1 00:00:08,696 --> 00:00:25,969 2 00:00:25,969 --> 00:00:28,556 3 00:00:28,556 --> 00:00:33,849 4 00:00:33,849 --> 00:00:37,975 5 00:00:39,646 --> 00:00:41,015 6 00:00:50,278 --> 00:00:56,794 A cofounder of the social, news and entertainment website reddit has been found dead. 7 00:00:57,404 --> 00:01:02,276 He certainly was a prodigy, although he never kind of thought of himself like that. 8 00:01:02,276 --> 00:01:04,920 He was totally unexcited 9 00:01:04,920 --> 00:01:08,444 about starting businesses and making money. 10 00:01:09,904 --> 00:01:13,269 There's a profound sense of loss tonight in Highland Park, 11 00:01:13,269 --> 00:01:15,197 Aaron Swartz's hometown, 12 00:01:15,197 --> 00:01:18,391 as loved ones say good-bye to one of the Internet's brightest lights. 13 00:01:18,391 --> 00:01:21,841 Freedom, open access and computer activists are mourning his loss. 14 00:01:21,841 --> 00:01:25,699 "An astonishing intellect", if you talk to people who knew him. 15 00:01:25,699 --> 00:01:27,029 He was killed by the government 16 00:01:27,029 --> 00:01:29,996 and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles. 17 00:01:29,996 --> 00:01:32,976 They wanted to make an example out of him. 18 00:01:35,176 --> 00:01:39,053 Governments have insatiable desire to control. 19 00:01:39,053 --> 00:01:43,477 He was potentially facing 35 years in prison and a one million dollar fine. 20 00:01:43,477 --> 00:01:50,042 Raising questions of prosecutorial zeal, and I would say even misconduct. 21 00:01:50,389 --> 00:01:55,437 Have you looked into that particular matter and reached any conclusions? 22 00:01:57,399 --> 00:02:00,915 Growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realizing 23 00:02:00,915 --> 00:02:03,562 that all the things around me, that people had told me 24 00:02:03,562 --> 00:02:06,713 were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be 25 00:02:06,713 --> 00:02:09,420 They weren't natural at all, there were things that could be changed 26 00:02:09,420 --> 00:02:11,824 and there were things that more importantly were wrong and should change. 27 00:02:11,824 --> 00:02:14,364 And once I realized that, there was really kind of no going back. 28 00:02:15,324 --> 00:02:21,093 The Internet's Own Boy. 29 00:02:24,274 --> 00:02:27,881 Welcome to story reading time. 30 00:02:28,048 --> 00:02:33,084 The name of the book is "Paddington at the fair". 31 00:02:33,573 --> 00:02:37,043 Well, he was born in Highland Park and grew up here. 32 00:02:37,434 --> 00:02:40,778 Aaron came from a family of three brothers, all extraordinarily bright. 33 00:02:40,778 --> 00:02:43,792 Oh, the box is tipping over... 34 00:02:44,532 --> 00:02:48,714 So we were all, you know, not the best behaved children. 35 00:02:48,714 --> 00:02:51,752 You know, three boys running around all the time, causing trouble. 36 00:02:51,752 --> 00:02:54,005 Hey, no, no no! 37 00:02:54,005 --> 00:02:56,234 - Aaron! - What? 38 00:02:56,234 --> 00:03:01,134 But I've come to the realization that Aaron learned how to learn at a very young age. 39 00:03:01,711 --> 00:03:05,711 "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,seven, eight, nine, ten" 40 00:03:06,462 --> 00:03:09,552 - Knock, knock! - Who's there? 41 00:03:09,552 --> 00:03:11,427 - Aaron. - Aaron who? 42 00:03:11,427 --> 00:03:12,773 - Aaron Funnyman. 43 00:03:12,773 --> 00:03:15,449 He knew what he wanted, and he always wanted to do it. 44 00:03:15,468 --> 00:03:17,269 He always accomplished what he wanted. 45 00:03:18,609 --> 00:03:21,288 His curiosity was endless. 46 00:03:21,888 --> 00:03:25,117 "Here's a little picture of what the planets are." 47 00:03:25,117 --> 00:03:32,929 "And each planet has a symbol. Mercury symbol, Venus symbol, Earth symbol, Mars symbol, Jupiter symbol." 48 00:03:33,114 --> 00:03:37,089 One day he said to Susan: what's this free family entertainment downtown Highland Park? 49 00:03:37,089 --> 00:03:39,964 "Free family entertainment at the downtown [less] park" 50 00:03:39,964 --> 00:03:41,571 He was three at the time. 51 00:03:42,432 --> 00:03:44,642 She said: what are you talking about? 52 00:03:44,642 --> 00:03:50,242 He said: Look, it says here on the refrigerator, "Free family entertainment downtown Highland Park". 53 00:03:50,272 --> 00:03:54,513 She was floored and astonished that he could read. 54 00:03:55,010 --> 00:03:59,010 It's called "My Family Seder". 55 00:03:59,755 --> 00:04:04,881 That Seder night is different from all other nights. 56 00:04:05,130 --> 00:04:08,772 I remember once, we were at the University of Chicago Library. 57 00:04:08,847 --> 00:04:12,318 I pulled a book off the shelf that was from like 1900. 58 00:04:12,318 --> 00:04:16,540 And showed to him, and said: you know, this is an extraordinary place. 59 00:04:16,540 --> 00:04:22,719 We all were curious children, but Aaron really liked learning and really liked teaching. 60 00:04:22,999 --> 00:04:27,509 And what we're going to learn is ABC backwards. 61 00:04:27,945 --> 00:04:31,385 Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T... 62 00:04:32,063 --> 00:04:35,620 I remember he came home from his first Algebra class. 63 00:04:35,620 --> 00:04:38,828 He was like: Noah, let me teach you Algebra! 64 00:04:38,828 --> 00:04:41,274 and I'm like: what is Algebra? 65 00:04:41,274 --> 00:04:43,287 And he was always like that. 66 00:04:43,287 --> 00:04:48,516 Now let's press click button, there! Now it's got that! 67 00:04:48,898 --> 00:04:51,858 Now it's in pink! 68 00:04:51,858 --> 00:04:56,318 When he was about two or three years old, and Bob introduced him to computers, 69 00:04:56,318 --> 00:04:59,608 then he just took off, like crazy on them. 70 00:04:59,820 --> 00:05:03,687 (baby talk) 71 00:05:03,687 --> 00:05:08,717 We all had computers, but Aaron really took to them, really took to the Internet. 72 00:05:09,698 --> 00:05:12,965 - Working at the computer? - Naah.. 73 00:05:12,965 --> 00:05:16,008 - How c... mommy, why is nothing working? 74 00:05:16,008 --> 00:05:18,667 He started programming from a really young age. 75 00:05:18,667 --> 00:05:25,533 I remember the first program that I wrote with him was in Basic, and it was a Star Wars trivia game. 76 00:05:25,533 --> 00:05:30,356 He sat down with me in the basement, where the computer was, 77 00:05:30,356 --> 00:05:33,337 for hours, programming this game. 78 00:05:34,817 --> 00:05:38,661 The problem that I kept having with him is that there was nothing that I wanted done. 79 00:05:38,661 --> 00:05:44,057 And to him, there was always something to do, always something that programming could solve. 80 00:05:47,018 --> 00:05:50,548 The way Aaron always saw it, is that programming is magic. 81 00:05:50,901 --> 00:05:54,222 You can accomplish these things that normal humans can't. 82 00:05:54,222 --> 00:05:58,892 Aaron made an ATM, using, like, a MacIntosh and, like, a cardboard box. 83 00:05:59,055 --> 00:06:02,368 One year for Halloween, I didn't know what I wanted to be, 84 00:06:02,368 --> 00:06:06,848 and he thought it would be really really cool if I dressed up like his new favorite computer, 85 00:06:06,848 --> 00:06:09,108 which at the time was the original iMac. 86 00:06:09,108 --> 00:06:13,434 I mean, he hated dressing up for Halloween but he loved convincing other people 87 00:06:13,434 --> 00:06:16,280 to dress up in these things that he wanted to see. 88 00:06:16,280 --> 00:06:20,395 Host Aaron, stop! Guys, come on, look at the camera! 89 00:06:20,395 --> 00:06:22,720 Spider-man looks at the camera 90 00:06:24,010 --> 00:06:30,725 He made this website called The Info, where people could just fill in information. 91 00:06:30,725 --> 00:06:34,987 I'm sure someone out there knows everything about gold, gold leafing. 92 00:06:34,987 --> 00:06:38,722 Why they don't write about that on this website? And then other people can come at a later point 93 00:06:38,722 --> 00:06:43,347 and read that information, and edit the information if they thought it was bad. 94 00:06:43,347 --> 00:06:46,226 Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right? 95 00:06:46,226 --> 00:06:50,474 And this was before Wikipedia begun, and this is developed by a 12 year old, 96 00:06:50,474 --> 00:06:58,452 in his room, by himself, running on this tiny server, using ancient technology. 97 00:06:58,452 --> 00:07:06,977 One of the teachers response was, like: This is a terrible idea, you cant' just let anyone author the encyclopedia. 98 00:07:06,977 --> 00:07:12,464 The whole reason we have scholars is to write these books for us. How did you have such a terrible idea? 99 00:07:12,484 --> 00:07:20,155 Me and my other brother will go, like: Oh, you know, Wikipedia is cool, but we had that in our house, like, five years ago. 100 00:07:20,776 --> 00:07:25,597 Aaron's website, theinfo.org, wins a school competition 101 00:07:25,597 --> 00:07:30,348 hosted by the Cambridge-based web design firm ArsDigita. 102 00:07:33,758 --> 00:07:38,090 We all went to the Cambridge for the... when he won the art centro prize 103 00:07:38,090 --> 00:07:40,506 and we had no clue what Aaron was doing. 104 00:07:40,506 --> 00:07:43,358 It was obvious that the prize was really important. 105 00:07:43,778 --> 00:07:48,171 Aaron soon became involved with online programming communities, 106 00:07:48,171 --> 00:07:51,437 then in the process of shaping a new tool for the web. 107 00:07:51,437 --> 00:07:55,545 He comes up saying to me, like: Ben, there's this really awesome thing that I'm working on. 108 00:07:55,545 --> 00:07:57,713 You need to hear about it! 109 00:07:57,713 --> 00:07:59,742 "Yeah, what is it?" 110 00:07:59,742 --> 00:08:01,769 "It's a thing called RSS." 111 00:08:02,259 --> 00:08:07,171 And he explains me what RSS is.like... like why is that useful,Aaron? 112 00:08:07,171 --> 00:08:11,268 Is any site using it, like why would I want to use it? 113 00:08:11,268 --> 00:08:16,664 There is this mailing list for people who are working on RSS, and XML more generally. 114 00:08:16,893 --> 00:08:21,134 And there was a person on it named Aaron Swartz who was really competitive but very smart, 115 00:08:21,134 --> 00:08:24,675 and who has lots of good ideas and he didn't ever come to the face to face meetings 116 00:08:24,675 --> 00:08:28,566 and he'd never come to face-to-face meetings, and they said, 117 00:08:28,632 --> 00:08:32,302 you know, when are you gonna come to one of these face-to-face meetings? 118 00:08:32,322 --> 00:08:36,942 And he said: you know, I don't think my mom would let me. I'm.. I've just turned 14. 119 00:08:37,222 --> 00:08:42,674 And so their first reaction was, well, you know, this person, this colleague we've been working with all year is... 120 00:08:42,674 --> 00:08:46,694 was 13 years old while we were working with him, and he's only 14 now. 121 00:08:46,694 --> 00:08:51,335 And their second reaction was: Christ, we really want to meet him, you know. That's extraordinary! 122 00:08:51,335 --> 00:08:53,785 He was part of the committee that drafted RSS. 123 00:08:53,785 --> 00:08:59,151 What he was doing was to help build the plumbing for modern hypertext. 124 00:08:59,151 --> 00:09:06,056 The piece that he was working on, RSS, was a tool that you can use to get summaries 125 00:09:06,056 --> 00:09:08,675 of things that are going on on other web pages. 126 00:09:08,675 --> 00:09:13,295 Most commonly, you would use this for a blog. You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read. 127 00:09:13,359 --> 00:09:18,329 You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of what's going on on those other pages 128 00:09:18,378 --> 00:09:22,609 to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on. 129 00:09:22,609 --> 00:09:27,778 Aaron was really young, but he understood the technology and he saw that it was imperfect 130 00:09:27,778 --> 00:09:30,418 and looked for ways to help make it better. 131 00:09:35,645 --> 00:09:39,965 So his mom started bundling him on planes in Chicago, we'd pick him up in San Francicso. 132 00:09:39,965 --> 00:09:45,363 We'd introduce him to interesting people to argue with, and we'd marvel at his horrific eating habits. 133 00:09:45,363 --> 00:09:51,072 He only ate white food, only like steamed rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white 134 00:09:51,072 --> 00:09:53,700 and white bread, and so on... 135 00:09:53,700 --> 00:09:59,250 And you kind of marveled at the quality of the debate emerging from this, 136 00:09:59,263 --> 00:10:01,744 what appeared to be a small boy's mouth. 137 00:10:01,744 --> 00:10:05,063 And you'd think, this is a kid that's really going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy. 138 00:10:05,063 --> 00:10:06,693 Aaron, you're up! 139 00:10:06,693 --> 00:10:10,002 I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like dotcoms. 140 00:10:10,002 --> 00:10:15,720 You can't have companies that just sell dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones. 141 00:10:15,720 --> 00:10:18,186 But there's still a lot of innovation going on. 142 00:10:18,186 --> 00:10:21,425 Think that maybe if you don't see the innovation, maybe your head is in the sand! 143 00:10:21,425 --> 00:10:24,696 He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's 144 00:10:24,696 --> 00:10:28,612 sort of like: "I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you I'm better than you, 145 00:10:28,612 --> 00:10:30,884 and I can tell you what to do." 146 00:10:30,884 --> 00:10:35,202 It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp. 147 00:10:35,310 --> 00:10:39,010 So you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems 148 00:10:39,010 --> 00:10:42,040 like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer. 149 00:10:45,110 --> 00:10:48,470 I first met him on IRC, or Internet Relay Chat. 150 00:10:48,470 --> 00:10:53,490 He didn't just write code, he also got people excited about solving problems he got. 151 00:10:53,490 --> 00:10:55,617 He was a connector. 152 00:10:55,617 --> 00:10:58,417 The free culture movement, he had a lot of this energy. 153 00:10:58,751 --> 00:11:03,872 I think Aaron was trying to make the world work. He was trying to fix it. 154 00:11:03,872 --> 00:11:08,640 He had a very kind of strong personality, that definitely ruffled feathers at times. 155 00:11:08,640 --> 00:11:13,395 It wasn't necesarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world 156 00:11:13,395 --> 00:11:16,265 and the world wasn't always comfortable with him. 157 00:11:18,994 --> 00:11:22,994 Aaron got into high school and he was really just sick of school. 158 00:11:22,999 --> 00:11:27,939 He didn't like it, he didn't like any of the classes that were being thaught, he didn't like the teachers. 159 00:11:27,939 --> 00:11:30,496 Aaron really knew how to get information. 160 00:11:30,496 --> 00:11:34,819 He was like: "I don't need to go to this teacher to learn how to do geometry. 161 00:11:34,819 --> 00:11:37,012 I can just read the geometry book. 162 00:11:37,032 --> 00:11:41,178 And I don't need to go to this teacher to learn their version of American history, 163 00:11:41,178 --> 00:11:45,400 like I have like three historical compilations here, I could just read them. 164 00:11:45,400 --> 00:11:49,091 And I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in the web." 165 00:11:49,091 --> 00:11:53,368 I was very frustrated with school, I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about. 166 00:11:53,368 --> 00:11:57,021 They were domineering and controlling, the homework was kind of a sham 167 00:11:57,021 --> 00:12:01,103 and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busywork. 168 00:12:01,103 --> 00:12:05,305 And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education 169 00:12:05,305 --> 00:12:07,847 and how this educational system was developed. 170 00:12:07,847 --> 00:12:11,221 Then, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things 171 00:12:11,221 --> 00:12:15,021 as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them. 172 00:12:15,240 --> 00:12:19,428 And that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in, 173 00:12:19,428 --> 00:12:24,361 I questioned the society that built the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for, 174 00:12:24,361 --> 00:12:28,089 I questioned the government that set up this whole structure. 175 00:12:28,089 --> 00:12:32,022 One of the thing he was most passionate about was copyright, especially in those early days. 176 00:12:32,192 --> 00:12:37,600 Copyright has always been something kind of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers, 177 00:12:38,120 --> 00:12:43,460 but it wasn't an eccessive burden, it was a reasonable institution to have in place, 178 00:12:44,477 --> 00:12:46,913 to make sure that people got paid. 179 00:12:47,045 --> 00:12:53,083 What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system 180 00:12:53,083 --> 00:12:57,120 and this amazing new thing we were trying to build, the Internet and the Web. 181 00:12:57,120 --> 00:13:00,260 These things collided, and what we got was chaos. 182 00:13:02,454 --> 00:13:06,061 He then met Harvard's Law professor Lawrence Lessig, 183 00:13:06,061 --> 00:13:09,328 who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court. 184 00:13:09,328 --> 00:13:13,269 The young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings. 185 00:13:13,279 --> 00:13:17,759 I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the LD, to see the LD document. 186 00:13:17,894 --> 00:13:23,144 Why did you fly out here from Chicago and come all this way to see the LD argument? 187 00:13:23,493 --> 00:13:25,743 That's a more difficult question... 188 00:13:29,231 --> 00:13:33,974 I don't know. It's very exciting to see the Supreme Court, 189 00:13:33,974 --> 00:13:36,704 especially in such a prestigious case as this one. 190 00:13:42,669 --> 00:13:47,039 Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet. 191 00:13:47,039 --> 00:13:49,356 It was called Creative Commons. 192 00:13:49,356 --> 00:13:53,560 So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people, creators, 193 00:13:53,560 --> 00:13:58,694 a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry. 194 00:13:58,694 --> 00:14:04,583 So if copyright is all about "All rights reserved", then this is a kind of a "Some rights reserved" model. 195 00:14:04,583 --> 00:14:08,789 I want a simple way to say to you: here is what you can do with my work, 196 00:14:08,979 --> 00:14:13,715 even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do. 197 00:14:13,715 --> 00:14:16,501 And Aaron's role was the computer part. 198 00:14:16,501 --> 00:14:20,802 Like how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable 199 00:14:20,802 --> 00:14:24,127 and expressed in a way so that machines can process it. 200 00:14:24,207 --> 00:14:29,994 And people were like: why do you have this 15 years old kid writing the specifications for Creative Commons? 201 00:14:29,994 --> 00:14:32,159 Don't you think that's a huge mistake? 202 00:14:32,159 --> 00:14:35,679 And they're like: the biggest mistake we would have is not listening to this kid. 203 00:14:36,031 --> 00:14:39,668 He barely is not even tall enough to even get over the podium. 204 00:14:39,711 --> 00:14:43,100 And it was this movable podium so it was this embarrassing thing, 205 00:14:43,102 --> 00:14:45,968 where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face. 206 00:14:46,874 --> 00:14:51,257 When you come to our website here, and you go to "Choose license", 207 00:14:51,257 --> 00:14:56,957 it gives you this list of options, it explains what it means, and you got three simple questions: 208 00:14:57,740 --> 00:15:00,055 "Do you want to require attribution?" 209 00:15:00,225 --> 00:15:03,287 "Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?" 210 00:15:03,507 --> 00:15:06,413 "Do you want to allow modifications of your work?" 211 00:15:06,413 --> 00:15:12,246 I was floored, just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult. 212 00:15:12,246 --> 00:15:16,428 And Aaron stood up there in fromt of a whole audience full of people and just started talking 213 00:15:16,428 --> 00:15:20,421 about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons. 214 00:15:20,421 --> 00:15:23,372 And they were all listening to him. Just... 215 00:15:23,372 --> 00:15:28,742 I was sitting at the back, thinking: he's just a kid, why are they listening to him? 216 00:15:28,892 --> 00:15:29,978 But they did... 217 00:15:30,168 --> 00:15:32,784 Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully. 218 00:15:32,784 --> 00:15:37,171 Though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work, 219 00:15:37,216 --> 00:15:40,572 the success of Creative Commons has been enormous. 220 00:15:40,572 --> 00:15:46,776 Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license. 221 00:15:46,992 --> 00:15:56,638 He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him. 222 00:15:57,651 --> 00:16:00,551 Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog: 223 00:16:01,101 --> 00:16:05,812 I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise. 224 00:16:06,722 --> 00:16:11,049 I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people. 225 00:16:11,429 --> 00:16:15,556 I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication. 226 00:16:15,636 --> 00:16:19,661 Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time 227 00:16:19,661 --> 00:16:21,654 on things that won't have an impact. 228 00:16:21,654 --> 00:16:26,161 I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously. 229 00:16:26,161 --> 00:16:32,086 I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience. 230 00:16:32,086 --> 00:16:35,396 I want to make the world a better place. 231 00:16:41,102 --> 00:16:46,475 In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University. 232 00:16:46,475 --> 00:16:51,848 He'd had ulcerative colitis which was very troubling and we were concerned about him taking his medication. 233 00:16:51,848 --> 00:16:55,863 He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day. 234 00:16:56,753 --> 00:17:01,093 And one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth, 235 00:17:01,093 --> 00:17:04,782 and made him feel different from any of the other students. 236 00:17:04,782 --> 00:17:07,828 Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship 237 00:17:07,828 --> 00:17:12,801 and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers 238 00:17:12,801 --> 00:17:20,828 who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters 239 00:17:20,828 --> 00:17:25,578 and I think it just made him bananas. 240 00:17:26,077 --> 00:17:29,197 In 2005, after only one year of college, 241 00:17:29,197 --> 00:17:35,874 Schwartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham. 242 00:17:36,431 --> 00:17:39,777 He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a a website." 243 00:17:39,851 --> 00:17:43,170 And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure." 244 00:17:43,170 --> 00:17:46,650 Suddenly he drops out of school, moves to this apartment... 245 00:17:46,668 --> 00:17:49,604 So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here. 246 00:17:49,604 --> 00:17:55,397 I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease 247 00:17:55,397 --> 00:17:58,737 'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college. 248 00:17:58,742 --> 00:18:04,989 Aaron lived in what's now the livingroom and some of the posters are leftovers from when Aaron lived here. 249 00:18:04,989 --> 00:18:09,889 And the library... there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's. 250 00:18:11,551 --> 00:18:17,511 Aaron's Y Combinator site was called infogami, a tool to build websites. 251 00:18:17,511 --> 00:18:21,098 But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually 252 00:18:21,098 --> 00:18:25,037 merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help. 253 00:18:25,037 --> 00:18:29,919 It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called reddit. 254 00:18:29,919 --> 00:18:33,988 That we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code, 255 00:18:33,988 --> 00:18:37,657 and growing day by day into a hugely popular website. 256 00:18:37,657 --> 00:18:39,846 And it showed no signs of letting up, 257 00:18:39,846 --> 00:18:44,373 first we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on... It was just incredible... 258 00:18:44,373 --> 00:18:49,563 reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet. 259 00:18:52,642 --> 00:19:01,220 There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flocked to the site 260 00:19:01,220 --> 00:19:07,883 and made that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news. 261 00:19:07,883 --> 00:19:12,008 reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels, 262 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, 263 00:19:19,368 --> 00:19:24,824 and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material, 264 00:19:24,824 --> 00:19:29,716 there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home 265 00:19:29,716 --> 00:19:33,929 and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well. 266 00:19:33,929 --> 00:19:36,791 It kind of sits on that edge of chaos. 267 00:19:36,791 --> 00:19:41,081 reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Condé Nast, 268 00:19:41,081 --> 00:19:42,938 who makes an offer to buy the company. 269 00:19:42,938 --> 00:19:46,939 Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions 270 00:19:46,939 --> 00:19:51,079 about like: "How do I store this money?" 271 00:19:51,302 --> 00:19:54,272 - Like a lot of money... - Like a lot of money. 272 00:19:54,272 --> 00:20:00,319 Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know. 273 00:20:00,319 --> 00:20:03,461 - And he's how old at the time? - 19 - 20... 274 00:20:05,165 --> 00:20:11,205 So it was in this apartment, they sat around on what predated these couches 275 00:20:11,205 --> 00:20:14,675 hacking on reddit, and when they sold reddit 276 00:20:14,757 --> 00:20:18,641 they threw a giant party, and then all flew out to California the next day 277 00:20:18,641 --> 00:20:21,885 and left the keys with me. 278 00:20:24,261 --> 00:20:27,480 It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start up so we all presumed 279 00:20:27,480 --> 00:20:29,329 he was the richest person around 280 00:20:29,329 --> 00:20:33,920 but he said, "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little shoe-box sized room. That's all I need." 281 00:20:33,920 --> 00:20:36,146 It was barely larger than a closet. 282 00:20:36,146 --> 00:20:42,499 The idea of him spending his money on fancy objects just seemed so implausible. 283 00:20:42,580 --> 00:20:47,590 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. 284 00:20:47,750 --> 00:20:49,888 And I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt, 285 00:20:50,016 --> 00:20:52,046 so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes. 286 00:20:52,046 --> 00:20:54,576 So it's really no big deal." 287 00:20:54,576 --> 00:20:57,966 What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic flows on the internet. 288 00:20:58,140 --> 00:21:00,680 And what commands our attention. 289 00:21:00,844 --> 00:21:04,252 In the old system of broadcasting, you're fundamentally limited by the amount of 290 00:21:04,252 --> 00:21:08,583 space in the airwaves. You can only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television 291 00:21:08,583 --> 00:21:10,915 or even with cable, you had 500 channels. 292 00:21:11,003 --> 00:21:15,593 On the Internet, everybody can have a channel. Everyone can get a blog, or a Myspace page. 293 00:21:15,690 --> 00:21:18,274 Everyone has a way of expressing themselves. 294 00:21:18,274 --> 00:21:21,280 What you see now is not a question of who gets access to the airwaves, 295 00:21:21,280 --> 00:21:25,100 it's a question of who gets control over the ways you find people. 296 00:21:25,120 --> 00:21:29,286 You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, they are sort of gate-keepers that tell you 297 00:21:29,286 --> 00:21:30,993 where on the internet you want to go. 298 00:21:30,993 --> 00:21:34,273 The people who provide you your sources of news and information. 299 00:21:34,273 --> 00:21:38,314 So it's not only certain people have a license to speak, now everyone has 300 00:21:38,314 --> 00:21:40,904 a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard. 301 00:21:45,196 --> 00:21:49,806 After he started working in San Francisco at Condé Nast, he comes into the office 302 00:21:49,806 --> 00:21:53,792 and they want to give him a computer with all this crap installed on it 303 00:21:53,792 --> 00:21:57,273 and say he can't install any new things on his computer, 304 00:21:57,273 --> 00:21:59,375 which to developers is outrageous. 305 00:21:59,375 --> 00:22:02,095 From the first day he was complaining about all the stuff. 306 00:22:05,317 --> 00:22:11,147 "Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it. 307 00:22:11,147 --> 00:22:15,483 By lunchtime, I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying. 308 00:22:15,483 --> 00:22:18,285 I can't imagine staying sane with someone buzzing in my ear all day 309 00:22:18,285 --> 00:22:21,575 Let alone getting any actual work done. 310 00:22:21,575 --> 00:22:24,087 Nobody else seems to get work done here either 311 00:22:24,087 --> 00:22:27,587 Everybody's always coming into our room to hang out and chat, or invite us to play 312 00:22:27,587 --> 00:22:29,927 the new video game system that Wired is testing." 313 00:22:32,972 --> 00:22:37,867 He really had different aspirations that were politically oriented. 314 00:22:37,987 --> 00:22:41,862 And Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture 315 00:22:41,862 --> 00:22:46,967 that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals. 316 00:22:47,237 --> 00:22:49,613 Aaron hated working for a corporation. 317 00:22:49,613 --> 00:22:53,673 They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron is the only one who is not going to take it. 318 00:22:53,694 --> 00:22:55,884 And Aaron basically gets himself fired. 319 00:22:55,903 --> 00:22:58,313 By not showing up to work, ever. 320 00:23:01,183 --> 00:23:05,434 It was said to be a messy break-up. Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman 321 00:23:05,447 --> 00:23:08,277 declined to be interviewed for this film. 322 00:23:09,251 --> 00:23:15,891 He rejected the business world. One of the really important things to remember about 323 00:23:15,891 --> 00:23:22,664 that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up culture is that he was also leaving behind 324 00:23:22,664 --> 00:23:31,334 the things that had made him famous and well-loved. He was at risk of letting down fans. 325 00:23:31,422 --> 00:23:35,866 He got to where he was supposed to be going, and had the self-awareness 326 00:23:35,866 --> 00:23:43,051 and the orneriness to realize that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck 327 00:23:43,051 --> 00:23:45,849 the single rose and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell. 328 00:23:45,849 --> 00:23:50,399 And rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed, 329 00:23:50,399 --> 00:23:53,693 and he did get the rose in any event, 330 00:23:53,693 --> 00:23:57,413 he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool. 331 00:23:58,026 --> 00:24:01,728 The way Aaron always thought it is that programming is magic. 332 00:24:01,728 --> 00:24:07,110 You can accomplish these things that normal humans can't, by being able to program. 333 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? 334 00:24:15,009 --> 00:24:18,478 Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries he had met as a child. 335 00:24:18,478 --> 00:24:22,387 The man who had invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. 336 00:24:22,387 --> 00:24:25,938 In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on 337 00:24:25,938 --> 00:24:29,260 one of the most lucrative inventions of the 20th century. 338 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. 339 00:24:36,067 --> 00:24:39,707 It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today. 340 00:24:41,118 --> 00:24:45,261 Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim. 341 00:24:45,261 --> 00:24:50,928 Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genius, who doesn't in any sense cash out. 342 00:24:50,928 --> 00:24:55,865 He's not at all interested in how he's going to figure out how to make a billion dollars. 343 00:24:55,865 --> 00:24:57,829 People were saying, "Ah there's money to be made there", 344 00:24:57,829 --> 00:25:00,636 so there would have been lots of little webs. 345 00:25:00,636 --> 00:25:02,139 Instead of one big one. 346 00:25:02,139 --> 00:25:05,030 And one little web, all sorts of webs doesn't work, 347 00:25:05,030 --> 00:25:08,080 because you can't follow links from one to the other. 348 00:25:10,173 --> 00:25:14,112 You had to have the critical masses, the thing was the entire planet, 349 00:25:14,112 --> 00:25:17,172 so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board. 350 00:25:24,141 --> 00:25:28,372 I feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is, 351 00:25:28,702 --> 00:25:34,732 it's just kind of take what you're given, and you know follow the things that adults told you to do, 352 00:25:34,732 --> 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. 353 00:25:39,045 --> 00:25:43,145 I take this very scientific attitude, that everything you've learned is just provisional, 354 00:25:43,405 --> 00:25:49,267 you know, it's always open to recantation or refutation or questioning, and I think the same applies to society. 355 00:25:49,267 --> 00:25:53,491 Once I realized that there were real serious problems, fundamental problems 356 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. 357 00:26:02,600 --> 00:26:04,831 We just started spending a lot of time, 358 00:26:04,831 --> 00:26:06,621 just kind of as friends. 359 00:26:08,912 --> 00:26:11,884 We would just talk for hours, into the night. 360 00:26:14,393 --> 00:26:18,110 I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me. I think to some degree 361 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. 362 00:26:25,161 --> 00:26:28,937 As my marriage was breaking down and I was really stuck without anywhere to go, 363 00:26:28,937 --> 00:26:32,927 we became roommates, and I brought my daughter over. 364 00:26:34,081 --> 00:26:37,246 We moved in and furnished the house, and it was really peaceful. 365 00:26:37,246 --> 00:26:40,816 My life had not been peaceful for a while, and really neither had his. 366 00:26:46,225 --> 00:26:54,073 We were extremely close from the beginning of our romantic relationship. 367 00:26:54,073 --> 00:26:57,633 We just...we were in constant contact. 368 00:26:57,633 --> 00:27:02,432 But we're both really difficult people to deal with. 369 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. 370 00:27:12,345 --> 00:27:16,504 It was Extraordinary Machine, by Fiona Apple. 371 00:27:16,504 --> 00:27:24,154 I think it was just that sense of being a little bit embattled that the song has. 372 00:27:25,054 --> 00:27:27,697 And it also had this hopefulness to it. 373 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... 374 00:27:34,418 --> 00:27:36,689 changing all the time ♪ 375 00:27:36,689 --> 00:27:44,481 In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic about life. Even when he didn't feel it, 376 00:27:44,481 --> 00:27:47,041 he could be tremendously optimistic about life. 377 00:27:47,041 --> 00:27:49,561 ♪ Extraordinary machine ♪ 378 00:27:53,237 --> 00:27:58,317 - What are you doing? (Quinn) - Flicker has video now. 379 00:27:59,730 --> 00:28:01,743 Swartz threw his energy into a string of new 380 00:28:01,743 --> 00:28:04,731 projects involving access to public information. 381 00:28:04,731 --> 00:28:08,189 Including an accountability webside called Watchdog.net 382 00:28:08,189 --> 00:28:10,799 and a project called The Open Library. 383 00:28:10,986 --> 00:28:15,299 So the Open Library Project is a website you can visit at openlibrary.org 384 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. 385 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 386 00:28:23,910 --> 00:28:29,551 all the information from publishers, from booksellers, from libraries, from readers 387 00:28:29,551 --> 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. 388 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 389 00:28:39,958 --> 00:28:44,050 That's the dream of Open Library, is building this website where both you can leap 390 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 391 00:28:49,297 --> 00:28:54,127 of knowledge that's been embedded and lost in big physical libraries, that's hard to find, 392 00:28:54,177 --> 00:28:59,086 that's not very well accessible online. It's really important because books are our cultural legacy. 393 00:28:59,086 --> 00:29:01,283 Books are the place people go to write things down, 394 00:29:01,283 --> 00:29:05,813 and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary. 395 00:29:06,730 --> 00:29:10,771 How can you bring public access to the public domain? 396 00:29:10,771 --> 00:29:14,828 It may sound obvious that you'd have public access to the public domain, 397 00:29:14,828 --> 00:29:21,368 but in fact it's not true. So the public domain should be free to all, but it's often locked up. 398 00:29:21,378 --> 00:29:26,756 There's often guard cages. It's like having a national park but with a moat around it, 399 00:29:26,756 --> 00:29:33,245 and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody may want to actually come and enjoy the public domain. 400 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. 401 00:29:39,458 --> 00:29:43,258 This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble. 402 00:29:46,254 --> 00:29:52,794 I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States. 403 00:29:54,458 --> 00:29:59,108 What I discovered was a puzzling system, called Pacer. 404 00:29:59,518 --> 00:30:03,124 Which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. 405 00:30:03,124 --> 00:30:07,314 I started Googling, and that's when I ran across Carl Malamud. 406 00:30:08,886 --> 00:30:14,997 Access to legal materials in the U.S. is a $10 billion per year business. 407 00:30:14,997 --> 00:30:23,004 Pacer is just this incredible abomination of government services. It's 10 cents a page, 408 00:30:23,004 --> 00:30:27,471 it's this most braindead code you've ever seen. You can't search it, you can't bookmark anything. 409 00:30:27,471 --> 00:30:31,891 You've got to have a credit card, and these are public records. 410 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. 411 00:30:37,429 --> 00:30:44,369 Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists, students, citizens and lawyers 412 00:30:44,369 --> 00:30:48,637 all need access to Pacer and it fights them every step of the way. 413 00:30:48,637 --> 00:30:55,246 People without means can't see the law as readily as people that have that gold American Express card. 414 00:30:55,246 --> 00:30:57,776 It's a poll tax on access to justice. 415 00:30:57,946 --> 00:31:04,096 You know the law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it? 416 00:31:04,246 --> 00:31:07,135 You know, that's not much of a democracy. 417 00:31:07,135 --> 00:31:11,869 They make about 120 million dollars a year on the Pacer system 418 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. 419 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, 420 00:31:25,834 --> 00:31:29,591 in order to reimburse the costs of running Pacer. 421 00:31:34,621 --> 00:31:40,160 As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the Pacer charges. 422 00:31:40,160 --> 00:31:43,300 He started a program called the Pacer Recycling Project, 423 00:31:43,300 --> 00:31:47,297 where people could upload Pacer documents they had already paid for 424 00:31:47,297 --> 00:31:50,334 to a free database so others could use them. 425 00:31:50,334 --> 00:31:55,331 The Pacer people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access, 426 00:31:55,336 --> 00:32:00,925 and so they put together a system in 17 libraries across the country that was free Pacer access. 427 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. 428 00:32:08,095 --> 00:32:12,173 I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Court, 429 00:32:12,173 --> 00:32:17,157 and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the Pacer recycling site. 430 00:32:17,157 --> 00:32:20,813 People take a thumb drive into one of these libraries and they download a bunch of documents 431 00:32:20,813 --> 00:32:25,089 and they send them to me... I mean, it was just a joke. 432 00:32:25,089 --> 00:32:28,636 In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Court, there was a Wizard of Oz [movie clip], 433 00:32:28,636 --> 00:32:32,111 you know, the Munchkin singing, so a videoclip came up: 434 00:32:32,173 --> 00:32:35,034 ♪ We represent the lollipop guild. ♪ 435 00:32:35,260 --> 00:32:39,386 But of course I get this phone calls from Steve Shultz and Aaron, saying: 436 00:32:39,621 --> 00:32:43,047 Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Court. 437 00:32:43,377 --> 00:32:47,544 Around that time I ran into Aaron at a conference. 438 00:32:47,544 --> 00:32:51,633 This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people. 439 00:32:51,633 --> 00:32:53,347 So I approached him and I said: 440 00:32:53,347 --> 00:32:58,195 Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the Pacer problem. 441 00:32:59,865 --> 00:33:04,442 Schultz had already developed a program that could automatically download Pacer documents 442 00:33:04,442 --> 00:33:06,459 from the trial libraries. 443 00:33:06,459 --> 00:33:08,796 Swartz wanted to take a look. 444 00:33:08,796 --> 00:33:13,481 So, I showed him the code and I didn't know what would come next, 445 00:33:13,481 --> 00:33:19,033 but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference, 446 00:33:19,033 --> 00:33:24,588 he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his 447 00:33:24,588 --> 00:33:32,139 that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library and to begin to test his improved code, 448 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. 449 00:33:38,440 --> 00:33:42,901 And data started to come in, and come in, and come in 450 00:33:42,901 --> 00:33:47,632 and soon there was 760 GB of Pacer docs, about 20 million pages. 451 00:33:48,862 --> 00:33:52,098 Using information retrieved from the trial libraries, 452 00:33:52,098 --> 00:33:57,304 Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the Pacer system. 453 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. 454 00:34:04,360 --> 00:34:09,865 Now I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps exceed the expectations of the people 455 00:34:09,865 --> 00:34:14,535 running the pilot access project, but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal. 456 00:34:14,830 --> 00:34:19,096 Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to The New York Times about what happened. 457 00:34:19,731 --> 00:34:26,500 They also caught the attention of the FBI, who began to stake out Swartz's parents' house in Illinois. 458 00:34:26,639 --> 00:34:31,053 And I get a tweet from his mother, saying: "Call me!!" 459 00:34:31,053 --> 00:34:34,127 So, I think, like, what the hell's going on here? 460 00:34:34,127 --> 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!" 461 00:34:40,271 --> 00:34:45,831 An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway, trying to see if Aaron is, like, in his room. 462 00:34:47,164 --> 00:34:51,899 I remember being home that day, and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway, 463 00:34:51,899 --> 00:34:55,110 and just driving back up. That's weird! 464 00:34:56,719 --> 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. 465 00:35:05,185 --> 00:35:09,009 He was terrified. He was totally terrified. 466 00:35:09,959 --> 00:35:14,920 He was way more terrified after the FBI actually called him up on the phone, 467 00:35:15,280 --> 00:35:19,302 and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer. 468 00:35:19,322 --> 00:35:23,664 He said he went home and lay down on the bed and, you know, was shaking. 469 00:35:25,511 --> 00:35:30,006 The downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents. 470 00:35:30,242 --> 00:35:34,922 Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result. 471 00:35:34,922 --> 00:35:42,530 And the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges. 472 00:35:42,530 --> 00:35:47,602 To this day, I found it remarkable. 473 00:35:47,602 --> 00:35:50,983 That anybody, even the most remote podunk field office of the FBI 474 00:35:50,983 --> 00:35:53,237 thought that a fitting use for tax-payers dollars was investigating people 475 00:35:53,237 --> 00:35:55,491 for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public. 476 00:35:55,491 --> 00:35:57,746 How can you call yourself a lawman 477 00:35:58,055 --> 00:36:02,055 And think that there could possibly be anything wrong in this whole world 478 00:36:02,055 --> 00:36:03,815 with making the law public ? 479 00:36:04,086 --> 00:36:10,206 Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in. 480 00:36:10,285 --> 00:36:15,535 Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology and into a broad range of political causes. 481 00:36:15,716 --> 00:36:20,436 I went into Congress and I invited him to come and hang out and intern for us for a while 482 00:36:20,532 --> 00:36:23,662 so that he could learn, you know, the political process. 483 00:36:23,834 --> 00:36:29,464 He was sort of learning about new community and new sets of skills and kind of learning to hack politics. 484 00:36:29,536 --> 00:36:35,406 It seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away until their whole bodies are dripping with sweat 485 00:36:35,519 --> 00:36:41,279 faced with the knowledge that if they dare to stop, they wouldn't able to put food on their table that night. 486 00:36:41,376 --> 00:36:46,576 While I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day just by sitting and watching TV. 487 00:36:46,648 --> 00:36:48,898 But apparently the world is ridiculous. 488 00:36:49,025 --> 00:36:53,465 So, I co-founded a group called "The Progressive Change Campaign Committee", 489 00:36:53,568 --> 00:36:59,288 and what we trying to do is we try to organize people over the Internet who care about progressive politics 490 00:36:59,368 --> 00:37:02,788 and moving the country toward a more progressive direction. 491 00:37:02,900 --> 00:37:06,360 To kind of come together, join our e-mail list journal campaign 492 00:37:06,477 --> 00:37:10,297 and help us to get progressive candidates elect all across the country. 493 00:37:10,386 --> 00:37:16,716 The group is responsible for igniting the grassroots effort behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate. 494 00:37:16,746 --> 00:37:22,186 He might have thought it was a dumb system but he came in and he said, "I need to learn the system, 495 00:37:22,250 --> 00:37:26,050 because it can be manipulated like any, you know, any social system". 496 00:37:26,100 --> 00:37:29,760 But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat. 497 00:37:29,775 --> 00:37:34,210 Aaron began to take a closer look at the institutions that publish academic journal articles. 498 00:37:34,210 --> 00:37:39,341 By virtue of being students at a major US university, I assume you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals. 499 00:37:39,341 --> 00:37:44,961 Pretty much every major university in the United States pays some sort of licensing and fees to organizations like 500 00:37:44,995 --> 00:37:50,605 Jstor and Thompson Isi to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read. 501 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 These scholarly journals and articles are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online 502 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And many have been paid for with taxpayer money or with government grants. 503 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But to read them, you often have to pay again handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed-Elsevier. 504 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 These licenses fees are so substantial that people who are studying in India instead of studying in United States 505 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 don't have this kind of access, they are locked out from all of these journals. 506 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 they are locked out from our entire scientific legacy. I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to the enlightenment. 507 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it's been scanned, digitized and put in these collections. 508 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists. 509 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people, 510 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but instead, it has been locked up and put on line by an handful of for-profit corporations 511 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 who then try to get the maximum of what they can out of it. 512 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So a researcher paid by the university or the people publishes a paper 513 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and at the very, very last end of that process, after all the work is done 514 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 after all the original researches and the thinking, the lab work, the analysis, after everything is done 515 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 at that last stage, then the researcher has to hand over his or her copyright to this multi-billion dollar company. 516 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And it's sick. 517 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's an entire economy built on volunteer labor, and then the publishers sit at the very top and script off of the cream. 518 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Talk about a scam. One publisher in Britain made a profit of three billion dollars last year. 519 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I mean, what a racket! 520 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 JSTOR is just a very, very small player in that story but, for some reason, JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront. 521 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing, and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was 522 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but I think they, at some point Aaron asked the question, like : "How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?" 523 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And they gave some, I think it was two hundred million dollars 524 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous 525 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Working on a fellowship at Harvard, he knew users on MIT's famously open and fast network next door had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR, Swartz saw an opportunity. 526 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 You have a key to those gates 527 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and with a little bit of shell script magic, you can get those journal articles. 528 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 On September 24th 2010, 529 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Swartz registered an newly purchase acer laptop 530 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 on the MIT network under the name Garry Host. 531 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The client name was registered as Ghost laptop 532 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking. 533 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The JSTOR database was organized 534 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 so it was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in JSTOR 535 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 because it was basically numbered 536 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It was basically slash slash... number article 400 and 44000, 24 and 25 and 26 537 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He wrote a Python script called keepgrabbing.pi 538 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 which was, like, keeping grabbing one article after another. 539 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The next day, Ghost laptop begins grabbing articles 540 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but soon, the computer's IP address is blocked. For Swartz, it'a barely a bump in the road. 541 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading. 542 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps to try to interfere with this 543 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 when they notice that this is happening 544 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and when the more modest steps don't work, 545 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 then at a certain stage, JSTOR just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database. 546 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So there's a kind of cat-and-mouse game around 547 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 getting access to the JSTOR database. 548 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Aaron, ultimately obviously, is the cat because he has more technical capability 549 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 than the JSTOR database people do and defending them. 550 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings 551 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and he went, instead of going through wi-fi, he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network 552 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and just left it there with an external harddrive downloading these articles to the computer. 553 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Unknown to Swartz, his laptop and harddrive had been found by authorities. 554 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They didn't stop the downloads, instead, 555 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 they installed a surveillance camera. 556 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They found the computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building. 557 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They could have unplugged it, they could have waited for the guy to come back and said, 558 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Dude, what are you doing, you know, cut it out. Who are you?" 559 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They could have done all that kind of stuff, but they didn't. 560 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 What they wanted to do was film it to gather evidence to make a case. That's the only reason why you film something like that. 561 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 At first, the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera 562 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans. 563 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But days later, it caught Swartz. 564 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Swartz is replacing the hard drive. He takes it out of his backpack, 565 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 leans out of frame for about five minutes, 566 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and then leaves. 567 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And then they, like, organized like a stakeout where, as he was biking home from MIT, these cops came out from like either side of the road 568 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 or something like that and started going after him. 569 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He describes that he was pressed down, and assaulted by the police. 570 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He tells me that they--it's unclear that they were police that were after him. He thought that someone was trying to attack him. 571 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He does tell me they beat him up. 572 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It was just devastating. The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution of anyone in our family or anything 573 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 was so foreign and incomprehensible, I didn't know what to do. 574 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house, his apartment in Cambridge, in his office at Harvard. 575 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police. 576 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They had been taken over by the United States Secret Service. 577 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The Secret Service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984, 578 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but six weeks after the attack on 9/11, their role expanded. 579 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [applause] 580 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 President Bush used The Patriot Act to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces" 581 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists. 582 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 According to the Secret Service, they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact, 583 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 organized criminal groups, or use of schemes involving new technology. 584 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The Secret Service turned Swartz's case over to the Boston U.S. attorney's office. 585 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 There was a guy in the U.S. attorney's office who had the title: 586 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Head of the Computer Crimes Division or Task Force" 587 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 um, I don't know what else he had going, 588 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but you're certainly not much of a "Computer Crimes Prosecutor" without a computer crime to prosecute, 589 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 so he jumped on it, kept if for himself, didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit 590 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and that's Steve Heymann. 591 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz, 592 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but he can be seen here, in an episode of the television show "American Greed", filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest. 593 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzales, 594 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades. 595 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Gonzales masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers, 596 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the largest such fraud in history. 597 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Here, Heymann, describing Gonzales, gives his view on the hacker mindset: 598 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by. 599 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They have an ego, they like challenge, and of course they like money and everything you can get for money. 600 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzales case was a young hacker named Jonathan James. 601 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Believing Gonzales' crimes would be pinned on him, 602 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 James committed suicide during the investigation. 603 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 In an early press release describing the governement position in the case of Aaron Swarz, 604 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [lessing] boss US attorney for the district of Massachussets Carmen Ortiz, said this : 605 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Stealing is stealing, wheter you use a computer command or a crowbar 606 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and whether you take documents, data, or dollars". 607 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's not true; it's obviously not true. 608 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I'm not saying it's harmless, 609 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I'm not saying that we should'nt criminalize stealing of informations 610 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but you got to be much more [lessing] in 611 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 trying to figure out exactly which kinds of arms are handful here. 612 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So the thing about the crowbar is 613 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 every time I break into a place with a crowbar 614 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I do damages there is no doubt about it. 615 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But when Aaron writes its script that says 616 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 download download download an hundred times in a second 617 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 there's no obvious damage to anybody. 618 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 If he does that for the purpose of gathering 619 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 an archive to academic researchers 620 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 there is never any damage to anybody. 621 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He wasn't stealing, he wasn't selling what he got, or giving it away. He was making a point, as far as I could tell. 622 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The arrest took its toll on Swartz. 623 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He just wouldn't talk about it. 624 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I mean he was very stressed. 625 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 If you would thought that like the FBI 626 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 was like going to come to your doorstep any day 627 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 anytime you went down the hall 628 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 even to do your laundry 629 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and they'd break in into your appartment 630 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 'cause you left the door unlocked 631 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 like... I'd be pretty stressed 632 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and it was clear, 633 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and so Aaron was always sort of like in, like in a dour mood. 634 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He wouldn't give off any sensitive information 635 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 about his whereabouts during this time, 636 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 because he was so afraid 637 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that the FBI would be waiting for him. 638 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism. 639 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Time Magazine would later name as their 640 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 2011 Person of the Year "The Protester". 641 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on. 642 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables, 643 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Manning had been under arrest 644 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 at the time it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak. 645 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble, 646 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and has a lot of hackers in its ranks 647 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 were going on various sprees of sorts. 648 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 If you compare that to what he did, 649 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with 650 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in a kind of private, professional matter. 651 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system. 652 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It just didn't belong there. 653 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal 654 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that involved three months in prison, 655 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 time in an half-way house, 656 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and a year of home detention, 657 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 all without the use of a computer. 658 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony. 659 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Here we are, we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever 660 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 about what the government's case is, 661 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and we have to make this immense decision 662 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 where the lawyer is pushing you to do this, 663 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand, 664 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and you're told that you're likelyhood 665 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 of prevailing is small 666 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 so whether you're guilty or not, 667 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 you're better off taking, taking the deal. 668 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Boston has its own Computer Crimes Division, 669 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need. 670 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So, you know, you can imagine all sorts of cases 671 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that'll where it's be really hard to prosecute 672 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 'cause you've got some criminals in Russia, 673 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 or you've got some people inside of a corporation 674 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that are gonna five hundred dollar lawyers or seven hundred dollar-an-hour lawyers 675 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 sitting down against you, 676 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and then you got this case with this kid 677 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 which is pretty easy to prove 678 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that he did something 679 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and he's already marked himself 680 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 as a troublemaker with the FBI, 681 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 so why not go as tough as you can 682 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 against that guy? 683 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's good for you the prosecutor, 684 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 it's good for the Republic 685 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types. 686 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was so scared, I was so scared 687 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 of having my computer seized, 688 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was so scared to going to jail 689 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 because of my computer being seized, 690 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I had confidential material 691 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 from sources from my previous work on my laptop, 692 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and that is above all my priority 693 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 is to keep my sources safe. 694 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was so scared of what was going to happen toAda. 695 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Aaron told me that they offered him a deal 696 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and he finally just said that he would take it 697 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 if I told him to. 698 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And I say, I came real close to saying, 699 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Take it." 700 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He had these, he had developed, like, serious political aspirations 701 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in the meaning intervening time between when, 702 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 you know that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial startup life, 703 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and begun this new life that had come to this political activism, 704 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony. 705 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 You know, he said to me one day, 706 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 we were walking by the White House, and he said to me, 707 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "They don't let felons work there." 708 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And you know he really, he really wanted that to be his life. 709 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He hadn't killed anybody, he hadn't hurt anybody, 710 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 he hadn't like stolen money, 711 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 he hadn't done anything that seems felony worthy, right, 712 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and there is this idea that like, 713 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 there is no reason that he should be labelled a felon 714 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and taken away his right to vote in many states 715 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 for doing what he did like, that's just outrageous. 716 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Like it makes sense for him to be, you know, 717 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 maybe find a bunch of money or, you know, 718 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 asked not to come back to MIT again. 719 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But like, to be a felon? To face jail time? 720 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Swartz turned down the plea deal. 721 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Heymann redoubled his efforts. 722 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Heymann continued to press us at all, at all levels. 723 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's 724 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Acer computer harddrive and USB drive, 725 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives. 726 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR, 727 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and just what did he plan to do with them? 728 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The government claims that he was planning to publish these. 729 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 We don't really know whether that was his real intention 730 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 because Aaron also had a history of 731 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 doing projects where he'd analyze giant data sets of articles 732 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in order to learn interesting things about them. 733 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford, 734 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database. 735 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 In a project with Stanford law students, 736 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database. 737 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He uncovered troubling connections between 738 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 funders of legal research 739 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and favorable results. 740 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies 741 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles 742 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 which were then beneficial to, like, Exxon during an oil spill. 743 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So it was a very corrupt system of funding, 744 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 you know, vanity research. 745 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents. 746 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database. 747 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 That would have been completely okay. 748 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 If he were, on the other hand, intending to create 749 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 a competitive service to JSTOR, 750 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 like, we're going to set up our own, you know, 751 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 access to the Harvard Law Review and charge, 752 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 you know, money for it, then you know, okay now 753 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 it seems like criminal violation because you are 754 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 commercially trying to exploit this material, 755 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but it's kind of crazy to imagine that that was what he was doing. 756 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So, but then there's the middle case: well, what if he 757 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world, 758 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but depending on what he was doing, 759 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 it creates a very different character to how the law should be thinking about it, 760 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 um, the government was prosecuting him as if this was like a commercial criminal violation, 761 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records that it was that kind of crime. 762 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I don't know what he was going to do with that database, 763 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him 764 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that he was going to analyze the data for evidence of 765 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 corporate funding of climate change research 766 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that led to biased results, 767 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I, I, I totally believe that. 768 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me... 769 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 um, and I thought that maybe this was a way I could get out of this, 770 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 just, just exit the situation, 771 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I didn't want to live in fear of having my computer seized, 772 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 um, I didn't want to live in fear of having to go to jail 773 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 on a contempt of court charge if they tried to 774 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 compel me to decrypt my computer. 775 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 When they came to me and said, 776 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Steve wants to talk to you" 777 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that seemed reasonable. 778 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They offered Norton what is know as: 779 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 a "Queen For A Day" letter or a proffer. 780 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case. 781 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself, 782 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 for any information she revealed during the meeting. 783 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I didn't like it, I, I told my lawyers repeatedly 784 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that I didn't...this seemed fishy, I didn't like this, I didn't want immunity, 785 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I didn't need immunity, I hadn't done anything, 786 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but they were really, really stringent that there was, 787 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 they did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity. 788 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Interviewer] But just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal, a proffer. 789 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Norton] Right, a proffer letter. 790 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Interviewer] In which you basically handed information to them 791 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in exchange for protection from prosecution. 792 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Norton] So, um, it wasn't handing information over, 793 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 it was, at least that's not how I saw it, 794 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 it was just having a discussion, having an interview with them. 795 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Interviewer] Well, it's, they're asking you questions... 796 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Norton] They're asking me questions... 797 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Interviewer] and they can ask about whatever they want. 798 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Norton] Right. 799 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Interviewer] and whatever they learn... 800 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Norton] I really... 801 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Interviewer] ...not allowed to prosecute... 802 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 [Norton] Right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked. 803 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I repeatedly, I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter. 804 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was ill, I was being pressured by my lawyers, 805 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was confused, I was not doing well by this point, 806 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was depressed and I was scared 807 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I didn't understand the situation I was in 808 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I had no idea why I was in this situation. 809 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong. 810 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 We went out of our minds. 811 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Aaron was clearly very distraught about it. 812 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 We were very distraught about it. 813 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it. 814 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys. 815 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was very unused to being in a room 816 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 with large men, well-armed 817 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that are continually telling me I'm lying, 818 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and that I must have done something. 819 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting 820 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 wasn't a crime. 821 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I told them that they were on the wrong side of history. 822 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I used that phrase. 823 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I said, "You're on the wrong side of history." 824 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Um, and they looked bored. 825 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They didn't even look angry, they just looked bored, 826 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I, I, it began to occur to me that we weren't having 827 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the same conversation. 828 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I mean, I told them plenty of things, about you know, 829 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 why people would download journal articles, 830 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and eventually, I don't remember what was around it 831 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 um, uh, I mentioned that he'd done this blog post, 832 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto". 833 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 This is the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto" 834 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 supposedly written in July 2008 in Italy. 835 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." 836 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, 837 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations." 838 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by." 839 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, 840 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends." 841 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground." 842 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were 843 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew." 844 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative." 845 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy." 846 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "There's no justice in following unjust laws." 847 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "It's time to come into the light and, in a grand tradition of civil disobedience, 848 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture." 849 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people.