"Unjust laws exist;" "shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?" "Henry David Thoreau" "The co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "reddit" has been found dead" "He surely was a prodigy althought he never kind of thought of himself like that" "He was totally unexcited about studing businesses and making money" "There's a profound sense of loss tonight in Highland Park Aaron Swartz's hometown as loved ones say goodbye to one of the Internet's brightest lights ...Open Access and computer activits are mourning his loss ...an astonishing intellect." "You talk to people who knew him ...he was killed by the government and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles ...they wanted to make an example out of it, ok?" "Governments have an insatiable desire to control ...he was potentially facing 35 years in prison and 1 million dollars fine" "Raising questions of prosecutorial zeal and I would say even miscondut." "Have you looked into that particular matter and reached any conclusions?" "Growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realising that all the things around me, that people had told me were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be." "They weren't natural at all." "They were things that could be changed and they were thing that more importantly were wrong and should change." "And once I realised that, there was really kind of no going back" "The Internet's Own Boy" "Welcome to story reading time" "The name of the book is 'Paddington at the fair'" "Well, he was born in Highland Park and grew up here" "Aaron came from a family of three brothers all extraordinarly bright" "The box is flipping over!" "So, we were all, you know, not the best behaved children you know, three boys running around all the time, causing trouble" "Mom:" "No, no, no..." "Aaron!" "?" "Aaron:" "What?" "But, I've come to the realization:" "Aaron learned how to learn at a very young age" "Toc, toc!" "?" "Who's here?" "Aaron!" "Aaron who?" "Aaron funny man" "He knew what he wanted, he always wanted to do it." "He always accomplished what he wanted." "His curiosity was endless" "Here's the little picture of a [?" "] [?" "]" "One day he said to Susan:" ""Let's do three family entertainment[?" "] downtown in the park"" "Three family entertainment[?" "] downtown in the park" "He was three at the time" "She said: "What are you talking about?"" "He said: "Look it says here on on the refrigerator"" ""Three family entertainment[?" "] downtown in the park"" "She was flurred and astonished that he could read" "It's called: "My family seder"" "The seder night is different from all other nights" "I remember once we were are the University of Chicago library" "I pulled a book off the shelf that was like from 1900 and showed to him, I said: "You know this is [?" "] an extraordinary place"" "We all were curious children but Aaron really liked learning and really liked teaching" "Today we're going to read the ABC backwards z, y, x, w, ..." "I remember he came home from his first algebra class he was like: "Noah, let me teach you algebra!"" "and I'm like: "What is algebra?"" "and he was always like that" "Now I press button, click button there, now he's got that[?" "], now it's a pink" "When he was at 2 or 3 three years old an Bob introduced him to computers then he just took off like crazy on them" "[?" "]" "We all had computers, but Aaron really talked to them, really talked to the Internet" "Looking at the computer?" "No, how [?" "]" "He started programming from a really young age." "I remember the first program that I wrote with him was in basic and was a Star Wars trivia game" "He sat down with me in the basement were the computer was for hours programming this game" "The problem that I kept having with him is that there was nothing that I wanted done and to him there was always something to do always something that programming could solve" "The way that Aaron always thought is that programming is magic you can accomplish this things that normal humans can't" "Aaron made an ATM using like a Macintosh and like a cardboard box" "One year for Halloween I didn't know what I wanted to be and he thought would be really really cool if I dressed up like his new favourite computer which at the time was the original iMac and he hated dressing up for Hallowen" "but he loved convincing other people to dress like other things he wanted to see" "[?" "] Guys, come on, look at the camera" "He made this website called "The Info"" "where people could just fill in information" "Like, I'm sure someone out there knows all about gold, gold leafing[?" "]." "Why aren't they writing about that on this website?" "And then other people can come at a later point and read that information and edit the information if they thought that it was bad" "Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, all right?" "This is before Wikipedia begun and this is developed by a 12 year old in his room, by himself running on this tiny server using ancient technology" "One of the teacher's response like:" ""This is a terrible idea, you can't just let anyone author the dictionary, like author the encyclopedia"" ""For a whole reason we have scholars to write these book for us"" ""How did you ever had such a terrible idea"" "Me and my other brother would be like: "Yeah, you know"" ""Wikipedia is cool but we had that in our house, like 5 years ago"" "Aaron's website "The Info.org" wins a school competition hosted by the Cambridge based web design firm ArsDigita" "We all went to Cambridge when he won the ArsDigita Prize and, you know, we had no clue of what Aaron was doing it was obvious that the pirze was really important" "Aaron soon became involved with on-line programming communities than in the process of shaping a new tool for the Web" "He concept is like[?" "]: "Ben, there's a really awesome thing that I'm working on"" ""you need to hear about it"" "I'm like: "Yeah, what is it?"" "He says: "Is this thing called RSS"" "And he explains me what RSS is and I like: "Why is that useful?" "Aaron, is a site using it?" "Why would I want to use it?"" "There was this mailing list for people who were working on RSS and XML more generally and there was a person on it named Aaron Swartz who was combatitive but very smart and who had lots of good ideas and he did never come to the face to face meetings and they said:" ""You know, when are you gonna come to one of those face to face meetings?"" "He said: "You know, I don't think my mom would let me, you know I just turned 14"" "So the first reaction was, well you know, this person this colleague we've been working with all year was 13 years old when we were working with him and is only 14 now and their second reaction was: "Christ, we really want to meet him!"" ""You know that's extraordinary"" "Was part of the community that drafted RSS" "What he was doing was to help building the plumbing for modern hypertext and the piece he was working on, RSS was a tool that you can use to get summaries of things that are going on on other web pages" "Commonly you would use this for a blog" "You might have 10 or 20 people's blog you wanna read you use the RSS feeds, these summaries of what's going on on those other pages to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on" "Aaron was really young but he understood the technology and he saw that was imperfect and looked for ways to help make it better" "So his mom bundles[?" "] him on a plane in Chicago, we pick him up in San Francisco we introduced him to interesting people to argue with and we marvelled at his horrific eating habits he only eat white food, only like, you know, steamed rice" "and not white rice, beacause that was not sufficiently white, and white bread, and so on and you kind of marvel at the quality of the debate emerging from what appeared to be a small boy's mouth" "and you think, this is a kid, is really going to go somewhere if he doesn't die of scroovy[?" "]" "Aaron you're up" "I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like that per-se you can't have companies that just like" ""let's sell dog food over the Internet, dog food over the cellphones"" "but there still lot of innovation going on," "I think, if you don't see the innovation maybe your head is in the sand" "He takes on this alpha-male personality where he's sort of like" ""I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you" "I'm better than you, and I can tell you what to do"" "It's an extension of him being like a kind of torpe[?" "]" "So you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems like searching for aliens or trying to cure cancer" "First I met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat, he didn't just write code he also got people excited about solving problems, he was a connector the free culture movement, which had lot of his energy" "I think Aaron was trying to make the world work." "He was trying to fix it" "He had a very kind of strong personality, that definetly ruffled[?" "] feathers at times and wasn't necessarily the case that he was always confortable in the world and the world wasn't confortable with him" "Aaron got into high school, and was really just sick of school he didn't like it, he didn't like any of the classes he had been taught he didn't like the teachers" "Aaron really knew how to get information" "He was like, I don't need to go to these teachers to know how to do geometry" "I can just read the geometry book and I don't need to go to the teacher to learn their version of American history" "I have like three historical compilations here like I can just read them and I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in the Web" "I was very frustrated with school" "I thought, you know, the teachers didn't know what they were talking about [position] they were very domineering and controlling, homework was kind of a sham[?" "]" "I was just like, you know, all the way are penstick[?" "] together and force them to do busy work and, you know, I started reading books about the history of education and how this educational system was developed and, you know, alternative ways to do it[?" "] people could actually learn things instead of just regurgitating facts that the teachers told them and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things and once I questioned the school I was in, I questioned the society that built the school" "I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for" "I questioned the government that, you know, setup this whole structure" "One of the themes he was more passionate about was copyright, especially in those early days" "Copyright has always been something overburden on publishing industry and on readers but it wasn't an excessive burden it was a reasonable institution to have in place to make sure that people got paid" "What Aaron generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system and this amazing new thing we were trying to build, the Internet and the Web" "These things collided and what we got was chaos" "He then met Harward law professot Lawrence Lessig who was then challenging copyright law in the supreme court" "A young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the supreme court hearings" "I'm Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the Eldred ...to see the Eldred argument" "Why did you fly out here from Chicago and come all this way to see the Eldred argument?" "That's a more difficult question" "I don't know, I'm very excited to see the supreme court especially in such a prestigious case as this one" "Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet it was called Creative Commons" "So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people, creators a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry" "So copyright is about "all rights reserved"" "then this is a kind of "some rights reserved" bottle[?" "]" "It's I want a simple way to say to you "here's what you can do with my work"" "even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do" "And Aaron's role was the computer part like how do you architect the licenses so that would be simple and understandable and expressed in way that machines could process it" "And people are like, why do you have this fifteen year old kid writing the specifications of creative commons?" "like, don't you think that's a huge mistake?" "and larry is like: "the biggest mistake that we would have is not listening to this kid"" "embarrassing[?" "] is not even tall enough to get over the podium and it wasn't one of those movable podiums so this embarrassing thing that once he put his screen up nobody could see his face" "When we come to our website here and we've got few licences it gives you this list of options explaining what it means and we thought three set of questions" "Do you want to require attribution?" "Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?" "Do you want to allow modifications of your work?" "I was floored just completely fiberglassed that these adults regarded him as an adult" "Aaron stood up there in front an whole audience full of people and just started talking about the platform that he created for Creative Commons" "And they where all listening to him, just" "I was sitting AT the back thinking:" ""he's just a kid, why're listening to him?"" "but they did well I don't think I comprehended it fully" "Though critics have said that it does little to ensure artists get payed for their work the success of Creative Commons has been enourmous" "Currently on the website flickr alone over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license" "He contributed through his technical abilities and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him" "Aaron Often wrote candidly in his personal blog" "I think deeply about things and I want others to do likewise." "I work for ideas and learn from people." "I don't like excluding people." "I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication." "Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time on things that won't have impact." "I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously." "I don't hold grudges (it's not productive) but I learn from my experience." "I want to make the world a better place." "In 2004 Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University" "He had also diverticolite[?" "] which was very troubling and we were concerned about him taking his medications." "He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail pills everyday and one of these pills was a steroid which dauted his growth and made him feel different from any of the other students" "Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to scholarship and find himself effectively in a baby sitting program for overachieving high school-ers who in four years meant to become captain of industry and one percent-ers and I think it just made him banana" "In 2005 after only one year of college" "Swartz was offered a spot at a new startup incubation firm called Y Combinator led by Paul Graham" "He's like, "hey, I have this idea for a web site"" "and Paul Graham likes him enough and so yeah, sure, so Aaron drops out of school to this apartment" "So this used to be Aaron apartment when he lived here my big memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease cause Aaron had no credit and dropped out of college" "Aaron lived in what[?" "] called the living room and some of the posters here are left over from when Aaron lived here and the library, there were[?" "] more books then, but a lot of them are Aaron's" "Aaron YCombinator site is called "infogami" a tool to build websites but infogami struggles to find users and Swartz eventually merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help it was a project led by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian called "reddit"" "Now we were starting from almost nothing, no users, no money, no code and growing day by day into hugely popular website and it shows no sign of letting up first we had a thousand users, than 10.000, then 20.000 and on and on, it's just incredible" "reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet" "There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art and there's just people who flocked to the site and made that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news." ""reddit" kind of just borders on chaos at some level, so on the one hand its a place for people to discuss ...news of the day, technology, politics and issues and yet there is a lot of kind of not safe for work" "...material, offensive material." "Some subreddits were "trolls", "find a welcome home"" "and so in that sense reddit has been home to controversies as well" "It's kind of sits on the edge of chaos." "reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant "Condé Nast"" "...who makes an offer to buy the company." "reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant "Condé Nast"" "...who makes an offer to buy the company." "Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions about like" ""How do I... store this money?"" "Interviewer:" "Like a lot of money Noah:" "Like a lot of money" "Like... probably more than a million dollars." "But I don't actually know." "And he's how old then?" "Nineteen or twenty?" "So he was in this apartment, they are like sat around on [?" "] couch hacking on "reddit" and... when they sold reddit they threw giant party and then all flew out to California the next day they left the keys with me." "It was funny you know, he just sold a startup so we all kind of presumed he was the richest person around... but he.. ah.. he said "Oh, no." "I'll take this tiny little shoe box sized room, that's all I need"" "...like he was barely larger than a closet." "The idea of him spending his money on fancy objects just seems so implausible." "...like he was barely larger than a closet." "He explains it like, I like living in apartments, so I'm not gonna spend lot of money on a new place to live, I'm not gonna buy a mansion ... and I like wearning jeans and t-shirt," "so I am not gonna spend any more money on clothes." "So like, it's really no big deal."" "What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic flows on the Internet and what commands our attention?" "In the old system of broadcasting you're fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves." "You know, you could always send out 10 channels over the airwaves for televisions right away even with cables you have 500 channels." "On the Internet everybody can have a channel." "Everyone can get a blog or a myspace page." "Everyone has a way of expressing themselves." "And so what you see now is not a question of" ""who gets access to the airwaves?"." "It's the question of "who gets control over the ways you find people?"" "You know you started seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, these sort of gate keepers that tell you where on the Internet where you want to go." "The people who provides you, your sources of news information." "So it's not you know, only certain people have a license to speak now everyone has a license to speak" "It's a question of "who gets heard?"" "After he started working, in San Fransico at Condé Nast, he comes into the office and they want to give him a computer with all this crap installed on it and say that he can't install any new things on this computer, which to a developer is outrageous, right?" "From the first day he was complaining about all this sutff." "Gray wall, gray desks, gray noise." "The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it." "By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying." "I can't imagine staying sane with someone buzzing in my ear all day, let alone getting any actual work done." "Nobody else seems to get work done either." "Everybody's is always coming into our room to hang out and chat or invite us to play the new video game system that wired is testing." "He really had different aspirations, that were politically oriented and Silicon valley just doesn't really quite have that culture that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals." "Aaron hated working for a corporation." "They all hated working for Condé Nast but Aaron is like the only one who is not going to take it." "And then basically he got himself fired by not showing up to work ever." "It was said to be a messy breakup." "Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman declined to be interviewed for this film" "He rejected the business world" "One of the really important things to remember about that choice when Aaron decided to kind of leave the startup colture is that he was also leaving behind the things that made him famous and well love and, you know, he was at risk of letting down fans" "He got to where he was supposed to be going and had the self-awareness and honorariness to realise that he had climbed that mountain of shit to pluck a single rose and discover that it lost its sense of smell and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed" "and he did get the rose in any event, he climbed down again, which is pretty cool!" "The way that Aaron always thought is that programming is magic, right" "You can accomplish this things that normal humans can't by being able to program so, if you had magical power, would you use them for good, or to make you mounts of cash?" "Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries he had met as a child the man who had invented the World Wide Web:" "Tim Berners-Lee" "In the 1990s Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on one of the most lucrative inventions of the 20th century but instead of profiting from the invention of the World Wide Web he gave it away for free." "It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today" "Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim." "Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genious who doesn't in any sense cash out." "Is not at all interested in how he's going figure out how to make a billion dollars" "People would have seen "oh, there are money to be made there"" "so there would have been lots of little webs, instead of one big one" "And one little web and also which doesn't work because you can't follow links from one to the other." "Now you had to have the critial mass that this thing[?" "] was in the entire planet so is not gonna work unless the whole planet can get onboard." "I am, you know, feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is to just, kind of, take what you're given and, you know, follow the things that adults told you to do" "and, you know, your parents told you to do and that society tells you to do" "I think you should always be questioning, you know, I take this very scientific attitude that everything you've learned is just provisional that, you know, is always open to recantation or refutation or questioning" "And I think the same applies to society" "Once I realised that there where real serious problems, fundamental problems that I could do something to address" "I didn't see a way to forget that, I didn't see a why not to" "We just started spending a lot of time, just kind of as friends," "We would just talk for hours in the night" "I definetly should have understood that he was flirting with me" "I think just to some degree I was like" ""This is a terrible idea and impossible and therefore I will pretend it is not happening"" "As my marriage was breaking down and I was really stuck without anywhere to go we became roommates and brough my daughter over" "We moved in [?" "] house, it was really peaceful, like, my life had not been peaceful for a while and really need [?" "] is" "We were extremely close, from the beginning of our romantic relationship we just, we were constantly in contact but we were both really difficult people to deal with" "In a very Ally McBeal discussion he confessed we had a theme song and I made him play it for me." "It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple" "I think it was just that sense of, kind of, being a little bit embattled that the song has umm... and it also had like this hopefulness too." "In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic about life." "Even when he didn't feel it." "In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic about life." "Even when he didn't feel it." "He could be tremendously optimistic about life." "Aaron:" "What are you doing?" "Quinn:" "Flickr has video now" "Swartz threw his energy into a string[?" "] of new projects involving access to public information including an accountability website called "Watchdog.net"" "and the project called the "Open Library"" "So the open library project is a website" "You can visit openlibrary.org and the idea is to be huge wiki a kind of website with one page per book." "So for every book ever published you wanna have a webpage about it which combines all the information from publishers, from book sellers, from libraries, from readers under one site and then gives you links so that you can buy it, you can borrow it or you can browse it." "I love libraries, you know, I'm the kind of person who goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library." "That's the dream of the Open library, building this website where both you can meet from book to book, from person to author from subject to idea." "You go through this vastity[?" "] of knowledge that has been embedded and lost in big physical library that's hard to find, that's not very well accessible online it's really imporatant because books are our cultural legacy you know, books are the place where people write things down" "and to have that all swallowed up by one corporation it's kind of scary." "How can you bring public access to the public domain?" "To me sound obvious, that you have to have public access to public domain" "But in fact is not true." "So the public domain should be free to all." "but it is often locked up there's often guard gates, it is just like having national park but with a moat around it and gun turrets pointed to out in case somebody might want actually come and enjoy the public domain" "One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in was bringing public access to the public domain" "This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble." "I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States." "what I discovered was a puzzling system called "PACER"" "which stands for "Public Access to Court Electronic Records"" "I started googling and that's when I read across Carl Malamud" "Access to legal materials in the United States is a 10 billion dollar per year business." "PACER is just this incredible abomination of government service" "It's 10 cents a page, it's this most brain dead code you have ever seen you can't search it, you can't bookmark anything, you got to have a credit card and these are public records, it's you know US district courts are very important" "it's where all our seminal litigations starts, civil right cases, patent cases, all sort of stuff, in journalism students, citizens and lawyers all need access to PACER and it fights in every step in the way." "People without means can't see the law as readily as people that have that gold American express card." "It's a poll[?" "] tax on access to justice." "You know the Law is the Operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?" "Ah." "You know that's not a much of democracy." "They make about a 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system and it doesn't cost anything near that according to their own records in fact, it's illegal the "e-Government Act" of 2002 states that the court may charge" "only to the extent necessary in order to reimburse the cost of running PACER." "As the founder of public.resource.org" "Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges" "He started a programme called "The PACER recycling Project"" "where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for to a free database so others can use them." "The PACER people were getting a lot of flak from congress and others about public access and so they put together a system in 17 libraries accross the country that was free PACER access." "You know, that's 1 library every 22,000 square miles I believe." "So wasn't like really convinient..." "I encouraged volunteers to join the so called ThumbDrive corp." "and download document from public access libraries and upload them to the PACER recycling site." "People take a thumbdrive as one of these libraries and they download a bunch of documents and send them to me" "I mean, it was just a joke" "In fact when you click on ThumbDrive corps there was a "Widard of Oz"" "you know the Munchkin singing video clip came up." "But of-course I get the phone call from Steve Schultze and Aaron saying [?" "] we would like to join the Thumbdrive corp." "Around that time, I ran into Aaron at the conference" "This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people" "So I approached him and said" ""Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the PACER of problem."" "Schultze had already developed a program that could automatically download PACER documents from the trial libraries" "Swartz wanted to take a look" "So I showed him the code and I didn't know what would come next but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours of that conference he was sitting in the corner improving my code," "recruiting a friend of his that lived near one of these libraries, to go into the library and to begin to test his improved code at which point the folks at the courts realized something's not going quite according to plan." "And data started to come in... and come in... and come in... and soon there was 760 GigaBytes of PACER docs, about 20 million pages." "Using informations retrieved from the trial libraries," "Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the PACER system." "He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million federal court documents almost 20 million pages of text." "Now, I'll guarantee you that 20 million pages had perhaps exceeded the expectations of the people running the pilot access project but surprising a beaurocrat isn't illegal." "Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to the New York Times about what happened." "They also caught the attention of the FBI who began to stake[?" "] at Swartz's parent's house at Illinois." "I get a tweet from his mother saying: "Call me"" "I thought "What the hell is going on here?"" "and so I found [?" "] of Aaron and you know" "Aaron's mother was like "Oh my god, FBI!" "FBI!" "FBI!"" "An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway trying to see if Aaron is like in this room." "and I remember being home that day and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway and just driving back out," "That's weird!" "Like 5 years later, I read this FBI file and I'm like" "Oh my goodness!" "that was the FBI agent in my driveway" "He was terrified, he was totally terrified he was way more terrified after the FBI actually called him up on the phone, tried to suck an amenda[?" "]" "coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer" "He said he went home and laid down on the bed and, you know, was shaking" "The downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result" "and the FBI closed thier investigation without bringing charges" "To this day I find it remarkable, that anybody, even at the most remote [?" "]hog field office of the FBI, thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars was investigating people for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public" "How can you call yourself a lawman and think there can possibly be anything wrong in this whole world with making the law public" "Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in" "Bothered by wealth disparity" "Swartz moves beyond technology in into a broader range of political causes" "I went into congress, and I invited him to come and hangout an intern for us for a while so that he could learn, you know, the political process he was sort of learning about a new community" "and a new set of skills and kind of learning to hack politics" "It's seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away until they whole bodies are dripping with sweat faced with the knowledge that if they dared to stop they won't be able to put food on the table that night" "while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day just by sitting and watching TV" "but apparently the world is ridiculous" "So, I co-founded a group called the "Progressive Change Campaign Committee"" "and what we're trying to do is organise people over the Internet who care about progressive politics and moving the country in a more progressive direction to kind of come together join our e-mail list, join our campaign," "help get progressive candidates selected all across the country" "The group is responsible for igniting the grassroots efforts behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren" "He might have thought was a dumb system, but he came in and he said I need to learn this system 'cause it can be manipulated, like any, you know, like any social system" "But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat" "Aaron began to take a closer look at institutions that publish academic journal articles" "A virtue of being a student at a major US univerity" "I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licencing fees to organizations like JSTOR and [?" "]" "to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read" "These scholarly journals and articles are essentlialy the entire wealth of human knowledge on-line and many had been payed for with taxpayer money or with government grants but to read them you often have to pay again handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed Elsevier" "These licensing fees are so substantial that people who are studing in India, instead of studing in the United States, don't have this kind of access they're left out from all of these journals they're left out from our entire scientific legacy" "I mean, a lot of those journal articles go back to the enlightenment everytime someone has written down a scientific paper it has been scanned, digitized and put in these collections that is a legacy that has been brought to us" "by the history of people doing interesting work the history of scientists it's legacy that should belong to us as commons, as a people but instead it's been locked down and put on-line by handful of for-profit corporations" "then trying to get the maximum profit as they can out of it" "So, a researcher by the University or the people publishes a paper and in the very very last step of that process after all the work is done, after all the original research is done, the thinking, the lab work, the analysis" "after everything is done, at that last stage then the researcher has to handover his or her copyright to this multi billion dollar company and it's sick!" "It's an entire economy built on volunteer labour and then the publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream" "Talk about a scam one publisher in Britain made a profit of 3 billion dollars last year" "I mean, what a racket!" "JSTOR is just a very very small player in that story but for some reason JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront" "He gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing and, I don't know who the person from JSTOR was, but I think they, at some point Aaron asked the question, like:" ""How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"" "and they gave some..." "I think is 200 billion dollars something that Aaron thought was truly ridiculous" "Working at a fellowship at Harward he knew users on MIT's famously open and fast network next door had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR" "Swartz saw an opportunity" "You have the key to those gates and, with a little bit of shell script magic you can get those journal articles" "On September 24th 2010" "Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop on the MIT network, under the name Gary Host the client name was registered as "ghost_laptop"" "He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking the JSTOR database was organised so was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in JSTOR because are basically numbers it was basically "/" "/" "/" number article 444024, and ...25 ...26" "He wrote a python script called "keepgrabbing.py"" "which, was keep grabbing one article after another" "The next day ghost laptop begins grabbing articles but soon the computers IP address is blocked for Swartz is barely a bump in the road he quickly reassigns his computer IP address and keeps downloading" "Well JSTOR and MIT take a number of step to try interfer with this when they noticed that this was happening and when the more modest steps don't work in a certain stage they," "JSTOR, just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database so this is a kind of cat mouse game around trying to get access to the JSTOR database" "Aaron ultimately obviously is the cat because he has more technical capabilities than the JSTOR database people defending them" "Eventually there was a lot[?" "] of supplies in the basement of one of the buildings they whent, instead of going through WiFi he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network and just left it there with an external hard drive dowloading articles to the computer" "Unkown to Swartz his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities they didn't stop the downloads, instead they installed a surveillance camera" "They found that computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building they could have unplugged it, they could have waited for the guy to come back and say "Dude, what are you doing?" "You know, cut it out." "Who are you?"" "and they could have done all this kind of stuff, but they didn't what they wanted to do was film it to gather evidences to make a case that's the only reason you film something like that" "At first the only person caught on the glitchy[?" "] surveillance camera was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans" "But days later it caught Swartz" "Swartz is replacing a hard drive, he takes it out of his backpack, leans out of frame for about 5 minutes, and then leaves" "And then, like, organise a [?" "] as he was biking home from MIT these cops came out from, like, other side of the road, or something like that, instead of going after him" "He describes that he was pressed down and assoulted by the police he tells me that they... it's unclear[?" "] they were police that were after someone [?" "] was trying to attack him." "He does tell me they beat him up." "He was just devastaded." "The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution of anyone in our family was so foreign[?" "] and uncomprensible, I didn't know what to do." "Well they executed search warrants[?" "] at Aaron's house, his apartment in Canbdridge and his office at Harward." "Two days before the arrest the investigation had gone beyod JSTOR and the local Cambridge police they had been taken over by the United States secret service." "The secret service begun investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984 but 6 weeks after attack on 9/11 their role expanded." "President Bush used the "Patriot Act"" "to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces"." "The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists." "According to the secret service they are primarily engaged in activities with economic impact, organized criminal groups or use of schemes involving new technology." "The secret service turns Swartz's case over to the Boston US attorney office." "There was a guy in the US attorneys office who had the title "Head of the computer crimes division" or "task force"" "I don't know what else he had going but you're certainly not much of a computer crime prosecutor without a computer crime to prosecute, so he jumped on it kept it for himself, didn't assign to anyone else in the office or the unit" "and that's Stephen Heymann." "Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largerly out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz but he can be seen here in an episode of the TV show "American Greed"" "filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest he's describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Albert Gonzalez." "a case that gained Heymann enourmous pretentious[?" "] and accolades." "Gonzalez masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers the largest such fraud in history." "Here Heymann, decribing Gonzalez, gives his view on the hacker mindset." "These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by they have an ego, they like challege and of course they like money and everything you can get from money." "One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzalez case was a young hacker named Jonathan James believing Gonzalez's crimes would be pinned on him" "James committed suicide during the investigation." "In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz" "Heymann's boss, US attorney for the disctrict of Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz said this:" "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and wether you take documents, data, or dollars" "It's not true." "It's obviously not true." "I'm not saying it's harmless and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalise stealing of information but you gotta be much more subtle in trying to figure out exactly which kind of harms are harmful here" "so the thing about a crowbar is everytime I brake into a place with a crowbar" "I do damage, there's no doubt about it" "But when Aaron writes a script that says: "download, download, download" hundreds times per second" "there's no obvious damage, to anybody" "If he does that for the purpose of gathering archive to do academic research on it there's never any damage to anybody" "He wasn't stealing, he wasn't selling what he got or giving it away he was making a point as for I can tell" "The arrest took its toll[?" "] on Swartz" "He just don't want to talk about it, and he's like very stressed if you thought like the FBI was like, going to come to your doorstep" "[?" "] any time you went down the hall, even to do your laundry and it would brake in to your apartment, because you left the door unlocked like, I'd be preety stressed." "And it was clear," "And so Aarorn was always sort of, like in, down on[?" "] mood." "He wouldn't give up any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time, because he was so afraid that the FBI will be waiting for him" "It was a time of unprecedent social and political activism" "Time magazine would later name as their 2011 person of the year" ""the protester"" "There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on" "WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables" "Manning had been under arrest at the time it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak" "Anonymous which is a kind of protest ensemble that has lots of hackers in its ranks were going on various spreeze of sorts[?" "]" "If you compare that to what he did this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with, in a kind of private, professional matter." "It should have never got to the attention of the criminal system," "It just didn't belong there." "Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal, that involved three months in prison, time in a halfway house, and a year of home detention, all without the use of a computer." "It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony." "Here we are, we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever about what the government case is and we have to make this immense decision where the lawyer is pushing you do this the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand" "and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small" "So wether you're guilty or not you better of taking the deal." "Boston has it's own computer crime division lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need" "So, you know, you can imagine all sort of cases where it would be really hard to prosecute cause you've got some criminals in Russia or you've got some people inside a corporation who are gonna have $500 a hour lawyers" "or $700 a hour lawyers sitting down against you and then you got this case with this kid, which is pretty easy to prove that he did something and he has already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI" "so why not go as tough as you can in hearing[?" "] against that guy?" "It's good for you the prosecutor, it's good for the republic 'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types" "I was so scared," "I was so scared of having my computer ceased" "I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being ceased" "I had confidential material from sources from my previous work on my laptop, and that is above all of my priority is to keep my sources safe." "I was so scared of what was gonna happen to Ada" "Aaron told me that they offered me a deal and he finally just said, that he would take it if I told him to and I came real close to saying him "take it"." "He had this... he had developed, like, serious political aspirations in the intervening time between when, you know, that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial startup life and begun this new life that had come to this political activism" "and he just didn't believe that he could continue in this life with a felony, you know, he said to me one day we were walking by the white house and he said to me" ""they don't have felon work there"" "I mean, you know, he really wanted that to be his life." "He hadn't killed anybody, he hadn't hurt anybody, he hadn't like stolen money he hadn't done anything that seemed felony worthy, right?" "and, there's this idea that, like, there's no reason that he should be labeled a felon and taken away his right to vote in many states for doing what he did, like, that's just outrageous, like, it makes sense for him to be" "you know, maybe fined a bunch of money or you know, asked not to come back at MIT again but like, to be a felon?" "to face jail time?" "Swartz turned down the plea deal" "Heymann were doubled his efforts," "Heymann continued to press us at all, at all levels." "Even with the physical evidences ceased from Aaron Acer computer, hard drive and usb drive the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives." "Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR?" "and just what did he planned to do with them?" "The government claimed that he was planning to publish these, we don't really know whether that was his real intention because Aaron also had a history of" "doing projects where he had analyzed giant datasets of articles in order to learn interesting things about them" "The best evidence for that is that when he was at Stanford he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database." "In a project with Stanford law students" "Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database he uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research and favorable results." "He did this amazing analysis of for profit companies giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles which would then beneficial to, like, Exxon, during an oil spill" "So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research." "Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents." "In theory he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database" "That would have been completely OK." "if he were on the other hand intending to create a competitive service to JSTOR, or gonna set up our own, you know, access to the Harward law review and charge money for it, then, you know, ok, now it seems like criminal violation" "because you're commercially trying to exploit this material but that's kind of crazy to imagine that's what he was doing." "So, but than there's a middle case what if he was just trying to liberate for all of the developing world?" "But depending on what he was doing it creates a very different character to how the law should be thinking about it the government was prosecuting him as if this was like a commercial criminal violation like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records" "like it was that kind of crime." "I don't know what he was gonna do with that database but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him he was going to analyze the data for evidence of corporate funding of climate change research" "that led to biased results." "And I totally believe that." "I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me." "and I tought maybe this is a way I can get out of this." "just to exit the situation." "I didn't want to leave in fear to having my computer ceased" "I didn't want to leave in fear to having to go to jail on a contempt of court charge if they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer when they came to me and said: "Steve wants to talk to you"" "that seemed reasonable." "They offered Norton what is known as a "Queen for a day" letter or a proffer it allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case." "Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself for any information she revealed during the meeting." "I didn't like it" "I told my lawyers repeadetly that I didn't... this seemed de[?" "], I didn't like ithis" "I didn't want immunity, I didn't need immunity" "I hadn't done anything." "But they were really really stringent thay did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity." "Interviewer: just to make clear, this is a queen for a day deal proffer" "Right a proffer letter" "Interviewer:" "In which you basically handed information over them in exchange for protection from prosecution." "So, it wasn't handing information over, it was, at least this was how I saw, it was just having a discussion, having an inteview with them" "Interviewer:" "Well, they're asking you questions Quinn:" "They're asking me questions" "Interviewer:" "They are asking about what they want Quinn:" "Right" "Interviewer: and whatever they learned [?" "] prosecute for that" "Right, I really... right, and I repeadetly tried to go in naked" "I repeadetly tried to turn down the proffer letter" "I was ill, I was being pressured by my lawyers," "I was confused." "I was not doing well by this point" "I was depressed, and I was scared, and I didn't understand the situation I was in." "I had no idea why I was in this situation" "I hadn't done anything intresting much less wrong." "[?" "] over minds[?" "]" "Aaron was clearly very destroyed about it we were very destroyed about it" "Aaron attorneys were very destroyed about it we tried to get Quinn to change attorneys" "I was very unused to be in a room with large man, well armed, that are continuosly telling me I'm lying and I must have done something" "I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting wasn't a crime," "I told them that they were on the wrong side of history" "I used that phrase, I said:" ""you're on the wrong side of history"" "And they were bored, they didn't look angry, they just looked bored and I begun... it occured to me that we weren't having the same conversation" "I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know, why people would donwload journal articles, and eventually" "I don't remember what was around it" "I mentioned he had done this blog post" ""the guerilla open access manifesto"" "This is the guerilla open access manifesto supposedly written in July 2008, in Italy" "Information is power." "But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." "The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations." "Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by." "You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends." "But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground." "It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew." "But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative." "Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy." "There is no justice in following unjust laws." "It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture." "The manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people and also edited by Norton but it was Swartz who had signed his name to it." "When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron and tell him everything I can remember about it" "and he gets very angry" "The things that I'he done shouldn't have added up that way" "I hadn't done anything wrong and everything had gone wrong" "but I was never..." "I'm still angry" "I'm still angry try your best with these people to do the right thing and they turn everything against you and they will hurt you with anything they can" "and, in that moment, I regret that I said what I did but my larger regret is that we've settled for this that we're OK with this that we're ok with a justice system which [?" "] tries to game people into like traps so that they can ruin their lives" "So, yeah, I wish I hadn't said that but I'm much much angrier that this is where I am" "That this is what we as people think is OK" "They used every method that I think they could think of to get her to provide information which would be unhelpful to Aaron, and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron" "But, you know, I don't think she had information that was helpful to the government." "Months go by as Swartz's friends and family await a looming indictment." "In the meantime, Swartz was becoming a goto expert on a series of Internet issues." "Do you think that the Intenet is something that should be considered a human right something that the government can not take away from you." "Yes." "Definitely." "There is this notion that national security is an excuse to shut down the Internet." "that's exactly what we heard in Egypt, Syria and these other countries." "and so its true, sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up some embarassing material about what what the US govt does." "and people are going to be organizing to protest about it and try and change the government." "You know, that's a good thing." "Thats what all these First Amendment rights of free expression, freedom of association are all about." "and so the notion that we should try and shut them down" "I think, just goes against very basic American principles." "a principle, I think, is one that our founding fathers would have understood." "If the Internet would have been around back then instead of putting Post Offices in the constituion they would have put ISPs." "Swartz meets activist Taren Steinbrickner-Kauffman and the two begin to date." "...in a massive public outcry." "There is no massive global public outcry." "It won't create any change." "You know, 4 people in this city should cause a massive global public outcry." "You know, we need a petition signer." "Without telling her specifics, he warned her he was involved in something he called simply "the bad thing"." "And I had, sort of, crazy theories, like that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or" "I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren." "So sometime in probably late July Aaron called me and I happen to pick up and he said:" ""The bad thing might be in the news tomorrow"" ""Do you want me to tell you or do you want to read about it in the news"." "and I said: "I want you to tell me."" "and he said: "Well I have been arrested"" ""for downloading too many academic journal articles"" ""and they want to make an example out of me."" "and I was like: "That's it!" "That's the big fuss!" "Really?"" ""it doesn't sound like a very big deal."" "On July 14th, 2011, Federal prosecutors indict Swartz on 4 felony counts." "He gets indicted" "On the same day 2 people in England who are part of LulzSec get arrested and few other real hackers and Aaron is just someone who kind of looks like a hacker enough that, they can like, put his head on the stakes and put it on the gates." "Aaron went to surrender and they arrested him." "they then strip searched him." "took away his shoelaces, took away his belt and left him in solitary confinement." "The District of Massachusetts, United States Attorney's Office released a statement saying:" ""Swartz faces up to 35 yrs in prison to be followed by 3 yrs of supervised release restitution, forefeiture and a fine of upto $1 million dollars."" "He was released on a $100,00 bail." "The same day, the primary victim in the case JSTOR formally drops all charges against Swartz and declines to pursue the case." "JSTOR, they weren't our friends." "They weren't helpful or friendly to us but they also were just kind of like "We are not part of this"" "JSTOR, and their parent company Ithica also sidestepped request to talk for the film." "aut at the time they released a statement saying it was the goverment's decision weather to prosecute, not JSTOR's" "And so it was our belief that with that the case would be over." "that we should be able to get Stephen Heymann to drop the case." "or settle in some rational way." "and the government refused." "Interviewer:" "Why?" "Well, because I think, they wanted to make an example out of Aaron and they said the reason why they wouldnt move on, requiring a felony conviction and jail time was that they wanted to use this case as a case for deterrence." "They told us that." "Interviewer:" "They told you that?" "Yes." "Interviewer:" "This was gonna be an example?" "Aaron's Father:" "Yes." "Interviewer:" "He was gonna be an example?" "Aaron's Father:" "Yes." "Stephen Heymann said that." "Deterring who?" "Like is a lot of people running around and logging onto JSTOR and downloading the artcles to make a political statement, I mean, who are they deterring." "It would be easier to understand the Obama Administration's posture of supposedly being for deterrence if this had been Adminsitration that, for instance prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime this country has seen in the last 100 yrs the crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall St." "When you start deploying the non-controversial idea of deterrence only selectively, you stop making a dispassionate analysis of law breaking and you started deciding to deploy law enforcement resources specifically on the basis of political ideology and thats not just un-democratic it is supposed to be un-American." "Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel that the straw that broke the camel's back was a press release sent out by an organization Swartz founded called "Demand Progress"." "According to the MIT account" "Heymann reacted to the short statement of support calling it a wild Internet campaign and a foolish move that moved the case from human one-on-one level to an institutional level." "That was a poisnous combination." "A prosecutor who didn't want to lose face, who had a political carrer in the offing may be and didn't want to have this to come back and haunt them." "you spent how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library and got your ass handed to you in court." "No way!" "I then moved to try and put pressure on MIT in various ways to get them to go to the government and request the government to stop the prosecution." "Interviewer:" "What was MIT's reaction then?" "There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point." "MIT doesn't defend Aaron, which to people inside of MIT community seems outrageous, because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word." "At MIT the idea of going and running around in routes and tunnels that you weren't allowed to be in, was not only a rite of passage, it was part of the MIT tour," ",nd lock picking was a winter course at MIT." "They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks." "MIT never stood up and took a position of saying to the Feds:" ""Don't do this." "We dont want you to do this you are over reacting, this is too strong" , that I'm aware of." "They acted kind of like any corporation would." "They helped the government and they didn't help us, unless they felt that they had to and they never tried to stop it." "MIT declined repeated requests to comment." "but they later released a report saying that they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality and believed Heymann and US Attorney's office did not care what MIT thought or said about the case." "MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos." "You could argue that MIT turned a blind eye and that was okay for them to do but taking that stance, taking that neutral stance in itself was taking a pro-prosecutor stance." "If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack, they started by selling a bluebox which was a thing designed to defraud the phone company." "If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen, they initially started their buisness by using computer time at Harvard which was pretty clearly against the rules." "Difference between Aaron and people that I just mentioned is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place, he didn't want to just make money." "Swartz continues to be outspoken on variety of Internet Issues." "You know the reason Internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas." "and what we need to be focussing on is getting more information about our government more accessability, more discussion, more debate." "aut instead it seems, what Congress is foccussed on is shutting the things down," "Aaron thought that he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people." "FLAME can literally control your computer and make it spy on you." "Welcome Aaron, good to have you back on the show here." "You know, just like spies used to, in olden days, put microphones and tap what people are saying, now they are using computers to do the same things." "Swartz's political activity continues, his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy." "It was called SOPA." "Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous over reach, threatening the technical integrity of Internet itself." "In one of the first things I did was to call Aaron, and I said can we do a big online campaign against this," "This isn't a bill about copyright," "It's not?" "No, he said." "It's a bill about the freedom to connect." "Now I was listening." "And he thought about it for a while and then said yes, and he went and founded Demand Progress." "Demand Progress in an online activism organization." "We got around a million and half member now." "But started in the fall on 2010." "Aaron was one of the most prominent people in a community of people who helped lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country." "SOPA was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies, but what it did was basically take a sledge hammer to a problem that needed a scalpel." "If passed the law would allow a company to cut off finances to entire websites without due process or even to force Google to exclude their links all they needed was a single claim of copyright infringment." "It pitted the titans of traditional media against the new and now far more sophisticated remix culture." "It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman and if they don't do their job of making sure that nobody on their site uses it for anything that even potentially illegal the entire site could get shutdown without even so much as a trial." "This was over the top." "I mean, this was a catostrophy." "This bill poses a serious threat to speech and civil liberties for all who use the Internet." "Only handful of us who said: "Look we are not for piracy either but it makes no sense to destory the architecture of the Internet, the domian name system and so much that makes it free and open" "in the name of fighting piracy and Aaron got that right away." "The freedoms guaranteed in our constitution, freedoms our country has been built on would be suddenly deleted." "New technology instead of bringing us greater freedom would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted." "and I realized that day talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen." "When SOPA was introduced in October 2011 it was considered inevitable our strategy when it first came out was to hopefully slow the bill down maybe weaken it a little bit, but even we didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill." "Having worked in Washington what you learn is that typically in Washington the legislative fights are fights between different sets of corporate money interests." "and all duking it out to pass legislations and the fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interest against another set of corporate interests and they are financially equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying." "Those are the closest ones." "The ones that aren't even fights, typically, are ones where all the money is on one side all the corporations are on one side, and its just millions of people are on the other side." "I haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service, there were more than 40 United States senators on that bill as co-sponsers." "so there were already a long long way to getting 60 votes to clear all the procedural hoops." "Even I began to doubt myself." "It was a rough period." "Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshall enormous support using traditional outrage combined with commonly used Voice over IP to make it very easy for people to call Congress." "I've never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level, both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side." "Millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-SOPA petitions." "Congress was caught off guard." "There was just something about watching those clueless member of Congress debate the bill, watching them insist they could regulate the Internet and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them." "I'm not a nerd." "I am just not enough of a nerd." "...maybe we ought to ask some nerds what this thing really does." "Let's have hearing, bring in the nerds." "Really?" "Nerds?" "You know, I think actually the word you are looking for is "Experts"." "to enlighten you, so your laws won't backfire, break the Internet." "We used the term Geek, but we are allowed to use that because we are geeks." "The fact that it got as far as it did without them talking to any technical experts reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town." "I'm looking for somebody to come before this body and testify in a hearing and say this is why they are wrong." "There used to be an office that provided Science and Technology advice and members could go to them and say "Help me understand XYZ"." "and Gingrich killed it." "He said it was waste of money." "Ever since then Congress has plunged into the dark ages." "I don't think anybody thought that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron." "He knew it was worth trying but it doesn't seem winnable." "And I remember, maybe a few months later, I remember him just turning to me and being like "I think we might win this"" "and I was like "That would be amazing"" "Calls to Congress contiune when Domain hosting site GoDaddy becomes a supporter of the bill." "tens of thousands of users transfer their Domain Names in protest." "Within a week, a humbled GoDaddy reverses their position on SOPA." "About when the Congress people that supported these the record and movie industries realize that there was this backlash they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit, you could see the curve happening." "you could see that our arguments were starting to resonate." "It was like Aaron had been like striking a match and he was being blown out... striking another one and being blown out and finally he managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught and then they turned into this roaring blaze." "On January 16th, 2012, the White House issued a statement saying they didn't support the bill." "and then this happened." "I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy and we should deal with them in a serious way but this bill is not the right bill." "When Jimmy Wales put his support towards blacking out Wikipedia the number 5 most popular website in the world this is a website 7% of all of the clicks on anywhere on the Internet." "Wikipedia went black," "Reddit went black," "Craigslist went black, phonelines on Capitol Hill flat out melted, members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill, that they were promoting just a couple of days ago." "Within 24 hours the number of oponents of SOPA in Congress went from this to this." "To see Congressmen and Senators slowly flipside throughout the day of blackout was pretty unbeliveable, there was like a hundered representatives swing," "And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe after all this" "We had won!" "The thing everyone said was impossible, that some of the biggest companies in the world had written of as kind of a pipe dream had happened." "We did it!" "We won!" "This is a historic week in Internet politics, maybe American politics." "The thing that we heard from people in Washington D.C, from staffers on Capitol Hill was, they recieved more e-mails and more phone calls on SOPA blackout day than they ever recieved about anything." "I think that was an extremenly exciting moment, this was the moment when the Internet had grown up politically." "It was exhilarating because its hard to believe that it actually happened." "It's hard to believe, a bill with so much financial power behind it didn't simply sail through the Congress." "and not only did it not sail through, it didn't pass at all." "It's easy sometimes to feel like you are powerless like, when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell, and nobody hears you." "But I'm here to tell you today:" "You are powerfull!" "Maybe sometimes you feel like you not being listened to, but I'm here to tell you that you are, that you are being listened to," "You are making a difference." "You can stop this bill if you dont stop fighting." "Stop PIPA!" "Stop SOPA!" "Some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which the little competitors could get censored." "We can't let that happen." "For him it was more important to be sure that you made a small change than to play a small part in a big change." "But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change." "and so for him it was kind of like his proof of concept." "Okay, you know, what I want to do with my life is to change the world." "I think about it in this really scientific way of measuring my impact and this shows that it is possible right, the thing that I want to do with my life is possible." "I have proved that I can do it." "That I, Aaron Swartz, could change the world." "For a guy who never really thought he had done much which was Aaron." "it was one of the few moments where you could really see that he felt like he had done something good." "feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap." "Everyone said that there was on way could we stop SOPA." "We stopped it." "This are 3 outrageously good victories and the year isn't over yet." "I mean, if there is a time to be positive it's now." "He wins SOPA a year after he is arrested." "it's not an unambigously happy moment." "There is a lot going on." "He is so atuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him." "The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enourmous." "and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread Internet surveillance" "Swartz was already concerned." "It is shocking to think that accountability is so lax Swartz was already concerned." "It is shocking to think that accountability is so lax that they don't even have basic statistics about how big this spying programme is." "The answer is "We are spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them."" "then thats an awful lot of people." "One thing that they said was "Look, we know number of telephones we are spying on, we dont know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."" "but they came back and said we can't give you a number at all." "Thats pretty..." "I mean, that's scary is what it is." "And they put incredible pressure on him, took away .. all of the money he had made." "they threatened to take away his physical freedom." "Why did they do it?" "Why are they going after whistleblowers?" "Why are they going after people who tell the truth about all sorts of things from the banks to war, to just sort of government transparency." "So secrecy serves those who are already in power, and we are living in an era of secrecy.." "That coincides with an era where the government is doing and also a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional." "So, those two things are not coincidences" "It's very clear that this technology has been developed not for small countries overseas, but right here for the use in United States by the US government." "The problem with the spying programme is that its sort of long, slow expansion you kknow, going back to the Nixon Administration." "Obviosly it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush and Obama has continued to expand it the problems have slowly grown worse and worse but there has been this moment you can point to and say" ""Okay we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters."" "The prosecution, in my estimation, of Aaron Swartz was about sending a particular laser like message to a group of people that the Obama Administration sees as politically threatening" "and that is the essentially the hacker, the information and the democracy activist community." "and the message that the Obama Administration wanted to send to that particular community was in my estimation" ""we know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment and so were going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."" "And the governement said" ""oh, the legal opinions we are using to legalize the spying programme are also classified so we can't even tell you which laws we are using to spy on you."" "Everytime they can say "Oh this is another instance of cyber war"" ""the cyber criminals are attacking us agian"" ""we are all in danger, we are all under threat"." "they use those as an excuse to push through more and more dangerous laws." "Interviewer:" "Personally, how do you feel the fight is going?" "It's up to you." "You know, there are sort of these two polarizing prespectives" "Everything is great, Internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everythings gonna be fantastic." "or everything is terrible." "Internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying and, you know, controlling what we say." "and I think these both are true." "the Internet has done both and both are kind of amazing and astonishing and which one will win out in the long run is up to us." "It doesn't make sense to say "Oh one is doing better than the other"" "you know, they are both true." "and its up to us which one we emphasize and which one we take advantage of because they are both there and they are always gonna be there." "On September 12th, 2012, Federal prosecutors filed a superseeding indictment against Swartz adding additional counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer and Computer Fraud." "Now instead of 4 felony counts Swartz was facing 13." "The prosecution leverage had dramatically increased as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines." "They filed a seperate indictment to add more charges and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law." "That theory and much of the prosecution case agianst Swartz involved a law created originally in 1986." "it is called "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act."." "The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was inspired by the movie "War Games"" "with Mathew Brodrick, which was a great movie," "In this movie, a kid get the ability through the magic of computer networks to, like, launch a nuclear attack." "Now that's not actually possible and certainly wasn't possible in the 80s but apparently this movie scared Congress enough to pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act." "This is a law that is behind the times for example it penalises a Terms of Service kind of arrangements and somebody sort of inflates their own personal characteristic and all of a sudden depending on the jurisdiction and prosecutor they" "could be in whole host of troubles." "We all know what Terms of Use are." "Most people don't read them, but not abiding by their terms could mean you are committing a felony." "The website terms of service often say things like "Be nice to each other" or" ""dont do anything that's improper"." "The idea that criminal law has anything to say about these kinds of violations" "I think strikes most people as crazy." "The examples even get even more crazy." "Untill it was changed in March, 2013." "the Terms of Use on the website of Seventeen magzine said you had to be 18 in order to read it." "I would say that the way CFAA has been interpreted by Justice Department we are all probabaly breaking the law." "Vague and prone to misuse CFAA has become "one size, fits all" hammer for a wide range of computer related disputes." "Though not the only factor in his case, 11 of 13 charges against Swartz involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act." "The question "Why?" hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz." "just what was motivating the goverment and what their case would have been" "The Dept. of Justice declined requests for answers." "but Prof. Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case." "I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons." "I was a federal prosecutor at the justice department for 3 yrs before I started teaching." "the government came forward with an indictment based on what crimes they thought were committed just as a purely lawyers matter, looking at the precedents lookings at the statues, looking at history, looking at the cases that are out there so far" "I think it was a fair indictment based on that." "You can debate whether they should have charged this case." "There is just a lot of disagreement." "Some people are on Open Access side, some people are not." "I think the govt took Swartz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto very seriously and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed, as a moral imperative, to breaking the law to overcome the law that Swartz saw as unjust" "and in a democracy if you think a law is unjust there are ways of changing that law there is, going to congress, as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA or you can violate that law in order to nullify that law." "And I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was committed not just to breaking the law but really making sure that law was nullified." "That everyone would have have access to the database in a way that you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the tube it would be done and Swartz's side would win." "There is a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law and ultimately thats a decision for American people to make working through Congress." "and than the second problem is I think, we are still trying to figure out what's the line between less serious offenses and more serious offenses." "We are now entering that different environment of computers and computer misuse and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are because we are just woking that out." "This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion." "The hammer that the Justice Dept has to scare people with just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and so most people, you know, can't role dice with your life like that" "Should we tap somebody's phone?" "Should we film them?" "Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?" "That's how federal agents and prosecutors think." "They build cases, they make cases." "Swartz was caught in the gears of brutal criminal justice system that could not turn back." "A machine that has made America the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world." "We have in this country allowed ourselves to be captured by the politics of fear and anger and anything we are afraid of, like the future of the Internet and access and anything we are angry about instinctively creates a criminal justice intervention." "and we have used jail, prison and punishment to resolve whole host of problems that historically were never seen as criminal justice problem." "The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute which is part of what has created this debate and contorversy over online access and information on the Internet." "It's very consistent with what we have seen in other areas one difference is people are usually targeted and victimized by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority." "Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased." "He had basically stopped working on anything else." "and the case was in fact taking over his whole life." "One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he was emotionally vulnerable." "and that was something they really needed to keep in mind, so that.. they knew that." "It was weighing on him very heavily he did not like having his actions and movements restricted in any way and threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot" "was terrifying to him." "Completley exhausted his financial resources and it cost us a lot of money also and he raised a substantial amount of money." "So, you know, it was in millions of dollars." "Interviewer:" "The legal defence?" "Aaron's Father:" "Yes." "Interviewer:" "Was it millions?" "Aaron's Father:" "Yes." "Yea, I think he didn't want to be a burden to people." "I think that was a factor" "Like I have my normal life, and I have this shitty thing I have to deal with." "and I try to keep the two of them as seperate as possible." "But they were just begining to blur together and everything was becoming shitty." "Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher." "To admit guilt and move on with your life or do you fight a broken system." "with his legal case the answer was simple." "He rejects the final plea deal and a trial date is set." "Aaron was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something that he didn't believe was fair but I also think that he was scared." "I don't think they would have convicted Aaron." "I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse and I would have given him a big hug and we would have walked across that little river in Boston and gone and had a couple of beers." "I really thought that we were right." "I thought we were gonna win the case." "I thought we could win the case." "He didn't talk about it very much but you could see the enourmous pain he was going through." "No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings, or like depressive episodes or anything that I would describe to as severe depression." "And it;s possible you know he was depressed, people get depressed" "Very early in our relationship, like 3 or 4 weeks in or something," "I remember him saying to me that I was a lot stronger than he was." "you know, he was brittle in lot of ways, things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people." "It was part of his brilliance too." "I think, he probably had something like clinical depression in his early 20s" "I don't think he did when I was with him." "He wasn't a joyful person.... but that's different from being depressed." "He was just under such such enourmous pressure for two years straight." "He just didn't want to do it anymore." "He was just.." "I think it was too much." "I got a phone call late at night." "I could tell something was wrong and then I called and I realized what had happened." "The cofounder of the social news and entertainment website reddit has been found dead." "Police say 26 year old Aaron Swartz killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment." "I just thought we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation." "I was like the whole world fell apart at that moment." "It was one of the hardest nights of my life." "It was like I was screaming "I can't hear you.. what did you just say.." "I can't hear you."" "I can't." "That's it." "None of it made any sense, and really still doesn't." "I was so frustrated and angry." "You know I tried to explain it to my kids." "My 3 yr old told me that the doctors would fix him." "I know lots of people who have died but I've never lost anybody like this." "Because everybody feels, and I do too, there is so much that we could've.. more to do." "I just didn't know that he was there." "I didn't know this is what he was suffering." "He was part of me." "And I just wanted it to not be real." "And then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date." "02-02-2013" "Aaron is dead" "Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder." "Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own." "Nurturers, carers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child." "Let us all weep." "My first thought was what if nobody even notices." "It wasn't clear to me how salient he was." "I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw." "The net just lit up." "Everyone was trying to explain it in their own way but I have never seen people grieve on Twitter before." "People were visibily grieving online." "He was the Internet's Own Boy... and the whole world killed him." "We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched." "architects of financial meltdown have dinner with the President regularly." "in middle of that time the idea that this was what the government had to prosecute" "it just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic." "The question is can we do something, given what's happened, to make the world a better place." "And how can we further that legacy." "Thats the only question one can ask." "All over the world there are starting to be hackathons, gatherings and Aaron Swartz has in some sense brought the best out us in trying to say "how do we fix this"." "He was in my humble opinion one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries that this country has produced" "I don't know weather Aaron was defeated or victorious, but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with." "When we turned armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge we've broken the rule of law and we've desecrated the temple of justice." "Aaron Swartz was not a criminal." "Change does not role in on the wheels.." ".. of inevitability." "It comes through continous struggle." ".. of inevitability." "It comes through continous struggle." "Aaron really could do magic and I am dedicated to making sure  his magic doesn't end with his death." "He believed that he could change the world." "And he was right." "Out of the last week, and out of today.." ".. phoenixes are already rising." "Since Swartz's death Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Sen. Ron Wyden.." "have introduced legislations that would reform ... the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act." "The outdated law that formed the majority of the charges.." "against Swartz." "It's called "Aaron's Law."" "Aaron believed that like you literally ought to.." ".. be asking yourself all the time.." ".. "what is the most thing i could be working on in the world right now?"" "And if you are not working on that, why aren't you?" "I wish we could change the past, but we cannot." "But we can change the future and we must." "We must do so for Aaron." "We must do so for ourselves." "We must do so to make our world a better place.. a more humane place." "A place where justice works." "And access to knowledge becomes a human right." "So there was a kid, back in feburary from Baltimore." "14 years old." "..who had access to JStor and he had been splunking through JStor after reading something." "And he figured out a way to do early tests for Pancreatic Cancer." "And Pancreatic cancer kills the shit out of you." "Because we detect it way to late." "By the time we detect its already too late to do anything about that." "And, he sent e-mails off to entire Oncology department at John Hopkins.." "you know hundereds of them." "Interviewer:" "A 14 year old?" "14 year old kid yeah." "And most of them ignored it." "But one of them, like, sent him a e-mail back" "And said, "this is not an entirely stupid idea." "Why don't you come on over."" "This kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher and in Feburary I heard him on the news.." ".. just couple of weeks after Aaron died, when Aaron was in the news a lot." "Sorry." "And he said, the reason he was on the news is because they had done it." "They were shipping an early test for pancreatic cancer that was gonna save lives." "And he said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important."" "Because you never know, right." "This truth of the universe is not only something that policy makers use to figure out... .. you know, what the speed limit should be." "Its where the things thats gonna keep, your kid from dying of Pancreatic cancer comes from." "And, without access the person who might come up with the thing thats got your number on it may never find that answer." "[?" "]" "Very good, Aaron, very good!" "Okay!" "Now it's [?" "] time"