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
-
was inspired by the movie "War Games" with Matthew Broderick--great movie.
-
[Broderick] I have you now.
-
In this movie, a kid gets the ability, through the magic of computer networks
-
to launch a nuclear attack.
-
[missiles firing up]
-
You know, that's not actually possible, and it certainly wasn't possible in the '80s
-
but apparently this movie scared Congress enough to
-
pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
-
This is a law that's just behind the times, for example, it penalizes
-
a terms of service kind of arrangement. You can have something like
-
eHarmony or Match.com, and somebody sort of inflates their own personal characteristics,
-
and all of a sudden, depending on the jurisdiction and the prosecutors,
-
they could be in a whole host of troubles.
-
We all know what "Terms of Use" are.
-
Most people don't read them, but not abiding by their terms could mean
-
you are committing a felony.
-
The website Terms of Service often say things like:
-
"Be nice to each other", or "Don't do anything that's improper."
-
The idea that the Criminal Law has anything to say about these kinds of violations,
-
I think strikes most people as crazy.
-
The examples get even more "crazy":
-
Until it was changed in March of 2013, the Terms of Use on the website of Hearst's Seventeen magazine
-
said you had to be eighteen in order to read it.
-
I would say that the way the CFAA has been interpreted by the Justice Department,
-
we are probably all breaking the law.
-
Vague and prone to misuse, the CFAA has become a one-size-fits-all hammer
-
for a wide range of computer-related disputes.
-
Though not the only factor in his case,
-
eleven of the thirteen charges against Swartz involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
-
The question "Why?" hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz.
-
Just what was motivating the government, and what would their case have been?
-
The Department of Justice declined requests for answers,
-
but Professor Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case.
-
So, I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons:
-
I was a federal prosecutor at the Justice Department for three years
-
before I started teaching. The government came forward
-
with an indictment based on what crimes they thought were committed,
-
just as a purely lawyer's matter, looking at the precedents, looking at the statute,
-
looking at the history, looking at the cases that are out there so far,
-
I think it was a fair indictment based on that.
-
You can debate whether they should have charged this case.
-
There's just a lot of disagreement. Some people are on the Open Access side, some people are not.
-
I think the government took Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" very seriously,
-
and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed, as a moral imperative,
-
to breaking the law, to overcome a law that Swartz saw as unjust,
-
and in a democracy, if you think a law is unjust, there are ways of changing that law.
-
There's going to Congress as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA,
-
or you can violate that law in a way to try to nullify that law,
-
and I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was committed,
-
not just to breaking the law, but to really making sure that law was nullified.
-
That everyone would have access to the database in a way that
-
you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the tube.
-
It would be done, and Swartz's side would win.
-
There's a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law,
-
and ultimately, that is a decision for the American people to make, working through Congress.
-
And then the second problem is, I think, we're still trying to figure out:
-
What's the line between less serious offences and more serious offences?
-
We're now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse,
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and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are
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because we're just working that out.
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This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion.
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The hammer that the Justice Department has to scare people with
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just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,
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and so most people just--you know, you can't roll the dice with your life like that.
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Should we tap somebody's phone? Should we film them?
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Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?
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That's how federal agents and prosecutors think.
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They build cases. They make cases.
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Swartz was caught in the gears of a brutal criminal justice system that could not turn back,
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a machine that has made America the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
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We have, in this country, allowed ourselves to be captured by the politics of fear and anger,
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and anything we're afraid of, like the future of the internet and access,
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and anything we're angry about, instinctively creates a criminal justice intervention,
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and we've used jail, prison, and punishment to resolve a whole host of problems
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that, historically, were never seen as criminal justice problems.
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The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute, which is part of what
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has created this debate and controversy over online access to information on the internet,
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is very consistent with what we've seen in other areas.
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The one difference is that the people who are usually targeted and victimized
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by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority.
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Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.
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He had basically stopped working on anything else,
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and the case was, in fact, taking over sort of his whole life.
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One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he was emotionally vulnerable,
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and that that was something they really needed to keep in mind so that they knew that.
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It was weighing on him very heavily.
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He did not like having his actions and his movements restricted in any way,
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and the threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot,
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was terrifying to him.
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Completely exhausted his financial resources,
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and it cost us a lot of money also, and he raised a substantial amount of money,
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so it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.
-
[Interviewer] The legal defence?
- Yes.
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-Was in millions?
- Yes.
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I think he didn't want to be a burden to people.
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I think that was a factor like, "I have my normal life,
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and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with,
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and I try to keep the two of them as separate as possible,
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but they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty."
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Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher:
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Do you admit guilt and move on with your life,
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or do you fight a broken system?
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With his legal case, the answer was simple:
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He rejects a final plea deal and a trial date is set.
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Aaron was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something
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that he didn't believe was fair, but I also think he was scared.
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I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.
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I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse, and I would have given him a big hug,
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and we would have walked across that little river in Boston, and gone and had a couple of beers.
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I really thought that we were right. I thought that we were going to win the case.
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I thought that we could win the case.
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He didn't talk about it very much, but you could see
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the enormous pain that he was going through.
-
[song]
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No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings
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or depressive episodes or anything that I would describe as "severe depression"
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and it's possible, you know, he was depressed. People get depressed.
-
[music]
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Very early in our relationship, three or four weeks in or something,
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I remember him saying to me
-
that I was a lot stronger than he was.
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You know, he was brittle in a lot of ways.
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Things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.
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That was part of his brilliance, too.
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I think he probably had something like clinical depression in his early twenties.
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I don't think he did when I was with him.
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He wasn't a "joyful" person, but that's different from being depressed.
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He was just under such enormous pressure for two years straight.
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He just didn't want to do it anymore.
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He was just--I just think it was too much.
-
[song]
-
I got a phone call late at night.
-
I could tell something was wrong, and then I called, and I realized what had happened.
-
A co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "Reddit" has been found dead.
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Police say twenty-six-year-old Aaron Swartz
-
killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.
-
I just thought, we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation.
-
I was like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.
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It was one of the hardest nights of my life.
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I just kept screaming, "I can't hear you! What did you say? I can't hear you!"
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I can't. That's it.
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[Interviewer] Okay.
-
Yeah, none of it made any sense,
-
and really still doesn't.
-
I was so frustrated, angry.
-
[exhales]
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You know, I tried to explain it to my kids.
-
My three-year-old told me that the doctors would fix him.
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I've known lots of people that have died, but I've never lost anybody like this,
-
because everybody feels, and I do too, there is so much we could have--more to do like...
-
I just didn't know he was there. I didn't know this was what he was suffering and...
-
He was part of me.
-
And I just wanted it to not be real, and then...
-
and then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date:
-
"to 2013".
-
[quote on screen]
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My first thought was: what if nobody even notices?
-
You know, because it wasn't clear to me how salient he was.
-
I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw.
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The Net just lit up.
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Everyone was trying to explain it in their own way, but I've never seen
-
people grieve on Twitter before.
-
People were visibly grieving online.
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He was the internet's own boy,
-
and the old world killed him.
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We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched.
-
Architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the president, regularly.
-
In the middle of that time, the idea that this is what the government had to prosecute,
-
It just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.
-
The question is: Can we do something, given what's happened,
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to make the world a better place,
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and how can we further that legacy?
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That's the only question one could ask.
-
All over the world there are starting to be hack-a-thons, gatherings,
-
Aaron Swartz has, in some sense, brought the best out of us, in trying to say:
-
How do we fix this?
-
He was, in my humble opinion, one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries
-
that this country has produced.
-
I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious,
-
but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with.
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When we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,
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we've broken the rule of law--we've desecrated the temple of justice.
-
Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.
-
[applause]
-
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,
-
it comes through continuous struggle.
-
Aaron really could do magic,
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and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death.
-
He believed that he could change the world, and he was right.
-
Out of the last week, and out of today, phoenixes are already rising.
-
[applause]
-
Since Swartz's death, Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden
-
have introduced legislation that would reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act--
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the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Swartz.
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It's called "Aaron's Law".
-
Aaron believed that you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time:
-
What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now?
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And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?
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[Protesters] This is what democracy looks like!
-
[crowd chants] We are the people too!
-
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?
-
Stand up, fight back!
-
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?
-
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Carmen Ortiz has got to go!
-
I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.
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But we can change the future and we must.
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We must do so for Aaron, we must do so for ourselves.
-
We must do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place,
-
a place where justice works, and access to knowledge becomes a human right. [applause]
-
So there was a kid, back in February, from Baltimore, fourteen years old,
-
who had access to JSTOR, and he'd been spelunking through JSTOR after reading something,
-
and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer,
-
and pancreatic cancer kills the shit out of you because we detect it way too late
-
by the time we detect it, it's already too late to do anything about it,
-
and he sent emails off to the entire oncology department at Johns Hopkins,
-
you know hundreds of them, and every--
- [Interviewer] Did you say fourteen years old?
-
- Fourteen-year-old kid, yeah, and most of them ignored it but one of them sent him an email back,
-
and said this is not an entirely stupid idea, why don't you come on over?
-
This kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher, and in February I heard him on the news
-
just a couple of weeks after Aaron died, when Aaron was in the news a lot..
-
Sorry...
-
and he said the reason he was on the news was 'cause they'd done it. They were shipping
-
an early test for pancreatic cancer that was going to save lives,
-
and he said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important."
-
Because you never know, right? This truth of the universe is not only something
-
that policymakers use to figure out, you know, what the speed limit should be.
-
It's where the thing that's gonna keep your kid from dying of pancreatic cancer comes from,
-
and without access, the person who might come up with the thing that's got your number on it,
-
may never find that answer.
-
He slept so well, he didn't fall out of the tree, not even when he dreamed he was back on the spacecraft.
-
[Aaron's dad] Very good, Aaron. Very good. Yay, Aaron!
-
Okay, now it's song time.
-
♪ ♪ ♪
-
[credits]
-
[the end]
English [en]
Bengali [bn]
Hebrew [he]