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[quote on screen]

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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.

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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 <i>Star Wars</i> 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 and is like, "Ben, there's this
really awesome thing that I'm working on."

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"You need to hear about it!"

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"Yeah, what is it?"

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"It's this thing called RSS."

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And he explains to me what RSS is.
I'm like, "Why is that useful, Aaron?"

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"Is any site using it?
Why would I want to use it?"

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There was this mailing list for people who are
working on RSS, and XML more generally,

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and there was a person on it named
Aaron Swartz who was combative but very smart,

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and who had lots of good ideas, and

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he didn't ever come to the
face-to-face meetings, and they said,

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"You know, when are you gonna come out
to one of these face-to-face meetings?"

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And he said, "You know, I don't think
my mom would let me. I've just turned fourteen."

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And so their first reaction was: "Well, this person,
this colleague we've been working with all year

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was thirteen years old while we were
working with him, and he's only fourteen now."

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And their second reaction was:

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"Christ, we really want to meet him.
That's extraordinary!"

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He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.

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What he was doing was to help build
the plumbing for modern hypertext.

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The piece that he was working on, RSS,
was a tool that you can use to get summaries

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of things that are going on on other web pages.

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Most commonly, you would use this for a blog.

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You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read.

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You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of
what's going on on those other pages

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to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on.

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Aaron was really young, but he understood
the technology and he saw that it was imperfect

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and looked for ways to help make it better.

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So his mom started bundling him on planes in Chicago. We'd pick him up in San Francicso.

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We'd introduce him to interesting people to argue with, and we'd marvel at his horrific eating habits.

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He only ate white food, only like steamed rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white

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and white bread, and so on...

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and you kind of marveled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,

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what appeared to be a small boy's mouth,

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and you'd think, this is a kid that's really going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy.

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Aaron, you're up!

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I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like dotcoms.

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You can't have companies that just sell dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones.

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But there's still a lot of innovation going on.

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I think that maybe if you don't see the innovation, maybe your head is in the sand.

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He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's

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sort of like, "I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you, I'm better than you,

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and I can tell you what to do."

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It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp.

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So you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems

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like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.

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I first met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat.

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He didn't just write code, he also got people excited about solving problems he got.

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He was a connector.

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The free culture movement has had a lot of his energy.

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I think Aaron was trying to make the world work. He was trying to fix it.

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He had a very kind of strong personality that definitely ruffled feathers at times.

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It wasn't necessarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world

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and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.

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Aaron got into high school and was really just sick of school.

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He didn't like it. He didn't like any of the classes that were being taught. He didn't like the teachers.

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Aaron really knew how to get information.

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He was like, "I don't need to go to this teacher to learn how to do geometry.

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I can just read the geometry book,

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and I don't need to go to this teacher to learn their version of American history,

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I have, like, three historical compilations here, I could just read them,

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and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the Web."

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I was very frustrated with school. I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about,

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and they were domineering and controlling, and the homework was kind of a sham,

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and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busywork.

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And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education

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and how this educational system was developed,

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and, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things

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as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them,

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and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in,

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I questioned the society that built the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for,

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I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.

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One of the thing he was most passionate about was copyright, especially in those early days.

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Copyright has always been something of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers,

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but it wasn't an excessive burden. It was a reasonable institution to have in place

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to make sure that people got paid.

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What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system

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and this amazing new thing we were trying to build--the Internet and the Web.

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These things collided, and what we got was chaos.

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He then met Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig,

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who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court.

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A young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings.

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I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the Eldred--to see the Eldred document.

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Why did you fly out here from Chicago, and come all this way to see the Eldred argument?

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That's a more difficult question...

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I don't know. It's very exciting to see the Supreme Court,

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especially in such a prestigious case as this one.

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Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet.

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It was called "Creative Commons".

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So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people--creators--

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a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry.

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So if copyright is all about "All Rights Reserved", then this is a kind of a "Some Rights Reserved" model.

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I want a simple way to say to you, "Here's what you can do with my work,

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even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do."

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And Aaron's role was the computer part.

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Like, how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable

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and expressed in a way so that machines could process it?

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And people were like, "Why do you have this fifteen-year-old kid writing the specifications for Creative Commons?

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Don't you think that's a huge mistake?"

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And Larry is like, "The biggest mistake we would have 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.

222
00:15:57,651 --> 00:16:00,551
Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

223
00:16:01,101 --> 00:16:05,812
I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

224
00:16:06,722 --> 00:16:11,049
I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

225
00:16:11,429 --> 00:16:15,556
I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

226
00:16:15,636 --> 00:16:19,661
Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time

227
00:16:19,661 --> 00:16:21,654
on things that won't have an impact.

228
00:16:21,654 --> 00:16:26,161
I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

229
00:16:26,161 --> 00:16:32,086
I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

230
00:16:32,086 --> 00:16:35,396
I want to make the world a better place.

231
00:16:41,102 --> 00:16:46,475
In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

232
00:16:46,475 --> 00:16:51,848
He'd had ulcerative colitis which was very troubling, and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

233
00:16:51,848 --> 00:16:55,863
He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day,

234
00:16:56,753 --> 00:17:01,093
and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth,

235
00:17:01,093 --> 00:17:04,782
and made him feel different from any of the other students.

236
00:17:04,782 --> 00:17:07,828
Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

237
00:17:07,828 --> 00:17:12,801
and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

238
00:17:12,801 --> 00:17:20,828
who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters

239
00:17:20,828 --> 00:17:25,578
and I think it just made him bananas.

240
00:17:26,077 --> 00:17:29,197
In 2005, after only one year of college,

241
00:17:29,197 --> 00:17:35,874
Swartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

242
00:17:36,431 --> 00:17:39,777
He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a a website."

243
00:17:39,851 --> 00:17:43,170
And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure."

244
00:17:43,170 --> 00:17:46,650
So Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment...

245
00:17:46,668 --> 00:17:49,604
So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here.

246
00:17:49,604 --> 00:17:55,397
I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

247
00:17:55,397 --> 00:17:58,737
'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

248
00:17:58,742 --> 00:18:04,989
Aaron lived in what's now the livingroom and some of the posters are leftover from when Aaron lived here.

249
00:18:04,989 --> 00:18:09,889
And then the library...there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

250
00:18:11,551 --> 00:18:17,511
Aaron's Y Combinator site was called "infogami", a tool to build websites.

251
00:18:17,511 --> 00:18:21,098
But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

252
00:18:21,098 --> 00:18:25,037
merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

253
00:18:25,037 --> 00:18:29,919
It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called "Reddit".

254
00:18:29,919 --> 00:18:33,988
There we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

255
00:18:33,988 --> 00:18:37,657
and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,

256
00:18:37,657 --> 00:18:39,846
And it showed no signs of letting up.

257
00:18:39,846 --> 00:18:44,373
First we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on...It was just incredible.

258
00:18:44,373 --> 00:18:49,563
Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

259
00:18:52,642 --> 00:19:01,220
There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flock to the site,

260
00:19:01,220 --> 00:19:07,883
and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

261
00:19:07,883 --> 00:19:12,008
reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

262
00:19:12,008 --> 00:19:19,368
so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

263
00:19:19,368 --> 00:19:24,824
and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

264
00:19:24,824 --> 00:19:29,716
there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home,

265
00:19:29,716 --> 00:19:33,929
and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well.

266
00:19:33,929 --> 00:19:36,791
It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

267
00:19:36,791 --> 00:19:41,081
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Condé Nast,

268
00:19:41,081 --> 00:19:42,938
who makes an offer to buy the company.

269
00:19:42,938 --> 00:19:46,939
Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

270
00:19:46,939 --> 00:19:51,079
about like: "How do I store this money?"

271
00:19:51,302 --> 00:19:54,272
- Like a lot of money...
- Like a lot of money.

272
00:19:54,272 --> 00:20:00,319
Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

273
00:20:00,319 --> 00:20:03,461
- And he's how old at the time?
- 19, 20.

274
00:20:05,165 --> 00:20:11,205
So it was in this apartment. They sat around 
on what predated these couches,

275
00:20:11,205 --> 00:20:14,675
hacking on Reddit, and when they sold Reddit

276
00:20:14,757 --> 00:20:18,641
they threw a giant party, and then all flew
out to California the next day,

277
00:20:18,641 --> 00:20:21,885
and left the keys with me.

278
00:20:24,261 --> 00:20:27,480
It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start-up so we all presumed

279
00:20:27,480 --> 00:20:29,329
he was the richest person around

280
00:20:29,329 --> 00:20:33,920
but he said, "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little
shoebox-sized room. That's all I need."

281
00:20:33,920 --> 00:20:36,146
It was barely larger than a closet.

282
00:20:36,146 --> 00:20:42,499
The idea of him spending his money on
fancy objects just seemed so implausible.

283
00:20:42,580 --> 00:20:47,590
He explains it as, "I like living in apartments so I'm not going to spend a lot of money on a new place to live. I'm not gonna buy a mansion,

284
00:20:47,750 --> 00:20:49,888
and I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt,

285
00:20:50,016 --> 00:20:52,046
so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes.

286
00:20:52,046 --> 00:20:54,576
So it's really no big deal."

287
00:20:54,576 --> 00:20:57,966
What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic 
flows on the internet,

288
00:20:58,140 --> 00:21:00,680
and what commands our attention.

289
00:21:00,844 --> 00:21:04,252
In the old system of broadcasting, you're
fundamentally limited by the amount of

290
00:21:04,252 --> 00:21:08,583
space in the airwaves. You could only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television

291
00:21:08,583 --> 00:21:10,915
or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

292
00:21:11,003 --> 00:21:15,593
On the Internet, everybody can have a channel. 
Everyone can get a blog, or a MySpace page.

293
00:21:15,690 --> 00:21:18,274
Everyone has a way of expressing themselves. 


294
00:21:18,274 --> 00:21:21,280
What you see now is not a question of who gets
access to the airwaves,

295
00:21:21,280 --> 00:21:25,100
it's a question of who gets control over the 
ways you find people.

296
00:21:25,120 --> 00:21:29,286
You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, theses sort of gatekeepers that tell you

297
00:21:29,286 --> 00:21:30,993
where on the internet you want to go.

298
00:21:30,993 --> 00:21:34,273
The people who provide you your sources of news and information.

299
00:21:34,273 --> 00:21:38,314
So it's not only certain people have a license to speak, now everyone has

300
00:21:38,314 --> 00:21:40,904
a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard.

301
00:21:45,196 --> 00:21:49,806
After he started working in San Francisco 
at Condé Nast, he comes into the office

302
00:21:49,806 --> 00:21:53,792
and they want to give him a computer with all
this crap installed on it

303
00:21:53,792 --> 00:21:57,273
and say he can't install any new things 
on this computer,

304
00:21:57,273 --> 00:21:59,375
which to developers is outrageous.

305
00:21:59,375 --> 00:22:02,095
From the first day, he was complaining
about all the stuff.

306
00:22:05,317 --> 00:22:11,147
"Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first
day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.

307
00:22:11,147 --> 00:22:15,483
By lunchtime, I had literally locked myself 
in a bathroom stall and started crying.

308
00:22:15,483 --> 00:22:18,285
I can't imagine staying sane with someone
buzzing in my ear all day


309
00:22:18,285 --> 00:22:21,575
Let alone getting any actual work done. 


310
00:22:21,575 --> 00:22:24,087
Nobody else seems to get work done here either

311
00:22:24,087 --> 00:22:27,587
Everybody's always coming into our room to 
hang out and chat, or invite us to play 



312
00:22:27,587 --> 00:22:29,927
the new video game system that Wired is testing."

313
00:22:32,972 --> 00:22:37,867
He really had different aspirations that were politically-oriented,

314
00:22:37,987 --> 00:22:41,862
and Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture

315
00:22:41,862 --> 00:22:46,967
that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals.

316
00:22:47,237 --> 00:22:49,613
Aaron hated working for a corporation.

317
00:22:49,613 --> 00:22:53,673
They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron
is the only one who is not going to take it.

318
00:22:53,694 --> 00:22:55,884
And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

319
00:22:55,903 --> 00:22:58,313
By not showing up to work, ever.

320
00:23:01,183 --> 00:23:05,434
It was said to be a messy breakup. 
Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

321
00:23:05,447 --> 00:23:08,277
declined to be interviewed for this film.

322
00:23:09,251 --> 00:23:15,891
He rejected the business world. One of the really important things to remember about

323
00:23:15,891 --> 00:23:22,664
that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up
culture is that he was also leaving behind

324
00:23:22,664 --> 00:23:31,334
the things that had made him famous and well-loved, and he was at risk of letting down fans.

325
00:23:31,422 --> 00:23:35,866
He got to where he was supposed to be going, and had the self-awareness

326
00:23:35,866 --> 00:23:43,051
and the orneriness to realize that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck

327
00:23:43,051 --> 00:23:45,849
the single rose and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell,

328
00:23:45,849 --> 00:23:50,399
and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed,

329
00:23:50,399 --> 00:23:53,693
and he did get the rose in any event,

330
00:23:53,693 --> 00:23:57,413
he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool.

331
00:23:58,026 --> 00:24:01,728
The way Aaron always saw it, is that 
programming is magic--

332
00:24:01,728 --> 00:24:07,110
you can accomplish these things that normal
humans can't, by being able to program.

333
00:24:07,110 --> 00:24:13,310
So if you had magical powers, would you use 
them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

334
00:24:15,009 --> 00:24:18,478
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries
he had met as a child.

335
00:24:18,478 --> 00:24:22,387
The man who had invented the World Wide Web,
Tim Berners-Lee.

336
00:24:22,387 --> 00:24:25,938
In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on

337
00:24:25,938 --> 00:24:29,260
one of the most lucrative inventions of 
the 20th century,

338
00:24:29,260 --> 00:24:35,137
but instead of profiting from the invention 
of the World Wide Web, he gave it away for free.

339
00:24:36,067 --> 00:24:39,707
It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.

340
00:24:41,118 --> 00:24:45,261
Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.

341
00:24:45,261 --> 00:24:50,928
Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genius, who doesn't in any sense cash out.

342
00:24:50,928 --> 00:24:55,865
He's not at all interested in how he's going to figure out how to make a billion dollars.

343
00:24:55,865 --> 00:24:57,829
People were saying, "Ah, there's money to be made there,"

344
00:24:57,829 --> 00:25:00,636
so there would have been lots of little webs,

345
00:25:00,636 --> 00:25:02,139
instead of one big one,

346
00:25:02,139 --> 00:25:05,030
and one little web, and all sorts of webs doesn't work,

347
00:25:05,030 --> 00:25:08,080
because you can't follow links from one to the other.

348
00:25:10,173 --> 00:25:14,112
You had to have the critical masses--the thing was the entire planet,

349
00:25:14,112 --> 00:25:17,172
so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board.

350
00:25:24,141 --> 00:25:28,372
I feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is,

351
00:25:28,702 --> 00:25:34,732
to just kind of take what you're given, and you know, follow the things that adults told you to do,

352
00:25:34,732 --> 00:25:39,032
and that your parents told you to do, and that society tells you to do. I think you should always be questioning.

353
00:25:39,045 --> 00:25:43,145
I take this very scientific attitude, that 
everything you've learned is just provisional,

354
00:25:43,405 --> 00:25:49,267
that it's always open to recantation or refutation or 
questioning, and I think the same applies to society.

355
00:25:49,267 --> 00:25:53,491
Once I realized that there were real serious problems--fundamental problems--

356
00:25:53,491 --> 00:25:58,601
that I could do something to address, I didn't see a way to forget that. I didn't see a way not to.

357
00:26:02,600 --> 00:26:04,831
We just started spending a lot of time,


358
00:26:04,831 --> 00:26:06,621
just kind of as friends.

359
00:26:08,912 --> 00:26:11,884
We would just talk, for hours, into the night.

360
00:26:14,393 --> 00:26:18,110
I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me. I think to some degree,

361
00:26:18,110 --> 00:26:23,980
I was, like, this is a terrible idea, and impossible, and therefore I will pretend it is not happening.

362
00:26:25,161 --> 00:26:28,937
As my marriage was breaking down, and I was
really stuck without anywhere to go,

363
00:26:28,937 --> 00:26:32,927
we became roommates, and I brought my daughter over.

364
00:26:34,081 --> 00:26:37,246
We moved in, and furnished the house, and it 
was really peaceful.

365
00:26:37,246 --> 00:26:40,816
My life had not been peaceful for a while, and really neither had his.

366
00:26:46,225 --> 00:26:54,073
We were extremely close from the beginning of our romantic relationship.

367
00:26:54,073 --> 00:26:57,633
We just...we were in constant contact.

368
00:26:57,633 --> 00:27:02,432
But we're both really difficult people to deal with. [laughs]

369
00:27:04,495 --> 00:27:10,865
In a very Ally McBeal discussion, he confessed he had a theme song, and I made him play it for me.

370
00:27:12,345 --> 00:27:16,504
It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple.

371
00:27:16,504 --> 00:27:24,154
I think it was just that sense of kind of being a little bit embattled that the song has,

372
00:27:25,054 --> 00:27:27,697
and it also had, like, this hopefulness to it.

373
00:27:27,837 --> 00:27:34,418
♪ By foot it's a slow climb, but I'm good
at being uncomfortable so I can't stop

374
00:27:34,418 --> 00:27:36,689
changing all the time ♪

375
00:27:36,689 --> 00:27:44,481
In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic
about life. Even when he didn't feel it, 


376
00:27:44,481 --> 00:27:47,041
he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

377
00:27:47,041 --> 00:27:49,561
♪ Extraordinary machine ♪

378
00:27:53,237 --> 00:27:58,317
- What are you doing?
(Quinn) - Flicker has video now.

379
00:27:59,730 --> 00:28:01,743
Swartz threw his energy into a string of new

380
00:28:01,743 --> 00:28:04,731
projects involving access to public information,

381
00:28:04,731 --> 00:28:08,189
including an accountability webside called
Watchdog.net,

382
00:28:08,189 --> 00:28:10,799
and a project called The Open Library.

383
00:28:10,986 --> 00:28:15,299
So, the Open Library Project is a website you can visit at openlibrary.org,

384
00:28:15,299 --> 00:28:19,778
and the idea is to be a huge wiki, an editable website with one page per book.

385
00:28:19,778 --> 00:28:23,910
So for every book ever published, we want to have a web page about it that combines

386
00:28:23,910 --> 00:28:29,551
all the information from publishers, from booksellers, from libraries, from readers

387
00:28:29,551 --> 00:28:34,587
onto one site, and then gives you links where
you can buy it, you can borrow it, or you can browse it.

388
00:28:34,587 --> 00:28:39,958
I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who 
goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.

389
00:28:39,958 --> 00:28:44,050
That's the dream of Open Library, is building this website where both you can leap

390
00:28:44,050 --> 00:28:49,297
from book to book, from person to author, from subject to idea, go through this vast tree

391
00:28:49,297 --> 00:28:54,127
of knowledge that's been embedded and lost in big physical libraries, that's hard to find,

392
00:28:54,177 --> 00:28:59,086
that's not very well-accessible online. It's really important because books are our cultural legacy.

393
00:28:59,086 --> 00:29:01,283
Books are the place people go to write things down,

394
00:29:01,283 --> 00:29:05,813
and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary.

395
00:29:06,730 --> 00:29:10,771
How can you bring public access to the public domain?

396
00:29:10,771 --> 00:29:14,828
It may sound obvious that you'd have public access to the public domain,

397
00:29:14,828 --> 00:29:21,368
but in fact it's not true. So the public domain should be free to all, but it's often locked up.

398
00:29:21,378 --> 00:29:26,756
There's often guard cages. It's like having a national park but with a moat around it,

399
00:29:26,756 --> 00:29:33,245
and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain.

400
00:29:33,245 --> 00:29:39,458
One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in was bringing public access to the public domain.

401
00:29:39,458 --> 00:29:43,258
This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble.

402
00:29:46,254 --> 00:29:52,794
I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States.

403
00:29:54,458 --> 00:29:59,108
What I discovered was a puzzling system called PACER.

404
00:29:59,518 --> 00:30:03,124
Which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

405
00:30:03,124 --> 00:30:07,314
I started Googling, and that's when I ran
across Carl Malamud.

406
00:30:08,886 --> 00:30:14,997
Access to legal materials in the United States is a ten billion dollar per year business.

407
00:30:14,997 --> 00:30:23,004
PACER is just this incredible abomination
of government services. It's ten cents a page,

408
00:30:23,004 --> 00:30:27,471
it's this most braindead code you've ever seen. You can't search it. You can't bookmark anything.

409
00:30:27,471 --> 00:30:31,891
You've got to have a credit card, and these are public records.

410
00:30:31,891 --> 00:30:37,429
U.S. district courts are very important; it's
where a lot of our seminal litigation starts.

411
00:30:37,429 --> 00:30:44,369
Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists, students, citizens and lawyers

412
00:30:44,369 --> 00:30:48,637
all need access to PACER, and it fights them every step of the way.

413
00:30:48,637 --> 00:30:55,246
People without means can't see the law as readily as people that have that Gold American Express card.

414
00:30:55,246 --> 00:30:57,776
It's a poll tax on access to justice.

415
00:30:57,946 --> 00:31:04,096
You know, the law is the operating system of our democracy, and you have to pay to see it?

416
00:31:04,246 --> 00:31:07,135
You know, that's not much of a democracy.

417
00:31:07,135 --> 00:31:11,869
They make about 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system,

418
00:31:11,869 --> 00:31:18,236
and it doesn't cost anything near that, according to their own records. In fact, it's illegal.

419
00:31:18,937 --> 00:31:25,834
The E-Government Act of 2002 states that the courts may charge only to the extent necessary,

420
00:31:25,834 --> 00:31:29,591
in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER.

421
00:31:34,621 --> 00:31:40,160
As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges.

422
00:31:40,160 --> 00:31:43,300
He started a program called The PACER Recycling Project,

423
00:31:43,300 --> 00:31:47,297
where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for

424
00:31:47,297 --> 00:31:50,334
to a free database so others could use them.

425
00:31:50,334 --> 00:31:55,331
The PACER people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access,

426
00:31:55,336 --> 00:32:00,925
and so they put together a system in 17 libraries across the country that was free PACER access.

427
00:32:01,885 --> 00:32:07,625
You know, that's one library every 22,000 square miles, I believe, so it wasn't like really convenient.

428
00:32:08,095 --> 00:32:12,173
I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Corps,

429
00:32:12,173 --> 00:32:17,157
and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the PACER recycling site.

430
00:32:17,157 --> 00:32:20,813
People take a thumb drive into one of these libraries, and they download a bunch of documents,

431
00:32:20,813 --> 00:32:25,089
and they send them to me. I mean, it was just a joke.

432
00:32:25,089 --> 00:32:28,636
In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Corps, there was a Wizard of Oz,

433
00:32:28,636 --> 00:32:32,111
you know, the Munchkins singing, so a videoclip came up:

434
00:32:32,173 --> 00:32:35,034
♪ We represent the lollipop guild...♪

435
00:32:35,260 --> 00:32:39,386
But of course, I get this phone calls from Steve Shultz and Aaron, saying,

436
00:32:39,621 --> 00:32:43,047
"Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps."

437
00:32:43,377 --> 00:32:47,544
Around that time, I ran into Aaron at a conference.

438
00:32:47,544 --> 00:32:51,633
This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.

439
00:32:51,633 --> 00:32:53,347
So I approached him and I said,

440
00:32:53,347 --> 00:32:58,195
"Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the PACER problem."

441
00:32:59,865 --> 00:33:04,442
Schultz had already developed a program that could automatically download PACER documents

442
00:33:04,442 --> 00:33:06,459
from the trial libraries.

443
00:33:06,459 --> 00:33:08,796
Swartz wanted to take a look.

444
00:33:08,796 --> 00:33:13,481
So, I showed him the code, and I didn't know what would come next,

445
00:33:13,481 --> 00:33:19,033
but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference,

446
00:33:19,033 --> 00:33:24,588
he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his

447
00:33:24,588 --> 00:33:32,139
that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library, and to begin to test his improved code.

448
00:33:32,139 --> 00:33:38,440
At which point the folks at the courts realized something is not going quite according to plan.

449
00:33:38,440 --> 00:33:42,901
And data started to come in, and come in, and come in

450
00:33:42,901 --> 00:33:47,632
and soon there was 760 GB of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.

451
00:33:48,862 --> 00:33:52,098
Using information retrieved from the trial libraries,

452
00:33:52,098 --> 00:33:57,304
Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the PACER system.

453
00:33:57,304 --> 00:34:04,360
He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million Federal Court documents, almost 20 million pages of text.

454
00:34:04,360 --> 00:34:09,865
Now, I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps exceed the expectations of the people

455
00:34:09,865 --> 00:34:14,535
running the pilot access project, but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal.

456
00:34:14,830 --> 00:34:19,096
Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to The New York Times about what happened.

457
00:34:19,731 --> 00:34:26,500
They also caught the attention of the FBI, who began to stake out Swartz's parents' house in Illinois.

458
00:34:26,639 --> 00:34:31,053
And I get a tweet from his mother, saying, "Call me!!"

459
00:34:31,053 --> 00:34:34,127
So, I think, like, what the hell's going on here?

460
00:34:34,127 --> 00:34:38,981
And so, finally I get a hold of Aaron and, you know, Aaron's mother was like, "Oh my God, FBI, FBI, FBI!"

461
00:34:40,271 --> 00:34:45,831
An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway, trying to see if Aaron is in his room.

462
00:34:47,164 --> 00:34:51,899
I remember being home that day, and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway,

463
00:34:51,899 --> 00:34:55,110
and just driving back up. That's weird!

464
00:34:56,719 --> 00:35:04,953
Like, five years later I read this FBI file, like, oh my goodness: that was the FBI agent, in my driveway.

465
00:35:05,185 --> 00:35:09,009
He was terrified. He was totally terrified.

466
00:35:09,959 --> 00:35:14,920
He was way more terrified after the FBI actually called him up on the phone,

467
00:35:15,280 --> 00:35:19,302
and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.

468
00:35:19,322 --> 00:35:23,664
He said he went home and lay down on the bed and, you know, was shaking.

469
00:35:25,511 --> 00:35:30,006
The downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents.

470
00:35:30,242 --> 00:35:34,922
Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result,

471
00:35:34,922 --> 00:35:39,850
and the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges.

472
00:35:39,850 --> 00:35:42,722
To this day, I find it remarkable

473
00:35:42,722 --> 00:35:47,823
that anybody, even at the most remote podunk field office of the FBI

474
00:35:47,823 --> 00:35:52,327
thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars was investigating people

475
00:35:52,327 --> 00:35:55,491
for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public.

476
00:35:55,491 --> 00:35:57,746
How can you call yourself a lawman,

477
00:35:58,055 --> 00:36:02,055
and think that there could possibly be anything wrong in this whole world

478
00:36:02,055 --> 00:36:03,815
with making the law public?

479
00:36:03,815 --> 00:36:09,455
Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in.

480
00:36:09,455 --> 00:36:15,586
Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology, and into a broader range of political causes.

481
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

482
00:36:21,812 --> 00:36:25,182
so that he could learn the political process.

483
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.

484
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

485
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,

486
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.

487
00:36:46,648 --> 00:36:48,898
But apparently the world <i>is</i> ridiculous.

488
00:36:49,025 --> 00:36:53,035
So, I co-founded a group called "The Progressive Change Campaign Committee",

489
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

490
00:36:58,318 --> 00:37:00,568
and moving the country toward a more progressive direction

491
00:37:00,570 --> 00:37:03,787
to kind of come together, join our e-mail list, join our campaigns

492
00:37:03,787 --> 00:37:06,297
and help us to get progressive candidates elected all across the country.

493
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.

494
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,

495
00:37:17,900 --> 00:37:21,480
because it can be manipulated like any social system."

496
00:37:21,540 --> 00:37:25,850
But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat.

497
00:37:25,855 --> 00:37:31,170
Aaron began to take a closer look at institutions that publish academic journal articles.

498
00:37:31,520 --> 00:37:35,630
By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume you have access

499
00:37:35,630 --> 00:37:38,760
to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

500
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

501
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.

502
00:37:51,054 --> 00:37:57,278
These scholarly journals and articles are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online,

503
00:37:57,278 --> 00:38:02,278
and many have been paid for with taxpayer money or with government grants,

504
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.

505
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,

506
00:38:15,128 --> 00:38:18,937
don't have this kind of access. They are locked out from all of these journals.

507
00:38:19,253 --> 00:38:23,247
They are locked out from our entire scientific legacy.

508
00:38:23,247 --> 00:38:27,361
I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to The Enlightenment.

509
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.

510
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.

511
00:38:39,766 --> 00:38:43,167
It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people,

512
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

513
00:38:48,127 --> 00:38:53,044
who then try to get the maximum profit they can out of it.

514
00:38:53,464 --> 00:38:58,769
So a researcher paid by the university or the people publishes a paper,

515
00:38:58,769 --> 00:39:02,312
and at the very, very last step of that process, after all the work is done,

516
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,

517
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.

518
00:39:14,488 --> 00:39:18,238
And it's sick. It's an entire economy built on volunteer labor,

519
00:39:18,238 --> 00:39:21,080
and then the publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream.

520
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.

521
00:39:28,968 --> 00:39:30,484
I mean, what a racket!

522
00:39:30,494 --> 00:39:34,321
JSTOR is just a very, very small player in that story

523
00:39:34,321 --> 00:39:41,068
but for some reason, JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront.

524
00:39:41,068 --> 00:39:45,009
He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing,

525
00:39:45,009 --> 00:39:47,070
and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,

526
00:39:47,070 --> 00:39:50,368
but I think they--at some point, Aaron asked the question,

527
00:39:50,368 --> 00:39:54,606
"How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"

528
00:39:54,606 --> 00:39:58,225
And they gave some--I think it was two hundred million dollars,

529
00:39:58,225 --> 00:40:00,422
something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.

530
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

531
00:40:07,452 --> 00:40:12,238
had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR. Swartz saw an opportunity.

532
00:40:12,238 --> 00:40:14,434
You have a key to those gates,

533
00:40:14,434 --> 00:40:19,694
and with a little bit of shell script magic, you can get those journal articles.

534
00:40:21,302 --> 00:40:23,492
On September 24, 2010,

535
00:40:23,492 --> 00:40:27,301
Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop

536
00:40:27,301 --> 00:40:31,479
on the MIT network, under the name "Garry Host".

537
00:40:31,479 --> 00:40:36,169
The client name was registered as "GHost laptop".

538
00:40:36,169 --> 00:40:38,990
He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking.

539
00:40:38,990 --> 00:40:40,943
The JSTOR database was organized,

540
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,

541
00:40:44,500 --> 00:40:46,567
because it was basically numbered.

542
00:40:46,567 --> 00:40:52,351
It was basically slash slash slash...number article 444024 and -25 and -26.

543
00:40:52,351 --> 00:40:55,784
He wrote a Python script called keepgrabbing.pi,

544
00:40:55,784 --> 00:40:58,607
which was like, keeping grabbing one article after another.

545
00:40:58,607 --> 00:41:02,210
The next day, GHost laptop begins grabbing articles,

546
00:41:02,210 --> 00:41:08,765
but soon, the computer's IP address is blocked. For Swartz, it's barely a bump in the road.

547
00:41:08,765 --> 00:41:13,628
He quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading.

548
00:41:13,628 --> 00:41:18,172
Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps to try to interfere with this,

549
00:41:18,172 --> 00:41:19,766
when they notice that this is happening,

550
00:41:19,766 --> 00:41:22,184
and when the more modest steps don't work,

551
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.

552
00:41:27,171 --> 00:41:29,713
So there's a kind of cat-and-mouse game around

553
00:41:29,713 --> 00:41:33,876
getting access to the JSTOR database.

554
00:41:33,876 --> 00:41:39,920
Aaron, ultimately, obviously is the cat because he has more technical capability

555
00:41:39,920 --> 00:41:42,921
than the JSTOR database people do in defending them.

556
00:41:42,921 --> 00:41:47,228
Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings,

557
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

558
00:41:51,495 --> 00:41:56,541
and just left it there with an external hard drive downloading these articles to the computer.

559
00:41:56,541 --> 00:42:01,812
Unknown to Swartz, his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities.

560
00:42:02,882 --> 00:42:05,736
They didn't stop the downloads.

561
00:42:05,736 --> 00:42:09,001
Instead, they installed a surveillance camera.

562
00:42:10,584 --> 00:42:14,540
They found the computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building.

563
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,

564
00:42:19,759 --> 00:42:23,764
"Dude, what are you doing, you know, cut it out. Who are you?"

565
00:42:23,764 --> 00:42:25,887
They could have done all that kind of stuff, but they didn't.

566
00:42:25,887 --> 00:42:30,182
What they wanted to do was film it to gather evidence to make a case.

567
00:42:30,182 --> 00:42:36,477
That's the only reason you film something like that.

568
00:42:37,667 --> 00:42:42,082
At first, the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera

569
00:42:42,082 --> 00:42:46,475
was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans.

570
00:42:53,202 --> 00:42:57,033
But days later, it caught Swartz.

571
00:43:06,185 --> 00:43:10,658
Swartz is replacing the hard drive. He takes it out of his backpack,

572
00:43:11,240 --> 00:43:14,517
leans out of frame for about five minutes,

573
00:43:15,014 --> 00:43:21,863
and then leaves.

574
00:43:37,238 --> 00:43:41,775
And then they organized, like, a stakeout where, as he was biking home from MIT,

575
00:43:41,899 --> 00:43:44,554
these cops came out from either side of the road,

576
00:43:44,614 --> 00:43:48,436
or something like that, and started going after him.

577
00:43:49,199 --> 00:43:54,436
He describes that he was pressed down and assaulted by the police.

578
00:43:55,207 --> 00:43:58,382
He tells me that they--it's unclear that they were police that were after him.

579
00:43:58,382 --> 00:44:02,797
He thought that someone was trying to attack him.

580
00:44:02,797 --> 00:44:05,914
He does tell me they beat him up.

581
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

582
00:44:15,406 --> 00:44:18,358
was so foreign and incomprehensible, I didn't know what to do.

583
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.

584
00:44:27,972 --> 00:44:33,587
Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police.

585
00:44:33,964 --> 00:44:37,661
It had been taken over by the United States Secret Service.

586
00:44:38,061 --> 00:44:42,531
The Secret Service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984,

587
00:44:42,807 --> 00:44:46,060
but six weeks after the attack on 9/11, their role expanded.

588
00:44:47,290 --> 00:44:49,363
[applause]

589
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".

590
00:44:56,791 --> 00:45:01,328
The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists.

591
00:45:01,643 --> 00:45:06,580
According to the Secret Service, they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact,

592
00:45:06,841 --> 00:45:11,169
organized criminal groups, or use of schemes involving new technology.

593
00:45:11,384 --> 00:45:15,866
The Secret Service turned Swartz's case over to the Boston U.S. Attorney's office.

594
00:45:16,246 --> 00:45:18,722
There was a guy in the U.S. attorney's office who had the title:

595
00:45:19,054 --> 00:45:21,895
"Head of the Computer Crimes Division or Task Force"

596
00:45:22,179 --> 00:45:24,317
I don't know what else he had going,

597
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,

598
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

599
00:45:35,564 --> 00:45:37,638
and that's Steve Heymann.

600
00:45:37,806 --> 00:45:41,896
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,

601
00:45:41,896 --> 00:45:46,793
but he can be seen here, in an episode of the television show "American Greed",

602
00:45:46,793 --> 00:45:49,550
filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.

603
00:45:49,550 --> 00:45:53,378
He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzales,

604
00:45:53,652 --> 00:45:56,899
a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades.

605
00:45:57,273 --> 00:46:02,017
Gonzales masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers,

606
00:46:02,209 --> 00:46:04,537
the largest such fraud in history.

607
00:46:04,852 --> 00:46:09,983
Here, Heymann, describing Gonzales, gives his view on the hacker mindset:

608
00:46:10,263 --> 00:46:16,178
These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by.

609
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.

610
00:46:25,134 --> 00:46:29,891
One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzales case was a young hacker named Jonathan James.

611
00:46:30,254 --> 00:46:33,127
Believing Gonzales' crimes would be pinned on him,

612
00:46:33,420 --> 00:46:36,929
James committed suicide during the investigation.

613
00:46:37,139 --> 00:46:40,865
In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,

614
00:46:41,115 --> 00:46:45,974
Heymann's boss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusets, Carmen Ortiz, said this:

615
00:46:46,521 --> 00:46:50,116
"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,

616
00:46:50,116 --> 00:46:53,021
and whether you take documents, data, or dollars."

617
00:46:53,731 --> 00:46:55,587
It is not true. It's obviously not true.

618
00:46:56,037 --> 00:46:57,717
I'm not saying it's harmless,

619
00:46:58,487 --> 00:47:04,102
and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalize stealing of information,

620
00:47:04,318 --> 00:47:06,693
but you got to be much more subtle

621
00:47:09,063 --> 00:47:14,261
in trying to figure out exactly which kinds of harms are harmful here.

622
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,

623
00:47:18,957 --> 00:47:21,768
I do damage. There is no doubt about it.

624
00:47:21,768 --> 00:47:24,005
But when Aaron writes a script that says

625
00:47:24,206 --> 00:47:28,329
download download download, a hundred times in a second,

626
00:47:28,329 --> 00:47:31,047
there's no obvious damage to anybody.

627
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,

628
00:47:36,211 --> 00:47:38,621
there is never any damage to anybody.

629
00:47:38,659 --> 00:47:42,925
He wasn't stealing. He wasn't selling what he got or giving it away.

630
00:47:42,925 --> 00:47:45,671
He was making a point, for as far as I could tell.

631
00:47:45,671 --> 00:47:48,149
The arrest took its toll on Swartz.

632
00:47:48,230 --> 00:47:49,712
He just wouldn't talk about it.

633
00:47:49,819 --> 00:47:51,466
I mean, he was very stressed.

634
00:47:51,706 --> 00:47:56,424
If you would thought that the FBI was going to come to your doorstep any day,

635
00:47:56,424 --> 00:47:59,604
anytime you went down the hall, even to do your laundry,

636
00:47:59,604 --> 00:48:03,170
and they'd break in into your apartment 'cause you left the door unlocked,

637
00:48:03,170 --> 00:48:06,545
like...I'd be pretty stressed,

638
00:48:06,545 --> 00:48:12,727
and it was clear, and so Aaron was always sort of like in a dour mood.

639
00:48:18,800 --> 00:48:24,093
He wouldn't give off any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time,

640
00:48:24,111 --> 00:48:28,345
because he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him.

641
00:48:31,445 --> 00:48:35,452
It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism.

642
00:48:35,702 --> 00:48:41,811
Time Magazine would later name, as their 2011 Person of the Year, "The Protester".

643
00:48:42,348 --> 00:48:46,925
There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.

644
00:48:49,056 --> 00:48:53,442
WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables,

645
00:48:53,907 --> 00:48:56,491
Manning had been under arrest at the time,

646
00:48:56,526 --> 00:48:59,933
it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak.

647
00:49:00,586 --> 00:49:04,801
Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble that

648
00:49:04,801 --> 00:49:07,129
has a lot of hackers in its ranks,

649
00:49:07,834 --> 00:49:11,357
were going on various sprees of sorts.

650
00:49:11,745 --> 00:49:14,107
If you compare that to what he did,

651
00:49:14,107 --> 00:49:17,902
this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,

652
00:49:18,596 --> 00:49:22,048
in a kind of private, professional matter.

653
00:49:22,395 --> 00:49:27,657
It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system.

654
00:49:28,425 --> 00:49:31,870
It just didn't belong there.

655
00:49:36,645 --> 00:49:39,720
Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal

656
00:49:40,151 --> 00:49:43,230
that involved three months in prison, time in an halfway house,

657
00:49:43,230 --> 00:49:45,535
and a year of home detention,

658
00:49:45,599 --> 00:49:48,006
all without the use of a computer.

659
00:49:48,170 --> 00:49:52,460
It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.

660
00:49:52,806 --> 00:49:56,789
Here we are: we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever

661
00:49:57,075 --> 00:49:58,793
about what the government's case is,

662
00:49:58,974 --> 00:50:01,821
and we have to make this immense decision

663
00:50:01,976 --> 00:50:05,464
where the lawyer is pushing you to do this,

664
00:50:05,746 --> 00:50:09,732
the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand,

665
00:50:10,041 --> 00:50:13,360
and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small,

666
00:50:13,617 --> 00:50:18,563
so whether you're guilty or not, you're better off taking the deal.

667
00:50:18,908 --> 00:50:20,940
Boston has its own Computer Crimes Division,

668
00:50:21,315 --> 00:50:25,208
lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need.

669
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,

670
00:50:30,737 --> 00:50:32,897
because you've got some criminals in Russia,

671
00:50:33,261 --> 00:50:35,997
or you've got some people inside of a corporation

672
00:50:36,254 --> 00:50:40,028
that are gonna five hundred dollar lawyers or seven hundred dollar-an-hour lawyers

673
00:50:40,028 --> 00:50:43,856
sitting down against you, and then you've got this case with this kid,

674
00:50:44,156 --> 00:50:48,022
which is pretty easy to prove that he did something,

675
00:50:48,049 --> 00:50:52,731
and he's already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI,

676
00:50:52,837 --> 00:50:56,551
so why not go as tough as you can against that guy?

677
00:50:56,551 --> 00:50:59,714
It's good for you the prosecutor. It's good for the Republic,

678
00:50:59,714 --> 00:51:02,242
'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types.

679
00:51:02,631 --> 00:51:03,996
I was so scared.

680
00:51:03,996 --> 00:51:06,053
I was so scared of having my computer seized.

681
00:51:06,053 --> 00:51:10,228
I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being seized.

682
00:51:10,338 --> 00:51:15,293
I had confidential material from sources from my previous work on my laptop,

683
00:51:15,470 --> 00:51:20,517
and that is, above all, my priority--is to keep my sources safe.

684
00:51:20,677 --> 00:51:25,220
I was so scared of what was going to happen to Ada.

685
00:51:25,400 --> 00:51:27,764
Aaron told me that they'd offered him a deal,

686
00:51:28,136 --> 00:51:32,853
and he finally just said that he would take it if I told him to,

687
00:51:33,180 --> 00:51:37,456
and I say--I came real close to saying, "Take it."

688
00:51:37,673 --> 00:51:42,595
He had these--he had developed, like, serious political aspirations

689
00:51:42,731 --> 00:51:45,622
in the intervening time, between when, you know,

690
00:51:45,651 --> 00:51:51,218
that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial start-up life,

691
00:51:51,406 --> 00:51:56,448
and begun this new life that had come to this political activism,

692
00:51:57,077 --> 00:52:03,834
and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony.

693
00:52:04,180 --> 00:52:07,386
You know, he said to me one day, we were walking by the White House,

694
00:52:07,386 --> 00:52:12,379
and he said to me, "They don't let felons work there."

695
00:52:17,801 --> 00:52:22,031
And you know he really--he really wanted that to be his life.

696
00:52:22,387 --> 00:52:25,440
He hadn't killed anybody. He hadn't hurt anybody.

697
00:52:25,784 --> 00:52:28,298
He hadn't, like, stolen money.

698
00:52:28,489 --> 00:52:32,573
He hadn't done anything that seemed felony-worthy, and...

699
00:52:34,793 --> 00:52:39,327
there is this idea that there is no reason that he should be labelled a felon,

700
00:52:39,357 --> 00:52:42,892
and taken away his right to vote in many states

701
00:52:43,363 --> 00:52:45,807
for doing what he did. That's just outrageous.

702
00:52:45,807 --> 00:52:50,100
It makes sense for him to be maybe fined a bunch of money,

703
00:52:50,100 --> 00:52:54,467
or asked not to come back to MIT again.

704
00:52:54,467 --> 00:52:59,454
But to be a felon? To face jail time?

705
00:53:01,516 --> 00:53:04,063
Swartz turned down the plea deal.

706
00:53:04,342 --> 00:53:07,188
Heymann redoubled his efforts.

707
00:53:07,523 --> 00:53:12,457
Heymann continued to press us at all levels.

708
00:53:13,040 --> 00:53:15,667
Even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's

709
00:53:15,988 --> 00:53:18,389
Acer computer harddrive and USB drive,

710
00:53:18,760 --> 00:53:21,503
the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.

711
00:53:21,913 --> 00:53:24,847
Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR,

712
00:53:25,199 --> 00:53:28,380
and just what did he plan to do with them?

713
00:53:29,284 --> 00:53:32,167
The government claim was that he was planning to publish these.

714
00:53:32,709 --> 00:53:36,073
We don't really know whether that was his real intention

715
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

716
00:53:43,314 --> 00:53:45,443
in order to learn interesting things about them.

717
00:53:45,746 --> 00:53:48,101
The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford,

718
00:53:48,353 --> 00:53:53,037
he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.

719
00:53:53,407 --> 00:53:55,948
In a project with Stanford law students,

720
00:53:56,115 --> 00:53:58,445
Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

721
00:53:58,676 --> 00:54:02,822
He uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research

722
00:54:02,822 --> 00:54:04,534
and favorable results.

723
00:54:04,764 --> 00:54:08,097
He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies

724
00:54:08,097 --> 00:54:11,698
giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles

725
00:54:11,698 --> 00:54:15,517
which were then beneficial to, like, Exxon during an oil spill.

726
00:54:15,637 --> 00:54:19,391
So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research.

727
00:54:19,441 --> 00:54:22,694
Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.

728
00:54:23,046 --> 00:54:25,599
In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.

729
00:54:25,955 --> 00:54:27,679
That would have been completely okay.

730
00:54:27,916 --> 00:54:33,521
If he were, on the other hand, intending to create a competitive service to JSTOR,

731
00:54:33,600 --> 00:54:35,887
like, we're going to set up our own, you know,

732
00:54:36,075 --> 00:54:39,340
access to the Harvard Law Review and charge, you know, money for it,

733
00:54:39,340 --> 00:54:42,632
then, okay, now it seems like criminal violation

734
00:54:42,632 --> 00:54:45,044
because you are commercially trying to exploit this material,

735
00:54:45,044 --> 00:54:48,336
but it's kind of crazy to imagine that that was what he was doing.

736
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?

737
00:54:54,356 --> 00:54:57,195
But depending on what he was doing, it creates a very different character

738
00:54:57,195 --> 00:55:00,728
to how the law should be thinking about it. The government was prosecuting him

739
00:55:00,728 --> 00:55:03,666
as if this was like a commercial criminal violation,

740
00:55:03,910 --> 00:55:06,853
like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records, that it was that kind of crime.

741
00:55:07,001 --> 00:55:10,383
I don't know what he was going to do with that database,

742
00:55:10,602 --> 00:55:13,845
but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him

743
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

744
00:55:18,736 --> 00:55:24,212
that led to biased results, and I totally believe that.

745
00:55:25,322 --> 00:55:28,638
I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me,

746
00:55:29,052 --> 00:55:32,968
and I thought maybe this was a way I could get out of this,

747
00:55:33,442 --> 00:55:35,138
just exit the situation,

748
00:55:35,508 --> 00:55:38,197
and I didn't want to live in fear of having my computer seized.

749
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

750
00:55:42,889 --> 00:55:46,661
if they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer.

751
00:55:47,146 --> 00:55:50,546
When they came to me and said, "Steve wants to talk to you,"

752
00:55:50,725 --> 00:55:52,856
that seemed reasonable.

753
00:55:53,209 --> 00:55:57,649
They offered Norton what is know as a "Queen For A Day" letter or a proffer.

754
00:55:57,796 --> 00:56:00,822
It allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case.

755
00:56:01,131 --> 00:56:03,854
Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself,

756
00:56:04,137 --> 00:56:06,564
for any information she revealed during the meeting.

757
00:56:06,787 --> 00:56:09,700
I didn't like it. I told my lawyers repeatedly

758
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,

759
00:56:14,211 --> 00:56:16,325
I didn't need immunity, I hadn't done anything,

760
00:56:16,566 --> 00:56:19,008
but they were really, really stringent that there was--

761
00:56:19,172 --> 00:56:21,898
they did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity.

762
00:56:22,144 --> 00:56:24,822
[Interviewer] But just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal, a proffer.

763
00:56:24,822 --> 00:56:26,485
Right, a proffer letter.

764
00:56:26,485 --> 00:56:30,350
-In which you basically handed information to them in exchange for protection from prosecution.

765
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--

766
00:56:35,944 --> 00:56:38,298
it was just having a discussion, having an interview with them.

767
00:56:38,329 --> 00:56:40,979
-Well, they're asking you questions...
-They're asking me questions.

768
00:56:41,030 --> 00:56:43,043
-and they can ask about whatever they want...
-Right.

769
00:56:43,043 --> 00:56:45,565
- and whatever they learn...
-I really...

770
00:56:45,737 --> 00:56:49,983
-They can't have you prosecuted.
-Right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked.

771
00:56:50,384 --> 00:56:53,448
I repeatedly--I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter.

772
00:56:53,837 --> 00:56:56,640
I was ill. I was being pressured by my lawyers.

773
00:56:56,864 --> 00:56:59,723
I was confused. I was not doing well by this point.

774
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.

775
00:57:05,855 --> 00:57:08,960
I had no idea why I was in this situation.

776
00:57:09,329 --> 00:57:13,192
I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong.

777
00:57:13,496 --> 00:57:15,365
We went out of our minds.

778
00:57:15,719 --> 00:57:19,280
Aaron was clearly very distraught about it. We were very distraught about it.

779
00:57:19,361 --> 00:57:21,203
Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it.

780
00:57:21,414 --> 00:57:23,584
We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys.

781
00:57:23,997 --> 00:57:28,304
I was very unused to being in a room with large men, well-armed,

782
00:57:28,304 --> 00:57:33,214
that are continually telling me I'm lying, and that I must have done something.

783
00:57:33,566 --> 00:57:36,871
I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting

784
00:57:37,177 --> 00:57:39,730
wasn't a crime.

785
00:57:40,763 --> 00:57:43,499
I told them that they were on the wrong side of history.

786
00:57:43,714 --> 00:57:47,262
I used that phrase. I said, "You're on the wrong side of history."

787
00:57:47,352 --> 00:57:52,297
And they looked bored. They didn't even look angry. They just looked bored,

788
00:57:52,460 --> 00:57:57,610
and it began to occur to me that we weren't having the same conversation.

789
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,

790
00:58:02,140 --> 00:58:05,973
and eventually--I don't remember what was around it--

791
00:58:05,973 --> 00:58:12,258
I mentioned that he'd done this blog post, the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto".

792
00:58:12,749 --> 00:58:16,130
This is the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto",

793
00:58:16,496 --> 00:58:20,032
supposedly written in July, 2008 in Italy.

794
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."

795
00:58:25,276 --> 00:58:30,149
"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,
published over centuries in books and journals,


796
00:58:30,149 --> 00:58:33,634
is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

797
00:58:34,407 --> 00:58:38,320
"Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by."

798
00:58:38,408 --> 00:58:41,087
"You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences,

799
00:58:41,087 --> 00:58:44,633
liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends."

800
00:58:44,814 --> 00:58:47,812
"But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground."

801
00:58:48,088 --> 00:58:51,253
"It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were

802
00:58:51,253 --> 00:58:54,661
"the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew."

803
00:58:54,931 --> 00:58:57,449
"But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative."

804
00:58:57,666 --> 00:59:01,248
"Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy."

805
00:59:01,719 --> 00:59:04,356
"There's no justice in following unjust laws."

806
00:59:04,717 --> 00:59:08,413
"It's time to come into the light and, in a grand tradition of civil disobedience,

807
00:59:08,639 --> 00:59:11,710
declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture."

808
00:59:12,645 --> 00:59:18,572
The Manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people, and also edited by Norton.

809
00:59:18,572 --> 00:59:21,603
But it was Swartz who had signed his name to it.

810
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,

811
00:59:29,104 --> 00:59:32,411
and he gets very angry.

812
00:59:34,502 --> 00:59:37,669
The things that I'd done shouldn't have added up that way.

813
00:59:40,078 --> 00:59:45,366
I hadn't done anything wrong, and everything had gone wrong,

814
00:59:47,257 --> 00:59:49,639
but I was never...

815
00:59:57,302 --> 01:00:00,162
I'm still angry.

816
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,

817
01:00:06,610 --> 01:00:09,325
and they'd turn everything against you.

818
01:00:09,325 --> 01:00:13,591
And they will hurt you with anything they can.

819
01:00:15,210 --> 01:00:19,297
And in that moment, I regret that I said what I did.

820
01:00:19,991 --> 01:00:23,495
But my much larger regret is that we have settled for this.

821
01:00:23,641 --> 01:00:25,947
That we are okay with this.

822
01:00:26,175 --> 01:00:28,012
That we are okay with the justice system,

823
01:00:28,012 --> 01:00:32,080
a system that tries to game people into little traps so they can ruin our lives.

824
01:00:33,080 --> 01:00:35,178
So yeah, I wish I hadn't said that.

825
01:00:35,585 --> 01:00:40,812
But I'm much, much angrier that this is where I am.

826
01:00:42,891 --> 01:00:47,505
That this is what we, as a people, think is okay.

827
01:00:48,358 --> 01:00:52,187
They used every method that I think they could think of

828
01:00:52,542 --> 01:00:56,973
to get her to provide information which would be unhelpful to Aaron,

829
01:00:57,257 --> 01:01:00,169
and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron,

830
01:01:00,584 --> 01:01:07,240
but I don't think she had information that was helpful to the government.

831
01:01:08,259 --> 01:01:12,051
Months go by, as Swartz's friends and family await a looming indictment.

832
01:01:12,572 --> 01:01:17,142
In the meantime, Swartz was becoming a go-to expert on a series of internet issues.

833
01:01:17,142 --> 01:01:19,826
[RT interviewer} ...a question to you then: Do you think that the internet is something

834
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?

835
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,

836
01:01:30,576 --> 01:01:34,017
that's exactly what we heard in Egypt and Syria and all these other countries,

837
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

838
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,

839
01:01:42,553 --> 01:01:45,661
and try and change their government. You know, and that's a good thing,

840
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,

841
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.

842
01:01:55,238 --> 01:01:58,133
A principle, I think, is one that our Founding Fathers would have understood.

843
01:01:58,200 --> 01:02:00,128
If the internet had been around back then,

844
01:02:00,128 --> 01:02:03,265
instead of putting "post offices" in the Constitution, they would have put "ISPs".

845
01:02:03,350 --> 01:02:05,901
[RT interviewer] Well, it's definitely interesting to see how far...

846
01:02:05,965 --> 01:02:10,566
Swartz meets activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and the two begin to date.

847
01:02:10,676 --> 01:02:12,599
[Aaron] We need a massive global public outcry.

848
01:02:12,648 --> 01:02:15,165
[Taren] If there's no massive global public outcry, it won't create any change.

849
01:02:15,290 --> 01:02:18,541
-You know, four people in this city should cause a massive global public outcry.

850
01:02:18,701 --> 01:02:21,952
-You know, we need a petition signer.

851
01:02:22,350 --> 01:02:25,809
Without telling her specifics, he warned her he was involved in something

852
01:02:25,809 --> 01:02:27,608
he called simply "The Bad Thing".

853
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.

854
01:02:33,089 --> 01:02:37,890
I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, actually, but...

855
01:02:38,284 --> 01:02:41,410
So, sometime in probably late July, Aaron called me,

856
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.

857
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?"

858
01:02:49,831 --> 01:02:52,453
And I said, "Well, I want you to tell me."

859
01:02:53,433 --> 01:02:58,472
Aaron said, "Well, I've been--I've been arrested

860
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."

861
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."

862
01:03:11,225 --> 01:03:17,283
On July 14, 2011, federal prosecutors indict Swartz on four felony counts.

863
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,

864
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,

865
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.

866
01:03:35,022 --> 01:03:37,882
Aaron went to surrender, and they arrested him.

867
01:03:38,248 --> 01:03:41,990
They then strip searched him,

868
01:03:42,548 --> 01:03:48,243
took away his shoelaces, took away his belt, and left him in solitary confinement.

869
01:03:50,475 --> 01:03:54,247
The District of Massachusetts United States Attorney's office released a statement

870
01:03:54,589 --> 01:03:57,832
saying, "Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison,

871
01:03:58,053 --> 01:04:00,940
to be followed by three years of supervised release,

872
01:04:01,139 --> 01:04:05,002
restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to one million dollars."

873
01:04:06,786 --> 01:04:09,370
He is released on one hundred thousand dollars bail.

874
01:04:09,420 --> 01:04:12,330
The same day, the primary victim in the case, JSTOR,

875
01:04:12,738 --> 01:04:17,769
formally drops all charges against Swartz, and declines to pursue the case.

876
01:04:18,139 --> 01:04:21,575
JSTOR--they weren't our friends; they weren't helpful or friendly to us,

877
01:04:21,575 --> 01:04:25,595
but they also were just kind of like, "We're not part of this."

878
01:04:25,675 --> 01:04:30,490
JSTOR, and their parent company, ITHAKA, also sidestepped requests to talk with this film.

879
01:04:30,868 --> 01:04:33,524
But at the time, they released a statement saying,

880
01:04:33,718 --> 01:04:37,696
"It was the government's decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR's."

881
01:04:38,497 --> 01:04:42,688
And so it's our belief that, with that, the case will be over.

882
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.

883
01:04:48,654 --> 01:04:50,762
And the government refused.

884
01:04:51,149 --> 01:04:52,856
[Narrator] Why?

885
01:04:55,808 --> 01:04:58,055
Well, because I think they wanted to make an example out of Aaron,

886
01:04:58,369 --> 01:05:01,337
and they said they wanted--the reason why they wouldn't

887
01:05:01,538 --> 01:05:05,644
move on requiring a felony conviction and jail time

888
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.

889
01:05:13,255 --> 01:05:15,199
[Interviewer] They told you that?
- Yes.

890
01:05:15,320 --> 01:05:17,177
-This was going to be an example?
-Yes.

891
01:05:17,263 --> 01:05:19,730
-He was going to be made an example?
- Yes.

892
01:05:20,145 --> 01:05:21,857
Steve Heymann said that.

893
01:05:22,170 --> 01:05:26,477
Deterring who? There's other people out there running around logging onto JSTOR,

894
01:05:26,679 --> 01:05:30,167
and downloading the articles to make a political statement? I mean, who are they deterring?

895
01:05:30,374 --> 01:05:34,551
It would be easier to understand the Obama administration's

896
01:05:34,597 --> 01:05:37,520
posture of supposedly being for deterrence

897
01:05:37,771 --> 01:05:40,756
if this was an administration that, for instance,

898
01:05:40,845 --> 01:05:43,601
prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime

899
01:05:43,645 --> 01:05:45,527
that this country has seen in the last hundred years.

900
01:05:45,527 --> 01:05:49,630
The crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street.

901
01:05:50,101 --> 01:05:52,140
When you start deploying

902
01:05:52,452 --> 01:05:56,329
the non-controversial idea of deterrence

903
01:05:56,513 --> 01:05:58,254
only selectively

904
01:05:58,455 --> 01:06:01,909
you stop making a dispassionate analysis of law-breaking

905
01:06:02,128 --> 01:06:06,663
and you started deciding to deploy law enforcement resources

906
01:06:06,902 --> 01:06:10,223
specifically on the basis of political ideology,

907
01:06:10,410 --> 01:06:14,859
and that's not just undemocratic, it's supposed to be un-American.

908
01:06:19,319 --> 01:06:24,382
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel

909
01:06:24,596 --> 01:06:27,317
that the straw that broke the camel's back

910
01:06:27,317 --> 01:06:31,467
was a press release sent out by an organization Swartz founded called "Demand Progress".

911
01:06:31,633 --> 01:06:35,853
According to the MIT account, Heymann reacted to the short statement of support,

912
01:06:36,050 --> 01:06:40,036
calling it a "wild internet campaign" and a "foolish move"

913
01:06:40,036 --> 01:06:44,326
that moved the case from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.

914
01:06:44,486 --> 01:06:48,646
That was a poisonous combination: a prosecutor who didn't want to lose face,

915
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.

916
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,

917
01:06:58,019 --> 01:07:01,469
and then got your ass handed to you in court? No way!

918
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

919
01:07:05,980 --> 01:07:10,739
to go to the government, and request the government to stop the prosecution.

920
01:07:11,472 --> 01:07:14,528
[Interviewer] What was MIT's reaction to that?

921
01:07:14,704 --> 01:07:19,304
There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point.

922
01:07:23,131 --> 01:07:25,931
MIT doesn't defend Aaron

923
01:07:26,273 --> 01:07:30,583
which, to people inside of the MIT community, seems outrageous,

924
01:07:30,737 --> 01:07:35,667
because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word.

925
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

926
01:07:41,318 --> 01:07:46,538
was not only a rite of passage, it was part of the MIT tour,

927
01:07:46,971 --> 01:07:51,071
and lockpicking was a winter course at MIT.

928
01:07:51,353 --> 01:07:55,753
They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks.

929
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."

930
01:08:02,221 --> 01:08:06,407
"We don't want you to do this. You're overreacting. This is too strong."

931
01:08:06,407 --> 01:08:08,940
...that I'm aware of.

932
01:08:09,104 --> 01:08:14,474
They acted kind of like any corporation would. They sort of--they helped the government,

933
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.

934
01:08:22,547 --> 01:08:25,840
MIT declined repeated requests to comment,

935
01:08:26,090 --> 01:08:30,380
but they later released a report saying they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality,

936
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.

937
01:08:36,252 --> 01:08:41,882
MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos.

938
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,

939
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.

940
01:08:52,846 --> 01:08:55,831
If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,

941
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.

942
01:09:01,628 --> 01:09:04,861
If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen,

943
01:09:05,150 --> 01:09:08,850
they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard,

944
01:09:09,011 --> 01:09:11,441
which was pretty clearly against the rules.

945
01:09:11,602 --> 01:09:13,762
The difference between Aaron and the people I just mentioned

946
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.

947
01:09:18,985 --> 01:09:23,151
Swartz continues to be outspoken on a variety of internet issues.

948
01:09:23,624 --> 01:09:28,869
You know, the reason the internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas,

949
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,

950
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.

951
01:09:38,970 --> 01:09:44,320
Aaron thought he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people.

952
01:09:44,638 --> 01:09:48,728
[RT interviewer] Flame can literally control your computer, and make it spy on you.

953
01:09:49,149 --> 01:09:52,519
Welcome, Aaron. Good to have you back on the show here.

954
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,

955
01:09:56,975 --> 01:09:59,735
now they're using computers to do the same things.

956
01:09:59,807 --> 01:10:01,896
[Narrator] Swartz's political activity continues,

957
01:10:01,936 --> 01:10:06,676
his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy.

958
01:10:06,865 --> 01:10:08,709
It was called "SOPA".

959
01:10:09,054 --> 01:10:13,174
Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous overreach,

960
01:10:13,264 --> 01:10:16,254
threatening the technical integrity of the Internet itself.

961
01:10:16,351 --> 01:10:18,791
[Ekersley] And one of the first things I did was to call Aaron.

962
01:10:18,829 --> 01:10:22,359
And I said, "Can we do a big online campaign against this?"

963
01:10:22,432 --> 01:10:24,982
"This isn't a bill about copyright."

964
01:10:25,136 --> 01:10:26,576
"It's not?"

965
01:10:26,658 --> 01:10:30,408
"No," he said, "it's a bill about the freedom to connect."

966
01:10:30,815 --> 01:10:32,475
Now I was listening.

967
01:10:32,703 --> 01:10:36,113
And he thought about it for a while, and then said, "Yes."

968
01:10:36,282 --> 01:10:38,752
And he went and founded Demand Progress.

969
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,

970
01:10:44,184 --> 01:10:47,231
but started in the fall of 2010.

971
01:10:47,422 --> 01:10:50,612
Aaron was one of the most prominent people in a community of people

972
01:10:50,692 --> 01:10:55,780
who helped lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country.

973
01:10:55,930 --> 01:11:01,424
SOPA was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies,

974
01:11:01,543 --> 01:11:06,993
but what it did was basically take a sledgehammer to a problem that needed a scalpel.

975
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,

976
01:11:13,594 --> 01:11:16,834
or even to force Google to exclude their links.

977
01:11:16,834 --> 01:11:21,173
All they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement.

978
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.

979
01:11:27,270 --> 01:11:30,490
It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman,

980
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

981
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.

982
01:11:38,958 --> 01:11:43,728
This was over the top, I mean, this was a catastrophe.

983
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.

984
01:11:51,922 --> 01:11:55,614
There were only a handful of us who said, "Look, we're not for piracy either,

985
01:11:55,914 --> 01:12:00,517
but it makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet,

986
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,

987
01:12:05,922 --> 01:12:08,022
and Aaron got that right away.

988
01:12:08,117 --> 01:12:11,977
The freedoms, guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on

989
01:12:12,057 --> 01:12:14,497
would be suddenly deleted.

990
01:12:14,679 --> 01:12:18,779
New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights

991
01:12:18,821 --> 01:12:21,382
we'd always taken for granted.

992
01:12:21,492 --> 01:12:27,260
And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.

993
01:12:28,483 --> 01:12:33,508
When SOPA was introduced in October, 2011, it was considered inevitable.

994
01:12:33,715 --> 01:12:37,617
Our strategy, when it first came out, was to hopefully slow the bill down,

995
01:12:37,617 --> 01:12:41,797
maybe weaken it a little bit but, even we

996
01:12:41,797 --> 01:12:44,828
didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill.

997
01:12:46,230 --> 01:12:52,025
Having worked in Washington, what you learn is that, typically in Washington,

998
01:12:52,250 --> 01:12:57,822
the legislative fights are fights between different sets of corporate monied interests.

999
01:12:58,220 --> 01:13:02,223
They're all duking it out to pass legislation, and the fights that are the closest

1000
01:13:02,693 --> 01:13:07,143
are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests,

1001
01:13:07,363 --> 01:13:11,264
and they're financially equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying.

1002
01:13:11,437 --> 01:13:13,269
Those are the closest ones.

1003
01:13:13,351 --> 01:13:16,413
The ones that aren't even fights, typically, are ones

1004
01:13:16,413 --> 01:13:20,676
where all the money is on one side, all the corporations are on one side,

1005
01:13:20,691 --> 01:13:23,603
and it's just millions of people on the other side.

1006
01:13:25,257 --> 01:13:30,369
I haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service.

1007
01:13:30,676 --> 01:13:36,587
There were more than forty United States senators on that bill as co-sponsors,

1008
01:13:36,860 --> 01:13:40,534
so they were already a long, long way to getting the

1009
01:13:40,534 --> 01:13:43,968
sixty votes to have it clear all the procedural hoops.

1010
01:13:44,456 --> 01:13:47,603
Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period.

1011
01:13:48,112 --> 01:13:53,381
Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal enormous support using traditional outreach,

1012
01:13:53,605 --> 01:13:59,267
combined with commonly used voiceover IP, to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

1013
01:14:00,011 --> 01:14:03,847
I've never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level

1014
01:14:03,847 --> 01:14:07,985
both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side.

1015
01:14:08,867 --> 01:14:12,669
Millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-SOPA petitions.

1016
01:14:12,948 --> 01:14:14,922
Congress was caught off guard.

1017
01:14:15,251 --> 01:14:20,233
There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill,

1018
01:14:20,478 --> 01:14:22,897
watching them insist they could regulate the internet,

1019
01:14:23,070 --> 01:14:25,248
and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them.

1020
01:14:25,248 --> 01:14:26,390
I am not a nerd.

1021
01:14:26,621 --> 01:14:28,084
I'm just not enough of a nerd...

1022
01:14:28,398 --> 01:14:31,120
Maybe we oughta ask some nerds what this thing really does. [laughter]

1023
01:14:31,120 --> 01:14:33,413
Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds...

1024
01:14:33,413 --> 01:14:35,890
[laughter]

1025
01:14:35,890 --> 01:14:37,689
Really?

1026
01:14:37,719 --> 01:14:40,101
[laughter]

1027
01:14:40,287 --> 01:14:41,275
"Nerds"?

1028
01:14:41,275 --> 01:14:42,315
[laughter]

1029
01:14:42,361 --> 01:14:45,689
You know, I think, actually the word you're looking for is "experts"...

1030
01:14:45,788 --> 01:14:47,166
[laughter]

1031
01:14:47,275 --> 01:14:51,625
to enlighten you so your laws don't backfire [audience laughter and applause]

1032
01:14:51,625 --> 01:14:53,568
and break the internet.

1033
01:14:53,714 --> 01:14:57,033
We use the term "geek" but we're allowed to use that because we are geeks.

1034
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,

1035
01:15:01,905 --> 01:15:04,839
reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town.

1036
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."

1037
01:15:12,439 --> 01:15:15,421
There used to be an office that provided science and technology advice,

1038
01:15:15,741 --> 01:15:19,208
and members could go to them and say, "Help me understand X,Y,Z."

1039
01:15:19,208 --> 01:15:22,375
And Gingrich killed it. He said it was a waste of money.

1040
01:15:22,375 --> 01:15:26,118
Ever since then, Congress has plunged into the Dark Ages.

1041
01:15:26,529 --> 01:15:29,554
I don't think anybody really thought that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron.

1042
01:15:30,464 --> 01:15:34,113
It was worth trying, but it didn't seem winnable,

1043
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,

1044
01:15:38,653 --> 01:15:40,700
"I think we might win this."

1045
01:15:40,840 --> 01:15:43,949
And I was like, "That would be amazing."

1046
01:15:44,439 --> 01:15:46,134
Calls to Congress continue.

1047
01:15:46,317 --> 01:15:50,512
When the domain hosting site Go Daddy becomes a supporter of the bill,

1048
01:15:50,747 --> 01:15:54,902
tens of thousands of users transferred their domain names in protest.

1049
01:15:55,272 --> 01:16:00,084
Within a week, a humbled Go Daddy reverses their position on SOPA.

1050
01:16:00,376 --> 01:16:05,962
When the congress people that supported the record and movie industries,

1051
01:16:06,383 --> 01:16:10,707
realized that there was this backlash, they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit.

1052
01:16:10,879 --> 01:16:16,081
You could see the curve happening. You could see that our arguments were starting to resonate.

1053
01:16:16,357 --> 01:16:19,034
It was like Aaron had been striking a match and it was being blown out,

1054
01:16:19,034 --> 01:16:21,055
striking another one, and it was being blown out,

1055
01:16:21,055 --> 01:16:24,645
and finally he'd managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught,

1056
01:16:24,692 --> 01:16:27,590
and then it turned into this roaring blaze.

1057
01:16:27,820 --> 01:16:31,743
On January 16, 2012, the White House issued a statement

1058
01:16:31,743 --> 01:16:34,326
saying they didn't support the bill.

1059
01:16:34,348 --> 01:16:36,603
And then this happened:

1060
01:16:36,662 --> 01:16:40,202
I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy,

1061
01:16:40,202 --> 01:16:44,745
and we should deal with them in a serious way, but this bill is not the right bill.

1062
01:16:44,924 --> 01:16:48,965
When Jimmy Wales put his support toward blacking out Wikipedia,

1063
01:16:49,337 --> 01:16:52,520
the number five most popular website in the world,

1064
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.

1065
01:16:58,880 --> 01:17:00,089
Wikipedia went black.

1066
01:17:00,165 --> 01:17:01,141
Reddit went black.

1067
01:17:01,233 --> 01:17:03,221
Craigslist went black.

1068
01:17:03,340 --> 01:17:06,050
The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat out melted.

1069
01:17:06,179 --> 01:17:10,295
Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill

1070
01:17:10,815 --> 01:17:13,927
that they were promoting just a couple days ago.

1071
01:17:14,106 --> 01:17:17,698
Within 24 hours, the number of opponents of SOPA in Congress

1072
01:17:17,853 --> 01:17:19,215
went from this...

1073
01:17:19,457 --> 01:17:22,591
to this.

1074
01:17:22,796 --> 01:17:29,815
To see congressmen and senators slowly flip sides throughout the day of the blackout

1075
01:17:30,051 --> 01:17:31,825
was pretty unbelievable.

1076
01:17:32,175 --> 01:17:35,210
There was like a hundred representative swing.

1077
01:17:35,378 --> 01:17:38,746
And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this,

1078
01:17:38,924 --> 01:17:40,756
we had won.

1079
01:17:41,049 --> 01:17:43,210
The thing that everyone said was impossible,

1080
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,

1081
01:17:46,779 --> 01:17:48,697
had happened.

1082
01:17:49,142 --> 01:17:50,467
We did it.

1083
01:17:50,933 --> 01:17:52,689
We won.

1084
01:17:52,909 --> 01:17:55,525


1085
01:17:55,945 --> 01:17:58,781
This is a historic week in internet politics--maybe American politics.

1086
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:

1087
01:18:04,478 --> 01:18:08,664
they received more emails and more phone calls on SOPA Blackout Day

1088
01:18:08,908 --> 01:18:11,080
than they'd ever received about anything.

1089
01:18:11,317 --> 01:18:13,224
I think that was an extremely exciting moment.

1090
01:18:13,397 --> 01:18:17,640
This was the moment when the internet had grown up, politically.

1091
01:18:17,934 --> 01:18:21,463
It was exhilarating because it's hard to believe it actually happened.

1092
01:18:21,658 --> 01:18:25,365
It's hard to believe a bill with so much financial power behind it

1093
01:18:25,679 --> 01:18:29,157
didn't simply sail through the Congress.

1094
01:18:29,541 --> 01:18:32,167
And not only did not sail through, it didn't pass at all.

1095
01:18:34,153 --> 01:18:36,669
It's easy sometimes to feel like you're powereless,

1096
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.

1097
01:18:40,889 --> 01:18:43,568
But I'm here to tell you today, you are powerful.

1098
01:18:43,568 --> 01:18:46,295
[Crowd cheers]

1099
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.

1100
01:18:50,976 --> 01:18:53,400
You are being listened to. You are making a difference.

1101
01:18:53,588 --> 01:18:56,992
You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.

1102
01:18:57,132 --> 01:18:59,974
[Crowd cheers]

1103
01:19:00,049 --> 01:19:01,170
Stop PIPA.

1104
01:19:01,170 --> 01:19:02,916
Stop SOPA.

1105
01:19:02,916 --> 01:19:04,072
[Crowd cheers]

1106
01:19:04,182 --> 01:19:07,648
Some of the biggest internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit

1107
01:19:07,648 --> 01:19:11,219
from a world in which their little competitors could get censored.

1108
01:19:12,519 --> 01:19:15,106
We can't let that happen.

1109
01:19:15,172 --> 01:19:19,291
For him, it was more important to be sure that you made a small change

1110
01:19:19,612 --> 01:19:23,271
than to play a small part in a big change.

1111
01:19:23,708 --> 01:19:28,187
But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change,

1112
01:19:28,187 --> 01:19:30,753
and so for him, it was kind of this proof of concept

1113
01:19:30,753 --> 01:19:35,069
like, "Okay, what I want to do with my life is change the world."

1114
01:19:35,326 --> 01:19:39,471
"I think about it in this really scientific way of measuring my impact,

1115
01:19:39,725 --> 01:19:42,813
and this shows that it's possible."

1116
01:19:43,081 --> 01:19:45,810
"The thing that I want to do with my life is possible."

1117
01:19:46,078 --> 01:19:48,763
"I have proved that I can do it,

1118
01:19:48,763 --> 01:19:50,999
that I, Aaron Swartz, can change the world."

1119
01:19:51,090 --> 01:19:57,516
For a guy who never really thought he had done much--which was Aaron--

1120
01:19:59,161 --> 01:20:04,115
was one of the few moments where you could really see

1121
01:20:04,115 --> 01:20:06,769
that he felt like he had done something good,

1122
01:20:06,994 --> 01:20:11,836
feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap.

1123
01:20:13,828 --> 01:20:16,060
Everyone said there was no way we could stop SOPA.

1124
01:20:16,194 --> 01:20:17,903
We stopped it.

1125
01:20:17,997 --> 01:20:22,576
This is three outrageously good victories, and the year isn't even over yet.

1126
01:20:22,747 --> 01:20:26,257
I mean, if there's a time to be positive, it's now.

1127
01:20:26,847 --> 01:20:29,700
You know, he wins at SOPA a year after he's arrested.

1128
01:20:29,989 --> 01:20:33,529
It's not unambiguously happy moments. There's a lot going on.

1129
01:20:33,813 --> 01:20:40,334
He's so attuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him.

1130
01:20:40,576 --> 01:20:44,521
The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous,

1131
01:20:44,831 --> 01:20:48,074
and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance,

1132
01:20:48,402 --> 01:20:50,959
Swartz was already concerned.

1133
01:20:51,240 --> 01:20:55,200
It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax

1134
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.

1135
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"

1136
01:21:04,186 --> 01:21:06,483
then that's an awful lot of people.

1137
01:21:06,811 --> 01:21:10,063
It'd be one thing if they said, "Look, we know the number of telephones we're spying on,

1138
01:21:10,063 --> 01:21:12,953
we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."

1139
01:21:13,050 --> 01:21:15,916
but they just came back and said, "We can't give you a number at all."

1140
01:21:16,229 --> 01:21:18,644
That's pretty--I mean, that's scary, is what it is.

1141
01:21:18,881 --> 01:21:25,502
And they put incredible pressure on him, took away all of the money he had made.

1142
01:21:25,803 --> 01:21:29,538
They, you know, threatened to take away his physical freedom.

1143
01:21:29,937 --> 01:21:33,788
Why'd they do it, you know? I mean, well, why are they going after whistleblowers?

1144
01:21:34,741 --> 01:21:38,813
You know, why are they going after people who tell the truth

1145
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.

1146
01:21:46,744 --> 01:21:49,776
So secrecy serves those who are already in power,

1147
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,

1148
01:21:55,278 --> 01:21:58,410
a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional.

1149
01:21:58,841 --> 01:22:01,941
So, those two things are not coincidences.

1150
01:22:02,154 --> 01:22:04,378
It's very clear that this technology has been developed

1151
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.

1152
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,

1153
01:22:14,604 --> 01:22:17,124
going back to the Nixon administation, right,

1154
01:22:17,319 --> 01:22:20,082
obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush,

1155
01:22:20,316 --> 01:22:23,536
and Obama has continued to expand it, and the problems have slowly grown worse and worse,

1156
01:22:24,028 --> 01:22:27,553
but there's never been this moment you can point to and say,

1157
01:22:27,701 --> 01:22:31,941
"Okay, we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters..."

1158
01:22:32,455 --> 01:22:38,959
The prosecution, in my estimation of Aaron Swartz, was about sending a particular, laserlike message

1159
01:22:39,363 --> 01:22:45,413
to a group of people that the Obama administration sees as politically threatening,

1160
01:22:47,341 --> 01:22:54,141
and that is, essentially, the hacker, the information, and the democracy activist community,

1161
01:22:54,447 --> 01:22:59,702
and the message that the Obama administration wanted to send to that particular community was,

1162
01:22:59,905 --> 01:23:05,113
in my estimation, "We know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment,

1163
01:23:05,335 --> 01:23:08,677
and so we are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz

1164
01:23:08,977 --> 01:23:13,418
to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."

1165
01:23:13,843 --> 01:23:17,160
And the government said, "Oh, the legal opinions we're using

1166
01:23:17,382 --> 01:23:20,453
to legalize the spying program are also classified,

1167
01:23:20,786 --> 01:23:23,666
so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you."

1168
01:23:24,011 --> 01:23:26,461
You know, every time they can say, "Oh, this is another instance of cyberwar.

1169
01:23:26,685 --> 01:23:30,201
The cybercriminals are attacking us again. We're all in danger. We're all under threat."

1170
01:23:30,510 --> 01:23:33,737
They use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws.

1171
01:23:35,563 --> 01:23:40,388
[Interviewer] And so just to follow--personally, how do you feel the fight is going?

1172
01:23:40,947 --> 01:23:42,404
It's up to you!

1173
01:23:42,404 --> 01:23:46,264
-I know. It's just that we gotta, you know...

1174
01:23:47,800 --> 01:23:52,738
You know, there's sort of these two polarizing perspectives, right,

1175
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

1176
01:23:57,422 --> 01:23:59,093
or everything is terrible,

1177
01:23:59,093 --> 01:24:01,914
the internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying,

1178
01:24:01,972 --> 01:24:03,762
and controlling what we say.

1179
01:24:03,821 --> 01:24:05,700
And the thing is, both are true, right?

1180
01:24:05,948 --> 01:24:10,040
The internet has done both, and both are kind of amazing and astonishing

1181
01:24:10,386 --> 01:24:13,287
and which one will win out in the long run is up to us.

1182
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.

1183
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

1184
01:24:21,233 --> 01:24:23,600
because they're both there, and they're both always going to be there.

1185
01:24:28,950 --> 01:24:35,010
On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Swartz,

1186
01:24:35,010 --> 01:24:40,170
adding additional counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer, and computer fraud.

1187
01:24:40,825 --> 01:24:45,557
Now, instead of four felony counts, Swartz was facing thirteen.

1188
01:24:45,882 --> 01:24:48,835
The prosecution's leverage had dramatically increased,

1189
01:24:49,043 --> 01:24:52,294
as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines.

1190
01:24:52,294 --> 01:24:55,417
They filed a separate indictment to add more charges,

1191
01:24:55,804 --> 01:25:01,526
and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes,

1192
01:25:01,899 --> 01:25:06,010
and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law.

1193
01:25:07,331 --> 01:25:10,426
That theory, and much of the prosecution's case against Swartz

1194
01:25:10,904 --> 01:25:13,862
involved a law created originally in 1986.

1195
01:25:14,360 --> 01:25:16,663
It is called the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".

1196
01:25:16,996 --> 01:25:18,660
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

1197
01:25:18,660 --> 01:25:22,261
was inspired by the movie "War Games" with Matthew Broderick--great movie.

1198
01:25:22,478 --> 01:25:23,954
[Broderick] I have you now.

1199
01:25:23,954 --> 01:25:27,895
In this movie, a kid gets the ability, through the magic of computer networks

1200
01:25:28,123 --> 01:25:30,456
to launch a nuclear attack.

1201
01:25:30,551 --> 01:25:33,561
[missiles firing up]

1202
01:25:33,761 --> 01:25:37,669
You know, that's not actually possible, and it certainly wasn't possible in the '80s

1203
01:25:37,854 --> 01:25:41,954
but apparently this movie scared Congress enough to

1204
01:25:42,005 --> 01:25:44,965
pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1205
01:25:45,262 --> 01:25:48,711
This is a law that's just behind the times, for example, it penalizes

1206
01:25:49,431 --> 01:25:53,995
a terms of service kind of arrangement. You can have something like

1207
01:25:54,103 --> 01:26:01,111
eHarmony or Match.com, and somebody sort of inflates their own personal characteristics,

1208
01:26:01,409 --> 01:26:05,255
and all of a sudden, depending on the jurisdiction and the prosecutors,

1209
01:26:05,503 --> 01:26:07,958
they could be in a whole host of troubles.

1210
01:26:08,172 --> 01:26:10,263
We all know what "Terms of Use" are.

1211
01:26:10,594 --> 01:26:14,214
Most people don't read them, but not abiding by their terms could mean

1212
01:26:14,438 --> 01:26:16,461
you are committing a felony.

1213
01:26:16,727 --> 01:26:19,024
The website Terms of Service often say things like:

1214
01:26:19,272 --> 01:26:22,492
"Be nice to each other", or "Don't do anything that's improper."

1215
01:26:22,789 --> 01:26:27,496
The idea that the Criminal Law has anything to say about these kinds of violations,

1216
01:26:27,668 --> 01:26:30,721
I think strikes most people as crazy.

1217
01:26:30,938 --> 01:26:33,483
The examples get even more "crazy":

1218
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

1219
01:26:39,884 --> 01:26:43,258
said you had to be eighteen in order to read it.

1220
01:26:43,327 --> 01:26:46,674
I would say that the way the CFAA has been interpreted by the Justice Department,

1221
01:26:46,674 --> 01:26:49,223
we are probably all breaking the law.

1222
01:26:49,589 --> 01:26:54,937
Vague and prone to misuse, the CFAA has become a one-size-fits-all hammer

1223
01:26:55,000 --> 01:26:58,012
for a wide range of computer-related disputes.

1224
01:26:58,121 --> 01:27:00,408
Though not the only factor in his case,

1225
01:27:00,576 --> 01:27:04,935
eleven of the thirteen charges against Swartz involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1226
01:27:07,248 --> 01:27:11,465
The question "Why?" hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz.

1227
01:27:11,815 --> 01:27:16,045
Just what was motivating the government, and what would their case have been?

1228
01:27:16,185 --> 01:27:19,945
The Department of Justice declined requests for answers,

1229
01:27:20,060 --> 01:27:23,660
but Professor Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case.

1230
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:

1231
01:27:28,359 --> 01:27:31,303
I was a federal prosecutor at the Justice Department for three years

1232
01:27:31,461 --> 01:27:34,191
before I started teaching. The government came forward

1233
01:27:34,191 --> 01:27:38,463
with an indictment based on what crimes they thought were committed,

1234
01:27:38,501 --> 01:27:42,176
just as a purely lawyer's matter, looking at the precedents, looking at the statute,

1235
01:27:42,505 --> 01:27:45,778
looking at the history, looking at the cases that are out there so far,

1236
01:27:45,974 --> 01:27:49,281
I think it was a fair indictment based on that.

1237
01:27:49,526 --> 01:27:51,501
You can debate whether they should have charged this case.

1238
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.

1239
01:27:57,681 --> 01:28:03,108
I think the government took Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" very seriously,

1240
01:28:04,086 --> 01:28:09,706
and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed, as a moral imperative,

1241
01:28:10,059 --> 01:28:15,147
to breaking the law, to overcome a law that Swartz saw as unjust,

1242
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.

1243
01:28:21,140 --> 01:28:24,465
There's going to Congress as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA,

1244
01:28:24,662 --> 01:28:28,441
or you can violate that law in a way to try to nullify that law,

1245
01:28:28,834 --> 01:28:33,998
and I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was committed,

1246
01:28:34,205 --> 01:28:39,691
not just to breaking the law, but to really making sure that law was nullified.

1247
01:28:40,006 --> 01:28:43,890
That everyone would have access to the database in a way that

1248
01:28:44,054 --> 01:28:47,129
you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the tube.

1249
01:28:47,368 --> 01:28:51,199
It would be done, and Swartz's side would win.

1250
01:28:52,815 --> 01:28:56,181
There's a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law,

1251
01:28:56,470 --> 01:29:00,357
and ultimately, that is a decision for the American people to make, working through Congress.

1252
01:29:00,621 --> 01:29:03,547
And then the second problem is, I think, we're still trying to figure out:

1253
01:29:03,752 --> 01:29:07,706
What's the line between less serious offences and more serious offences?

1254
01:29:08,027 --> 01:29:12,317
We're now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse,

1255
01:29:12,556 --> 01:29:16,840
and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are

1256
01:29:17,044 --> 01:29:19,277
because we're just working that out.

1257
01:29:19,650 --> 01:29:22,392
This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion.

1258
01:29:22,659 --> 01:29:25,891
The hammer that the Justice Department has to scare people with

1259
01:29:25,998 --> 01:29:28,700
just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,

1260
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.

1261
01:29:33,340 --> 01:29:35,958
Should we tap somebody's phone? Should we film them?

1262
01:29:36,111 --> 01:29:39,413
Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?

1263
01:29:39,689 --> 01:29:42,366
That's how federal agents and prosecutors think.

1264
01:29:42,528 --> 01:29:44,974
They build cases. They make cases.

1265
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,

1266
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.

1267
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,

1268
01:30:02,905 --> 01:30:07,986
and anything we're afraid of, like the future of the internet and access,

1269
01:30:08,453 --> 01:30:13,233
and anything we're angry about, instinctively creates a criminal justice intervention,

1270
01:30:13,686 --> 01:30:18,924
and we've used jail, prison, and punishment to resolve a whole host of problems

1271
01:30:19,220 --> 01:30:23,007
that, historically, were never seen as criminal justice problems.

1272
01:30:23,223 --> 01:30:28,583
The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute, which is part of what

1273
01:30:28,792 --> 01:30:32,138
has created this debate and controversy over online access and information on the internet,

1274
01:30:32,953 --> 01:30:35,706
is very consistent with what we've seen in other areas.

1275
01:30:35,928 --> 01:30:39,960
The one difference is that the people who are usually targeted and victimized

1276
01:30:40,327 --> 01:30:45,901
by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority.

1277
01:30:47,747 --> 01:30:50,860
Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.

1278
01:30:51,222 --> 01:30:53,503
He had basically stopped working on anything else,

1279
01:30:53,548 --> 01:30:57,283
and the case was, in fact, taking over sort of his whole life.

1280
01:30:57,296 --> 01:31:02,457
One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he was emotionally vulnerable,

1281
01:31:03,220 --> 01:31:07,333
and that that was something they really needed to keep in mind so that they knew that.

1282
01:31:07,333 --> 01:31:09,578
It was weighing on him very heavily.

1283
01:31:09,820 --> 01:31:14,877
He did not like having his actions and his movements restricted in any way,

1284
01:31:15,754 --> 01:31:20,902
and the threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot,

1285
01:31:21,919 --> 01:31:23,931
was terrifying to him.

1286
01:31:23,931 --> 01:31:26,540
Completely exhausted his financial resouces,

1287
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,

1288
01:31:32,511 --> 01:31:36,481
so it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

1289
01:31:36,755 --> 01:31:38,551
[Interviewer] The legal defence?
- Yes.

1290
01:31:38,551 --> 01:31:40,855
-Was in millions?
- Yes.

1291
01:31:41,479 --> 01:31:43,995
I think he didn't want to be a burden to people.

1292
01:31:44,252 --> 01:31:47,786
I think that was a factor like, "I have my normal life,

1293
01:31:48,166 --> 01:31:50,291
and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with,

1294
01:31:50,452 --> 01:31:53,259
and I try to keep the two of them as separate as possible,

1295
01:31:53,489 --> 01:31:57,484
but they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty."

1296
01:31:59,333 --> 01:32:02,686
Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher:

1297
01:32:02,720 --> 01:32:05,149
Do you admit guilt and move on with your life,

1298
01:32:05,166 --> 01:32:07,458
or do you fight a broken system?

1299
01:32:07,622 --> 01:32:09,651
With his legal case, the answer was simple:

1300
01:32:09,651 --> 01:32:13,079
He rejects a final plea deal and a trial date is set.

1301
01:32:13,300 --> 01:32:17,174
Aaron was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something

1302
01:32:17,381 --> 01:32:21,639
that he didn't believe was fair, but I also think he was scared.

1303
01:32:33,045 --> 01:32:34,912
I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

1304
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,

1305
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.

1306
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.

1307
01:32:50,094 --> 01:32:52,025
I thought that we could win the case.

1308
01:32:52,025 --> 01:32:54,611
He didn't talk about it very much, but you could see

1309
01:32:54,611 --> 01:32:57,548
the enormous pain that he was going through.

1310
01:32:57,605 --> 01:33:01,749
[song]

1311
01:33:01,940 --> 01:33:05,106
No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings

1312
01:33:05,360 --> 01:33:10,846
or depressive episodes or anything that I would describe as "severe depression"

1313
01:33:11,114 --> 01:33:13,962
and it's possible, you know, he was depressed. People get depressed.

1314
01:33:14,155 --> 01:33:18,867
[music]

1315
01:33:19,112 --> 01:33:23,415
Very early in our relationship, three or four weeks in or something,

1316
01:33:24,078 --> 01:33:26,730
I remember him saying to me

1317
01:33:27,787 --> 01:33:30,711
that I was a lot stronger than he was.

1318
01:33:30,947 --> 01:33:33,660
You know, he was brittle in a lot of ways.

1319
01:33:33,830 --> 01:33:36,999
Things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

1320
01:33:37,200 --> 01:33:39,810
That was part of his brilliance, too.

1321
01:33:41,216 --> 01:33:46,909
I think he probably had something like clinical depression in his early twenties.

1322
01:33:47,228 --> 01:33:49,702
I don't think he did when I was with him.

1323
01:33:49,971 --> 01:33:55,275
He wasn't a "joyful" person, but that's different from being depressed.

1324
01:33:56,843 --> 01:34:01,616
He was just under such enormous pressure for two years straight.

1325
01:34:01,842 --> 01:34:04,193
He just didn't want to do it anymore.

1326
01:34:04,375 --> 01:34:07,729
He was just--I just think it was too much.

1327
01:34:07,814 --> 01:34:14,503
[song]

1328
01:34:14,571 --> 01:34:17,320
I got a phone call late at night.

1329
01:34:17,814 --> 01:34:23,091
I could tell something was wrong, and then I called, and I realized what had happened.

1330
01:34:23,981 --> 01:34:29,059
A co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "Reddit" has been found dead.

1331
01:34:29,247 --> 01:34:31,730
Police say twenty-six-year-old Aaron Swartz

1332
01:34:31,828 --> 01:34:35,585
killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.

1333
01:34:37,539 --> 01:34:46,506
I just thought, we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation.

1334
01:34:46,963 --> 01:34:51,096
I was like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.

1335
01:34:57,082 --> 01:35:00,299
It was one of the hardest nights of my life.

1336
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!"

1337
01:35:07,693 --> 01:35:09,240
I can't. That's it.

1338
01:35:09,240 --> 01:35:11,098
[Interviewer] Okay.

1339
01:35:16,408 --> 01:35:22,553
Yeah, none of it made any sense,

1340
01:35:22,773 --> 01:35:25,180
and really still doesn't.

1341
01:35:25,180 --> 01:35:27,561
I was so frustrated, angry.

1342
01:35:32,652 --> 01:35:36,688
[exhales]

1343
01:35:38,217 --> 01:35:43,326
You know, I tried to explain it to my kids.

1344
01:35:43,885 --> 01:35:47,198
My three-year-old told me that the doctors would fix him.

1345
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,

1346
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...

1347
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...

1348
01:36:11,656 --> 01:36:14,375
He was part of me.

1349
01:36:16,585 --> 01:36:20,845
And I just wanted it to not be real, and then...

1350
01:36:25,105 --> 01:36:29,367
and then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date:

1351
01:36:33,244 --> 01:36:35,761
"to 2013".

1352
01:36:50,710 --> 01:36:54,304
[quote on screen]

1353
01:37:14,958 --> 01:37:19,636
My first thought was: what if nobody even notices?

1354
01:37:19,636 --> 01:37:24,108
You know, because it wasn't clear to me how salient he was.

1355
01:37:24,508 --> 01:37:30,060
I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw.

1356
01:37:30,060 --> 01:37:32,116
The Net just lit up.

1357
01:37:32,116 --> 01:37:37,677
Everyone was trying to explain it in their own way, but I've never seen

1358
01:37:38,281 --> 01:37:40,356
people grieve on Twitter before.

1359
01:37:40,356 --> 01:37:43,888
People were visibly grieving online.

1360
01:37:46,552 --> 01:37:49,668
He was the internet's own boy,

1361
01:37:50,115 --> 01:37:54,126
and the old world killed him.

1362
01:37:55,747 --> 01:38:01,316
We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched.

1363
01:38:02,204 --> 01:38:06,564
Architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the president, regularly.

1364
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,

1365
01:38:14,774 --> 01:38:17,859
It just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.

1366
01:38:17,859 --> 01:38:23,643
The question is: Can we do something, given what's happened,

1367
01:38:23,643 --> 01:38:26,698
to make the world a better place,

1368
01:38:26,698 --> 01:38:28,817
and how can we further that legacy?

1369
01:38:28,817 --> 01:38:32,284
That's the only question one could ask.

1370
01:38:33,310 --> 01:38:37,796
All over the world there are starting to be hack-a-thons, gatherings,

1371
01:38:37,971 --> 01:38:43,578
Aaron Swartz has, in some sense, brought the best out of us, in trying to say:

1372
01:38:44,044 --> 01:38:47,079
How do we fix this?

1373
01:38:47,994 --> 01:38:52,892
He was, in my humble opinion, one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries

1374
01:38:52,892 --> 01:38:55,817
that this country has produced.

1375
01:38:55,817 --> 01:38:59,504
I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious,

1376
01:38:59,715 --> 01:39:05,939
but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with.

1377
01:39:06,089 --> 01:39:12,430
When we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,

1378
01:39:12,601 --> 01:39:17,163
we've broken the rule of law--we've desecrated the temple of justice.

1379
01:39:17,344 --> 01:39:19,684
Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

1380
01:39:19,684 --> 01:39:21,756
[applause]

1381
01:39:21,756 --> 01:39:25,525
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,

1382
01:39:25,525 --> 01:39:29,084
it comes through continuous struggle.

1383
01:39:30,316 --> 01:39:32,703
Aaron really could do magic,

1384
01:39:32,976 --> 01:39:36,308
and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death.

1385
01:39:36,308 --> 01:39:40,409
He believed that he could change the world, and he was right.

1386
01:39:40,780 --> 01:39:44,935
Out of the last week, and out of today, phoenixes are already rising.

1387
01:39:45,022 --> 01:39:46,728
[applause]

1388
01:39:46,978 --> 01:39:51,605
Since Swartz's death, Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden

1389
01:39:51,605 --> 01:39:55,509
have introduced legislation that would reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act--

1390
01:39:55,811 --> 01:40:00,563
the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Swartz.

1391
01:40:00,816 --> 01:40:03,511
It's called "Aaron's Law".

1392
01:40:03,511 --> 01:40:07,310
Aaron believed that you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time:

1393
01:40:07,310 --> 01:40:10,731
What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now?

1394
01:40:10,940 --> 01:40:13,203
And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?

1395
01:40:13,203 --> 01:40:15,758
[Protesters] This is what democracy looks like!

1396
01:40:15,758 --> 01:40:17,278
[crowd chants] We are the people too!

1397
01:40:17,278 --> 01:40:21,088
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

1398
01:40:21,088 --> 01:40:22,814
Stand up, fight back!

1399
01:40:22,814 --> 01:40:25,928
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

1400
01:40:25,928 --> 01:40:30,929
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! NROC has got to go!

1401
01:40:33,740 --> 01:40:37,331
I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.

1402
01:40:37,331 --> 01:40:39,898
But we can change the future and we must.

1403
01:40:39,898 --> 01:40:44,107
We must do so for Aaron, we must do so for ourselves.

1404
01:40:44,107 --> 01:40:48,797
We must do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place,

1405
01:40:48,797 --> 01:40:54,179
a place where justice works, and access to knowledge becomes a human right. [applause]

1406
01:40:54,584 --> 01:41:01,741
So there was a kid, back in February, from Baltimore, fourteen years old,

1407
01:41:02,109 --> 01:41:08,448
who had access to JSTOR, and he'd been spalunking through JSTOR after reading something,

1408
01:41:08,506 --> 01:41:14,350
and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer,

1409
01:41:14,876 --> 01:41:19,639
and pancreatic cancer kills the shit out of you because we detect it way too late

1410
01:41:19,639 --> 01:41:23,032
by the time we detect it, it's already too late to do anything about it,

1411
01:41:23,187 --> 01:41:29,080
and he sent emails off to the entire oncology department at Johns Hopkins,

1412
01:41:29,144 --> 01:41:32,368
you know hundreds of them, and every--
- [Interviewer] Did you say fourteen years old?

1413
01:41:35,379 --> 01:41:35,853
- Fourteen-year-old kid, yeah, and most of them ignored it but one of them sent him an email back,

1414
01:41:35,853 --> 01:41:38,798
and said this is not an entirely stupid idea, why don't you come on over?

1415
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

1416
01:41:43,470 --> 01:41:48,832
just a couple of weeks after Aaron died, when Aaron was in the news a lot..

1417
01:41:50,907 --> 01:41:53,005
Sorry...

1418
01:41:53,550 --> 01:41:59,550
and he said the reason he was on the news was 'cause they'd done it. They were shipping

1419
01:42:00,152 --> 01:42:03,941
an early test for pancreatic cancer that was going to save lives,

1420
01:42:03,941 --> 01:42:09,917
and he said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important."

1421
01:42:10,453 --> 01:42:15,359
Because you never know, right? This truth of the universe is not only something

1422
01:42:15,359 --> 01:42:19,581
that policymakers use to figure out, you know, what the speed limit should be.

1423
01:42:19,581 --> 01:42:24,390
It's where the thing that's gonna keep your kid from dying of pancreatic cancer comes from,

1424
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,

1425
01:42:32,692 --> 01:42:34,487
may never find that answer.

1426
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.

1427
01:42:48,030 --> 01:42:51,805
[Aaron's dad] Very good, Aaron. Very good. Yay, Aaron!

1428
01:42:51,805 --> 01:42:56,586
Okay, now it's song time.

1429
01:42:56,586 --> 01:43:18,326
♪ ♪ ♪

1430
01:43:19,385 --> 01:43:23,983
AARON SWARTZ, 1986-2013

1431
01:43:48,832 --> 01:43:50,668
[credits]

1432
01:44:44,808 --> 01:44:49,208
[the end]