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[quote on screen]

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The cofounder of the social, news,[br]and entertainment website "Reddit"

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has been found dead.

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He certainly was a prodigy,

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although he never thought[br]of himself like that.

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He was totally unexcited

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about starting businesses [br]and making money.

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There is a profound sense of loss[br]tonight in Highland Park,

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Aaron Swartz's hometown

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as loved ones say goodbye[br]to one of the Internet's brightest lights.

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Freedom, Open Access, and computer[br]activists are mourning his loss.

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"An astonishing intellect," if you talk[br]to people who knew him.

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He was killed by the Government, and[br]MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.

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They wanted to make [br]an example out of him. Okay?

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Governments have insatiable[br]desire to control.

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He was potentially facing 35 years [br]in prison and a 1-million-dollar fine.

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Raising questions to prosecutorial zeal,[br]and I would say even 'misconduct.'

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Have you looked into that particular[br]matter and reached any conclusions?

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Growing up, you know,[br]I slowly had this process realizing

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that all the things around me[br]that people had told me

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were just the natural way of things were,[br]or the way things would be,

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they weren't natural at all.

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There were things that could be changed.

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And there were things, more importantly,[br]were wrong and should change.

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And once I realized that, [br]there was really kind of no going back.

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Welcome to story reading time.

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The name of the book[br]is "Paddington at the Fair."

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He was born in Highland Park[br]and grew up here.

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Aaron came from a family of three[br]brothers, all extraordinarily bright.

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"...Oh the box is tipping over..."

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[Boys screaming]

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So, we were all, you know, [br]not the best behaved children.

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You know, three boys, running [br]around all the time, causing trouble...

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"Hey, no, no, no!"

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- Aaron![br]- What?

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But I've come to the realization Aaron [br]learned how to learn at a very young age.

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"One, two, three, four, five, [br]six, seven, eight, nine, ten!"

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- Knock, knock![br]- Who's there?

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- Aaron.[br]- Aaron who?

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- Aaron Funnyman.

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He knew what he wanted[br]and he always wanted to do it.

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He always accomplished what he wanted.

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His curiosity was endless.

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

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

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

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"Free family entertainment in downtown Highland Park"

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He was three at that time.

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She said, "What are you talking about?"

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He said, "Look, it says here on the refrigerator."

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"Free family entertainment in downtown Highland Park"

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She was floored, and astonished that he could read.

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It's called "My Family Seder."

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"The Seder night is different from all other nights."

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I remember once, we were at the University of Chicago library.

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I pulled a book off the shelf that was from like 1900,

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And showed him saying "this is just a really extraordinary place."

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

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"...We're going to learn the ABC backward."

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"Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T..."

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I remember, he came home from his first Algebra class

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and he was like, "Noah, let me teach you Algebra!"

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and I'm like, "What IS Algebra?"

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He was always like that.

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"Now you press the click button. There. Now it's got that."

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"Now it's in pink."

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When he was about two or three years old, and Bob introduced him to computers.

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Then he just took off like crazy on them.

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[Baby talk]

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We all had computers, but Aaron really took to them, really took to the Internet.

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- Working at the computer?[br]- Nah...

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"How come... Mommy, why is nothing working?"

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He started programming from a really young age.

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I remember the first program that I wrote with him was in BASIC

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and it was a Star Wars trivia game.

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He sat down with me in the basement, where the computer was

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for hours programming this game.

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The problem that I kept having with him was there was nothing that I wanted done,

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but to him, there was always something to do.

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Always something that programming can solve.

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The way Aaron always saw it is that programming is magic.

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You can accomplish these things that normal humans can't.

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Aaron made an ATM using Macintosh and a cardboard box.

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One year for Halloween, I didn't know what I wanted to be.

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And he thought it would be really really cool if I dressed up like his new favorite computer,

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which at that time, the original iMac.

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I mean, he hated dressing up for Halloween, but he loved convincing other people

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to dress up in things he wanted to see.

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"Host Aaron, stop, guys, come on, look at the camera!"

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"Spiderman looks at the Camera."

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He made this website called "The Info," where people can just fill in information.

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I'm sure someone out there know all about gold, gold leafing.

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

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read that information and edit the information if they though it was bad.

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Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right?

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And this was before Wikipedia had begun, and this was developed by a 12-year-old

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in his room, by himself, running on this tiny server using ancient technology.

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And one of the teachers' response was like,

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"This is a terrible idea. You can't just let anyone author the encyclopedia.

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The whole reason we have scholars is to write these books for us.

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How could you ever have such a terrible idea?"

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Me and my other brother were like, "Aw, you know, Wikipedia is cool, but...

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we had that in our house like, 5 years ago."

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Aaron's website, theinfo.org, wins a school competition

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hosted by the Cambridge-based web design firm ArsDigita.

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We all went to Cambridge when he won the ArsDigita prize

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and we had no clue what Aaron was doing.

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It was obvious that the prize was really important.

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Aaron soon became involved with online programming communities,

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then in the process of shaping[br]a new tool for the Web.

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He comes up to me and is like, "Ben, there's this[br]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.[br]I'm like, "Why is that useful, Aaron?"

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"Is any site using it?[br]Why would I want to use it?"

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There was this mailing list for people who are[br]working on RSS, and XML more generally,

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and there was a person on it named[br]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[br]face-to-face meetings, and they said,

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"You know, when are you gonna come out[br]to one of these face-to-face meetings?"

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And he said, "You know, I don't think[br]my mom would let me. I've just turned fourteen."

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And so their first reaction was: "Well, this person,[br]this colleague we've been working with all year

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was thirteen years old while we were[br]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.[br]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[br]the plumbing for modern hypertext.

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The piece that he was working on, RSS,[br]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[br]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[br]the technology and he saw that it was imperfect

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and looked for ways to help make it better.

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So his mom started bundling him on planes in Chicago. We'd pick him up in San Francicso.

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We'd introduce him to interesting people to argue with, and we'd marvel at his horrific eating habits.

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He only ate white food, only like steamed rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white

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and white bread, and so on...

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and you kind of marveled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,

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what appeared to be a small boy's mouth,

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and you'd think, this is a kid that's really going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy.

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Aaron, you're up!

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I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like dotcoms.

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You can't have companies that just sell dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones.

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But there's still a lot of innovation going on.

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I think that maybe if you don't see the innovation, maybe your head is in the sand.

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He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's

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sort of like, "I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you, I'm better than you,

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and I can tell you what to do."

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It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp.

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So you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems

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like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.

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I first met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat.

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He didn't just write code, he also got people excited about solving problems he got.

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He was a connector.

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The free culture movement has had a lot of his energy.

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I think Aaron was trying to make the world work. He was trying to fix it.

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He had a very kind of strong personality that definitely ruffled feathers at times.

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It wasn't necesarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world

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and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.

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Aaron got into high school and was really just sick of school.

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He didn't like it. He didn't like any of the classes that were being taught. He didn't like the teachers.

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Aaron really knew, like, how to get information.

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He was like, "I don't need to go to this teacher to learn how to do geometry.

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I can just read the geometry book,

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and I don't need to go to this teacher to learn their version of American history,

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I have, like, three historical compilations here, I could just read them,

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and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the Web."

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I was very frustrated with school. I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about,

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and they were domineering and controlling, and the homework was kind of a sham,

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and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busywork.

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And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education

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and how this educational system was developed,

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and, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things

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as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them,

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and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in,

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I questioned the society that built the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for,

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I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.

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One of the thing he was most passionate about was copyright, especially in those early days.

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Copyright has always been something of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers,

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but it wasn't an excessive burden. It was a reasonable institution to have in place

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to make sure that people got paid.

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What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system

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and this amazing new thing we were trying to build--the Internet and the Web.

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These things collided, and what we got was chaos.

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He then met Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig,

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who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court.

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A young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings.

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I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the Eldred--to see the Eldred argument.

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Why did you fly out here from Chicago, and come all this way to see the Eldred argument?

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That's a more difficult question...

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I don't know. It's very exciting to see the Supreme Court,

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especially in such a prestigious case as this one.

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Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet.

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It was called Creative Commons.

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So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people--creators--

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a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry.

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So if copyright is all about "All Rights Reserved", then this is a kind of a "Some Rights Reserved" model.

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I want a simple way to say to you, "Here's what you can do with my work,

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even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do."

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And Aaron's role was the computer part.

0:14:16.261,0:14:20.562
Like, how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable

0:14:20.562,0:14:22.927
and expressed in a way so that machines can process it?

0:14:22.927,0:14:29.144
And people were like, "Why do you have this fifteen-year-old kid writing the specifications for Creative Commons?

0:14:29.144,0:14:30.549
Don't you think that's a huge mistake?"

0:14:30.549,0:14:34.971
And Larry is like, "The biggest mistake we would have done is not listening to this kid."

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

0:14:39.271,0:14:42.062
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".

0:14:50.827,0:14:56.830
It gives you this list of options, it explains what it means, and you've got three simple questions:

0:14:56.830,0:14:59.435
"Do you want to require attribution?"

0:14:59.435,0:15:02.377
"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,

0:15:11.406,0:15:15.708
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,

0:15:19.721,0:15:23.272
and they were all listening to him, just...

0:15:23.272,0:15:27.762
I was sitting at the back, thinking: he's just a kid, why are they listening to him?

0:15:27.772,0:15:29.358
But they did...

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

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

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the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.

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

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

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Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

0:16:00.921,0:16:05.822
I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

0:16:05.822,0:16:10.949
I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

0:16:10.949,0:16:15.416
I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

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

0:16:18.831,0:16:21.034
on things that won't have an impact.

0:16:21.034,0:16:26.161
I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

0:16:26.161,0:16:31.436
I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

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I want to make the world a better place.

0:16:40.182,0:16:45.755
In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

0:16:45.755,0:16:51.848
He'd had ulcerative colitis which was very troubling, and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

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

0:16:55.873,0:17:00.773
and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth,

0:17:00.773,0:17:03.822
and made him feel different from any of the other students.

0:17:03.822,0:17:06.458
Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

0:17:06.458,0:17:12.800
and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

0:17:12.800,0:17:20.828
who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters

0:17:20.828,0:17:24.915
and I think it just made him bananas.

0:17:25.487,0:17:28.527
In 2005, after only one year of college,

0:17:28.527,0:17:35.531
Swartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

0:17:35.751,0:17:39.181
He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a website."

0:17:39.181,0:17:42.230
And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure."

0:17:42.230,0:17:45.738
So Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment...

0:17:45.738,0:17:48.864
So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here.

0:17:48.864,0:17:54.977
I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

0:17:54.977,0:17:57.862
'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

0:17:57.862,0:18:03.669
Aaron lived in what's now the living room and some of the posters are leftover from when Aaron lived here.

0:18:03.669,0:18:09.279
And then the library...there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

0:18:10.911,0:18:16.731
Aaron's Y Combinator site was called "infogami", a tool to build websites.

0:18:16.861,0:18:20.438
But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

0:18:20.438,0:18:24.747
merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

0:18:24.747,0:18:29.539
It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called "Reddit".

0:18:29.539,0:18:33.708
There we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

0:18:33.708,0:18:37.027
and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,

0:18:37.027,0:18:38.816
And it showed no signs of letting up.

0:18:38.816,0:18:44.373
First we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on...It was just incredible.

0:18:44.373,0:18:49.563
Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

0:18:52.152,0:19:01.100
There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flock to the site,

0:19:01.100,0:19:07.413
and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

0:19:07.413,0:19:12.008
reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

0:19:12.008,0:19:19.368
so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

0:19:19.368,0:19:24.824
and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

0:19:24.824,0:19:29.716
there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home,

0:19:29.716,0:19:33.929
and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well.

0:19:33.929,0:19:36.791
It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

0:19:36.791,0:19:41.081
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Condé Nast,

0:19:41.081,0:19:42.938
who makes an offer to buy the company.

0:19:42.938,0:19:46.939
Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

0:19:46.939,0:19:51.079
about like: "How do I store this money?"

0:19:51.302,0:19:54.272
- Like a lot of money...[br]- Like a lot of money.

0:19:54.272,0:20:00.319
Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

0:20:00.319,0:20:03.461
- And he's how old at the time?[br]- 19, 20.

0:20:05.165,0:20:11.205
So it was in this apartment. They sat around[br]on what predated these couches,

0:20:11.205,0:20:14.487
hacking on Reddit, and when they sold Reddit

0:20:14.487,0:20:18.641
they threw a giant party, and then all flew[br]out to California the next day,

0:20:18.641,0:20:20.195
and left the keys with me.

0:20:23.701,0:20:27.400
It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start-up so we all presumed

0:20:27.400,0:20:29.329
he was the richest person around

0:20:29.329,0:20:33.920
but he said, "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little[br]shoebox-sized room. That's all I need."

0:20:33.920,0:20:36.146
It was barely larger than a closet.

0:20:36.146,0:20:42.440
The idea of him spending his money on[br]fancy objects just seemed so implausible.

0:20:42.500,0:20:47.620
He explains it as, "I like living in apartments so I'm not going to spend a lot of money on a new place to live. I'm not gonna buy a mansion,

0:20:47.620,0:20:49.886
and I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt,

0:20:49.886,0:20:52.046
so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes.

0:20:52.046,0:20:54.576
So it's really no big deal."

0:20:54.576,0:20:57.966
What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic[br]flows on the internet,

0:20:57.970,0:21:00.524
and what commands our attention.

0:21:00.524,0:21:03.522
In the old system of broadcasting, you're[br]fundamentally limited by the amount of

0:21:03.522,0:21:08.583
space in the airwaves. You could only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television

0:21:08.583,0:21:10.915
or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

0:21:11.003,0:21:15.360
On the Internet, everybody can have a channel.[br]Everyone can get a blog, or a MySpace page.

0:21:15.360,0:21:18.164
Everyone has a way of expressing themselves.

0:21:18.164,0:21:21.280
What you see now is not a question of who gets[br]access to the airwaves,

0:21:21.280,0:21:25.030
it's a question of who gets control over the[br]ways you find people.

0:21:25.030,0:21:29.026
You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, theses sort of gatekeepers that tell you

0:21:29.026,0:21:30.993
where on the internet you want to go.

0:21:30.993,0:21:34.273
The people who provide you your sources of news and information.

0:21:34.273,0:21:38.264
So it's not only certain people have a license to speak, now everyone has

0:21:38.264,0:21:40.904
a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard.

0:21:44.526,0:21:49.806
After he started working in San Francisco[br]at Condé Nast, he comes into the office

0:21:49.806,0:21:53.792
and they want to give him a computer with all[br]this crap installed on it

0:21:53.792,0:21:57.273
and say he can't install any new things[br]on this computer,

0:21:57.273,0:21:59.325
which to developers is outrageous.

0:21:59.325,0:22:02.095
From the first day, he was complaining[br]about all the stuff.

0:22:05.037,0:22:10.627
"Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first[br]day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.

0:22:10.627,0:22:15.373
By lunchtime, I had literally locked myself[br]in a bathroom stall and started crying.

0:22:15.373,0:22:18.285
I can't imagine staying sane with someone[br]buzzing in my ear all day

0:22:18.285,0:22:20.965
Let alone getting any actual work done.

0:22:20.965,0:22:24.087
Nobody else seems to get work done here either

0:22:24.087,0:22:27.057
Everybody's always coming into our room to[br]hang out and chat, or invite us to play

0:22:27.057,0:22:29.927
the new video game system that Wired is testing."

0:22:32.152,0:22:37.817
He really had different aspirations that were politically-oriented,

0:22:37.817,0:22:41.862
and Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture

0:22:41.862,0:22:46.967
that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals.

0:22:47.007,0:22:49.533
Aaron hated working for a corporation.

0:22:49.533,0:22:53.004
They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron[br]is the only one who is not going to take it.

0:22:53.004,0:22:55.643
And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

0:22:55.643,0:22:58.313
By not showing up to work, ever.

0:23:01.013,0:23:05.434
It was said to be a messy breakup.[br]Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

0:23:05.447,0:23:08.277
declined to be interviewed for this film.

0:23:09.251,0:23:15.891
He rejected the business world. One of the really important things to remember about

0:23:15.891,0:23:22.404
that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up[br]culture is that he was also leaving behind

0:23:22.404,0:23:31.162
the things that had made him famous and well-loved, and he was at risk of letting down fans.

0:23:31.162,0:23:35.866
He got to where he was supposed to be going, and had the self-awareness

0:23:35.866,0:23:42.821
and the orneriness to realize that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck

0:23:42.821,0:23:45.849
the single rose and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell,

0:23:45.849,0:23:50.399
and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed,

0:23:50.399,0:23:53.693
and he did get the rose in any event,

0:23:53.693,0:23:57.413
he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool.

0:23:58.026,0:24:01.728
The way Aaron always saw it, is that[br]programming is magic--

0:24:01.728,0:24:07.110
you can accomplish these things that normal[br]humans can't, by being able to program.

0:24:07.110,0:24:13.310
So if you had magical powers, would you use[br]them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

0:24:15.009,0:24:18.478
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries[br]he had met as a child.

0:24:18.478,0:24:22.387
The man who had invented the World Wide Web,[br]Tim Berners-Lee.

0:24:22.387,0:24:25.938
In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on

0:24:25.938,0:24:29.260
one of the most lucrative inventions of[br]the 20th century,

0:24:29.260,0:24:35.137
but instead of profiting from the invention[br]of the World Wide Web, he gave it away for free.

0:24:35.917,0:24:39.707
It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.

0:24:41.118,0:24:45.261
Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.

0:24:45.261,0:24:51.398
Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genius, who doesn't in any sense cash out.

0:24:51.398,0:24:55.865
He's not at all interested in how he's going to figure out how to make a billion dollars.

0:24:55.865,0:24:57.829
People were saying, "Ah, there's money to be made there,"

0:24:57.829,0:25:00.566
so there would have been lots of little webs,

0:25:00.566,0:25:02.139
instead of one big one,

0:25:02.139,0:25:05.030
and one little web, and all sorts of webs doesn't work,

0:25:05.030,0:25:08.080
because you can't follow links from one to the other.

0:25:09.923,0:25:14.112
You had to have the critical masses--the thing was the entire planet,

0:25:14.112,0:25:17.172
so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board.

0:25:23.891,0:25:28.162
I feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is,

0:25:28.162,0:25:33.852
to just kind of take what you're given, and you know, follow the things that adults told you to do,

0:25:33.852,0:25:39.032
and that your parents told you to do, and that society tells you to do. I think you should always be questioning.

0:25:39.045,0:25:43.055
I take this very scientific attitude, that[br]everything you've learned is just provisional,

0:25:43.055,0:25:49.117
that it's always open to recantation or refutation or[br]questioning, and I think the same applies to society.

0:25:49.117,0:25:53.491
Once I realized that there were real serious problems--fundamental problems--

0:25:53.491,0:25:58.601
that I could do something to address, I didn't see a way to forget that. I didn't see a way not to.

0:26:02.600,0:26:04.831
We just started spending a lot of time,

0:26:04.831,0:26:06.621
just kind of as friends.

0:26:08.912,0:26:11.884
We would just talk, for hours, into the night.

0:26:14.393,0:26:18.110
I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me. I think to some degree,

0:26:18.110,0:26:23.980
I was, like, this is a terrible idea, and impossible, and therefore I will pretend it is not happening.

0:26:25.161,0:26:28.937
As my marriage was breaking down, and I was[br]really stuck without anywhere to go,

0:26:28.937,0:26:32.927
we became roommates, and I brought my daughter over.

0:26:34.081,0:26:37.246
We moved in, and furnished the house, and it[br]was really peaceful.

0:26:37.246,0:26:40.816
My life had not been peaceful for a while, and really neither had his.

0:26:46.225,0:26:54.073
We were extremely close from the beginning of our romantic relationship.

0:26:54.073,0:26:57.633
We just...we were in constant contact.

0:26:57.633,0:27:02.432
But we're both really difficult people to deal with. [laughs]

0:27:04.495,0:27:10.865
In a very Ally McBeal discussion, he confessed he had a theme song, and I made him play it for me.

0:27:12.345,0:27:16.504
It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple.

0:27:16.504,0:27:24.154
I think it was just that sense of kind of being a little bit embattled that the song has,

0:27:25.054,0:27:27.697
and it also had, like, this hopefulness to it.

0:27:27.837,0:27:34.418
♪ By foot it's a slow climb, but I'm good[br]at being uncomfortable so I can't stop

0:27:34.418,0:27:36.689
changing all the time ♪

0:27:36.689,0:27:44.481
In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic[br]about life. Even when he didn't feel it,

0:27:44.481,0:27:47.041
he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

0:27:47.041,0:27:50.171
♪ Extraordinary machine ♪

0:27:53.037,0:27:57.527
- What are you doing?[br](Quinn) - Flicker has video now.

0:27:59.390,0:28:01.743
Swartz threw his energy into a string of new

0:28:01.743,0:28:04.731
projects involving access to public information,

0:28:04.731,0:28:08.189
including an accountability website called[br]Watchdog.net,

0:28:08.189,0:28:10.799
and a project called The Open Library.

0:28:10.816,0:28:15.299
So, the Open Library Project is a website you can visit at openlibrary.org,

0:28:15.299,0:28:19.778
and the idea is to be a huge wiki, an editable website with one page per book.

0:28:19.778,0:28:23.910
So for every book ever published, we want to have a web page about it that combines

0:28:23.910,0:28:29.391
all the information from publishers, from booksellers, from libraries, from readers

0:28:29.391,0:28:34.587
onto one site, and then gives you links where[br]you can buy it, you can borrow it, or you can browse it.

0:28:34.587,0:28:39.958
I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who[br]goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.

0:28:39.958,0:28:44.050
That's the dream of Open Library, is building this website where both you can leap

0:28:44.050,0:28:49.297
from book to book, from person to author, from subject to idea, go through this vast tree

0:28:49.297,0:28:53.757
of knowledge that's been embedded and lost in big physical libraries, that's hard to find,

0:28:53.757,0:28:59.086
that's not very well-accessible online. It's really important because books are our cultural legacy.

0:28:59.086,0:29:00.943
Books are the place people go to write things down,

0:29:00.943,0:29:05.813
and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary.

0:29:06.560,0:29:10.771
How can you bring public access to the public domain?

0:29:10.771,0:29:14.828
It may sound obvious that you'd have public access to the public domain,

0:29:14.828,0:29:21.078
but in fact it's not true. So the public domain should be free to all, but it's often locked up.

0:29:21.078,0:29:26.756
There's often guard cages. It's like having a national park but with a moat around it,

0:29:26.756,0:29:33.245
and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain.

0:29:33.245,0:29:39.458
One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in was bringing public access to the public domain.

0:29:39.458,0:29:43.258
This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble.

0:29:46.254,0:29:52.794
I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States.

0:29:54.458,0:29:59.058
What I discovered was a puzzling system called PACER.

0:29:59.058,0:30:02.884
Which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

0:30:02.884,0:30:07.314
I started Googling, and that's when I ran[br]across Carl Malamud.

0:30:08.886,0:30:14.837
Access to legal materials in the United States is a ten billion dollar per year business.

0:30:14.837,0:30:22.564
PACER is just this incredible abomination[br]of government services. It's ten cents a page,

0:30:22.564,0:30:27.221
it's this most braindead code you've ever seen. You can't search it. You can't bookmark anything.

0:30:27.221,0:30:31.891
You've got to have a credit card, and these are public records.

0:30:31.891,0:30:37.429
U.S. district courts are very important; it's[br]where a lot of our seminal litigation starts.

0:30:37.429,0:30:44.369
Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists, students, citizens and lawyers

0:30:44.369,0:30:48.367
all need access to PACER, and it fights them every step of the way.

0:30:48.367,0:30:55.246
People without means can't see the law as readily as people that have that Gold American Express card.

0:30:55.246,0:30:57.776
It's a poll tax on access to justice.

0:30:57.816,0:31:04.096
You know, the law is the operating system of our democracy, and you have to pay to see it?

0:31:04.246,0:31:07.135
You know, that's not much of a democracy.

0:31:07.135,0:31:11.869
They make about 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system,

0:31:11.869,0:31:18.236
and it doesn't cost anything near that, according to their own records. In fact, it's illegal.

0:31:18.937,0:31:25.834
The E-Government Act of 2002 states that the courts may charge only to the extent necessary,

0:31:25.834,0:31:29.591
in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER.

0:31:34.621,0:31:40.160
As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges.

0:31:40.160,0:31:43.300
He started a program called The PACER Recycling Project,

0:31:43.300,0:31:47.297
where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for

0:31:47.297,0:31:50.334
to a free database so others could use them.

0:31:50.334,0:31:55.056
The PACER people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access,

0:31:55.056,0:32:00.925
and so they put together a system in 17 libraries across the country that was free PACER access.

0:32:01.885,0:32:07.625
You know, that's one library every 22,000 square miles, I believe, so it wasn't like really convenient.

0:32:07.915,0:32:12.173
I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Corps,

0:32:12.173,0:32:16.607
and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the PACER recycling site.

0:32:16.607,0:32:20.813
People take a thumb drive into one of these libraries, and they download a bunch of documents,

0:32:20.813,0:32:25.089
and they send them to me. I mean, it was just a joke.

0:32:25.089,0:32:28.636
In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Corps, there was a Wizard of Oz,

0:32:28.636,0:32:31.593
you know, the Munchkins singing, so a videoclip came up:

0:32:31.593,0:32:34.940
♪ We represent the lollipop guild...♪

0:32:34.940,0:32:39.381
But of course, I get this phone calls from Steve Shultze and Aaron, saying,

0:32:39.381,0:32:43.047
"Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps."

0:32:43.377,0:32:47.334
Around that time, I ran into Aaron at a conference.

0:32:47.334,0:32:51.593
This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.

0:32:51.593,0:32:53.217
So I approached him and I said,

0:32:53.217,0:32:58.195
"Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the PACER problem."

0:32:59.865,0:33:04.442
Shultze had already developed a program that could automatically download PACER documents

0:33:04.442,0:33:06.459
from the trial libraries.

0:33:06.459,0:33:08.796
Swartz wanted to take a look.

0:33:08.796,0:33:13.481
So, I showed him the code, and I didn't know what would come next,

0:33:13.481,0:33:19.033
but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference,

0:33:19.033,0:33:24.168
he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his

0:33:24.168,0:33:32.139
that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library, and to begin to test his improved code.

0:33:32.139,0:33:38.440
At which point the folks at the courts realized something is not going quite according to plan.

0:33:38.440,0:33:42.681
And data started to come in, and come in, and come in

0:33:42.681,0:33:47.632
and soon there was 760 GB of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.

0:33:48.282,0:33:52.098
Using information retrieved from the trial libraries,

0:33:52.098,0:33:57.304
Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the PACER system.

0:33:57.304,0:34:04.360
He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million Federal Court documents, almost 20 million pages of text.

0:34:04.360,0:34:09.864
Now, I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps exceed the expectations of the people

0:34:09.864,0:34:14.614
running the pilot access project, but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal.

0:34:14.620,0:34:19.096
Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to The New York Times about what happened.

0:34:19.731,0:34:26.498
They also caught the attention of the FBI, who began to stake out Swartz's parents' house in Illinois.

0:34:26.498,0:34:31.053
And I get a tweet from his mother, saying, "Call me!!"

0:34:31.053,0:34:33.597
So, I think, like, what the hell's going on here?

0:34:33.597,0:34:38.981
And so, finally I get a hold of Aaron and, you know, Aaron's mother was like, "Oh my God, FBI, FBI, FBI!"

0:34:40.271,0:34:45.831
An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway, trying to see if Aaron is in his room.

0:34:47.164,0:34:51.899
I remember being home that day, and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway,

0:34:51.899,0:34:55.110
and just driving back up. That's weird!

0:34:56.599,0:35:04.953
Like, five years later I read this FBI file, like, oh my goodness: that was the FBI agent, in my driveway.

0:35:04.995,0:35:08.479
He was terrified. He was totally terrified.

0:35:09.499,0:35:14.910
He was way more terrified after the FBI actually called him up on the phone,

0:35:14.910,0:35:19.142
and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.

0:35:19.142,0:35:23.834
He said he went home and lay down on the bed and, you know, was shaking.

0:35:25.511,0:35:30.056
The downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents.

0:35:30.056,0:35:34.922
Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result,

0:35:34.922,0:35:39.430
and the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges.

0:35:39.430,0:35:41.762
To this day, I find it remarkable

0:35:41.762,0:35:46.613
that anybody, even at the most remote podunk field office of the FBI

0:35:46.613,0:35:51.177
thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars was investigating people

0:35:51.177,0:35:55.491
for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public.

0:35:55.491,0:35:57.745
How can you call yourself a lawman,

0:35:57.745,0:36:01.725
and think that there could possibly be anything wrong in this whole world

0:36:01.725,0:36:03.575
with making the law public?

0:36:03.575,0:36:09.455
Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in.

0:36:09.455,0:36:15.586
Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology, and into a broader range of political causes.

0:36:15.586,0:36:21.622
I went into Congress, and I invited him to come and hang out and intern for us for a while

0:36:21.622,0:36:25.182
so that he could learn the political process.

0:36:25.194,0:36:31.194
He was sort of learning about new community and new sets of skills and kind of learning to hack politics.

0:36:31.194,0:36:36.506
It seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away until their whole bodies are dripping with sweat

0:36:36.506,0:36:41.276
faced with the knowledge that if they dare to stop, they won't able to put food on the table that night,

0:36:41.306,0:36:46.438
while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day just by sitting and watching TV.

0:36:46.438,0:36:48.898
<i>But apparently the world is ridiculous.</i>

0:36:49.025,0:36:53.035
So, I co-founded a group called "The Progressive Change Campaign Committee",

0:36:53.038,0:36:57.888
and what we try and do is we try to organize people over the Internet who care about progressive politics

0:36:57.888,0:37:00.220
and moving the country toward a more progressive direction

0:37:00.220,0:37:03.027
to kind of come together, join our e-mail list, join our campaigns

0:37:03.027,0:37:06.297
and help us to get progressive candidates elected all across the country.

0:37:06.326,0:37:12.656
The group is responsible for igniting the grassroots effort behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate.

0:37:12.716,0:37:17.000
He might have thought it was a dumb system but he came in and he said, "I need to learn this system,

0:37:17.000,0:37:21.310
because it can be manipulated like any social system."

0:37:21.310,0:37:24.925
But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat.

0:37:24.925,0:37:31.030
Aaron began to take a closer look at institutions that publish academic journal articles.

0:37:31.040,0:37:34.960
By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume you have access

0:37:34.960,0:37:37.660
to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

0:37:37.660,0:37:43.551
Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like

0:37:43.551,0:37:50.694
JSTOR and Thomson Isi to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read.

0:37:50.694,0:37:57.278
These scholarly journals and articles are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online,

0:37:57.278,0:38:02.273
and many have been paid for with taxpayer money or with government grants,

0:38:02.273,0:38:08.591
but to read them, you often have to pay again handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed-Elsevier.

0:38:08.591,0:38:14.728
These licenses fees are so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in United States,

0:38:14.728,0:38:19.097
don't have this kind of access. They are locked out from all of these journals.

0:38:19.103,0:38:23.057
They are locked out from our entire scientific legacy.

0:38:23.057,0:38:27.021
I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to The Enlightenment.

0:38:27.021,0:38:32.467
Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it's been scanned, digitized, and put in these collections.

0:38:32.467,0:38:39.766
That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists.

0:38:39.766,0:38:43.167
It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people,

0:38:43.167,0:38:48.127
but instead, it has been locked up and put online by an handful of for-profit corporations

0:38:48.127,0:38:52.454
who then try to get the maximum profit they can out of it.

0:38:53.304,0:38:58.769
So a researcher paid by the university or the people publishes a paper,

0:38:58.769,0:39:01.782
and at the very, very last step of that process, after all the work is done,

0:39:01.782,0:39:06.991
after all the original research is done--the thinking, the lab work, the analysis, after everything is done,

0:39:06.991,0:39:13.849
at that last stage, then the researcher has to hand over his or her copyright to this multi-billion dollar company.

0:39:13.908,0:39:18.238
And it's sick. It's an entire economy built on volunteer labor,

0:39:18.238,0:39:21.350
and then the publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream.

0:39:21.390,0:39:28.558
Talk about a scam. One publisher in Britain made a profit of three billion dollars last year.

0:39:28.558,0:39:30.194
I mean, what a racket!

0:39:30.194,0:39:34.271
JSTOR is just a very, very small player in that story

0:39:34.271,0:39:39.828
but for some reason, JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront.

0:39:40.938,0:39:44.469
He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing,

0:39:44.469,0:39:46.380
and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,

0:39:46.380,0:39:49.778
but I think they--at some point, Aaron asked the question,

0:39:49.778,0:39:54.406
"How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"

0:39:54.406,0:39:58.045
And they gave some--I think it was two hundred million dollars,

0:39:58.045,0:40:00.566
something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.

0:40:00.566,0:40:07.372
Working on a fellowship at Harvard, he knew users on MIT's famously open and fast network next door

0:40:07.372,0:40:12.238
had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR. Swartz saw an opportunity.

0:40:12.238,0:40:14.434
You have a key to those gates,

0:40:14.434,0:40:19.824
and with a little bit of shell script magic, you can get those journal articles.

0:40:20.992,0:40:23.492
On September 24, 2010,

0:40:23.492,0:40:27.031
Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop

0:40:27.031,0:40:30.659
on the MIT network, under the name "Garry Host".

0:40:30.859,0:40:35.449
The client name was registered as "GHost laptop".

0:40:35.449,0:40:38.420
He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking.

0:40:38.420,0:40:40.113
The JSTOR database was organized,

0:40:40.113,0:40:44.150
so it was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in JSTOR,

0:40:44.150,0:40:45.667
because it was basically numbered.

0:40:45.667,0:40:52.351
It was basically slash slash slash...number article 444024 and -25 and -26.

0:40:52.351,0:40:54.974
He wrote a Python script called keepgrabbing.py,

0:40:54.974,0:40:58.347
which was like, keeping grabbing one article after another.

0:40:58.437,0:41:02.210
The next day, GHost laptop begins grabbing articles,

0:41:02.210,0:41:08.385
but soon, the computer's IP address is blocked. For Swartz, it's barely a bump in the road.

0:41:08.385,0:41:12.798
He quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading.

0:41:13.028,0:41:17.472
Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps to try to interfere with this,

0:41:17.472,0:41:19.616
when they notice that this is happening,

0:41:19.616,0:41:21.854
and when the more modest steps don't work,

0:41:21.854,0:41:26.721
then at a certain stage, JSTOR just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database.

0:41:26.721,0:41:29.303
So there's a kind of cat-and-mouse game around

0:41:29.303,0:41:33.326
getting access to the JSTOR database.

0:41:33.326,0:41:38.990
Aaron, ultimately, obviously is the cat because he has more technical capability

0:41:38.990,0:41:42.651
than the JSTOR database people do in defending them.

0:41:42.651,0:41:46.898
Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings,

0:41:46.898,0:41:50.695
and he went, instead of going through WiFi, he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network

0:41:50.695,0:41:56.541
and just left it there with an external hard drive downloading these articles to the computer.

0:41:56.541,0:42:01.812
Unknown to Swartz, his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities.

0:42:02.882,0:42:04.986
They didn't stop the downloads.

0:42:04.986,0:42:09.001
Instead, they installed a surveillance camera.

0:42:10.094,0:42:14.582
They found the computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building.

0:42:14.582,0:42:19.299
They could have unplugged it. They could have waited for the guy to come back and said,

0:42:19.299,0:42:23.704
"Dude, what are you doing, you know, cut it out. Who are you?"

0:42:23.704,0:42:25.377
They could have done all that kind of stuff, but they didn't.

0:42:25.377,0:42:29.762
What they wanted to do was film it to gather evidence to make a case.

0:42:29.762,0:42:34.367
That's the only reason you film something like that.

0:42:37.667,0:42:41.132
At first, the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera

0:42:41.132,0:42:45.745
was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans.

0:42:53.142,0:42:57.033
But days later, it caught Swartz.

0:43:05.435,0:43:10.658
Swartz is replacing the hard drive. He takes it out of his backpack,

0:43:10.940,0:43:14.454
leans out of frame for about five minutes,

0:43:14.454,0:43:21.863
and then leaves.

0:43:36.758,0:43:41.819
And then they organized, like, a stakeout where, as he was biking home from MIT,

0:43:41.819,0:43:44.294
these cops came out from either side of the road,

0:43:44.294,0:43:47.796
or something like that, and started going after him.

0:43:49.119,0:43:54.756
He describes that he was pressed down and assaulted by the police.

0:43:54.756,0:43:58.312
He tells me that they--it's unclear that they were police that were after him.

0:43:58.312,0:44:02.377
He thought that someone was trying to attack him.

0:44:02.377,0:44:05.914
He does tell me they beat him up.

0:44:08.255,0:44:15.406
It was just devastating. The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution of anyone in our family or anything

0:44:15.406,0:44:18.139
was so foreign and incomprehensible, I didn't know what to do.

0:44:18.139,0:44:24.872
Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house, his apartment in Cambridge, in his office at Harvard.

0:44:27.522,0:44:33.544
Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police.

0:44:33.544,0:44:37.431
It had been taken over by the United States Secret Service.

0:44:37.431,0:44:42.087
The Secret Service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984,

0:44:42.087,0:44:46.040
but six weeks after the attack on 9/11, their role expanded.

0:44:46.670,0:44:48.042
[applause]

0:44:48.142,0:44:56.061
President Bush used The Patriot Act to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces".

0:44:56.061,0:45:01.323
The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists.

0:45:01.323,0:45:06.381
According to the Secret Service, they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact,

0:45:06.381,0:45:11.154
organized criminal groups, or use of schemes involving new technology.

0:45:11.154,0:45:15.606
The Secret Service turned Swartz's case over to the Boston U.S. Attorney's office.

0:45:15.606,0:45:17.934
There was a guy in the U.S. attorney's office who had the title:

0:45:17.934,0:45:22.285
"Head of the Computer Crimes Division or Task Force"

0:45:22.285,0:45:23.915
I don't know what else he had going,

0:45:23.915,0:45:29.364
but you're certainly not much of a "Computer Crimes Prosecutor" without a computer crime to prosecute,

0:45:29.364,0:45:34.934
so he jumped on it, kept if for himself, didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit

0:45:34.934,0:45:36.686
and that's Steve Heymann.

0:45:36.686,0:45:41.896
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,

0:45:41.896,0:45:46.333
but he can be seen here, in an episode of the television show "American Greed",

0:45:46.333,0:45:48.700
filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.

0:45:48.700,0:45:53.092
He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzales,

0:45:53.092,0:45:56.873
a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades.

0:45:56.873,0:46:01.909
Gonzales masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers,

0:46:01.909,0:46:04.512
the largest such fraud in history.

0:46:04.512,0:46:09.793
Here, Heymann, describing Gonzales, gives his view on the hacker mindset:

0:46:09.793,0:46:16.095
These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by.

0:46:16.095,0:46:24.774
They have an ego, they like challenge, and of course they like money and everything you can get for money.

0:46:24.814,0:46:29.714
One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzales case was a young hacker named Jonathan James.

0:46:29.714,0:46:33.210
Believing Gonzales' crimes would be pinned on him,

0:46:33.210,0:46:36.319
James committed suicide during the investigation.

0:46:36.319,0:46:40.905
In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,

0:46:40.905,0:46:45.974
Heymann's boss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusets, Carmen Ortiz, said this:

0:46:46.570,0:46:53.141
"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars."

0:46:53.301,0:46:55.587
It is not true. It's obviously not true.

0:46:56.777,0:46:58.397
I'm not saying it's harmless,

0:46:58.397,0:47:06.122
and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalize stealing of information,

0:47:06.122,0:47:08.283
but you got to be much more subtle

0:47:08.283,0:47:14.911
in trying to figure out exactly which kinds of harms are harmful here.

0:47:14.911,0:47:18.677
So the thing about a crowbar is, every time I break into a place with a crowbar,

0:47:18.677,0:47:21.768
I do damage. There is no doubt about it.

0:47:21.768,0:47:23.586
But when Aaron writes a script that says

0:47:23.586,0:47:28.329
download download download, a hundred times in a second,

0:47:28.329,0:47:31.047
there's no obvious damage to anybody.

0:47:31.047,0:47:36.238
If he does that for the purpose of gathering an archive to do academic research on it,

0:47:36.238,0:47:38.409
there is never any damage to anybody.

0:47:38.409,0:47:42.925
He wasn't stealing. He wasn't selling what he got or giving it away.

0:47:42.925,0:47:45.641
He was making a point, for as far as I could tell.

0:47:45.641,0:47:48.189
The arrest took its toll on Swartz.

0:47:48.189,0:47:49.822
He just wouldn't talk about it.

0:47:49.822,0:47:51.396
I mean, he was very stressed.

0:47:51.396,0:47:55.614
If you would thought that the FBI was going to come to your doorstep any day,

0:47:55.614,0:47:59.014
anytime you went down the hall, even to do your laundry,

0:47:59.014,0:48:03.140
and they'd break in into your apartment 'cause you left the door unlocked,

0:48:03.140,0:48:06.545
like...I'd be pretty stressed,

0:48:06.545,0:48:12.727
and it was clear, and so Aaron was always sort of like in a dour mood.

0:48:18.430,0:48:23.771
He wouldn't give off any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time,

0:48:23.771,0:48:28.345
because he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him.

0:48:30.775,0:48:35.452
It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism.

0:48:35.452,0:48:41.811
Time Magazine would later name, as their 2011 Person of the Year, "The Protester".

0:48:42.348,0:48:46.925
There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.

0:48:48.956,0:48:53.582
WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables,

0:48:53.617,0:48:56.551
Manning had been under arrest at the time,

0:48:56.551,0:49:00.223
it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak.

0:49:00.223,0:49:04.801
Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble that

0:49:04.801,0:49:07.459
has a lot of hackers in its ranks,

0:49:07.464,0:49:11.357
were going on various sprees of sorts.

0:49:11.455,0:49:14.107
If you compare that to what he did,

0:49:14.107,0:49:18.112
this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,

0:49:18.146,0:49:22.048
in a kind of private, professional matter.

0:49:22.105,0:49:27.757
It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system.

0:49:28.465,0:49:30.630
It just didn't belong there.

0:49:36.455,0:49:39.901
Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal

0:49:39.921,0:49:43.230
that involved three months in prison, time in an halfway house,

0:49:43.230,0:49:45.449
and a year of home detention,

0:49:45.449,0:49:47.986
all without the use of a computer.

0:49:47.986,0:49:52.460
It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.

0:49:52.496,0:49:56.765
Here we are: we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever

0:49:56.765,0:49:58.364
about what the government's case is,

0:49:58.364,0:50:01.821
and we have to make this immense decision

0:50:01.856,0:50:05.604
where the lawyer is pushing you to do this,

0:50:05.606,0:50:09.781
the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand,

0:50:09.781,0:50:13.327
and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small,

0:50:13.327,0:50:17.583
so whether you're guilty or not, you're better off taking the deal.

0:50:18.268,0:50:21.280
Boston has its own Computer Crimes Division,

0:50:21.280,0:50:25.518
lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need.

0:50:25.518,0:50:30.627
So, you know, you can imagine all sorts of cases that will be really hard to prosecute,

0:50:30.627,0:50:33.037
because you've got some criminals in Russia,

0:50:33.037,0:50:36.057
or you've got some people inside of a corporation

0:50:36.057,0:50:39.968
that are gonna five hundred dollar lawyers or seven hundred dollar-an-hour lawyers

0:50:39.968,0:50:43.606
sitting down against you, and then you've got this case with this kid,

0:50:43.606,0:50:47.919
which is pretty easy to prove that he did something,

0:50:47.919,0:50:52.727
and he's already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI,

0:50:52.727,0:50:56.461
so why not go as tough as you can against that guy?

0:50:56.461,0:50:59.444
It's good for you the prosecutor. It's good for the Republic,

0:50:59.444,0:51:02.232
'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types.

0:51:02.232,0:51:03.846
I was so scared.

0:51:03.846,0:51:05.923
I was so scared of having my computer seized.

0:51:05.923,0:51:10.048
I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being seized.

0:51:10.048,0:51:15.293
I had confidential material from sources from my previous work on my laptop,

0:51:15.390,0:51:20.517
and that is, above all, my priority--is to keep my sources safe.

0:51:20.527,0:51:25.220
I was so scared of what was going to happen to Ada.

0:51:25.370,0:51:28.054
Aaron told me that they'd offered him a deal,

0:51:28.054,0:51:32.830
and he finally just said that he would take it if I told him to,

0:51:32.830,0:51:36.986
and I say--I came real close to saying, "Take it."

0:51:37.603,0:51:42.621
He had these--he had developed, like, serious political aspirations

0:51:42.621,0:51:45.511
in the intervening time, between when, you know,

0:51:45.511,0:51:51.218
that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial start-up life,

0:51:51.246,0:51:56.448
and begun this new life that had come to this political activism,

0:51:56.967,0:52:03.884
and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony.

0:52:03.884,0:52:07.386
You know, he said to me one day, we were walking by the White House,

0:52:07.386,0:52:11.279
and he said to me, "They don't let felons work there."

0:52:17.661,0:52:22.031
And you know he really--he really wanted that to be his life.

0:52:22.287,0:52:25.560
He hadn't killed anybody. He hadn't hurt anybody.

0:52:25.564,0:52:28.329
He hadn't, like, stolen money.

0:52:28.329,0:52:32.573
He hadn't done anything that seemed felony-worthy, and...

0:52:34.643,0:52:39.327
there is this idea that there is no reason that he should be labelled a felon,

0:52:39.327,0:52:42.963
and taken away his right to vote in many states

0:52:42.963,0:52:45.767
for doing what he did. That's just outrageous.

0:52:45.767,0:52:49.900
It makes sense for him to be maybe fined a bunch of money,

0:52:49.900,0:52:54.137
or asked not to come back to MIT again.

0:52:54.137,0:52:57.744
But to be a felon? To face jail time?

0:53:00.546,0:53:04.062
Swartz turned down the plea deal.

0:53:04.062,0:53:06.868
Heymann redoubled his efforts.

0:53:06.868,0:53:12.337
Heymann continued to press us at all levels.

0:53:12.340,0:53:15.078
Even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's

0:53:15.078,0:53:18.290
Acer computer harddrive and USB drive,

0:53:18.290,0:53:21.153
the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.

0:53:21.153,0:53:24.699
Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR,

0:53:24.699,0:53:28.380
and just what did he plan to do with them?

0:53:28.854,0:53:32.279
The government claim was that he was planning to publish these.

0:53:32.279,0:53:35.830
We don't really know whether that was his real intention

0:53:35.830,0:53:42.728
because Aaron also had a history of doing projects where he'd analyze giant data sets of articles

0:53:42.728,0:53:45.156
in order to learn interesting things about them.

0:53:45.156,0:53:48.101
The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford,

0:53:48.103,0:53:53.087
he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.

0:53:53.117,0:53:55.525
In a project with Stanford law students,

0:53:55.525,0:53:58.316
Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

0:53:58.316,0:54:02.492
He uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research

0:54:02.492,0:54:04.444
and favorable results.

0:54:04.444,0:54:07.317
He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies

0:54:07.317,0:54:10.868
giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles

0:54:10.868,0:54:14.927
which were then beneficial to, like, Exxon during an oil spill.

0:54:14.927,0:54:19.391
So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research.

0:54:19.441,0:54:22.676
Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.

0:54:22.676,0:54:25.525
In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.

0:54:25.525,0:54:27.286
That would have been completely okay.

0:54:27.286,0:54:32.700
If he were, on the other hand, intending to create a competitive service to JSTOR,

0:54:32.700,0:54:35.055
like, we're going to set up our own, you know,

0:54:35.055,0:54:39.090
access to the Harvard Law Review and charge, you know, money for it,

0:54:39.090,0:54:41.972
then, okay, now it seems like criminal violation

0:54:41.972,0:54:45.044
because you are commercially trying to exploit this material,

0:54:45.044,0:54:47.780
but it's kind of crazy to imagine that that was what he was doing.

0:54:47.780,0:54:53.516
So, but then there's the middle case: well, what if he was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world?

0:54:53.516,0:54:56.855
But depending on what he was doing, it creates a very different character

0:54:56.855,0:55:00.538
to how the law should be thinking about it. The government was prosecuting him

0:55:00.538,0:55:03.630
as if this was like a commercial criminal violation,

0:55:03.630,0:55:06.851
like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records, that it was that kind of crime.

0:55:06.851,0:55:10.122
I don't know what he was going to do with that database,

0:55:10.122,0:55:12.804
but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him

0:55:12.804,0:55:18.086
that he was going to analyze the data for evidence of corporate funding of climate change research

0:55:18.086,0:55:24.212
that led to biased results, and I totally believe that.

0:55:24.972,0:55:28.682
I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me,

0:55:29.252,0:55:32.982
and I thought maybe this was a way I could get out of this,

0:55:32.982,0:55:35.088
just exit the situation,

0:55:35.088,0:55:38.427
and I didn't want to live in fear of having my computer seized.

0:55:38.659,0:55:42.759
I didn't want to live in fear of having to go to jail on a contempt of court charge

0:55:42.759,0:55:46.416
if they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer.

0:55:46.416,0:55:50.425
When they came to me and said, "Steve wants to talk to you,"

0:55:50.425,0:55:52.239
that seemed reasonable.

0:55:52.559,0:55:57.306
They offered Norton what is know as a "Queen For A Day" letter or a proffer.

0:55:57.306,0:56:00.561
It allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case.

0:56:00.561,0:56:03.587
Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself,

0:56:03.587,0:56:06.187
for any information she revealed during the meeting.

0:56:06.187,0:56:09.333
I didn't like it. I told my lawyers repeatedly

0:56:09.333,0:56:13.281
that I didn't...this seemed fishy, I didn't like this, I didn't want immunity,

0:56:13.281,0:56:15.946
I didn't need immunity, I hadn't done anything,

0:56:15.946,0:56:18.382
but they were really, really stringent that there was--

0:56:18.382,0:56:21.354
they did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity.

0:56:21.354,0:56:24.452
[Interviewer] But just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal, a proffer.

0:56:24.452,0:56:25.495
Right, a proffer letter.

0:56:25.495,0:56:30.162
-In which you basically handed information to them in exchange for protection from prosecution.

0:56:30.162,0:56:35.244
-So, it wasn't handing information over. It was--at least that's not how I saw it--

0:56:35.244,0:56:37.689
it was just having a discussion, having an interview with them.

0:56:37.689,0:56:40.010
-Well, they're asking you questions...[br]-They're asking me questions.

0:56:40.010,0:56:42.193
-and they can ask about whatever they want...[br]-Right.

0:56:42.193,0:56:44.727
- and whatever they learn...[br]-I really...

0:56:44.727,0:56:49.514
-They can't have you prosecuted.[br]-Right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked.

0:56:49.514,0:56:53.468
I repeatedly--I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter.

0:56:53.468,0:56:56.414
I was ill. I was being pressured by my lawyers.

0:56:56.414,0:57:00.902
I was confused. I was not doing well by this point.

0:57:00.902,0:57:05.502
I was depressed, and I was scared, and I didn't understand the situation I was in.

0:57:05.502,0:57:08.879
I had no idea why I was in this situation.

0:57:08.879,0:57:13.442
I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong.

0:57:13.442,0:57:14.949
We went out of our minds.

0:57:14.949,0:57:18.711
Aaron was clearly very distraught about it. We were very distraught about it.

0:57:18.711,0:57:20.884
Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it.

0:57:20.884,0:57:23.417
We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys.

0:57:23.727,0:57:28.364
I was very unused to being in a room with large men, well-armed,

0:57:28.364,0:57:33.234
that are continually telling me I'm lying, and that I must have done something.

0:57:33.664,0:57:37.431
I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting

0:57:37.431,0:57:40.520
wasn't a crime.

0:57:40.760,0:57:42.924
I told them that they were on the wrong side of history.

0:57:42.924,0:57:47.322
I used that phrase. I said, "You're on the wrong side of history."

0:57:48.302,0:57:53.217
And they looked bored. They didn't even look angry. They just looked bored,

0:57:53.217,0:57:57.210
and it began to occur to me that we weren't having the same conversation.

0:57:57.210,0:58:01.970
I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know, why people would download journal articles,

0:58:01.970,0:58:06.383
and eventually--I don't remember what was around it--

0:58:06.383,0:58:11.118
I mentioned that he'd done this blog post, the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto".

0:58:12.969,0:58:16.366
This is the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto",

0:58:16.366,0:58:20.263
supposedly written in July, 2008 in Italy.

0:58:20.263,0:58:24.736
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."

0:58:24.736,0:58:29.689
"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,[br]published over centuries in books and journals,

0:58:29.689,0:58:34.317
is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

0:58:34.317,0:58:38.048
"Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by."

0:58:38.048,0:58:40.237
"You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences,

0:58:40.237,0:58:44.454
liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends."

0:58:44.454,0:58:47.528
"But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground."

0:58:47.528,0:58:50.863
"It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were

0:58:50.863,0:58:54.531
the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew."

0:58:54.531,0:58:57.456
"But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative."

0:58:57.456,0:59:02.048
"Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy."

0:59:02.048,0:59:04.267
"There's no justice in following unjust laws."

0:59:04.267,0:59:08.229
"It's time to come into the light and, in a grand tradition of civil disobedience,

0:59:08.229,0:59:11.820
declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture."

0:59:12.105,0:59:18.502
The Manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people, and also edited by Norton.

0:59:18.502,0:59:21.474
But it was Swartz who had signed his name to it.

0:59:21.474,0:59:28.684
When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron and tell him everything I can remember about it,

0:59:28.684,0:59:30.611
and he gets very angry.

0:59:34.522,0:59:37.669
The things that I'd done shouldn't have added up that way.

0:59:40.078,0:59:45.576
I hadn't done anything wrong, and everything had gone wrong,

0:59:47.257,0:59:49.639
but I was never...

0:59:57.302,1:00:00.162
I'm still angry.

1:00:00.789,1:00:06.610
I'm still angry that you could try your best with these people to do the right thing,

1:00:06.610,1:00:09.325
and they'd turn everything against you.

1:00:09.325,1:00:13.371
And they will hurt you with anything they can.

1:00:15.530,1:00:19.297
And in that moment, I regret that I said what I did.

1:00:19.991,1:00:23.705
But my much larger regret is that we have settled for this.

1:00:23.705,1:00:26.087
That we are okay with this.

1:00:26.087,1:00:27.662
That we are okay with the justice system,

1:00:27.662,1:00:32.080
a system that tries to game people into little traps so they can ruin our lives.

1:00:33.080,1:00:35.538
So yeah, I wish I hadn't said that.

1:00:35.538,1:00:41.312
But I'm much, much angrier that this is where I am.

1:00:42.891,1:00:47.505
That this is what we, as a people, think is okay.

1:00:48.358,1:00:52.617
They used every method that I think they could think of

1:00:52.617,1:00:56.887
to get her to provide information which would be unhelpful to Aaron,

1:00:56.887,1:01:00.414
and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron,

1:01:01.964,1:01:07.240
but I don't think she had information that was helpful to the government.

1:01:08.029,1:01:12.051
Months go by, as Swartz's friends and family await a looming indictment.

1:01:12.062,1:01:17.142
In the meantime, Swartz was becoming a go-to expert on a series of internet issues.

1:01:17.142,1:01:19.826
[RT interviewer} ...a question to you then: Do you think that the internet is something

1:01:19.826,1:01:25.166
that should be considered a human right, and something that the government cannot take away from you?

1:01:25.276,1:01:30.446
Yes, definitely, I mean this notion that national security is an excuse to shut down the internet,

1:01:30.446,1:01:34.017
that's exactly what we heard in Egypt and Syria and all these other countries,

1:01:34.017,1:01:38.628
and so, yeah, it's true, sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up some embarrassing material

1:01:38.628,1:01:42.553
about what the U.S. government does, and people are going to be organizing to protest about it,

1:01:42.553,1:01:45.511
and try and change their government. You know, and that's a good thing,

1:01:45.511,1:01:50.290
that's what all these First Amendment Rights of free expression, of freedom of association are all about,

1:01:50.308,1:01:55.134
and so the notion that we should try and shut those down I think, just goes against very basic American principles.

1:01:55.238,1:01:57.960
A principle, I think, is one that our Founding Fathers would have understood.

1:01:57.960,1:01:59.958
If the internet had been around back then,

1:01:59.958,1:02:04.020
instead of putting "post offices" in the Constitution, they would have put "ISPs".

1:02:04.020,1:02:05.575
[RT interviewer] Well, it's definitely interesting to see how far...

1:02:05.575,1:02:10.566
Swartz meets activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and the two begin to date.

1:02:10.656,1:02:12.218
[Aaron] We need a massive global public outcry.

1:02:12.218,1:02:15.190
[Taren] If there's no massive global public outcry, it won't create any change.

1:02:15.190,1:02:18.961
-You know, four people in this city should cause a massive global public outcry.

1:02:18.961,1:02:21.952
-You know, we need a petition signer.

1:02:22.120,1:02:25.489
Without telling her specifics, he warned her he was involved in something

1:02:25.489,1:02:27.688
he called simply "The Bad Thing".

1:02:27.688,1:02:33.039
And I had sort of crazy theories, like, that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or something.

1:02:33.089,1:02:37.890
I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, actually, but...

1:02:38.284,1:02:41.720
So, sometime in probably late July, Aaron called me,

1:02:42.284,1:02:47.433
and I happened to pick up, and he said, "The Bad Thing" might be in the news tomorrow.

1:02:47.433,1:02:49.831
Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to read about it in the news?"

1:02:49.831,1:02:52.453
And I said, "Well, I want you to tell me."

1:02:53.433,1:02:58.472
Aaron said, "Well, I've been--I've been arrested

1:02:58.490,1:03:03.419
for downloading too many academic journal articles, and they want to make an example out of me."

1:03:04.329,1:03:11.163
And I was like, "That's it? That's the big fuss? Really? It just doesn't sound like a very big deal."

1:03:11.195,1:03:17.283
On July 14, 2011, federal prosecutors indict Swartz on four felony counts.

1:03:17.482,1:03:24.174
He gets indicted on the same day that two people in England who are part of LulzSec get arrested,

1:03:24.634,1:03:30.134
and a few other real hackers. And Aaron is just someone who kind of looks like a hacker,

1:03:30.134,1:03:34.917
enough that they can, you know, put his head on a stake and put it on the gates.

1:03:35.022,1:03:38.242
Aaron went to surrender, and they arrested him.

1:03:39.468,1:03:42.220
They then strip searched him,

1:03:42.638,1:03:48.343
took away his shoelaces, took away his belt, and left him in solitary confinement.

1:03:50.115,1:03:54.537
The District of Massachusetts United States Attorney's office released a statement

1:03:54.549,1:03:57.882
saying, "Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison,

1:03:57.882,1:04:00.790
to be followed by three years of supervised release,

1:04:00.790,1:04:06.012
restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to one million dollars."

1:04:06.276,1:04:09.370
He is released on one hundred thousand dollars bail.

1:04:09.370,1:04:12.288
The same day, the primary victim in the case, JSTOR,

1:04:12.288,1:04:17.769
formally drops all charges against Swartz, and declines to pursue the case.

1:04:18.079,1:04:21.575
JSTOR--they weren't our friends; they weren't helpful or friendly to us,

1:04:21.575,1:04:25.385
but they also were just kind of like, "We're not part of this."

1:04:25.385,1:04:30.800
JSTOR, and their parent company, ITHAKA, also sidestepped requests to talk with this film.

1:04:30.868,1:04:33.524
But at the time, they released a statement saying,

1:04:33.538,1:04:37.696
"It was the government's decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR's."

1:04:38.497,1:04:42.739
And so it's our belief that, with that, the case will be over.

1:04:42.739,1:04:48.230
That we should be able to get Steve Heymann to drop the case, or settle it in some rational way.

1:04:48.654,1:04:50.762
And the government refused.

1:04:51.149,1:04:52.856
[Narrator] Why?

1:04:55.138,1:04:58.375
Well, because I think they wanted to make an example out of Aaron,

1:04:58.375,1:05:01.988
and they said they wanted--the reason, why they wouldn't

1:05:01.988,1:05:05.349
move on requiring a felony conviction and jail time,

1:05:05.349,1:05:13.255
was that they wanted to use this case as a case for deterrence. They told us that.

1:05:13.255,1:05:15.319
[Interviewer] They told you that?[br]- Yes.

1:05:15.320,1:05:17.257
-This was going to be an example?[br]-Yes.

1:05:17.263,1:05:19.810
-He was going to be made an example?[br]- Yes.

1:05:20.025,1:05:22.030
Steve Heymann said that.

1:05:22.030,1:05:26.369
Deterring who? There's other people out there running around logging onto JSTOR,

1:05:26.369,1:05:30.154
and downloading the articles to make a political statement? I mean, who are they deterring?

1:05:30.154,1:05:34.611
It would be easier to understand the Obama administration's

1:05:34.611,1:05:37.441
posture of supposedly being for deterrence

1:05:37.441,1:05:41.146
if this was an administration that, for instance,

1:05:41.146,1:05:43.525
prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime

1:05:43.525,1:05:45.527
that this country has seen in the last hundred years.

1:05:45.527,1:05:49.630
The crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street.

1:05:50.101,1:05:52.532
When you start deploying

1:05:52.532,1:05:56.613
the non-controversial idea of deterrence

1:05:56.613,1:05:58.454
only selectively

1:05:58.455,1:06:02.139
you stop making a dispassionate analysis of law-breaking

1:06:02.139,1:06:06.893
and you started deciding to deploy law enforcement resources

1:06:06.902,1:06:10.390
specifically on the basis of political ideology,

1:06:10.390,1:06:15.949
and that's not just undemocratic, it's supposed to be un-American.

1:06:19.319,1:06:24.146
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel

1:06:24.146,1:06:26.587
that the straw that broke the camel's back

1:06:26.587,1:06:31.467
was a press release sent out by an organization Swartz founded called "Demand Progress".

1:06:31.473,1:06:35.590
According to the MIT account, Heymann reacted to the short statement of support,

1:06:35.590,1:06:39.596
calling it a "wild internet campaign" and a "foolish move"

1:06:39.596,1:06:44.036
that moved the case from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.

1:06:44.036,1:06:48.622
That was a poisonous combination: a prosecutor who didn't want to lose face,

1:06:48.622,1:06:52.987
who had a political career in the offing, maybe, and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them.

1:06:52.987,1:06:57.529
You spend how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library,

1:06:57.529,1:07:01.015
and then got your ass handed to you in court? No way!

1:07:01.015,1:07:05.550
I then moved to try to put as much pressure on MIT in various ways to get them

1:07:05.550,1:07:10.739
to go to the government, and request the government to stop the prosecution.

1:07:11.472,1:07:14.528
[Interviewer] What was MIT's reaction to that?

1:07:14.634,1:07:18.614
There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point.

1:07:22.631,1:07:25.613
MIT doesn't defend Aaron

1:07:25.613,1:07:30.307
which, to people inside of the MIT community, seems outrageous,

1:07:30.307,1:07:35.667
because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word.

1:07:35.716,1:07:40.728
At MIT, the idea of going and running around on roofs and tunnels that you weren't allowed to be in

1:07:40.728,1:07:45.831
was not only a rite of passage, it was part of the MIT tour,

1:07:45.831,1:07:50.313
and lockpicking was a winter course at MIT.

1:07:50.553,1:07:55.753
They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks.

1:07:56.233,1:08:01.691
MIT never stood up and took a position of saying to the Feds, "Don't do this."

1:08:01.691,1:08:06.197
"We don't want you to do this. You're overreacting. This is too strong."

1:08:06.197,1:08:08.334
...that I'm aware of.

1:08:08.334,1:08:14.474
They acted kind of like any corporation would. They sort of--they helped the government,

1:08:14.486,1:08:21.196
they didn't help us, unless they felt they had to, and they never tried to stop it.

1:08:22.345,1:08:25.229
MIT declined repeated requests to comment,

1:08:25.229,1:08:30.006
but they later released a report saying they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality,

1:08:30.006,1:08:35.952
and believed Heymann and the U.S. Attorney's office did not care what MIT thought or said about the case.

1:08:35.952,1:08:41.848
MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos.

1:08:41.848,1:08:47.158
You could argue that MIT turned a blind eye, and that was okay for them to do,

1:08:47.158,1:08:52.599
but taking that stance--taking that neutral stance, in and of itself--was taking a pro-prosecutor stance.

1:08:52.676,1:08:55.831
If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,

1:08:55.831,1:09:01.451
they started by selling a Blue Box, which was a thing designed to defraud the phone company.

1:09:01.627,1:09:04.671
If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen,

1:09:04.671,1:09:08.430
they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard,

1:09:08.430,1:09:11.441
which was pretty clearly against the rules.

1:09:11.462,1:09:13.332
The difference between Aaron and the people I just mentioned

1:09:13.332,1:09:17.952
is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place, he didn't just want to make money.

1:09:18.984,1:09:23.151
Swartz continues to be outspoken on a variety of internet issues.

1:09:23.624,1:09:28.850
You know, the reason the internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas,

1:09:28.850,1:09:32.978
and what we need to be focusing on is getting more information about our government, more accessibility,

1:09:32.978,1:09:38.484
more discussion, more debate, but instead it seems like what Congress is focused on is shutting things down.

1:09:38.670,1:09:44.319
Aaron thought he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people.

1:09:44.368,1:09:48.728
[RT interviewer] Flame can literally control your computer, and make it spy on you.

1:09:48.738,1:09:52.238
Welcome, Aaron. Good to have you back on the show here.

1:09:52.238,1:09:56.485
You know, just like spies used to in olden days, put microphones and tap what people were saying,

1:09:56.485,1:09:58.957
now they're using computers to do the same things.

1:09:58.957,1:10:01.726
[Narrator] Swartz's political activity continues,

1:10:01.726,1:10:06.676
his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy.

1:10:06.795,1:10:08.709
It was called "SOPA".

1:10:08.944,1:10:12.724
Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous overreach,

1:10:12.724,1:10:16.131
threatening the technical integrity of the Internet itself.

1:10:16.131,1:10:18.419
[Ekersley] And one of the first things I did was to call Aaron.

1:10:18.419,1:10:21.622
And I said, "Can we do a big online campaign against this?"

1:10:21.622,1:10:24.466
"This isn't a bill about copyright."

1:10:24.786,1:10:26.276
"It's not?"

1:10:26.418,1:10:30.198
"No," he said, "it's a bill about the freedom to connect."

1:10:30.345,1:10:32.463
Now I was listening.

1:10:32.463,1:10:35.922
And he thought about it for a while, and then said, "Yes."

1:10:35.922,1:10:38.088
And he went and founded Demand Progress.

1:10:38.088,1:10:44.184
Demand Progress is an online activism organization, we've got around a million and a half members now,

1:10:44.184,1:10:47.231
but started in the fall of 2010.

1:10:47.262,1:10:50.092
Aaron was one of the most prominent people in a community of people

1:10:50.092,1:10:55.390
who helped lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country.

1:10:55.390,1:11:01.193
SOPA was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies,

1:11:01.193,1:11:06.993
but what it did was basically take a sledgehammer to a problem that needed a scalpel.

1:11:07.161,1:11:13.124
If passed, the law would allow a company to cut off finances to entire websites without due process,

1:11:13.124,1:11:16.334
or even to force Google to exclude their links.

1:11:16.334,1:11:20.583
All they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement.

1:11:20.583,1:11:26.780
It pitted the titans of traditional media against a new and now far more sophisticated remix culture.

1:11:26.780,1:11:30.227
It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman,

1:11:30.227,1:11:33.609
and if they don't do their job of making sure that nobody on their site uses it for anything

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that's even potentially illegal, the entire site can get shut down without even so much as a trial.

1:11:38.848,1:11:43.421
This was over the top, I mean, this was a catastrophe.

1:11:43.421,1:11:51.632
This bill poses a serious threat to speech and civil liberties for all who use the internet.

1:11:51.632,1:11:55.574
There were only a handful of us who said, "Look, we're not for piracy either,

1:11:55.574,1:12:00.267
but it makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet,

1:12:00.267,1:12:05.672
the domain name system and so much that makes it free and open in the name of fighting piracy,

1:12:05.672,1:12:07.437
and Aaron got that right away.

1:12:07.437,1:12:11.557
The freedoms, guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on

1:12:11.557,1:12:13.739
would be suddenly deleted.

1:12:13.739,1:12:18.611
New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights

1:12:18.611,1:12:21.282
we'd always taken for granted.

1:12:21.282,1:12:27.260
And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.

1:12:28.483,1:12:32.925
When SOPA was introduced in October, 2011, it was considered inevitable.

1:12:32.925,1:12:37.417
Our strategy, when it first came out, was to hopefully slow the bill down,

1:12:37.417,1:12:41.367
maybe weaken it a little bit but, even we

1:12:41.367,1:12:44.828
didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill.

1:12:45.680,1:12:51.460
Having worked in Washington, what you learn is that, typically in Washington,

1:12:51.460,1:12:57.700
the legislative fights are fights between different sets of corporate monied interests.

1:12:57.700,1:13:02.093
They're all duking it out to pass legislation, and the fights that are the closest

1:13:02.093,1:13:07.073
are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests,

1:13:07.073,1:13:10.747
and they're financially equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying.

1:13:10.747,1:13:12.661
Those are the closest ones.

1:13:12.661,1:13:16.413
The ones that aren't even fights, typically, are ones

1:13:16.413,1:13:20.676
where all the money is on one side, all the corporations are on one side,

1:13:20.691,1:13:23.603
and it's just millions of people on the other side.

1:13:25.067,1:13:30.369
I haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service.

1:13:31.046,1:13:37.150
There were more than forty United States senators on that bill as co-sponsors,

1:13:37.150,1:13:40.534
so they were already a long, long way to getting the

1:13:40.534,1:13:43.968
sixty votes to have it clear all the procedural hoops.

1:13:44.456,1:13:47.603
Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period.

1:13:48.112,1:13:53.471
Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal enormous support using traditional outreach,

1:13:53.471,1:13:59.267
combined with commonly used voiceover IP, to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

1:14:00.011,1:14:03.847
I've never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level

1:14:03.847,1:14:07.985
both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side.

1:14:08.607,1:14:12.669
Millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-SOPA petitions.

1:14:12.948,1:14:15.381
Congress was caught off guard.

1:14:15.381,1:14:20.433
There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill,

1:14:20.433,1:14:22.690
watching them insist they could regulate the internet,

1:14:22.690,1:14:25.248
and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them.

1:14:25.248,1:14:26.390
I am not a nerd.

1:14:26.391,1:14:27.928
I'm just not enough of a nerd...

1:14:27.928,1:14:31.120
Maybe we oughta ask some nerds what this thing really does. [laughter]

1:14:31.120,1:14:33.353
Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds...

1:14:33.353,1:14:35.830
[laughter]

1:14:35.830,1:14:37.549
Really?

1:14:37.549,1:14:40.087
[laughter]

1:14:40.087,1:14:41.375
"Nerds"?

1:14:41.375,1:14:42.101
[laughter]

1:14:42.101,1:14:45.658
You know, I think, actually the word you're looking for is "experts"...

1:14:45.658,1:14:47.095
[laughter]

1:14:47.095,1:14:51.605
to enlighten you so your laws don't backfire [audience laughter and applause]

1:14:51.605,1:14:53.094
and break the internet.

1:14:53.094,1:14:56.639
We use the term "geek" but we're allowed to use that because we are geeks.

1:14:56.639,1:15:01.575
The fact that it got as far as it did, without them talking to any technical experts,

1:15:01.575,1:15:04.808
reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town.

1:15:04.808,1:15:12.138
I'm looking for somebody to come before this body, and testify in a hearing and say, "This is why they're wrong."

1:15:12.269,1:15:15.411
There used to be an office that provided science and technology advice,

1:15:15.411,1:15:19.208
and members could go to them and say, "Help me understand X,Y,Z."

1:15:19.208,1:15:22.295
And Gingrich killed it. He said it was a waste of money.

1:15:22.295,1:15:26.188
Ever since then, Congress has plunged into the Dark Ages.

1:15:26.219,1:15:29.744
I don't think anybody really thought that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron.

1:15:30.274,1:15:34.533
It was worth trying, but it didn't seem winnable,

1:15:34.533,1:15:38.583
and I remember, maybe a few months later, I remember him just turning to me and being like,

1:15:38.583,1:15:40.670
"I think we might win this."

1:15:40.670,1:15:42.719
And I was like, "That would be amazing."

1:15:44.249,1:15:46.434
Calls to Congress continue.

1:15:46.434,1:15:50.137
When the domain hosting site Go Daddy becomes a supporter of the bill,

1:15:50.137,1:15:55.212
tens of thousands of users transferred their domain names in protest.

1:15:55.212,1:16:00.146
Within a week, a humbled Go Daddy reverses their position on SOPA.

1:16:00.146,1:16:06.303
When the Congress people that supported the record and movie industries,

1:16:06.303,1:16:10.389
realized that there was this backlash, they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit.

1:16:10.389,1:16:15.881
You could see the curve happening. You could see that our arguments were starting to resonate.

1:16:15.881,1:16:18.904
It was like Aaron had been striking a match and it was being blown out,

1:16:18.904,1:16:20.715
striking another one, and it was being blown out,

1:16:20.715,1:16:24.082
and finally he'd managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught,

1:16:24.082,1:16:26.500
and then it turned into this roaring blaze.

1:16:26.910,1:16:31.373
On January 16, 2012, the White House issued a statement

1:16:31.373,1:16:34.258
saying they didn't support the bill.

1:16:34.258,1:16:36.202
And then this happened:

1:16:36.202,1:16:40.202
I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy,

1:16:40.202,1:16:44.744
and we should deal with them in a serious way, but this bill is not the right bill.

1:16:44.744,1:16:48.857
When Jimmy Wales put his support toward blacking out Wikipedia,

1:16:48.857,1:16:52.369
the number five most popular website in the world,

1:16:52.369,1:16:58.530
this is a website that's seven percent of all of the clicks on anywhere on the internet.

1:16:58.530,1:17:00.129
Wikipedia went black.

1:17:00.129,1:17:01.511
Reddit went black.

1:17:01.511,1:17:03.300
Craigslist went black.

1:17:03.300,1:17:06.109
The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat out melted.

1:17:06.109,1:17:10.835
Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill

1:17:10.835,1:17:13.147
that they were promoting just a couple days ago.

1:17:13.546,1:17:17.838
Within 24 hours, the number of opponents of SOPA in Congress

1:17:17.853,1:17:19.167
went from this...

1:17:19.167,1:17:20.701
to this.

1:17:22.706,1:17:29.815
To see congressmen and senators slowly flip sides throughout the day of the blackout

1:17:29.821,1:17:31.385
was pretty unbelievable.

1:17:31.385,1:17:34.568
There was like a hundred representative swing.

1:17:34.568,1:17:38.734
And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this,

1:17:38.734,1:17:40.756
we had won.

1:17:40.759,1:17:42.469
The thing that everyone said was impossible,

1:17:42.469,1:17:46.409
that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream,

1:17:46.409,1:17:48.207
had happened.

1:17:48.552,1:17:50.467
We did it.

1:17:50.803,1:17:52.689
We won.

1:17:55.405,1:17:58.571
This is a historic week in internet politics--maybe American politics.

1:17:58.571,1:18:03.838
The thing that we heard from people in Washington, D.C., from the staffers on Capitol Hill was:

1:18:03.838,1:18:08.538
they received more emails and more phone calls on SOPA Blackout Day

1:18:08.538,1:18:10.747
than they'd ever received about anything.

1:18:10.747,1:18:12.817
I think that was an extremely exciting moment.

1:18:12.817,1:18:17.640
This was the moment when the internet had grown up, politically.

1:18:17.644,1:18:21.198
It was exhilarating because it's hard to believe it actually happened.

1:18:21.198,1:18:25.365
It's hard to believe a bill with so much financial power behind it

1:18:25.389,1:18:29.151
didn't simply sail through the Congress.

1:18:29.151,1:18:32.167
And not only did not sail through, it didn't pass at all.

1:18:33.783,1:18:36.479
It's easy sometimes to feel like you're powereless,

1:18:36.479,1:18:40.524
like when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell and nobody hears you.

1:18:40.529,1:18:43.018
But I'm here to tell you today, you are powerful.

1:18:43.018,1:18:45.725
[Crowd cheers]

1:18:45.725,1:18:50.546
So, yeah, maybe sometimes you feel like you're not being listened to, but I'm here to tell you that you are.

1:18:50.546,1:18:53.118
You are being listened to. You are making a difference.

1:18:53.118,1:18:56.932
You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.

1:18:56.932,1:18:59.579
[Crowd cheers]

1:18:59.579,1:19:00.620
Stop PIPA.

1:19:00.620,1:19:02.586
Stop SOPA.

1:19:02.586,1:19:03.882
[Crowd cheers]

1:19:03.882,1:19:07.368
Some of the biggest internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit

1:19:07.368,1:19:11.219
from a world in which their little competitors could get censored.

1:19:12.429,1:19:14.642
We can't let that happen.

1:19:14.642,1:19:19.552
For him, it was more important to be sure that you made a small change

1:19:19.552,1:19:23.178
than to play a small part in a big change.

1:19:23.178,1:19:27.797
But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change,

1:19:27.797,1:19:30.753
and so for him, it was kind of this proof of concept

1:19:30.753,1:19:34.796
like, "Okay, what I want to do with my life is change the world."

1:19:34.796,1:19:39.821
"I think about it in this really scientific way of measuring my impact,

1:19:39.821,1:19:42.731
and this shows that it's possible."

1:19:42.731,1:19:45.578
"The thing that I want to do with my life is possible."

1:19:45.578,1:19:48.653
"I have proved that I can do it,

1:19:48.653,1:19:50.730
that I, Aaron Swartz, can change the world."

1:19:50.730,1:19:57.516
For a guy who never really thought he had done much--which was Aaron--

1:19:59.161,1:20:04.115
was one of the few moments where you could really see

1:20:04.115,1:20:06.769
that he felt like he had done something good,

1:20:06.854,1:20:11.836
feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap.

1:20:13.538,1:20:15.904
Everyone said there was no way we could stop SOPA.

1:20:15.904,1:20:17.337
We stopped it.

1:20:17.337,1:20:22.077
This is three outrageously good victories, and the year isn't even over yet.

1:20:22.077,1:20:26.257
I mean, if there's a time to be positive, it's now.

1:20:26.687,1:20:29.799
You know, he wins at SOPA a year after he's arrested.

1:20:29.799,1:20:33.363
It's not unambiguously happy moments. There's a lot going on.

1:20:33.363,1:20:39.766
He's so attuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him.

1:20:39.766,1:20:44.301
The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous,

1:20:44.301,1:20:47.862
and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance,

1:20:47.862,1:20:50.780
Swartz was already concerned.

1:20:50.780,1:20:54.584
It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax

1:20:54.584,1:20:59.587
that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is.

1:20:59.587,1:21:04.013
And if the answer is: "Oh, we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them"

1:21:04.013,1:21:06.101
then that's an awful lot of people.

1:21:06.101,1:21:09.743
It'd be one thing if they said, "Look, we know the number of telephones we're spying on,

1:21:09.743,1:21:12.430
we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."

1:21:12.430,1:21:15.759
but they just came back and said, "We can't give you a number at all."

1:21:15.759,1:21:18.644
That's pretty--I mean, that's scary, is what it is.

1:21:18.731,1:21:25.733
And they put incredible pressure on him, took away all of the money he had made.

1:21:25.733,1:21:29.578
They, you know, threatened to take away his physical freedom.

1:21:29.578,1:21:34.228
Why'd they do it, you know? I mean, well, why are they going after whistleblowers?

1:21:34.228,1:21:38.034
You know, why are they going after people who tell the truth

1:21:38.034,1:21:46.122
about all sorts of things, I mean, from the banks, you know, to war, to just sort of government transparency.

1:21:46.354,1:21:49.626
So secrecy serves those who are already in power,

1:21:49.626,1:21:54.888
and we are living in an era of secrecy that coincides with an era where the government is doing, also,

1:21:54.888,1:21:58.600
a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional.

1:21:58.600,1:22:01.074
So, those two things are not coincidences.

1:22:01.124,1:22:04.478
It's very clear that this technology has been developed

1:22:04.478,1:22:09.621
not for small countries overseas, but right here, for use in the United States, by the U.S. government.

1:22:09.621,1:22:14.384
The problem with the spying program is it's this sort of long, slow expansion, you know,

1:22:14.384,1:22:16.539
going back to the Nixon administration, right,

1:22:16.539,1:22:19.686
obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush,

1:22:19.686,1:22:23.616
and Obama has continued to expand it, and the problems have slowly grown worse and worse,

1:22:23.618,1:22:26.281
but there's never been this moment you can point to and say,

1:22:26.281,1:22:31.941
"Okay, we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters..."

1:22:32.455,1:22:38.653
The prosecution, in my estimation of Aaron Swartz, was about sending a particular, laserlike message

1:22:38.653,1:22:45.413
to a group of people that the Obama administration sees as politically threatening,

1:22:47.341,1:22:53.867
and that is, essentially, the hacker, the information, and the democracy activist community,

1:22:53.867,1:22:59.465
and the message that the Obama administration wanted to send to that particular community was,

1:22:59.465,1:23:04.415
in my estimation, "We know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment,

1:23:04.415,1:23:08.517
and so we are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz

1:23:08.517,1:23:13.418
to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."

1:23:13.583,1:23:17.260
And the government said, "Oh, the legal opinions we're using

1:23:17.260,1:23:20.376
to legalize the spying program are also classified,

1:23:20.376,1:23:23.641
so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you."

1:23:23.641,1:23:26.461
You know, every time they can say, "Oh, this is another instance of cyberwar.

1:23:26.465,1:23:29.900
The cybercriminals are attacking us again. We're all in danger. We're all under threat."

1:23:29.900,1:23:33.737
They use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws.

1:23:35.203,1:23:40.388
[Interviewer] And so just to follow--personally, how do you feel the fight is going?

1:23:40.947,1:23:41.984
It's up to you!

1:23:41.984,1:23:44.554
-I know. It's just that we gotta, you know...

1:23:47.360,1:23:52.616
You know, there's sort of these two polarizing perspectives, right,

1:23:52.616,1:23:57.122
everything is great, the internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everything's going to be fantastic

1:23:57.122,1:23:58.513
or everything is terrible,

1:23:58.513,1:24:01.472
the internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying,

1:24:01.472,1:24:03.681
and controlling what we say.

1:24:03.681,1:24:05.818
And the thing is, both are true, right?

1:24:05.818,1:24:09.796
The internet has done both, and both are kind of amazing and astonishing

1:24:09.796,1:24:12.603
and which one will win out in the long run is up to us.

1:24:12.603,1:24:17.314
It doesn't make sense to say, "Oh, one is doing better than the other." You know, they're both true.

1:24:17.321,1:24:21.153
And it's up to us which ones we emphasize and which ones we take advantage of

1:24:21.153,1:24:23.600
because they're both there, and they're both always going to be there.

1:24:28.950,1:24:35.010
On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Swartz,

1:24:35.010,1:24:40.170
adding additional counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer, and computer fraud.

1:24:40.465,1:24:45.592
Now, instead of four felony counts, Swartz was facing thirteen.

1:24:45.592,1:24:48.563
The prosecution's leverage had dramatically increased,

1:24:48.563,1:24:52.134
as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines.

1:24:52.134,1:24:55.694
They filed a separate indictment to add more charges,

1:24:55.694,1:25:01.876
and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes,

1:25:01.876,1:25:06.010
and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law.

1:25:06.861,1:25:10.656
That theory, and much of the prosecution's case against Swartz

1:25:10.656,1:25:13.952
involved a law created originally in 1986.

1:25:13.952,1:25:16.663
It is called the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".

1:25:16.666,1:25:17.960
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

1:25:17.960,1:25:21.888
was inspired by the movie "War Games" with Matthew Broderick--great movie.

1:25:21.888,1:25:23.354
[Broderick] I have you now.

1:25:23.354,1:25:27.743
In this movie, a kid gets the ability, through the magic of computer networks

1:25:27.743,1:25:30.131
to launch a nuclear attack.

1:25:30.131,1:25:33.501
[missiles firing up]

1:25:33.501,1:25:37.674
You know, that's not actually possible, and it certainly wasn't possible in the '80s

1:25:37.674,1:25:41.375
but apparently this movie scared Congress enough to

1:25:41.375,1:25:44.592
pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1:25:44.592,1:25:48.871
This is a law that's just behind the times, for example, it penalizes

1:25:48.871,1:25:54.105
a terms of service kind of arrangement. You can have something like

1:25:54.105,1:26:01.431
eHarmony or Match.com, and somebody sort of inflates their own personal characteristics,

1:26:01.431,1:26:05.705
and all of a sudden, depending on the jurisdiction and the prosecutors,

1:26:05.705,1:26:07.958
they could be in a whole host of troubles.

1:26:07.962,1:26:10.144
We all know what "Terms of Use" are.

1:26:10.144,1:26:14.188
Most people don't read them, but not abiding by their terms could mean

1:26:14.188,1:26:15.857
you are committing a felony.

1:26:15.857,1:26:18.542
The website Terms of Service often say things like:

1:26:18.542,1:26:22.439
"Be nice to each other", or "Don't do anything that's improper."

1:26:22.439,1:26:27.188
The idea that the Criminal Law has anything to say about these kinds of violations,

1:26:27.188,1:26:29.538
I think strikes most people as crazy.

1:26:29.998,1:26:32.964
The examples get even more "crazy":

1:26:32.964,1:26:39.484
Until it was changed in March of 2013, the Terms of Use on the website of Hearst's Seventeen magazine

1:26:39.484,1:26:42.777
said you had to be eighteen in order to read it.

1:26:42.777,1:26:46.674
I would say that the way the CFAA has been interpreted by the Justice Department,

1:26:46.674,1:26:48.999
we are probably all breaking the law.

1:26:49.199,1:26:54.540
Vague and prone to misuse, the CFAA has become a one-size-fits-all hammer

1:26:54.540,1:26:57.141
for a wide range of computer-related disputes.

1:26:57.141,1:27:00.156
Though not the only factor in his case,

1:27:00.156,1:27:04.935
eleven of the thirteen charges against Swartz involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1:27:07.248,1:27:11.815
The question "Why?" hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz.

1:27:11.815,1:27:16.155
Just what was motivating the government, and what would their case have been?

1:27:16.155,1:27:19.370
The Department of Justice declined requests for answers,

1:27:19.370,1:27:23.694
but Professor Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case.

1:27:23.694,1:27:28.059
So, I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons:

1:27:28.059,1:27:31.201
I was a federal prosecutor at the Justice Department for three years

1:27:31.201,1:27:34.191
before I started teaching. The government came forward

1:27:34.191,1:27:38.321
with an indictment based on what crimes they thought were committed,

1:27:38.321,1:27:42.055
just as a purely lawyer's matter, looking at the precedents, looking at the statute,

1:27:42.055,1:27:45.804
looking at the history, looking at the cases that are out there so far,

1:27:45.804,1:27:48.936
I think it was a fair indictment based on that.

1:27:48.936,1:27:51.396
You can debate whether they should have charged this case.

1:27:51.396,1:27:56.825
There's just a lot of disagreement. Some people are on the Open Access side, some people are not.

1:27:57.681,1:28:03.108
I think the government took Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" very seriously,

1:28:04.086,1:28:10.079
and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed, as a moral imperative,

1:28:10.079,1:28:15.202
to breaking the law, to overcome a law that Swartz saw as unjust,

1:28:15.202,1:28:20.940
and in a democracy, if you think a law is unjust, there are ways of changing that law.

1:28:20.940,1:28:24.675
There's going to Congress as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA,

1:28:24.675,1:28:28.441
or you can violate that law in a way to try to nullify that law,

1:28:28.444,1:28:34.178
and I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was committed,

1:28:34.195,1:28:39.831
not just to breaking the law, but to really making sure that law was nullified.

1:28:39.831,1:28:43.664
That everyone would have access to the database in a way that

1:28:43.664,1:28:47.328
you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the tube.

1:28:47.328,1:28:51.199
It would be done, and Swartz's side would win.

1:28:52.475,1:28:56.080
There's a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law,

1:28:56.080,1:29:00.141
and ultimately, that is a decision for the American people to make, working through Congress.

1:29:00.141,1:29:03.712
And then the second problem is, I think, we're still trying to figure out:

1:29:03.712,1:29:07.867
What's the line between less serious offences and more serious offences?

1:29:07.867,1:29:12.056
We're now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse,

1:29:12.056,1:29:16.754
and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are

1:29:16.754,1:29:19.337
because we're just working that out.

1:29:19.360,1:29:22.209
This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion.

1:29:22.209,1:29:25.878
The hammer that the Justice Department has to scare people with

1:29:25.878,1:29:28.514
just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,

1:29:28.514,1:29:32.960
and so most people just--you know, you can't roll the dice with your life like that.

1:29:32.960,1:29:35.431
Should we tap somebody's phone? Should we film them?

1:29:35.431,1:29:39.389
Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?

1:29:39.389,1:29:42.358
That's how federal agents and prosecutors think.

1:29:42.358,1:29:45.204
They build cases. They make cases.

1:29:46.918,1:29:51.316
Swartz was caught in the gears of a brutal criminal justice system that could not turn back,

1:29:51.626,1:29:57.121
a machine that has made America the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

1:29:57.121,1:30:02.732
We have, in this country, allowed ourselves to be captured by the politics of fear and anger,

1:30:02.732,1:30:08.436
and anything we're afraid of, like the future of the internet and access,

1:30:08.443,1:30:13.703
and anything we're angry about, instinctively creates a criminal justice intervention,

1:30:13.703,1:30:19.504
and we've used jail, prison, and punishment to resolve a whole host of problems

1:30:19.504,1:30:23.173
that, historically, were never seen as criminal justice problems.

1:30:23.173,1:30:28.422
The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute, which is part of what

1:30:28.422,1:30:33.023
has created this debate and controversy over online access to information on the internet,

1:30:33.023,1:30:35.458
is very consistent with what we've seen in other areas.

1:30:35.458,1:30:39.980
The one difference is that the people who are usually targeted and victimized

1:30:39.980,1:30:45.661
by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority.

1:30:47.597,1:30:50.900
Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.

1:30:50.900,1:30:53.543
He had basically stopped working on anything else,

1:30:53.548,1:30:57.006
and the case was, in fact, taking over sort of his whole life.

1:30:57.006,1:31:02.697
One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he was emotionally vulnerable,

1:31:02.697,1:31:06.893
and that that was something they really needed to keep in mind so that they knew that.

1:31:06.893,1:31:09.270
It was weighing on him very heavily.

1:31:10.060,1:31:15.584
He did not like having his actions and his movements restricted in any way,

1:31:15.584,1:31:20.902
and the threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot,

1:31:21.919,1:31:23.591
was terrifying to him.

1:31:23.591,1:31:27.180
Completely exhausted his financial resources,

1:31:27.180,1:31:32.318
and it cost us a lot of money also, and he raised a substantial amount of money,

1:31:32.318,1:31:36.181
so it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

1:31:36.205,1:31:38.341
[Interviewer] The legal defence?[br]- Yes.

1:31:38.341,1:31:40.855
-Was in millions?[br]- Yes.

1:31:41.299,1:31:43.942
I think he didn't want to be a burden to people.

1:31:43.942,1:31:47.516
I think that was a factor like, "I have my normal life,

1:31:47.516,1:31:49.492
and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with,

1:31:49.492,1:31:53.249
and I try to keep the two of them as separate as possible,

1:31:53.249,1:31:57.484
but they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty."

1:31:59.223,1:32:02.630
Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher:

1:32:02.630,1:32:04.756
Do you admit guilt and move on with your life,

1:32:04.756,1:32:07.458
or do you fight a broken system?

1:32:07.462,1:32:09.651
With his legal case, the answer was simple:

1:32:09.651,1:32:13.030
He rejects a final plea deal and a trial date is set.

1:32:13.030,1:32:16.981
Aaron was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something

1:32:16.981,1:32:21.639
that he didn't believe was fair, but I also think he was scared.

1:32:32.895,1:32:34.383
I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

1:32:34.383,1:32:38.537
I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse, and I would have given him a big hug,

1:32:38.537,1:32:44.344
and we would have walked across that little river in Boston, and gone and had a couple of beers.

1:32:45.752,1:32:49.734
I really thought that we were right. I thought that we were going to win the case.

1:32:49.734,1:32:51.495
I thought that we could win the case.

1:32:51.495,1:32:54.161
He didn't talk about it very much, but you could see

1:32:54.161,1:32:56.505
the enormous pain that he was going through.

1:32:56.505,1:33:01.420
[song]

1:33:01.420,1:33:05.130
No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings

1:33:05.130,1:33:10.834
or depressive episodes or anything that I would describe as "severe depression"

1:33:10.834,1:33:13.885
and it's possible, you know, he was depressed. People get depressed.

1:33:13.885,1:33:18.642
[music]

1:33:18.642,1:33:23.808
Very early in our relationship, three or four weeks in or something,

1:33:23.808,1:33:25.870
I remember him saying to me

1:33:27.380,1:33:30.647
that I was a lot stronger than he was.

1:33:30.647,1:33:33.480
You know, he was brittle in a lot of ways.

1:33:33.480,1:33:36.870
Things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

1:33:36.870,1:33:39.730
That was part of his brilliance, too.

1:33:40.966,1:33:47.329
I think he probably had something like clinical depression in his early twenties.

1:33:47.329,1:33:49.261
I don't think he did when I was with him.

1:33:49.261,1:33:55.245
He wasn't a "joyful" person, but that's different from being depressed.

1:33:56.503,1:34:01.242
He was just under such enormous pressure for two years straight.

1:34:01.242,1:34:03.955
He just didn't want to do it anymore.

1:34:03.955,1:34:07.364
He was just--I just think it was too much.

1:34:07.364,1:34:14.401
[song]

1:34:14.401,1:34:17.420
I got a phone call late at night.

1:34:17.420,1:34:23.091
I could tell something was wrong, and then I called, and I realized what had happened.

1:34:24.001,1:34:29.057
A co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "Reddit" has been found dead.

1:34:29.057,1:34:31.518
Police say twenty-six-year-old Aaron Swartz

1:34:31.518,1:34:33.995
killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.

1:34:37.259,1:34:46.513
I just thought, we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation.

1:34:46.513,1:34:49.856
I was like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.

1:34:56.872,1:34:59.688
It was one of the hardest nights of my life.

1:35:00.008,1:35:04.883
I just kept screaming, "I can't hear you! What did you say? I can't hear you!"

1:35:07.693,1:35:09.240
I can't. That's it.

1:35:09.240,1:35:11.098
[Interviewer] Okay.

1:35:19.738,1:35:22.543
Yeah, none of it made any sense,

1:35:22.543,1:35:24.540
and really still doesn't.

1:35:25.010,1:35:27.881
I was so frustrated, angry.

1:35:33.082,1:35:36.478
[exhales]

1:35:38.217,1:35:41.576
You know, I tried to explain it to my kids.

1:35:43.315,1:35:47.198
My three-year-old told me that the doctors would fix him.

1:35:52.226,1:35:56.824
I've known lots of people that have died, but I've never lost anybody like this,

1:35:56.824,1:36:04.471
because everybody feels, and I do too, there is so much we could have--more to do like...

1:36:04.932,1:36:11.306
I just didn't know he was there. I didn't know this was what he was suffering and...

1:36:11.316,1:36:12.675
He was part of me.

1:36:16.585,1:36:20.955
And I just wanted it to not be real, and then...

1:36:24.305,1:36:29.137
and then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date:

1:36:33.114,1:36:35.841
"to 2013".

1:36:44.918,1:37:10.096
[quote on screen]

1:37:14.986,1:37:19.458
My first thought was: what if nobody even notices?

1:37:19.458,1:37:23.980
You know, because it wasn't clear to me how salient he was.

1:37:23.980,1:37:30.036
I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw.

1:37:30.036,1:37:31.937
The Net just lit up.

1:37:31.937,1:37:37.566
Everyone was trying to explain it in their own way, but I've never seen

1:37:37.566,1:37:39.882
people grieve on Twitter before.

1:37:39.882,1:37:42.218
People were visibly grieving online.

1:37:45.738,1:37:49.307
He was the internet's own boy,

1:37:49.307,1:37:52.886
and the old world killed him.

1:37:55.164,1:37:59.704
We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched.

1:38:01.734,1:38:06.124
Architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the president, regularly.

1:38:06.124,1:38:14.149
In the middle of that time, the idea that this is what the government had to prosecute,

1:38:14.149,1:38:17.433
It just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.

1:38:17.433,1:38:22.978
The question is: Can we do something, given what's happened,

1:38:22.978,1:38:26.197
to make the world a better place,

1:38:26.197,1:38:28.054
and how can we further that legacy?

1:38:28.054,1:38:30.075
That's the only question one could ask.

1:38:32.981,1:38:37.324
All over the world there are starting to be hack-a-thons, gatherings,

1:38:37.324,1:38:43.454
Aaron Swartz has, in some sense, brought the best out of us, in trying to say:

1:38:43.454,1:38:45.712
How do we fix this?

1:38:47.102,1:38:52.287
He was, in my humble opinion, one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries

1:38:52.287,1:38:55.365
that this country has produced.

1:38:55.365,1:38:58.529
I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious,

1:38:58.529,1:39:05.850
but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with.

1:39:06.040,1:39:12.294
When we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,

1:39:12.294,1:39:17.044
we've broken the rule of law--we've desecrated the temple of justice.

1:39:17.044,1:39:20.056
Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

1:39:20.056,1:39:21.835
[applause]

1:39:21.835,1:39:25.916
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,

1:39:25.916,1:39:30.046
it comes through continuous struggle.

1:39:30.046,1:39:32.668
Aaron really could do magic,

1:39:32.668,1:39:36.310
and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death.

1:39:36.310,1:39:40.772
He believed that he could change the world, and he was right.

1:39:40.772,1:39:44.508
Out of the last week, and out of today, phoenixes are already rising.

1:39:44.508,1:39:45.215
[applause]

1:39:47.045,1:39:51.639
Since Swartz's death, Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden

1:39:51.639,1:39:55.316
have introduced legislation that would reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act--

1:39:55.316,1:40:00.401
the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Swartz.

1:40:00.401,1:40:03.210
It's called "Aaron's Law".

1:40:03.210,1:40:07.401
Aaron believed that you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time:

1:40:07.401,1:40:10.803
What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now?

1:40:10.803,1:40:12.678
And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?

1:40:12.678,1:40:15.488
[Protesters] This is what democracy looks like!

1:40:15.488,1:40:18.258
[crowd chants] We are the people too!

1:40:18.258,1:40:20.964
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

1:40:20.964,1:40:22.328
Stand up, fight back!

1:40:22.328,1:40:25.249
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

1:40:25.249,1:40:29.890
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Carmen Ortiz has got to go!

1:40:33.701,1:40:37.148
I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.

1:40:37.148,1:40:39.697
But we can change the future and we must.

1:40:39.697,1:40:43.387
We must do so for Aaron, we must do so for ourselves.

1:40:43.387,1:40:48.799
We must do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place,

1:40:48.799,1:40:53.781
a place where justice works, and access to knowledge becomes a human right. [applause]

1:40:53.781,1:41:02.038
So there was a kid, back in February, from Baltimore, fourteen years old,

1:41:02.038,1:41:08.530
who had access to JSTOR, and he'd been spelunking through JSTOR after reading something,

1:41:08.530,1:41:14.869
and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer,

1:41:14.869,1:41:19.167
and pancreatic cancer kills the shit out of you because we detect it way too late

1:41:19.167,1:41:23.014
by the time we detect it, it's already too late to do anything about it,

1:41:23.014,1:41:28.269
and he sent emails off to the entire oncology department at Johns Hopkins,

1:41:28.269,1:41:31.203
you know hundreds of them, and every--[br]- [Interviewer] Did you say fourteen years old?

1:41:31.203,1:41:35.218
- Fourteen-year-old kid, yeah, and most of them ignored it but one of them sent him an email back,

1:41:35.218,1:41:38.040
and said this is not an entirely stupid idea, why don't you come on over?

1:41:38.040,1:41:43.307
This kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher, and in February I heard him on the news

1:41:43.307,1:41:47.975
just a couple of weeks after Aaron died, when Aaron was in the news a lot..

1:41:51.080,1:41:53.542
Sorry...

1:41:53.542,1:41:59.701
and he said the reason he was on the news was 'cause they'd done it. They were shipping

1:41:59.701,1:42:03.423
an early test for pancreatic cancer that was going to save lives,

1:42:03.423,1:42:10.259
and he said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important."

1:42:10.259,1:42:15.481
Because you never know, right? This truth of the universe is not only something

1:42:15.481,1:42:19.680
that policymakers use to figure out, you know, what the speed limit should be.

1:42:19.680,1:42:26.241
It's where the thing that's gonna keep your kid from dying of pancreatic cancer comes from,

1:42:26.241,1:42:32.247
and without access, the person who might come up with the thing that's got your number on it,

1:42:32.247,1:42:34.925
may never find that answer.

1:42:35.580,1:42:45.418
He slept so well, he didn't fall out of the tree, not even when he dreamed he was back on the spacecraft.

1:42:48.395,1:42:51.403
[Aaron's dad] Very good, Aaron. Very good. Yay, Aaron!

1:42:51.403,1:42:53.603
Okay, now it's song time.

1:42:57.165,1:43:12.185
♪ ♪ ♪

1:43:25.738,1:43:32.230
[credits]

1:44:43.619,1:44:44.876
[the end]