WEBVTT

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A cofounder of the social, news and entertainment
website Reddit has been found dead.

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He certainly was a prodigy, 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's a profound sense of loss tonight
in Highland Park, 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 an insatiable
desire to control.

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He was potentially facing 35 years
in prison and a one million dollar fine.

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Raising questions of 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, I slowly had this process of
realizing that all the things around me that

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people had told me were just the natural way
things were, the way things always would be,

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they weren't natural at all,
there were things that could be changed

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and there were things that more importantly
were wrong and should change,

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and once I realized that,
there was really 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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Well, 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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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 that 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.

NOTE Paragraph

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"Here's a little picture of what the planets are.
And each planet has a symbol."

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"Mercury symbol, Venus symbol, Earth symbol,
Mars symbol, Jupiter symbol."

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One day he said to Susan, "What's this free
family entertainment downtown Highland Park?"

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"Free family entertainment
downtown Highland Park."

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He was three at the 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 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 to him and said, "You know,
this is really just an extraordinary place."

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We all were curious children, but Aaron really
liked learning and really liked teaching.

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"And we're going to learn the ABC backwards."

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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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He was like, "Noah, let me teach you algebra!"

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And I'm like, "What is algebra?"

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And he was always like that.

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"Now let's press 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 is
that there was nothing that I wanted done,

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and to him, there was always something to do,

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always something that programming could 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 like a Macintosh
and like 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 the time was 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 as things that 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 knows
all about gold, gold leafing...

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Why they don't write about that on this website?
And then other people can come at a later point,

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and read that information, and edit
the information if they thought 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 responds,

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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 would be like,
"Oh, you know, yeah Wikipedia is cool, but..."

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"we had that in our house, like, five 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: "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 is 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
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 this 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 thaught. He didn't like the teachers.

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Aaron really knew 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 kind 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's 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 LD, to see the LD document.

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Why did you fly out here from Chicago, and come all this way to see the LD 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's like, "The biggest mistake we would have is not listening to this kid."

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He barely is not even tall enough to even get over the podium,

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and it was this movable podium so it was this embarrassing thing,

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where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face.

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When you come to our website here, and you go to "Choose License".

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It gives you this list of options, it explains what it means, and you've got three simple questions:

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"Do you want to require attribution?"

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"Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?"

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"Do you want to allow modifications of your work?"

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I was floored, just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult,

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and Aaron stood up there in front of a whole audience full of people, and just started talking

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about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons,

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and they were all listening to him, just...

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I was sitting at the back, thinking: he's just a kid, why are they listening to him?

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But they did...

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Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully.

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Though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work,

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the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.

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Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license.

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He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.

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Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

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I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

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I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

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I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

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Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time

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on things that won't have an impact.

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I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

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I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

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I want to make the world a better place.

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In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

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He'd had ulcerative colitis which was very troubling, and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

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He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day,

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and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth,

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and made him feel different from any of the other students.

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Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

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and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

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who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters

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and I think it just made him bananas.

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In 2005, after only one year of college,

00:17:29.197 --> 00:17:35.874
Swartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

00:17:36.431 --> 00:17:39.777
He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a a website."

00:17:39.851 --> 00:17:43.170
And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure."

00:17:43.170 --> 00:17:46.650
So Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment...

00:17:46.668 --> 00:17:49.604
So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here.

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

00:17:55.397 --> 00:17:58.737
'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

00:17:58.742 --> 00:18:04.989
Aaron lived in what's now the livingroom and some of the posters are leftover from when Aaron lived here.

00:18:04.989 --> 00:18:09.889
And then the library... there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

00:18:11.551 --> 00:18:17.511
Aaron's Y Combinator site was called infogami, a tool to build websites.

00:18:17.511 --> 00:18:21.098
But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

00:18:21.098 --> 00:18:25.037
merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

00:18:25.037 --> 00:18:29.919
It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called reddit.

00:18:29.919 --> 00:18:33.988
That we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

00:18:33.988 --> 00:18:37.657
and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,

00:18:37.657 --> 00:18:39.846
And it showed no signs of letting up.

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...

00:18:44.373 --> 00:18:49.563
reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

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 flock to the site,

00:19:01.220 --> 00:19:07.883
and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

00:19:07.883 --> 00:19:12.008
reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

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,

00:19:19.368 --> 00:19:24.824
and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

00:19:24.824 --> 00:19:29.716
there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home,

00:19:29.716 --> 00:19:33.929
and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well.

00:19:33.929 --> 00:19:36.791
It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

00:19:36.791 --> 00:19:41.081
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Condé Nast,

00:19:41.081 --> 00:19:42.938
who makes an offer to buy the company.

00:19:42.938 --> 00:19:46.939
Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

00:19:46.939 --> 00:19:51.079
about like: "How do I store this money?"

00:19:51.302 --> 00:19:54.272
- Like a lot of money...
- Like a lot of money.

00:19:54.272 --> 00:20:00.319
Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

00:20:00.319 --> 00:20:03.461
- And he's how old at the time?
- 19, 20.

00:20:05.165 --> 00:20:11.205
So it was in this apartment. They sat around 
on what predated these couches,

00:20:11.205 --> 00:20:14.675
hacking on reddit, and when they sold reddit

00:20:14.757 --> 00:20:18.641
they threw a giant party, and then all flew
out to California the next day,

00:20:18.641 --> 00:20:21.885
and left the keys with me.

00:20:24.261 --> 00:20:27.480
It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start-up so we all presumed

00:20:27.480 --> 00:20:29.329
he was the richest person around

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."

00:20:33.920 --> 00:20:36.146
It was barely larger than a closet.

00:20:36.146 --> 00:20:42.499
The idea of him spending his money on
fancy objects just seemed so implausible.

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,

00:20:47.750 --> 00:20:49.888
and I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt,

00:20:50.016 --> 00:20:52.046
so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes.

00:20:52.046 --> 00:20:54.576
So it's really no big deal."

00:20:54.576 --> 00:20:57.966
What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic 
flows on the internet,

00:20:58.140 --> 00:21:00.680
and what commands our attention.

00:21:00.844 --> 00:21:04.252
In the old system of broadcasting, you're
fundamentally limited by the amount of

00:21:04.252 --> 00:21:08.583
space in the airwaves. You could only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television

00:21:08.583 --> 00:21:10.915
or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

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.

00:21:15.690 --> 00:21:18.274
Everyone has a way of expressing themselves. 


00:21:18.274 --> 00:21:21.280
What you see now is not a question of who gets
access to the airwaves,

00:21:21.280 --> 00:21:25.100
it's a question of who gets control over the 
ways you find people.

00:21:25.120 --> 00:21:29.286
You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, theses sort of gatekeepers that tell you

00:21:29.286 --> 00:21:30.993
where on the internet you want to go.

00:21:30.993 --> 00:21:34.273
The people who provide you your sources of news and information.

00:21:34.273 --> 00:21:38.314
So it's not only certain people have a license to speak, now everyone has

00:21:38.314 --> 00:21:40.904
a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard.

00:21:45.196 --> 00:21:49.806
After he started working in San Francisco 
at Condé Nast, he comes into the office

00:21:49.806 --> 00:21:53.792
and they want to give him a computer with all
this crap installed on it

00:21:53.792 --> 00:21:57.273
and say he can't install any new things 
on this computer,

00:21:57.273 --> 00:21:59.375
which to developers is outrageous.

00:21:59.375 --> 00:22:02.095
From the first day, he was complaining
about all the stuff.

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.

00:22:11.147 --> 00:22:15.483
By lunchtime, I had literally locked myself 
in a bathroom stall and started crying.

00:22:15.483 --> 00:22:18.285
I can't imagine staying sane with someone
buzzing in my ear all day


00:22:18.285 --> 00:22:21.575
Let alone getting any actual work done. 


00:22:21.575 --> 00:22:24.087
Nobody else seems to get work done here either

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 



00:22:27.587 --> 00:22:29.927
the new video game system that Wired is testing."

00:22:32.972 --> 00:22:37.867
He really had different aspirations that were politically-oriented,

00:22:37.987 --> 00:22:41.862
and Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture

00:22:41.862 --> 00:22:46.967
that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals.

00:22:47.237 --> 00:22:49.613
Aaron hated working for a corporation.

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.

00:22:53.694 --> 00:22:55.884
And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

00:22:55.903 --> 00:22:58.313
By not showing up to work, ever.

00:23:01.183 --> 00:23:05.434
It was said to be a messy breakup. 
Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

00:23:05.447 --> 00:23:08.277
declined to be interviewed for this film.

00:23:09.251 --> 00:23:15.891
He rejected the business world. One of the really important things to remember about

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

00:23:22.664 --> 00:23:31.334
the things that had made him famous and well-loved, and he was at risk of letting down fans.

00:23:31.422 --> 00:23:35.866
He got to where he was supposed to be going, and had the self-awareness

00:23:35.866 --> 00:23:43.051
and the orneriness to realize that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck

00:23:43.051 --> 00:23:45.849
the single rose and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell,

00:23:45.849 --> 00:23:50.399
and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed,

00:23:50.399 --> 00:23:53.693
and he did get the rose in any event,

00:23:53.693 --> 00:23:57.413
he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool.

00:23:58.026 --> 00:24:01.728
The way Aaron always saw it, is that 
programming is magic--

00:24:01.728 --> 00:24:07.110
you can accomplish these things that normal
humans can't, by being able to program.

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?

00:24:15.009 --> 00:24:18.478
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries
he had met as a child.

00:24:18.478 --> 00:24:22.387
The man who had invented the World Wide Web,
Tim Berners-Lee.

00:24:22.387 --> 00:24:25.938
In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on

00:24:25.938 --> 00:24:29.260
one of the most lucrative inventions of 
the 20th century,

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.

00:24:36.067 --> 00:24:39.707
It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.

00:24:41.118 --> 00:24:45.261
Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.

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.

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.

00:24:55.865 --> 00:24:57.829
People were saying, "Ah, there's money to be made there,"

00:24:57.829 --> 00:25:00.636
so there would have been lots of little webs,

00:25:00.636 --> 00:25:02.139
instead of one big one,

00:25:02.139 --> 00:25:05.030
and one little web, and all sorts of webs doesn't work,

00:25:05.030 --> 00:25:08.080
because you can't follow links from one to the other.

00:25:10.173 --> 00:25:14.112
You had to have the critical masses--the thing was the entire planet,

00:25:14.112 --> 00:25:17.172
so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board.

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,

00:25:28.702 --> 00:25:34.732
to just kind of take what you're given, and you know, follow the things that adults told you to do,

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.

00:25:39.045 --> 00:25:43.145
I take this very scientific attitude, that 
everything you've learned is just provisional,

00:25:43.405 --> 00:25:49.267
that it's always open to recantation or refutation or 
questioning, and I think the same applies to society.

00:25:49.267 --> 00:25:53.491
Once I realized that there were real serious problems--fundamental problems--

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.

00:26:02.600 --> 00:26:04.831
We just started spending a lot of time,


00:26:04.831 --> 00:26:06.621
just kind of as friends.

00:26:08.912 --> 00:26:11.884
We would just talk, for hours, into the night.

00:26:14.393 --> 00:26:18.110
I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me. I think to some degree,

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.

00:26:25.161 --> 00:26:28.937
As my marriage was breaking down, and I was
really stuck without anywhere to go,

00:26:28.937 --> 00:26:32.927
we became roommates, and I brought my daughter over.

00:26:34.081 --> 00:26:37.246
We moved in, and furnished the house, and it 
was really peaceful.

00:26:37.246 --> 00:26:40.816
My life had not been peaceful for a while, and really neither had his.

00:26:46.225 --> 00:26:54.073
We were extremely close from the beginning of our romantic relationship.

00:26:54.073 --> 00:26:57.633
We just...we were in constant contact.

00:26:57.633 --> 00:27:02.432
But we're both really difficult people to deal with. [laughs]

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.

00:27:12.345 --> 00:27:16.504
It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple.

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,

00:27:25.054 --> 00:27:27.697
and it also had, like, this hopefulness to it.

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

00:27:34.418 --> 00:27:36.689
changing all the time ♪

00:27:36.689 --> 00:27:44.481
In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic
about life. Even when he didn't feel it, 


00:27:44.481 --> 00:27:47.041
he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

00:27:47.041 --> 00:27:49.561
♪ Extraordinary machine ♪

00:27:53.237 --> 00:27:58.317
- What are you doing?
(Quinn) - Flicker has video now.

00:27:59.730 --> 00:28:01.743
Swartz threw his energy into a string of new

00:28:01.743 --> 00:28:04.731
projects involving access to public information,

00:28:04.731 --> 00:28:08.189
including an accountability webside called
Watchdog.net,

00:28:08.189 --> 00:28:10.799
and a project called The Open Library.

00:28:10.986 --> 00:28:15.299
So, the Open Library Project is a website you can visit at openlibrary.org,

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.

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

00:28:23.910 --> 00:28:29.551
all the information from publishers, from booksellers, from libraries, from readers

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.

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.

00:28:39.958 --> 00:28:44.050
That's the dream of Open Library, is building this website where both you can leap

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

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,

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.

00:28:59.086 --> 00:29:01.283
Books are the place people go to write things down,

00:29:01.283 --> 00:29:05.813
and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary.

00:29:06.730 --> 00:29:10.771
How can you bring public access to the public domain?

00:29:10.771 --> 00:29:14.828
It may sound obvious that you'd have public access to the public domain,

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.

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,

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.

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.

00:29:39.458 --> 00:29:43.258
This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble.

00:29:46.254 --> 00:29:52.794
I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States.

00:29:54.458 --> 00:29:59.108
What I discovered was a puzzling system called PACER.

00:29:59.518 --> 00:30:03.124
Which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

00:30:03.124 --> 00:30:07.314
I started Googling, and that's when I ran
across Carl Malamud.

00:30:08.886 --> 00:30:14.997
Access to legal materials in the United States is a ten billion dollar per year business.

00:30:14.997 --> 00:30:23.004
PACER is just this incredible abomination
of government services. It's ten cents a page,

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.

00:30:27.471 --> 00:30:31.891
You've got to have a credit card, and these are public records.

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.

00:30:37.429 --> 00:30:44.369
Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists, students, citizens and lawyers

00:30:44.369 --> 00:30:48.637
all need access to PACER, and it fights them every step of the way.

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.

00:30:55.246 --> 00:30:57.776
It's a poll tax on access to justice.

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?

00:31:04.246 --> 00:31:07.135
You know, that's not much of a democracy.

00:31:07.135 --> 00:31:11.869
They make about 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system,

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.

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,

00:31:25.834 --> 00:31:29.591
in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER.

00:31:34.621 --> 00:31:40.160
As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges.

00:31:40.160 --> 00:31:43.300
He started a program called The PACER Recycling Project,

00:31:43.300 --> 00:31:47.297
where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for

00:31:47.297 --> 00:31:50.334
to a free database so others could use them.

00:31:50.334 --> 00:31:55.331
The PACER people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access,

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.

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.

00:32:08.095 --> 00:32:12.173
I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Corps,

00:32:12.173 --> 00:32:17.157
and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the PACER recycling site.

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,

00:32:20.813 --> 00:32:25.089
and they send them to me. I mean, it was just a joke.

00:32:25.089 --> 00:32:28.636
In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Corps, there was a Wizard of Oz,

00:32:28.636 --> 00:32:32.111
you know, the Munchkin singing, so a videoclip came up:

00:32:32.173 --> 00:32:35.034
♪ We represent the lollipop guild. ♪

00:32:35.260 --> 00:32:39.386
but of course, I get this phone calls from Steve Shultz and Aaron, saying,

00:32:39.621 --> 00:32:43.047
"Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps."

00:32:43.377 --> 00:32:47.544
Around that time, I ran into Aaron at a conference.

00:32:47.544 --> 00:32:51.633
This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.

00:32:51.633 --> 00:32:53.347
So I approached him and I said,

00:32:53.347 --> 00:32:58.195
"Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the PACER problem."

00:32:59.865 --> 00:33:04.442
Schultz had already developed a program that could automatically download PACER documents

00:33:04.442 --> 00:33:06.459
from the trial libraries.

00:33:06.459 --> 00:33:08.796
Swartz wanted to take a look.

00:33:08.796 --> 00:33:13.481
So, I showed him the code, and I didn't know what would come next,

00:33:13.481 --> 00:33:19.033
but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference,

00:33:19.033 --> 00:33:24.588
he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his

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,

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.

00:33:38.440 --> 00:33:42.901
And data started to come in, and come in, and come in

00:33:42.901 --> 00:33:47.632
and soon there was 760 GB of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.

00:33:48.862 --> 00:33:52.098
Using information retrieved from the trial libraries,

00:33:52.098 --> 00:33:57.304
Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the PACER system.

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.

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

00:34:09.865 --> 00:34:14.535
running the pilot access project, but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal.

00:34:14.830 --> 00:34:19.096
Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to The New York Times about what happened.

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.

00:34:26.639 --> 00:34:31.053
And I get a tweet from his mother, saying, "Call me!!"

00:34:31.053 --> 00:34:34.127
So, I think, like, what the hell's going on here?

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!"

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.

00:34:47.164 --> 00:34:51.899
I remember being home that day, and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway,

00:34:51.899 --> 00:34:55.110
and just driving back up. That's weird!

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.

00:35:05.185 --> 00:35:09.009
He was terrified. He was totally terrified.

00:35:09.959 --> 00:35:14.920
He was way more terrified after the FBI actually called him up on the phone,

00:35:15.280 --> 00:35:19.302
and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.

00:35:19.322 --> 00:35:23.664
He said he went home and lay down on the bed and, you know, was shaking.

00:35:25.511 --> 00:35:30.006
The downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents.

00:35:30.242 --> 00:35:34.922
Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result,

00:35:34.922 --> 00:35:39.850
and the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges.

00:35:39.850 --> 00:35:42.722
To this day, I find it remarkable

00:35:42.722 --> 00:35:47.823
that anybody, even at the most remote podunk field office of the FBI

00:35:47.823 --> 00:35:52.327
thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars was investigating people

00:35:52.327 --> 00:35:55.491
for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public.

00:35:55.491 --> 00:35:57.746
How can you call yourself a lawman,

00:35:58.055 --> 00:36:02.055
and think that there could possibly be anything wrong in this whole world

00:36:02.055 --> 00:36:03.815
with making the law public?

00:36:03.815 --> 00:36:09.455
Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in.

00:36:09.455 --> 00:36:15.586
Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology, and into a broader range of political causes.

00:36:15.586 --> 00:36:21.786
I went into Congress, and I invited him to come and hang out and intern for us for a while

00:36:21.812 --> 00:36:25.182
so that he could learn the political process.

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.

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

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,

00:36:41.306 --> 00:36:46.576
while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day just by sitting and watching TV.

00:36:46.648 --> 00:36:48.898
But apparently the world <i>is</i> ridiculous.

00:36:49.025 --> 00:36:53.035
So, I co-founded a group called "The Progressive Change Campaign Committee",

00:36:53.058 --> 00:36:58.298
and what we try and do is we try to organize people over the Internet who care about progressive politics

00:36:58.318 --> 00:37:00.568
and moving the country toward a more progressive direction

00:37:00.570 --> 00:37:03.787
to kind of come together, join our e-mail list, join our campaigns

00:37:03.787 --> 00:37:06.297
and help us to get progressive candidates elected all across the country.

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.

00:37:12.806 --> 00:37:17.896
He might have thought it was a dumb system but he came in and he said, "I need to learn this system,

00:37:17.900 --> 00:37:21.480
because it can be manipulated like any social system."

00:37:21.540 --> 00:37:25.850
But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat.

00:37:25.855 --> 00:37:31.170
Aaron began to take a closer look at institutions that publish academic journal articles.

00:37:31.520 --> 00:37:35.630
By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume you have access

00:37:35.630 --> 00:37:38.760
to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

00:37:38.760 --> 00:37:43.851
Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like

00:37:43.851 --> 00:37:50.952
JSTOR and Thompson Isi to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read.

00:37:51.054 --> 00:37:57.278
These scholarly journals and articles are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online,

00:37:57.278 --> 00:38:02.278
and many have been paid for with taxpayer money or with government grants,

00:38:02.413 --> 00:38:08.639
but to read them, you often have to pay again handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed-Elsevier.

00:38:08.801 --> 00:38:14.732
These licenses fees are so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in United States,

00:38:15.128 --> 00:38:18.937
don't have this kind of access. They are locked out from all of these journals.

00:38:19.253 --> 00:38:23.247
They are locked out from our entire scientific legacy.

00:38:23.247 --> 00:38:27.361
I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to The Enlightenment.

00:38:27.361 --> 00:38:32.467
Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it's been scanned, digitized, and put in these collections.

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.

00:38:39.766 --> 00:38:43.167
It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people,

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

00:38:48.127 --> 00:38:53.044
who then try to get the maximum profit they can out of it.

00:38:53.464 --> 00:38:58.769
So a researcher paid by the university or the people publishes a paper,

00:38:58.769 --> 00:39:02.312
and at the very, very last step of that process, after all the work is done,

00:39:02.312 --> 00:39:07.031
after all the original research is done--the thinking, the lab work, the analysis, after everything is done,

00:39:07.031 --> 00:39:13.359
at that last stage, then the researcher has to hand over his or her copyright to this multi-billion dollar company.

00:39:14.488 --> 00:39:18.238
And it's sick. It's an entire economy built on volunteer labor,

00:39:18.238 --> 00:39:21.080
and then the publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream.

00:39:21.930 --> 00:39:28.968
Talk about a scam. One publisher in Britain made a profit of three billion dollars last year.

00:39:28.968 --> 00:39:30.484
I mean, what a racket!

00:39:30.494 --> 00:39:34.321
JSTOR is just a very, very small player in that story

00:39:34.321 --> 00:39:41.068
but for some reason, JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront.

00:39:41.068 --> 00:39:45.009
He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing,

00:39:45.009 --> 00:39:47.070
and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,

00:39:47.070 --> 00:39:50.368
but I think they--at some point, Aaron asked the question,

00:39:50.368 --> 00:39:54.606
"How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"

00:39:54.606 --> 00:39:58.225
And they gave some--I think it was two hundred million dollars,

00:39:58.225 --> 00:40:00.422
something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.

00:40:01.166 --> 00:40:07.452
Working on a fellowship at Harvard, he knew users on MIT's famously open and fast network next door

00:40:07.452 --> 00:40:12.238
had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR. Swartz saw an opportunity.

00:40:12.238 --> 00:40:14.434
You have a key to those gates,

00:40:14.434 --> 00:40:19.694
and with a little bit of shell script magic, you can get those journal articles.

00:40:21.302 --> 00:40:23.492
On September 24, 2010,

00:40:23.492 --> 00:40:27.301
Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop

00:40:27.301 --> 00:40:31.479
on the MIT network, under the name "Garry Host".

00:40:31.479 --> 00:40:36.169
The client name was registered as "GHost laptop".

00:40:36.169 --> 00:40:38.990
He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking.

00:40:38.990 --> 00:40:40.943
The JSTOR database was organized,

00:40:40.943 --> 00:40:44.500
so it was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in JSTOR,

00:40:44.500 --> 00:40:46.567
because it was basically numbered.

00:40:46.567 --> 00:40:52.351
It was basically slash slash slash...number article 444024 and -25 and -26.

00:40:52.351 --> 00:40:55.784
He wrote a Python script called keepgrabbing.pi,

00:40:55.784 --> 00:40:58.607
which was like, keeping grabbing one article after another.

00:40:58.607 --> 00:41:02.210
The next day, GHost laptop begins grabbing articles,

00:41:02.210 --> 00:41:08.765
but soon, the computer's IP address is blocked. For Swartz, it'a barely a bump in the road.

00:41:08.765 --> 00:41:13.628
He quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading.

00:41:13.628 --> 00:41:18.172
Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps to try to interfere with this,

00:41:18.172 --> 00:41:19.766
when they notice that this is happening,

00:41:19.766 --> 00:41:22.184
and when the more modest steps don't work,

00:41:22.184 --> 00:41:27.171
then at a certain stage, JSTOR just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database.

00:41:27.171 --> 00:41:29.713
So there's a kind of cat-and-mouse game around

00:41:29.713 --> 00:41:33.876
getting access to the JSTOR database.

00:41:33.876 --> 00:41:39.920
Aaron, ultimately, obviously is the cat because he has more technical capability

00:41:39.920 --> 00:41:42.921
than the JSTOR database people do in defending them.

00:41:42.921 --> 00:41:47.228
Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings,

00:41:47.228 --> 00:41:51.495
and he went, instead of going through WiFi, he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network

00:41:51.495 --> 00:41:56.541
and just left it there with an external hard drive downloading these articles to the computer.

00:41:56.541 --> 00:42:01.812
Unknown to Swartz, his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities.

00:42:02.882 --> 00:42:05.736
They didn't stop the downloads.

00:42:05.736 --> 00:42:09.001
Instead, they installed a surveillance camera.

00:42:10.584 --> 00:42:14.540
They found the computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building.

00:42:15.382 --> 00:42:19.759
They could have unplugged it. They could have waited for the guy to come back and said,

00:42:19.759 --> 00:42:23.764
"Dude, what are you doing, you know, cut it out. Who are you?"

00:42:23.764 --> 00:42:25.887
They could have done all that kind of stuff, but they didn't.

00:42:25.887 --> 00:42:30.182
What they wanted to do was film it to gather evidence to make a case.

00:42:30.182 --> 00:42:36.477
That's the only reason you film something like that.

00:42:37.667 --> 00:42:42.082
At first, the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera

00:42:42.082 --> 00:42:46.475
was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans.

00:42:53.202 --> 00:42:57.033
But days later, it caught Swartz.

00:43:06.185 --> 00:43:10.658
Swartz is replacing the hard drive. He takes it out of his backpack,

00:43:11.240 --> 00:43:14.517
leans out of frame for about five minutes,

00:43:15.014 --> 00:43:21.863
and then leaves.

00:43:37.238 --> 00:43:41.775
And then they organized like a stakeout where, as he was biking home from MIT,

00:43:41.899 --> 00:43:44.554
these cops came out from either side of the road,

00:43:44.614 --> 00:43:48.436
or something like that, and started going after him.

00:43:49.199 --> 00:43:54.436
He describes that he was pressed down, and assaulted by the police.

00:43:55.207 --> 00:43:58.382
He tells me that they--it's unclear that they were police that were after him.

00:43:58.382 --> 00:44:02.797
He thought that someone was trying to attack him.

00:44:02.797 --> 00:44:05.914
He does tell me they beat him up.

00:44:08.395 --> 00:44:15.406
It was just devastating. The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution of anyone in our family or anything

00:44:15.406 --> 00:44:18.358
was so foreign and incomprehensible, I didn't know what to do.

00:44:18.409 --> 00:44:24.232
Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house, his apartment in Cambridge, in his office at Harvard.

00:44:27.972 --> 00:44:33.587
Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police.

00:44:33.964 --> 00:44:37.661
It had been taken over by the United States Secret Service.

00:44:38.061 --> 00:44:42.531
The Secret Service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984,

00:44:42.807 --> 00:44:47.290
but six weeks after the attack on 9/11, their role expanded.

00:44:47.290 --> 00:44:49.363
[applause]

00:44:49.532 --> 00:44:56.061
President Bush used The Patriot Act to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces".

00:44:56.791 --> 00:45:01.328
The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists.

00:45:01.643 --> 00:45:06.580
According to the Secret Service, they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact,

00:45:06.841 --> 00:45:11.169
organized criminal groups, or use of schemes involving new technology.

00:45:11.384 --> 00:45:15.866
The Secret Service turned Swartz's case over to the Boston U.S. Attorney's office.

00:45:16.246 --> 00:45:18.722
There was a guy in the U.S. attorney's office who had the title:

00:45:19.054 --> 00:45:21.895
"Head of the Computer Crimes Division or Task Force"

00:45:22.179 --> 00:45:24.317
I don't know what else he had going,

00:45:24.455 --> 00:45:29.477
but you're certainly not much of a "Computer Crimes Prosecutor" without a computer crime to prosecute,

00:45:29.994 --> 00:45:35.095
so he jumped on it, kept if for himself, didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit

00:45:35.564 --> 00:45:37.638
and that's Steve Heymann.

00:45:37.806 --> 00:45:41.896
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,

00:45:41.896 --> 00:45:46.793
but he can be seen here, in an episode of the television show "American Greed",

00:45:46.793 --> 00:45:49.550
filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.

00:45:49.550 --> 00:45:53.378
He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzales,

00:45:53.652 --> 00:45:56.899
a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades.

00:45:57.273 --> 00:46:02.017
Gonzales masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers,

00:46:02.209 --> 00:46:04.537
the largest such fraud in history.

00:46:04.852 --> 00:46:09.983
Here, Heymann, describing Gonzales, gives his view on the hacker mindset:

00:46:10.263 --> 00:46:16.178
These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by.

00:46:16.515 --> 00:46:24.774
They have an ego, they like challenge, and of course they like money and everything you can get for money.

00:46:25.134 --> 00:46:29.891
One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzales case was a young hacker named Jonathan James.

00:46:30.254 --> 00:46:33.127
Believing Gonzales' crimes would be pinned on him,

00:46:33.420 --> 00:46:36.929
James committed suicide during the investigation.

00:46:37.139 --> 00:46:40.865
In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,

00:46:41.115 --> 00:46:45.974
Heymann's boss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusets, Carmen Ortiz, said this:

00:46:46.261 --> 00:46:50.093


00:46:50.478 --> 00:46:53.751


00:46:53.811 --> 00:46:56.803
It is not true. It's obviously not true.

00:46:56.803 --> 00:46:59.057
I'm not saying it's harmless,

00:46:59.057 --> 00:47:05.502
and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalize stealing of information,

00:47:06.218 --> 00:47:09.063
but you got to be much more subtle

00:47:09.063 --> 00:47:14.261
in trying to figure out exactly which kinds of harms are harmful here.

00:47:14.897 --> 00:47:18.957
So the thing about a crowbar is, every time I break into a place with a crowbar,

00:47:18.957 --> 00:47:21.768
I do damage. There is no doubt about it.

00:47:21.768 --> 00:47:24.005
But when Aaron writes a script that says

00:47:24.206 --> 00:47:28.329
download download download, a hundred times in a second,

00:47:28.329 --> 00:47:31.047
there's no obvious damage to anybody.

00:47:31.047 --> 00:47:36.148
If he does that for the purpose of gathering an archive to do academic research on it,

00:47:36.211 --> 00:47:38.621
there is never any damage to anybody.

00:47:38.659 --> 00:47:42.925
He wasn't stealing. He wasn't selling what he got or giving it away.

00:47:42.925 --> 00:47:45.671
He was making a point, for as far as I could tell.

00:47:45.671 --> 00:47:48.149
The arrest took its toll on Swartz.

00:47:48.230 --> 00:47:49.712
He just wouldn't talk about it.

00:47:49.819 --> 00:47:51.466
I mean, he was very stressed.

00:47:51.706 --> 00:47:56.424
If you would thought that the FBI was going to come to your doorstep any day,

00:47:56.424 --> 00:47:59.604
anytime you went down the hall, even to do your laundry,

00:47:59.604 --> 00:48:03.170
and they'd break in into your apartment 'cause you left the door unlocked,

00:48:03.170 --> 00:48:06.545
like...I'd be pretty stressed,

00:48:06.545 --> 00:48:12.727
and it was clear, and so Aaron was always sort of like in a dour mood.

00:48:18.800 --> 00:48:24.093
He wouldn't give off any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time,

00:48:24.111 --> 00:48:28.345
because he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him.

00:48:31.445 --> 00:48:35.452
It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism.

00:48:35.702 --> 00:48:41.811
Time Magazine would later name, as their 2011 Person of the Year, "The Protester".

00:48:42.348 --> 00:48:46.925
There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.

00:48:49.056 --> 00:48:53.442
WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables,

00:48:53.907 --> 00:48:56.491
Manning had been under arrest at the time,

00:48:56.526 --> 00:48:59.933
it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak.

00:49:00.586 --> 00:49:04.801
Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble that

00:49:04.801 --> 00:49:07.129
has a lot of hackers in its ranks,

00:49:07.834 --> 00:49:11.357
were going on various sprees of sorts.

00:49:11.745 --> 00:49:14.107
If you compare that to what he did,

00:49:14.107 --> 00:49:17.902
this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,

00:49:18.596 --> 00:49:22.048
in a kind of private, professional matter.

00:49:22.395 --> 00:49:27.657
It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system.

00:49:28.425 --> 00:49:31.870
It just didn't belong there.

00:49:32.190 --> 00:49:36.055


00:49:36.645 --> 00:49:39.720
Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal

00:49:40.151 --> 00:49:43.230
that involved three months in prison, time in an halfway house,

00:49:43.230 --> 00:49:45.535
and a year of home detention,

00:49:45.599 --> 00:49:48.006
all without the use of a computer.

00:49:48.170 --> 00:49:52.460
It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.

00:49:52.806 --> 00:49:56.789
Here we are: we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever

00:49:57.075 --> 00:49:58.793
about what the government's case is,

00:49:58.974 --> 00:50:01.821
and we have to make this immense decision

00:50:01.976 --> 00:50:05.464
where the lawyer is pushing you to do this,

00:50:05.746 --> 00:50:09.732
the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand,

00:50:10.041 --> 00:50:13.360
and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small,

00:50:13.617 --> 00:50:18.563
so whether you're guilty or not, you're better off taking the deal.

00:50:18.908 --> 00:50:20.940
Boston has its own Computer Crimes Division,

00:50:21.315 --> 00:50:25.208
lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need.

00:50:25.999 --> 00:50:30.664
So, you know, you can imagine all sorts of cases that will be really hard to prosecute,

00:50:30.737 --> 00:50:32.897
because you've got some criminals in Russia,

00:50:33.261 --> 00:50:35.997
or you've got some people inside of a corporation

00:50:36.254 --> 00:50:40.028
that are gonna five hundred dollar lawyers or seven hundred dollar-an-hour lawyers

00:50:40.028 --> 00:50:43.856
sitting down against you, and then you've got this case with this kid,

00:50:44.156 --> 00:50:48.022
which is pretty easy to prove that he did something,

00:50:48.049 --> 00:50:52.731
and he's already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI,

00:50:52.837 --> 00:50:56.551
so why not go as tough as you can against that guy?

00:50:56.551 --> 00:50:59.714
It's good for you the prosecutor. It's good for the Republic,

00:50:59.714 --> 00:51:02.242
'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types.

00:51:02.631 --> 00:51:03.996
I was so scared.

00:51:03.996 --> 00:51:06.053
I was so scared of having my computer seized.

00:51:06.053 --> 00:51:10.228
I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being seized.

00:51:10.338 --> 00:51:15.293
I had confidential material from sources from my previous work on my laptop,

00:51:15.470 --> 00:51:20.517
and that is, above all, my priority--is to keep my sources safe.

00:51:20.677 --> 00:51:25.220
I was so scared of what was going to happen to Ada.

00:51:25.400 --> 00:51:27.764
Aaron told me that they'd offered him a deal,

00:51:28.136 --> 00:51:32.853
and he finally just said that he would take it if I told him to,

00:51:33.180 --> 00:51:37.456
and I say--I came real close to saying, "Take it."

00:51:37.673 --> 00:51:42.595
He had these--he had developed, like, serious political aspirations

00:51:42.731 --> 00:51:45.622
in the intervening time, between when, you know,

00:51:45.651 --> 00:51:51.218
that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial start-up life,

00:51:51.406 --> 00:51:56.448
and begun this new life that had come to this political activism,

00:51:57.077 --> 00:52:03.834
and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony.

00:52:04.180 --> 00:52:07.386
You know, he said to me one day, we were walking by the White House,

00:52:07.386 --> 00:52:12.379
and he said to me, "They don't let felons work there."

00:52:17.801 --> 00:52:22.031
And you know he really--he really wanted that to be his life.

00:52:22.387 --> 00:52:25.440
He hadn't killed anybody. He hadn't hurt anybody.

00:52:25.784 --> 00:52:28.298
He hadn't, like, stolen money.

00:52:28.489 --> 00:52:32.573
He hadn't done anything that seemed felony-worthy, and...

00:52:34.793 --> 00:52:39.327
there is this idea that there is no reason that he should be labelled a felon,

00:52:39.357 --> 00:52:42.892
and taken away his right to vote in many states

00:52:43.363 --> 00:52:45.807
for doing what he did. That's just outrageous.

00:52:45.807 --> 00:52:50.100
It makes sense for him to be maybe fined a bunch of money,

00:52:50.100 --> 00:52:54.467
or asked not to come back to MIT again.

00:52:54.467 --> 00:52:59.454
But to be a felon? To face jail time?

00:53:01.516 --> 00:53:04.063
Swartz turned down the plea deal.

00:53:04.342 --> 00:53:07.188
Heymann redoubled his efforts.

00:53:07.523 --> 00:53:12.457
Heymann continued to press us at all levels.

00:53:13.040 --> 00:53:15.667
Even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's

00:53:15.988 --> 00:53:18.389
Acer computer harddrive and USB drive,

00:53:18.760 --> 00:53:21.503
the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.

00:53:21.913 --> 00:53:24.847
Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR,

00:53:25.199 --> 00:53:28.380
and just what did he plan to do with them?

00:53:29.284 --> 00:53:32.167
The government claim was that he was planning to publish these.

00:53:32.709 --> 00:53:36.073
We don't really know whether that was his real intention

00:53:36.310 --> 00:53:43.068
because Aaron also had a history of doing projects where he'd analyze giant data sets of articles

00:53:43.314 --> 00:53:45.443
in order to learn interesting things about them.

00:53:45.746 --> 00:53:48.101
The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford,

00:53:48.353 --> 00:53:53.037
he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.

00:53:53.407 --> 00:53:55.948
In a project with Stanford law students,

00:53:56.115 --> 00:53:58.445
Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

00:53:58.676 --> 00:54:02.822
He uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research

00:54:02.822 --> 00:54:04.534
and favorable results.

00:54:04.764 --> 00:54:08.097
He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies

00:54:08.097 --> 00:54:11.698
giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles

00:54:11.698 --> 00:54:15.517
which were then beneficial to, like, Exxon during an oil spill.

00:54:15.637 --> 00:54:19.391
So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research.

00:54:19.441 --> 00:54:22.694
Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.

00:54:23.046 --> 00:54:25.599
In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.

00:54:25.955 --> 00:54:27.679
That would have been completely okay.

00:54:27.916 --> 00:54:33.521
If he were, on the other hand, intending to create a competitive service to JSTOR,

00:54:33.600 --> 00:54:35.887
like, we're going to set up our own, you know,

00:54:36.075 --> 00:54:39.340
access to the Harvard Law Review and charge, you know, money for it,

00:54:39.340 --> 00:54:42.632
then, okay, now it seems like criminal violation

00:54:42.632 --> 00:54:45.044
because you are commercially trying to exploit this material,

00:54:45.044 --> 00:54:48.336
but it's kind of crazy to imagine that that was what he was doing.

00:54:48.830 --> 00:54:54.196
So, but then there's the middle case: well, what if he was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world?

00:54:54.356 --> 00:54:57.195
But depending on what he was doing, it creates a very different character

00:54:57.195 --> 00:55:00.728
to how the law should be thinking about it. The government was prosecuting him

00:55:00.728 --> 00:55:03.666
as if this was like a commercial criminal violation,

00:55:03.910 --> 00:55:06.853
like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records, that it was that kind of crime.

00:55:07.001 --> 00:55:10.383
I don't know what he was going to do with that database,

00:55:10.602 --> 00:55:13.845
but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him

00:55:14.014 --> 00:55:18.615
that he was going to analyze the data for evidence of corporate funding of climate change research

00:55:18.736 --> 00:55:24.212
that led to biased results, and I totally believe that.

00:55:25.322 --> 00:55:28.638
I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me,

00:55:29.052 --> 00:55:32.968
and I thought maybe this was a way I could get out of this,

00:55:33.442 --> 00:55:35.138
just exit the situation,

00:55:35.508 --> 00:55:38.197
and I didn't want to live in fear of having my computer seized.

00:55:38.579 --> 00:55:42.889
I didn't want to live in fear of having to go to jail on a contempt of court charge

00:55:42.889 --> 00:55:46.661
if they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer.

00:55:47.146 --> 00:55:50.546
When they came to me and said, "Steve wants to talk to you,"

00:55:50.725 --> 00:55:52.856
that seemed reasonable.

00:55:53.209 --> 00:55:57.649
They offered Norton what is know as a "Queen For A Day" letter or a proffer.

00:55:57.796 --> 00:56:00.822
It allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case.

00:56:01.131 --> 00:56:03.854
Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself,

00:56:04.137 --> 00:56:06.564
for any information she revealed during the meeting.

00:56:06.787 --> 00:56:09.700
I didn't like it. I told my lawyers repeatedly

00:56:09.923 --> 00:56:13.972
that I didn't...this seemed fishy, I didn't like this, I didn't want immunity,

00:56:14.211 --> 00:56:16.325
I didn't need immunity, I hadn't done anything,

00:56:16.566 --> 00:56:19.008
but they were really, really stringent that there was--

00:56:19.172 --> 00:56:21.898
they did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity.

00:56:22.144 --> 00:56:24.822
[Interviewer] But just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal, a proffer.

00:56:24.822 --> 00:56:26.485
Right, a proffer letter.

00:56:26.485 --> 00:56:30.350
-In which you basically handed information to them in exchange for protection from prosecution.

00:56:30.432 --> 00:56:35.713
-So, it wasn't handing information over. It was--at least that's not how I saw it--

00:56:35.944 --> 00:56:38.298
it was just having a discussion, having an interview with them.

00:56:38.329 --> 00:56:40.979
-Well, they're asking you questions...
-They're asking me questions.

00:56:41.030 --> 00:56:43.043
-and they can ask about whatever they want...
-Right.

00:56:43.043 --> 00:56:45.565
- and whatever they learn...
-I really...

00:56:45.737 --> 00:56:49.983
-They can't have you prosecuted.
-Right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked.

00:56:50.384 --> 00:56:53.448
I repeatedly--I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter.

00:56:53.837 --> 00:56:56.640
I was ill. I was being pressured by my lawyers.

00:56:56.864 --> 00:56:59.723
I was confused. I was not doing well by this point.

00:57:02.582 --> 00:57:05.442
I was depressed, and I was scared, and I didn't understand the situation I was in.

00:57:05.855 --> 00:57:08.960
I had no idea why I was in this situation.

00:57:09.329 --> 00:57:13.192
I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong.

00:57:13.496 --> 00:57:15.365
We went out of our minds.

00:57:15.719 --> 00:57:19.280
Aaron was clearly very distraught about it. We were very distraught about it.

00:57:19.361 --> 00:57:21.203
Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it.

00:57:21.414 --> 00:57:23.584
We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys.

00:57:23.997 --> 00:57:28.304
I was very unused to being in a room with large men, well-armed,

00:57:28.304 --> 00:57:33.214
that are continually telling me I'm lying, and that I must have done something.

00:57:33.566 --> 00:57:36.871
I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting

00:57:37.177 --> 00:57:39.730
wasn't a crime.

00:57:40.763 --> 00:57:43.499
I told them that they were on the wrong side of history.

00:57:43.714 --> 00:57:47.262
I used that phrase. I said, "You're on the wrong side of history."

00:57:47.352 --> 00:57:52.297
And they looked bored. They didn't even look angry. They just looked bored,

00:57:52.460 --> 00:57:57.610
and it began to occur to me that we weren't having the same conversation.

00:57:57.610 --> 00:58:02.140
I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know, why people would download journal articles,

00:58:02.140 --> 00:58:05.973
and eventually--I don't remember what was around it--

00:58:05.973 --> 00:58:12.258
I mentioned that he'd done this blog post, the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto".

00:58:12.749 --> 00:58:16.130
This is the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto",

00:58:16.496 --> 00:58:20.032
supposedly written in July, 2008 in Italy.

00:58:20.673 --> 00:58:24.827
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."

00:58:25.276 --> 00:58:30.149
"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,
published over centuries in books and journals,


00:58:30.149 --> 00:58:33.634
is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

00:58:34.407 --> 00:58:38.320
"Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by."

00:58:38.408 --> 00:58:41.087
"You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences,

00:58:41.087 --> 00:58:44.633
liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends."

00:58:44.814 --> 00:58:47.812
"But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground."

00:58:48.088 --> 00:58:51.253
"It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were

00:58:51.253 --> 00:58:54.661
"the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew."

00:58:54.931 --> 00:58:57.449
"But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative."

00:58:57.666 --> 00:59:01.248
"Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy."

00:59:01.719 --> 00:59:04.356
"There's no justice in following unjust laws."

00:59:04.717 --> 00:59:08.413
"It's time to come into the light and, in a grand tradition of civil disobedience,

00:59:08.639 --> 00:59:11.710
declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture."

00:59:12.645 --> 00:59:18.572
The Manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people, and also edited by Norton.

00:59:18.572 --> 00:59:21.603
But it was Swartz who had signed his name to it.

00:59:21.964 --> 00:59:28.395
When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron and tell him everything I can remember about it,

00:59:29.104 --> 00:59:32.411
and he gets very angry.

00:59:34.502 --> 00:59:37.669
The things that I'd done shouldn't have added up that way.

00:59:40.078 --> 00:59:45.366
I hadn't done anything wrong, and everything had gone wrong,

00:59:47.257 --> 00:59:49.639
but I was never...

00:59:57.302 --> 01:00:00.162
I'm still angry.

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,

01:00:06.610 --> 01:00:09.325
and they'd turn everything against you.

01:00:09.325 --> 01:00:13.591
And they will hurt you with anything they can.

01:00:15.210 --> 01:00:19.297
And in that moment, I regret that I said what I did.

01:00:19.991 --> 01:00:23.495
But my much larger regret is that we have settled for this.

01:00:23.641 --> 01:00:25.947
That we are okay with this.

01:00:26.175 --> 01:00:28.012
That we are okay with the justice system,

01:00:28.012 --> 01:00:32.080
a system that tries to game people into little traps so they can ruin our lives.

01:00:33.080 --> 01:00:35.178
So yeah, I wish I hadn't said that.

01:00:35.585 --> 01:00:40.812
But I'm much, much angrier that this is where I am.

01:00:42.891 --> 01:00:47.505
That this is what we, as a people, think is okay.

01:00:48.358 --> 01:00:52.187
They used every method that I think they could think of

01:00:52.542 --> 01:00:56.973
to get her to provide information which would be unhelpful to Aaron,

01:00:57.257 --> 01:01:00.169
and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron,

01:01:00.584 --> 01:01:07.240
but I don't think she had information that was helpful to the government.

01:01:08.259 --> 01:01:12.051
Months go by, as Swartz's friends and family await a looming indictment.

01:01:12.572 --> 01:01:17.142
In the meantime, Swartz was becoming a go-to expert on a series of internet issues.

01:01:17.142 --> 01:01:19.826
[RT interviewer} ...a question to you then: Do you think that the internet is something

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?

01:01:25.436 --> 01:01:30.454
Yes, definitely, I mean this notion that national security is an excuse to shut down the internet,

01:01:30.576 --> 01:01:34.017
that's exactly what we heard in Egypt and Syria and all these other countries,

01:01:34.017 --> 01:01:38.679
and so, yeah, it's true, sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up some embarassing material

01:01:38.728 --> 01:01:42.553
about what the U.S. government does, and people are going to be organizing to protest about it,

01:01:42.553 --> 01:01:45.661
and try and change their government. You know, and that's a good thing,

01:01:45.661 --> 01:01:50.290
that's what all these First Amendment Rights of free expression, of freedom of association are all about,

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.

01:01:55.238 --> 01:01:58.133
A principle, I think, is one that our Founding Fathers would have understood.

01:01:58.200 --> 01:02:00.128
If the internet had been around back then,

01:02:00.128 --> 01:02:03.265
instead of putting "post offices" in the Constitution, they would have put "ISPs".

01:02:03.350 --> 01:02:05.901
[RT interviewer] Well, it's definitely interesting to see how far...

01:02:05.965 --> 01:02:10.566
Swartz meets activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and the two begin to date.

01:02:10.676 --> 01:02:12.599
[Aaron] We need a massive global public outcry.

01:02:12.648 --> 01:02:15.165
[Taren] If there's no massive global public outcry, it won't create any change.

01:02:15.290 --> 01:02:18.541
-You know, four people in this city should cause a massive global public outcry.

01:02:18.701 --> 01:02:21.952
-You know, we need a petition signer.

01:02:22.350 --> 01:02:25.809
Without telling her specifics, he warned her he was involved in something

01:02:25.809 --> 01:02:27.608
he called simply "The Bad Thing".

01:02:27.903 --> 01:02:33.039
And I had sort of crazy theories, like, that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or something.

01:02:33.089 --> 01:02:37.890
I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, actually, but...

01:02:38.284 --> 01:02:41.410
So, sometime in probably late July, Aaron called me,

01:02:41.814 --> 01:02:47.433
and I happened to pick up, and he said, "The Bad Thing" might be in the news tomorrow.

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?"

01:02:49.831 --> 01:02:52.453
And I said, "Well, I want you to tell me."

01:02:53.433 --> 01:02:58.472
Aaron said, "Well, I've been--I've been arrested

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."

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."

01:03:11.225 --> 01:03:17.283
On July 14, 2011, federal prosecutors indict Swartz on four felony counts.

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,

01:03:24.634 --> 01:03:30.135
and a few other real hackers. And Aaron is just someone who kind of looks like a hacker,

01:03:30.354 --> 01:03:34.917
enough that they can, you know, put his head on a stake and put it on the gates.

01:03:35.022 --> 01:03:37.882
Aaron went to surrender, and they arrested him.

01:03:38.248 --> 01:03:41.990
They then strip searched him,

01:03:42.548 --> 01:03:48.243
took away his shoelaces, took away his belt, and left him in solitary confinement.

01:03:50.475 --> 01:03:54.247
The District of Massachusetts United States Attorney's office released a statement

01:03:54.589 --> 01:03:57.832
saying, "Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison,

01:03:58.053 --> 01:04:00.940
to be followed by three years of supervised release,

01:04:01.139 --> 01:04:05.002
restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to one million dollars."

01:04:06.786 --> 01:04:09.370
He is released on one hundred thousand dollars bail.

01:04:09.420 --> 01:04:12.330
The same day, the primary victim in the case, JSTOR,

01:04:12.738 --> 01:04:17.769
formally drops all charges against Swartz, and declines to pursue the case.

01:04:18.139 --> 01:04:21.575
JSTOR--they weren't our friends; they weren't helpful or friendly to us,

01:04:21.575 --> 01:04:25.595
but they also were just kind of like, "We're not part of this."

01:04:25.675 --> 01:04:30.490
JSTOR, and their parent company, ITHAKA, also sidestepped requests to talk with this film.

01:04:30.868 --> 01:04:33.524
But at the time, they released a statement saying,

01:04:33.718 --> 01:04:37.696
"It was the government's decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR's."

01:04:38.497 --> 01:04:42.688
And so it's our belief that, with that, the case will be over.

01:04:43.189 --> 01:04:48.230
That we should be able to get Steve Heymann to drop the case, or settle it in some rational way.

01:04:48.654 --> 01:04:50.762
And the government refused.

01:04:51.149 --> 01:04:52.856
[Narrator] Why?

01:04:55.808 --> 01:04:58.055
Well, because I think they wanted to make an example out of Aaron,

01:04:58.369 --> 01:05:01.337
and they said they wanted--the reason why they wouldn't

01:05:01.538 --> 01:05:05.644
move on requiring a felony conviction and jail time

01:05:05.849 --> 01:05:13.255
was that they wanted to use this case as a case for deterrence. They told us that.

01:05:13.255 --> 01:05:15.199
[Interviewer] They told you that?
- Yes.

01:05:15.320 --> 01:05:17.177
-This was going to be an example?
-Yes.

01:05:17.263 --> 01:05:19.730
-He was going to be made an example?
- Yes.

01:05:20.145 --> 01:05:21.857
Steve Heymann said that.

01:05:22.170 --> 01:05:26.477
Deterring who? There's other people out there running around logging onto JSTOR,

01:05:26.679 --> 01:05:30.167
and downloading the articles to make a political statement? I mean, who are they deterring?

01:05:30.374 --> 01:05:34.551
It would be easier to understand the Obama administration's

01:05:34.597 --> 01:05:37.520
posture of supposedly being for deterrence

01:05:37.771 --> 01:05:40.756
if this was an administration that, for instance,

01:05:40.845 --> 01:05:43.601
prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime

01:05:43.645 --> 01:05:45.527
that this country has seen in the last hundred years.

01:05:45.527 --> 01:05:49.630
The crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street.

01:05:50.101 --> 01:05:52.140
When you start deploying

01:05:52.452 --> 01:05:56.329
the non-controversial idea of deterrence

01:05:56.513 --> 01:05:58.254
only selectively

01:05:58.455 --> 01:06:01.909
you stop making a dispassionate analysis of law-breaking

01:06:02.128 --> 01:06:06.663
and you started deciding to deploy law enforcement resources

01:06:06.902 --> 01:06:10.223
specifically on the basis of political ideology,

01:06:10.410 --> 01:06:14.859
and that's not just undemocratic, it's supposed to be un-American.

01:06:19.319 --> 01:06:24.382
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel

01:06:24.596 --> 01:06:27.317
that the straw that broke the camel's back

01:06:27.317 --> 01:06:31.467
was a press release sent out by an organization Swartz founded called "Demand Progress".

01:06:31.633 --> 01:06:35.853
According to the MIT account, Heymann reacted to the short statement of support,

01:06:36.050 --> 01:06:40.036
calling it a "wild internet campaign" and a "foolish move"

01:06:40.036 --> 01:06:44.326
that moved the case from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.

01:06:44.486 --> 01:06:48.646
That was a poisonous combination: a prosecutor who didn't want to lose face,

01:06:48.772 --> 01:06:53.464
who had a political career in the offing, maybe, and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them.

01:06:53.617 --> 01:06:57.747
You spend how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library,

01:06:58.019 --> 01:07:01.469
and then got your ass handed to you in court? No way!

01:07:01.615 --> 01:07:05.839
I then moved to try to put as much pressure on MIT in various ways to get them

01:07:05.980 --> 01:07:10.739
to go to the government, and request the government to stop the prosecution.

01:07:11.472 --> 01:07:14.528
[Interviewer] What was MIT's reaction to that?

01:07:14.704 --> 01:07:19.304
There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point.

01:07:23.131 --> 01:07:25.931
MIT doesn't defend Aaron

01:07:26.273 --> 01:07:30.583
which, to people inside of the MIT community, seems outrageous,

01:07:30.737 --> 01:07:35.667
because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word.

01:07:35.956 --> 01:07:41.126
At MIT, the idea of going and running around on roofs and tunnels that you weren't allowed to be in

01:07:41.318 --> 01:07:46.538
was not only a rite of passage, it was part of the MIT tour,

01:07:46.971 --> 01:07:51.071
and lockpicking was a winter course at MIT.

01:07:51.353 --> 01:07:55.753
They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks.

01:07:56.233 --> 01:08:02.073
MIT never stood up and took a position of saying to the Feds, "Don't do this."

01:08:02.221 --> 01:08:06.407
"We don't want you to do this. You're overreacting. This is too strong."

01:08:06.407 --> 01:08:08.940
...that I'm aware of.

01:08:09.104 --> 01:08:14.474
They acted kind of like any corporation would. They sort of--they helped the government,

01:08:14.706 --> 01:08:21.106
they didn't help us, unless they felt they had to, and they never tried to stop it.

01:08:22.547 --> 01:08:25.840
MIT declined repeated requests to comment,

01:08:26.090 --> 01:08:30.380
but they later released a report saying they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality,

01:08:30.577 --> 01:08:36.076
and believed Heymann and the U.S. Attorney's office did not care what MIT thought or said about the case.

01:08:36.252 --> 01:08:41.882
MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos.

01:08:42.168 --> 01:08:47.198
You could argue that MIT turned a blind eye, and that was okay for them to do,

01:08:47.389 --> 01:08:52.599
but taking that stance--taking that neutral stance, in and of itself--was taking a pro-prosecutor stance.

01:08:52.846 --> 01:08:55.831
If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,

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.

01:09:01.628 --> 01:09:04.861
If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen,

01:09:05.150 --> 01:09:08.850
they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard,

01:09:09.011 --> 01:09:11.441
which was pretty clearly against the rules.

01:09:11.602 --> 01:09:13.762
The difference between Aaron and the people I just mentioned

01:09:13.762 --> 01:09:17.952
is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place, he didn't just want to make money.

01:09:18.985 --> 01:09:23.151
Swartz continues to be outspoken on a variety of internet issues.

01:09:23.624 --> 01:09:28.869
You know, the reason the internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas,

01:09:29.001 --> 01:09:33.068
and what we need to be focusing on is getting more information about our government, more accessibility,

01:09:33.068 --> 01:09:38.484
more discussion, more debate, but instead it seems like what congress is focused on is shutting things down.

01:09:38.970 --> 01:09:44.320
Aaron thought he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people.

01:09:44.638 --> 01:09:48.728
[RT interviewer] Flame can literally control your computer, and make it spy on you.

01:09:49.149 --> 01:09:52.519
Welcome, Aaron. Good to have you back on the show here.

01:09:52.519 --> 01:09:56.909
You know, just like spies used to in olden days, put microphones and tap what people were saying,

01:09:56.975 --> 01:09:59.735
now they're using computers to do the same things.

01:09:59.807 --> 01:10:01.896
[Narrator] Swartz's political activity continues,

01:10:01.936 --> 01:10:06.676
his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy.

01:10:06.865 --> 01:10:08.709
It was called "SOPA".

01:10:09.054 --> 01:10:13.174
Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous overreach,

01:10:13.264 --> 01:10:16.254
threatening the technical integrity of the Internet itself.

01:10:16.351 --> 01:10:18.791
[Ekersley] And one of the first things I did was to call Aaron.

01:10:18.829 --> 01:10:22.359
And I said, "Can we do a big online campaign against this?"

01:10:22.432 --> 01:10:24.982
"This isn't a bill about copyright."

01:10:25.136 --> 01:10:26.576
"It's not?"

01:10:26.658 --> 01:10:30.408
"No," he said, "it's a bill about the freedom to connect."

01:10:30.815 --> 01:10:32.475
Now I was listening.

01:10:32.703 --> 01:10:36.113
And he thought about it for a while, and then said, "Yes."

01:10:36.282 --> 01:10:38.752
And he went and founded Demand Progress.

01:10:38.838 --> 01:10:44.184
Demand Progress is an online activism organization, we've got around a million and a half members now,

01:10:44.184 --> 01:10:47.231
but started in the fall of 2010.

01:10:47.422 --> 01:10:50.612
Aaron was one of the most prominent people in a community of people

01:10:50.692 --> 01:10:55.780
who helped lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country.

01:10:55.930 --> 01:11:01.424
SOPA was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies,

01:11:01.543 --> 01:11:06.993
but what it did was basically take a sledgehammer to a problem that needed a scalpel.

01:11:07.161 --> 01:11:13.368
If passed, the law would allow a company to cut off finances to entire websites without due process,

NOTE Paragraph

01:11:13.594 --> 01:11:16.834
or even to force Google to exclude their links.

01:11:16.834 --> 01:11:21.173
All they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement.

01:11:21.173 --> 01:11:27.180
It pitted the titans of traditional media against a new and now far more sophisticated remix culture.

01:11:27.270 --> 01:11:30.490
It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman,

01:11:30.687 --> 01:11:34.167
and if they don't do their job of making sure that nobody on their site uses it for anything

01:11:34.299 --> 01:11:38.799
that's even potentially illegal, the entire site can get shut down without even so much as a trial.

01:11:38.958 --> 01:11:43.728
[Lofgren] This was over the top, I mean, this was a... a catastrophe.

01:11:43.941 --> 01:11:51.687
This bill poses a serious threat to speech and civil liberties for all who use the internet.

01:11:51.922 --> 01:11:55.614
We're only a handful of us who said, "Look... we're not for piracy, either,

01:11:55.914 --> 01:12:00.517
but it makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet,

01:12:00.517 --> 01:12:05.557
the domain name system and so much that makes it free and open in the name of fighting piracy,

01:12:05.922 --> 01:12:08.022
and Aaron got that right away.

01:12:08.117 --> 01:12:11.977
The freedoms, guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on

01:12:12.057 --> 01:12:14.497
would be suddenly deleted.

01:12:14.679 --> 01:12:18.779
New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights

01:12:18.821 --> 01:12:21.382
we'd always taken for granted.

01:12:21.492 --> 01:12:27.260
And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.

01:12:28.483 --> 01:12:33.508
When SOPA was introduced in October, 2011, it was considered inevitable.

01:12:33.715 --> 01:12:37.617
Our strategy, when it first came out, was to hopefully slow the bill down,

01:12:37.617 --> 01:12:41.797
maybe weaken it a little bit, uh but, even we

01:12:41.797 --> 01:12:44.828
didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill.

01:12:46.230 --> 01:12:52.025
Having worked in Washington, what you learn is that, typically in Washington,

01:12:52.250 --> 01:12:57.822
the legislative fights are fights between different sets of corporate monied interests.

01:12:58.220 --> 01:13:02.223
They're all duking it out to pass legislation, and the fights that are the closest

01:13:02.693 --> 01:13:07.143
are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests,

01:13:07.363 --> 01:13:11.264
and they're financially equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying.

01:13:11.437 --> 01:13:13.269
Those are the closest ones.

01:13:13.351 --> 01:13:16.413
The ones that aren't even fights, typically, are ones

01:13:16.413 --> 01:13:20.676
where all the money is on one side, all the corporations are on one side,

01:13:20.691 --> 01:13:23.603
and it's just millions of people on the other side.

01:13:25.257 --> 01:13:30.369
Haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service.

01:13:30.676 --> 01:13:36.587
There were more than forty United States senators on that bill as co-sponsors,

01:13:36.860 --> 01:13:40.534
so they were already a long, long way to getting the

01:13:40.534 --> 01:13:43.968
sixty votes to have it clear all the procedural hoops.

01:13:44.456 --> 01:13:47.603
Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period.

01:13:48.112 --> 01:13:53.381
Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal enormous support using traditional outreach

01:13:53.605 --> 01:13:59.267
combined with commonly used Voice over IP to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

01:14:00.011 --> 01:14:03.847
I've never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level

01:14:03.847 --> 01:14:07.985
both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side.

01:14:08.867 --> 01:14:12.669
Millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-SOPA petitions.

01:14:12.948 --> 01:14:14.922
Congress was caught off guard.

01:14:15.251 --> 01:14:20.233
There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill,

01:14:20.478 --> 01:14:22.897
watching them insist they could regulate the internet,

01:14:23.070 --> 01:14:25.248
and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them.

01:14:25.248 --> 01:14:26.390
I am not a nerd.

01:14:26.621 --> 01:14:28.084
I'm just not enough of a nerd...

01:14:28.398 --> 01:14:31.120
Maybe we oughta ask some nerds what this thing really does. [laughter]

01:14:31.120 --> 01:14:33.413
Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds...

01:14:33.413 --> 01:14:35.890
[laughter]

01:14:35.890 --> 01:14:37.689
Really?

01:14:37.719 --> 01:14:40.101
[laughter]

01:14:40.287 --> 01:14:41.275
"Nerds"?

01:14:41.275 --> 01:14:42.315
[laughter]

01:14:42.361 --> 01:14:45.689
You know, I think, actually the word you're looking for is "experts"...

01:14:45.788 --> 01:14:47.166
[laughter]

01:14:47.275 --> 01:14:51.625
to enlighten you so your laws don't backfire [audience laughter and applause]

01:14:51.625 --> 01:14:53.568
and break the internet.

01:14:53.714 --> 01:14:57.033
We use the term "geek" but we're allowed to use that because we are geeks.

01:14:57.329 --> 01:15:01.521
The fact that it got as far as it did, without them talking to any technical experts

01:15:01.905 --> 01:15:04.839
reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town.

01:15:05.198 --> 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."

01:15:12.439 --> 01:15:15.421
There used to be an office that provided science and technology advice,

01:15:15.741 --> 01:15:19.208
and members could go to them, and say, "Help me understand X,Y,Z."

01:15:19.208 --> 01:15:22.375
And Gingrich killed it. He said it was a waste of money.

01:15:22.375 --> 01:15:26.118
Ever since then, Congress has plunged into the Dark Ages.

01:15:26.529 --> 01:15:29.554
I don't think anybody really thought that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron.

01:15:30.464 --> 01:15:34.113
Like, it was worth trying, but it didn't seem winnable

01:15:34.810 --> 01:15:38.653
and I remember, maybe a few months later, I remember him just turning to me and being, like,

01:15:38.653 --> 01:15:40.700
"I think we might win this."

01:15:40.840 --> 01:15:43.949
And I was, like, "That would be amazing."

01:15:44.439 --> 01:15:46.134
Calls to Congress continue.

01:15:46.317 --> 01:15:50.512
When the domain hosting site Go Daddy becomes a supporter of the bill,

01:15:50.747 --> 01:15:54.902
tens of thousands of users transferred their domain names in protest.

01:15:55.272 --> 01:16:00.084
Within a week, a humbled Go Daddy reverses their position on SOPA.

01:16:00.376 --> 01:16:05.962
When the congress people that supported, uh, the record and movie industries,

01:16:06.383 --> 01:16:10.707
realized that there was this backlash, they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit.

01:16:10.879 --> 01:16:16.081
You could see the curve happening, you could see that we were, that our arguments were starting to resonate.

01:16:16.357 --> 01:16:19.034
It was like Aaron had been, like, striking a match and it was being blown out,

01:16:19.034 --> 01:16:21.055
striking another one, and it was being blown out,

01:16:21.055 --> 01:16:24.645
and finally he'd, like, managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught

01:16:24.692 --> 01:16:27.590
and then it turned into this roaring blaze.

01:16:27.820 --> 01:16:31.743
On January 16, 2012, the White House issued a statement

01:16:31.743 --> 01:16:34.326
saying they didn't support the bill.

01:16:34.348 --> 01:16:36.603
And then this happened:

01:16:36.662 --> 01:16:40.202
I'm a big believer that, uh, we should be dealing with issues of piracy,

01:16:40.202 --> 01:16:44.745
and we should deal with them in a serious way, uh, but this bill is not the right bill.

01:16:44.924 --> 01:16:48.965
When Jimmy Wales put his support toward blacking out Wikipedia,

01:16:49.337 --> 01:16:52.520
the number five most popular website in the world,

01:16:52.849 --> 01:16:58.789
this is a website that's seven percent of all of the clicks on anywhere on the internet.

01:16:58.880 --> 01:17:00.089
Wikipedia went black.

01:17:00.165 --> 01:17:01.141
Reddit went black.

01:17:01.233 --> 01:17:03.221
Craigslist went black.

01:17:03.340 --> 01:17:06.050
The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat out melted.

01:17:06.179 --> 01:17:10.295
Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill

01:17:10.815 --> 01:17:13.927
that they were promoting just a couple days ago.

01:17:14.106 --> 01:17:17.698
Within 24 hours, the number of opponents of SOPA in Congress

01:17:17.853 --> 01:17:19.215
went from this

01:17:19.457 --> 01:17:22.591
to this.

01:17:22.796 --> 01:17:29.815
To see congressmen and senators slowly flip sides throughout the day of the blackout

01:17:30.051 --> 01:17:31.825
was pretty unbelievable.

01:17:32.175 --> 01:17:35.210
There was like a hundred representative swing.

01:17:35.378 --> 01:17:38.746
And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this,

01:17:38.924 --> 01:17:40.756
we had won.

01:17:41.049 --> 01:17:43.210
The thing that everyone said was impossible,

01:17:43.459 --> 01:17:46.486
that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipedream,

01:17:46.779 --> 01:17:48.697
had happened.

01:17:49.142 --> 01:17:50.467
We did it.

01:17:50.933 --> 01:17:52.689
We won.

01:17:52.909 --> 01:17:55.525


01:17:55.945 --> 01:17:58.781
This is a historic week in internet politics--maybe American politics.

01:17:59.081 --> 01:18:04.069
The thing that we heard from people in Washington, D.C., from the staffers on Capitol Hill was:

01:18:04.478 --> 01:18:08.664
they received more emails and more phone calls on SOPA Blackout Day

01:18:08.908 --> 01:18:11.080
than they'd ever received about anything.

01:18:11.317 --> 01:18:13.224
I think that was an extremely exciting moment.

01:18:13.397 --> 01:18:17.640
This was the moment when the internet had grown up, politically.

01:18:17.934 --> 01:18:21.463
It was exhilarating because it's hard to believe it actually happened.

01:18:21.658 --> 01:18:25.365
It's hard to believe a bill with so much financial power behind it

01:18:25.679 --> 01:18:29.157
didn't simply sail through the Congress.

01:18:29.541 --> 01:18:32.167
And not only did not sail through, it didn't pass at all.

01:18:32.757 --> 01:18:34.153


01:18:34.153 --> 01:18:36.669
It's easy sometimes to feel like you're powereless,

01:18:36.669 --> 01:18:40.524
like when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell and nobody hears you.

01:18:40.889 --> 01:18:43.568
But I'm here to tell you today, you are powerful.

01:18:43.568 --> 01:18:46.295
[Crowd cheers]

01:18:46.295 --> 01:18:50.936
So, yeah, maybe sometimes you feel like you're not being listened to, but I'm here to tell you that you are.

01:18:50.976 --> 01:18:53.400
You are being listened to. You are making a difference.

01:18:53.588 --> 01:18:56.992
You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.

01:18:57.132 --> 01:18:59.974
[Crowd cheers]

01:19:00.049 --> 01:19:01.170
Stop PIPA.

01:19:01.170 --> 01:19:02.916
Stop SOPA.

01:19:02.916 --> 01:19:04.072
[Crowd cheers]

01:19:04.182 --> 01:19:07.648
Some of the biggest internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit

01:19:07.648 --> 01:19:11.219
from a world in which their little competitors could get censored.

01:19:12.519 --> 01:19:15.106
We can't let that happen.

01:19:15.172 --> 01:19:19.291
For him, it was more important to be sure that you made a small change

01:19:19.612 --> 01:19:23.271
than to play a small part in a big change.

01:19:23.708 --> 01:19:28.187
But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change,

01:19:28.187 --> 01:19:30.753
and so for him, it was kind of this proof of concept

01:19:30.753 --> 01:19:35.069
like, "Okay, you know, what I want to do with my life is change the world."

01:19:35.326 --> 01:19:39.471
"I think about it in this really scientific way of, like, I'm measuring my impact,

01:19:39.725 --> 01:19:42.813
and this shows that it's possible."

01:19:43.081 --> 01:19:45.810
"Right, the thing that I want to do with my life is possible."

01:19:46.078 --> 01:19:48.763
"Um, I have proved that I can do it,

01:19:48.763 --> 01:19:50.999
that I, Aaron Swartz, can change the world."

01:19:51.090 --> 01:19:57.516
For a guy who, um, never really thought he had done much, which was Aaron, um,

01:19:59.161 --> 01:20:04.115
was one of the few moments where you could really see

01:20:04.115 --> 01:20:06.769
that he felt like he had done something good,

01:20:06.994 --> 01:20:11.836
feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap.

01:20:13.828 --> 01:20:16.060
Everyone said there was no way we could stop SOPA.

01:20:16.194 --> 01:20:17.903
We stopped it.

01:20:17.997 --> 01:20:22.576
This is three outrageously good victories, and the year isn't even over yet.

01:20:22.747 --> 01:20:26.257
I mean, if there's a time to be positive, it's now.

01:20:26.847 --> 01:20:29.700
You know, he wins at SOPA a year after he's arrested.

01:20:29.989 --> 01:20:33.529
It's not unambiguously happy moments. There's a lot going on.

01:20:33.813 --> 01:20:40.334
He's so attuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him.

01:20:40.576 --> 01:20:44.521
The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous,

01:20:44.831 --> 01:20:48.074
and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance,

01:20:48.402 --> 01:20:50.959
Swartz was already concerned.

01:20:51.240 --> 01:20:55.200
It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax

01:20:55.404 --> 01:20:59.777
that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is.

01:20:59.857 --> 01:21:03.863
And if the answer is: "Oh, we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them"

01:21:04.186 --> 01:21:06.483
then that's an awful lot of people.

01:21:06.811 --> 01:21:10.063
It'd be one thing if they said, "Look-you know- we know the number of telephones we're spying on,

01:21:10.063 --> 01:21:12.953
we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."

01:21:13.050 --> 01:21:15.916
but they just came back and said, "We can't give you a number at all."

01:21:16.229 --> 01:21:18.644
That's pretty-I mean-that's scary, is what it is.

01:21:18.881 --> 01:21:25.502
And they put incredible pressure on him, took away his, um, you know, all of the money he had made.

01:21:25.803 --> 01:21:29.538
They, you know, threatened to take away his physical freedom.

01:21:29.937 --> 01:21:33.788
Why'd they do it, you know? I mean, well, why are they going after whistleblowers?

01:21:34.741 --> 01:21:38.813
You know, why are they going after people who tell the--you know--who tell the truth

01:21:39.114 --> 01:21:46.122
about all sorts of things, I mean, from the banks, to war, to just sort of government transparency.

01:21:46.744 --> 01:21:49.776
So secrecy serves those who are already in power,

01:21:50.026 --> 01:21:55.097
and we are living in an era of secrecy that coincides with an era where the government is doing, also,

01:21:55.278 --> 01:21:58.410
a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional.

01:21:58.841 --> 01:22:01.941
So, those two things are not coincidences.

01:22:02.154 --> 01:22:04.378
It's very clear that this technology has been developed

01:22:04.731 --> 01:22:10.080
not for small countries overseas, but right here, for use in the United States, by the U.S. government.

01:22:10.331 --> 01:22:14.351
The problem with the spying program is it's this sort of long, slow expansion, you know,

01:22:14.604 --> 01:22:17.124
going back to the Nixon administation, right,

01:22:17.319 --> 01:22:20.082
obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush,

01:22:20.316 --> 01:22:23.536
and Obama has continued to expand it, and the problems have slowly grown worse and worse,

01:22:24.028 --> 01:22:27.553
but there's never been this moment you can point to and say,

01:22:27.701 --> 01:22:31.941
"Okay, we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters..."

01:22:32.455 --> 01:22:38.959
The prosecution, in my estimation of Aaron Swartz, was about sending a particular, laser-like message

01:22:39.363 --> 01:22:45.413
to a group of people that the Obama administration sees as politically threatening,

01:22:47.341 --> 01:22:54.141
and that is, essentially, the hacker, the information, and the democracy activist community,

01:22:54.447 --> 01:22:59.702
and the message that the Obama administration wanted to send to that particular community was,

01:22:59.905 --> 01:23:05.113
in my estimation, "We know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment,

01:23:05.335 --> 01:23:08.677
and so we are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz

01:23:08.977 --> 01:23:13.418
to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."

01:23:13.843 --> 01:23:17.160
And the government said, "Oh, the legal opinions we're using

01:23:17.382 --> 01:23:20.453
to legalize the spying program are also classified,

01:23:20.786 --> 01:23:23.666
so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you."

01:23:24.011 --> 01:23:26.461
You know, every time they can say, "Oh, this is another instance of cyberwar.

01:23:26.685 --> 01:23:30.201
The cybercriminals are attacking us again. We're all in danger. We're all under threat."

01:23:30.510 --> 01:23:33.737
They use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws.

01:23:35.563 --> 01:23:40.388
[Interviewer] And so just to follow, like, personally, how do you feel the fight is going?

01:23:40.947 --> 01:23:42.404
It's up to you!

01:23:42.404 --> 01:23:46.264
[Interviewer] I know, it's just that, we gotta like, you know...

01:23:47.800 --> 01:23:52.738
You know, there's sort of these two polarizing perspectives, right,

01:23:52.936 --> 01:23:57.422
everything is great, the internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everything's going to be fantastic

01:23:57.422 --> 01:23:59.093
or everything is terrible,

01:23:59.093 --> 01:24:01.914
the internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying,

01:24:01.972 --> 01:24:03.762
and you know, controlling what we say.

01:24:03.821 --> 01:24:05.700
And the thing is, both are true, right?

01:24:05.948 --> 01:24:10.040
The internet has done both, and both are kind of amazing and astonishing

01:24:10.386 --> 01:24:13.287
and which one will win out in the long run is up to us.

01:24:13.443 --> 01:24:17.244
It doesn't make sense to say, "Oh, one is doing better than the other." You know, they're both true.

01:24:17.501 --> 01:24:21.097
And it's up to us which ones we emphasize and which ones we take advantage of

01:24:21.233 --> 01:24:23.600
because they're both there, and they're both always going to be there.

01:24:28.950 --> 01:24:35.010
On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Swartz,

01:24:35.010 --> 01:24:40.170
adding additional counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer, and computer fraud.

01:24:40.825 --> 01:24:45.557
Now, instead of four felony counts, Swartz was facing thirteen.

01:24:45.882 --> 01:24:48.835
The prosecution's leverage had dramatically increased,

01:24:49.043 --> 01:24:52.294
as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines.

01:24:52.294 --> 01:24:55.417
They filed a separate indictment to add more charges,

01:24:55.804 --> 01:25:01.526
and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes,

01:25:01.899 --> 01:25:06.010
and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law.

01:25:07.331 --> 01:25:10.426
That theory, and much of the prosecution's case against Swartz

01:25:10.904 --> 01:25:13.862
involved a law created originally in 1986.

01:25:14.360 --> 01:25:16.663
It is called the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".

01:25:16.996 --> 01:25:18.660
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

01:25:18.660 --> 01:25:22.261
was inspired by the movie "War Games" with Matthew Broderick--great movie.

01:25:22.478 --> 01:25:23.954
[Broderick] I have you now.

01:25:23.954 --> 01:25:27.895
In this movie, a kid gets the ability, through the magic of computer networks

01:25:28.123 --> 01:25:30.456
to, like, launch a nuclear attack.

01:25:30.551 --> 01:25:33.561
[missiles firing up]

01:25:33.761 --> 01:25:37.669
You know, that's not actually possible, and it certainly wasn't possible in the '80s

01:25:37.854 --> 01:25:41.954
but apparently this movie scared Congress enough to...

01:25:42.005 --> 01:25:44.965
pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

01:25:45.262 --> 01:25:48.711
This is a law that's just behind the times, for example, it penalizes

01:25:49.431 --> 01:25:53.995
a terms of service kind of arrangement. You can have something like

01:25:54.103 --> 01:26:01.111
eHarmony or Match.com and somebody sort of inflates, uh, their own personal characteristics

01:26:01.409 --> 01:26:05.255
and all of a sudden, depending on the jurisdiction and the prosecutors,

01:26:05.503 --> 01:26:07.958
they could be in a whole host of troubles.

01:26:08.172 --> 01:26:10.263
We all know what "Terms of Use" are.

01:26:10.594 --> 01:26:14.214
Most people don't read them, but not abiding by their terms could mean

01:26:14.438 --> 01:26:16.461
you are committing a felony.

01:26:16.727 --> 01:26:19.024
The website Terms of Service often say things like:

01:26:19.272 --> 01:26:22.492
"Be nice to each other", or "Don't do anything that's improper."

01:26:22.789 --> 01:26:27.496
The idea that the Criminal Law has anything to say about these kinds of violations,

01:26:27.668 --> 01:26:30.721
I think strikes most people as crazy.

01:26:30.938 --> 01:26:33.483
The examples get even more "crazy":

01:26:33.864 --> 01:26:39.557
Until it was changed in March of 2013, the Terms of Use on the website of Hearst's Seventeen magazine

01:26:39.884 --> 01:26:43.258
said you had to be eighteen in order to read it.

01:26:43.327 --> 01:26:46.674
I would say that the way the CFAA has been interpreted by the Justice Department,

01:26:46.674 --> 01:26:49.223
we are probably all breaking the law.

01:26:49.589 --> 01:26:54.937
Vague and prone to misuse, the CFAA has become a one-size-fits-all hammer

01:26:55.000 --> 01:26:58.012
for a wide range of computer-related disputes.

01:26:58.121 --> 01:27:00.408
Though not the only factor in his case,

01:27:00.576 --> 01:27:04.935
eleven of the thirteen charges against Swartz involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

01:27:07.248 --> 01:27:11.465
The question "Why?" hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz.

01:27:11.815 --> 01:27:16.045
Just what was motivating the government, and what would their case have been?

01:27:16.185 --> 01:27:19.945
The Department of Justice declined requests for answers,

01:27:20.060 --> 01:27:23.660
but Professor Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case.

01:27:24.084 --> 01:27:28.109
So, I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons:

01:27:28.359 --> 01:27:31.303
I was a federal prosecutor at the Justice Department for three years.

01:27:31.461 --> 01:27:34.191
Before I started teaching, the government came forward

01:27:34.191 --> 01:27:38.463
with an indictment based on what crimes they thought were committed,

01:27:38.501 --> 01:27:42.176
just as a purely lawyer's matter, looking at the precedents, looking at the statute,

01:27:42.505 --> 01:27:45.778
looking at the history, looking at the cases that are out there so far.

01:27:45.974 --> 01:27:49.281
Uh, I think it was a fair indictment based on that.

01:27:49.526 --> 01:27:51.501
You can debate whether they should have charged this case.

01:27:51.806 --> 01:27:56.825
There's just a lot of disagreement. Some people are on the Open Access side, some people are not.

01:27:57.681 --> 01:28:03.108
I think the government took Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" very seriously,

01:28:04.086 --> 01:28:09.706
uh, and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed as a moral imperative

01:28:10.059 --> 01:28:15.147
to breaking the law, to overcome a law that Swartz saw as unjust,

01:28:15.332 --> 01:28:20.968
and in a democracy, if you think a law is unjust, there are ways of changing that law.

01:28:21.140 --> 01:28:24.465
There's going to Congress as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA,

01:28:24.662 --> 01:28:28.441
uh, or you can violate that law in a way to try to nullify that law

01:28:28.834 --> 01:28:33.998
and I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was committed,

01:28:34.205 --> 01:28:39.691
not just to breaking the law, but to really making sure that law was nullified.

01:28:40.006 --> 01:28:43.890
That everyone would have access to the database in a way that

01:28:44.054 --> 01:28:47.129
you couldn't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

01:28:47.368 --> 01:28:51.199
It would be done, and Swartz's side would win.

01:28:52.815 --> 01:28:56.181
There's a big disagreement in society as to whether that is and unjust law,

01:28:56.470 --> 01:29:00.357
and ultimately, that is a decision for the American people to make, working through Congress.

01:29:00.621 --> 01:29:03.547
Uh, and then the second problem is, I think, we're still trying to figure out:

01:29:03.752 --> 01:29:07.706
What's the line between less serious offences and more serious offences?

01:29:08.027 --> 01:29:12.317
We're now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse,

01:29:12.556 --> 01:29:16.840
and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are

01:29:17.044 --> 01:29:19.277
'cause we're just working that out.

01:29:19.650 --> 01:29:22.392
This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion.

01:29:22.659 --> 01:29:25.891
The hammer that the Justice Department has to scare people with

01:29:25.998 --> 01:29:28.700
just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,

01:29:28.914 --> 01:29:33.111
and so, most people just, you know, you can't roll the dice with your life like that.

01:29:33.340 --> 01:29:35.958
Should we tap somebody's phone? Should we film them?

01:29:36.111 --> 01:29:39.413
Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?

01:29:39.689 --> 01:29:42.366
That's how federal agents and prosecutors think.

01:29:42.528 --> 01:29:44.974
They build cases. They make cases.

01:29:46.918 --> 01:29:51.452
Swartz was caught in the gears of a brutal criminal justice system that could not turn back,

01:29:51.746 --> 01:29:57.193
a machine that has made America the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

01:29:57.571 --> 01:30:02.512
We have, in this country, allowed ourselves to be captured by the politics of fear and anger,

01:30:02.905 --> 01:30:07.986
and anything we're afraid of, like the future of internet and access,

01:30:08.453 --> 01:30:13.233
and anything we're angry about, instinctively creates a criminal justice intervention,

01:30:13.686 --> 01:30:18.924
and we've used jail, prison, and punishment to resolve a whole host of problems

01:30:19.220 --> 01:30:23.007
that, historically, were never seen as criminal justice problems.

01:30:23.223 --> 01:30:28.583
The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute, which is part of what

01:30:28.792 --> 01:30:32.138
has created this debate and controversy over online access and information on the internet.

01:30:32.953 --> 01:30:35.706
It's very consistent with what we've seen in other areas.

01:30:35.928 --> 01:30:39.960
The one difference is that the people who are usually targeted and victimized

01:30:40.327 --> 01:30:45.901
by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority.

01:30:47.747 --> 01:30:50.860
Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.

01:30:51.222 --> 01:30:53.503
He had basically stopped working on anything else,

01:30:53.548 --> 01:30:57.283
and the case was, in fact, taking over sort of his whole life.

01:30:57.296 --> 01:31:02.457
One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he, he was emotionally vulnerable,

01:31:03.220 --> 01:31:07.333
and that that was something they really needed to keep in mind so that they, they knew that.

01:31:07.333 --> 01:31:09.578
It was weighing on him very heavily.

01:31:09.820 --> 01:31:14.877
He did not like having his actions and his movements restricted in any way,

01:31:15.754 --> 01:31:20.902
and the threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot,

01:31:21.919 --> 01:31:23.931
was terrifying to him.

01:31:23.931 --> 01:31:26.540
Completely exhausted his financial resouces,

01:31:26.540 --> 01:31:32.178
and it cost us a lot of money also, and he raised a substantial amount of money,

01:31:32.511 --> 01:31:36.481
so it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

01:31:36.755 --> 01:31:38.551
[Interviewer] The legal defence?
- Yes.

01:31:38.551 --> 01:31:40.855
[Interviewer] Was in millions?
- Yes.

01:31:41.479 --> 01:31:43.995
Yeah, I think he didn't want to be a burden to people.

01:31:44.252 --> 01:31:47.786
I think that was a factor, like, "I have my normal life,

01:31:48.166 --> 01:31:50.291
and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with,

01:31:50.452 --> 01:31:53.259
and I try to, like, keep the two of them as separate as possible,

01:31:53.489 --> 01:31:57.484
but they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty."

01:31:59.333 --> 01:32:02.686
Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher:

01:32:02.720 --> 01:32:05.149
Do you admit guilt and move on with your life,

01:32:05.166 --> 01:32:07.458
or do you fight a broken system?

01:32:07.622 --> 01:32:09.651
With his legal case, the answer was simple:

01:32:09.651 --> 01:32:13.079
He rejects a final plea deal and a trial date is set.

01:32:13.300 --> 01:32:17.174
Aaron was, was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something

01:32:17.381 --> 01:32:21.639
that he didn't believe was fair, but I also think he was scared.

01:32:33.045 --> 01:32:34.912
I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

01:32:35.113 --> 01:32:38.758
I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse, and I would have given him a big hug,

01:32:38.977 --> 01:32:44.344
and we would have walked across that little river in Boston, and gone and had a couple of beers.

01:32:45.752 --> 01:32:50.094
I really thought that we were right. I thought that we were going to win the case.

01:32:50.094 --> 01:32:52.025
I thought that we could win the case.

01:32:52.025 --> 01:32:54.611
He didn't talk about it very much, but you could see

01:32:54.611 --> 01:32:57.548
the enormous pain that he was going through.

01:32:57.605 --> 01:33:01.749
[song]

01:33:01.940 --> 01:33:05.106
No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings

01:33:05.360 --> 01:33:10.846
or like, depressive episodes, or anything that I would describe as "severe depression"

01:33:11.114 --> 01:33:13.962
and it's possible, you know, he was depressed. People get depressed.

01:33:14.155 --> 01:33:18.867
[music]

01:33:19.112 --> 01:33:23.415
Very early in our relationship, like three or four weeks in or something,

01:33:24.078 --> 01:33:26.730
I remember him saying to me

01:33:27.787 --> 01:33:30.711
that I was a lot stronger than he was.

01:33:30.947 --> 01:33:33.660
You know, he was-- he was brittle in a lot of ways.

01:33:33.830 --> 01:33:36.999
Things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

01:33:37.200 --> 01:33:39.810
That was part of his brilliance, too.

01:33:41.216 --> 01:33:46.909
I think he probably had something like clinical depression in his early twenties.

01:33:47.228 --> 01:33:49.702
I don't think he did when I was with him.

01:33:49.971 --> 01:33:55.275
He wasn't a "joyful" person, but that's different from being depressed.

01:33:56.843 --> 01:34:01.616
He was just under such, such enormous pressure for two years straight.

01:34:01.842 --> 01:34:04.193
He just didn't want to do it anymore.

01:34:04.375 --> 01:34:07.729
He was just, like, I just think it was too much.

01:34:07.814 --> 01:34:14.503
[song]

01:34:14.571 --> 01:34:17.320
I got a phone call late at night.

01:34:17.814 --> 01:34:23.091
I could tell something was wrong, and then I called and I realized what had happened.

01:34:23.981 --> 01:34:29.059
A co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "reddit" has been found dead.

01:34:29.247 --> 01:34:31.730
Police say twenty-six-year-old Aaron Swartz

01:34:31.828 --> 01:34:35.585
killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.

01:34:37.539 --> 01:34:46.506
I just thought, we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation.

01:34:46.963 --> 01:34:51.096
I was, like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.

01:34:57.082 --> 01:35:00.299
It was one of the hardest nights of my life.

01:35:00.548 --> 01:35:04.883
I just kept screaming, "I can't hear you! What did you say? I can't hear you!"

01:35:07.693 --> 01:35:09.240
I can't. That's it.

01:35:09.240 --> 01:35:11.098
[Interviewer] Okay.

01:35:16.408 --> 01:35:22.553
Uh...like, yeah, none of it made any sense,

01:35:22.773 --> 01:35:25.180
and really it still doesn't.

01:35:25.180 --> 01:35:27.561
I was so frustrated, angry.

01:35:32.652 --> 01:35:36.688
[exhales]

01:35:38.217 --> 01:35:43.326
You know, I tried to explain it to my kids.

01:35:43.885 --> 01:35:47.198
My three-year-old told me that the doctors would fix him.

01:35:52.576 --> 01:35:56.826
I've known lots of people that have died, but I've never lost anybody like this,

01:35:56.984 --> 01:36:04.001
because everybody feels, and I do too, there is so much we could have-- more to do like, uh

01:36:05.102 --> 01:36:11.196
I just didn't know he was there. I didn't know this was what he was suffering and...

01:36:11.656 --> 01:36:14.375
He was part of me.

01:36:16.585 --> 01:36:20.845
And I just wanted it to not be real, and then...

01:36:25.105 --> 01:36:29.367
and then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date,

01:36:33.244 --> 01:36:35.761
"to 2013".

01:36:43.894 --> 01:36:45.974


01:36:46.064 --> 01:36:50.710


01:36:50.710 --> 01:36:54.304


01:36:54.304 --> 01:36:56.314


01:36:57.420 --> 01:37:02.709


01:37:03.097 --> 01:37:05.536


01:37:05.606 --> 01:37:08.082


01:37:08.142 --> 01:37:11.808


01:37:14.958 --> 01:37:19.636
My first thought was: what if nobody even notices?

01:37:19.636 --> 01:37:24.108
You know, because it wasn't clear to me how salient he was.

01:37:24.508 --> 01:37:30.060
I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw.

01:37:30.060 --> 01:37:32.116
The Net just lit up.

01:37:32.116 --> 01:37:37.677
I mean, everyone was trying to explain it in their own way, but I've never seen

01:37:38.281 --> 01:37:40.356
people grieve on Twitter before.

01:37:40.356 --> 01:37:43.888
People were visibly grieving online.

01:37:46.552 --> 01:37:49.668
He was the internet's own boy,

01:37:50.115 --> 01:37:54.126
and the old world killed him.

01:37:55.747 --> 01:38:01.316
We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched.

01:38:02.204 --> 01:38:06.564
Architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the president, regularly.

01:38:06.564 --> 01:38:12.989
In the middle of that time, the idea that this is what the government had to prosecute,

01:38:14.774 --> 01:38:17.859
It just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.

01:38:17.859 --> 01:38:23.643
The question is: Can we do something, given what's happened,

01:38:23.643 --> 01:38:26.698
to make the world a better place?

01:38:26.698 --> 01:38:28.817
And how can we further that legacy?

01:38:28.817 --> 01:38:32.284
That's the only question one could ask.

01:38:33.310 --> 01:38:37.796
All over the world there are starting to be hack-a-thons, gatherings,

01:38:37.971 --> 01:38:43.578
Aaron Swartz has, in some sense, brought the best out of us, in trying to say:

01:38:44.044 --> 01:38:47.079
How do we fix this?

01:38:47.994 --> 01:38:52.892
He was, in my humble opinion, one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries

01:38:52.892 --> 01:38:55.817
that this country has produced.

01:38:55.817 --> 01:38:59.504
I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious,

01:38:59.715 --> 01:39:05.939
but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with.

01:39:06.089 --> 01:39:12.430
When we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,

01:39:12.601 --> 01:39:17.163
we've broken the rule of law, we've desecrated the temple of justice.

01:39:17.344 --> 01:39:19.684
Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

01:39:19.684 --> 01:39:21.756
[applause]

01:39:21.756 --> 01:39:25.525
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,

01:39:25.525 --> 01:39:29.084
it comes through continuous struggle.

01:39:30.316 --> 01:39:32.703
Aaron really could do magic,

01:39:32.976 --> 01:39:36.308
and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death.

01:39:36.308 --> 01:39:40.409
He believed that he could change the world, and he was right.

01:39:40.780 --> 01:39:44.935
Out of the last week, and out of today, phoenixes are already rising.

01:39:45.022 --> 01:39:46.728
[applause]

01:39:46.978 --> 01:39:51.605
Since Swartz's death, Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden

01:39:51.605 --> 01:39:55.509
have introduced legislation that would reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act--

01:39:55.811 --> 01:40:00.563
the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Swartz.

01:40:00.816 --> 01:40:03.511
It's called "Aaron's Law".

01:40:03.511 --> 01:40:07.310
Aaron believed that, like, you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time:

01:40:07.310 --> 01:40:10.731
What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now?

01:40:10.940 --> 01:40:13.203
And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?

01:40:13.203 --> 01:40:15.758
[Protesters] This is what democracy looks like!

01:40:15.758 --> 01:40:17.278
[crowd chants] We are the people too!

01:40:17.278 --> 01:40:21.088
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

01:40:21.088 --> 01:40:22.814
Stand up, fight back!

01:40:22.814 --> 01:40:25.928
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

01:40:25.928 --> 01:40:30.929
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! NROC ??? has got to go!

01:40:33.740 --> 01:40:37.331
I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.

01:40:37.331 --> 01:40:39.898
But we can change the future and we must.

01:40:39.898 --> 01:40:44.107
We must do so for Aaron, we must do so for ourselves.

01:40:44.107 --> 01:40:48.797
We must do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place,

01:40:48.797 --> 01:40:54.179
a place where justice works, and access to knowledge becomes a human right. [applause]

01:40:54.584 --> 01:41:01.741
So there was a kid, back in February, from Baltimore, fourteen years old,

01:41:02.109 --> 01:41:08.448
who had access to JSTOR, and he'd been spalunking through JSTOR after reading something,

01:41:08.506 --> 01:41:14.350
and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer,

01:41:14.876 --> 01:41:19.639
and pancreatic cancer kills the shit out of you because we detect it way too late

01:41:19.639 --> 01:41:23.032
by the time we detect it, it's already too late to do anything about it.

01:41:23.187 --> 01:41:29.080
And he sent emails off to the entire oncology department at Johns Hopkins,

01:41:29.144 --> 01:41:32.368
you know hundreds of them, and every
- [Interviewer] Say fourteen year old?

01:41:32.368 --> 01:41:35.853
- Fourteen year old kid, yeah, and most of them ignored it, but one of them sent him an email back,

01:41:35.853 --> 01:41:38.798
and said this is not an entirely stupid idea, why don't you come on over?

01:41:38.798 --> 01:41:43.470
This kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher, and in February I heard him on the news

01:41:43.470 --> 01:41:48.832
just a couple of weeks after Aaron died when Aaron was in the news a lot...

01:41:50.907 --> 01:41:53.005
sorry...

01:41:53.550 --> 01:41:59.550
and uh, he said, the reason he was on the news was 'cause they'd done it. They were shipping

01:42:00.152 --> 01:42:03.941
an early test for pancreatic cancer that was going to save lives.

01:42:03.941 --> 01:42:09.917
And he said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important."

01:42:10.453 --> 01:42:15.359
Because you never know, right? This truth of the universe is not only something

01:42:15.359 --> 01:42:19.581
that policymakers use to figure out, you know, what the speed limit should be.

01:42:19.581 --> 01:42:24.390
It's where the thing that's gonna keep, you know, your kid from dying of pancreatic cancer comes from,

01:42:26.173 --> 01:42:31.391
and without access, the person who might come up with the thing that's got your number on it,

01:42:32.692 --> 01:42:34.487
may never find that answer.

01:42:35.967 --> 01:42:36.267


01:42:36.267 --> 01:42:47.425
He sleeped so well, he didn't fall out of [baby talk] , not even when he dreamed he was back on the spacecraft.

01:42:48.030 --> 01:42:51.805
[Aaron's dad:] Very good, Aaron. Very good. Yay, Aaron!

01:42:51.805 --> 01:42:56.586
Okay, now it's song time.

01:42:56.703 --> 01:43:19.192
[music]

01:44:38.071 --> 01:44:43.593


01:44:43.873 --> 01:44:49.701
[credits]