[Brewster Kahle] Welcome. And welcome to the celebration of the life and work of Aaron
Swartz, a man who was a spark for many of us. I would like to thank the staff of the
Internet Archive, Lisa Ryan, the organizer, Shannon Lee, Steve Walling, Karl Malamud and
Cindy Cohn for helping pull this together.
[applause]
[Brewster] As you probably know, there are memorials going on all over the world. Hackathons
going on. There's an AaronSw IRC Chat for those that are following the hackathons. And
these proceedings are in the public domain. This isn't the type of event we imagined for
this space, but I can think of no better.
To the organizer and coordinated for this evening is Shannon Lee, and he will start
our program. Thank you very much.
[Shannon Lee] Thank you all for being here. Aaron Swartz has left behind a challenging
legacy. Tonight, we're going to talk about Aaron and what he left behind, and what we
can do to carry it forward. We're going to have an array of speakers, beginning with
Danny O'Brien and ending with Karl Malamud, and after that we'll have an opportunity to
share right here. I will see you at the end of the speakers.
[Danny O'Brien] So I first met Aaron in 2001, when Aaron was, I guess, 14, and was already
a leading light working with Tim Berners-Lee on the project that we know as the Semantic
Web, an incredibly ambitious idea to encode, in machine-readable form, all of the world's
knowledge.
And of course being a journalist at the time, I seized on this opportunity to sneak an explanation
of the Semantic Web past my editor. It's almost impossible to get any editor to understand
the Semantic Web. But the idea of a 14-year-old boy helping Tim Berners-Lee will always pass
muster, even if they don't know who Tim Berners-Lee is.
The editor, of course, is in charge of titling the article, and with that supreme lack of
understand, he actually titled it, "A Teenager in a Million," which of course was to miss
the point entirely. The point was that Aaron's age wasn't a particularly unique thing and
Aaron himself wasn't the exceptional part of this.
The exceptional part of this was an institution that allowed someone like Aaron to walk in
through its door and, before anyone had noticed where he came from or what age he was or what
his background was, they allowed him to start contributing good work and learning from his
peers.
An institution is not truly open until somebody you could never even imagine exists walks
through the door. When Tim Berners-Lee describes these moments at Aaron's funeral a week ago,
you could see, in a way that only Tim Berners-Lee can convey, the sort of glee he had that at
last the system was working. These open mailing lists, this open discussion, this exchange
of information was bringing new people into building the web.
He told me then, "I was worried about revealing my age and I did my best to keep it a secret.
Now, I let my words speak for themselves," and since then, so many words. Some written
in machine-readable form in Python, in computers. Some written in brimstone and sulfur for Congress-readable
forms and all of it in plain text. All of it in plain language for everyone to read.
And if he could not read enough words himself, his programs read and scraped and passed the
rest. Aaron loved beautiful code. I think the only time I really ever pained him was
when I'd said some program that he'd written and I'd looked at was unreadable. It turned
out that it wasn't actually his code at all. He'd written some code that had, in turn,
written that code.
[laughter]
And yet I think it still hurt, that somehow his own child had not inherited his own delicate
sensitivities.
Words fail me now, even though I have them written down here. I mean, try as hard as
Aaron did, I don't think you could ever encode all of his experience in words, and I don't
think that all of the relationships that he built between so many different peers and
so many new people coming in could be ever expressed in any number of RDF triplets.
I mean I can sort of try and convey the look Aaron's face when he played with my daughter
Erin, nine. There were some pictures downstairs that you may have saw him. But you can't really
convey that childish glee that most of us lose long before we begin we begin work on
the semantic web at least.
And I can't really describe to you the pain and frustration when Aaron so effectively
demolished a defense I had of John Searle's Chinese room argument, that I actually threw
down my knife and fork and stormed out of my own Christmas dinner.
[laughter]
Leaving, of course, the Turkey for Aaron to fail to eat.
[laughter]
There was always a sort of pleasure and ease in forgiving Aaron for those sort of arguments.
And also, to watch him so easily forgive the rest of us. And I don't think any archive
can hold those moments. But if I can share with you some code, if I can't share with
you the code that made up Aaron, I can, I hope, share with you the code that Aaron believed
could make more Aarons.
Aaron became Aaron because of his unfettered access to information and the knowledge and
sharing of his peers. He was very lucky in that respect. He had an incredibly loving
family who supported him who would pay for him to fly out to meetings. He had a computer.
He had all the privileges and benefits that being a young man in the United States of
America in the end of the 20th century have.
But he also had something new. He had a new advantage, which was that the gates of the
construction of this technology that was beginning to share information, was beginning to open
up, and he was one of the first, yes the youngest, but one of the first to take advantage of
that and use his curiosity and his drive, even at that age, to nip into there and beginning
sharing almost immediately with his peers.
And if anything bound together all of Aaron's crusades, it was his belief that he was not
alone in this. That he was not exceptional, and he believed he was not unique, and that
there were more than him out there with his curiosity and talent.
People say, when we talked about Aaron's work of taking the content of academic papers or
the content of the US legal system and opening it up for anyone to use and see and crunch
and peruse. You know, who really is this for?
Who wants to know about the legal system, can't in some way ask a friend or a contact
to get access to PACER? Who really has a craving for academic knowledge can't find somebody
and sneak their way in to MIT or another institution and just get that information, or work to
access it?
And those people forget, they forget that if Aaron was a teenager in a million, that
soon, very soon, as we continue the great work that we're indulged in here, that there
will be six billion people that we will connect to the world information networks. And out
of those six billion people there will 1.2 billion teenagers.
And if my editors' statistics are correct-and he never understood statistics either, then
there will be 1,200 Aarons out there, there are 1,200 Aarons out there right now who are
as smart and engaged and as curious and as driver as Aaron was. But they simply don't
have access to that information. There is no closed archives, no carefully guarded Ivory
Tower, that can seat billions. But the open society, the open and world wide web, the
free culture that Aaron worked for, is for all of those people.
And if give them what they need, if we give them the knowledge to feed their curiosity
and the care we must never forget they, that amazing sort of resource of future Aarons
from Kabera, from Guangzhou or Asan. All of those people will come, and they will build
the kind of things that Aaron was dreaming of.
And so even though we've lost one Aaron, we do have a potential, by continuing his work,
to find so many more. Aaron told me back in 2001 that one of the things that the web teaches
us is that everything is connected, hyperlinks, and that we should all work together, standards.
Too often school teaches us that everything is separate, and that we should all work alone.
I think one of the many, many tragedies of the situation that we find ourselves in now
is that, at least in some moment of Aaron's life, his belief that he was not alone failed
him, and for a few moments he believed himself to be alone.
And I'm sure, out there, there are many, many 14-year-old children who feel the same way.
That they have that binding curiosity, that fascination and that urge to change the world.
And that worry for a moment that it's just them. And there are no tools and no capabilities
and no friends to help them continue in that path.
I don't think it's ever too soon to begin working with the rest of the world, and I
think we all need to stay together, and never, ever again leave our friends too alone. A
boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
[applause]
[silence]
[Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman] The night before Aaron died, he and I shared a grilled cheese
sandwich. This was one of his favorite foods. As probably many of you know, there weren't
many of those favorite foods. It was a really good grilled cheese sandwich. He was really
happy about it.
A week before he died, we woke up one morning, and he said, "We really need to talk about
Bayesian statistics." I said, "Right now? It's Sunday morning. It's like 7: 00 AM. Can
it wait?" He said, "No, it's really important." We spent the next couple of hours working
through a naughty Bayesian statistics he'd already asked the Internet with no useful
responses.
I have the notes. We ended up with a naughty double integral that neither of us could solve,
but if anybody here wants to help me with the solution, let me know.
He was really excited the last couple of months. He was working on a drug policy research with
a friend of his, Matt Stoller, for GiveWell, and he would read these articles, all the
academic literature, talk to the experts.
He got really into this one particular study about an intervention that had been tried
in Hawaii for alcoholism. Control tests indicated that it got 90 percent of alcoholics dry in
the first month, and he was so bubbling over with excitement about all of it.
We went to Burlington, Vermont over New Years. He got the flu, but he came out and played
Mafia one evening with the friends that we rented a house with. I was really surprised,
because he didn't like playing games at all, but Ada, Danny's daughter, was there with
us, and he really wanted to see what would happen if Ada was the Mafia. [laughs] Unfortunately,
nobody selected Ada as the Mafia, which Ada was really annoyed about. [laughs]
One of the things that I loved about Aaron was the sheer number, and variety, and multitude
of wonderful, fascinating people who animated his life. I had the great privilege of sharing
that life with him for the last 20 months, but I know that I only met a small fraction
of the people whose lives he touched.
That's why I came out here today, because I know that many of you were important to
him, and I wanted to meet you, and I want you the stories like the stories I just told,
because I think it's really important that his friends, his family, his colleagues, his
admirers know that he had a lot to live for, and that he had a lot of happy moments in
those last few weeks and months.
I'm also here with another message. Aaron's death should radicalize us. The trial and
the case hung over our entire relationship. We started dating a few weeks before he was
indicted, a couple of months after he had been arrested.
I met his parents for the first time at 12: 30 AM the night before the indictment, and
spent five hours with him in the courthouse the next day. They didn't know I existed before
that, so that was an interesting first meeting. [laughs] He hadn't told me what was going
on when we first started dating.
All I knew was that there was something bad happening in his life, and that I was a good
distraction from it. He called it the "bad thing," and I had wild speculation about what
it might be. My leading candidate theory at one point was that he was having an affair
with Elizabeth Warren and was going to ruin her career.
[laughter]
He called me one night when I was at Frisbee practice in DC, and he was in Boston. He said,
"The bad thing might be in the news tomorrow. Do you want to hear what it is from me, or
do you want to read about it in the news?" I said, "I want to hear from you."
He said, "Well, I've been arrested for downloading too many academic journal articles, and they're
trying to make an example out of me," and I said, "Well, that doesn't actually sound
like a very big deal." [laughs] He paused for a second and he said, "Yeah, I guess it's
not like anybody has cancer." In the end, it kind of was like that.
The only time I was ever really worried about him, before the last week, was when he was
trying to decide whether to accept the plea bargain. The whole thing was so hard and so
stressful, and he felt he carried so much of the weight of it on his own. He didn't
want to involve any of his friends. He wanted to protect people, but he wasn't very good
at protecting himself.
I went to Boston with him last month in December for a hearing, and the judge granted another
evidentiary hearing about whether evidence should be admitted, and the trial was delayed
for another couple of months.
He came out of the courtroom, and I tried to give him a hug, and he pushed me away.
He said, "Not in front of Heymann. Not in front of Steve Heymann, the prosecutor." He
said, "I don't want to show him that. I don't want to show him any vulnerability."
I think Aaron made the wrong choice two weeks ago. I think the odds were decent at the trial,
and I think, even if he hadn't won, that life still was worth living, but I think he woke
up two years after this ordeal started, and I think he just couldn't face another day
of the stress, the uncertainty, the lack of control over his own destiny.
Aaron's death should radicalize us, and I mean that specifically about us, about you,
if you're here in this room or if you're watching this online. Aaron died because of deep injustice
in this world. Aaron loved to talk about the "5 Whys" of the Toyota management system,
so I'm going to ask why. Why did Aaron die?
Aaron died in part because we live in a system where the constitutional rights we've all
come to believe in, through civic classes and through watching "Law & Order," don't
actually apply in the real world. There's no right to a speedy trial. It had been two
years since Aaron was arrested. We still didn't have all the evidence that the government...the
government still hadn't turned over all of the evidence to us, that they were constitutionally
required to do so.
Why does that happen? In part, it's because the system is so clogged up with cases, and
has so few human resources, it takes years for practically anybody who actually wants
to go to trial to find out whether they're guilty from a jury of their peers.
It takes them years because the system is so clogged up, and so under-resourced, with
drug cases and with the senseless overcrowding of our criminal justice system. Prosecutors
aren't used to going to trial. Last year, only three percent of all federal charges
were taken to trial. Most of the rest were resolved in plea bargaining.
Plea bargaining processes give prosecutors enormous amounts of power. Imagine being totally
innocent of any crime and not having the resources that Aaron had at his disposal, and the networks,
and the support. Many people feel they have no choice but to accept a plea bargain. They
can't afford lawyers for two years.
You could say, in some sense, that Aaron's death was caused by the war on drugs. He wasn't
a victim directly, but he was a casualty at that war, that's aimed, actually, at quite
different people from Aaron.
Aaron's death should radicalize us. He died because of a prosecutor and a US attorney
who had immense individual power over his life, and were more interested in making a
high-profile example out of Aaron than in justice or in mercy.
Why did they do it? In the case of the prosecutor, Steve Heymann, the best theory I can offer
is that he's simply a vindictive old man who really doesn't like young, upstart whippersnappers,
like Aaron, who are trying to save the world. Heymann's the kind of guy who wants to claim
a notch on his belt and high-five other prosecutors at lunch, but we have to follow the "Whys."
Why does this man have the power to ruin the life of someone like Aaron? We can trace the
problem to tough-on-crime initiatives that have systematically transferred power from
the hands of judges to prosecutors.
We can trace it to punitive sentencing guidelines and ambiguous overreaching laws, like the
CFAA, that give prosecutors the power to charge someone with decades in prison for a victimless
crime. In the case of Carmen Ortiz, the US attorney who's Heymann's boss, Aaron's case
was a stepping stone to higher political ambitions.
Ortiz wanted to be a judge, or a governor, or a senator someday. She probably still wants
to be. Unfortunately, in our society, one of the well-trodden paths to elected office
is through the prosecutor's office.
That means that from mayors' offices to congress, leaders are disproportionately people who've
made their name in being tough on crime, the people who've spent the bulk of their career
trying to lock people up. They're people whose job it is to be punitive and not just or merciful.
That's how we end up with these kinds of laws to begin with.
They're people who embody a legal system that locks up more than 25 percent of the prisoners
in the world, and we have only three percent of the world's population. Why do we vote
for these people? Why do we provide them with the incentives we do? Why do we, as a country,
applaud and reward them, and build structures around them, as they lock up more than one-third
of the black men in our country?
Aaron's death should radicalize us because he's probably the first person that most people
in this room have ever met who got swept up by this system, but there are literally millions
of others whose lives are destroyed in this country, and Aaron would've been the last
person who would want us to fetishize his experiences or to treat him as exceptional.
In response to Aaron's death, I and his family are calling for five things. First, Steve
Heymann and Carmen Ortiz must be held accountable.
[applause]
Second, MIT has lost its way, and it must find it again. MIT could've saved Aaron with
a single public statement, and it refused.
[applause]
Third, all academic research from all time should be made openly accessible to anyone
with an Internet connection.
[applause]
Fourth, we have to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prevent prosecutors from
these kinds of overreaches.
[applause]
Fifth, we have to reform a criminal justice system where we incarcerate millions of people,
and prosecutors through the book at someone like Aaron, but not a single banker has gone
to prison since the financial crisis.
[applause]
Aaron's death should radicalize us, but Aaron's life should also radicalize us in a very different
way. One of Aaron's favorite shows was "Louie." There's an episode, and I'm going to do my
best Louie impression, which probably isn't very good, the episode where Louie gives a
little stand-up routine.
"I drive an Infiniti. That's really evil. There are people who just starved to death.
That's all they ever did. There are people who are born and go, 'I'm hungry.' Then they
die, and that's all they ever got to do. Meanwhile, I'm driving in my car having a great time,
and I sleep like a baby."
"It's totally my fault, because I could trade my Infiniti in for any other car, and I'd
get back like $20,000, and I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that
money, and every day, I don't do it. Every day, I make them die with my car."
Aaron loved that routine, and he realized something when we watched it together. He
realized that Louie copied this bit right out of Peter Singer. This is a Peter Singer
essay as a comedy routine. Peter Singer was one of the Aaron's favorite philosophers,
and he's a really uncomfortable philosopher. A lot of people don't like thinking about
Peter Singer. Here's why.
Let's say you knew you had the power to change a law that would save innocent people's lives,
maybe stopping a carcinogen from polluting ground water near a town. Let's say you knew
it would save 10 people's lives, and you chose to do something else instead, something that
didn't have much bearing or impact on the world. Are you culpable? Peter Singer would
say yes.
Most of us studiously avoid answering that question, because the truth is, we're faced
with questions like, "Should we trade in our Infiniti?" or, "Should we work on the carcinogen?"
every day. It's really hard to live your life thinking about that, but Aaron's life should
radicalize us.
Aaron lived a Singerian life more than anyone else I've ever met. Aaron had money, we all
know he could've had a lot more if he had tried, but he lived out of backpacks and he
stayed on people's couches.
Sometimes, I'll admit, it went a little too far, like the time we'd been dating for a
few months, and we were meeting up in Boston, and it was his responsibility to find us a
place to stay. He thought that an air mattress on his brother Noah's bathroom floor was perfectly
sufficient, [laughs] but I respected him for it.
He didn't buy an Infiniti. He didn't get a nice apartment. When he died, he left his
estate primarily to GiveWell, probably the most Singerian of all charities, but living
a life of personal austerity and charity isn't enough. Aaron felt responsible not just for
the direct costs of his lifestyle, but for the opportunity costs. He felt responsible
for the carcinogens he wasn't stopping.
Here in Silicon Valley, the idea of changing the world is no mirage. You see examples all
around you, every day, of people who changed the world, and Aaron was one of those people,
but the question is, how are they changing the world?
Facebook has changed the world, sure, but is the world better off because of Facebook?
Even more importantly, if you're deciding whether to take a job at Facebook, is that
the place in the world where you can do the most good?
Aaron wanted to do the most good. He wanted to apply the Lean Startup framework to impact.
He was learning and iterating. He thought we all needed to think both bigger and smaller.
He said to a few of my friends once, "The revolution will be A/B tested."
[laughter]
That's what he was trying to do. I'm here to ask the hard questions today. If you're
not already working to change the criminal justice system in the US, what are you working
on? Is it more important than that? It might be. There are more important things. There
are places where you can have more impact, but there are so many ways, so many things,
that need to be changed about this world. Which one of them are you working on?
Aaron's death should radicalize us, and his life should radicalize us. The fact is, we
live in a world in which very few people we know pay the ultimate price for their political
beliefs. We live in a world in which very few people we know even suffer serious life-altering
consequences for their political beliefs, but we live in a runaway global political
economy that's taking people's lives every day.
Aaron wasn't trying to become a martyr when he downloaded those JSTOR articles, but he
was taking a risk on behalf of the billions of people around the world who grew up without
his privilege. More of us need to do that.
There are so many ways to have impact, so many ways to help people. Aaron had an exchange
with David Segal, who runs Demand Progress, the group that he founded, that many of you
know from the SOPA fight.
Aaron loved recounting this conversation. David called him one night, and said to Aaron,
"Remember that year when we defeated SOPA, got indefinite detention ruled unconstitutional,
and got both political parties to incorporate Internet freedom into their platforms at the
conventions?" That was Aaron, David Segal, and a couple other people. They did all that
in one year.
Everybody here is capable of that kind of change. There are so many places in our world
where that kind of change can happen, just from having somebody there, somebody paying
attention, somebody pushing.
If you're a programmer or technologist, like many of you in the audience today, you have
special powers and special responsibilities. I went to a talk once that Aaron gave, where
he spoke to maybe a couple dozen people, like the people in this room, to programmers who
he was trying to convince to work in politics. He told them, "You can do magic."
Aaron really could do magic, and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end
with his death. I hope you'll join me.
[applause]
[Lisa Rein] I first met Aaron online on various W3C mailing lists for XML and RDF. He kind
of came out of nowhere at the end of 2001, as far as I could tell. Aaron's comments were
thoughtful and informative, and it became clear pretty quickly that he had a better
understanding of markup languages and data modeling than a lot of others on the list,
even some of the veterans.
Aaron had a talent for simplifying things and getting to the heart of everyone's concerns.
He was also rather politically disarming because he was, well, a kid, a kid with no ulterior
motives except wanting to be included and taken seriously, as seriously as others.
In April 2002, during the very early stages of the Creative Commons, I let Aaron know
that we were having a technical meeting at Harvard that I wanted him to attend. That
was it. I really wanted to include him in the whole project almost as equally as I was
involved in the project. I told him this was happening for real, and with him included.
It was then that he let me know that he was only 14 years old, and that I needed to give
his mother a call so he could figure things out.
[laughter]
When I first insisted that Aaron attend this meeting, everybody, even Lawrence Lessig,
at first thought that was really weird. "Do you need Aaron to do your job?" was a pretty
popular question, and the answer was clearly, "Yes." I needed Aaron to make sure that our
licensing markup was the absolute best that it could be.
People were usually skeptical about Aaron and his abilities when they first found out
he was only 14. But once they spoke to him for even a little while, he would always win
them over. I knew if Lessig met him in person that that would be that, and it was. Aaron
was growing up to become quite the technological statesman.
So my strategy, in the spring of 2002, was to introduce Aaron to as many people as I
could, and to introduce him to the right people. This included people from the EFF and the
Internet Archive, mainly, and also included going to cool events like South By Southwest.
In 2003, when he tried to get his own room in the cool hotel, right across from the venue,
but ended up getting a room in the janky hotel down the road with me, where I could be his
official adult supervision.
[laughter]
In October 2002, Aaron flew out to Washington, DC, to camp out in front of the Supreme Court
with me and about eight other people. This was the night before Lawrence Lessig's oral
argument in Eldred v. Ashcroft. This is the Eldred shirt from that. We were rather surprised
that Aaron convinced his mother to let him go. But there he was, staying in the same
bed and breakfast where I was staying.
I told them he was sort of like my little brother, and that wasn't very far from the
truth. He was a little brother that I ended up [crying] looking up to. EFF staff technologist
Seth Schoen took over as Aaron's chaperone pretty quickly during that trip to Washington,
DC.
There was a moment at about one AM when Aaron asked if he could walk around the block with
Seth. I thought they were kidding at first. Were they serious? Were they crazy? But then
I realized it was one of those right-of-passage moments. Plus I realized he wouldn't be by
himself, he was with Seth.
I think at that moment I passed on the torch to Seth as Aaron's west coast guardian. But
we always stayed in touch. His birthday was two days before mine, and he would remember
my birthday almost every year, and would send me a nice little email wishing me a good next
year. Thank you.
[Seth Schoen] As Lisa was just recounting, I met Aaron at the Supreme Court in October
of 2002, and we had gone to hear the oral argument in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Most of us
non-lawyers had to spend the night sleeping in the street in line in front of the court
in order to get a ticket.
The line for the oral argument starts the night before. But even though Aaron was a
teenager, he was Larry Lessig's personal guest at the argument. So since he had a ticket,
he had the luxury of spending the night in a hotel, which his parents apparently really
appreciated.
But Aaron decided to spend most of the night and most of the morning before the argument
hanging out with us at the encampment in front of the court. In part to show solidarity with
the people who hadn't received a ticket, and in part for the thrill of meeting actual,
grown-up copyright activists.
[laughter]
Aaron was truly star struck to meet people he thought of as legendary copyright reform
activists. But within a decade, Aaron himself would be among the most effective grassroots
copyright activists in the whole world.
At that moment he was the little kid markup and metadata expert that Larry Lessig admired
enough to give him a front row Supreme Court seat. And Aaron spent the evening with us
as we ordered pizza, which he could actually eat, for delivery to the sidewalk outside
the Supreme Court, which was apparently not a very unusual request for pizzerias in DC.
[laughter]
And all of us gossiped about copyright law for a couple of hours. I saw Aaron again in
December. My friends Leonard and Sumana found a picture, he's visiting my house, and I come,
like some people here, from a book family and I have a lot of books and we spent about
three hours with Leonard and Sumana and Aaron and I just sitting on my bed sort of manually
following hyperlinks between books.
[laughter]
"Oh, that book! Oh, well that's a reference to that book." Aaron was there because Larry
Lessig was unveiling his Creative Commons project in San Francisco. And Lessig had invited
Aaron, clad in a T-shirt, probably the youngest person in the entire hall, up on stage to
talk about metadata. It was very awkward. Aaron was trying to describe why it was useful
to be able to represent bibliographic information in a machine-readable format.
And in fact Aaron was always trying to describe why it was useful to be able to represent
bibliographic information in a machine-readable format.
[laughter]
The audience had had a few drinks, I think, and wasn't as focused as it might have been,
and didn't really care to envision this beautiful feature in which search engines would make
it easy for everyone to find works they could legally reuse and build upon. Which they now
can, thanks to Aaron's work.
But the audience didn't seem to get it. Lessig was very gracious and he basically said to
the crowd, "See, our project is going to succeed and it's going to succeed because we have
this genius creating our infrastructure." Aaron reminded me how frustrating it is to
be curious about things that other people don't understand. Or that other people regard
as trivial or bizarre.
He wrote a blog post about a theory that one's degree of nearsightedness is affected by blood
oxygen levels, and that it might be possible to use eye exercise to systematically reduce
nearsightedness.
"Aaron," he wrote, "was already experimenting on himself to see if it would work, and he
said he wished he could meet a girl who wouldn't laugh at this project." Later, Aaron met Seth
Roberts, a researcher who advocates self-experimentation as a way of generating potentially-useful
wild ideas about health.
Roberts and Aaron got along extremely well. I think that Roberts, like many other people,
felt that Aaron naturally generated potentially useful wild ideas about absolutely everything.
I visited Aaron in his dorm at Stanford a few years later. I was thrilled that he had
the opportunity to study at such a great university.
But Aaron was alienated from Stanford. He had few friends, and the students around him
weren't curious about the things he was curious about. This wasn't the way his Stanford adventure
was supposed to pan out. I helped him pack for his flight to Boston for his interview
with Paul Graham, who was starting a fund to invest in young people just like Aaron.
It want well. Aaron dropped out of Stanford and moved to Boston. In 2006, just after Condé
Nast acquired reddit and just before they fired Aaron, Aaron and I were at a hacker
conference together in Berlin. To Larry Lessig's chagrin, Aaron and Lessig had, at that time,
fallen out of touch. Perhaps neither of them were deeply involved in the day-to-day work
of Creative Commons, which had brought them together.
Aaron had gone off to work in the startup world while simultaneously deepening his study
of left-wind politics, macroeconomics, and sociology. Lessig and Aaron were both planning
to tell America, as matter of some urgency, what had gone wrong with the American project,
but they had slightly different diagnoses.
Our friend and I took Aaron out to Wannsee, where Lessig was spending a year at the American
Academy in Berlin. Lessig looked extraordinarily proud to see Aaron. Their meeting had, for
me, the sense of an extraordinarily poignant reunion, as if they hadn't seen each other
in 20 years. Of course they had actually seen each other a few months before.
But my friend and I left the two of them alone for an hour or so, and I remember as we walked
away, seeing Lessig and Aaron leaning a wall at the Wannsee train station, talking animatedly
to each other. It reminded me of the scene at the climax of the German film "Goodbye
Lenin!" where we can see but not hear the actors talking about incredibly urgent matters,
and we have to imagine for ourselves what they must be saying to each other.
And I thought, Lessig is so proud-his protégé is all grown up and he's come back to show
his respect for his teacher. Aaron was a free speech absolutist's, free speech absolutist,
an idealist's idealist, an activist's activist, and, I must say, a libertarian socialist's
libertarian socialist.
[laughter]
His credo was that bits are not a bug, that come hell or high water we should celebrate,
and not fear, people's ability to communicate to each other whatever they might choose to
communicate, and the infrastructure that supports that ability.
Aaron came of age a long time after the end of the cypherpunk movement. But he always
seemed like a cypherpunk movement. But he always seemed like a cypherpunk and lived
up to the notion that cypherpunks write code.
He channeled all sorts of different idealisms of supposedly bygone eras. You would have
thought he was too young to know about those idealisms. And he did it in a way that mixed
intelligence, creativity, and humor. In the long run, Aaron felt that he was going to
fix the world, mainly by clearly explaining it to people.
[laughter]
I believe Aaron grew up to be exactly the person that he would have been most astonished
and excited to meet in the line in front of the Supreme Court. I've never known anyone
else like him.
[Peter Eckersley] So I know we have all been spending a lot of time thinking about Aaron
and his life and what kind of person he was and what he did. And I know many of you in
the room knew him, knew him well. Others probably never got to meet him in person, saw him on
a mailing list or read his blog posts. And then now, trying to figure out what we've
lost, who we've lost.
And for me, you know I was lucky enough, I got to live with Aaron for a while, and we
got to be good friends and work on things together. But I found I was always trying
to figure out exactly who he was and what he was up to. Because he was such a complicated
and contradictory human being, and he'd get you in these ways that you weren't expecting.
Some of this was simple, obvious stuff. You know, I, look-he and I had met before, but
we moved to San Francisco at the same time. I came here to work for the EFF. He was just
in the process of selling reddit and going to Condé Nast and going through the messy
divorce that he had with the other cofounders. And so I sent him an email and said, "Hey,
I'm setting up a sharehouse. Like, do you want a place to live?" And he said yes.
And so we had this rambling Victorian in this apartment building. And I said, "Oh, we've
got all these open rooms we need to fill." And he's like, "Oh, there's this tiny little
one in the corner, I'll take that." This room was the size of a-you know, it was a closet,
basically. We were pretty sure he was the wealthiest person in the building. He'd just
sold reddit, but he wanted this tiny little thing.
And getting to know him was weird, like...I'd, I knew him, I knew his blog, I had met him
before. But living with him, the first experience, he was so shy. Like, he'd just be there, and
like, in his own little world, struggling to talk to people, until the conversation
took the right turn. You'd say the right thing to him, and he would come alive, and he would
come so alive.
I remember Danny mentioned the Chinese room argument, but I remember the day that somehow
I prodded him about that. And then for the next week, you know, like we were going at
it. Like, I think he was totally wrong about the Chinese room argument, actually. I still
do.
[laughter]
His position was crazy. He defended a crazy position very well, and I had to argue him
into so many weird corners to get anywhere. I remember another scene, we had a film crew
who showed up and stayed in our house and filmed this thing, "Steal This Film." You
can go and see it on the Internet. You can see Aaron in it.
They were a documentary crew talking about copyright and trying to film these takes in
the middle of the night. You know, our cramped little living room, and everyone was kind
of drunk and there was chaos and I remember some of us were struggling to say anything
coherent to a camera. But someone pointed a camera at Aaron and he caught fire.
Like, he just...he taught me how to, like, speak to a room or speak to a television or
whatever it was. He just had a message that he'd simplified out of the ether and could
deliver. And that was the same skill he turned to politics and to so much else that he did
in his intellectual life, and it was beautiful to watch.
And he paired that with this...you know, honestly, he had a flare for self-promotion. There wouldn't
be hundreds of people in this room and hundreds of people in all the rooms for all the memorials
that he's had in different cities, and millions of people reading about him, if he didn't
have some little talent at getting the things he was doing out to the world in a way that
people would notice. People noticed his 16-year-old self. His 14-year-old self.
But he wasn't just a giant ego who kind of was out there promoting himself because he
thought he was awesome. He actually...The one thing he failed to care about, often,
was taking care of himself. And I remember, like, living with him and trying to get him
to eat and...He wouldn't...
He had medical things that he was struggling with, and I said, "Aaron, you know, like,
how does this work, like let's talk about it. Surely you've read the research on this
condition. Like, we can go through what's been tried...And he said, "No, I haven't read
any of it." Like, "I don't know anything about it."
And I said, "Aaron! You devour books! Like, I can see you devouring books, you've read
five this week. Like, you have a stack of academic journal articles by your bed. We're
talking about half of them. Why haven't you read anything about this condition that is
making your own life harder?" And he just said, "Well, I don't think I'm that important.
The world's important," like...
Watching that happen was hard. You struggle to take care of him. He also had these days
that were down. I mean, I guess it was a down day in the end that got him. In between the
days when he was doing amazing amounts of stuff. You all know how much he did.
He was too young to possible have done a third of the things he managed, and who knows what
he would have achieved with another 50 years. But in-between those days, there'd be days
when he was just blue. I remember I caught him on one of those and said, "Aaron, this
is amazing stuff. We can go and do it right now."
And he just said, "No, the code, it's all terrible, it's ugly, it's broken." I'm like,
"OK, let's do some science." And he'd say, "No, the data doesn't work, it sucks, it's
too hard." And I said, "Surely, there must be something that you'd be doing. That really
would feel right." And he stopped for a while and said, "Yes, actually. Typography."
[laughter]
I could do typography. Anyway, so he was contradictory. You never knew exactly what to make of him.
He was brilliant and sometimes and infuriating and wrong. Like, the Chinese room argument.
[laughter]
But then sometimes...I guess I'm talking about paradoxes in Aaron. Sometimes he was infuriating
and wrong and brilliant at the same time. And I have one story about a paradox. He and
I were talking about moral philosophy, ethical philosophy.
We were both interested in these ideas, the [inaudible 00: 49:23] ideas of...actually,
we have a responsibility to find the thing that we can do that makes the most difference
to the universe, to the world, and makes it better, whatever that means.
But I had just read a paper about a paradox showing that actually, if you write down all
of our most compelling intuitions about what it is for the world to be good, so that we
can know how to make it better. You write them all down, you can actually mathematically
prove it's a recent result, 10 years old by a Swedish philosopher. Our deepest intuitions
about this are flatly contradictory. It's a 'paradox. There is actually no completely
coherent definition of what makes the world better.
And Aaron just looked at me and said, "That's completely wrong." Like, "Actually, no, it's
this, this and this." And I said, "Aaron, you're arguing with a mathematical theorem.
I have a proof of it right here. You're not pointing out any flaws in the logic in this
paper."
And he said, "No, no, it's like..." Then I stopped and I stared at him for a while and
I said, "I'm not sure you're right, but actually maybe we can find a way out of this theorem."
It's not an impossibility theorem, it's not a paradox.
Actually, maybe it's more like an uncertainty theorem. We can rehabilitate it as a kind
of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for morality. You can't be completely sure about
what's right. But you can actually pin the amount of uncertainty down to minimum and
still get the right answers to obvious moral dilemmas.
So he and I actually sat down and wrote a paper about this which we still haven't published.
I now actually have a...this is a thing I promised to Aaron's ghost. I'm going to finish
that paper and maybe people will read it. But he was paradoxical and yet he got so much
done, did so many amazing things at the same time.
There's a lot more I want to say and there are a lot of things that we all need to do.
Because Aaron's loss reminded us or pointed out that they needed to be done. Some of them
are things that matter a lot to this community here in this room. We need to free the literature,
the scientific literature, that Aaron died trying to free.
And we also need to figure out what we can do to fix the insane criminal justice system
in the United States.
[applause]
But I've said enough for tonight, and there other people who will take up these threads.
[Tim O'Reilly] I've been asked how I as a publisher who has an online service that puts
content behind a paywall could possibly be a support of Aaron Schwartz, this guy who
downloads content from services like that. And my answer is that we're trying to invent
the future, and the future does not look like the past. And the future is uncovered by struggle
to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And the people who figure that out are
people to whom we owe an enormous debt.
I was trying to think of, you know, past experiences with Aaron. When I first met him, he came
to our Foo Camp and our Etech Conferences. But what I decided to share with you is a
poem that I read as part of a talk that I gave at our Etech Conference in 2008. And
I checked, and just to refresh memory, Aaron was there.
The poem was part of a talk entitled, "Why I Love Hackers." And I started out with a
picture of some berries, some poisonous ones and some ones that were good to eat. And I
said, "Somewhere way back in time, somebody had the courage to figure out which of these
things were good to eat." And I talked about people wanting to fly, and how it was this
crazy dream, and eventually, we figured it out, and lots of other stories from the history
of hacking.
And then I ended with a poem, which seems singularly appropriate for Aaron because it's
about both the courage to try to do what hasn't been done, to change the world, but also how
hard that is, and the challenge of it. It's a poem called "The Man Watching," by Rainer
Maria Rilke, in translation by Robert Bly.
He said, "I can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days on my worried
window panes, that a storm is coming, and I hear the far-off fields say things. I can't
bear without a friend. I can't love without a sister."
"The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across the woods and across time, and the
world looks as if it had no age. The landscape, like a line in the psalm book, is seriousness
and weight and eternity."
"What we choose to fight is so tiny. What fights us is so great. If only we would let
ourselves be dominated, as things do, by some immense storm. We would become strong too,
and not need names."
"When we win, it's with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is
extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean, the angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament. When the wrestler's sinews grew long like metal
strings, he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music."
"Whoever was beaten by this angel, who often simply declined the fight, went away proud,
and strengthened, and great from that harsh hand, that needed him as if to change his
shape. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings."
I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious, but we are certainly shaped by
the hand of the things that he wrestled with.
[applause]
[Molly Shaffer Van Houweling] I didn't know Aaron quite as well as many who have been
so generous in sharing their memories. But as a member of the board of directors of Creative
Commons, I am honored to be here to convey CC's grief, our gratitude, and our commitment
to continuing to work toward the world of openness and sharing that Aaron worked to
architect for all of us.
Many of you recently helped us celebrate the tenth birth of Creative Commons, commemorating
the launch in December, 2002 of our first suite of open content licenses at the party
that Seth described. But of course there was a gestation period before the birth of CC
and that's when I met Aaron thanks to Lisa. I think he was 15 when I met him, but appeared
to be about 11.
As most of you know, Creative Commons is a steward of a set of public content licenses.
They have licensed deeds and legal code and RDF metadata that is designed to make the
license human-readable and lawyer-readable and machine-readable. That's the beauty of
the CC vision.
But it's also a challenge. It's a challenge to find any one person who can really wrap
their heads around and talk about this idea. A person who understands humans and lawyers
and machines. So when Lisa and I first described CC at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
in May, 2002, we needed some help.
Speaking for myself, I was human and I was a lawyer, but I didn't read or speak machine.
So the idea of explaining what CC would have to do with HTML, XML, RDF, and the W3C terrified
me. So I gave a presentation in which I said some boring things about law and some vague
things about metadata. Lisa gave a demonstration that I think was more exciting. But when the
complicated questions from the audience started, we handed the mic down to little Aaron.
With some trepidation...I'd just met the kid-but it was an act from me of pure desperation.
I couldn't answer those questions about RDF, and I figured, well, at least he's adorable.
[laughter]
Of course, I found Aaron's notes on the presentation still online this afternoon. They read almost
like poetry. "We did the Creative Commons intro in the morning. Lisa forgot the VGA
dongle for her iBook, so I donated mine instead. Whole thing seemed to go over pretty well.
I answered a couple of questions at the end."
I think Aaron answered all of the questions, and I was wrong to be nervous about it. Of
course he could answer the questions and delight the audience, not with his adorableness, not
only that, with his vision and with his ability to communicate it to all of us.
We were finally hearing from someone who could explain to humans, and even to lawyers, how
to harness the power of machines to overcome unnecessary limits on sharing. Aaron's vision,
more powerful than I could explain or even comprehend, how to harness the power of machines
to overcome unnecessary limits on sharing.
It was a vision Aaron pursued for CC, but far beyond CC as well, as many of you can
attest better than I, but Aaron was not a machine, and he was not a lawyer. He was a
human, and tragically mortal, but his vision was not. The answers he gave to our questions
were not.
He shared them, and so we still have them, and the people in this room are dedicated
to sharing them forward, and to making the machines for sharing them forward work better
and better, and to making the law for sharing them forward work better and better.
I want to end with something else that Aaron shared. It's just a casual email to a W3C
list from August 2002. To me, it captures his brilliance, his gift for communicating,
his vision of sharing, and his generous spirit.
"Hi there. If you haven't already heard, Creative Commons is a new nonprofit organization working
to make it easier for copyright holders to share their work by dedicating to the public
domain, or licensing it to the public on generous terms. As part of that effort, we've been
working hard to develop our licenses and metadata strategy over the past few months."
"When we launch our site, we want to not only give our users licenses, but also a sample
of RDF that they can add to their web page. We're hoping that by spreading these chunks
of RDF around the web, we'll provide a useful base that interesting projects and applications
can exploit. For more information, please check out our website."
"We'd appreciate your comments, thoughts, and code. Please send them to the cc-metadata
mailing list. We'll be monitoring the list and responding to your questions. Thanks.
Aaron."
"We'll be monitoring the list and responding to your questions." I hope that, somehow,
Aaron is monitoring this list.
[applause]
I hope we return to his words and his vision to help answer our questions, and that we
share those answers with our fellow humans. To Aaron, thank you. Thank you for sharing.
[applause]
[Alex Stamos] Unlike a lot of the people here, I didn't know Aaron. I never met him, didn't
speak to him on the phone, never even got to exchange emails with him, which, ironically,
is why I'm here.
The fact that I didn't know him is the reason why I was going to be the person that was
put forth to objectively explain to the jury of what Aaron did, and I think I was able
to hold onto that objectivity until the last week and a half, and per Teran's comments,
I've perhaps become much more radical than I was before, which you can tell, because
I'm wearing my radical tie today.
[laughter]
What we were going to do is...I was objectively going to go in front of that jury, and explain
to them that these horrible hacking crimes that Aaron was accused of is functionally
the same as putting in the incorrect email address to an airport WiFi, or going down
the street to Starbucks to change your IP address.
Dan Purcell was going to get up there and grill MIT and JSTOR witnesses, and talk to
them about how this kind of thing happens dozens and dozens of times a year at MIT,
and yet Aaron is the first person to ever have the Secret Service get involved. That
JSTOR witness was going to talk about how, "Oh, there wasn't really any damage. We were
a little ticked off, but this isn't a big deal for us, and we don't want this to happen."
Then Elliot Peters was going to get up and give this fiery defense attorney speech, pounding
the table, and pointing to Boston Harbor, and invoking the American Revolution, and
the spirit of freedom, and how Aaron lives up to the greatest ideals in our founding
documents.
Then Aaron's future was going to be in the hands of 12 normal people, I mean, normal
people who couldn't get out of jury duty, but hopefully people who, I think, would have
had the sense to understand that there is a huge chasm between the way Aaron was being
portrayed by the government and the young man who was sitting there at that table.
I had faith in them, and we're not going to get that chance to do all those things, and
we can't help Aaron anymore, but I think we, and by "we," I mean everybody who is listening
to this, we can help the next Aaron, and we didn't have to wait very long for the next
Aaron.
The next Aaron is the Chinese-American man who is accused of stealing source code from
a hedge fund, and is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act. The next Aaron is the Canadian
student who was expelled from his university for pointing out security flaws to the university
in their software that exposed his personal information.
The next Aaron is going to be that young lady whose DEFCON speech is interrupted by the
clink of handcuffs, or that grandfather who is mystified by the demand for $50,000 to
pay for copyright violations, because his next door neighbor uses open WiFi to do a
little BitTorrent. Those are the next Aarons, and those are the people we can help.
One of the reasons, I think we really to need help them is, while I think all of us feel
gratified about the outpouring of love and care, and the feeling of momentum that has
come out of the last week and a half.
We also have to be really aware that we want, that when people face the same kind of odds
that Aaron faced, many of them without Aaron's resources, that we want them not to think
Aaron's final moments of weakness and doubt to be the kind of thing that they need to
do to bring about change.
There are two things we need to do for that. One...
[applause]
One, we need to give those people as much as much support as Aaron was able to give.
Those people don't know Larry Lessig. They don't hang out with MIT professors, yet they
need the kind of support that Aaron was able to muster.
One of the things I realized through this whole thing is we never considered computer
science to be the kind of thing that is a profession that changes lives, and something
this has demonstrated is that being able to make an argument of whether a MAC address
is just something that you use to keep collisions from happening on a network, it is not equivalent
to the serial number on a gun.
Making that argument is the kind of thing that can mean spending decades in prison.
There are other professions that are life-changing, medicine and law, and in those professions,
people have an idea about equal access and helping people, and that doesn't happen in
reality, but at least they try.
There's an idea that everybody has a defense lawyer. There's an idea that you can go and
get treated by a doctor, and they have an ethical obligation to you. I think those of
us in the computer world need to see, via Aaron's tragedy, that we have the same kind
of obligation.
[applause]
The second thing we all need to do is when we are up here speaking, or we're commenting
on Reddit, or Hacker News, or talking to people about Aaron, while we talk about the positive
change that is going to come out of his death, we have to make it clear that all of those
positive things pale in comparison to what he would've done had he lived.
[applause]
That's an important part of the message, because we don't want those young people to think
that their only way out is to sacrifice themselves, that they deserve to live too, and that they
have people who are standing behind them. Thank you.
[applause]
[Cindy Cohn] Good evening. Thank you everybody. We're all starting with how we met Aaron.
I think I met Aaron before this, but my first real memory of him is on the steps of the
United States Supreme Court on the night before the Eldred argument in 2002. I remember thinking,
"Does your mother know you're here?"
I recently found his account of that night, and it reminded me of how very young he was,
how excited he was to be at the court, and yet, his understanding of the nuances of the
Copyright Term Extension Act were better than mine at that time. I also realized that by
having our first...or least, the first I'd met, really, Fanboy, that we were building
a movement.
Since the early morning of January 12th, when I learned that Aaron had passed away, I feel
like I've had a little Aaron on my shoulder, reminding me that we are still part of a movement,
and demanding that we push forward, push further, and that the tragedy of his death be parts
of the roots of something good and something better.
I don't think Aaron named his organization Demand Progress by accident. At EFF, we feel
this intensely, and I think we feel it in two directions. First, we feel the need to
continue his work, opening access to publicly funded and public domain information for all
people, so that you don't have to be in an ivory tower to learn.
[applause]
The second, though, is the one that I've spent most of my time on for the last few weeks,
and that was number four on Taren's list, which is trying to fix the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act.
EFF has a draft of some modest fixes that would reduce the ability of prosecutors to
use the CFAA, and similar computer laws, to ratchet up threats on people like Aaron. It's
on our website. It's on Reddit.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, as many of you know, had led the way, and remains willing
to help, but we have to create the space for real change, not not-real change, and that
remains to be done. Her initial proposals are not sufficient.
We have a lot of work to do to get this where it will be, but we need to ensure that what
happened to Aaron never happens to another bright, idealistic, geeky kid who wants to
make the world a better place, and if we can't do it in Congress, then we need to do it in
the courts, but we need your help. In fact, we need the help of everyone you all know.
We need to marshal the same sort of support for this fight that we were able to marshal
with SOPA about SOPA and PIPA, and maybe even more, since this involves not just Hollywood,
but federal power, and we won't have Aaron.
I was hesitant to make this bold pitch at Aaron's memorial, but honestly, I don't think
Aaron would've forgiven me if I didn't. We can't help Aaron directly anymore, but we
can help the next Aaron, and the one after that, and all of us who would be the beneficiaries
of what those next Aarons will create for us, and the knowledge that they will make
available to all the rest of us and all the people around the world.
I think we built the movement that I first saw by seeing the little fanboy, Aaron Swartz,
in 2002, so now, let's use it.
[applause]
[Brewster Kahle] Wow. I learned from Aaron what living an open source life was like.
I think he really live that way. He floated and helped others. He gave everything away.
He really wasn't tied to an institution. He really was not a company man in any sense.
He was really quite pure in his motivations, and it made him incredibly effective of cutting
through a lot of the stuff that most of us deal with, an open source life. He was able
to keep his self-interests at bay, which is kind of remarkable for a lot of us, but he
was able to do it, and he was able to communicate well with an open smile and a kind heart.
He had a way of spending time, and his energy, on things that mattered, and he had a genius
at finding things that mattered to millions of people. There are lots of things to work
on, but the things that he worked on were incredibly effective.
We first met, I think, in 2002, at the Eldred Supreme Court case in Washington, DC, when
we drove a bookmobile across, celebrating the public domain by giving away books that
kids made, and also, then, at the Creative Commons launch.
I really got to know Aaron when he said, "I'd really like to help make the Open Library
website with the Internet Archive, to go and give books, and integrate books into the Internet
itself." He said, "I've got this cool technology called Infogami. It made possible to make
Reddit happen. Let's use it again for this other thing."
It was wonderful to work with him, but it was really unlike working with anybody else
I've ever met. You certainly couldn't tell him what to do. He just did what was the right
thing to do, and he was right, certainly, a lot more often than I was.
We worked together in other areas when he was a champion of open access, especially
of the public domain, bringing public access to the public domain. Most people think that's
kind of an obvious thing. "Isn't the public thing mean that it's publicly accessible?"
Of course, all of us are like, "No."
It's sort of like there are these national parks with moats, and walls, and guns, and
turrets pointing out in case somebody might want to come near the public domain, and Aaron
didn't think this was right, and he spent a lot of time and effort freeing these materials.
One of the first ones that we were actively working together on was freeing government
court cases, so that anybody could see this without having to have special privilege or
money, and also, to make it so you could data mine it, and go and look at these things in
a very different way.
He freed and liberated a lot of court cases from the PACER system, and uploaded them in-bulk
to the Internet Archive, so that people could have access to these. There are now four million
documents from 800,000 cases that have been used by six million people because of the
project that Aaron Swartz and others helped start.
[applause]
It was an interesting project because it went over many different organizations, each playing
a role, and all cooperating in a very non-corporate way. It was a very Aaron style way of making
things happen, and the idea of making court documents and legal documents available more
easily struck a chord with me, because in college, I was trying to figure out how I
was going to try to get out of the draft.
My college didn't have a legal collection, and the only way I could try to get to legal
court documents was to get an ID from my professor and break into the Harvard Law Library to
go and read court documents.
[applause]
That sucked. It really makes no sense, and Aaron not only saw that it doesn't make sense,
he decided he was going to try to help solve this, not just for himself, but for everyone.
Then there were other public domain collections, like the Google Books collection.
Google Books was a library project to go and digitize lots and lots of books. A lot of
them were public domain. Google would make them available from their website, but really,
really painfully. It would make it so that if you wanted one book, you could get one
book. If you wanted 100 books, they'd turn off your IP address forever.
This is no way to have public access to the public domain. The Internet Archive started
getting these uploads of Google Books, going faster, and faster, and faster. It was like,
"Well, where are these coming from?" Well, it turns out, it's Aaron.
He and a bunch of friends figured out that they could go and get a bunch of computers
to go slowly enough to just clock through tons of Google Books and upload them to the
Internet Archive. Interestingly, Google never got upset about it. The libraries, on the
other hand, grumbled. Anyway, they'll get over it.
[laughter]
When this started happening, we said, "OK, what's going on? Should we be concerned?"
"No, it's public domain. We just made sure that we got the cataloging data right, and
we linked back to Google, so that if you're on the book, you can go back to the original
page and see..." It all worked well, but there was Aaron doing it again, bringing public
access to the public domain.
What is crushing to me is that Aaron got ensnared by the Federal Government for doing something
that the Internet Archive actively encourages others to do for our collections, and we think
all libraries should encourage, which is bulk downloading to support data mining and other
research using computers. This is just the way the world works.
[applause]
The first step is, for a computer to read and analyze materials, to download a set of
documents. When Aaron did this from one library, JSTOR, they strongly objected, and demanded
that MIT find and stop that user, which then led US prosecutors to pull out their worst
techniques.
Did anybody stop to ask if bulk downloading is a crime? I say, "No." Bulk downloading
is not in itself a crime. Let's stop this practice of discouraging bulk downloading
because there are encouraging projects that are learning amazing new things by having
computers be part of the research process. Let's not stop this, and discourage young
people from coming up with new and different ways to make access, to learn things from
our libraries.
What resulted, in this case, was tragic and not necessary. Really, what we want is computers
to be able to read. Aaron knew this, we were all building this, and he got ensnared anyway.
Let's let our computers read.
Because of this tragedy, JSTOR, I talked to this morning, and the Internet Archive have
agreed to meet to discuss the broad issue of data mining and web crawling. I hope that
we really make progress. At least there are reasons to be positive.
This assault on Aaron would disillusion, discourage, and depress a principled young man, and if
there ever was a principled young man, it was Aaron Swartz. We miss you, and we will
carry on your important work.
[applause]
[Carl Malamud] Do not. Do not think for a moment. Do not think for a moment, that Aaron's
work on JSTOR was a random act of a lone hacker, some kind of crazy, spur-of-the-moment bulk
download. JSTOR had long come in for withering criticism from the net.
Larry Lessig called JSTOR a moral outrage in a talk, and I suppose I have to confess
he was quoting me, and we weren't the only ones fanning those flames. Sequestering knowledge
behind pay walls, making scientific journals, only available to a few kids fortunate enough
to be at fancy universities, and charging $20 an article for the remaining 99 percent
of us, was a festering wound.
It offended many people. It embarrassed many who wrote those articles, that their work
had become somebody's profit margin, a members-only country club of knowledge. Many of us helped
fan those flames, and many of us feel guilty today for fanning those flames, but JSTOR
was just one of many battles.
They tried to paint Aaron as some kind of lone wolf hacker, a young terrorist who went
on a crazy IP killing spree that caused $92 million in damages, but Aaron wasn't a lone
wolf. He was part of an army, and I had the honor of serving with him for a decade. You've
heard many things about his remarkable life, but I want to focus tonight on just one.
Aaron was part of an army of citizens that believes democracy only works when a citizenry
are informed, and we know about our rights and our obligations, an army that believes
we must make justice and knowledge available to all, not just the well-born, or those that
have grabbed the reins of power, so that we may govern ourselves more wisely.
He was part of an army of citizens that rejects kings and generals and believes in rough consensus
and running code.
[applause]
We worked together on a dozen government databases. When we worked o something, the decisions
weren't rash. Our work often took months, sometimes years, sometimes a decade, and Aaron
Swartz did not get his proper serving of decades. We looked at and poked at the US copyright
database for a long time. It was a system so old it was still running [inaudible 01:
25:25] .
[laughter]
The government had, believe it or not, asserted copyright on the copyright database. Now how
you copyright a database that is specifically called out in the United States Constitution
is beyond me. But we knew we were playing with fire by violating their terms of use.
So we were careful. We grabbed that data and it was used to feed the Open Library here
at the Internet Archive, and it was used to feed Google Books, and we got a letter from
the Copyright Office waving copyright on that copyright database.
But before we did that, we had to talk to many lawyers and worry about the government
hauling us in for malicious, pre-meditated bulk downloading.
[laughter]
These were not random acts of aggression. We worked on databases to make them better,
to make our democracy work better, to help our government. We were not criminals. When
we brought in 20 million pages of US District Court documents from behind their eight-cent-per-page
PACER paywall, we found those public filings infested with privacy violations.
Names of minor children, names of informants, medical records, mental health records, financial
records, and tens of thousands of Social Security numbers. We were whistleblowers, and we sent
our results to the chief judges of 31 District Courts. And those judges were shocked and
dismayed, and then redacted those documents, and they yelled at the lawyers that filed
them, and the Judicial Conference changed their privacy rules.
[applause]
But you know what the bureaucrats did? You know what the bureaucrats did who ran the
Administrative Office of the United States Courts? To them, weren't citizens that made
public data better. We were thieves that took $1.6 million of their property. So they called
the FBI. They said they were hacked by criminals, an organized gang that was imperiling their
$120 million per year revenue stream selling public government documents.
The FBI sat outside Aaron's house. They called him up, and tried to sucker him into meeting
them without his lawyer. The FBI sat two armed agents down in an interrogation room with
me to get to the bottom of this alleged conspiracy.
But we weren't criminals! We were only citizens. We did nothing wrong. They found nothing wrong.
We did our duty as citizens and the government investigation had nothing to show for it but
a waste of a whole lot of time and money.
If you want a chilling effect, sit somebody down with a couple FBI agents for a while
and see how quickly their blood runs cold. There are people who face danger every day
to protect us, police officers, and firefighters, and emergency workers, and I am grateful and
amazed by what they do, but the work that people like Aaron and I did, slinging DVDs
and running shell scripts on public materials, should not be a dangerous profession.
We weren't criminals, but there were crimes committed, crimes against the very idea of
justice. When the US attorney told Aaron he had to plead guilty to 13 felonies for attempting
to propagate knowledge before she'd even consider a deal, that was an abuse of power, a misuse
of the criminal justice system.
[applause]
That was a crime against justice, and that US attorney does not act alone. She is part
of a posse intent on protecting property, not people. All over the United States, those
without access to means don't have access to justice, and face these abuses of power
every day.
It was a crime against learning when a nonprofit corporation like JSTOR charged with advancing
knowledge, turned a download, that caused no harm and no damage, into a $92 million
federal case, and the JSTOR corporate monopoly on knowledge is not alone.
All over the United States, corporations have staked their fences on the field of education,
for-profited colleges that steal from our veterans, nonprofit standard bodies that ration
public safety codes while paying million dollar salaries, multinational conglomerates that
measure the work of scientific papers and legal materials by their gross margins.
[applause]
In the JSTOR case, was the overly aggressive posture of the department of justice, prosecutors,
and law enforcement officials revenge, because they were embarrassed that, in their view
at least, we somehow got away with something in the PACER incident?
Was the merciless JSTOR prosecution the revenge of embarrassed bureaucrats because they looked
stupid in the "New York Times," because the United States Senate called them on the carpet?
We will probably never know the answer to that question, but it sure looks like they
destroyed a young man's life in a petty abuse of power. This was not a criminal matter.
Aaron was not a criminal.
If you think you own something, and I think that thing is public, I'm more than happy
to meet you in a court of law, and if you're right, I'll take my lumps if I've wronged
you, but when we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access
to knowledge, we've broken the rule of law. We've desecrated the temple of justice. Aaron
Swartz was not a criminal.
[applause]
Aaron Swartz was a citizen, and he was a brave soldier in a war which continues today, a
war in which corrupt and venal profiteers try to steal, and horde, and starve our public
domain for their own private gain.
When people try to restrict access to the law, or they try to collect tolls on the road
to knowledge, or deny education to those without means, those people are the ones who should
not face a stern gaze of an outraged public prosecutor. What the Department of Justice
put Aaron through for trying to make our world better is the same thing they can put you
through.
Our army isn't one lone wolf. It is thousands of citizens, many of you in this room, who
are fighting for justice and knowledge. I say we are an army, and I use the word with
cause, because we face people who want to imprison us for downloading a database to
take a closer look. We face people who believe they can tell us what we can read and what
we can say.
But when I see our army, I see an army that creates instead of destroys. I see the army
of Mahatma Gandhi walking peacefully to the sea to make salt for the people. I see the
army of Martin Luther King walking peacefully but with determination to Washington to demand
their rights. Because change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes
through continuous struggle.
[applause]
When I see our army, I see an army that creates new opportunities for the poor. An army that
makes our society more just and more fair. An army that makes knowledge universal. When
I see our army, I see the people who have created the Wikipedia and the Internet Archive,
the people who coded GNU and Apache and BIND and Linux, I see the people who made the EFF
and the Creative Commons. I see the people who created our Internet as a gift to the
world.
When I see our army, I see Aaron Schwartz, and my heart is broken. We've truly lost one
of our better angels. I wish we could change the past, but we cannot. But we can change
the future and we must. We must do so for Aaron. We must do so for ourselves. We must
do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place, a place where justice works
and access to knowledge becomes a human right. Thank you.
[applause]