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[quote on screen]

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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.

226
00:15:40,002 --> 00:15:46,462
Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license.

227
00:15:46,462 --> 00:15:56,021
He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.

228
00:15:56,921 --> 00:16:00,551
Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

229
00:16:00,921 --> 00:16:05,822
I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

230
00:16:05,822 --> 00:16:10,949
I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

231
00:16:10,949 --> 00:16:15,416
I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

232
00:16:15,416 --> 00:16:18,831
Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time

233
00:16:18,831 --> 00:16:21,034
on things that won't have an impact.

234
00:16:21,034 --> 00:16:26,161
I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

235
00:16:26,161 --> 00:16:31,436
I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

236
00:16:31,436 --> 00:16:35,246
I want to make the world a better place.

237
00:16:40,182 --> 00:16:45,755
In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

238
00:16:45,755 --> 00:16:51,848
He'd had ulcerative colitis which was very troubling, and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

239
00:16:51,848 --> 00:16:55,863
He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day,

240
00:16:55,873 --> 00:17:00,773
and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth,

241
00:17:00,773 --> 00:17:03,822
and made him feel different from any of the other students.

242
00:17:03,822 --> 00:17:06,458
Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

243
00:17:06,458 --> 00:17:12,800
and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

244
00:17:12,800 --> 00:17:20,828
who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters

245
00:17:20,828 --> 00:17:24,915
and I think it just made him bananas.

246
00:17:25,487 --> 00:17:28,527
In 2005, after only one year of college,

247
00:17:28,527 --> 00:17:35,531
Swartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

248
00:17:35,751 --> 00:17:39,181
He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a website."

249
00:17:39,181 --> 00:17:42,230
And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure."

250
00:17:42,230 --> 00:17:45,738
So Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment...

251
00:17:45,738 --> 00:17:48,864
So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here.

252
00:17:48,864 --> 00:17:54,977
I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

253
00:17:54,977 --> 00:17:57,862
'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

254
00:17:57,862 --> 00:18:03,669
Aaron lived in what's now the living room and some of the posters are leftover from when Aaron lived here.

255
00:18:03,669 --> 00:18:09,279
And then the library...there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

256
00:18:10,911 --> 00:18:16,731
Aaron's Y Combinator site was called "infogami", a tool to build websites.

257
00:18:16,861 --> 00:18:20,438
But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

258
00:18:20,438 --> 00:18:24,747
merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

259
00:18:24,747 --> 00:18:29,539
It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called "Reddit".

260
00:18:29,539 --> 00:18:33,708
There we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

261
00:18:33,708 --> 00:18:37,027
and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,

262
00:18:37,027 --> 00:18:38,816
And it showed no signs of letting up.

263
00:18:38,816 --> 00:18:44,373
First we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on...It was just incredible.

264
00:18:44,373 --> 00:18:49,563
Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

265
00:18:52,152 --> 00:19:01,100
There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flock to the site,

266
00:19:01,100 --> 00:19:07,413
and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

267
00:19:07,413 --> 00:19:12,008
reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

268
00:19:12,008 --> 00:19:19,368
so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

269
00:19:19,368 --> 00:19:24,824
and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

270
00:19:24,824 --> 00:19:29,716
there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home,

271
00:19:29,716 --> 00:19:33,929
and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well.

272
00:19:33,929 --> 00:19:36,791
It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

273
00:19:36,791 --> 00:19:41,081
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Condé Nast,

274
00:19:41,081 --> 00:19:42,938
who makes an offer to buy the company.

275
00:19:42,938 --> 00:19:46,939
Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

276
00:19:46,939 --> 00:19:51,079
about like: "How do I store this money?"

277
00:19:51,302 --> 00:19:54,272
- Like a lot of money...
- Like a lot of money.

278
00:19:54,272 --> 00:20:00,319
Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

279
00:20:00,319 --> 00:20:03,461
- And he's how old at the time?
- 19, 20.

280
00:20:05,165 --> 00:20:11,205
So it was in this apartment. They sat around
on what predated these couches,

281
00:20:11,205 --> 00:20:14,487
hacking on Reddit, and when they sold Reddit

282
00:20:14,487 --> 00:20:18,641
they threw a giant party, and then all flew
out to California the next day,

283
00:20:18,641 --> 00:20:20,195
and left the keys with me.

284
00:20:23,701 --> 00:20:27,400
It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start-up so we all presumed

285
00:20:27,400 --> 00:20:29,329
he was the richest person around

286
00:20:29,329 --> 00:20:33,920
but he said, "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little
shoebox-sized room. That's all I need."

287
00:20:33,920 --> 00:20:36,146
It was barely larger than a closet.

288
00:20:36,146 --> 00:20:42,440
The idea of him spending his money on
fancy objects just seemed so implausible.

289
00:20:42,500 --> 00:20:47,620
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,

290
00:20:47,620 --> 00:20:49,886
and I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt,

291
00:20:49,886 --> 00:20:52,046
so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes.

292
00:20:52,046 --> 00:20:54,576
So it's really no big deal."

293
00:20:54,576 --> 00:20:57,966
What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic
flows on the internet,

294
00:20:57,970 --> 00:21:00,524
and what commands our attention.

295
00:21:00,524 --> 00:21:03,522
In the old system of broadcasting, you're
fundamentally limited by the amount of

296
00:21:03,522 --> 00:21:08,583
space in the airwaves. You could only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television

297
00:21:08,583 --> 00:21:10,915
or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

298
00:21:11,003 --> 00:21:15,360
On the Internet, everybody can have a channel.
Everyone can get a blog, or a MySpace page.

299
00:21:15,360 --> 00:21:18,164
Everyone has a way of expressing themselves.

300
00:21:18,164 --> 00:21:21,280
What you see now is not a question of who gets
access to the airwaves,

301
00:21:21,280 --> 00:21:25,030
it's a question of who gets control over the
ways you find people.

302
00:21:25,030 --> 00:21:29,026
You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, theses sort of gatekeepers that tell you

303
00:21:29,026 --> 00:21:30,993
where on the internet you want to go.

304
00:21:30,993 --> 00:21:34,273
The people who provide you your sources of news and information.

305
00:21:34,273 --> 00:21:38,264
So it's not only certain people have a license to speak, now everyone has

306
00:21:38,264 --> 00:21:40,904
a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard.

307
00:21:44,526 --> 00:21:49,806
After he started working in San Francisco
at Condé Nast, he comes into the office

308
00:21:49,806 --> 00:21:53,792
and they want to give him a computer with all
this crap installed on it

309
00:21:53,792 --> 00:21:57,273
and say he can't install any new things
on this computer,

310
00:21:57,273 --> 00:21:59,325
which to developers is outrageous.

311
00:21:59,325 --> 00:22:02,095
From the first day, he was complaining
about all the stuff.

312
00:22:05,037 --> 00:22:10,627
"Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first
day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.

313
00:22:10,627 --> 00:22:15,373
By lunchtime, I had literally locked myself
in a bathroom stall and started crying.

314
00:22:15,373 --> 00:22:18,285
I can't imagine staying sane with someone
buzzing in my ear all day

315
00:22:18,285 --> 00:22:20,965
Let alone getting any actual work done.

316
00:22:20,965 --> 00:22:24,087
Nobody else seems to get work done here either

317
00:22:24,087 --> 00:22:27,057
Everybody's always coming into our room to
hang out and chat, or invite us to play

318
00:22:27,057 --> 00:22:29,927
the new video game system that Wired is testing."

319
00:22:32,152 --> 00:22:37,817
He really had different aspirations that were politically-oriented,

320
00:22:37,817 --> 00:22:41,862
and Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture

321
00:22:41,862 --> 00:22:46,967
that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals.

322
00:22:47,007 --> 00:22:49,533
Aaron hated working for a corporation.

323
00:22:49,533 --> 00:22:53,004
They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron
is the only one who is not going to take it.

324
00:22:53,004 --> 00:22:55,643
And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

325
00:22:55,643 --> 00:22:58,313
By not showing up to work, ever.

326
00:23:01,013 --> 00:23:05,434
It was said to be a messy breakup.
Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

327
00:23:05,447 --> 00:23:08,277
declined to be interviewed for this film.

328
00:23:09,251 --> 00:23:15,891
He rejected the business world. One of the really important things to remember about

329
00:23:15,891 --> 00:23:22,404
that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up
culture is that he was also leaving behind

330
00:23:22,404 --> 00:23:31,162
the things that had made him famous and well-loved, and he was at risk of letting down fans.

331
00:23:31,162 --> 00:23:35,866
He got to where he was supposed to be going, and had the self-awareness

332
00:23:35,866 --> 00:23:42,821
and the orneriness to realize that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck

333
00:23:42,821 --> 00:23:45,849
the single rose and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell,

334
00:23:45,849 --> 00:23:50,399
and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed,

335
00:23:50,399 --> 00:23:53,693
and he did get the rose in any event,

336
00:23:53,693 --> 00:23:57,413
he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool.

337
00:23:58,026 --> 00:24:01,728
The way Aaron always saw it, is that
programming is magic--

338
00:24:01,728 --> 00:24:07,110
you can accomplish these things that normal
humans can't, by being able to program.

339
00:24:07,110 --> 00:24:13,310
So if you had magical powers, would you use
them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

340
00:24:15,009 --> 00:24:18,478
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries
he had met as a child.

341
00:24:18,478 --> 00:24:22,387
The man who had invented the World Wide Web,
Tim Berners-Lee.

342
00:24:22,387 --> 00:24:25,938
In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on

343
00:24:25,938 --> 00:24:29,260
one of the most lucrative inventions of
the 20th century,

344
00:24:29,260 --> 00:24:35,137
but instead of profiting from the invention
of the World Wide Web, he gave it away for free.

345
00:24:35,917 --> 00:24:39,707
It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.

346
00:24:41,118 --> 00:24:45,261
Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.

347
00:24:45,261 --> 00:24:51,398
Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genius, who doesn't in any sense cash out.

348
00:24:51,398 --> 00:24:55,865
He's not at all interested in how he's going to figure out how to make a billion dollars.

349
00:24:55,865 --> 00:24:57,829
People were saying, "Ah, there's money to be made there,"

350
00:24:57,829 --> 00:25:00,566
so there would have been lots of little webs,

351
00:25:00,566 --> 00:25:02,139
instead of one big one,

352
00:25:02,139 --> 00:25:05,030
and one little web, and all sorts of webs doesn't work,

353
00:25:05,030 --> 00:25:08,080
because you can't follow links from one to the other.

354
00:25:09,923 --> 00:25:14,112
You had to have the critical masses--the thing was the entire planet,

355
00:25:14,112 --> 00:25:17,172
so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board.

356
00:25:23,891 --> 00:25:28,162
I feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is,

357
00:25:28,162 --> 00:25:33,852
to just kind of take what you're given, and you know, follow the things that adults told you to do,

358
00:25:33,852 --> 00:25:39,032
and that your parents told you to do, and that society tells you to do. I think you should always be questioning.

359
00:25:39,045 --> 00:25:43,055
I take this very scientific attitude, that
everything you've learned is just provisional,

360
00:25:43,055 --> 00:25:49,117
that it's always open to recantation or refutation or
questioning, and I think the same applies to society.

361
00:25:49,117 --> 00:25:53,491
Once I realized that there were real serious problems--fundamental problems--

362
00:25:53,491 --> 00:25:58,601
that I could do something to address, I didn't see a way to forget that. I didn't see a way not to.

363
00:26:02,600 --> 00:26:04,831
We just started spending a lot of time,

364
00:26:04,831 --> 00:26:06,621
just kind of as friends.

365
00:26:08,912 --> 00:26:11,884
We would just talk, for hours, into the night.

366
00:26:14,393 --> 00:26:18,110
I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me. I think to some degree,

367
00:26:18,110 --> 00:26:23,980
I was, like, this is a terrible idea, and impossible, and therefore I will pretend it is not happening.

368
00:26:25,161 --> 00:26:28,937
As my marriage was breaking down, and I was
really stuck without anywhere to go,

369
00:26:28,937 --> 00:26:32,927
we became roommates, and I brought my daughter over.

370
00:26:34,081 --> 00:26:37,246
We moved in, and furnished the house, and it
was really peaceful.

371
00:26:37,246 --> 00:26:40,816
My life had not been peaceful for a while, and really neither had his.

372
00:26:46,225 --> 00:26:54,073
We were extremely close from the beginning of our romantic relationship.

373
00:26:54,073 --> 00:26:57,633
We just...we were in constant contact.

374
00:26:57,633 --> 00:27:02,432
But we're both really difficult people to deal with. [laughs]

375
00:27:04,495 --> 00:27:10,865
In a very Ally McBeal discussion, he confessed he had a theme song, and I made him play it for me.

376
00:27:12,345 --> 00:27:16,504
It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple.

377
00:27:16,504 --> 00:27:24,154
I think it was just that sense of kind of being a little bit embattled that the song has,

378
00:27:25,054 --> 00:27:27,697
and it also had, like, this hopefulness to it.

379
00:27:27,837 --> 00:27:34,418
♪ By foot it's a slow climb, but I'm good
at being uncomfortable so I can't stop

380
00:27:34,418 --> 00:27:36,689
changing all the time ♪

381
00:27:36,689 --> 00:27:44,481
In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic
about life. Even when he didn't feel it,

382
00:27:44,481 --> 00:27:47,041
he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

383
00:27:47,041 --> 00:27:50,171
♪ Extraordinary machine ♪

384
00:27:53,037 --> 00:27:57,527
- What are you doing?
(Quinn) - Flicker has video now.

385
00:27:59,390 --> 00:28:01,743
Swartz threw his energy into a string of new

386
00:28:01,743 --> 00:28:04,731
projects involving access to public information,

387
00:28:04,731 --> 00:28:08,189
including an accountability website called
Watchdog.net,

388
00:28:08,189 --> 00:28:10,799
and a project called The Open Library.

389
00:28:10,816 --> 00:28:15,299
So, the Open Library Project is a website you can visit at openlibrary.org,

390
00:28:15,299 --> 00:28:19,778
and the idea is to be a huge wiki, an editable website with one page per book.

391
00:28:19,778 --> 00:28:23,910
So for every book ever published, we want to have a web page about it that combines

392
00:28:23,910 --> 00:28:29,391
all the information from publishers, from booksellers, from libraries, from readers

393
00:28:29,391 --> 00:28:34,587
onto one site, and then gives you links where
you can buy it, you can borrow it, or you can browse it.

394
00:28:34,587 --> 00:28:39,958
I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who
goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.

395
00:28:39,958 --> 00:28:44,050
That's the dream of Open Library, is building this website where both you can leap

396
00:28:44,050 --> 00:28:49,297
from book to book, from person to author, from subject to idea, go through this vast tree

397
00:28:49,297 --> 00:28:53,757
of knowledge that's been embedded and lost in big physical libraries, that's hard to find,

398
00:28:53,757 --> 00:28:59,086
that's not very well-accessible online. It's really important because books are our cultural legacy.

399
00:28:59,086 --> 00:29:00,943
Books are the place people go to write things down,

400
00:29:00,943 --> 00:29:05,813
and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary.

401
00:29:06,560 --> 00:29:10,771
How can you bring public access to the public domain?

402
00:29:10,771 --> 00:29:14,828
It may sound obvious that you'd have public access to the public domain,

403
00:29:14,828 --> 00:29:21,078
but in fact it's not true. So the public domain should be free to all, but it's often locked up.

404
00:29:21,078 --> 00:29:26,756
There's often guard cages. It's like having a national park but with a moat around it,

405
00:29:26,756 --> 00:29:33,245
and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain.

406
00:29:33,245 --> 00:29:39,458
One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in was bringing public access to the public domain.

407
00:29:39,458 --> 00:29:43,258
This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble.

408
00:29:46,254 --> 00:29:52,794
I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States.

409
00:29:54,458 --> 00:29:59,058
What I discovered was a puzzling system called PACER.

410
00:29:59,058 --> 00:30:02,884
Which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

411
00:30:02,884 --> 00:30:07,314
I started Googling, and that's when I ran
across Carl Malamud.

412
00:30:08,886 --> 00:30:14,837
Access to legal materials in the United States is a ten billion dollar per year business.

413
00:30:14,837 --> 00:30:22,564
PACER is just this incredible abomination
of government services. It's ten cents a page,

414
00:30:22,564 --> 00:30:27,221
it's this most braindead code you've ever seen. You can't search it. You can't bookmark anything.

415
00:30:27,221 --> 00:30:31,891
You've got to have a credit card, and these are public records.

416
00:30:31,891 --> 00:30:37,429
U.S. district courts are very important; it's
where a lot of our seminal litigation starts.

417
00:30:37,429 --> 00:30:44,369
Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists, students, citizens and lawyers

418
00:30:44,369 --> 00:30:48,367
all need access to PACER, and it fights them every step of the way.

419
00:30:48,367 --> 00:30:55,246
People without means can't see the law as readily as people that have that Gold American Express card.

420
00:30:55,246 --> 00:30:57,776
It's a poll tax on access to justice.

421
00:30:57,816 --> 00:31:04,096
You know, the law is the operating system of our democracy, and you have to pay to see it?

422
00:31:04,246 --> 00:31:07,135
You know, that's not much of a democracy.

423
00:31:07,135 --> 00:31:11,869
They make about 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system,

424
00:31:11,869 --> 00:31:18,236
and it doesn't cost anything near that, according to their own records. In fact, it's illegal.

425
00:31:18,937 --> 00:31:25,834
The E-Government Act of 2002 states that the courts may charge only to the extent necessary,

426
00:31:25,834 --> 00:31:29,591
in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER.

427
00:31:34,621 --> 00:31:40,160
As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges.

428
00:31:40,160 --> 00:31:43,300
He started a program called The PACER Recycling Project,

429
00:31:43,300 --> 00:31:47,297
where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for

430
00:31:47,297 --> 00:31:50,334
to a free database so others could use them.

431
00:31:50,334 --> 00:31:55,056
The PACER people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access,

432
00:31:55,056 --> 00:32:00,925
and so they put together a system in 17 libraries across the country that was free PACER access.

433
00:32:01,885 --> 00:32:07,625
You know, that's one library every 22,000 square miles, I believe, so it wasn't like really convenient.

434
00:32:07,915 --> 00:32:12,173
I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Corps,

435
00:32:12,173 --> 00:32:16,607
and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the PACER recycling site.

436
00:32:16,607 --> 00:32:20,813
People take a thumb drive into one of these libraries, and they download a bunch of documents,

437
00:32:20,813 --> 00:32:25,089
and they send them to me. I mean, it was just a joke.

438
00:32:25,089 --> 00:32:28,636
In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Corps, there was a Wizard of Oz,

439
00:32:28,636 --> 00:32:31,593
you know, the Munchkins singing, so a videoclip came up:

440
00:32:31,593 --> 00:32:34,940
♪ We represent the lollipop guild...♪

441
00:32:34,940 --> 00:32:39,381
But of course, I get this phone calls from Steve Shultze and Aaron, saying,

442
00:32:39,381 --> 00:32:43,047
"Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps."

443
00:32:43,377 --> 00:32:47,334
Around that time, I ran into Aaron at a conference.

444
00:32:47,334 --> 00:32:51,593
This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.

445
00:32:51,593 --> 00:32:53,217
So I approached him and I said,

446
00:32:53,217 --> 00:32:58,195
"Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the PACER problem."

447
00:32:59,865 --> 00:33:04,442
Shultze had already developed a program that could automatically download PACER documents

448
00:33:04,442 --> 00:33:06,459
from the trial libraries.

449
00:33:06,459 --> 00:33:08,796
Swartz wanted to take a look.

450
00:33:08,796 --> 00:33:13,481
So, I showed him the code, and I didn't know what would come next,

451
00:33:13,481 --> 00:33:19,033
but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference,

452
00:33:19,033 --> 00:33:24,168
he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his

453
00:33:24,168 --> 00:33:32,139
that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library, and to begin to test his improved code.

454
00:33:32,139 --> 00:33:38,440
At which point the folks at the courts realized something is not going quite according to plan.

455
00:33:38,440 --> 00:33:42,681
And data started to come in, and come in, and come in

456
00:33:42,681 --> 00:33:47,632
and soon there was 760 GB of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.

457
00:33:48,282 --> 00:33:52,098
Using information retrieved from the trial libraries,

458
00:33:52,098 --> 00:33:57,304
Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the PACER system.

459
00:33:57,304 --> 00:34:04,360
He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million Federal Court documents, almost 20 million pages of text.

460
00:34:04,360 --> 00:34:09,864
Now, I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps exceed the expectations of the people

461
00:34:09,864 --> 00:34:14,614
running the pilot access project, but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal.

462
00:34:14,620 --> 00:34:19,096
Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to The New York Times about what happened.

463
00:34:19,731 --> 00:34:26,498
They also caught the attention of the FBI, who began to stake out Swartz's parents' house in Illinois.

464
00:34:26,498 --> 00:34:31,053
And I get a tweet from his mother, saying, "Call me!!"

465
00:34:31,053 --> 00:34:33,597
So, I think, like, what the hell's going on here?

466
00:34:33,597 --> 00:34:38,981
And so, finally I get a hold of Aaron and, you know, Aaron's mother was like, "Oh my God, FBI, FBI, FBI!"

467
00:34:40,271 --> 00:34:45,831
An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway, trying to see if Aaron is in his room.

468
00:34:47,164 --> 00:34:51,899
I remember being home that day, and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway,

469
00:34:51,899 --> 00:34:55,110
and just driving back up. That's weird!

470
00:34:56,599 --> 00:35:04,953
Like, five years later I read this FBI file, like, oh my goodness: that was the FBI agent, in my driveway.

471
00:35:04,995 --> 00:35:08,479
He was terrified. He was totally terrified.

472
00:35:09,499 --> 00:35:14,910
He was way more terrified after the FBI actually called him up on the phone,

473
00:35:14,910 --> 00:35:19,142
and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.

474
00:35:19,142 --> 00:35:23,834
He said he went home and lay down on the bed and, you know, was shaking.

475
00:35:25,511 --> 00:35:30,056
The downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents.

476
00:35:30,056 --> 00:35:34,922
Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result,

477
00:35:34,922 --> 00:35:39,430
and the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges.

478
00:35:39,430 --> 00:35:41,762
To this day, I find it remarkable

479
00:35:41,762 --> 00:35:46,613
that anybody, even at the most remote podunk field office of the FBI

480
00:35:46,613 --> 00:35:51,177
thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars was investigating people

481
00:35:51,177 --> 00:35:55,491
for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public.

482
00:35:55,491 --> 00:35:57,745
How can you call yourself a lawman,

483
00:35:57,745 --> 00:36:01,725
and think that there could possibly be anything wrong in this whole world

484
00:36:01,725 --> 00:36:03,575
with making the law public?

485
00:36:03,575 --> 00:36:09,455
Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in.

486
00:36:09,455 --> 00:36:15,586
Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology, and into a broader range of political causes.

487
00:36:15,586 --> 00:36:21,622
I went into Congress, and I invited him to come and hang out and intern for us for a while

488
00:36:21,622 --> 00:36:25,182
so that he could learn the political process.

489
00:36:25,194 --> 00:36:31,194
He was sort of learning about new community and new sets of skills and kind of learning to hack politics.

490
00:36:31,194 --> 00:36:36,506
It seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away until their whole bodies are dripping with sweat

491
00:36:36,506 --> 00:36:41,276
faced with the knowledge that if they dare to stop, they won't able to put food on the table that night,

492
00:36:41,306 --> 00:36:46,438
while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day just by sitting and watching TV.

493
00:36:46,438 --> 00:36:48,898
<i>But apparently the world is ridiculous.</i>

494
00:36:49,025 --> 00:36:53,035
So, I co-founded a group called "The Progressive Change Campaign Committee",

495
00:36:53,038 --> 00:36:57,888
and what we try and do is we try to organize people over the Internet who care about progressive politics

496
00:36:57,888 --> 00:37:00,220
and moving the country toward a more progressive direction

497
00:37:00,220 --> 00:37:03,027
to kind of come together, join our e-mail list, join our campaigns

498
00:37:03,027 --> 00:37:06,297
and help us to get progressive candidates elected all across the country.

499
00:37:06,326 --> 00:37:12,656
The group is responsible for igniting the grassroots effort behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate.

500
00:37:12,716 --> 00:37:17,000
He might have thought it was a dumb system but he came in and he said, "I need to learn this system,

501
00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:21,310
because it can be manipulated like any social system."

502
00:37:21,310 --> 00:37:24,925
But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat.

503
00:37:24,925 --> 00:37:31,030
Aaron began to take a closer look at institutions that publish academic journal articles.

504
00:37:31,040 --> 00:37:34,960
By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume you have access

505
00:37:34,960 --> 00:37:37,660
to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

506
00:37:37,660 --> 00:37:43,551
Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like

507
00:37:43,551 --> 00:37:50,694
JSTOR and Thomson Isi to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read.

508
00:37:50,694 --> 00:37:57,278
These scholarly journals and articles are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online,

509
00:37:57,278 --> 00:38:02,273
and many have been paid for with taxpayer money or with government grants,

510
00:38:02,273 --> 00:38:08,591
but to read them, you often have to pay again handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed-Elsevier.

511
00:38:08,591 --> 00:38:14,728
These licenses fees are so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in United States,

512
00:38:14,728 --> 00:38:19,097
don't have this kind of access. They are locked out from all of these journals.

513
00:38:19,103 --> 00:38:23,057
They are locked out from our entire scientific legacy.

514
00:38:23,057 --> 00:38:27,021
I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to The Enlightenment.

515
00:38:27,021 --> 00:38:32,467
Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it's been scanned, digitized, and put in these collections.

516
00:38:32,467 --> 00:38:39,766
That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists.

517
00:38:39,766 --> 00:38:43,167
It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people,

518
00:38:43,167 --> 00:38:48,127
but instead, it has been locked up and put online by an handful of for-profit corporations

519
00:38:48,127 --> 00:38:52,454
who then try to get the maximum profit they can out of it.

520
00:38:53,304 --> 00:38:58,769
So a researcher paid by the university or the people publishes a paper,

521
00:38:58,769 --> 00:39:01,782
and at the very, very last step of that process, after all the work is done,

522
00:39:01,782 --> 00:39:06,991
after all the original research is done--the thinking, the lab work, the analysis, after everything is done,

523
00:39:06,991 --> 00:39:13,849
at that last stage, then the researcher has to hand over his or her copyright to this multi-billion dollar company.

524
00:39:13,908 --> 00:39:18,238
And it's sick. It's an entire economy built on volunteer labor,

525
00:39:18,238 --> 00:39:21,350
and then the publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream.

526
00:39:21,390 --> 00:39:28,558
Talk about a scam. One publisher in Britain made a profit of three billion dollars last year.

527
00:39:28,558 --> 00:39:30,194
I mean, what a racket!

528
00:39:30,194 --> 00:39:34,271
JSTOR is just a very, very small player in that story

529
00:39:34,271 --> 00:39:39,828
but for some reason, JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront.

530
00:39:40,938 --> 00:39:44,469
He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing,

531
00:39:44,469 --> 00:39:46,380
and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,

532
00:39:46,380 --> 00:39:49,778
but I think they--at some point, Aaron asked the question,

533
00:39:49,778 --> 00:39:54,406
"How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"

534
00:39:54,406 --> 00:39:58,045
And they gave some--I think it was two hundred million dollars,

535
00:39:58,045 --> 00:40:00,566
something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.

536
00:40:00,566 --> 00:40:07,372
Working on a fellowship at Harvard, he knew users on MIT's famously open and fast network next door

537
00:40:07,372 --> 00:40:12,238
had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR. Swartz saw an opportunity.

538
00:40:12,238 --> 00:40:14,434
You have a key to those gates,

539
00:40:14,434 --> 00:40:19,824
and with a little bit of shell script magic, you can get those journal articles.

540
00:40:20,992 --> 00:40:23,492
On September 24, 2010,

541
00:40:23,492 --> 00:40:27,031
Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop

542
00:40:27,031 --> 00:40:30,659
on the MIT network, under the name "Garry Host".

543
00:40:30,859 --> 00:40:35,449
The client name was registered as "GHost laptop".

544
00:40:35,449 --> 00:40:38,420
He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking.

545
00:40:38,420 --> 00:40:40,113
The JSTOR database was organized,

546
00:40:40,113 --> 00:40:44,150
so it was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in JSTOR,

547
00:40:44,150 --> 00:40:45,667
because it was basically numbered.

548
00:40:45,667 --> 00:40:52,351
It was basically slash slash slash...number article 444024 and -25 and -26.

549
00:40:52,351 --> 00:40:54,974
He wrote a Python script called keepgrabbing.py,

550
00:40:54,974 --> 00:40:58,347
which was like, keeping grabbing one article after another.

551
00:40:58,437 --> 00:41:02,210
The next day, GHost laptop begins grabbing articles,

552
00:41:02,210 --> 00:41:08,385
but soon, the computer's IP address is blocked. For Swartz, it's barely a bump in the road.

553
00:41:08,385 --> 00:41:12,798
He quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading.

554
00:41:13,028 --> 00:41:17,472
Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps to try to interfere with this,

555
00:41:17,472 --> 00:41:19,616
when they notice that this is happening,

556
00:41:19,616 --> 00:41:21,854
and when the more modest steps don't work,

557
00:41:21,854 --> 00:41:26,721
then at a certain stage, JSTOR just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database.

558
00:41:26,721 --> 00:41:29,303
So there's a kind of cat-and-mouse game around

559
00:41:29,303 --> 00:41:33,326
getting access to the JSTOR database.

560
00:41:33,326 --> 00:41:38,990
Aaron, ultimately, obviously is the cat because he has more technical capability

561
00:41:38,990 --> 00:41:42,651
than the JSTOR database people do in defending them.

562
00:41:42,651 --> 00:41:46,898
Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings,

563
00:41:46,898 --> 00:41:50,695
and he went, instead of going through WiFi, he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network

564
00:41:50,695 --> 00:41:56,541
and just left it there with an external hard drive downloading these articles to the computer.

565
00:41:56,541 --> 00:42:01,812
Unknown to Swartz, his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities.

566
00:42:02,882 --> 00:42:04,986
They didn't stop the downloads.

567
00:42:04,986 --> 00:42:09,001
Instead, they installed a surveillance camera.

568
00:42:10,094 --> 00:42:14,582
They found the computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building.

569
00:42:14,582 --> 00:42:19,299
They could have unplugged it. They could have waited for the guy to come back and said,

570
00:42:19,299 --> 00:42:23,704
"Dude, what are you doing, you know, cut it out. Who are you?"

571
00:42:23,704 --> 00:42:25,377
They could have done all that kind of stuff, but they didn't.

572
00:42:25,377 --> 00:42:29,762
What they wanted to do was film it to gather evidence to make a case.

573
00:42:29,762 --> 00:42:34,367
That's the only reason you film something like that.

574
00:42:37,667 --> 00:42:41,132
At first, the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera

575
00:42:41,132 --> 00:42:45,745
was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans.

576
00:42:53,142 --> 00:42:57,033
But days later, it caught Swartz.

577
00:43:05,435 --> 00:43:10,658
Swartz is replacing the hard drive. He takes it out of his backpack,

578
00:43:10,940 --> 00:43:14,454
leans out of frame for about five minutes,

579
00:43:14,454 --> 00:43:21,863
and then leaves.

580
00:43:36,758 --> 00:43:41,819
And then they organized, like, a stakeout where, as he was biking home from MIT,

581
00:43:41,819 --> 00:43:44,294
these cops came out from either side of the road,

582
00:43:44,294 --> 00:43:47,796
or something like that, and started going after him.

583
00:43:49,119 --> 00:43:54,756
He describes that he was pressed down and assaulted by the police.

584
00:43:54,756 --> 00:43:58,312
He tells me that they--it's unclear that they were police that were after him.

585
00:43:58,312 --> 00:44:02,377
He thought that someone was trying to attack him.

586
00:44:02,377 --> 00:44:05,914
He does tell me they beat him up.

587
00:44:08,255 --> 00:44:15,406
It was just devastating. The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution of anyone in our family or anything

588
00:44:15,406 --> 00:44:18,139
was so foreign and incomprehensible, I didn't know what to do.

589
00:44:18,139 --> 00:44:24,872
Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house, his apartment in Cambridge, in his office at Harvard.

590
00:44:27,522 --> 00:44:33,544
Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police.

591
00:44:33,544 --> 00:44:37,431
It had been taken over by the United States Secret Service.

592
00:44:37,431 --> 00:44:42,087
The Secret Service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984,

593
00:44:42,087 --> 00:44:46,040
but six weeks after the attack on 9/11, their role expanded.

594
00:44:46,670 --> 00:44:48,042
[applause]

595
00:44:48,142 --> 00:44:56,061
President Bush used The Patriot Act to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces".

596
00:44:56,061 --> 00:45:01,323
The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists.

597
00:45:01,323 --> 00:45:06,381
According to the Secret Service, they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact,

598
00:45:06,381 --> 00:45:11,154
organized criminal groups, or use of schemes involving new technology.

599
00:45:11,154 --> 00:45:15,606
The Secret Service turned Swartz's case over to the Boston U.S. Attorney's office.

600
00:45:15,606 --> 00:45:17,934
There was a guy in the U.S. attorney's office who had the title:

601
00:45:17,934 --> 00:45:22,285
"Head of the Computer Crimes Division or Task Force"

602
00:45:22,285 --> 00:45:23,915
I don't know what else he had going,

603
00:45:23,915 --> 00:45:29,364
but you're certainly not much of a "Computer Crimes Prosecutor" without a computer crime to prosecute,

604
00:45:29,364 --> 00:45:34,934
so he jumped on it, kept if for himself, didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit

605
00:45:34,934 --> 00:45:36,686
and that's Steve Heymann.

606
00:45:36,686 --> 00:45:41,896
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,

607
00:45:41,896 --> 00:45:46,333
but he can be seen here, in an episode of the television show "American Greed",

608
00:45:46,333 --> 00:45:48,700
filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.

609
00:45:48,700 --> 00:45:53,092
He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzales,

610
00:45:53,092 --> 00:45:56,873
a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades.

611
00:45:56,873 --> 00:46:01,909
Gonzales masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers,

612
00:46:01,909 --> 00:46:04,512
the largest such fraud in history.

613
00:46:04,512 --> 00:46:09,793
Here, Heymann, describing Gonzales, gives his view on the hacker mindset:

614
00:46:09,793 --> 00:46:16,095
These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by.

615
00:46:16,095 --> 00:46:24,774
They have an ego, they like challenge, and of course they like money and everything you can get for money.

616
00:46:24,814 --> 00:46:29,714
One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzales case was a young hacker named Jonathan James.

617
00:46:29,714 --> 00:46:33,210
Believing Gonzales' crimes would be pinned on him,

618
00:46:33,210 --> 00:46:36,319
James committed suicide during the investigation.

619
00:46:36,319 --> 00:46:40,905
In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,

620
00:46:40,905 --> 00:46:45,974
Heymann's boss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusets, Carmen Ortiz, said this:

621
00:46:46,570 --> 00:46:53,141
"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars."

622
00:46:53,301 --> 00:46:55,587
It is not true. It's obviously not true.

623
00:46:56,777 --> 00:46:58,397
I'm not saying it's harmless,

624
00:46:58,397 --> 00:47:06,122
and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalize stealing of information,

625
00:47:06,122 --> 00:47:08,283
but you got to be much more subtle

626
00:47:08,283 --> 00:47:14,911
in trying to figure out exactly which kinds of harms are harmful here.

627
00:47:14,911 --> 00:47:18,677
So the thing about a crowbar is, every time I break into a place with a crowbar,

628
00:47:18,677 --> 00:47:21,768
I do damage. There is no doubt about it.

629
00:47:21,768 --> 00:47:23,586
But when Aaron writes a script that says

630
00:47:23,586 --> 00:47:28,329
download download download, a hundred times in a second,

631
00:47:28,329 --> 00:47:31,047
there's no obvious damage to anybody.

632
00:47:31,047 --> 00:47:36,238
If he does that for the purpose of gathering an archive to do academic research on it,

633
00:47:36,238 --> 00:47:38,409
there is never any damage to anybody.

634
00:47:38,409 --> 00:47:42,925
He wasn't stealing. He wasn't selling what he got or giving it away.

635
00:47:42,925 --> 00:47:45,641
He was making a point, for as far as I could tell.

636
00:47:45,641 --> 00:47:48,189
The arrest took its toll on Swartz.

637
00:47:48,189 --> 00:47:49,822
He just wouldn't talk about it.

638
00:47:49,822 --> 00:47:51,396
I mean, he was very stressed.

639
00:47:51,396 --> 00:47:55,614
If you would thought that the FBI was going to come to your doorstep any day,

640
00:47:55,614 --> 00:47:59,014
anytime you went down the hall, even to do your laundry,

641
00:47:59,014 --> 00:48:03,140
and they'd break in into your apartment 'cause you left the door unlocked,

642
00:48:03,140 --> 00:48:06,545
like...I'd be pretty stressed,

643
00:48:06,545 --> 00:48:12,727
and it was clear, and so Aaron was always sort of like in a dour mood.

644
00:48:18,430 --> 00:48:23,771
He wouldn't give off any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time,

645
00:48:23,771 --> 00:48:28,345
because he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him.

646
00:48:30,775 --> 00:48:35,452
It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism.

647
00:48:35,452 --> 00:48:41,811
Time Magazine would later name, as their 2011 Person of the Year, "The Protester".

648
00:48:42,348 --> 00:48:46,925
There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.

649
00:48:48,956 --> 00:48:53,582
WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables,

650
00:48:53,617 --> 00:48:56,551
Manning had been under arrest at the time,

651
00:48:56,551 --> 00:49:00,223
it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak.

652
00:49:00,223 --> 00:49:04,801
Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble that

653
00:49:04,801 --> 00:49:07,459
has a lot of hackers in its ranks,

654
00:49:07,464 --> 00:49:11,357
were going on various sprees of sorts.

655
00:49:11,455 --> 00:49:14,107
If you compare that to what he did,

656
00:49:14,107 --> 00:49:18,112
this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,

657
00:49:18,146 --> 00:49:22,048
in a kind of private, professional matter.

658
00:49:22,105 --> 00:49:27,757
It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system.

659
00:49:28,465 --> 00:49:30,630
It just didn't belong there.

660
00:49:36,455 --> 00:49:39,901
Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal

661
00:49:39,921 --> 00:49:43,230
that involved three months in prison, time in an halfway house,

662
00:49:43,230 --> 00:49:45,449
and a year of home detention,

663
00:49:45,449 --> 00:49:47,986
all without the use of a computer.

664
00:49:47,986 --> 00:49:52,460
It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.

665
00:49:52,496 --> 00:49:56,765
Here we are: we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever

666
00:49:56,765 --> 00:49:58,364
about what the government's case is,

667
00:49:58,364 --> 00:50:01,821
and we have to make this immense decision

668
00:50:01,856 --> 00:50:05,604
where the lawyer is pushing you to do this,

669
00:50:05,606 --> 00:50:09,781
the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand,

670
00:50:09,781 --> 00:50:13,327
and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small,

671
00:50:13,327 --> 00:50:17,583
so whether you're guilty or not, you're better off taking the deal.

672
00:50:18,268 --> 00:50:21,280
Boston has its own Computer Crimes Division,

673
00:50:21,280 --> 00:50:25,518
lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need.

674
00:50:25,518 --> 00:50:30,627
So, you know, you can imagine all sorts of cases that will be really hard to prosecute,

675
00:50:30,627 --> 00:50:33,037
because you've got some criminals in Russia,

676
00:50:33,037 --> 00:50:36,057
or you've got some people inside of a corporation

677
00:50:36,057 --> 00:50:39,968
that are gonna five hundred dollar lawyers or seven hundred dollar-an-hour lawyers

678
00:50:39,968 --> 00:50:43,606
sitting down against you, and then you've got this case with this kid,

679
00:50:43,606 --> 00:50:47,919
which is pretty easy to prove that he did something,

680
00:50:47,919 --> 00:50:52,727
and he's already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI,

681
00:50:52,727 --> 00:50:56,461
so why not go as tough as you can against that guy?

682
00:50:56,461 --> 00:50:59,444
It's good for you the prosecutor. It's good for the Republic,

683
00:50:59,444 --> 00:51:02,232
'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types.

684
00:51:02,232 --> 00:51:03,846
I was so scared.

685
00:51:03,846 --> 00:51:05,923
I was so scared of having my computer seized.

686
00:51:05,923 --> 00:51:10,048
I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being seized.

687
00:51:10,048 --> 00:51:15,293
I had confidential material from sources from my previous work on my laptop,

688
00:51:15,390 --> 00:51:20,517
and that is, above all, my priority--is to keep my sources safe.

689
00:51:20,527 --> 00:51:25,220
I was so scared of what was going to happen to Ada.

690
00:51:25,370 --> 00:51:28,054
Aaron told me that they'd offered him a deal,

691
00:51:28,054 --> 00:51:32,830
and he finally just said that he would take it if I told him to,

692
00:51:32,830 --> 00:51:36,986
and I say--I came real close to saying, "Take it."

693
00:51:37,603 --> 00:51:42,621
He had these--he had developed, like, serious political aspirations

694
00:51:42,621 --> 00:51:45,511
in the intervening time, between when, you know,

695
00:51:45,511 --> 00:51:51,218
that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial start-up life,

696
00:51:51,246 --> 00:51:56,448
and begun this new life that had come to this political activism,

697
00:51:56,967 --> 00:52:03,884
and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony.

698
00:52:03,884 --> 00:52:07,386
You know, he said to me one day, we were walking by the White House,

699
00:52:07,386 --> 00:52:11,279
and he said to me, "They don't let felons work there."

700
00:52:17,661 --> 00:52:22,031
And you know he really--he really wanted that to be his life.

701
00:52:22,287 --> 00:52:25,560
He hadn't killed anybody. He hadn't hurt anybody.

702
00:52:25,564 --> 00:52:28,329
He hadn't, like, stolen money.

703
00:52:28,329 --> 00:52:32,573
He hadn't done anything that seemed felony-worthy, and...

704
00:52:34,643 --> 00:52:39,327
there is this idea that there is no reason that he should be labelled a felon,

705
00:52:39,327 --> 00:52:42,963
and taken away his right to vote in many states

706
00:52:42,963 --> 00:52:45,767
for doing what he did. That's just outrageous.

707
00:52:45,767 --> 00:52:49,900
It makes sense for him to be maybe fined a bunch of money,

708
00:52:49,900 --> 00:52:54,137
or asked not to come back to MIT again.

709
00:52:54,137 --> 00:52:57,744
But to be a felon? To face jail time?

710
00:53:00,546 --> 00:53:04,062
Swartz turned down the plea deal.

711
00:53:04,062 --> 00:53:06,868
Heymann redoubled his efforts.

712
00:53:06,868 --> 00:53:12,337
Heymann continued to press us at all levels.

713
00:53:12,340 --> 00:53:15,078
Even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's

714
00:53:15,078 --> 00:53:18,290
Acer computer harddrive and USB drive,

715
00:53:18,290 --> 00:53:21,153
the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.

716
00:53:21,153 --> 00:53:24,699
Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR,

717
00:53:24,699 --> 00:53:28,380
and just what did he plan to do with them?

718
00:53:28,854 --> 00:53:32,279
The government claim was that he was planning to publish these.

719
00:53:32,279 --> 00:53:35,830
We don't really know whether that was his real intention

720
00:53:35,830 --> 00:53:42,728
because Aaron also had a history of doing projects where he'd analyze giant data sets of articles

721
00:53:42,728 --> 00:53:45,156
in order to learn interesting things about them.

722
00:53:45,156 --> 00:53:48,101
The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford,

723
00:53:48,103 --> 00:53:53,087
he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.

724
00:53:53,117 --> 00:53:55,525
In a project with Stanford law students,

725
00:53:55,525 --> 00:53:58,316
Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

726
00:53:58,316 --> 00:54:02,492
He uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research

727
00:54:02,492 --> 00:54:04,444
and favorable results.

728
00:54:04,444 --> 00:54:07,317
He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies

729
00:54:07,317 --> 00:54:10,868
giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles

730
00:54:10,868 --> 00:54:14,927
which were then beneficial to, like, Exxon during an oil spill.

731
00:54:14,927 --> 00:54:19,391
So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research.

732
00:54:19,441 --> 00:54:22,676
Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.

733
00:54:22,676 --> 00:54:25,525
In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.

734
00:54:25,525 --> 00:54:27,286
That would have been completely okay.

735
00:54:27,286 --> 00:54:32,700
If he were, on the other hand, intending to create a competitive service to JSTOR,

736
00:54:32,700 --> 00:54:35,055
like, we're going to set up our own, you know,

737
00:54:35,055 --> 00:54:39,090
access to the Harvard Law Review and charge, you know, money for it,

738
00:54:39,090 --> 00:54:41,972
then, okay, now it seems like criminal violation

739
00:54:41,972 --> 00:54:45,044
because you are commercially trying to exploit this material,

740
00:54:45,044 --> 00:54:47,780
but it's kind of crazy to imagine that that was what he was doing.

741
00:54:47,780 --> 00:54:53,516
So, but then there's the middle case: well, what if he was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world?

742
00:54:53,516 --> 00:54:56,855
But depending on what he was doing, it creates a very different character

743
00:54:56,855 --> 00:55:00,538
to how the law should be thinking about it. The government was prosecuting him

744
00:55:00,538 --> 00:55:03,630
as if this was like a commercial criminal violation,

745
00:55:03,630 --> 00:55:06,851
like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records, that it was that kind of crime.

746
00:55:06,851 --> 00:55:10,122
I don't know what he was going to do with that database,

747
00:55:10,122 --> 00:55:12,804
but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him

748
00:55:12,804 --> 00:55:18,086
that he was going to analyze the data for evidence of corporate funding of climate change research

749
00:55:18,086 --> 00:55:24,212
that led to biased results, and I totally believe that.

750
00:55:24,972 --> 00:55:28,682
I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me,

751
00:55:29,252 --> 00:55:32,982
and I thought maybe this was a way I could get out of this,

752
00:55:32,982 --> 00:55:35,088
just exit the situation,

753
00:55:35,088 --> 00:55:38,427
and I didn't want to live in fear of having my computer seized.

754
00:55:38,659 --> 00:55:42,759
I didn't want to live in fear of having to go to jail on a contempt of court charge

755
00:55:42,759 --> 00:55:46,416
if they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer.

756
00:55:46,416 --> 00:55:50,425
When they came to me and said, "Steve wants to talk to you,"

757
00:55:50,425 --> 00:55:52,239
that seemed reasonable.

758
00:55:52,559 --> 00:55:57,306
They offered Norton what is know as a "Queen For A Day" letter or a proffer.

759
00:55:57,306 --> 00:56:00,561
It allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case.

760
00:56:00,561 --> 00:56:03,587
Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself,

761
00:56:03,587 --> 00:56:06,187
for any information she revealed during the meeting.

762
00:56:06,187 --> 00:56:09,333
I didn't like it. I told my lawyers repeatedly

763
00:56:09,333 --> 00:56:13,281
that I didn't...this seemed fishy, I didn't like this, I didn't want immunity,

764
00:56:13,281 --> 00:56:15,946
I didn't need immunity, I hadn't done anything,

765
00:56:15,946 --> 00:56:18,382
but they were really, really stringent that there was--

766
00:56:18,382 --> 00:56:21,354
they did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity.

767
00:56:21,354 --> 00:56:24,452
[Interviewer] But just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal, a proffer.

768
00:56:24,452 --> 00:56:25,495
Right, a proffer letter.

769
00:56:25,495 --> 00:56:30,162
-In which you basically handed information to them in exchange for protection from prosecution.

770
00:56:30,162 --> 00:56:35,244
-So, it wasn't handing information over. It was--at least that's not how I saw it--

771
00:56:35,244 --> 00:56:37,689
it was just having a discussion, having an interview with them.

772
00:56:37,689 --> 00:56:40,010
-Well, they're asking you questions...
-They're asking me questions.

773
00:56:40,010 --> 00:56:42,193
-and they can ask about whatever they want...
-Right.

774
00:56:42,193 --> 00:56:44,727
- and whatever they learn...
-I really...

775
00:56:44,727 --> 00:56:49,514
-They can't have you prosecuted.
-Right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked.

776
00:56:49,514 --> 00:56:53,468
I repeatedly--I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter.

777
00:56:53,468 --> 00:56:56,414
I was ill. I was being pressured by my lawyers.

778
00:56:56,414 --> 00:57:00,902
I was confused. I was not doing well by this point.

779
00:57:00,902 --> 00:57:05,502
I was depressed, and I was scared, and I didn't understand the situation I was in.

780
00:57:05,502 --> 00:57:08,879
I had no idea why I was in this situation.

781
00:57:08,879 --> 00:57:13,442
I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong.

782
00:57:13,442 --> 00:57:14,949
We went out of our minds.

783
00:57:14,949 --> 00:57:18,711
Aaron was clearly very distraught about it. We were very distraught about it.

784
00:57:18,711 --> 00:57:20,884
Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it.

785
00:57:20,884 --> 00:57:23,417
We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys.

786
00:57:23,727 --> 00:57:28,364
I was very unused to being in a room with large men, well-armed,

787
00:57:28,364 --> 00:57:33,234
that are continually telling me I'm lying, and that I must have done something.

788
00:57:33,664 --> 00:57:37,431
I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting

789
00:57:37,431 --> 00:57:40,520
wasn't a crime.

790
00:57:40,760 --> 00:57:42,924
I told them that they were on the wrong side of history.

791
00:57:42,924 --> 00:57:47,322
I used that phrase. I said, "You're on the wrong side of history."

792
00:57:48,302 --> 00:57:53,217
And they looked bored. They didn't even look angry. They just looked bored,

793
00:57:53,217 --> 00:57:57,210
and it began to occur to me that we weren't having the same conversation.

794
00:57:57,210 --> 00:58:01,970
I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know, why people would download journal articles,

795
00:58:01,970 --> 00:58:06,383
and eventually--I don't remember what was around it--

796
00:58:06,383 --> 00:58:11,118
I mentioned that he'd done this blog post, the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto".

797
00:58:12,969 --> 00:58:16,366
This is the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto",

798
00:58:16,366 --> 00:58:20,263
supposedly written in July, 2008 in Italy.

799
00:58:20,263 --> 00:58:24,736
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."

800
00:58:24,736 --> 00:58:29,689
"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,
published over centuries in books and journals,

801
00:58:29,689 --> 00:58:34,317
is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

802
00:58:34,317 --> 00:58:38,048
"Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by."

803
00:58:38,048 --> 00:58:40,237
"You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences,

804
00:58:40,237 --> 00:58:44,454
liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends."

805
00:58:44,454 --> 00:58:47,528
"But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground."

806
00:58:47,528 --> 00:58:50,863
"It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were

807
00:58:50,863 --> 00:58:54,531
the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew."

808
00:58:54,531 --> 00:58:57,456
"But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative."

809
00:58:57,456 --> 00:59:02,048
"Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy."

810
00:59:02,048 --> 00:59:04,267
"There's no justice in following unjust laws."

811
00:59:04,267 --> 00:59:08,229
"It's time to come into the light and, in a grand tradition of civil disobedience,

812
00:59:08,229 --> 00:59:11,820
declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture."

813
00:59:12,105 --> 00:59:18,502
The Manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people, and also edited by Norton.

814
00:59:18,502 --> 00:59:21,474
But it was Swartz who had signed his name to it.

815
00:59:21,474 --> 00:59:28,684
When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron and tell him everything I can remember about it,

816
00:59:28,684 --> 00:59:30,611
and he gets very angry.

817
00:59:34,522 --> 00:59:37,669
The things that I'd done shouldn't have added up that way.

818
00:59:40,078 --> 00:59:45,576
I hadn't done anything wrong, and everything had gone wrong,

819
00:59:47,257 --> 00:59:49,639
but I was never...

820
00:59:57,302 --> 01:00:00,162
I'm still angry.

821
01:00:00,789 --> 01:00:06,610
I'm still angry that you could try your best with these people to do the right thing,

822
01:00:06,610 --> 01:00:09,325
and they'd turn everything against you.

823
01:00:09,325 --> 01:00:13,371
And they will hurt you with anything they can.

824
01:00:15,530 --> 01:00:19,297
And in that moment, I regret that I said what I did.

825
01:00:19,991 --> 01:00:23,705
But my much larger regret is that we have settled for this.

826
01:00:23,705 --> 01:00:26,087
That we are okay with this.

827
01:00:26,087 --> 01:00:27,662
That we are okay with the justice system,

828
01:00:27,662 --> 01:00:32,080
a system that tries to game people into little traps so they can ruin our lives.

829
01:00:33,080 --> 01:00:35,538
So yeah, I wish I hadn't said that.

830
01:00:35,538 --> 01:00:41,312
But I'm much, much angrier that this is where I am.

831
01:00:42,891 --> 01:00:47,505
That this is what we, as a people, think is okay.

832
01:00:48,358 --> 01:00:52,617
They used every method that I think they could think of

833
01:00:52,617 --> 01:00:56,887
to get her to provide information which would be unhelpful to Aaron,

834
01:00:56,887 --> 01:01:00,414
and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron,

835
01:01:01,964 --> 01:01:07,240
but I don't think she had information that was helpful to the government.

836
01:01:08,029 --> 01:01:12,051
Months go by, as Swartz's friends and family await a looming indictment.

837
01:01:12,062 --> 01:01:17,142
In the meantime, Swartz was becoming a go-to expert on a series of internet issues.

838
01:01:17,142 --> 01:01:19,826
[RT interviewer} ...a question to you then: Do you think that the internet is something

839
01:01:19,826 --> 01:01:25,166
that should be considered a human right, and something that the government cannot take away from you?

840
01:01:25,276 --> 01:01:30,446
Yes, definitely, I mean this notion that national security is an excuse to shut down the internet,

841
01:01:30,446 --> 01:01:34,017
that's exactly what we heard in Egypt and Syria and all these other countries,

842
01:01:34,017 --> 01:01:38,628
and so, yeah, it's true, sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up some embarrassing material

843
01:01:38,628 --> 01:01:42,553
about what the U.S. government does, and people are going to be organizing to protest about it,

844
01:01:42,553 --> 01:01:45,511
and try and change their government. You know, and that's a good thing,

845
01:01:45,511 --> 01:01:50,290
that's what all these First Amendment Rights of free expression, of freedom of association are all about,

846
01:01:50,308 --> 01:01:55,134
and so the notion that we should try and shut those down I think, just goes against very basic American principles.

847
01:01:55,238 --> 01:01:57,960
A principle, I think, is one that our Founding Fathers would have understood.

848
01:01:57,960 --> 01:01:59,958
If the internet had been around back then,

849
01:01:59,958 --> 01:02:04,020
instead of putting "post offices" in the Constitution, they would have put "ISPs".

850
01:02:04,020 --> 01:02:05,575
[RT interviewer] Well, it's definitely interesting to see how far...

851
01:02:05,575 --> 01:02:10,566
Swartz meets activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and the two begin to date.

852
01:02:10,656 --> 01:02:12,218
[Aaron] We need a massive global public outcry.

853
01:02:12,218 --> 01:02:15,190
[Taren] If there's no massive global public outcry, it won't create any change.

854
01:02:15,190 --> 01:02:18,961
-You know, four people in this city should cause a massive global public outcry.

855
01:02:18,961 --> 01:02:21,952
-You know, we need a petition signer.

856
01:02:22,120 --> 01:02:25,489
Without telling her specifics, he warned her he was involved in something

857
01:02:25,489 --> 01:02:27,688
he called simply "The Bad Thing".

858
01:02:27,688 --> 01:02:33,039
And I had sort of crazy theories, like, that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or something.

859
01:02:33,089 --> 01:02:37,890
I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, actually, but...

860
01:02:38,284 --> 01:02:41,720
So, sometime in probably late July, Aaron called me,

861
01:02:42,284 --> 01:02:47,433
and I happened to pick up, and he said, "The Bad Thing" might be in the news tomorrow.

862
01:02:47,433 --> 01:02:49,831
Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to read about it in the news?"

863
01:02:49,831 --> 01:02:52,453
And I said, "Well, I want you to tell me."

864
01:02:53,433 --> 01:02:58,472
Aaron said, "Well, I've been--I've been arrested

865
01:02:58,490 --> 01:03:03,419
for downloading too many academic journal articles, and they want to make an example out of me."

866
01:03:04,329 --> 01:03:11,163
And I was like, "That's it? That's the big fuss? Really? It just doesn't sound like a very big deal."

867
01:03:11,195 --> 01:03:17,283
On July 14, 2011, federal prosecutors indict Swartz on four felony counts.

868
01:03:17,482 --> 01:03:24,174
He gets indicted on the same day that two people in England who are part of LulzSec get arrested,

869
01:03:24,634 --> 01:03:30,134
and a few other real hackers. And Aaron is just someone who kind of looks like a hacker,

870
01:03:30,134 --> 01:03:34,917
enough that they can, you know, put his head on a stake and put it on the gates.

871
01:03:35,022 --> 01:03:38,242
Aaron went to surrender, and they arrested him.

872
01:03:39,468 --> 01:03:42,220
They then strip searched him,

873
01:03:42,638 --> 01:03:48,343
took away his shoelaces, took away his belt, and left him in solitary confinement.

874
01:03:50,115 --> 01:03:54,537
The District of Massachusetts United States Attorney's office released a statement

875
01:03:54,549 --> 01:03:57,882
saying, "Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison,

876
01:03:57,882 --> 01:04:00,790
to be followed by three years of supervised release,

877
01:04:00,790 --> 01:04:06,012
restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to one million dollars."

878
01:04:06,276 --> 01:04:09,370
He is released on one hundred thousand dollars bail.

879
01:04:09,370 --> 01:04:12,288
The same day, the primary victim in the case, JSTOR,

880
01:04:12,288 --> 01:04:17,769
formally drops all charges against Swartz, and declines to pursue the case.

881
01:04:18,079 --> 01:04:21,575
JSTOR--they weren't our friends; they weren't helpful or friendly to us,

882
01:04:21,575 --> 01:04:25,385
but they also were just kind of like, "We're not part of this."

883
01:04:25,385 --> 01:04:30,800
JSTOR, and their parent company, ITHAKA, also sidestepped requests to talk with this film.

884
01:04:30,868 --> 01:04:33,524
But at the time, they released a statement saying,

885
01:04:33,538 --> 01:04:37,696
"It was the government's decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR's."

886
01:04:38,497 --> 01:04:42,739
And so it's our belief that, with that, the case will be over.

887
01:04:42,739 --> 01:04:48,230
That we should be able to get Steve Heymann to drop the case, or settle it in some rational way.

888
01:04:48,654 --> 01:04:50,762
And the government refused.

889
01:04:51,149 --> 01:04:52,856
[Narrator] Why?

890
01:04:55,138 --> 01:04:58,375
Well, because I think they wanted to make an example out of Aaron,

891
01:04:58,375 --> 01:05:01,988
and they said they wanted--the reason, why they wouldn't

892
01:05:01,988 --> 01:05:05,349
move on requiring a felony conviction and jail time,

893
01:05:05,349 --> 01:05:13,255
was that they wanted to use this case as a case for deterrence. They told us that.

894
01:05:13,255 --> 01:05:15,319
[Interviewer] They told you that?
- Yes.

895
01:05:15,320 --> 01:05:17,257
-This was going to be an example?
-Yes.

896
01:05:17,263 --> 01:05:19,810
-He was going to be made an example?
- Yes.

897
01:05:20,025 --> 01:05:22,030
Steve Heymann said that.

898
01:05:22,030 --> 01:05:26,369
Deterring who? There's other people out there running around logging onto JSTOR,

899
01:05:26,369 --> 01:05:30,154
and downloading the articles to make a political statement? I mean, who are they deterring?

900
01:05:30,154 --> 01:05:34,611
It would be easier to understand the Obama administration's

901
01:05:34,611 --> 01:05:37,441
posture of supposedly being for deterrence

902
01:05:37,441 --> 01:05:41,146
if this was an administration that, for instance,

903
01:05:41,146 --> 01:05:43,525
prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime

904
01:05:43,525 --> 01:05:45,527
that this country has seen in the last hundred years.

905
01:05:45,527 --> 01:05:49,630
The crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street.

906
01:05:50,101 --> 01:05:52,532
When you start deploying

907
01:05:52,532 --> 01:05:56,613
the non-controversial idea of deterrence

908
01:05:56,613 --> 01:05:58,454
only selectively

909
01:05:58,455 --> 01:06:02,139
you stop making a dispassionate analysis of law-breaking

910
01:06:02,139 --> 01:06:06,893
and you started deciding to deploy law enforcement resources

911
01:06:06,902 --> 01:06:10,390
specifically on the basis of political ideology,

912
01:06:10,390 --> 01:06:15,949
and that's not just undemocratic, it's supposed to be un-American.

913
01:06:19,319 --> 01:06:24,146
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel

914
01:06:24,146 --> 01:06:26,587
that the straw that broke the camel's back

915
01:06:26,587 --> 01:06:31,467
was a press release sent out by an organization Swartz founded called "Demand Progress".

916
01:06:31,473 --> 01:06:35,590
According to the MIT account, Heymann reacted to the short statement of support,

917
01:06:35,590 --> 01:06:39,596
calling it a "wild internet campaign" and a "foolish move"

918
01:06:39,596 --> 01:06:44,036
that moved the case from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.

919
01:06:44,036 --> 01:06:48,622
That was a poisonous combination: a prosecutor who didn't want to lose face,

920
01:06:48,622 --> 01:06:52,987
who had a political career in the offing, maybe, and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them.

921
01:06:52,987 --> 01:06:57,529
You spend how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library,

922
01:06:57,529 --> 01:07:01,015
and then got your ass handed to you in court? No way!

923
01:07:01,015 --> 01:07:05,550
I then moved to try to put as much pressure on MIT in various ways to get them

924
01:07:05,550 --> 01:07:10,739
to go to the government, and request the government to stop the prosecution.

925
01:07:11,472 --> 01:07:14,528
[Interviewer] What was MIT's reaction to that?

926
01:07:14,634 --> 01:07:18,614
There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point.

927
01:07:22,631 --> 01:07:25,613
MIT doesn't defend Aaron

928
01:07:25,613 --> 01:07:30,307
which, to people inside of the MIT community, seems outrageous,

929
01:07:30,307 --> 01:07:35,667
because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word.

930
01:07:35,716 --> 01:07:40,728
At MIT, the idea of going and running around on roofs and tunnels that you weren't allowed to be in

931
01:07:40,728 --> 01:07:45,831
was not only a rite of passage, it was part of the MIT tour,

932
01:07:45,831 --> 01:07:50,313
and lockpicking was a winter course at MIT.

933
01:07:50,553 --> 01:07:55,753
They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks.

934
01:07:56,233 --> 01:08:01,691
MIT never stood up and took a position of saying to the Feds, "Don't do this."

935
01:08:01,691 --> 01:08:06,197
"We don't want you to do this. You're overreacting. This is too strong."

936
01:08:06,197 --> 01:08:08,334
...that I'm aware of.

937
01:08:08,334 --> 01:08:14,474
They acted kind of like any corporation would. They sort of--they helped the government,

938
01:08:14,486 --> 01:08:21,196
they didn't help us, unless they felt they had to, and they never tried to stop it.

939
01:08:22,345 --> 01:08:25,229
MIT declined repeated requests to comment,

940
01:08:25,229 --> 01:08:30,006
but they later released a report saying they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality,

941
01:08:30,006 --> 01:08:35,952
and believed Heymann and the U.S. Attorney's office did not care what MIT thought or said about the case.

942
01:08:35,952 --> 01:08:41,848
MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos.

943
01:08:41,848 --> 01:08:47,158
You could argue that MIT turned a blind eye, and that was okay for them to do,

944
01:08:47,158 --> 01:08:52,599
but taking that stance--taking that neutral stance, in and of itself--was taking a pro-prosecutor stance.

945
01:08:52,676 --> 01:08:55,831
If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,

946
01:08:55,831 --> 01:09:01,451
they started by selling a Blue Box, which was a thing designed to defraud the phone company.

947
01:09:01,627 --> 01:09:04,671
If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen,

948
01:09:04,671 --> 01:09:08,430
they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard,

949
01:09:08,430 --> 01:09:11,441
which was pretty clearly against the rules.

950
01:09:11,462 --> 01:09:13,332
The difference between Aaron and the people I just mentioned

951
01:09:13,332 --> 01:09:17,952
is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place, he didn't just want to make money.

952
01:09:18,984 --> 01:09:23,151
Swartz continues to be outspoken on a variety of internet issues.

953
01:09:23,624 --> 01:09:28,850
You know, the reason the internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas,

954
01:09:28,850 --> 01:09:32,978
and what we need to be focusing on is getting more information about our government, more accessibility,

955
01:09:32,978 --> 01:09:38,484
more discussion, more debate, but instead it seems like what Congress is focused on is shutting things down.

956
01:09:38,670 --> 01:09:44,319
Aaron thought he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people.

957
01:09:44,368 --> 01:09:48,728
[RT interviewer] Flame can literally control your computer, and make it spy on you.

958
01:09:48,738 --> 01:09:52,238
Welcome, Aaron. Good to have you back on the show here.

959
01:09:52,238 --> 01:09:56,485
You know, just like spies used to in olden days, put microphones and tap what people were saying,

960
01:09:56,485 --> 01:09:58,957
now they're using computers to do the same things.

961
01:09:58,957 --> 01:10:01,726
[Narrator] Swartz's political activity continues,

962
01:10:01,726 --> 01:10:06,676
his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy.

963
01:10:06,795 --> 01:10:08,709
It was called "SOPA".

964
01:10:08,944 --> 01:10:12,724
Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous overreach,

965
01:10:12,724 --> 01:10:16,131
threatening the technical integrity of the Internet itself.

966
01:10:16,131 --> 01:10:18,419
[Ekersley] And one of the first things I did was to call Aaron.

967
01:10:18,419 --> 01:10:21,622
And I said, "Can we do a big online campaign against this?"

968
01:10:21,622 --> 01:10:24,466
"This isn't a bill about copyright."

969
01:10:24,786 --> 01:10:26,276
"It's not?"

970
01:10:26,418 --> 01:10:30,198
"No," he said, "it's a bill about the freedom to connect."

971
01:10:30,345 --> 01:10:32,463
Now I was listening.

972
01:10:32,463 --> 01:10:35,922
And he thought about it for a while, and then said, "Yes."

973
01:10:35,922 --> 01:10:38,088
And he went and founded Demand Progress.

974
01:10:38,088 --> 01:10:44,184
Demand Progress is an online activism organization, we've got around a million and a half members now,

975
01:10:44,184 --> 01:10:47,231
but started in the fall of 2010.

976
01:10:47,262 --> 01:10:50,092
Aaron was one of the most prominent people in a community of people

977
01:10:50,092 --> 01:10:55,390
who helped lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country.

978
01:10:55,390 --> 01:11:01,193
SOPA was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies,

979
01:11:01,193 --> 01:11:06,993
but what it did was basically take a sledgehammer to a problem that needed a scalpel.

980
01:11:07,161 --> 01:11:13,124
If passed, the law would allow a company to cut off finances to entire websites without due process,

981
01:11:13,124 --> 01:11:16,334
or even to force Google to exclude their links.

982
01:11:16,334 --> 01:11:20,583
All they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement.

983
01:11:20,583 --> 01:11:26,780
It pitted the titans of traditional media against a new and now far more sophisticated remix culture.

984
01:11:26,780 --> 01:11:30,227
It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman,

985
01:11:30,227 --> 01:11:33,609
and if they don't do their job of making sure that nobody on their site uses it for anything

986
01:11:33,609 --> 01:11:38,799
that's even potentially illegal, the entire site can get shut down without even so much as a trial.

987
01:11:38,848 --> 01:11:43,421
This was over the top, I mean, this was a catastrophe.

988
01:11:43,421 --> 01:11:51,632
This bill poses a serious threat to speech and civil liberties for all who use the internet.

989
01:11:51,632 --> 01:11:55,574
There were only a handful of us who said, "Look, we're not for piracy either,

990
01:11:55,574 --> 01:12:00,267
but it makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet,

991
01:12:00,267 --> 01:12:05,672
the domain name system and so much that makes it free and open in the name of fighting piracy,

992
01:12:05,672 --> 01:12:07,437
and Aaron got that right away.

993
01:12:07,437 --> 01:12:11,557
The freedoms, guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on

994
01:12:11,557 --> 01:12:13,739
would be suddenly deleted.

995
01:12:13,739 --> 01:12:18,611
New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights

996
01:12:18,611 --> 01:12:21,282
we'd always taken for granted.

997
01:12:21,282 --> 01:12:27,260
And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.

998
01:12:28,483 --> 01:12:32,925
When SOPA was introduced in October, 2011, it was considered inevitable.

999
01:12:32,925 --> 01:12:37,417
Our strategy, when it first came out, was to hopefully slow the bill down,

1000
01:12:37,417 --> 01:12:41,367
maybe weaken it a little bit but, even we

1001
01:12:41,367 --> 01:12:44,828
didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill.

1002
01:12:45,680 --> 01:12:51,460
Having worked in Washington, what you learn is that, typically in Washington,

1003
01:12:51,460 --> 01:12:57,700
the legislative fights are fights between different sets of corporate monied interests.

1004
01:12:57,700 --> 01:13:02,093
They're all duking it out to pass legislation, and the fights that are the closest

1005
01:13:02,093 --> 01:13:07,073
are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests,

1006
01:13:07,073 --> 01:13:10,747
and they're financially equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying.

1007
01:13:10,747 --> 01:13:12,661
Those are the closest ones.

1008
01:13:12,661 --> 01:13:16,413
The ones that aren't even fights, typically, are ones

1009
01:13:16,413 --> 01:13:20,676
where all the money is on one side, all the corporations are on one side,

1010
01:13:20,691 --> 01:13:23,603
and it's just millions of people on the other side.

1011
01:13:25,067 --> 01:13:30,369
I haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service.

1012
01:13:31,046 --> 01:13:37,150
There were more than forty United States senators on that bill as co-sponsors,

1013
01:13:37,150 --> 01:13:40,534
so they were already a long, long way to getting the

1014
01:13:40,534 --> 01:13:43,968
sixty votes to have it clear all the procedural hoops.

1015
01:13:44,456 --> 01:13:47,603
Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period.

1016
01:13:48,112 --> 01:13:53,471
Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal enormous support using traditional outreach,

1017
01:13:53,471 --> 01:13:59,267
combined with commonly used voiceover IP, to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

1018
01:14:00,011 --> 01:14:03,847
I've never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level

1019
01:14:03,847 --> 01:14:07,985
both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side.

1020
01:14:08,607 --> 01:14:12,669
Millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-SOPA petitions.

1021
01:14:12,948 --> 01:14:15,381
Congress was caught off guard.

1022
01:14:15,381 --> 01:14:20,433
There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill,

1023
01:14:20,433 --> 01:14:22,690
watching them insist they could regulate the internet,

1024
01:14:22,690 --> 01:14:25,248
and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them.

1025
01:14:25,248 --> 01:14:26,390
I am not a nerd.

1026
01:14:26,391 --> 01:14:27,928
I'm just not enough of a nerd...

1027
01:14:27,928 --> 01:14:31,120
Maybe we oughta ask some nerds what this thing really does. [laughter]

1028
01:14:31,120 --> 01:14:33,353
Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds...

1029
01:14:33,353 --> 01:14:35,830
[laughter]

1030
01:14:35,830 --> 01:14:37,549
Really?

1031
01:14:37,549 --> 01:14:40,087
[laughter]

1032
01:14:40,087 --> 01:14:41,375
"Nerds"?

1033
01:14:41,375 --> 01:14:42,101
[laughter]

1034
01:14:42,101 --> 01:14:45,658
You know, I think, actually the word you're looking for is "experts"...

1035
01:14:45,658 --> 01:14:47,095
[laughter]

1036
01:14:47,095 --> 01:14:51,605
to enlighten you so your laws don't backfire [audience laughter and applause]

1037
01:14:51,605 --> 01:14:53,094
and break the internet.

1038
01:14:53,094 --> 01:14:56,639
We use the term "geek" but we're allowed to use that because we are geeks.

1039
01:14:56,639 --> 01:15:01,575
The fact that it got as far as it did, without them talking to any technical experts,

1040
01:15:01,575 --> 01:15:04,808
reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town.

1041
01:15:04,808 --> 01:15:12,138
I'm looking for somebody to come before this body, and testify in a hearing and say, "This is why they're wrong."

1042
01:15:12,269 --> 01:15:15,411
There used to be an office that provided science and technology advice,

1043
01:15:15,411 --> 01:15:19,208
and members could go to them and say, "Help me understand X,Y,Z."

1044
01:15:19,208 --> 01:15:22,295
And Gingrich killed it. He said it was a waste of money.

1045
01:15:22,295 --> 01:15:26,188
Ever since then, Congress has plunged into the Dark Ages.

1046
01:15:26,219 --> 01:15:29,744
I don't think anybody really thought that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron.

1047
01:15:30,274 --> 01:15:34,533
It was worth trying, but it didn't seem winnable,

1048
01:15:34,533 --> 01:15:38,583
and I remember, maybe a few months later, I remember him just turning to me and being like,

1049
01:15:38,583 --> 01:15:40,670
"I think we might win this."

1050
01:15:40,670 --> 01:15:42,719
And I was like, "That would be amazing."

1051
01:15:44,249 --> 01:15:46,434
Calls to Congress continue.

1052
01:15:46,434 --> 01:15:50,137
When the domain hosting site Go Daddy becomes a supporter of the bill,

1053
01:15:50,137 --> 01:15:55,212
tens of thousands of users transferred their domain names in protest.

1054
01:15:55,212 --> 01:16:00,146
Within a week, a humbled Go Daddy reverses their position on SOPA.

1055
01:16:00,146 --> 01:16:06,303
When the Congress people that supported the record and movie industries,

1056
01:16:06,303 --> 01:16:10,389
realized that there was this backlash, they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit.

1057
01:16:10,389 --> 01:16:15,881
You could see the curve happening. You could see that our arguments were starting to resonate.

1058
01:16:15,881 --> 01:16:18,904
It was like Aaron had been striking a match and it was being blown out,

1059
01:16:18,904 --> 01:16:20,715
striking another one, and it was being blown out,

1060
01:16:20,715 --> 01:16:24,082
and finally he'd managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught,

1061
01:16:24,082 --> 01:16:26,500
and then it turned into this roaring blaze.

1062
01:16:26,910 --> 01:16:31,373
On January 16, 2012, the White House issued a statement

1063
01:16:31,373 --> 01:16:34,258
saying they didn't support the bill.

1064
01:16:34,258 --> 01:16:36,202
And then this happened:

1065
01:16:36,202 --> 01:16:40,202
I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy,

1066
01:16:40,202 --> 01:16:44,744
and we should deal with them in a serious way, but this bill is not the right bill.

1067
01:16:44,744 --> 01:16:48,857
When Jimmy Wales put his support toward blacking out Wikipedia,

1068
01:16:48,857 --> 01:16:52,369
the number five most popular website in the world,

1069
01:16:52,369 --> 01:16:58,530
this is a website that's seven percent of all of the clicks on anywhere on the internet.

1070
01:16:58,530 --> 01:17:00,129
Wikipedia went black.

1071
01:17:00,129 --> 01:17:01,511
Reddit went black.

1072
01:17:01,511 --> 01:17:03,300
Craigslist went black.

1073
01:17:03,300 --> 01:17:06,109
The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat out melted.

1074
01:17:06,109 --> 01:17:10,835
Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill

1075
01:17:10,835 --> 01:17:13,147
that they were promoting just a couple days ago.

1076
01:17:13,546 --> 01:17:17,838
Within 24 hours, the number of opponents of SOPA in Congress

1077
01:17:17,853 --> 01:17:19,167
went from this...

1078
01:17:19,167 --> 01:17:20,701
to this.

1079
01:17:22,706 --> 01:17:29,815
To see congressmen and senators slowly flip sides throughout the day of the blackout

1080
01:17:29,821 --> 01:17:31,385
was pretty unbelievable.

1081
01:17:31,385 --> 01:17:34,568
There was like a hundred representative swing.

1082
01:17:34,568 --> 01:17:38,734
And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this,

1083
01:17:38,734 --> 01:17:40,756
we had won.

1084
01:17:40,759 --> 01:17:42,469
The thing that everyone said was impossible,

1085
01:17:42,469 --> 01:17:46,409
that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream,

1086
01:17:46,409 --> 01:17:48,207
had happened.

1087
01:17:48,552 --> 01:17:50,467
We did it.

1088
01:17:50,803 --> 01:17:52,689
We won.

1089
01:17:55,405 --> 01:17:58,571
This is a historic week in internet politics--maybe American politics.

1090
01:17:58,571 --> 01:18:03,838
The thing that we heard from people in Washington, D.C., from the staffers on Capitol Hill was:

1091
01:18:03,838 --> 01:18:08,538
they received more emails and more phone calls on SOPA Blackout Day

1092
01:18:08,538 --> 01:18:10,747
than they'd ever received about anything.

1093
01:18:10,747 --> 01:18:12,817
I think that was an extremely exciting moment.

1094
01:18:12,817 --> 01:18:17,640
This was the moment when the internet had grown up, politically.

1095
01:18:17,644 --> 01:18:21,198
It was exhilarating because it's hard to believe it actually happened.

1096
01:18:21,198 --> 01:18:25,365
It's hard to believe a bill with so much financial power behind it

1097
01:18:25,389 --> 01:18:29,151
didn't simply sail through the Congress.

1098
01:18:29,151 --> 01:18:32,167
And not only did not sail through, it didn't pass at all.

1099
01:18:33,783 --> 01:18:36,479
It's easy sometimes to feel like you're powereless,

1100
01:18:36,479 --> 01:18:40,524
like when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell and nobody hears you.

1101
01:18:40,529 --> 01:18:43,018
But I'm here to tell you today, you are powerful.

1102
01:18:43,018 --> 01:18:45,725
[Crowd cheers]

1103
01:18:45,725 --> 01:18:50,546
So, yeah, maybe sometimes you feel like you're not being listened to, but I'm here to tell you that you are.

1104
01:18:50,546 --> 01:18:53,118
You are being listened to. You are making a difference.

1105
01:18:53,118 --> 01:18:56,932
You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.

1106
01:18:56,932 --> 01:18:59,579
[Crowd cheers]

1107
01:18:59,579 --> 01:19:00,620
Stop PIPA.

1108
01:19:00,620 --> 01:19:02,586
Stop SOPA.

1109
01:19:02,586 --> 01:19:03,882
[Crowd cheers]

1110
01:19:03,882 --> 01:19:07,368
Some of the biggest internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit

1111
01:19:07,368 --> 01:19:11,219
from a world in which their little competitors could get censored.

1112
01:19:12,429 --> 01:19:14,642
We can't let that happen.

1113
01:19:14,642 --> 01:19:19,552
For him, it was more important to be sure that you made a small change

1114
01:19:19,552 --> 01:19:23,178
than to play a small part in a big change.

1115
01:19:23,178 --> 01:19:27,797
But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change,

1116
01:19:27,797 --> 01:19:30,753
and so for him, it was kind of this proof of concept

1117
01:19:30,753 --> 01:19:34,796
like, "Okay, what I want to do with my life is change the world."

1118
01:19:34,796 --> 01:19:39,821
"I think about it in this really scientific way of measuring my impact,

1119
01:19:39,821 --> 01:19:42,731
and this shows that it's possible."

1120
01:19:42,731 --> 01:19:45,578
"The thing that I want to do with my life is possible."

1121
01:19:45,578 --> 01:19:48,653
"I have proved that I can do it,

1122
01:19:48,653 --> 01:19:50,730
that I, Aaron Swartz, can change the world."

1123
01:19:50,730 --> 01:19:57,516
For a guy who never really thought he had done much--which was Aaron--

1124
01:19:59,161 --> 01:20:04,115
was one of the few moments where you could really see

1125
01:20:04,115 --> 01:20:06,769
that he felt like he had done something good,

1126
01:20:06,854 --> 01:20:11,836
feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap.

1127
01:20:13,538 --> 01:20:15,904
Everyone said there was no way we could stop SOPA.

1128
01:20:15,904 --> 01:20:17,337
We stopped it.

1129
01:20:17,337 --> 01:20:22,077
This is three outrageously good victories, and the year isn't even over yet.

1130
01:20:22,077 --> 01:20:26,257
I mean, if there's a time to be positive, it's now.

1131
01:20:26,687 --> 01:20:29,799
You know, he wins at SOPA a year after he's arrested.

1132
01:20:29,799 --> 01:20:33,363
It's not unambiguously happy moments. There's a lot going on.

1133
01:20:33,363 --> 01:20:39,766
He's so attuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him.

1134
01:20:39,766 --> 01:20:44,301
The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous,

1135
01:20:44,301 --> 01:20:47,862
and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance,

1136
01:20:47,862 --> 01:20:50,780
Swartz was already concerned.

1137
01:20:50,780 --> 01:20:54,584
It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax

1138
01:20:54,584 --> 01:20:59,587
that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is.

1139
01:20:59,587 --> 01:21:04,013
And if the answer is: "Oh, we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them"

1140
01:21:04,013 --> 01:21:06,101
then that's an awful lot of people.

1141
01:21:06,101 --> 01:21:09,743
It'd be one thing if they said, "Look, we know the number of telephones we're spying on,

1142
01:21:09,743 --> 01:21:12,430
we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."

1143
01:21:12,430 --> 01:21:15,759
but they just came back and said, "We can't give you a number at all."

1144
01:21:15,759 --> 01:21:18,644
That's pretty--I mean, that's scary, is what it is.

1145
01:21:18,731 --> 01:21:25,733
And they put incredible pressure on him, took away all of the money he had made.

1146
01:21:25,733 --> 01:21:29,578
They, you know, threatened to take away his physical freedom.

1147
01:21:29,578 --> 01:21:34,228
Why'd they do it, you know? I mean, well, why are they going after whistleblowers?

1148
01:21:34,228 --> 01:21:38,034
You know, why are they going after people who tell the truth

1149
01:21:38,034 --> 01:21:46,122
about all sorts of things, I mean, from the banks, you know, to war, to just sort of government transparency.

1150
01:21:46,354 --> 01:21:49,626
So secrecy serves those who are already in power,

1151
01:21:49,626 --> 01:21:54,888
and we are living in an era of secrecy that coincides with an era where the government is doing, also,

1152
01:21:54,888 --> 01:21:58,600
a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional.

1153
01:21:58,600 --> 01:22:01,074
So, those two things are not coincidences.

1154
01:22:01,124 --> 01:22:04,478
It's very clear that this technology has been developed

1155
01:22:04,478 --> 01:22:09,621
not for small countries overseas, but right here, for use in the United States, by the U.S. government.

1156
01:22:09,621 --> 01:22:14,384
The problem with the spying program is it's this sort of long, slow expansion, you know,

1157
01:22:14,384 --> 01:22:16,539
going back to the Nixon administration, right,

1158
01:22:16,539 --> 01:22:19,686
obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush,

1159
01:22:19,686 --> 01:22:23,616
and Obama has continued to expand it, and the problems have slowly grown worse and worse,

1160
01:22:23,618 --> 01:22:26,281
but there's never been this moment you can point to and say,

1161
01:22:26,281 --> 01:22:31,941
"Okay, we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters..."

1162
01:22:32,455 --> 01:22:38,653
The prosecution, in my estimation of Aaron Swartz, was about sending a particular, laserlike message

1163
01:22:38,653 --> 01:22:45,413
to a group of people that the Obama administration sees as politically threatening,

1164
01:22:47,341 --> 01:22:53,867
and that is, essentially, the hacker, the information, and the democracy activist community,

1165
01:22:53,867 --> 01:22:59,465
and the message that the Obama administration wanted to send to that particular community was,

1166
01:22:59,465 --> 01:23:04,415
in my estimation, "We know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment,

1167
01:23:04,415 --> 01:23:08,517
and so we are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz

1168
01:23:08,517 --> 01:23:13,418
to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."

1169
01:23:13,583 --> 01:23:17,260
And the government said, "Oh, the legal opinions we're using

1170
01:23:17,260 --> 01:23:20,376
to legalize the spying program are also classified,

1171
01:23:20,376 --> 01:23:23,641
so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you."

1172
01:23:23,641 --> 01:23:26,461
You know, every time they can say, "Oh, this is another instance of cyberwar.

1173
01:23:26,465 --> 01:23:29,900
The cybercriminals are attacking us again. We're all in danger. We're all under threat."

1174
01:23:29,900 --> 01:23:33,737
They use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws.

1175
01:23:35,203 --> 01:23:40,388
[Interviewer] And so just to follow--personally, how do you feel the fight is going?

1176
01:23:40,947 --> 01:23:41,984
It's up to you!

1177
01:23:41,984 --> 01:23:44,554
-I know. It's just that we gotta, you know...

1178
01:23:47,360 --> 01:23:52,616
You know, there's sort of these two polarizing perspectives, right,

1179
01:23:52,616 --> 01:23:57,122
everything is great, the internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everything's going to be fantastic

1180
01:23:57,122 --> 01:23:58,513
or everything is terrible,

1181
01:23:58,513 --> 01:24:01,472
the internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying,

1182
01:24:01,472 --> 01:24:03,681
and controlling what we say.

1183
01:24:03,681 --> 01:24:05,818
And the thing is, both are true, right?

1184
01:24:05,818 --> 01:24:09,796
The internet has done both, and both are kind of amazing and astonishing

1185
01:24:09,796 --> 01:24:12,603
and which one will win out in the long run is up to us.

1186
01:24:12,603 --> 01:24:17,314
It doesn't make sense to say, "Oh, one is doing better than the other." You know, they're both true.

1187
01:24:17,321 --> 01:24:21,153
And it's up to us which ones we emphasize and which ones we take advantage of

1188
01:24:21,153 --> 01:24:23,600
because they're both there, and they're both always going to be there.

1189
01:24:28,950 --> 01:24:35,010
On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Swartz,

1190
01:24:35,010 --> 01:24:40,170
adding additional counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer, and computer fraud.

1191
01:24:40,465 --> 01:24:45,592
Now, instead of four felony counts, Swartz was facing thirteen.

1192
01:24:45,592 --> 01:24:48,563
The prosecution's leverage had dramatically increased,

1193
01:24:48,563 --> 01:24:52,134
as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines.

1194
01:24:52,134 --> 01:24:55,694
They filed a separate indictment to add more charges,

1195
01:24:55,694 --> 01:25:01,876
and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes,

1196
01:25:01,876 --> 01:25:06,010
and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law.

1197
01:25:06,861 --> 01:25:10,656
That theory, and much of the prosecution's case against Swartz

1198
01:25:10,656 --> 01:25:13,952
involved a law created originally in 1986.

1199
01:25:13,952 --> 01:25:16,663
It is called the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".

1200
01:25:16,666 --> 01:25:17,960
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

1201
01:25:17,960 --> 01:25:21,888
was inspired by the movie "War Games" with Matthew Broderick--great movie.

1202
01:25:21,888 --> 01:25:23,354
[Broderick] I have you now.

1203
01:25:23,354 --> 01:25:27,743
In this movie, a kid gets the ability, through the magic of computer networks

1204
01:25:27,743 --> 01:25:30,131
to launch a nuclear attack.

1205
01:25:30,131 --> 01:25:33,501
[missiles firing up]

1206
01:25:33,501 --> 01:25:37,674
You know, that's not actually possible, and it certainly wasn't possible in the '80s

1207
01:25:37,674 --> 01:25:41,375
but apparently this movie scared Congress enough to

1208
01:25:41,375 --> 01:25:44,592
pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1209
01:25:44,592 --> 01:25:48,871
This is a law that's just behind the times, for example, it penalizes

1210
01:25:48,871 --> 01:25:54,105
a terms of service kind of arrangement. You can have something like

1211
01:25:54,105 --> 01:26:01,431
eHarmony or Match.com, and somebody sort of inflates their own personal characteristics,

1212
01:26:01,431 --> 01:26:05,705
and all of a sudden, depending on the jurisdiction and the prosecutors,

1213
01:26:05,705 --> 01:26:07,958
they could be in a whole host of troubles.

1214
01:26:07,962 --> 01:26:10,144
We all know what "Terms of Use" are.

1215
01:26:10,144 --> 01:26:14,188
Most people don't read them, but not abiding by their terms could mean

1216
01:26:14,188 --> 01:26:15,857
you are committing a felony.

1217
01:26:15,857 --> 01:26:18,542
The website Terms of Service often say things like:

1218
01:26:18,542 --> 01:26:22,439
"Be nice to each other", or "Don't do anything that's improper."

1219
01:26:22,439 --> 01:26:27,188
The idea that the Criminal Law has anything to say about these kinds of violations,

1220
01:26:27,188 --> 01:26:29,538
I think strikes most people as crazy.

1221
01:26:29,998 --> 01:26:32,964
The examples get even more "crazy":

1222
01:26:32,964 --> 01:26:39,484
Until it was changed in March of 2013, the Terms of Use on the website of Hearst's Seventeen magazine

1223
01:26:39,484 --> 01:26:42,777
said you had to be eighteen in order to read it.

1224
01:26:42,777 --> 01:26:46,674
I would say that the way the CFAA has been interpreted by the Justice Department,

1225
01:26:46,674 --> 01:26:48,999
we are probably all breaking the law.

1226
01:26:49,199 --> 01:26:54,540
Vague and prone to misuse, the CFAA has become a one-size-fits-all hammer

1227
01:26:54,540 --> 01:26:57,141
for a wide range of computer-related disputes.

1228
01:26:57,141 --> 01:27:00,156
Though not the only factor in his case,

1229
01:27:00,156 --> 01:27:04,935
eleven of the thirteen charges against Swartz involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1230
01:27:07,248 --> 01:27:11,815
The question "Why?" hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz.

1231
01:27:11,815 --> 01:27:16,155
Just what was motivating the government, and what would their case have been?

1232
01:27:16,155 --> 01:27:19,370
The Department of Justice declined requests for answers,

1233
01:27:19,370 --> 01:27:23,694
but Professor Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case.

1234
01:27:23,694 --> 01:27:28,059
So, I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons:

1235
01:27:28,059 --> 01:27:31,201
I was a federal prosecutor at the Justice Department for three years

1236
01:27:31,201 --> 01:27:34,191
before I started teaching. The government came forward

1237
01:27:34,191 --> 01:27:38,321
with an indictment based on what crimes they thought were committed,

1238
01:27:38,321 --> 01:27:42,055
just as a purely lawyer's matter, looking at the precedents, looking at the statute,

1239
01:27:42,055 --> 01:27:45,804
looking at the history, looking at the cases that are out there so far,

1240
01:27:45,804 --> 01:27:48,936
I think it was a fair indictment based on that.

1241
01:27:48,936 --> 01:27:51,396
You can debate whether they should have charged this case.

1242
01:27:51,396 --> 01:27:56,825
There's just a lot of disagreement. Some people are on the Open Access side, some people are not.

1243
01:27:57,681 --> 01:28:03,108
I think the government took Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" very seriously,

1244
01:28:04,086 --> 01:28:10,079
and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed, as a moral imperative,

1245
01:28:10,079 --> 01:28:15,202
to breaking the law, to overcome a law that Swartz saw as unjust,

1246
01:28:15,202 --> 01:28:20,940
and in a democracy, if you think a law is unjust, there are ways of changing that law.

1247
01:28:20,940 --> 01:28:24,675
There's going to Congress as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA,

1248
01:28:24,675 --> 01:28:28,441
or you can violate that law in a way to try to nullify that law,

1249
01:28:28,444 --> 01:28:34,178
and I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was committed,

1250
01:28:34,195 --> 01:28:39,831
not just to breaking the law, but to really making sure that law was nullified.

1251
01:28:39,831 --> 01:28:43,664
That everyone would have access to the database in a way that

1252
01:28:43,664 --> 01:28:47,328
you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the tube.

1253
01:28:47,328 --> 01:28:51,199
It would be done, and Swartz's side would win.

1254
01:28:52,475 --> 01:28:56,080
There's a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law,

1255
01:28:56,080 --> 01:29:00,141
and ultimately, that is a decision for the American people to make, working through Congress.

1256
01:29:00,141 --> 01:29:03,712
And then the second problem is, I think, we're still trying to figure out:

1257
01:29:03,712 --> 01:29:07,867
What's the line between less serious offences and more serious offences?

1258
01:29:07,867 --> 01:29:12,056
We're now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse,

1259
01:29:12,056 --> 01:29:16,754
and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are

1260
01:29:16,754 --> 01:29:19,337
because we're just working that out.

1261
01:29:19,360 --> 01:29:22,209
This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion.

1262
01:29:22,209 --> 01:29:25,878
The hammer that the Justice Department has to scare people with

1263
01:29:25,878 --> 01:29:28,514
just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,

1264
01:29:28,514 --> 01:29:32,960
and so most people just--you know, you can't roll the dice with your life like that.

1265
01:29:32,960 --> 01:29:35,431
Should we tap somebody's phone? Should we film them?

1266
01:29:35,431 --> 01:29:39,389
Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?

1267
01:29:39,389 --> 01:29:42,358
That's how federal agents and prosecutors think.

1268
01:29:42,358 --> 01:29:45,204
They build cases. They make cases.

1269
01:29:46,918 --> 01:29:51,316
Swartz was caught in the gears of a brutal criminal justice system that could not turn back,

1270
01:29:51,626 --> 01:29:57,121
a machine that has made America the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

1271
01:29:57,121 --> 01:30:02,732
We have, in this country, allowed ourselves to be captured by the politics of fear and anger,

1272
01:30:02,732 --> 01:30:08,436
and anything we're afraid of, like the future of the internet and access,

1273
01:30:08,443 --> 01:30:13,703
and anything we're angry about, instinctively creates a criminal justice intervention,

1274
01:30:13,703 --> 01:30:19,504
and we've used jail, prison, and punishment to resolve a whole host of problems

1275
01:30:19,504 --> 01:30:23,173
that, historically, were never seen as criminal justice problems.

1276
01:30:23,173 --> 01:30:28,422
The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute, which is part of what

1277
01:30:28,422 --> 01:30:33,023
has created this debate and controversy over online access to information on the internet,

1278
01:30:33,023 --> 01:30:35,458
is very consistent with what we've seen in other areas.

1279
01:30:35,458 --> 01:30:39,980
The one difference is that the people who are usually targeted and victimized

1280
01:30:39,980 --> 01:30:45,661
by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority.

1281
01:30:47,597 --> 01:30:50,900
Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.

1282
01:30:50,900 --> 01:30:53,543
He had basically stopped working on anything else,

1283
01:30:53,548 --> 01:30:57,006
and the case was, in fact, taking over sort of his whole life.

1284
01:30:57,006 --> 01:31:02,697
One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he was emotionally vulnerable,

1285
01:31:02,697 --> 01:31:06,893
and that that was something they really needed to keep in mind so that they knew that.

1286
01:31:06,893 --> 01:31:09,270
It was weighing on him very heavily.

1287
01:31:10,060 --> 01:31:15,584
He did not like having his actions and his movements restricted in any way,

1288
01:31:15,584 --> 01:31:20,902
and the threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot,

1289
01:31:21,919 --> 01:31:23,591
was terrifying to him.

1290
01:31:23,591 --> 01:31:27,180
Completely exhausted his financial resources,

1291
01:31:27,180 --> 01:31:32,318
and it cost us a lot of money also, and he raised a substantial amount of money,

1292
01:31:32,318 --> 01:31:36,181
so it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

1293
01:31:36,205 --> 01:31:38,341
[Interviewer] The legal defence?
- Yes.

1294
01:31:38,341 --> 01:31:40,855
-Was in millions?
- Yes.

1295
01:31:41,299 --> 01:31:43,942
I think he didn't want to be a burden to people.

1296
01:31:43,942 --> 01:31:47,516
I think that was a factor like, "I have my normal life,

1297
01:31:47,516 --> 01:31:49,492
and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with,

1298
01:31:49,492 --> 01:31:53,249
and I try to keep the two of them as separate as possible,

1299
01:31:53,249 --> 01:31:57,484
but they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty."

1300
01:31:59,223 --> 01:32:02,630
Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher:

1301
01:32:02,630 --> 01:32:04,756
Do you admit guilt and move on with your life,

1302
01:32:04,756 --> 01:32:07,458
or do you fight a broken system?

1303
01:32:07,462 --> 01:32:09,651
With his legal case, the answer was simple:

1304
01:32:09,651 --> 01:32:13,030
He rejects a final plea deal and a trial date is set.

1305
01:32:13,030 --> 01:32:16,981
Aaron was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something

1306
01:32:16,981 --> 01:32:21,639
that he didn't believe was fair, but I also think he was scared.

1307
01:32:32,895 --> 01:32:34,383
I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

1308
01:32:34,383 --> 01:32:38,537
I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse, and I would have given him a big hug,

1309
01:32:38,537 --> 01:32:44,344
and we would have walked across that little river in Boston, and gone and had a couple of beers.

1310
01:32:45,752 --> 01:32:49,734
I really thought that we were right. I thought that we were going to win the case.

1311
01:32:49,734 --> 01:32:51,495
I thought that we could win the case.

1312
01:32:51,495 --> 01:32:54,161
He didn't talk about it very much, but you could see

1313
01:32:54,161 --> 01:32:56,505
the enormous pain that he was going through.

1314
01:32:56,505 --> 01:33:01,420
[song]

1315
01:33:01,420 --> 01:33:05,130
No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings

1316
01:33:05,130 --> 01:33:10,834
or depressive episodes or anything that I would describe as "severe depression"

1317
01:33:10,834 --> 01:33:13,885
and it's possible, you know, he was depressed. People get depressed.

1318
01:33:13,885 --> 01:33:18,642
[music]

1319
01:33:18,642 --> 01:33:23,808
Very early in our relationship, three or four weeks in or something,

1320
01:33:23,808 --> 01:33:25,870
I remember him saying to me

1321
01:33:27,380 --> 01:33:30,647
that I was a lot stronger than he was.

1322
01:33:30,647 --> 01:33:33,480
You know, he was brittle in a lot of ways.

1323
01:33:33,480 --> 01:33:36,870
Things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

1324
01:33:36,870 --> 01:33:39,730
That was part of his brilliance, too.

1325
01:33:40,966 --> 01:33:47,329
I think he probably had something like clinical depression in his early twenties.

1326
01:33:47,329 --> 01:33:49,261
I don't think he did when I was with him.

1327
01:33:49,261 --> 01:33:55,245
He wasn't a "joyful" person, but that's different from being depressed.

1328
01:33:56,503 --> 01:34:01,242
He was just under such enormous pressure for two years straight.

1329
01:34:01,242 --> 01:34:03,955
He just didn't want to do it anymore.

1330
01:34:03,955 --> 01:34:07,364
He was just--I just think it was too much.

1331
01:34:07,364 --> 01:34:14,401
[song]

1332
01:34:14,401 --> 01:34:17,420
I got a phone call late at night.

1333
01:34:17,420 --> 01:34:23,091
I could tell something was wrong, and then I called, and I realized what had happened.

1334
01:34:24,001 --> 01:34:29,057
A co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "Reddit" has been found dead.

1335
01:34:29,057 --> 01:34:31,518
Police say twenty-six-year-old Aaron Swartz

1336
01:34:31,518 --> 01:34:33,995
killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.

1337
01:34:37,259 --> 01:34:46,513
I just thought, we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation.

1338
01:34:46,513 --> 01:34:49,856
I was like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.

1339
01:34:56,872 --> 01:34:59,688
It was one of the hardest nights of my life.

1340
01:35:00,008 --> 01:35:04,883
I just kept screaming, "I can't hear you! What did you say? I can't hear you!"

1341
01:35:07,693 --> 01:35:09,240
I can't. That's it.

1342
01:35:09,240 --> 01:35:11,098
[Interviewer] Okay.

1343
01:35:19,738 --> 01:35:22,543
Yeah, none of it made any sense,

1344
01:35:22,543 --> 01:35:24,540
and really still doesn't.

1345
01:35:25,010 --> 01:35:27,881
I was so frustrated, angry.

1346
01:35:33,082 --> 01:35:36,478
[exhales]

1347
01:35:38,217 --> 01:35:41,576
You know, I tried to explain it to my kids.

1348
01:35:43,315 --> 01:35:47,198
My three-year-old told me that the doctors would fix him.

1349
01:35:52,226 --> 01:35:56,824
I've known lots of people that have died, but I've never lost anybody like this,

1350
01:35:56,824 --> 01:36:04,471
because everybody feels, and I do too, there is so much we could have--more to do like...

1351
01:36:04,932 --> 01:36:11,306
I just didn't know he was there. I didn't know this was what he was suffering and...

1352
01:36:11,316 --> 01:36:12,675
He was part of me.

1353
01:36:16,585 --> 01:36:20,955
And I just wanted it to not be real, and then...

1354
01:36:24,305 --> 01:36:29,137
and then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date:

1355
01:36:33,114 --> 01:36:35,841
"to 2013".

1356
01:36:44,918 --> 01:37:10,096
[quote on screen]

1357
01:37:14,986 --> 01:37:19,458
My first thought was: what if nobody even notices?

1358
01:37:19,458 --> 01:37:23,980
You know, because it wasn't clear to me how salient he was.

1359
01:37:23,980 --> 01:37:30,036
I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw.

1360
01:37:30,036 --> 01:37:31,937
The Net just lit up.

1361
01:37:31,937 --> 01:37:37,566
Everyone was trying to explain it in their own way, but I've never seen

1362
01:37:37,566 --> 01:37:39,882
people grieve on Twitter before.

1363
01:37:39,882 --> 01:37:42,218
People were visibly grieving online.

1364
01:37:45,738 --> 01:37:49,307
He was the internet's own boy,

1365
01:37:49,307 --> 01:37:52,886
and the old world killed him.

1366
01:37:55,164 --> 01:37:59,704
We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched.

1367
01:38:01,734 --> 01:38:06,124
Architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the president, regularly.

1368
01:38:06,124 --> 01:38:14,149
In the middle of that time, the idea that this is what the government had to prosecute,

1369
01:38:14,149 --> 01:38:17,433
It just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.

1370
01:38:17,433 --> 01:38:22,978
The question is: Can we do something, given what's happened,

1371
01:38:22,978 --> 01:38:26,197
to make the world a better place,

1372
01:38:26,197 --> 01:38:28,054
and how can we further that legacy?

1373
01:38:28,054 --> 01:38:30,075
That's the only question one could ask.

1374
01:38:32,981 --> 01:38:37,324
All over the world there are starting to be hack-a-thons, gatherings,

1375
01:38:37,324 --> 01:38:43,454
Aaron Swartz has, in some sense, brought the best out of us, in trying to say:

1376
01:38:43,454 --> 01:38:45,712
How do we fix this?

1377
01:38:47,102 --> 01:38:52,287
He was, in my humble opinion, one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries

1378
01:38:52,287 --> 01:38:55,365
that this country has produced.

1379
01:38:55,365 --> 01:38:58,529
I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious,

1380
01:38:58,529 --> 01:39:05,850
but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with.

1381
01:39:06,040 --> 01:39:12,294
When we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,

1382
01:39:12,294 --> 01:39:17,044
we've broken the rule of law--we've desecrated the temple of justice.

1383
01:39:17,044 --> 01:39:20,056
Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

1384
01:39:20,056 --> 01:39:21,835
[applause]

1385
01:39:21,835 --> 01:39:25,916
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,

1386
01:39:25,916 --> 01:39:30,046
it comes through continuous struggle.

1387
01:39:30,046 --> 01:39:32,668
Aaron really could do magic,

1388
01:39:32,668 --> 01:39:36,310
and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death.

1389
01:39:36,310 --> 01:39:40,772
He believed that he could change the world, and he was right.

1390
01:39:40,772 --> 01:39:44,508
Out of the last week, and out of today, phoenixes are already rising.

1391
01:39:44,508 --> 01:39:45,215
[applause]

1392
01:39:47,045 --> 01:39:51,639
Since Swartz's death, Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden

1393
01:39:51,639 --> 01:39:55,316
have introduced legislation that would reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act--

1394
01:39:55,316 --> 01:40:00,401
the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Swartz.

1395
01:40:00,401 --> 01:40:03,210
It's called "Aaron's Law".

1396
01:40:03,210 --> 01:40:07,401
Aaron believed that you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time:

1397
01:40:07,401 --> 01:40:10,803
What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now?

1398
01:40:10,803 --> 01:40:12,678
And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?

1399
01:40:12,678 --> 01:40:15,488
[Protesters] This is what democracy looks like!

1400
01:40:15,488 --> 01:40:18,258
[crowd chants] We are the people too!

1401
01:40:18,258 --> 01:40:20,964
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

1402
01:40:20,964 --> 01:40:22,328
Stand up, fight back!

1403
01:40:22,328 --> 01:40:25,249
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

1404
01:40:25,249 --> 01:40:29,890
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Carmen Ortiz has got to go!

1405
01:40:33,701 --> 01:40:37,148
I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.

1406
01:40:37,148 --> 01:40:39,697
But we can change the future and we must.

1407
01:40:39,697 --> 01:40:43,387
We must do so for Aaron, we must do so for ourselves.

1408
01:40:43,387 --> 01:40:48,799
We must do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place,

1409
01:40:48,799 --> 01:40:53,781
a place where justice works, and access to knowledge becomes a human right. [applause]

1410
01:40:53,781 --> 01:41:02,038
So there was a kid, back in February, from Baltimore, fourteen years old,

1411
01:41:02,038 --> 01:41:08,530
who had access to JSTOR, and he'd been spelunking through JSTOR after reading something,

1412
01:41:08,530 --> 01:41:14,869
and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer,

1413
01:41:14,869 --> 01:41:19,167
and pancreatic cancer kills the shit out of you because we detect it way too late

1414
01:41:19,167 --> 01:41:23,014
by the time we detect it, it's already too late to do anything about it,

1415
01:41:23,014 --> 01:41:28,269
and he sent emails off to the entire oncology department at Johns Hopkins,

1416
01:41:28,269 --> 01:41:31,203
you know hundreds of them, and every--
- [Interviewer] Did you say fourteen years old?

1417
01:41:31,203 --> 01:41:35,218
- Fourteen-year-old kid, yeah, and most of them ignored it but one of them sent him an email back,

1418
01:41:35,218 --> 01:41:38,040
and said this is not an entirely stupid idea, why don't you come on over?

1419
01:41:38,040 --> 01:41:43,307
This kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher, and in February I heard him on the news

1420
01:41:43,307 --> 01:41:47,975
just a couple of weeks after Aaron died, when Aaron was in the news a lot..

1421
01:41:51,080 --> 01:41:53,542
Sorry...

1422
01:41:53,542 --> 01:41:59,701
and he said the reason he was on the news was 'cause they'd done it. They were shipping

1423
01:41:59,701 --> 01:42:03,423
an early test for pancreatic cancer that was going to save lives,

1424
01:42:03,423 --> 01:42:10,259
and he said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important."

1425
01:42:10,259 --> 01:42:15,481
Because you never know, right? This truth of the universe is not only something

1426
01:42:15,481 --> 01:42:19,680
that policymakers use to figure out, you know, what the speed limit should be.

1427
01:42:19,680 --> 01:42:26,241
It's where the thing that's gonna keep your kid from dying of pancreatic cancer comes from,

1428
01:42:26,241 --> 01:42:32,247
and without access, the person who might come up with the thing that's got your number on it,

1429
01:42:32,247 --> 01:42:34,925
may never find that answer.

1430
01:42:35,580 --> 01:42:45,418
He slept so well, he didn't fall out of the tree, not even when he dreamed he was back on the spacecraft.

1431
01:42:48,395 --> 01:42:51,403
[Aaron's dad] Very good, Aaron. Very good. Yay, Aaron!

1432
01:42:51,403 --> 01:42:53,603
Okay, now it's song time.

1433
01:42:57,165 --> 01:43:12,185
♪ ♪ ♪

1434
01:43:25,738 --> 01:43:32,230
[credits]

1435
01:44:43,619 --> 01:44:44,876
[the end]