The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

The film follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron's story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.

Film by Brian Knappenberger - Luminant Media
http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/26788492/aaron-swartz-documentary-the-internets-own-boy-0
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

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A co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "reddit" has been found dead

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He certainly was a prodigy although he never kind of thought of himself like that

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He was totally unexcited about starting businesses and making money

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There's a profound sense of loss tonight in Highland Park, Aaron Swartz's hometown

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as loved ones say goodbye to one of the Internet's brightest lights

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...Open Access and computer activists are mourning his loss

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...an astonishing intellect. You talk to people who knew him

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...he was killed by the government and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles

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...they wanted to make an example out of him, ok?

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Governments have an insatiable desire to control

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...he was potentially facing 35 years in prison and a 1 million dollar fine

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Raising questions of prosecutorial zeal and I would say even misconduct.

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

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Growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realising

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that all the things around me, that people had told me

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were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be.

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They weren't natural at all. They were things that could be changed

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and they were thing that more importantly were wrong and should change.

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And once I realised that, 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 is 'Paddington at the fair'

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Well, he was born in Highland Park and grew up here

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Aaron came from a family of three brothers all extraordinarly bright

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The box is flipping over!

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So, we were all, you know, not the best behaved children

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you know, three boys running around all the time, causing trouble

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Mom: No, no, no... Aaron!?
Aaron: What?

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But, I've come to the realization: Aaron learned how to learn at a very young age

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One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!

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Knock, knock!

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Who's here?

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Aaron!

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Aaron who?

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Aaron funny man!

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He knew what he wanted, 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 the little picture of what the planets are

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and each planet has a symbol:

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

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One day he said to Susan:

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"What's this free family entertainment downtown Highland Park?"

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Free family entertainment downtown Highland Park

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He was three at the time

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She said: "What are you talking about?"

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He said: "Look it says here on on the refrigerator"

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"Free family entertainment downtown Highland Park"

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She was floored and astonished that he could read

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It's called: "My family Seder"

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The Seder night is different from all other nights

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I remember once we were are the University of Chicago library

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

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and showed to him, I said: "You know this is really just an extraordinary place"

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

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Today we're going to read the ABCs backwards z, y, x, w, ...

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I remember he came home from his first algebra class

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he was like: "Noah, let me teach you algebra!"

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and I'm like: "What is algebra?"

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and he was always like that

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Now I press button, click button

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there, now it's got that, now it's a pink

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When he was at 2 or 3 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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[?]

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

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Looking at the computer?

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Nah... How could... 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 were the computer was

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for hours programming this game

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

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and to him there was always something to do

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always something that programming could solve

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The way Aaron always thought is that programming is magic, right,

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you can accomplish these things that normal humans can't

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Aaron made an ATM using like a Macintosh and like a cardboard box

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

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and he thought it would be really really cool if I dressed up

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like his new favourite computer which at the time was the original iMac

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I mean, he hated dressing up for Hallowen

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but he loved convincing other people to dress like other things he wanted to see

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Host Aaron, stop!
Guys, come on, look at the camera

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He made this website called "The Info"

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where people could just fill in information

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

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Why don't they write about that on this website?

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And then other people could come at a later point and read that information

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and edit the information if they thought that it was bad

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Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, all right?

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This is before Wikipedia had begun

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and this is developed by a 12 year old

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in his room, by himself

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running on this tiny server using ancient technology

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One of the teacher's response like:

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"This is a terrible idea, you can't just let anyone

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author the dictionary, like, author the encyclopedia"

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

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"How could you ever have such a terrible idea?"

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Me and my other brother would be like: "Oh, you know"

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"Yeah, Wikipedia is cool but we had that in our house, like 5 years ago"

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Aaron's website "The Info.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, you know, 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 on-line programming communities

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then in the process of shaping a new tool for the Web

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He...comes up to me, it's like: "Ben, there's a really awesome thing that I'm working on"

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"you need to hear about it!"

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I'm like: "Yeah, what is it?"

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He says: "It's this thing called RSS!"

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And he explains to me what RSS is

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and I'm like: "Why is that useful, Aaron? Is any site using it? Why would I want to use it?"

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There was this mailing list for people who were working on RSS

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and XML more generally and there was a person on it named Aaron Swartz

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who was combative but very smart and who had lots of good ideas

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and he didn't ever come to the face to face meetings and they said:

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"You know, when are you gonna come out to one of those face to face meetings?"

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He said: "You know, I don't think my mom would let me, you know I just turned 14"

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So their first reaction was, well you know,

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"This person, this colleague we've been working with all year

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was 13 years old when we were working with him and is only 14 now!"

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and their second reaction was: "Christ, we really want to meet him!"

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you know, "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 building the plumbing for modern hypertext

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and the piece that he was working on, RSS

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was a tool that you can use to get summaries

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of things that are going on on other web pages

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Most commonly, you would use this for a blog

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You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read

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you use their RSS feeds, these summaries of what's going on on those other pages

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to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on

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Aaron was really young but he understood the technology

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and he saw that was imperfect and looked for ways to help make it better

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So his mom startd bundling him on planes in Chicago, we pick him up in San Francisco

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we introduced him to interesting people to argue with

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and we marvelled at his horrific eating habits

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he only ate white food, only like, you know, steamed rice

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and not fried rice, beacause that was not sufficiently white,

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and white bread, and so on

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and you kind of marvel at the quality of the debate

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emerging from what appeared to be a small boy's mouth

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and you think, this is a kid, is really going to go 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 that per-se

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you can't have companies that just like

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"let's sell dog food over the Internet, dog food over the cellphones"

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but there is still a lot of innovation going on,

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

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He takes on this "Alpha Nerd" personality where he's sort of like

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"I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you

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I'm better than you, and I can tell you what to do"

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It's an extension of him being kind of like a torpe. [Chuckles].

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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 or trying to cure cancer

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First I met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat, he didn't just write code

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he also got people excited about solving problems, he was a connector

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the free culture movement, which had 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,

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that definitely ruffled feathers at times.

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

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and the world wasn't 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 he had been taught

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he didn't like the teachers

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Aaron really knew how to get information

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He was like, I don't need to go to these teachers 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 the teacher to learn their version of American history

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I have like three historical compilations here like I can 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

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I thought, you know, the teachers didn't know what they were talking about

[position]

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

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I was just like, you know, all the way are penstick[?] together

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and force them to do busy work

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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 the teachers told them

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and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things

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you know, once I questioned the school I was in, I questioned the society that built the school

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I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for

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I questioned the government that, you know, setup this whole structure

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One of the themes he was more passionate about was copyright,

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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

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it was a reasonable institution to have in place
to make sure that people got paid

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What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision

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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'm 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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Cause, I don't know, I'm very excited 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

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with the freedoms they intended to carry

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So if copyright is all about "all rights reserved"

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then this is a kind of "some rights reserved" model

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

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

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And Aaron's role was the computer part

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like how do you architect the licenses

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so that would be simple and understandable and expressed in way that machines could process it

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And people are like, why do you have this fifteen year old kid

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writing the specifications for the creative commons?

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like, don't you think that's a huge mistake?

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and Larry is like: "the biggest mistake we would have is not listening to this kid"

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And he barely he's not even tall enough to get over the podium

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and it wasn't these movable podiums

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so there's this embarrassing thing where, once he puts his screen up, nobody could see his face

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When we come to our website here

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and we've got few licences

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it gives you this list of options explaining what it means

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and we thought three set of questions

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Do you want to require attribution?

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Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?

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Do you want to allow modifications of your work?

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I was floored

233
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just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult

234
00:15:12,000 --> 00:15:14,800
and Aaron stood up there in front an whole audience full of people

235
00:15:15,000 --> 00:15:20,000
and just started talking about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons

236
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And they where all listening to him, just

237
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I was sitting at the back thinking:
"he's just a kid, why are they listening to him?"

238
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but they did

239
00:15:29,900 --> 00:15:32,400
well I don't think I comprehended it fully

240
00:15:32,600 --> 00:15:37,000
Though critics have said that it does little to ensure artists get payed for their work

241
00:15:37,200 --> 00:15:40,000
the success of Creative Commons has been enormous

242
00:15:40,200 --> 00:15:46,700
Currently on the website Flickr alone over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license

243
00:15:46,800 --> 00:15:51,400
He contributed through his technical abilities

244
00:15:51,600 --> 00:15:56,600
and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him

245
00:15:57,600 --> 00:16:00,600
Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog

246
00:16:01,300 --> 00:16:05,600
I think deeply about things and I want others to do likewise.

247
00:16:06,500 --> 00:16:10,800
I work for ideas and learn from people. I don’t like excluding people.

248
00:16:11,000 --> 00:16:14,800
I’m a perfectionist, but I won’t let that get in the way of publication.

249
00:16:15,200 --> 00:16:21,300
Except for education and entertainment, I’m not going to waste my time on things that won’t have an impact.

250
00:16:21,400 --> 00:16:25,800
I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don’t take me seriously.

251
00:16:26,500 --> 00:16:31,800
I don’t hold grudges (it’s not productive) but I learn from my experience.

252
00:16:32,200 --> 00:16:36,000
I want to make the world a better place.

253
00:16:40,700 --> 00:16:45,700
In 2004 Swartz, leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University

254
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He had had all sort of colitis, which was very troubling

255
00:16:50,000 --> 00:16:51,900
and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

256
00:16:53,000 --> 00:16:56,200
He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail pills everyday

257
00:16:56,400 --> 00:17:00,200
and one of those pills was a steroid which daunted his growth and

258
00:17:00,700 --> 00:17:03,600
made him feel different from any of the other students

259
00:17:04,000 --> 00:17:06,800
Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to scholarship

260
00:17:07,000 --> 00:17:12,600
and finds himself, effectively, in a baby sitting program for overachieving high school-ers

261
00:17:12,800 --> 00:17:21,300
who in four years are meant to become, you know, captains of industry and one percent-ers

262
00:17:21,500 --> 00:17:25,600
and I think it just made him bananas

263
00:17:25,800 --> 00:17:28,900
In 2005 after only one year of college

264
00:17:28,923 --> 00:17:32,210
Swartz was offered a spot at a new startup incubation firm

265
00:17:32,312 --> 00:17:36,130
called Y Combinator, led by Paul Graham

266
00:17:36,283 --> 00:17:39,192
He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a website!"

267
00:17:39,272 --> 00:17:41,876
and Paul Graham likes him enough and says

268
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"Yeah, sure!", so Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment

269
00:17:46,247 --> 00:17:48,900
So this used to be Aaron apartment when he lived here

270
00:17:48,952 --> 00:17:55,163
I have big memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

271
00:17:55,701 --> 00:17:58,400
cause Aaron had no credit and dropped out of college

272
00:17:58,501 --> 00:18:00,600
Aaron lived in what's now the living room

273
00:18:00,654 --> 00:18:04,000
and some of the posters here are left over from when Aaron lived here

274
00:18:04,356 --> 00:18:08,800
and the library, there were more books, but, a lot of them are Aaron's

275
00:18:11,500 --> 00:18:17,400
Aaron's Y Combinator site is called "infogami", a tool to build websites

276
00:18:17,476 --> 00:18:19,774
but infogami struggles to find users

277
00:18:19,800 --> 00:18:21,978
and Swartz eventually merges his company

278
00:18:22,029 --> 00:18:24,581
with another Y Combinator project in need of help

279
00:18:24,800 --> 00:18:29,700
it was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian called "reddit"

280
00:18:29,774 --> 00:18:33,680
There we were starting from almost nothing, no users, no money, no code

281
00:18:33,745 --> 00:18:36,800
and growing day by day into a hugely popular website

282
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and it showed no sign of letting up

283
00:18:38,850 --> 00:18:43,600
first we had a thousand users, than 10.000, then 20.000 and on and on, it's just incredible

284
00:18:49,025 --> 00:18:49,207
reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet

285
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There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art

286
00:18:57,300 --> 00:19:01,100
and there's just people who flocked to the site

287
00:19:01,300 --> 00:19:07,500
and made that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

288
00:19:07,600 --> 00:19:15,500
"reddit" kind of just borders on chaos at some level, so on the one hand its a place where people discuss

289
00:19:15,600 --> 00:19:21,800
...news of the day, technology, politics and issues and yet there is a lot of kind of not safe for work

290
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...material, offensive material. Some subreddits were "trolls", "find a welcome home"

291
00:19:29,900 --> 00:19:33,800
and so in that sense, reddit has been home to controversy as well

292
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It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

293
00:19:36,900 --> 00:19:40,700
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant "Condé Nast"

294
00:19:40,700 --> 00:19:40,800
...who makes an offer to buy the company.
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant "Condé Nast"

295
00:19:40,800 --> 00:19:42,400
...who makes an offer to buy the company.

296
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Some large amount of money,

297
00:19:43,900 --> 00:19:46,800
large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions about like

298
00:19:47,000 --> 00:19:51,300
"How do I... store this money?"

299
00:19:51,400 --> 00:19:53,800
Interviewer: Like a lot of money
Noah: Like a lot of money

300
00:19:53,900 --> 00:20:00,200
Like... probably more than a million dollars. But I don't actually know.

301
00:20:00,200 --> 00:20:01,800
And he is how old at the time?

302
00:20:02,100 --> 00:20:03,200
Nineteen? Twenty?

303
00:20:05,100 --> 00:20:13,500
So he was in this apartment, they are like sat around on what predated these couches, hacking on reddit and...

304
00:20:13,600 --> 00:20:18,300
when they sold reddit they threw giant party and then all flew out to California

305
00:20:18,400 --> 00:20:20,300
the next day and left the keys with me.

306
00:20:23,700 --> 00:20:28,800
It was funny you know, he just sold a startup so we all kind of presumed he was the richest person around...

307
00:20:28,900 --> 00:20:34,100
but he said "Oh, no. I'll take this tiny little shoe box sized room, that's all I need"

308
00:20:34,200 --> 00:20:36,203
...like it was barely larger than a closet.

309
00:20:36,203 --> 00:20:42,500
The idea of him spending his money on fancy objects just seems so implausible.

310
00:20:42,700 --> 00:20:44,807
He explains, it's like "I like living in apartments,

311
00:20:44,843 --> 00:20:47,900
so I'm not gonna spend a lot of money on a new place to live, I'm not gonna buy a mansion

312
00:20:48,138 --> 00:20:49,825
... and I like wearning jeans and t-shirts,

313
00:20:49,840 --> 00:20:54,500
so I am not gonna spend any more money on clothes. So like, it's really no big deal."

314
00:20:54,600 --> 00:21:00,500
What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic flows on the Internet and what commands our attention.

315
00:21:00,600 --> 00:21:04,800
In the old system of broadcasting you're fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves.

316
00:21:04,900 --> 00:21:09,500
You know, you could only send out 10 channels over the airwaves for television,

317
00:21:09,600 --> 00:21:13,200
or even with cables you have 500 channels. On the Internet everybody can have a channel.

318
00:21:13,300 --> 00:21:17,800
Everyone can get a blog or a myspace page. Everyone has a way of expressing themselves.

319
00:21:17,900 --> 00:21:19,800
And so what you see now is not a question of

320
00:21:19,900 --> 00:21:24,800
"who gets access to the airwaves?". It's the question of "who gets control over the ways you find people?"

321
00:21:24,900 --> 00:21:29,500
You know you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, these sort of gate keepers that tell you

322
00:21:29,500 --> 00:21:34,500
where on the Internet you want to go. The people who provide you, your sources of news and information.

323
00:21:34,600 --> 00:21:39,500
So it's not, you know, "only certain people have a license to speak", now everyone has a license to speak.

324
00:21:39,500 --> 00:21:41,300
It's a question of "who gets heard?"

325
00:21:44,400 --> 00:21:49,700
After he started working, in San Fransico at Condé Nast, he comes into the office

326
00:21:49,800 --> 00:21:55,500
and they want to give him a computer with all this crap installed on it and say that he can't

327
00:21:55,600 --> 00:21:59,400
install any new things on this computer, which to a developer is outrageous, right?

328
00:21:59,500 --> 00:22:01,800
From the first day he was complaining about all this sutff.

329
00:22:05,600 --> 00:22:10,800
Gray wall, gray desks, gray noise. The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.

330
00:22:10,900 --> 00:22:14,800
By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying.

331
00:22:14,900 --> 00:22:18,310
I can't imagine staying sane with someone buzzing in my ear all day

332
00:22:18,430 --> 00:22:20,680
let alone getting any actual work done.

333
00:22:21,400 --> 00:22:23,740
Nobody else seems to get work done either.

334
00:22:23,900 --> 00:22:26,700
Everybody's always coming into our room to hang out and chat

335
00:22:26,750 --> 00:22:30,130
or invite us to play the new video game system that Wired is testing.

336
00:22:32,700 --> 00:22:39,600
He really had different aspirations, that were politically oriented. And Silicon Valley

337
00:22:39,700 --> 00:22:46,600
just doesn't really quite have that culture that orients technical activity for the purposes

338
00:22:46,700 --> 00:22:50,200
of political goals. Aaron hated working for a corporation. They all hated

339
00:22:50,300 --> 00:22:53,100
working for Condé Nast but Aaron is like the only one who is not going to take it.

340
00:22:53,300 --> 00:22:57,800
And then basically he got himself fired by not showing up to work, ever.

341
00:23:01,000 --> 00:23:03,300
It was said to be a messy breakup.

342
00:23:03,500 --> 00:23:07,600
Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman declined to be interviewed for this film.

343
00:23:09,400 --> 00:23:11,600
He rejected the business world.

344
00:23:12,200 --> 00:23:16,100
One of the really important things to remember about

345
00:23:16,300 --> 00:23:19,800
that choice when Aaron decided to kind of leave the startup culture,

346
00:23:19,900 --> 00:23:26,100
is that he was also leaving behind the things that had made him famous

347
00:23:26,300 --> 00:23:31,400
and well loved and, you know, he was at risk of letting down fans.

348
00:23:31,600 --> 00:23:33,900
He got to where he was supposed to be going,

349
00:23:34,100 --> 00:23:39,500
and had the self-awareness and honorariness to realise

350
00:23:39,700 --> 00:23:43,600
that he had climbed that mountain of shit to pluck the single rose

351
00:23:43,700 --> 00:23:45,500
and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell.

352
00:23:45,700 --> 00:23:50,100
And rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed

353
00:23:50,500 --> 00:23:57,200
and he did get the rose in any event, he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool!

354
00:23:57,500 --> 00:24:01,600
The way Aaron always thought is that programming is magic.

355
00:24:01,800 --> 00:24:06,400
You can accomplish these things that normal humans can't, by being able to program.

356
00:24:06,700 --> 00:24:13,800
So, if you had magical powers, would you use them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

357
00:24:15,200 --> 00:24:18,500
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries he had met as a child,

358
00:24:18,700 --> 00:24:22,000
the man who had invented the World Wide Web: Tim Berners-Lee.

359
00:24:22,600 --> 00:24:29,000
In the 1990s Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on one of the most lucrative inventions of the 20th century

360
00:24:29,200 --> 00:24:32,600
but instead of profiting from the invention of the World Wide Web,

361
00:24:32,800 --> 00:24:35,300
he gave it away for free.

362
00:24:35,800 --> 00:24:39,400
It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.

363
00:24:41,000 --> 00:24:44,600
Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.

364
00:24:44,700 --> 00:24:51,400
Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genious who doesn't, in any sense, cash out.

365
00:24:51,600 --> 00:24:55,800
He's not at all interested in how he's going figure out how to make a billion dollars.

366
00:24:55,900 --> 00:24:57,600
People would have seen "Oh, there's money to be made there!"

367
00:24:57,800 --> 00:25:01,000
so there would have been lots of little webs, instead of one big one.

368
00:25:01,200 --> 00:25:04,400
And one little web and also which doesn't work.

369
00:25:04,600 --> 00:25:06,800
Because you can't follow links from one to the other.

370
00:25:09,900 --> 00:25:13,500
Now you had to have the critical masses, this thing was in the entire planet

371
00:25:13,700 --> 00:25:17,600
so is not gonna work unless the whole planet can get onboard.

372
00:25:22,200 --> 00:25:28,500
I mean I, you know, feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is

373
00:25:28,700 --> 00:25:33,400
to just, kind of, take what you're given and, you know, follow the things that adults told you to do

374
00:25:33,600 --> 00:25:37,300
and, you know, your parents told you to do and that society tells you to do.

375
00:25:37,500 --> 00:25:41,100
I think you should always be questioning, you know, I take this very scientific attitude

376
00:25:41,300 --> 00:25:42,800
that everything you've learned is just provisional

377
00:25:42,900 --> 00:25:46,700
that, you know, is always open to recantation or refutation or questioning.

378
00:25:46,900 --> 00:25:49,400
And I think the same applies to society

379
00:25:49,600 --> 00:25:52,200
Once I realised that there where real serious problems,

380
00:25:52,400 --> 00:25:54,900
fundamental problems that I could do something to address

381
00:25:55,100 --> 00:25:58,400
I didn't see a way to forget that, I didn't see a why not to.

382
00:26:02,200 --> 00:26:06,400
We just started spending a lot of time, just kind of as friends,

383
00:26:08,800 --> 00:26:11,300
We would just talk for hours into the night

384
00:26:14,300 --> 00:26:17,200
I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me.

385
00:26:17,400 --> 00:26:19,300
I think to some degree I was like

386
00:26:19,400 --> 00:26:24,300
"This is a terrible idea and impossible and therefore I will pretend it is not happening".

387
00:26:25,200 --> 00:26:29,200
As my marriage was breaking down and I was really stuck without anywhere to go

388
00:26:29,400 --> 00:26:32,500
we became roommates and I brought my daughter over.

389
00:26:34,200 --> 00:26:39,200
We moved in an unfurnished house, it was really peaceful, like, my life had not been peaceful for a while

390
00:26:39,300 --> 00:26:40,800
and, really, neither had his.

391
00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:53,600
We were extremely close, from the beginning of our romantic relationship.

392
00:26:53,700 --> 00:26:57,000
We just, we were in constant contact.

393
00:26:57,500 --> 00:27:02,000
But we're both really difficult people to deal with.

394
00:27:04,720 --> 00:27:07,100
In a very Ally McBeal discussion,

395
00:27:07,200 --> 00:27:10,700
he confessed we had a theme song and I made him play it for me.

396
00:27:12,200 --> 00:27:14,900
It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple.

397
00:27:16,600 --> 00:27:21,900
I think it was just that sense of, kind of, being a little bit embattled

398
00:27:22,000 --> 00:27:28,400
that the song has. And it also had like this hopefulness, too.

399
00:27:36,590 --> 00:27:41,900
In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic about life.

400
00:27:41,970 --> 00:27:44,390
Even when he didn't feel it.

401
00:27:44,500 --> 00:27:46,890
He could be tremendously optimistic about life.

402
00:27:53,400 --> 00:27:57,700
Aaron: What are you doing?
Quinn: Flickr has video now

403
00:27:59,000 --> 00:28:04,800
Swartz threw his energy into a string of new projects involving access to public information

404
00:28:04,900 --> 00:28:08,600
including an accountability website called "Watchdog.net"

405
00:28:08,650 --> 00:28:10,800
and a project called the "Open Library".

406
00:28:10,800 --> 00:28:13,400
So the Open Library project is a website,

407
00:28:13,450 --> 00:28:17,300
that you can visit at openlibrary.org and the idea is to be huge wiki,

408
00:28:17,350 --> 00:28:19,920
a kind of a website with one page per book.

409
00:28:20,062 --> 00:28:23,600
So for every book ever published you wanna have a webpage about it

410
00:28:23,600 --> 00:28:25,831
which combines all the information from publishers,

411
00:28:25,866 --> 00:28:29,084
from book sellers, from libraries, from readers

412
00:28:29,310 --> 00:28:31,155
under one site and then gives you links

413
00:28:31,191 --> 00:28:34,600
so that you can buy it, you can borrow it or you can browse it.

414
00:28:34,640 --> 00:28:37,173
I love libraries, you know, I'm the kind of person who goes

415
00:28:37,200 --> 00:28:39,600
to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.

416
00:28:39,700 --> 00:28:42,622
That's the dream of Open library, it's building this website

417
00:28:42,648 --> 00:28:45,991
where both you can meet from book to book, from person to author

418
00:28:46,020 --> 00:28:50,142
from subject to idea. You go through this vast tree of knowledge

419
00:28:50,195 --> 00:28:52,600
that has been embedded and lost in big physical libraries,

420
00:28:52,700 --> 00:28:55,644
that's hard to find, that's not very well accessible online,

421
00:28:55,680 --> 00:28:58,586
it's really important because books are our cultural legacy,

422
00:28:58,986 --> 00:29:01,226
you know, books are the place where people write things down,

423
00:29:02,300 --> 00:29:04,088
and to have that all swallowed up by one corporation,

424
00:29:04,693 --> 00:29:06,222
it's kind of scary.

425
00:29:06,871 --> 00:29:10,737
How can you bring public access to the public domain?

426
00:29:10,780 --> 00:29:14,773
It may sound obvious, that you'd have public access to public domain,

427
00:29:14,826 --> 00:29:19,410
but in fact it's not true. So the public domain should be free to all,

428
00:29:19,670 --> 00:29:21,120
but it's often locked up.

429
00:29:21,395 --> 00:29:25,500
There's often guard gates, it is just like having national park

430
00:29:25,600 --> 00:29:29,093
but with a moat around it and gun turrets pointed to out

431
00:29:29,120 --> 00:29:32,933
in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain.

432
00:29:33,022 --> 00:29:36,328
One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in, was

433
00:29:36,600 --> 00:29:39,306
bringing public access to the public domain.

434
00:29:39,368 --> 00:29:42,500
This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble.

435
00:29:46,106 --> 00:29:52,240
I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States.

436
00:29:54,400 --> 00:29:58,906
What I discovered was a puzzling system called "PACER",

437
00:29:59,040 --> 00:30:02,888
which stands for "Public Access to Court Electronic Records"

438
00:30:03,048 --> 00:30:07,500
I started googling and that's when I ran across Carl Malamud.

439
00:30:08,835 --> 00:30:14,897
Access to legal materials in the United States is a 10 billion dollar per year business.

440
00:30:15,004 --> 00:30:20,097
PACER is just this incredible abomination of government service.

441
00:30:20,100 --> 00:30:25,333
It's 10 cents a page, it's this most brain dead code you've ever seen.

442
00:30:25,377 --> 00:30:29,500
You can't search it, you can't bookmark anything, you got to have a credit card.

443
00:30:29,600 --> 00:30:33,848
and these are public records, it's, you know, US district courts are very important,

444
00:30:35,600 --> 00:30:38,400
it's where all our seminal litigations starts, civil right cases,

445
00:30:38,435 --> 00:30:42,500
patent cases, all sorts of stuff, and journalists, and students,

446
00:30:42,600 --> 00:30:48,500
citizens and lawyers all need access to PACER and it fights in every step of the way.

447
00:30:48,551 --> 00:30:51,857
People without means can't see the law

448
00:30:51,893 --> 00:30:55,040
as readily as people that have that gold American express card.

449
00:30:55,093 --> 00:30:57,800
It's a poll tax on access to justice.

450
00:30:57,800 --> 00:31:04,800
You know the law is the Operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?

451
00:31:04,900 --> 00:31:07,164
You know, that's not a much of democracy.

452
00:31:07,190 --> 00:31:11,964
They make about a 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system,

453
00:31:11,982 --> 00:31:16,700
and it doesn't cost anything near that according to their own records.

454
00:31:16,730 --> 00:31:18,364
In fact, it's illegal

455
00:31:18,906 --> 00:31:23,964
the "e-Government Act" of 2002 states that the court may charge

456
00:31:24,008 --> 00:31:30,700
only to the extent necessary in order to reimburse the cost of running PACER.

457
00:31:34,620 --> 00:31:37,386
As the founder of public.resource.org,

458
00:31:37,466 --> 00:31:40,408
Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges.

459
00:31:40,530 --> 00:31:43,786
He started a programme called "The PACER recycling Project",

460
00:31:44,026 --> 00:31:47,440
where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for

461
00:31:47,635 --> 00:31:49,920
to a free database so others can use them.

462
00:31:50,053 --> 00:31:53,120
The PACER people were getting a lot of flak from congress

463
00:31:53,160 --> 00:31:56,693
and others about public access and so they put together a system

464
00:31:56,711 --> 00:32:01,700
in 17 libraries across the country that was free PACER access.

465
00:32:01,800 --> 00:32:05,875
You know, that's 1 library every 22,000 square miles I believe.

466
00:32:05,902 --> 00:32:07,700
So wasn't like really convenient.

467
00:32:08,035 --> 00:32:11,591
I encouraged volunteers to join the so called ThumbDrive corp.

468
00:32:12,080 --> 00:32:16,782
and download document from public access libraries and upload them to the PACER recycling site.

469
00:32:17,040 --> 00:32:19,271
People take a ThumbDrive as one of these libraries

470
00:32:19,280 --> 00:32:22,026
and they download a bunch of documents and send them to me.

471
00:32:23,022 --> 00:32:24,853
I mean, it was just a joke

472
00:32:24,888 --> 00:32:28,551
In fact when you click on ThumbDrive corps there was a "Wizard of Oz"

473
00:32:28,604 --> 00:32:31,700
you know the Munchkin singing video clip came up.

474
00:32:35,288 --> 00:32:38,640
But of course I get the phone call from Steve Schultze and Aaron

475
00:32:38,640 --> 00:32:42,700
saying "Gee! We would like to join the Thumbdrive corp!"

476
00:32:43,440 --> 00:32:47,466
Around that time, I ran into Aaron at the conference.

477
00:32:47,490 --> 00:32:51,546
This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.

478
00:32:51,600 --> 00:32:53,786
So I approached him and said

479
00:32:53,840 --> 00:32:58,110
"Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the PACER problem."

480
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:02,080
Schultze had already developed a program

481
00:33:02,124 --> 00:33:05,911
that could automatically download PACER documents from the trial libraries.

482
00:33:06,500 --> 00:33:08,462
Swartz wanted to take a look.

483
00:33:08,657 --> 00:33:13,653
So I showed him the code and I didn't know what would come next,

484
00:33:13,733 --> 00:33:18,942
but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours of that conference,

485
00:33:18,977 --> 00:33:22,071
he was sitting in the corner, improving my code,

486
00:33:22,097 --> 00:33:26,515
recruiting a friend of his that lived near one of these libraries,

487
00:33:26,560 --> 00:33:31,653
to go into the library and to begin to test his improved code,

488
00:33:32,080 --> 00:33:38,293
at which point the folks at the courts realized something's not going quite according to plan.

489
00:33:38,337 --> 00:33:42,311
And data started to come in... and come in... and come in...

490
00:33:42,355 --> 00:33:47,500
and soon there was 760 GigaBytes of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.

491
00:33:48,740 --> 00:33:51,955
Using information retrieved from the trial libraries,

492
00:33:51,982 --> 00:33:57,130
Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the PACER system.

493
00:33:57,288 --> 00:34:01,500
He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million federal court documents,

494
00:34:01,600 --> 00:34:04,275
almost 20 million pages of text.

495
00:34:04,320 --> 00:34:07,484
Now, I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps

496
00:34:07,530 --> 00:34:11,804
exceeded the expectations of the people running the pilot access project

497
00:34:11,884 --> 00:34:14,500
but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal.

498
00:34:14,862 --> 00:34:19,500
Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to the New York Times about what happened.

499
00:34:20,070 --> 00:34:22,737
They also caught the attention of the FBI.

500
00:34:22,950 --> 00:34:26,311
who began to stake-out Swartz's parent's house in Illinois.

501
00:34:26,570 --> 00:34:31,004
I get a tweet from his mother saying: "Call me!!"

502
00:34:31,102 --> 00:34:33,520
I thought "What the hell is going on here?"

503
00:34:33,570 --> 00:34:36,560
and so I found, I got hold of Aaron and, you know

504
00:34:36,640 --> 00:34:39,564
Aaron's mother was like "Oh my god, FBI! FBI! FBI!"

505
00:34:40,151 --> 00:34:46,133
An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway trying to see if Aaron is in this room.

506
00:34:47,500 --> 00:34:50,266
and I remember being home that day and wondering why

507
00:34:50,293 --> 00:34:53,244
this car was driving down our driveway and just driving back out,

508
00:34:53,724 --> 00:34:55,500
That's weird!

509
00:34:56,500 --> 00:34:59,537
Like 5 years later, I read this FBI file and I'm like

510
00:34:59,591 --> 00:35:00,830
Oh my goodness!

511
00:35:01,503 --> 00:35:03,153
that was the FBI agent

512
00:35:04,208 --> 00:35:05,192
in my driveway.

513
00:35:05,418 --> 00:35:08,075
He was terrified, he was totally terrified.

514
00:35:09,717 --> 00:35:13,623
He was way more terrified after the FBI actually

515
00:35:13,896 --> 00:35:16,640
called him up on the phone, tried to suck an amenda[?]

516
00:35:16,640 --> 00:35:18,597
coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.

517
00:35:19,040 --> 00:35:21,792
He said he went home and laid down on the bed

518
00:35:21,792 --> 00:35:23,790
and, you know, was shaking.

519
00:35:25,620 --> 00:35:27,750
The downloading also uncovered massive

520
00:35:27,792 --> 00:35:30,141
privacy violations in the court documents.

521
00:35:30,390 --> 00:35:34,094
Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result

522
00:35:35,152 --> 00:35:38,875
and the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges.

523
00:35:39,628 --> 00:35:43,068
To this day I find it remarkable that anybody,

524
00:35:43,260 --> 00:35:47,007
even at the most remote Podunk field office of the FBI,

525
00:35:47,317 --> 00:35:49,661
thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars

526
00:35:49,802 --> 00:35:53,049
was investigating people for criminal theft

527
00:35:53,124 --> 00:35:55,581
on the grounds that they had made the law public.

528
00:35:55,741 --> 00:35:57,952
How can you call yourself a lawman,

529
00:35:58,291 --> 00:36:01,703
and think there can possibly be anything wrong in this whole world

530
00:36:01,882 --> 00:36:03,487
with making the law public?

531
00:36:03,736 --> 00:36:06,263
Aaron was willing to put himself at risk

532
00:36:06,447 --> 00:36:08,800
for the causes that he believed in.

533
00:36:09,576 --> 00:36:11,336
Bothered by wealth disparity,

534
00:36:11,557 --> 00:36:13,440
Swartz moves beyond technology

535
00:36:13,468 --> 00:36:15,985
in into a broader range of political causes.

536
00:36:16,225 --> 00:36:18,738
I went into congress, and I invited him to

537
00:36:18,823 --> 00:36:21,425
come and hangout an intern for us for a while

538
00:36:21,712 --> 00:36:25,035
so that he could learn, you know, the political process.

539
00:36:25,303 --> 00:36:27,816
He was sort of learning about a new community

540
00:36:27,825 --> 00:36:28,865
and a new set of skills

541
00:36:29,200 --> 00:36:31,120
and kind of learning to hack politics.

542
00:36:31,505 --> 00:36:34,315
It seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away

543
00:36:34,315 --> 00:36:36,423
until they whole bodies are dripping with sweat,

544
00:36:36,701 --> 00:36:38,884
faced with the knowledge that if they dared to stop

545
00:36:38,903 --> 00:36:40,880
they won't be able to put food on the table that night,

546
00:36:41,369 --> 00:36:43,915
while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day

547
00:36:43,929 --> 00:36:45,463
just by sitting and watching TV.

548
00:36:46,592 --> 00:36:48,621
But apparently the world is ridiculous.

549
00:36:49,520 --> 00:36:51,242
So, I co-founded a group called

550
00:36:51,261 --> 00:36:53,077
the "Progressive Change Campaign Committee"

551
00:36:53,129 --> 00:36:56,145
and what we're trying to do is we try to organise people over the Internet

552
00:36:56,145 --> 00:36:58,130
who care about progressive politics

553
00:36:58,136 --> 00:37:00,100
and moving the country in a more progressive direction,

554
00:37:00,296 --> 00:37:01,624
to kind of come together

555
00:37:01,800 --> 00:37:03,368
join our e-mail list, join our campaign,

556
00:37:03,370 --> 00:37:06,128
help get progressive candidates selected all across the country.

557
00:37:06,272 --> 00:37:09,264
The group is responsible for igniting the grassroots efforts

558
00:37:09,270 --> 00:37:12,616
behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate.

559
00:37:13,032 --> 00:37:15,160
He might have thought was a dumb system, but

560
00:37:15,352 --> 00:37:17,512
he came in and he said I need to learn this system,

561
00:37:17,688 --> 00:37:20,992
cause it can be manipulated, like any, you know, like any social system.

562
00:37:21,488 --> 00:37:23,848
But his passion for knowledge and libraries

563
00:37:23,904 --> 00:37:25,272
didn't take a back seat.

564
00:37:25,744 --> 00:37:27,270
Aaron began to take a closer look

565
00:37:27,296 --> 00:37:30,488
at institutions that publish academic journal articles.

566
00:37:31,248 --> 00:37:33,944
A virtue of being a student at a major US univerity

567
00:37:33,952 --> 00:37:37,920
I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

568
00:37:38,384 --> 00:37:41,160
Pretty much every major university in the United States

569
00:37:41,200 --> 00:37:42,808
pays these sort of licencing fees

570
00:37:42,832 --> 00:37:46,072
to organizations like JSTOR and Thompson ISI

571
00:37:46,496 --> 00:37:49,056
to get access to scholarly journals that

572
00:37:49,096 --> 00:37:50,640
the rest of the world can't read.

573
00:37:50,960 --> 00:37:53,064
These scholarly journals and articles

574
00:37:53,248 --> 00:37:57,240
are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online

575
00:37:57,288 --> 00:38:00,048
and many had been payed for with taxpayer money

576
00:38:00,296 --> 00:38:02,040
or with government grants.

577
00:38:02,480 --> 00:38:04,952
But to read them you often have to pay again

578
00:38:05,130 --> 00:38:08,480
handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

579
00:38:08,830 --> 00:38:11,048
These licensing fees are so substantial that

580
00:38:11,152 --> 00:38:12,990
people who are studying in India,

581
00:38:12,995 --> 00:38:14,792
instead of studying in the United States,

582
00:38:15,104 --> 00:38:16,704
don't have this kind of access.

583
00:38:16,880 --> 00:38:19,096
They're locked out from all of these journals.

584
00:38:19,472 --> 00:38:22,704
They're locked out from our entire scientific legacy.

585
00:38:22,992 --> 00:38:26,248
I mean, a lot of those journal articles go back to the enlightenment.

586
00:38:26,800 --> 00:38:29,600
Everytime someone has written down a scientific paper,

587
00:38:29,610 --> 00:38:32,200
it has been scanned, digitized and put in these collections.

588
00:38:32,848 --> 00:38:35,568
That is a legacy that has been brought to us

589
00:38:35,768 --> 00:38:38,432
by the history of people doing interesting work,

590
00:38:38,464 --> 00:38:39,672
the history of scientists,

591
00:38:39,768 --> 00:38:43,136
it's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people

592
00:38:43,392 --> 00:38:45,904
but instead it's been locked down and put online

593
00:38:45,910 --> 00:38:48,448
by handful of for-profit corporations,

594
00:38:48,616 --> 00:38:51,336
who are then trying to get the maximum profit as they can out of it.

595
00:38:53,376 --> 00:38:57,288
So, a researcher paid by the University, or the people

596
00:38:57,688 --> 00:39:01,016
publishes a paper and in the very very last step of that process,

597
00:39:01,040 --> 00:39:03,480
after all the work is done, after all the original research is done,

598
00:39:03,490 --> 00:39:05,856
the thinking, the lab work, the analysis,

599
00:39:05,864 --> 00:39:08,232
after everything is done, at that last stage,

600
00:39:08,488 --> 00:39:11,744
then the researcher has to handover his or her copyright

601
00:39:11,760 --> 00:39:13,740
to this multi billion dollar company.

602
00:39:14,384 --> 00:39:15,280
And it's sick.

603
00:39:15,400 --> 00:39:17,864
It's an entire economy built on volunteer labour,

604
00:39:18,216 --> 00:39:21,008
and then the publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream.

605
00:39:21,744 --> 00:39:23,704
Talk about a scam!

606
00:39:23,976 --> 00:39:28,936
One publisher in Britain made a profit of 3 billion dollars last year.

607
00:39:28,976 --> 00:39:30,184
I mean, what a racket!

608
00:39:30,472 --> 00:39:33,944
JSTOR is just a very very small player in that story,

609
00:39:33,976 --> 00:39:38,544
but for some reason JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront.

610
00:39:41,616 --> 00:39:43,720
He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing,

611
00:39:44,384 --> 00:39:46,352
and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,

612
00:39:46,376 --> 00:39:49,520
but I think they... at some point Aaron asked the question:

613
00:39:50,096 --> 00:39:53,048
"How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"

614
00:39:54,368 --> 00:39:58,064
and they gave some... I think is 200 billion dollars

615
00:39:58,070 --> 00:40:00,060
something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.

616
00:40:00,968 --> 00:40:02,888
Working at a fellowship at Harward

617
00:40:02,960 --> 00:40:07,392
he knew users on MIT's famously open and fast network next door

618
00:40:07,552 --> 00:40:10,328
had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR.

619
00:40:10,392 --> 00:40:12,320
Swartz saw an opportunity.

620
00:40:12,424 --> 00:40:14,320
You have the key to those gates,

621
00:40:14,400 --> 00:40:17,328
and, with a little bit of shell script magic

622
00:40:17,888 --> 00:40:19,864
you can get those journal articles.

623
00:40:21,024 --> 00:40:23,576
On September 24th 2010

624
00:40:23,752 --> 00:40:27,112
Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop

625
00:40:27,136 --> 00:40:30,544
on the MIT network, under the name Gary Host.

626
00:40:31,088 --> 00:40:34,248
The client name was registered as "ghost_laptop"

627
00:40:35,544 --> 00:40:38,656
He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking.

628
00:40:38,720 --> 00:40:40,456
the JSTOR database was organised, so

629
00:40:40,464 --> 00:40:42,088
was completely trivial to figure out

630
00:40:42,090 --> 00:40:44,440
how you could download all the articles in JSTOR

631
00:40:44,464 --> 00:40:45,560
because are basically numbers

632
00:40:45,590 --> 00:40:48,360
it was basically "/" "/" "/" number article...

633
00:40:48,408 --> 00:40:52,630
...444024, and ...25 ...26

634
00:40:52,640 --> 00:40:55,392
He wrote a python script called “keepgrabbing.py”

635
00:40:55,416 --> 00:40:58,072
which, was keep grabbing one article after another

636
00:40:58,725 --> 00:41:01,825
The next day ghost laptop begins grabbing articles

637
00:41:02,020 --> 00:41:05,400
but soon the computers IP address is blocked.

638
00:41:05,720 --> 00:41:08,400
For Swartz is barely a bump in the road

639
00:41:08,420 --> 00:41:11,425
he quickly reassigns his computer IP address

640
00:41:11,425 --> 00:41:13,420
and keeps downloading.

641
00:41:13,420 --> 00:41:17,625
Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps to try interfere with this

642
00:41:17,630 --> 00:41:19,525
when they noticed that this was happening.

643
00:41:19,530 --> 00:41:22,925
And when the more modest steps don't work, at a certain stage they,

644
00:41:22,930 --> 00:41:26,925
JSTOR, just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database.

645
00:41:26,930 --> 00:41:33,475
So this is a kind of a cat and mouse game, around getting access to the JSTOR database.

646
00:41:33,480 --> 00:41:35,825
Aaron ultimately obviously is the cat

647
00:41:35,830 --> 00:41:42,075
because he has more technical capabilities than the JSTOR database people defending them

648
00:41:42,675 --> 00:41:46,765
Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings.

649
00:41:46,770 --> 00:41:48,515
He went, instead of going through WiFi,

650
00:41:48,520 --> 00:41:51,015
he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network.

651
00:41:51,020 --> 00:41:55,875
And just left it there with an external hard drive dowloading articles to the computer

652
00:41:56,625 --> 00:42:01,900
Unknown to Swartz, his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities.

653
00:42:03,150 --> 00:42:08,325
They didn't stop the downloads, instead they installed a surveillance camera.

654
00:42:10,200 --> 00:42:14,670
They found that computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building.

655
00:42:14,675 --> 00:42:18,740
They could have unplugged it, they could have waited for the guy to come back

656
00:42:18,750 --> 00:42:23,640
and say "Dude, what are you doing? You know, cut it out. Who are you?"

657
00:42:23,650 --> 00:42:25,640
and they could have done all this kind of stuff, but they didn't.

658
00:42:25,650 --> 00:42:29,905
What they wanted to do was film it to gather evidences to make a case

659
00:42:29,920 --> 00:42:32,825
That's the only reason you film something like that.

660
00:42:38,100 --> 00:42:41,575
At first the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera

661
00:42:41,650 --> 00:42:45,275
was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans.

662
00:42:53,100 --> 00:42:56,025
But days later, it caught Swartz.

663
00:43:05,550 --> 00:43:11,215
Swartz is replacing a hard drive, he takes it out of his backpack,

664
00:43:11,220 --> 00:43:15,750
leans out of frame for about 5 minutes, and then leaves.

665
00:43:37,025 --> 00:43:42,150
And then they, like, organise like a stake-out where as he was biking home from MIT

666
00:43:42,325 --> 00:43:46,400
these cops came out from, like, other side of the road, or something like that, instead of going after him

667
00:43:49,375 --> 00:43:55,000
He describes that he was pressed down and assaulted by the police

668
00:43:55,000 --> 00:43:57,800
he tells me that they... it's unclear they were police

669
00:43:57,810 --> 00:44:02,100
that were after him, he thought that someone was trying to attack him.

670
00:44:02,150 --> 00:44:04,350
He does tell me they beat him up.

671
00:44:08,150 --> 00:44:09,500
He was just devastated.

672
00:44:09,525 --> 00:44:14,800
The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution for anyone in our family

673
00:44:14,800 --> 00:44:18,175
was so foreign and uncomprensible, I didn't know what to do.

674
00:44:18,250 --> 00:44:21,315
Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house,

675
00:44:21,320 --> 00:44:24,775
his apartment in Canbridge and his office at Harvard.

676
00:44:27,670 --> 00:44:33,625
Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police,

677
00:44:33,775 --> 00:44:37,150
they had been taken over by the United States secret service.

678
00:44:37,550 --> 00:44:42,400
The secret service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984,

679
00:44:42,600 --> 00:44:46,600
but 6 weeks after attack on 9/11, their role expanded.

680
00:44:48,875 --> 00:44:50,925
President Bush used the "Patriot Act"

681
00:44:51,075 --> 00:44:55,350
to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces".

682
00:44:56,575 --> 00:45:01,500
The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists.

683
00:45:01,600 --> 00:45:06,865
According to the secret service, they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact,

684
00:45:06,870 --> 00:45:11,400
organized criminal groups or use of schemes involving new technology.

685
00:45:11,700 --> 00:45:16,200
The secret service turns Swartz's case over to the Boston US attorney's office.

686
00:45:16,200 --> 00:45:17,915
There was a guy in the US attorney's office

687
00:45:17,920 --> 00:45:22,175
who had the title "Head of the computer crimes division" or "task force"

688
00:45:22,300 --> 00:45:24,515
I don't know what else he had going

689
00:45:24,520 --> 00:45:27,390
but you're certainly not much of a computer crimes prosecutor

690
00:45:27,400 --> 00:45:31,365
without a computer crime to prosecute, so he jumped on it

691
00:45:31,370 --> 00:45:35,145
kept it for himself, didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit

692
00:45:35,150 --> 00:45:37,015
and that's Steve Heymann.

693
00:45:37,020 --> 00:45:41,650
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largerly out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,

694
00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:46,565
but he can be seen here in an episode of the TV show "American Greed"

695
00:45:46,570 --> 00:45:48,640
filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.

696
00:45:48,650 --> 00:45:53,425
He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzalez,

697
00:45:53,525 --> 00:45:57,040
a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades.

698
00:45:57,050 --> 00:46:02,025
Gonzalez masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers

699
00:46:02,075 --> 00:46:04,325
the largest such fraud in history.

700
00:46:04,475 --> 00:46:09,675
Here Heymann, decribing Gonzalez, gives his view on the hacker mindset.

701
00:46:10,200 --> 00:46:16,125
These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by.

702
00:46:16,275 --> 00:46:22,240
They have an ego, they like challenge and of course they like money

703
00:46:22,250 --> 00:46:24,875
and everything you can get from money.

704
00:46:25,075 --> 00:46:27,665
One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzalez case

705
00:46:27,670 --> 00:46:30,000
was a young hacker named Jonathan James.

706
00:46:30,010 --> 00:46:33,115
Believing Gonzalez's crimes would be pinned on him

707
00:46:33,120 --> 00:46:36,025
James committed suicide during the investigation.

708
00:46:36,725 --> 00:46:41,100
In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,

709
00:46:41,250 --> 00:46:46,275
Heymann's boss, US attorney for the disctrict of Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz said this:

710
00:46:46,375 --> 00:46:50,165
"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,

711
00:46:50,170 --> 00:46:52,750
and whether you take documents, data, or dollars."

712
00:46:53,100 --> 00:46:56,100
It's not true. It's obviously not true.

713
00:46:56,400 --> 00:46:58,790
I'm not saying it's harmless

714
00:46:58,800 --> 00:47:05,475
and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalise stealing of information,

715
00:47:06,100 --> 00:47:09,575
but you've gotta be much more subtle in trying to figure out

716
00:47:09,575 --> 00:47:13,675
exactly which kind of harms are harmful here.

717
00:47:14,950 --> 00:47:16,525
So the thing about a crowbar is,

718
00:47:16,548 --> 00:47:18,742
everytime I break into a place with a crowbar,

719
00:47:19,497 --> 00:47:20,708
I do damage. There's no doubt about it.

720
00:47:21,988 --> 00:47:23,371
But when Aaron writes a script

721
00:47:23,380 --> 00:47:27,051
that says: "download, download, download", hundred times at a second,

722
00:47:28,160 --> 00:47:30,342
there's no obvious damage, to anybody.

723
00:47:30,948 --> 00:47:33,462
If he does that for the purpose of gathering

724
00:47:33,577 --> 00:47:35,965
archive to do academic research on it

725
00:47:35,970 --> 00:47:38,057
there's never any damage to anybody.

726
00:47:38,434 --> 00:47:42,685
He wasn't stealing, he wasn't selling what he got or giving it away

727
00:47:43,074 --> 00:47:45,634
he was making a point as far as I can tell.

728
00:47:45,782 --> 00:47:47,965
The arrest took its toll on Swartz.

729
00:47:48,308 --> 00:47:51,314
He just wouldn't talk about it, and he's like very stressed

730
00:47:51,320 --> 00:47:55,245
if you thought like the FBI was like, going to come to your doorstep

731
00:47:55,280 --> 00:47:58,982
any day, any time you went down the hall, even to do your laundry

732
00:47:59,040 --> 00:48:02,388
and they would break in to your apartment, because you left the door unlocked

733
00:48:02,685 --> 00:48:07,177
I'd be pretty stressed. And it was clear,

734
00:48:07,291 --> 00:48:11,074
And so Aaron was always sort of, in a downer mood.

735
00:48:18,420 --> 00:48:22,102
He wouldn't give off any sensitive information

736
00:48:22,110 --> 00:48:23,874
about his whereabouts during this time,

737
00:48:23,880 --> 00:48:27,382
because he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him.

738
00:48:30,948 --> 00:48:34,777
It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism.

739
00:48:35,737 --> 00:48:39,988
Time magazine would later name as their 2011 person of the year

740
00:48:39,990 --> 00:48:41,337
"the protester"

741
00:48:42,651 --> 00:48:46,068
There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.

742
00:48:48,948 --> 00:48:53,817
WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables

743
00:48:53,977 --> 00:48:57,040
Manning had been under arrest at the time,

744
00:48:57,074 --> 00:48:59,657
it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak.

745
00:48:59,908 --> 00:49:04,697
Anonymous which is a kind of protest ensemble

746
00:49:04,720 --> 00:49:07,474
that has lots of hackers in its ranks,

747
00:49:07,520 --> 00:49:11,440
were going on various spreeze of sorts.

748
00:49:11,611 --> 00:49:14,205
If you compare that to what he did

749
00:49:14,342 --> 00:49:18,091
this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,

750
00:49:18,228 --> 00:49:22,057
in a kind of private, professional manner.

751
00:49:22,060 --> 00:49:28,262
It should have never got to the attention of the criminal system,

752
00:49:28,720 --> 00:49:30,731
It just didn't belong there.

753
00:49:36,628 --> 00:49:39,874
Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal,

754
00:49:39,920 --> 00:49:43,451
that involved three months in prison, time in a halfway house,

755
00:49:43,450 --> 00:49:45,257
and a year of home detention,

756
00:49:45,348 --> 00:49:47,508
all without the use of a computer.

757
00:49:47,908 --> 00:49:52,011
It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.

758
00:49:52,217 --> 00:49:56,480
Here we are, we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever

759
00:49:56,560 --> 00:49:58,251
about what the government's case is,

760
00:49:58,250 --> 00:50:01,634
and we have to make this immense decision,

761
00:50:01,805 --> 00:50:05,794
where the lawyer is pushing you do this,

762
00:50:05,965 --> 00:50:09,714
the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand,

763
00:50:09,817 --> 00:50:13,028
and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small.

764
00:50:13,108 --> 00:50:17,485
So whether you're guilty or not you're better off taking the deal.

765
00:50:18,468 --> 00:50:21,085
Boston has its own computer crime division.

766
00:50:21,588 --> 00:50:25,222
Lots of lawyers. Probably more lawyers than they need.

767
00:50:25,420 --> 00:50:28,662
So, you know, you can imagine all sort of cases

768
00:50:28,674 --> 00:50:30,160
where it would be really hard to prosecute

769
00:50:30,182 --> 00:50:33,177
cause you've got some criminals in Russia,

770
00:50:33,188 --> 00:50:38,260
or you've got some people inside a corporation that are gonna have $500 a hour lawyers

771
00:50:38,270 --> 00:50:41,234
or $700 a hour lawyers sitting down against you

772
00:50:41,290 --> 00:50:43,097
and then you got this case with this kid,

773
00:50:43,874 --> 00:50:47,565
which is pretty easy to prove that he did something,

774
00:50:47,570 --> 00:50:52,525
and he has already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI,

775
00:50:52,530 --> 00:50:56,502
so why not go as tough as you can in hearing[?] against that guy?

776
00:50:56,510 --> 00:50:57,805
It's good for you the prosecutor,

777
00:50:57,828 --> 00:51:02,194
it's good for the republic 'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types

778
00:51:02,200 --> 00:51:03,531
I was so scared,

779
00:51:03,577 --> 00:51:05,400
I was so scared of having my computer seized,

780
00:51:05,400 --> 00:51:07,200
I was so scared of going to jail,

781
00:51:07,337 --> 00:51:10,068
because of my computer being seized.

782
00:51:10,137 --> 00:51:13,268
I had confidential material from sources

783
00:51:13,302 --> 00:51:15,260
from my previous work on my laptop.

784
00:51:15,634 --> 00:51:18,760
And that is above all of my priority,

785
00:51:18,770 --> 00:51:20,411
is to keep my sources safe.

786
00:51:20,502 --> 00:51:24,697
I was so scared of what was gonna happen to Ada

787
00:51:25,508 --> 00:51:27,862
Aaron told me that they offered me a deal,

788
00:51:28,331 --> 00:51:32,240
and he finally just said, that he would take it if I told him to

789
00:51:32,891 --> 00:51:35,862
and I came real close to saying "take it".

790
00:51:37,862 --> 00:51:42,800
He had these... he had developed, like, serious political aspirations

791
00:51:42,868 --> 00:51:46,297
in the intervening time between when, you know, that moment

792
00:51:46,605 --> 00:51:51,360
when he ended that entrepreneurial startup life

793
00:51:51,360 --> 00:51:56,171
and begun this new life that had come to this political activism,

794
00:51:57,165 --> 00:52:02,765
and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life

795
00:52:02,982 --> 00:52:05,702
with a felony, you know, he said to me one day

796
00:52:05,805 --> 00:52:07,910
we were walking by the white house and he said to me

797
00:52:07,920 --> 00:52:09,800
"they don't let felons work there"

798
00:52:17,752 --> 00:52:20,696
I mean, you know, he really wanted that to be his life.

799
00:52:22,112 --> 00:52:25,216
He hadn't killed anybody, he hadn't hurt anybody,

800
00:52:25,256 --> 00:52:27,768
he hadn't like stolen money,

801
00:52:28,208 --> 00:52:30,830
he hadn't done anything that seemed felony worthy, right?

802
00:52:31,808 --> 00:52:36,800
And, there's this idea that, like,

803
00:52:36,960 --> 00:52:38,960
there's no reason that he should be labeled a felon

804
00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:42,800
and taken away his right to vote in many states

805
00:52:43,320 --> 00:52:44,784
for doing what he did, like,

806
00:52:44,808 --> 00:52:46,890
that's just outrageous, like, it makes sense for him to be

807
00:52:46,900 --> 00:52:50,208
you know, maybe fined a bunch of money or

808
00:52:50,560 --> 00:52:53,872
you know, asked not to come back at MIT again

809
00:52:54,200 --> 00:52:57,904
but like, to be a felon? To face jail time?

810
00:53:01,120 --> 00:53:03,440
Swartz turned down the plea deal.

811
00:53:03,910 --> 00:53:06,824
Heymann redoubled his efforts,

812
00:53:06,968 --> 00:53:12,512
Heymann continued to press us, at all levels.

813
00:53:12,710 --> 00:53:14,512
Even with the physical evidences

814
00:53:14,520 --> 00:53:18,100
seized from Aaron's Acer computer, hard drive and usb drive,

815
00:53:18,448 --> 00:53:21,232
the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.

816
00:53:21,376 --> 00:53:24,696
Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR?

817
00:53:24,824 --> 00:53:27,160
and just what did he plan to do with them?

818
00:53:29,160 --> 00:53:32,096
The government claim is that he was planning to publish these.

819
00:53:32,464 --> 00:53:36,008
We don't really know whether that was his real intention,

820
00:53:36,016 --> 00:53:37,832
because Aaron also had a history of

821
00:53:39,136 --> 00:53:42,768
doing projects where he'd analyze giant datasets of articles

822
00:53:42,920 --> 00:53:45,048
in order to learn interesting things about them.

823
00:53:45,248 --> 00:53:48,136
The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford

824
00:53:48,650 --> 00:53:53,192
he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.

825
00:53:53,616 --> 00:53:55,824
In a project with Stanford law students,

826
00:53:55,864 --> 00:53:58,664
Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

827
00:53:58,712 --> 00:54:00,904
He uncovered troubling connections between

828
00:54:00,920 --> 00:54:04,208
funders of legal research and favorable results.

829
00:54:04,488 --> 00:54:07,696
He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies

830
00:54:07,700 --> 00:54:11,040
giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles,

831
00:54:11,064 --> 00:54:15,072
which would then beneficial to, like, Exxon, during an oil spill.

832
00:54:15,080 --> 00:54:19,528
So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research.

833
00:54:19,768 --> 00:54:22,680
Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.

834
00:54:22,808 --> 00:54:25,544
In theory he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.

835
00:54:25,656 --> 00:54:27,540
That would have been completely OK.

836
00:54:27,568 --> 00:54:29,976
If he were on the other hand intending to

837
00:54:29,992 --> 00:54:33,040
create a competitive service to JSTOR,

838
00:54:33,184 --> 00:54:37,064
like we're gonna set up our own, you know, access to the Harvard Law Review,

839
00:54:37,064 --> 00:54:39,060
and charge money for it,

840
00:54:39,104 --> 00:54:42,024
then, you know, ok, now it seems like criminal violation

841
00:54:42,040 --> 00:54:44,810
because you're commercially trying to exploit this material

842
00:54:44,820 --> 00:54:47,272
but that's kind of crazy to imagine that's what he was doing.

843
00:54:48,264 --> 00:54:49,624
So, but than there's a middle case

844
00:54:49,648 --> 00:54:52,720
what if he was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world?

845
00:54:53,736 --> 00:54:55,360
But depending on what he was doing,

846
00:54:55,360 --> 00:54:58,648
it creates a very different character to how the law should be thinking about it.

847
00:54:59,184 --> 00:55:00,744
The government was prosecuting him

848
00:55:00,750 --> 00:55:03,536
as if this was like a commercial criminal violation

849
00:55:03,560 --> 00:55:05,608
like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records

850
00:55:05,600 --> 00:55:06,840
like it was that kind of crime.

851
00:55:07,010 --> 00:55:10,424
I don't know what he was gonna do with that database

852
00:55:10,430 --> 00:55:12,248
but I heard from a friend of his

853
00:55:12,360 --> 00:55:14,944
that Aaron had told him he was going to analyze the data

854
00:55:14,950 --> 00:55:18,376
for evidence of corporate funding of climate change research

855
00:55:18,400 --> 00:55:20,024
that led to biased results.

856
00:55:20,432 --> 00:55:22,752
And I totally believe that.

857
00:55:25,216 --> 00:55:27,848
I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me.

858
00:55:29,152 --> 00:55:32,896
and I thought maybe this is a way I could get out of this.

859
00:55:33,136 --> 00:55:35,016
just to exit the situation.

860
00:55:35,224 --> 00:55:37,824
And I didn't want to leave in fear of having my computer seized

861
00:55:38,672 --> 00:55:41,032
I didn't want to leave in fear of having to go to jail

862
00:55:41,048 --> 00:55:43,030
on a contempt of court charge if

863
00:55:43,080 --> 00:55:46,296
they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer

864
00:55:46,616 --> 00:55:49,456
when they came to me and said: "Steve wants to talk to you"

865
00:55:50,560 --> 00:55:52,208
that seemed reasonable.

866
00:55:52,864 --> 00:55:54,760
They offered Norton what is known as

867
00:55:54,770 --> 00:55:57,296
a "Queen for a day" letter or a proffer

868
00:55:57,576 --> 00:56:00,728
it allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case.

869
00:56:00,744 --> 00:56:03,848
Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself,

870
00:56:03,880 --> 00:56:06,240
for any information she revealed during the meeting.

871
00:56:06,352 --> 00:56:07,432
I didn't like it

872
00:56:07,630 --> 00:56:10,608
I told my lawyers repeadetly that I didn't,

873
00:56:10,920 --> 00:56:12,712
this seemed fishy, I didn't like this

874
00:56:12,728 --> 00:56:14,616
I didn't want immunity, I didn't need immunity

875
00:56:14,632 --> 00:56:16,112
I hadn't done anything.

876
00:56:16,248 --> 00:56:18,000
But they were really really stringent

877
00:56:18,032 --> 00:56:21,696
thay did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity.

878
00:56:21,800 --> 00:56:24,928
Interviewer: just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal proffer

879
00:56:24,960 --> 00:56:25,920
Right, a proffer letter

880
00:56:25,920 --> 00:56:28,224
Interviewer: In which you basically handed information over

881
00:56:28,240 --> 00:56:30,312
in exchange for protection from prosecution.

882
00:56:30,360 --> 00:56:33,592
So, it wasn't handing information over,

883
00:56:33,624 --> 00:56:36,304
it was, at least this was how I saw, it was just

884
00:56:36,344 --> 00:56:38,232
having a discussion, having an interview with them

885
00:56:38,256 --> 00:56:41,040
Interviewer: Well, they're asking you questions
Quinn: They're asking me questions

886
00:56:41,072 --> 00:56:42,144
Interviewer: And they can ask about whatever they want
Quinn: Right

887
00:56:42,410 --> 00:56:44,288
Interviewer: and whatever they learn they can go and prosecute for that

888
00:56:44,344 --> 00:56:49,352
Right, I really... right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked.

889
00:56:50,120 --> 00:56:53,536
I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter.

890
00:56:53,800 --> 00:56:56,520
I was ill, I was being pressured by my lawyers,

891
00:56:56,560 --> 00:56:57,712
I was confused.

892
00:56:57,896 --> 00:57:01,208
I was not doing well by this point.

893
00:57:01,216 --> 00:57:02,992
I was depressed, and I was scared,

894
00:57:03,016 --> 00:57:05,648
and I didn't understand the situation I was in.

895
00:57:05,720 --> 00:57:08,888
I had no idea why I was in this situation.

896
00:57:09,000 --> 00:57:13,312
I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong.

897
00:57:13,584 --> 00:57:14,800
We were out of our minds.

898
00:57:15,096 --> 00:57:17,024
Aaron was clearly very destroyed about it,

899
00:57:17,230 --> 00:57:18,624
we were very destroyed about it.

900
00:57:19,024 --> 00:57:20,952
Aaron attorneys were very destroyed about it.

901
00:57:21,176 --> 00:57:23,432
We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys.

902
00:57:23,768 --> 00:57:28,112
I was very unused to being in a room with large men, well armed,

903
00:57:28,672 --> 00:57:30,600
that are continuously telling me I'm lying

904
00:57:30,824 --> 00:57:32,360
and that I must have done something.

905
00:57:33,736 --> 00:57:36,504
I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting

906
00:57:37,184 --> 00:57:39,936
wasn't a crime,

907
00:57:40,960 --> 00:57:43,224
I told them that they were on the wrong side of history

908
00:57:43,232 --> 00:57:44,528
I used that phrase, I said:

909
00:57:44,528 --> 00:57:46,520
"you're on the wrong side of history"

910
00:57:48,648 --> 00:57:49,672
And they looked bored,

911
00:57:49,712 --> 00:57:51,670
they didn't look angry, they just looked bored

912
00:57:52,616 --> 00:57:55,220
and it began to occur to me that

913
00:57:55,230 --> 00:57:57,304
we weren't having the same conversation.

914
00:57:57,344 --> 00:57:59,384
I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know

915
00:57:59,390 --> 00:58:02,688
why people would download journal articles, and eventually

916
00:58:03,120 --> 00:58:04,768
I don't remember what was around it

917
00:58:06,144 --> 00:58:08,400
I mentioned he had done this blog post

918
00:58:08,400 --> 00:58:10,008
the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto"

919
00:58:12,736 --> 00:58:15,608
This is the guerilla open access manifesto

920
00:58:16,080 --> 00:58:19,704
supposedly written in July 2008, in Italy

921
00:58:20,296 --> 00:58:21,560
Information is power.

922
00:58:21,736 --> 00:58:22,816
But like all power,

923
00:58:22,820 --> 00:58:24,872
there are those who want to keep it for themselves.

924
00:58:25,160 --> 00:58:27,264
The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,

925
00:58:27,328 --> 00:58:29,496
published over centuries in books and journals,

926
00:58:29,784 --> 00:58:32,064
is increasingly being digitized and locked up

927
00:58:32,080 --> 00:58:34,060
by a handful of private corporations.

928
00:58:34,320 --> 00:58:38,096
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by.

929
00:58:38,280 --> 00:58:40,496
You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences,

930
00:58:40,504 --> 00:58:42,614
liberating the information locked up by the publishers

931
00:58:42,620 --> 00:58:43,856
and sharing them with your friends.

932
00:58:44,608 --> 00:58:47,424
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground.

933
00:58:47,584 --> 00:58:49,216
It's called stealing or piracy,

934
00:58:49,344 --> 00:58:52,142
as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of

935
00:58:52,150 --> 00:58:54,368
plundering a ship and murdering its crew.

936
00:58:54,728 --> 00:58:57,592
But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative.

937
00:58:57,680 --> 00:58:59,088
Only those blinded by greed

938
00:58:59,112 --> 00:59:01,320
would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

939
00:59:02,168 --> 00:59:04,448
There is no justice in following unjust laws.

940
00:59:04,450 --> 00:59:06,264
It's time to come into the light and,

941
00:59:06,288 --> 00:59:08,328
in the grand tradition of civil disobedience,

942
00:59:08,328 --> 00:59:11,504
declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

943
00:59:12,344 --> 00:59:16,392
The manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people

944
00:59:16,728 --> 00:59:18,390
and also edited by Norton

945
00:59:18,696 --> 00:59:21,168
but it was Swartz who had signed his name to it.

946
00:59:21,624 --> 00:59:25,248
When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron

947
00:59:25,250 --> 00:59:27,616
and tell him everything I can remember about it

948
00:59:28,896 --> 00:59:30,384
And he gets very angry.

949
00:59:34,696 --> 00:59:37,208
The things that I'd done shouldn't have added up that way.

950
00:59:40,416 --> 00:59:42,808
I hadn't done anything wrong

951
00:59:43,272 --> 00:59:45,224
and everything had gone wrong

952
00:59:47,024 --> 00:59:48,216
but I was never...

953
00:59:56,904 --> 00:59:58,664
I'm still angry

954
01:00:00,176 --> 01:00:01,864
I'm still angry that you can...

955
01:00:03,110 --> 01:00:05,728
...try your best with these people to do the right thing

956
01:00:06,360 --> 01:00:08,576
and they turn everything against you

957
01:00:08,600 --> 01:00:11,888
and they will hurt you with anything they can.

958
01:00:14,840 --> 01:00:18,816
And, in that moment, I regret that I said what I did

959
01:00:19,744 --> 01:00:23,216
but my larger regret is that we've settled for this

960
01:00:23,608 --> 01:00:25,432
that we're OK with this

961
01:00:25,840 --> 01:00:28,968
that we're OK with a justice system which tries to game people

962
01:00:28,970 --> 01:00:31,568
into little traps so that they can ruin their lives.

963
01:00:32,784 --> 01:00:35,032
So, yeah, I wish I hadn't said that

964
01:00:35,272 --> 01:00:41,104
but I'm much much angrier that this is where I am

965
01:00:42,552 --> 01:00:46,880
That this is what we as a people, think is OK.

966
01:00:48,296 --> 01:00:52,232
They used every method that I think they could think of

967
01:00:52,256 --> 01:00:55,168
to get her to provide information which would be

968
01:00:55,180 --> 01:00:59,200
unhelpful to Aaron, and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron

969
01:01:00,394 --> 01:01:06,581
But, you know, I don't think she had information that was helpful to the government.

970
01:01:08,032 --> 01:01:12,000
Months go by as Swartz's friends and family await a looming indictment.

971
01:01:12,426 --> 01:01:17,376
In the meantime, Swartz was becoming a goto expert on a series of Internet issues.

972
01:01:17,930 --> 01:01:22,036
Do you think that the Internet is something that should be considered a human right

973
01:01:22,072 --> 01:01:24,580
something that the government can not take away from you?

974
01:01:25,140 --> 01:01:26,967
Yes. Definitely.

975
01:01:27,127 --> 01:01:30,458
I mean, this notion that national security is an excuse to shut down the Internet,

976
01:01:30,624 --> 01:01:34,016
that's exactly what we heard in Egypt, in Syria and all these other countries.

977
01:01:34,290 --> 01:01:37,141
and so its true, sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up

978
01:01:37,178 --> 01:01:39,810
some embarassing material about what what the US government does

979
01:01:40,032 --> 01:01:42,506
and people are going to be organizing to protest about it

980
01:01:42,516 --> 01:01:43,800
and try and change their government.

981
01:01:44,029 --> 01:01:46,160
You know, and that's a good thing.

982
01:01:46,210 --> 01:01:48,225
Thats what all these First Amendment rights of free expression

983
01:01:48,261 --> 01:01:49,950
freedom of association are all about.

984
01:01:49,950 --> 01:01:52,341
and so the notion that we should try and shut those down

985
01:01:52,370 --> 01:01:55,061
I think, just goes against very basic American principles.

986
01:01:55,120 --> 01:01:58,100
a principle, I think, is one that our founding fathers would have understood.

987
01:01:58,138 --> 01:01:59,716
If the Internet had been around back then

988
01:01:59,789 --> 01:02:03,345
instead of putting Post Offices in the Constitution, they would have put ISPs.

989
01:02:05,504 --> 01:02:10,261
Swartz meets activist Taren Steinbrickner-Kauffman and the two begin to date.

990
01:02:10,794 --> 01:02:12,437
...in a massive public outcry.

991
01:02:12,437 --> 01:02:15,616
There is no massive global public outcry. It won't create any change.

992
01:02:15,658 --> 01:02:18,930
You know, 4 people in this city should cause a massive global public outcry.

993
01:02:19,018 --> 01:02:22,140
You know, we need a petition signer.

994
01:02:22,390 --> 01:02:24,196
Without telling her specifics, he warned her

995
01:02:24,225 --> 01:02:27,690
he was involved in something he called simply "the bad thing".

996
01:02:27,800 --> 01:02:29,876
And I had, sort of, crazy theories, like

997
01:02:29,927 --> 01:02:32,340
that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or

998
01:02:33,280 --> 01:02:35,776
I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren.

999
01:02:38,000 --> 01:02:41,767
So sometime in probably late July, Aaron called me

1000
01:02:42,356 --> 01:02:44,480
and I happen to pick up and he said:

1001
01:02:45,265 --> 01:02:47,476
"The bad thing might be in the news tomorrow"

1002
01:02:47,534 --> 01:02:49,629
"Do you want me to tell you or do you want to read about it in the news".

1003
01:02:49,672 --> 01:02:51,520
and I said: "I want you to tell me."

1004
01:02:53,469 --> 01:02:58,654
and he said: "Well, I've been arrested"

1005
01:02:58,690 --> 01:03:00,800
"for downloading too many academic journal articles"

1006
01:03:00,840 --> 01:03:03,440
"and they want to make an example out of me."

1007
01:03:04,240 --> 01:03:08,906
and I was like: "That's it? That's the big fuss? Really?"

1008
01:03:09,288 --> 01:03:11,120
"it doesn't sound like a very big deal."

1009
01:03:11,317 --> 01:03:17,632
On July 14th, 2011, Federal prosecutors indict Swartz on 4 felony counts.

1010
01:03:17,630 --> 01:03:18,613
He gets indicted

1011
01:03:18,871 --> 01:03:24,110
on the same day that two people in England who are part of LulzSec get arrested

1012
01:03:24,410 --> 01:03:26,995
and few other real hackers

1013
01:03:27,288 --> 01:03:29,920
and Aaron is just someone who kind of looks like a hacker

1014
01:03:29,920 --> 01:03:35,082
enough that, they can like, put his head on the stick and put it on the gates.

1015
01:03:35,317 --> 01:03:38,794
Aaron went to surrender and they arrested him.

1016
01:03:39,178 --> 01:03:42,336
they then strip searched him.

1017
01:03:42,417 --> 01:03:45,137
took away his shoelaces, took away his belt

1018
01:03:45,324 --> 01:03:47,520
and left him in solitary confinement.

1019
01:03:50,290 --> 01:03:52,906
The District of Massachusetts, United States Attorney's Office

1020
01:03:52,951 --> 01:03:54,862
released a statement saying:

1021
01:03:54,897 --> 01:03:57,795
"Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison

1022
01:03:57,875 --> 01:04:00,568
to be followed by 3 years of supervised release

1023
01:04:00,666 --> 01:04:05,350
restitution, forefeiture and a fine of upto $1 million dollars."

1024
01:04:06,248 --> 01:04:09,130
He is released on a $100,00 bail.

1025
01:04:09,380 --> 01:04:12,417
The same day, the primary victim in the case JSTOR

1026
01:04:12,560 --> 01:04:17,217
formally drops all charges against Swartz and declines to pursue the case.

1027
01:04:17,822 --> 01:04:21,635
JSTOR, they weren't our friends. They weren't helpful or friendly to us

1028
01:04:21,671 --> 01:04:24,755
but they also were just kind of like "We are not part of this".

1029
01:04:25,280 --> 01:04:27,555
JSTOR, and their parent company Ithica

1030
01:04:27,662 --> 01:04:30,780
also sidestepped requests to talk for the film.

1031
01:04:30,970 --> 01:04:33,324
But at the time they released a statement saying

1032
01:04:33,351 --> 01:04:36,942
it was the government's decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR's.

1033
01:04:38,208 --> 01:04:42,304
And so it was our belief that with that the case would be over

1034
01:04:42,675 --> 01:04:45,350
that we should be able to get Stephen Heymann to drop the case

1035
01:04:45,395 --> 01:04:48,170
or settle in some rational way.

1036
01:04:48,789 --> 01:04:50,133
And the government refused.

1037
01:04:51,137 --> 01:04:52,050
Interviewer: Why?

1038
01:04:55,315 --> 01:04:58,017
Well, because I think, they wanted to make an example out of Aaron

1039
01:04:58,150 --> 01:05:03,200
and they said the reason why they wouldnt move on

1040
01:05:03,235 --> 01:05:05,413
requiring a felony conviction and jail time

1041
01:05:05,484 --> 01:05:12,190
was that they wanted to use this case as a case for deterrence.

1042
01:05:12,192 --> 01:05:13,301
They told us that.

1043
01:05:13,395 --> 01:05:14,168
Interviewer: They told you that?

1044
01:05:14,222 --> 01:05:15,000
Yes.

1045
01:05:15,315 --> 01:05:17,324
Interviewer: This was gonna be an example?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

1046
01:05:17,386 --> 01:05:21,870
Interviewer: He was gonna be an example?
Aaron's Father: Yes. Steve Heymann said that.

1047
01:05:21,955 --> 01:05:23,413
Deterring who?

1048
01:05:23,466 --> 01:05:26,497
There is a lot of people running around and loggin onto JSTOR

1049
01:05:26,515 --> 01:05:29,680
and downloading the articles to make a political statement, I mean, who are they deterring?

1050
01:05:29,720 --> 01:05:35,502
It would be easier to understand the Obama Administration's posture

1051
01:05:35,520 --> 01:05:40,853
of supposedly being for deterrence if this was an Administration that, for instance

1052
01:05:40,880 --> 01:05:45,795
prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime this country has seen in the last 100 years

1053
01:05:45,893 --> 01:05:49,370
the crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street.

1054
01:05:50,124 --> 01:05:58,310
When you start deploying the non-controversial idea of deterrence only selectively

1055
01:05:58,360 --> 01:06:01,964
you stop making a dispassionate analysis of law breaking

1056
01:06:02,000 --> 01:06:06,417
and you start deciding to deploy law enforcement resources

1057
01:06:06,520 --> 01:06:10,151
specifically on the basis of political ideology

1058
01:06:10,275 --> 01:06:15,570
and thats not just un-democratic it is supposed to be un-American.

1059
01:06:19,850 --> 01:06:23,875
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel

1060
01:06:24,150 --> 01:06:27,422
that the straw that broke the camel's back was a press release

1061
01:06:27,466 --> 01:06:31,240
sent out by an organization Swartz founded called "Demand Progress".

1062
01:06:31,333 --> 01:06:33,120
According to the MIT account

1063
01:06:33,191 --> 01:06:35,777
Heymann reacted to the short statement of support

1064
01:06:35,991 --> 01:06:38,186
calling it a wild Internet campaign

1065
01:06:38,302 --> 01:06:44,160
and a foolish move that moved the case from human one-on-one level to an institutional level.

1066
01:06:44,231 --> 01:06:46,622
That was a poisonous combination.

1067
01:06:46,684 --> 01:06:51,137
A prosecutor who didn't want to lose face, who had a political career in the offing maybe

1068
01:06:51,244 --> 01:06:53,448
and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them.

1069
01:06:53,502 --> 01:06:57,617
you spent how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library

1070
01:06:57,898 --> 01:07:00,970
and got your ass handed to you in court. No way!

1071
01:07:00,970 --> 01:07:04,648
I then moved to try and put pressure on MIT in various ways

1072
01:07:04,684 --> 01:07:06,355
to get them to go to the government

1073
01:07:06,391 --> 01:07:10,071
and request the government to stop the prosecution.

1074
01:07:11,217 --> 01:07:13,360
Interviewer: What was MIT's reaction then?

1075
01:07:14,275 --> 01:07:17,520
There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point.

1076
01:07:23,110 --> 01:07:25,724
MIT doesn't defend Aaron

1077
01:07:25,910 --> 01:07:30,497
which to people inside of MIT community seems outrageous

1078
01:07:30,542 --> 01:07:35,700
because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word.

1079
01:07:35,900 --> 01:07:39,715
At MIT the idea of going and running around in routes and tunnels

1080
01:07:39,751 --> 01:07:43,457
that you weren't allowed to be in, was not only a rite of passage,

1081
01:07:43,733 --> 01:07:45,870
it was part of the MIT tour

1082
01:07:45,877 --> 01:07:49,952
and lock picking was a winter course at MIT.

1083
01:07:50,990 --> 01:07:56,074
They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks.

1084
01:07:56,186 --> 01:08:00,780
MIT never stood up and took a position of saying to the Feds:

1085
01:08:00,980 --> 01:08:03,902
"Don't do this. We don't want you to do this

1086
01:08:03,937 --> 01:08:07,280
you are over reacting, this is too strong", that I'm aware of.

1087
01:08:08,800 --> 01:08:12,506
They acted kind of like any corporation would.

1088
01:08:12,551 --> 01:08:15,680
They helped the government, they didn't help us

1089
01:08:15,680 --> 01:08:21,418
unless they felt that they had to, and they never tried to stop it.

1090
01:08:22,442 --> 01:08:25,216
MIT declined repeated requests to comment.

1091
01:08:25,216 --> 01:08:30,208
but they later released a report saying that they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality

1092
01:08:30,208 --> 01:08:35,520
and believed Heymann and the US Attorney's office did not care what MIT thought or said about the case.

1093
01:08:35,861 --> 01:08:41,472
MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos.

1094
01:08:42,069 --> 01:08:47,274
You could argue that MIT turned a blind eye and that was okay for them to do

1095
01:08:47,445 --> 01:08:52,757
but taking that stance, taking that neutral stance in and of itself, was taking a pro-prosecutor stance.

1096
01:08:52,757 --> 01:08:58,922
If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack, they started by selling a bluebox

1097
01:08:58,922 --> 01:09:01,610
which was a thing designed to defraud the phone company.

1098
01:09:01,710 --> 01:09:04,506
If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen,

1099
01:09:04,551 --> 01:09:08,728
they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard

1100
01:09:08,826 --> 01:09:11,093
which was pretty clearly against the rules.

1101
01:09:11,140 --> 01:09:13,431
The difference between Aaron and the people that I just mentioned

1102
01:09:13,466 --> 01:09:16,690
is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place, he didn't just want to make money.

1103
01:09:19,244 --> 01:09:23,300
Swartz continues to be outspoken on a variety of Internet Issues.

1104
01:09:23,440 --> 01:09:28,590
You know, the reason the Internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas.

1105
01:09:28,590 --> 01:09:31,804
and what we need to be focusing on is getting more information about our government

1106
01:09:31,848 --> 01:09:34,540
more accessibility, more discussion, more debate.

1107
01:09:34,741 --> 01:09:38,261
but instead, it seems what the Congress is focused on, is shutting things down

1108
01:09:38,515 --> 01:09:40,426
Aaron thought he could change the world

1109
01:09:40,488 --> 01:09:44,071
just by explaining the world very clearly to people.

1110
01:09:44,346 --> 01:09:48,920
FLAME can literally control your computer and make it spy on you.

1111
01:09:48,960 --> 01:09:52,020
Welcome Aaron, good to have you back on the show here.

1112
01:09:52,060 --> 01:09:54,106
You know, just like spies used to, in olden days,

1113
01:09:54,370 --> 01:09:56,373
put microphones and tap what people are saying,

1114
01:09:56,373 --> 01:09:58,784
now they are using computers to do the same things.

1115
01:09:59,253 --> 01:10:01,621
Swartz's political activity continues,

1116
01:10:01,777 --> 01:10:06,840
his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy.

1117
01:10:06,848 --> 01:10:08,896
It was called SOPA.

1118
01:10:09,200 --> 01:10:12,951
Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous over reach,

1119
01:10:13,084 --> 01:10:15,884
threatening the technical integrity of Internet itself.

1120
01:10:15,893 --> 01:10:18,218
In one of the first things I did was to call Aaron,

1121
01:10:18,240 --> 01:10:21,900
and I said can we do a big online campaign against this,

1122
01:10:21,955 --> 01:10:24,040
"This isn't a bill about copyright."

1123
01:10:25,109 --> 01:10:25,941
"It's not?"

1124
01:10:26,355 --> 01:10:29,930
"No", he said. "It's a bill about the freedom to connect."

1125
01:10:30,533 --> 01:10:31,671
Now I was listening.

1126
01:10:32,177 --> 01:10:35,608
And he thought about it for a while and then said yes,

1127
01:10:35,715 --> 01:10:38,008
and he went and founded Demand Progress.

1128
01:10:38,400 --> 01:10:40,693
Demand Progress in an online activism organization.

1129
01:10:40,720 --> 01:10:44,240
We got around a million and half members now.

1130
01:10:44,355 --> 01:10:47,182
But started in the Fall on 2010.

1131
01:10:47,297 --> 01:10:49,306
Aaron was one of the most prominent people

1132
01:10:49,342 --> 01:10:51,937
in a community of people who helped lead organizing

1133
01:10:52,053 --> 01:10:55,330
around social justice issues at the federal level in this country.

1134
01:10:55,760 --> 01:11:01,440
SOPA was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies,

1135
01:11:01,480 --> 01:11:04,897
but what it did was basically take a sledge hammer

1136
01:11:04,924 --> 01:11:07,060
to a problem that needed a scalpel.

1137
01:11:07,226 --> 01:11:11,795
If passed, the law would allow a company to cut off finances to entire websites

1138
01:11:11,928 --> 01:11:16,650
without due process or even to force Google to exclude their links

1139
01:11:16,949 --> 01:11:20,448
all they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement.

1140
01:11:20,808 --> 01:11:23,884
It pitted the titans of traditional media against the new

1141
01:11:23,928 --> 01:11:26,720
and now far more sophisticated remix culture.

1142
01:11:27,160 --> 01:11:30,222
It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman

1143
01:11:30,382 --> 01:11:33,013
and if they don't do their job of making sure that nobody on their site

1144
01:11:33,066 --> 01:11:35,422
uses it for anything that's even potentially illegal

1145
01:11:35,653 --> 01:11:38,480
the entire site could get shutdown without even so much as a trial.

1146
01:11:38,622 --> 01:11:43,500
This was over the top. I mean, this was a catastrophy.

1147
01:11:43,706 --> 01:11:49,310
This bill poses a serious threat to speech and civil liberties

1148
01:11:49,368 --> 01:11:51,570
for all who use the Internet.

1149
01:11:51,626 --> 01:11:55,848
Only handful of us who said: "Look we are not for piracy either

1150
01:11:56,293 --> 01:11:58,906
but it makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the Internet,

1151
01:11:59,084 --> 01:12:03,466
the domain name system and so much that makes it free and open

1152
01:12:03,591 --> 01:12:06,080
in the name of fighting piracy

1153
01:12:06,142 --> 01:12:07,591
and Aaron got that right away.

1154
01:12:07,680 --> 01:12:09,617
The freedoms guaranteed in our constitution,

1155
01:12:09,653 --> 01:12:13,840
the freedoms our country has been built on would be suddenly deleted.

1156
01:12:14,124 --> 01:12:16,728
New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom

1157
01:12:16,942 --> 01:12:20,130
would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted.

1158
01:12:21,422 --> 01:12:26,850
And I realized that day talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.

1159
01:12:28,497 --> 01:12:33,360
When SOPA was introduced in October 2011 it was considered inevitable.

1160
01:12:33,422 --> 01:12:37,350
Our strategy when it first came out was to hopefully slow the bill down

1161
01:12:37,520 --> 01:12:39,573
maybe weaken it a little bit

1162
01:12:39,600 --> 01:12:44,355
but even we didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill.

1163
01:12:45,920 --> 01:12:49,431
Having worked in Washington what you learn is that

1164
01:12:49,982 --> 01:12:53,377
typically in Washington the legislative fights

1165
01:12:53,644 --> 01:12:57,760
are fights between different sets of corporate money interests.

1166
01:12:58,000 --> 01:13:00,613
And all duking it out to pass legislations

1167
01:13:00,650 --> 01:13:04,995
and the fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interests

1168
01:13:05,386 --> 01:13:08,130
against another set of corporate interests and they are financially

1169
01:13:08,168 --> 01:13:11,160
equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying.

1170
01:13:11,168 --> 01:13:12,661
Those are the closest ones.

1171
01:13:13,013 --> 01:13:15,395
The ones that aren't even fights, typically,

1172
01:13:15,528 --> 01:13:18,440
are ones where all the money is on one side

1173
01:13:18,480 --> 01:13:20,346
all the corporations are on one side,

1174
01:13:20,391 --> 01:13:22,850
and its just millions of people on the other side.

1175
01:13:25,141 --> 01:13:30,560
I haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service

1176
01:13:31,413 --> 01:13:36,832
there were more than 40 United States senators on that bill as co-sponsors.

1177
01:13:37,557 --> 01:13:43,744
So there were already a long long way to getting 60 votes to clear all the procedural hoops.

1178
01:13:44,682 --> 01:13:48,010
Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period.

1179
01:13:48,010 --> 01:13:51,697
Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshall enormous support

1180
01:13:52,106 --> 01:13:56,168
using traditional outrage combined with commonly used Voice over IP

1181
01:13:56,370 --> 01:13:59,182
to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

1182
01:13:59,850 --> 01:14:03,857
I've never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level,

1183
01:14:03,928 --> 01:14:08,320
both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side.

1184
01:14:08,453 --> 01:14:12,577
Millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-SOPA petitions.

1185
01:14:13,048 --> 01:14:14,970
Congress was caught off guard.

1186
01:14:15,660 --> 01:14:20,231
There was just something about watching those clueless member of Congress debate the bill,

1187
01:14:20,680 --> 01:14:22,791
watching them insist they could regulate the Internet

1188
01:14:22,835 --> 01:14:24,951
and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them.

1189
01:14:25,093 --> 01:14:26,071
I'm not a nerd.

1190
01:14:26,133 --> 01:14:27,640
I am just not enough of a nerd.

1191
01:14:27,688 --> 01:14:30,737
...maybe we ought to ask some nerds what this thing really does.

1192
01:14:30,869 --> 01:14:32,896
Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds.

1193
01:14:35,617 --> 01:14:36,390
Really?

1194
01:14:39,760 --> 01:14:41,031
Nerds?

1195
01:14:42,088 --> 01:14:45,546
You know, I think actually the word you are looking for is "Experts".

1196
01:14:46,698 --> 01:14:53,290
to enlighten you, so your laws won't backfire, break the Internet.

1197
01:14:53,351 --> 01:14:56,702
We used the term Geek, but we are allowed to use that because we are geeks.

1198
01:14:56,800 --> 01:15:01,880
The fact that it got as far as it did without them talking to any technical experts

1199
01:15:01,888 --> 01:15:04,704
reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town.

1200
01:15:04,737 --> 01:15:10,115
I'm looking for somebody to come before this body and testify in a hearing

1201
01:15:10,248 --> 01:15:12,080
and say this is why they're wrong.

1202
01:15:12,320 --> 01:15:15,484
There used to be an office that provided Science and Technology advice

1203
01:15:15,546 --> 01:15:19,480
and members could go to them and say "Help me understand XYZ".

1204
01:15:19,488 --> 01:15:22,069
and Gingrich killed it. He said it was waste of money.

1205
01:15:22,069 --> 01:15:25,717
Ever since then Congress has plunged into the dark ages.

1206
01:15:26,097 --> 01:15:29,850
I don't think anybody really thought that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron.

1207
01:15:30,222 --> 01:15:34,053
I think it was worth trying, but it didn't seem winnable.

1208
01:15:34,506 --> 01:15:37,130
And I remember, maybe a few months later, I remember him

1209
01:15:37,146 --> 01:15:40,030
just turning to me and being like "I think we might win this"

1210
01:15:40,394 --> 01:15:42,250
and I was like "That would be amazing!"

1211
01:15:44,500 --> 01:15:50,222
Calls to Congress continue when the domain hosting site GoDaddy becomes a supporter of the bill.

1212
01:15:50,248 --> 01:15:54,920
Tens of thousands of users transfer their domain names in protest.

1213
01:15:55,351 --> 01:15:59,650
Within a week, a humbled GoDaddy reverses their position on SOPA.

1214
01:15:59,650 --> 01:16:04,453
About when the Congress people that supported these

1215
01:16:04,471 --> 01:16:08,320
the record and movie industries realize that there was this backlash

1216
01:16:08,346 --> 01:16:10,364
they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit

1217
01:16:10,430 --> 01:16:11,644
you could see the curve happening.

1218
01:16:11,688 --> 01:16:15,890
you could see that our arguments were starting to resonate.

1219
01:16:15,946 --> 01:16:18,980
It was like Aaron had been like striking a match and it was being blown out...

1220
01:16:18,986 --> 01:16:20,864
striking another one and being blown out and finally

1221
01:16:21,110 --> 01:16:24,071
he managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught

1222
01:16:24,789 --> 01:16:26,873
and then they turned into this roaring blaze.

1223
01:16:27,029 --> 01:16:32,042
On January 16th, 2012, the White House issued a statement saying

1224
01:16:32,042 --> 01:16:33,706
they didn't support the bill.

1225
01:16:34,048 --> 01:16:35,776
and then this happened.

1226
01:16:36,180 --> 01:16:39,866
I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy

1227
01:16:39,893 --> 01:16:42,040
and we should deal with them in a serious way

1228
01:16:42,560 --> 01:16:44,337
but this bill is not the right bill.

1229
01:16:44,453 --> 01:16:48,930
When Jimmy Wales put his support towards blacking out Wikipedia

1230
01:16:49,057 --> 01:16:52,666
the number 5 most popular website in the world

1231
01:16:52,773 --> 01:16:58,680
this is a website that 7% of all of the clicks on anywhere on the Internet.

1232
01:16:58,720 --> 01:17:00,110
Wikipedia went black,

1233
01:17:00,266 --> 01:17:01,580
Reddit went black,

1234
01:17:01,724 --> 01:17:02,970
Craigslist went black,

1235
01:17:03,306 --> 01:17:06,110
phonelines on Capitol Hill flat out melted,

1236
01:17:06,280 --> 01:17:09,395
members of Congress started rushing to issue statements

1237
01:17:09,422 --> 01:17:12,960
retracting their support for the bill, that they were promoting just a couple of days ago.

1238
01:17:13,600 --> 01:17:17,973
Within 24 hours the number of oponents of SOPA in Congress

1239
01:17:18,017 --> 01:17:19,475
went from this...

1240
01:17:19,546 --> 01:17:21,130
...to this.

1241
01:17:22,711 --> 01:17:27,697
To see Congressmen and Senators slowly flip sides

1242
01:17:27,733 --> 01:17:31,244
throughout the day of blackout was pretty unbeliveable,

1243
01:17:31,271 --> 01:17:34,080
there was like a hundred representatives swing,

1244
01:17:34,506 --> 01:17:38,581
And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe after all this

1245
01:17:38,581 --> 01:17:39,925
We had won!

1246
01:17:40,690 --> 01:17:42,426
The thing that everyone said was impossible,

1247
01:17:42,462 --> 01:17:48,540
that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream had happened.

1248
01:17:48,702 --> 01:17:50,030
We did it!

1249
01:17:50,942 --> 01:17:52,275
We won!

1250
01:17:55,777 --> 01:17:58,773
This is a historic week in Internet politics, maybe American politics.

1251
01:17:58,826 --> 01:18:02,488
The thing that we heard from people in Washington D.C.

1252
01:18:02,533 --> 01:18:06,970
from staffers on Capitol Hill was, they recieved more emails and more phone calls

1253
01:18:06,970 --> 01:18:10,462
on SOPA blackout day than they'd ever recieved about anything.

1254
01:18:10,581 --> 01:18:12,928
I think that was an extremely exciting moment,

1255
01:18:12,928 --> 01:18:17,770
this was the moment when the Internet had grown up politically.

1256
01:18:17,770 --> 01:18:21,269
It was exhilarating because its hard to believe that it actually happened.

1257
01:18:21,351 --> 01:18:25,470
It's hard to believe, a bill with so much financial power behind it

1258
01:18:25,893 --> 01:18:29,244
didn't simply sail through the Congress.

1259
01:18:29,376 --> 01:18:32,298
and not only did it not sail through, it didn't pass at all.

1260
01:18:34,060 --> 01:18:36,293
It's easy sometimes to feel like you are powerless

1261
01:18:36,311 --> 01:18:39,060
like, when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell,

1262
01:18:39,075 --> 01:18:40,435
and nobody hears you.

1263
01:18:40,462 --> 01:18:43,057
But I'm here to tell you today: you are powerful!

1264
01:18:46,053 --> 01:18:48,550
Maybe sometimes you feel like you not being listened to,

1265
01:18:48,577 --> 01:18:51,860
but I'm here to tell you that you are, that you are being listened to,

1266
01:18:51,870 --> 01:18:56,405
You are making a difference. You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.

1267
01:18:59,968 --> 01:19:02,404
Stop PIPA! Stop SOPA!

1268
01:19:04,444 --> 01:19:07,370
Some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit

1269
01:19:07,600 --> 01:19:11,160
from a world in which their little competitors could get censored.

1270
01:19:12,524 --> 01:19:14,040
We can't let that happen.

1271
01:19:15,114 --> 01:19:19,125
For him it was more important to be sure that you made a small change

1272
01:19:19,582 --> 01:19:22,640
than to play a small part in a big change.

1273
01:19:23,377 --> 01:19:26,990
But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change.

1274
01:19:27,351 --> 01:19:30,008
and so for him it was kind of his proof of concept.

1275
01:19:30,862 --> 01:19:34,540
Okay, you know, what I want to do with my life is to change the world.

1276
01:19:34,826 --> 01:19:40,074
I think about it in this really scientific way of measuring my impact

1277
01:19:40,186 --> 01:19:42,310
and this shows that it is possible

1278
01:19:42,528 --> 01:19:45,472
right, that the thing that I want to do with my life is possible.

1279
01:19:46,044 --> 01:19:50,860
I have proved that I can do it. That I, Aaron Swartz, could change the world.

1280
01:19:50,869 --> 01:19:56,352
For a guy who never really thought he had done much

1281
01:19:56,672 --> 01:19:57,888
which was Aaron.

1282
01:19:59,381 --> 01:20:02,517
it was one of the few moments where you could really see

1283
01:20:03,925 --> 01:20:06,848
that he felt like he had done something good.

1284
01:20:06,890 --> 01:20:11,392
feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap.

1285
01:20:13,717 --> 01:20:16,341
Everyone said that there was no way could we stop SOPA.

1286
01:20:16,356 --> 01:20:22,025
We stopped it. These are 3 outrageously good victories and the year isn't over yet.

1287
01:20:22,025 --> 01:20:25,194
I mean, if there is a time to be positive it's now.

1288
01:20:27,200 --> 01:20:29,845
He wins at SOPA a year after he is arrested.

1289
01:20:30,016 --> 01:20:31,978
it's not an unambiguously happy moment.

1290
01:20:31,978 --> 01:20:33,344
There is a lot going on.

1291
01:20:33,344 --> 01:20:40,149
He is so atuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him.

1292
01:20:40,337 --> 01:20:44,350
The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous.

1293
01:20:44,352 --> 01:20:48,256
and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread Internet surveillance

1294
01:20:48,440 --> 01:20:50,490
Swartz was already concerned.

1295
01:20:50,670 --> 01:20:54,620
It is shocking to think that accountability is so lax

1296
01:20:55,290 --> 01:20:57,111
that they don't even have basic statistics

1297
01:20:57,137 --> 01:20:59,110
about how big this spying programme is.

1298
01:20:59,200 --> 01:21:03,594
If the answer is "We are spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them."

1299
01:21:03,594 --> 01:21:05,749
then that's an awful lot of people.

1300
01:21:06,602 --> 01:21:10,058
One thing that they said was "Look, we know the number of telephones we are spying on,

1301
01:21:10,058 --> 01:21:12,868
we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."

1302
01:21:13,210 --> 01:21:15,349
but they just came back and said we can't give you a number at all.

1303
01:21:15,386 --> 01:21:18,800
Thats pretty... I mean, that's scary is what it is.

1304
01:21:18,888 --> 01:21:25,730
And they put incredible pressure on him, took away .. all of the money he had made.

1305
01:21:27,500 --> 01:21:29,807
they threatened to take away his physical freedom.

1306
01:21:30,057 --> 01:21:34,293
Why did they do it? Why are they going after whistleblowers?

1307
01:21:34,540 --> 01:21:38,337
Why are they going after people who tell the truth

1308
01:21:38,650 --> 01:21:42,986
about all sorts of things, from the banks

1309
01:21:43,066 --> 01:21:46,190
to war, to just sort of government transparency.

1310
01:21:46,447 --> 01:21:51,466
So secrecy serves those who are already in power, and we are living in an era of secrecy

1311
01:21:51,620 --> 01:21:54,408
that coincides with an era where the government is doing

1312
01:21:54,480 --> 01:21:58,293
and also a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional.

1313
01:21:58,595 --> 01:22:01,520
So, those two things are not coincidences

1314
01:22:01,530 --> 01:22:04,275
It's very clear that this technology has been developed

1315
01:22:04,311 --> 01:22:07,351
not for small countries overseas, but right here

1316
01:22:07,440 --> 01:22:09,920
for use in the United States by the US government.

1317
01:22:09,920 --> 01:22:13,724
The problem with the spying programme is that its sort of long, slow expansion

1318
01:22:13,720 --> 01:22:16,622
you know, going back to the Nixon Administration

1319
01:22:16,890 --> 01:22:19,920
obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush

1320
01:22:19,973 --> 01:22:21,768
and Obama has continued to expand it

1321
01:22:21,848 --> 01:22:23,866
the problems have slowly grown worse and worse

1322
01:22:23,991 --> 01:22:26,515
but there's never been this moment you can point to and say

1323
01:22:26,551 --> 01:22:30,970
"Okay we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters."

1324
01:22:32,230 --> 01:22:34,888
The prosecution, in my estimation, of Aaron Swartz

1325
01:22:34,977 --> 01:22:41,230
was about sending a particular laser-like message to a group of people

1326
01:22:41,237 --> 01:22:45,504
that the Obama Administration sees as politically threatening

1327
01:22:47,422 --> 01:22:53,780
and that is the essentially the hacker, the information and the democracy activist community.

1328
01:22:54,030 --> 01:22:57,306
and the message that the Obama Administration wanted to send

1329
01:22:57,333 --> 01:23:00,800
to that particular community was in my estimation

1330
01:23:00,853 --> 01:23:04,808
"we know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment

1331
01:23:06,910 --> 01:23:08,862
and so are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz

1332
01:23:08,897 --> 01:23:13,600
to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."

1333
01:23:13,706 --> 01:23:14,817
And the governement said

1334
01:23:14,888 --> 01:23:20,270
"Oh, the legal opinions we are using to legalize the spying programme are also classified

1335
01:23:20,355 --> 01:23:23,448
so we can't even tell you which laws we are using to spy on you."

1336
01:23:23,490 --> 01:23:26,533
Everytime they can say "Oh this is another instance of cyber war"

1337
01:23:26,560 --> 01:23:28,440
"the cyber criminals are attacking us again"

1338
01:23:28,462 --> 01:23:30,360
"we are all in danger, we are all under threat".

1339
01:23:30,435 --> 01:23:33,970
they use those as an excuse to push through more and more dangerous laws.

1340
01:23:37,320 --> 01:23:40,897
Interviewer: Personally, how do you feel the fight is going?

1341
01:23:41,004 --> 01:23:42,890
It's up to you.

1342
01:23:47,635 --> 01:23:52,195
You know, there are sort of these two polarizing prespectives

1343
01:23:52,320 --> 01:23:55,457
Everything is great, Internet has created all this freedom and liberty,

1344
01:23:55,457 --> 01:23:57,040
and everything's gonna be fantastic.

1345
01:23:57,084 --> 01:23:58,506
or everything is terrible.

1346
01:23:58,542 --> 01:24:00,471
Internet has created all these tools for cracking down

1347
01:24:00,497 --> 01:24:03,370
and spying and, you know, controlling what we say.

1348
01:24:03,484 --> 01:24:05,310
and I think both are true.

1349
01:24:06,293 --> 01:24:10,069
the Internet has done both and both are kind of amazing and astonishing

1350
01:24:10,097 --> 01:24:13,102
and which one will win out in the long run is up to us.

1351
01:24:13,160 --> 01:24:15,635
It doesn't make sense to say "Oh one is doing better than the other"

1352
01:24:15,653 --> 01:24:17,620
you know, they're both true.

1353
01:24:17,728 --> 01:24:21,461
and it's up to us which one we emphasize and which one we take advantage of

1354
01:24:21,711 --> 01:24:23,701
because they are both there and they are always gonna be there.

1355
01:24:29,184 --> 01:24:34,901
On September 12th, 2012, Federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Swartz

1356
01:24:34,965 --> 01:24:40,256
adding additional counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer and Computer Fraud.

1357
01:24:40,506 --> 01:24:45,397
Now, instead of 4 felony counts, Swartz was facing 13.

1358
01:24:45,760 --> 01:24:48,576
The prosecution leverage had dramatically increased

1359
01:24:48,826 --> 01:24:51,797
as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines.

1360
01:24:52,047 --> 01:24:55,488
They filed a seperate indictment to add more charges

1361
01:24:55,738 --> 01:25:01,589
and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes

1362
01:25:01,839 --> 01:25:05,749
and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law.

1363
01:25:07,048 --> 01:25:10,515
That theory and much of the prosecution case against Swartz

1364
01:25:10,640 --> 01:25:13,857
involved a law created originally in 1986.

1365
01:25:14,044 --> 01:25:16,500
it is called "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".

1366
01:25:16,885 --> 01:25:19,914
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was inspired by the movie "War Games"

1367
01:25:19,982 --> 01:25:21,660
with Mathew Brodrick, which is a great movie.

1368
01:25:23,320 --> 01:25:27,884
In this movie, a kid get the ability through the magic of computer networks

1369
01:25:27,911 --> 01:25:30,257
to, like, launch a nuclear attack.

1370
01:25:33,920 --> 01:25:37,706
Now that's not actually possible and it certainly wasn't possible in the 80s

1371
01:25:37,700 --> 01:25:40,613
but apparently this movie scared Congress enough

1372
01:25:40,702 --> 01:25:44,960
to pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1373
01:25:45,130 --> 01:25:47,093
This is a law that is behind the times

1374
01:25:47,120 --> 01:25:53,130
for example it penalises a Terms of Service kinds of arrangements

1375
01:25:53,130 --> 01:25:56,906
and something like eHarmony or match.com

1376
01:25:56,995 --> 01:26:01,400
and somebody sort of inflates their own personal characteristics

1377
01:26:01,431 --> 01:26:05,840
and all of a sudden, depending on the jurisdiction and prosecutors, they

1378
01:26:05,952 --> 01:26:08,106
could be in whole host of troubles.

1379
01:26:08,120 --> 01:26:10,389
We all know what Terms of Use are.

1380
01:26:10,600 --> 01:26:13,555
Most people don't read them, but not abiding by their terms

1381
01:26:13,617 --> 01:26:16,300
could mean you are committing a felony.

1382
01:26:16,426 --> 01:26:20,458
The website terms of service often say things like "Be nice to each other" or

1383
01:26:20,708 --> 01:26:22,510
"don't do anything that's improper".

1384
01:26:22,604 --> 01:26:27,600
The idea that criminal law has anything to say about these kinds of violations

1385
01:26:27,697 --> 01:26:29,840
I think strikes most people as crazy.

1386
01:26:30,586 --> 01:26:33,130
The examples get even more crazy.

1387
01:26:33,664 --> 01:26:36,202
Until it was changed in March, 2013.

1388
01:26:36,202 --> 01:26:42,645
the Terms of Use on the website of Seventeen magzine said you had to be 18 in order to read it.

1389
01:26:42,880 --> 01:26:46,720
I would say that the way CFAA has been interpreted by Justice Department

1390
01:26:46,764 --> 01:26:49,066
we are all probably breaking the law.

1391
01:26:49,600 --> 01:26:55,082
Vague and prone to misuse, the CFAA has become "one size, fits all" hammer

1392
01:26:55,111 --> 01:26:57,790
for a wide range of computer related disputes.

1393
01:26:57,875 --> 01:27:02,737
Though not the only factor in his case, 11 of 13 charges against Swartz

1394
01:27:02,826 --> 01:27:05,111
involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1395
01:27:07,351 --> 01:27:11,760
The question "Why?" hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz.

1396
01:27:11,946 --> 01:27:15,626
just what was motivating the government and what would their case have been?

1397
01:27:16,204 --> 01:27:19,440
The Dept. of Justice declined requests for answers.

1398
01:27:19,637 --> 01:27:23,285
but Prof. Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case.

1399
01:27:23,493 --> 01:27:27,937
I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons.

1400
01:27:28,277 --> 01:27:32,437
I was a federal prosecutor at the justice department for 3 years before I started teaching.

1401
01:27:32,613 --> 01:27:34,640
The government came forward with an indictment

1402
01:27:34,684 --> 01:27:37,920
based on what crimes they thought were committed

1403
01:27:37,920 --> 01:27:41,137
just as a purely lawyers matter, looking at the precedents

1404
01:27:41,164 --> 01:27:43,200
looking at the statute, looking at history,

1405
01:27:43,240 --> 01:27:45,484
looking at the cases that are out there so far

1406
01:27:45,697 --> 01:27:48,370
I think it was a fair indictment based on that.

1407
01:27:49,120 --> 01:27:51,573
You can debate whether they should have charged this case.

1408
01:27:51,573 --> 01:27:52,768
There is just a lot of disagreement.

1409
01:27:52,874 --> 01:27:56,992
Some people are on the Open Access side, some people are not.

1410
01:27:57,342 --> 01:28:03,260
I think the government took Swartz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto very seriously

1411
01:28:03,502 --> 01:28:09,810
and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed, as a moral imperative,

1412
01:28:09,813 --> 01:28:15,488
to breaking the law to overcome a law that Swartz saw as unjust

1413
01:28:15,488 --> 01:28:20,821
and in a democracy if you think a law is unjust, there are ways of changing that law

1414
01:28:20,821 --> 01:28:24,725
there is, going to congress, as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA

1415
01:28:24,725 --> 01:28:28,458
or you can violate that law in order to nullify that law.

1416
01:28:28,458 --> 01:28:32,512
And I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense

1417
01:28:32,762 --> 01:28:39,594
that Swartz was committed not just to breaking the law but really making sure that law was nullified.

1418
01:28:39,768 --> 01:28:43,768
That everyone would have have access to the database in a way that

1419
01:28:43,804 --> 01:28:47,066
you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the tube

1420
01:28:47,200 --> 01:28:50,400
it would be done and Swartz's side would win.

1421
01:28:52,650 --> 01:28:55,893
There is a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law

1422
01:28:56,177 --> 01:29:00,130
and ultimately that's a decision for American people to make, working through Congress.

1423
01:29:00,437 --> 01:29:03,680
and than the second problem is I think, we are still trying to figure out

1424
01:29:03,724 --> 01:29:07,600
what's the line between less serious offenses and more serious offenses.

1425
01:29:07,940 --> 01:29:12,142
We are now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse

1426
01:29:12,850 --> 01:29:16,737
and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are

1427
01:29:16,782 --> 01:29:18,440
because we are just working that out.

1428
01:29:19,208 --> 01:29:22,088
This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion.

1429
01:29:22,204 --> 01:29:28,400
The hammer that the Justice Department has to scare people with just gets bigger and bigger and bigger

1430
01:29:28,453 --> 01:29:32,970
and so most people, you know, you can't role dice with your life like that

1431
01:29:33,004 --> 01:29:35,660
Should we tap somebody's phone? Should we film them?

1432
01:29:35,688 --> 01:29:39,320
Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?

1433
01:29:39,754 --> 01:29:42,421
That's how federal agents and prosecutors think.

1434
01:29:42,421 --> 01:29:45,194
They build cases, they make cases.

1435
01:29:46,835 --> 01:29:49,964
Swartz was caught in the gears of brutal criminal justice system

1436
01:29:50,208 --> 01:29:51,829
that could not turn back.

1437
01:29:51,875 --> 01:29:56,880
A machine that has made America the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

1438
01:29:57,084 --> 01:30:02,770
We have in this country allowed ourselves to be captured by the politics of fear and anger

1439
01:30:02,773 --> 01:30:08,021
and anything we are afraid of, like the future of the Internet and access

1440
01:30:08,746 --> 01:30:11,925
and anything we are angry about instinctively creates

1441
01:30:11,991 --> 01:30:13,580
a criminal justice intervention.

1442
01:30:13,820 --> 01:30:17,182
and we have used jail, prison and punishment

1443
01:30:17,262 --> 01:30:21,173
to resolve whole host of problems that historically were never seen

1444
01:30:21,208 --> 01:30:22,740
as criminal justice problem.

1445
01:30:22,906 --> 01:30:26,702
The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute

1446
01:30:26,844 --> 01:30:32,780
which is part of what has created this debate and controversy over online access and information on the Internet.

1447
01:30:33,002 --> 01:30:35,477
It's very consistent with what we have seen in other areas

1448
01:30:35,511 --> 01:30:40,284
one difference is people are usually targeted and victimized by

1449
01:30:40,328 --> 01:30:44,951
these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority.

1450
01:30:47,440 --> 01:30:50,382
Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.

1451
01:30:50,640 --> 01:30:53,155
He had basically stopped working on anything else.

1452
01:30:53,297 --> 01:30:56,740
and the case was in fact taking over his whole life.

1453
01:30:56,888 --> 01:31:00,053
One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that

1454
01:31:00,053 --> 01:31:02,702
he was emotionally vulnerable.

1455
01:31:03,048 --> 01:31:06,830
and that was something they really needed to keep in mind, so that.. they knew that.

1456
01:31:06,906 --> 01:31:09,271
It was weighing on him very heavily

1457
01:31:09,324 --> 01:31:15,260
he did not like having his actions and his movements restricted in any way

1458
01:31:15,514 --> 01:31:20,640
and threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot

1459
01:31:22,097 --> 01:31:23,710
was terrifying to him.

1460
01:31:23,768 --> 01:31:26,871
He completely exhausted his financial resources and

1461
01:31:27,537 --> 01:31:32,030
it cost us a lot of money also, and he raised a substantial amount of money.

1462
01:31:32,280 --> 01:31:35,680
So, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

1463
01:31:36,378 --> 01:31:38,197
Interviewer: The legal defence?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

1464
01:31:38,447 --> 01:31:40,288
Interviewer: Was in millions?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

1465
01:31:41,173 --> 01:31:44,950
Yea, I think he didn't want to be a burden to people. I think that was a factor

1466
01:31:45,207 --> 01:31:49,546
Like I have my normal life, and I have this shitty thing I have to deal with.

1467
01:31:49,582 --> 01:31:52,890
and I try to keep the two of them as separate as possible.

1468
01:31:53,146 --> 01:31:57,184
But they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty.

1469
01:31:58,888 --> 01:32:02,410
Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher.

1470
01:32:02,533 --> 01:32:06,740
Do you admit guilt and move on with your life, or do you fight a broken system?

1471
01:32:06,991 --> 01:32:12,608
With his legal case the answer was simple. He rejects the final plea deal and a trial date is set.

1472
01:32:12,728 --> 01:32:16,100
Aaron was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under

1473
01:32:16,142 --> 01:32:18,810
and accept something that he didn't believe was fair

1474
01:32:19,066 --> 01:32:20,949
but I also think that he was scared.

1475
01:32:32,789 --> 01:32:34,325
I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

1476
01:32:34,382 --> 01:32:38,540
I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse and I would have given him a big hug

1477
01:32:38,613 --> 01:32:42,940
and we would have walked across that little river in Boston and gone and had a couple of beers.

1478
01:32:46,044 --> 01:32:47,653
I really thought that we were right.

1479
01:32:47,751 --> 01:32:49,386
I thought that we were gonna win the case.

1480
01:32:49,422 --> 01:32:51,130
I thought we could win the case.

1481
01:32:51,253 --> 01:32:55,840
He didn't talk about it very much but you could see the enormous pain he was going through.

1482
01:33:01,162 --> 01:33:06,624
No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings, or like depressive episodes

1483
01:33:06,624 --> 01:33:10,592
or anything that I would describe as severe depression.

1484
01:33:10,842 --> 01:33:13,322
And it's possible, you know, that he was depressed, people get depressed.

1485
01:33:18,702 --> 01:33:23,733
Very early in our relationship, like 3 or 4 weeks in or something,

1486
01:33:23,813 --> 01:33:29,960
I remember him saying to me that I was a lot stronger than he was.

1487
01:33:30,517 --> 01:33:36,362
You know, he was brittle in lot of ways, things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

1488
01:33:36,405 --> 01:33:38,304
It was part of his brilliance too.

1489
01:33:40,770 --> 01:33:46,666
I think, he probably had something like clinical depression in his early 20s.

1490
01:33:47,484 --> 01:33:49,370
I don't think he did when I was with him.

1491
01:33:49,431 --> 01:33:53,770
He wasn't a joyful person.... but that's different from being depressed.

1492
01:33:56,364 --> 01:34:00,830
He was just under such such enormous pressure, for two years straight.

1493
01:34:00,874 --> 01:34:02,816
He just didn't want to do it anymore.

1494
01:34:03,617 --> 01:34:07,290
He was just.. I think it was too much.

1495
01:34:14,213 --> 01:34:16,275
I got a phone call late at night.

1496
01:34:17,511 --> 01:34:22,420
I could tell something was wrong and then I called and I realized what had happened.

1497
01:34:23,688 --> 01:34:28,970
The cofounder of the social news and entertainment website reddit has been found dead.

1498
01:34:29,075 --> 01:34:34,020
Police say 26 year old Aaron Swartz killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.

1499
01:34:36,870 --> 01:34:46,275
I just thought we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation.

1500
01:34:46,444 --> 01:34:50,346
I was like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.

1501
01:34:56,435 --> 01:34:59,310
It was one of the hardest nights of my life.

1502
01:34:59,982 --> 01:35:03,910
I kept screaming "I can't hear you.. what did you just say.. I can't hear you."

1503
01:35:07,468 --> 01:35:11,765
I can't. That's it.

1504
01:35:19,546 --> 01:35:23,710
None of it made any sense, and really still doesn't.

1505
01:35:24,542 --> 01:35:27,480
I was so frustrated and angry.

1506
01:35:38,154 --> 01:35:41,120
You know I tried to explain it to my kids.

1507
01:35:41,370 --> 01:35:46,325
My 3 year old told me that the doctors would fix him.

1508
01:35:52,021 --> 01:35:56,160
I've known lots of people who have died but I've never lost anybody like this.

1509
01:35:56,245 --> 01:36:03,050
Because everybody feels, and I do too, there is so much that we could've.. more to do.

1510
01:36:04,672 --> 01:36:10,059
I just didn't know that he was there. I didn't know this is what he was suffering, and...

1511
01:36:11,242 --> 01:36:13,601
He was part of me.

1512
01:36:15,253 --> 01:36:19,328
And I just wanted it to not be real.

1513
01:36:23,466 --> 01:36:27,989
And then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date.

1514
01:36:32,065 --> 01:36:34,944
to 2013

1515
01:36:43,697 --> 01:36:44,871
Aaron is dead

1516
01:36:45,973 --> 01:36:50,062
Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.

1517
01:36:50,755 --> 01:36:54,017
Hackers for right, we are one down,

1518
01:36:54,257 --> 01:36:56,115
we have lost one of our own.

1519
01:36:57,057 --> 01:37:02,275
Nurturers, carers, listeners,
feeders, parents all,

1520
01:37:02,755 --> 01:37:04,933
we have lost a child.

1521
01:37:05,262 --> 01:37:07,386
Let us all weep.

1522
01:37:14,742 --> 01:37:17,953
My first thought was what if nobody even notices.

1523
01:37:18,805 --> 01:37:22,913
It wasn't clear to me how salient he was.

1524
01:37:23,818 --> 01:37:29,749
I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw.

1525
01:37:29,856 --> 01:37:31,242
The net just lit up.

1526
01:37:31,505 --> 01:37:35,600
Everyone was trying to explain it in their own way

1527
01:37:35,636 --> 01:37:39,883
but I have never seen people grieve on Twitter before.

1528
01:37:39,968 --> 01:37:42,549
People were visibly grieving online.

1529
01:37:46,465 --> 01:37:51,253
He was the Internet's Own Boy... and the old world killed him.

1530
01:37:55,328 --> 01:38:00,277
We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched.

1531
01:38:01,960 --> 01:38:05,832
Architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the President regularly.

1532
01:38:06,269 --> 01:38:09,992
In middle of that time the idea that this

1533
01:38:10,516 --> 01:38:12,669
was what the government had to prosecute

1534
01:38:14,528 --> 01:38:17,642
it just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.

1535
01:38:17,670 --> 01:38:23,221
The question is can we do something, given what's happened

1536
01:38:23,272 --> 01:38:25,220
to make the world a better place.

1537
01:38:26,389 --> 01:38:30,485
And how can we further that legacy? That's the only question one can ask.

1538
01:38:33,061 --> 01:38:37,229
All over the world there are starting to be hackathons, gatherings

1539
01:38:37,260 --> 01:38:42,101
and Aaron Swartz has in some sense brought the best out of us

1540
01:38:42,232 --> 01:38:45,030
in trying to say "how do we fix this?".

1541
01:38:47,130 --> 01:38:50,341
He was, in my humble opinion one, of the true

1542
01:38:50,356 --> 01:38:54,480
extraordinary revolutionaries that this country has produced

1543
01:38:55,010 --> 01:38:59,250
I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious, but

1544
01:38:59,280 --> 01:39:04,270
we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things

1545
01:39:04,527 --> 01:39:05,877
that he wrestled with.

1546
01:39:06,127 --> 01:39:08,692
When we turned armed agents of the law

1547
01:39:08,821 --> 01:39:12,192
on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge

1548
01:39:12,442 --> 01:39:14,133
we've broken the rule of law

1549
01:39:14,383 --> 01:39:16,778
and we've desecrated the temple of justice.

1550
01:39:17,028 --> 01:39:19,530
Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

1551
01:39:21,000 --> 01:39:25,470
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability

1552
01:39:25,510 --> 01:39:27,700
it comes through continuous struggle.

1553
01:39:30,026 --> 01:39:31,690
Aaron really could do magic

1554
01:39:32,000 --> 01:39:33,900
and I am dedicated to making sure...

1555
01:39:34,095 --> 01:39:35,936
... his magic doesn't end with his death.

1556
01:39:36,186 --> 01:39:37,664
He believed that he could change the world.

1557
01:39:37,914 --> 01:39:39,498
And he was right.

1558
01:39:40,590 --> 01:39:44,210
Out of the last week and out of today phoenixes are already rising

1559
01:39:46,890 --> 01:39:51,630
Since Swartz's death Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden

1560
01:39:51,887 --> 01:39:53,536
have introduced legislations that would reform

1561
01:39:53,786 --> 01:39:55,370
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1562
01:39:55,500 --> 01:39:59,820
the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Swartz.

1563
01:40:00,186 --> 01:40:02,389
It's called "Aaron's Law."

1564
01:40:02,639 --> 01:40:05,802
Aaron believed that like you literally ought to

1565
01:40:06,052 --> 01:40:07,424
be asking yourself all the time

1566
01:40:07,674 --> 01:40:11,157
"what is the most thing i could be working on in the world right now?"

1567
01:40:11,407 --> 01:40:13,269
And if you are not working on that, why aren't you?

1568
01:40:33,700 --> 01:40:37,098
I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.

1569
01:40:37,160 --> 01:40:39,570
but we can change the future and we must.

1570
01:40:39,620 --> 01:40:43,750
We must do so for Aaron. We must do so for ourselves.

1571
01:40:43,880 --> 01:40:48,460
We must do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place.

1572
01:40:48,719 --> 01:40:50,304
A place where justice works.

1573
01:40:50,554 --> 01:40:54,272
And access to knowledge becomes a human right.

1574
01:40:54,520 --> 01:40:59,010
So there was a kid, back in feburary from Baltimore.

1575
01:40:59,140 --> 01:41:01,500
14 years old

1576
01:41:02,000 --> 01:41:08,350
who had access to JSTOR and he had been splunking through JSTOR after reading something.

1577
01:41:08,602 --> 01:41:13,365
and he figured out a way to do early tests for Pancreatic Cancer.

1578
01:41:14,810 --> 01:41:17,830
and Pancreatic cancer kills the shit out of you.

1579
01:41:17,940 --> 01:41:22,560
Because we detect it way too late. By the time we detect it, it's already too late to do anything about that.

1580
01:41:22,740 --> 01:41:28,720
And, he sent emails off to the entire Oncology department at Johns Hopkins.

1581
01:41:28,810 --> 01:41:31,430
you know hundreds of them.
Interviewer: A 14 year old?

1582
01:41:31,470 --> 01:41:33,610
14 year old kid yeah. And most of them ignored it.

1583
01:41:33,860 --> 01:41:35,594
But one of them, like, sent him a email back

1584
01:41:35,844 --> 01:41:38,100
And said, "this is not an entirely stupid idea. Why don't you come on over."

1585
01:41:38,350 --> 01:41:43,180
This kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher and in February, I heard him on the news

1586
01:41:43,466 --> 01:41:46,794
just couple of weeks after Aaron died, when Aaron was in the news a lot.

1587
01:41:50,000 --> 01:41:51,200
...sorry.

1588
01:41:53,344 --> 01:41:58,997
And he said, the reason he was on the news is because they had done it.

1589
01:41:59,247 --> 01:42:03,200
They were shipping an early test for pancreatic cancer that was gonna save lives.

1590
01:42:03,626 --> 01:42:07,744
And he said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important."

1591
01:42:10,496 --> 01:42:12,224
Because you never know, right.

1592
01:42:12,245 --> 01:42:17,024
This truth of the universe is not only something that policy makers use to figure out

1593
01:42:17,274 --> 01:42:19,029
you know, what the speed limit should be.

1594
01:42:19,279 --> 01:42:25,258
It's where the thing that's gonna keep, your kid from dying of Pancreatic cancer comes from.

1595
01:42:26,026 --> 01:42:31,146
And, without access the person who might come up with the thing that's got your

1596
01:42:31,396 --> 01:42:34,901
number on it may never find that answer.

1597
01:42:35,856 --> 01:42:47,520
He sleeped so well, he didn't fall out of [?] not even when he dreamed he was back on the spacecraft.

1598
01:42:48,210 --> 01:42:50,534
Very good, Aaron, very good!

1599
01:42:51,113 --> 01:42:56,890
Okay! Now it's song time

1600
01:43:28,000 --> 01:43:34,000
Subtitles Creative Commons CC0 license:
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

1601
01:43:38,000 --> 01:43:45,000
Contribute and help translating at:
https://github.com/iliasbartolini/the-internet-s-own-boy--aaron-swartz--subtitles