TheInternetsOwnBoy_TheStoryofAaronSwartz-HD-en_US.srt

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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 realizing

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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 realized 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 extraordinarily 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 learn 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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Go press that one, go to ABC

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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 where the computer was

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for hours programming this game

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

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and to him there was always something to do

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always something that programming could solve

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The way Aaron always 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 favorite computer which at the time was the original iMac

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I mean, he hated dressing up for Halloween

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but he loved convincing other people to dress up as 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 was before Wikipedia had begun

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and this was 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 teachers responds 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 build 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 it was imperfect and looked for ways to help make it better

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So his mom started bundling him on planes in Chicago, we'd pick him up in San Francisco

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we introduced him to interesting people to argue with

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and we marveled 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, because that wasn't 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, you know, this is a kid who 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 twerp. [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 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 always comfortable with him.

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

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he didn't like it, he didn't like any of the classes 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 this teacher to learn how to do geometry

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I can just read the geometry book

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

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I have like three historical compilations here 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

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

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I was just like, you know, all the way it pens them[?] 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 things 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, it's very exciting to see the supreme court

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especially in such a prestigious case as this one

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

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it was called Creative Commons

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

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a simple way to mark their creativity

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with the freedoms they intend it 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 they 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 you go to "choose liscense"

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it gives you this list of options, explains what it means

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and you fill out three simple questions

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Do you want to require attribution?

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Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?

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Do you want to allow modifications of your work?

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I was floored

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just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult

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and Aaron stood up there in front a whole audience full of people

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and just started talking about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons

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And they where all listening to him, just

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

238
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but they did

239
00:15:29,900 --> 00:15:32,420
well I don't think I comprehended it fully

240
00:15:32,600 --> 00:15:37,190
Though critics have said that it does little to ensure artists get payed for their work

241
00:15:37,200 --> 00:15:40,140
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 --> 00:16:15,190
I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

249
00:16:15,200 --> 00:16:21,390
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 --> 00:16:26,320
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 ulcerative colitis, which was very troubling

255
00:16:50,000 --> 00:16:52,990
and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

256
00:16:53,000 --> 00:16:56,390
He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day

257
00:16:56,400 --> 00:17:00,300
and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth and

258
00:17:00,700 --> 00:17:03,940
made him feel different from any of the other students

259
00:17:04,000 --> 00:17:06,990
Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

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

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
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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
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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 --> 00:17:48,942
So this used to be Aaron's 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 --> 00:17:58,491
cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college

272
00:17:58,501 --> 00:18:00,644
Aaron lived in what's now the living room

273
00:18:00,654 --> 00:18:04,346
and some of the posters are left over from when Aaron lived here

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

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

276
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but infogami struggles to find users

277
00:18:19,800 --> 00:18:22,019
and Swartz eventually merges his company

278
00:18:22,029 --> 00:18:24,790
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 --> 00:18:33,735
There we were starting from almost nothing, no users, no money, no code

281
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and growing day by day into a hugely popular website

282
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and it showed no signs of letting up

283
00:18:38,850 --> 00:18:44,310
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 --> 00:18:51,690
reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet

285
00:18:51,700 --> 00:18:57,100
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
00:19:21,900 --> 00:19:29,800
...material, offensive material. Some subreddits where "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
00:19:33,900 --> 00:19:36,700
It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

293
00:19:36,900 --> 00:19:40,690
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant "Condé Nast"

294
00:19:40,700 --> 00:19:40,790
...who makes an offer to buy the company.
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant "Condé Nast"

295
00:19:40,800 --> 00:19:42,590
...who makes an offer to buy the company.

296
00:19:42,600 --> 00:19:43,890
Some large amount of money,

297
00:19:43,900 --> 00:19:46,990
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 --> 00:19:53,890
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 --> 00:20:02,000
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 --> 00:20:18,390
when they sold reddit they threw a giant party and then all flew out to California

305
00:20:18,400 --> 00:20:20,740
the next day and left the keys with me.

306
00:20:23,700 --> 00:20:28,890
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 --> 00:20:34,120
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 --> 00:20:36,193
...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 --> 00:20:44,833
He explains, it's like "I like living in apartments,

311
00:20:44,843 --> 00:20:48,128
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 --> 00:20:49,830
... and I like wearing jeans and a t-shirt,

313
00:20:49,840 --> 00:20:54,590
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 --> 00:21:04,890
In the old system of broadcasting you're fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves.

316
00:21:04,900 --> 00:21:09,590
You know, you could only send out 10 channels over the airwaves for television,

317
00:21:09,600 --> 00:21:13,290
or even with cables you have 500 channels. On the Internet everybody can have a channel.

318
00:21:13,300 --> 00:21:17,890
Everyone can get a blog or a Myspace page. Everyone has a way of expressing themselves.

319
00:21:17,900 --> 00:21:19,890
And so what you see now is not a question of

320
00:21:19,900 --> 00:21:24,890
"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 --> 00:21:29,490
You know you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, these sort of gatekeepers that tell you

322
00:21:29,500 --> 00:21:34,590
where on the Internet you want to go. The people who provide you your sources of news and information.

323
00:21:34,600 --> 00:21:39,490
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 --> 00:21:41,660
It's a question of "who gets heard?"

325
00:21:44,400 --> 00:21:49,700
After he started working in San Francisco 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 --> 00:21:59,490
install any new things on this computer, which to a developer is outrageous, right?

328
00:21:59,500 --> 00:22:03,040
From the first day he was complaining about all this stuff.

329
00:22:05,600 --> 00:22:10,890
Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.

330
00:22:10,900 --> 00:22:14,890
By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying.

331
00:22:14,900 --> 00:22:18,420
I can't imagine staying sane with someone buzzing in my ear all day

332
00:22:18,430 --> 00:22:20,770
let alone getting any actual work done.

333
00:22:21,400 --> 00:22:23,890
Nobody else seems to get work done here either.

334
00:22:23,900 --> 00:22:26,740
Everybody's always coming into our room to hang out and chat

335
00:22:26,750 --> 00:22:30,890
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 --> 00:22:50,290
of political goals. Aaron hated working for a corporation. They all hate

339
00:22:50,300 --> 00:22:53,290
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 gets 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 --> 00:23:08,240
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 --> 00:23:19,890
that choice when Aaron decided to kind of leave 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 --> 00:23:34,090
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 orneriness to realize

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

351
00:23:43,700 --> 00:23:45,690
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 --> 00:24:06,690
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 --> 00:24:18,690
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries he had met as a child,

358
00:24:18,700 --> 00:24:22,360
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 --> 00:24:32,790
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 genius who doesn't, in any sense, cash out.

365
00:24:51,600 --> 00:24:55,890
He's not at all interested in how he's going figure out how to make a billion dollars.

366
00:24:55,900 --> 00:24:57,790
People would have seen "Oh, there's money to be made there!"

367
00:24:57,800 --> 00:25:01,190
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 --> 00:25:07,780
Because you can't follow links from one to the other.

370
00:25:09,900 --> 00:25:13,690
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 on-board.

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 --> 00:25:33,590
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 --> 00:25:37,490
and, you know, your parents told you to do and that society tells you to do.

375
00:25:37,500 --> 00:25:41,290
I think you should always be questioning, you know, I take this very scientific attitude

376
00:25:41,300 --> 00:25:42,890
that everything you've learned is just provisional

377
00:25:42,900 --> 00:25:46,890
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 --> 00:25:52,390
Once I realized that there where real serious problems,

380
00:25:52,400 --> 00:25:55,090
fundamental problems that I could do something to address

381
00:25:55,100 --> 00:25:58,760
I didn't see a way to forget that, I didn't see a way 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 --> 00:26:11,380
We would just talk for hours into the night

384
00:26:14,300 --> 00:26:17,390
I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me.

385
00:26:17,400 --> 00:26:19,380
I think to some degree I was like

386
00:26:19,400 --> 00:26:24,800
"This is a terrible idea and impossible and therefore I will pretend it is not happening".

387
00:26:25,200 --> 00:26:29,390
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 --> 00:26:39,290
We moved in and furnished the house, and it was really peaceful, like, my life had not been peaceful for a while

390
00:26:39,300 --> 00:26:41,040
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 --> 00:27:10,980
he confessed he had a theme song and I made him play it for me.

396
00:27:12,200 --> 00:27:14,960
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 --> 00:27:47,320
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 --> 00:28:10,790
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 --> 00:28:17,340
that you can visit at openlibrary.org and the idea is to be huge wiki,

408
00:28:17,350 --> 00:28:19,930
an editable website with one page per book.

409
00:28:20,062 --> 00:28:23,590
So for every book ever published you wanna have a web page about it

410
00:28:23,600 --> 00:28:25,856
that 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 --> 00:28:31,181
under one site and then gives you links

413
00:28:31,191 --> 00:28:34,630
where you can buy it, you can borrow it, or you can browse it.

414
00:28:34,640 --> 00:28:37,190
I love libraries, you know, I'm the kind of person who goes

415
00:28:37,200 --> 00:28:39,690
to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.

416
00:28:39,700 --> 00:28:42,638
That's the dream of Open library, is building this website

417
00:28:42,648 --> 00:28:46,010
where both you can leap 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 --> 00:28:52,690
that has been embedded and lost in big physical libraries,

420
00:28:52,700 --> 00:28:55,670
that's hard to find, that's not very well accessible on-line,

421
00:28:55,680 --> 00:28:58,976
it's really important because books are our cultural legacy,

422
00:28:58,986 --> 00:29:02,290
you know, books are the place people go to write things down,

423
00:29:02,300 --> 00:29:04,683
and to have that all swallowed up by one corporation,

424
00:29:04,693 --> 00:29:06,222
is 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 --> 00:29:14,816
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 --> 00:29:21,170
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 out

431
00:29:29,120 --> 00:29:33,012
in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain.

432
00:29:33,022 --> 00:29:36,562
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 --> 00:29:42,968
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 --> 00:30:29,590
You can't search it, you can't bookmark anything, you got to have a credit card.

443
00:30:29,600 --> 00:30:34,640
and these are public records, it's, you know, US district courts are very important,

444
00:30:35,600 --> 00:30:38,425
it's where a lot of 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
and citizens and lawyers all need access to PACER and it fights them 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 --> 00:30:55,083
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 --> 00:31:07,180
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 courts 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 --> 00:31:44,016
He started a programme called "The PACER recycling Project",

460
00:31:44,026 --> 00:31:47,625
where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for

461
00:31:47,635 --> 00:31:50,043
to a free database so others can use them.

462
00:31:50,053 --> 00:31:53,150
The PACER people were getting a lot of flak from congress

463
00:31:53,160 --> 00:31:56,701
and others about public access and so they put together this 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 --> 00:32:07,882
So wasn't like really convenient.

467
00:32:08,035 --> 00:32:11,755
I encouraged volunteers to join the so called ThumbDrive corp.

468
00:32:12,080 --> 00:32:17,030
and download docs from the public access libraries and upload them to the PACER recycling site.

469
00:32:17,040 --> 00:32:19,270
People take a ThumbDrive into one of these libraries

470
00:32:19,280 --> 00:32:23,012
and they download a bunch of documents and they 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 --> 00:32:28,594
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 --> 00:32:38,630
But of course I get this 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 a conference.

477
00:32:47,490 --> 00:32:51,590
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 --> 00:33:02,114
Schultze had already developed a program

481
00:33:02,124 --> 00:33:06,490
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 at that conference,

485
00:33:18,977 --> 00:33:22,071
he was off sitting in a 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 were 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 --> 00:34:07,500
Now, I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps

496
00:34:07,530 --> 00:34:11,850
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 --> 00:34:26,490
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 --> 00:34:33,560
I thought "What the hell is going on here?"

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

504
00:34:36,640 --> 00:34:39,700
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 his room.

506
00:34:47,500 --> 00:34:50,283
and I remember being home that day and wondering why

507
00:34:50,293 --> 00:34:53,714
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 --> 00:34:59,581
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 --> 00:35:16,630
called him up on the phone, tried to sucker him into

516
00:35:16,640 --> 00:35:19,030
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 --> 00:35:27,782
The downloading also uncovered massive

520
00:35:27,792 --> 00:35:30,312
privacy violations in the court documents.

521
00:35:30,390 --> 00:35:34,650
Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result

522
00:35:35,152 --> 00:35:38,992
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 --> 00:35:49,792
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 --> 00:35:55,731
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 --> 00:36:01,872
and think that there can possibly be anything wrong in this whole world

530
00:36:01,882 --> 00:36:03,502
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
into a broader range of political causes.

536
00:36:16,225 --> 00:36:18,745
I went into congress, and I invited him to

537
00:36:18,823 --> 00:36:21,583
come and hangout and intern for us for a while

538
00:36:21,712 --> 00:36:25,072
so that he could learn, you know, the political process.

539
00:36:25,303 --> 00:36:27,815
He was sort of learning about a new community

540
00:36:27,825 --> 00:36:29,190
and a new set of skills

541
00:36:29,200 --> 00:36:31,480
and kind of learning to hack politics.

542
00:36:31,505 --> 00:36:34,305
It seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away

543
00:36:34,315 --> 00:36:36,691
until they whole bodies are dripping with sweat,

544
00:36:36,701 --> 00:36:38,893
faced with the knowledge that if they dare to stop

545
00:36:38,903 --> 00:36:41,359
they won't be able to put food on the table that night,

546
00:36:41,369 --> 00:36:43,919
while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day

547
00:36:43,929 --> 00:36:45,849
just by sitting and watching TV.

548
00:36:46,592 --> 00:36:48,932
But apparently the world is ridiculous.

549
00:36:49,520 --> 00:36:51,251
So, I co-founded a group called

550
00:36:51,261 --> 00:36:53,119
the "Progressive Change Campaign Committee"

551
00:36:53,129 --> 00:36:56,135
and what we try and do is we try and organize people over the Internet

552
00:36:56,145 --> 00:36:58,126
who care about progressive politics

553
00:36:58,136 --> 00:37:00,286
and moving the country in a more progressive direction,

554
00:37:00,296 --> 00:37:01,736
to kind of come together

555
00:37:01,800 --> 00:37:03,360
join our e-mail list, join our campaigns,

556
00:37:03,370 --> 00:37:06,262
help get progressive candidates elected all across the country.

557
00:37:06,272 --> 00:37:09,260
The group is responsible for igniting the grassroots efforts

558
00:37:09,270 --> 00:37:12,870
behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate.

559
00:37:13,032 --> 00:37:15,342
He might have thought it was a dumb system, but

560
00:37:15,352 --> 00:37:17,678
he came in and he said I need to learn this system,

561
00:37:17,688 --> 00:37:21,478
cause it can be manipulated, like any, you know, like any social system.

562
00:37:21,488 --> 00:37:23,894
But his passion for knowledge and libraries

563
00:37:23,904 --> 00:37:25,344
didn't take a back seat.

564
00:37:25,744 --> 00:37:27,286
Aaron began to take a closer look

565
00:37:27,296 --> 00:37:30,596
at institutions that publish academic journal articles.

566
00:37:31,248 --> 00:37:33,942
By virtue of being students at a major US university

567
00:37:33,952 --> 00:37:38,152
I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

568
00:37:38,384 --> 00:37:41,190
Pretty much every major university in the United States

569
00:37:41,200 --> 00:37:42,822
pays these sort of licensing 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 --> 00:37:50,950
the rest of the world can't read.

573
00:37:50,960 --> 00:37:53,180
These scholarly journals and articles

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

575
00:37:57,288 --> 00:38:00,168
and many have been payed for with taxpayer money

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

577
00:38:02,480 --> 00:38:05,120
But to read them you often have to pay again

578
00:38:05,130 --> 00:38:08,550
handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

579
00:38:08,830 --> 00:38:11,142
These licensing fees are so substantial that

580
00:38:11,152 --> 00:38:12,985
people who are studying in India,

581
00:38:12,995 --> 00:38:15,094
instead of studying in the United States,

582
00:38:15,104 --> 00:38:16,870
don't have this kind of access.

583
00:38:16,880 --> 00:38:19,462
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 --> 00:38:26,790
I mean, a lot of those journal articles, they go back to the enlightenment.

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

587
00:38:29,610 --> 00:38:32,838
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 --> 00:38:38,454
by the history of people doing interesting work,

590
00:38:38,464 --> 00:38:39,758
the history of scientists,

591
00:38:39,768 --> 00:38:43,382
it's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people

592
00:38:43,392 --> 00:38:45,900
but instead it's been locked down and put on-line

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

594
00:38:48,616 --> 00:38:52,156
who then try and get the maximum profit 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 --> 00:39:01,030
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 --> 00:39:05,854
the thinking, the lab work, the analysis,

599
00:39:05,864 --> 00:39:08,478
after everything is done, at that last stage,

600
00:39:08,488 --> 00:39:11,750
then the researcher has to hand over his or her copyright

601
00:39:11,760 --> 00:39:13,980
to this multi-billion dollar company.

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

603
00:39:15,400 --> 00:39:18,206
It's an entire economy built on volunteer labour,

604
00:39:18,216 --> 00:39:21,734
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 --> 00:39:30,296
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 --> 00:39:44,374
He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing,

611
00:39:44,384 --> 00:39:46,366
and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,

612
00:39:46,376 --> 00:39:49,916
but I think they... at some point Aaron asked the question:

613
00:39:50,096 --> 00:39:53,456
"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 --> 00:40:00,958
something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.

616
00:40:00,968 --> 00:40:02,950
Working on a fellowship at Harvard

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 a 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 --> 00:40:19,988
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 --> 00:40:38,710
He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking.

628
00:40:38,720 --> 00:40:40,454
the JSTOR database was organized, so

629
00:40:40,464 --> 00:40:42,080
it was completely trivial to figure out

630
00:40:42,090 --> 00:40:44,454
how you could download all the articles in JSTOR

631
00:40:44,464 --> 00:40:45,580
because it was basically numbered

632
00:40:45,590 --> 00:40:48,398
it was basically "/"  "/"  "/"  number article...

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

634
00:40:52,640 --> 00:40:55,406
He wrote a python script called “keepgrabbing.py”

635
00:40:55,416 --> 00:40:58,416
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 it's 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 --> 00:41:19,520
when they noticed that this is happening.

643
00:41:19,530 --> 00:41:22,920
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 do defending them

648
00:41:42,675 --> 00:41:46,760
Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings.

649
00:41:46,770 --> 00:41:48,510
He went, instead of going through WiFi,

650
00:41:48,520 --> 00:41:51,010
he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network.

651
00:41:51,020 --> 00:41:56,615
And just left it there with an external hard drive downloading these  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 the 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 said "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 that 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 --> 00:42:33,040
That's the only reason you film something like that.

660
00:42:38,100 --> 00:42:41,640
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, organize like a stake-out where as he was biking home from MIT

666
00:43:42,325 --> 00:43:48,805
these cops came out from, like, either side of the road, or something like that, and started 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 that 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
I 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 --> 00:44:18,240
was so foreign and uncomprehensible, I didn't know what to do.

674
00:44:18,250 --> 00:44:21,310
Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house,

675
00:44:21,320 --> 00:44:24,775
his apartment in Cambridge 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 --> 00:44:37,435
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 the attack on 9/11, their role expanded.

680
00:44:48,875 --> 00:44:51,065
President Bush used the "Patriot Act"

681
00:44:51,075 --> 00:44:55,575
to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces".

682
00:44:56,575 --> 00:45:01,590
The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists.

683
00:45:01,600 --> 00:45:06,860
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 --> 00:45:16,190
The secret service turns Swartz's case over to the Boston US attorney's office.

686
00:45:16,200 --> 00:45:17,910
There was a guy in the US attorney's office

687
00:45:17,920 --> 00:45:22,240
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 --> 00:45:35,140
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 --> 00:45:41,990
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,

694
00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:46,560
but he can be seen here in an episode of the television 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 --> 00:45:53,510
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 --> 00:46:02,065
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, describing 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 --> 00:46:27,660
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 --> 00:46:36,060
James committed suicide during the investigation.

708
00:46:36,725 --> 00:46:41,240
In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,

709
00:46:41,250 --> 00:46:46,365
Heymann's boss, US attorney for the district of Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz said this:

710
00:46:46,375 --> 00:46:50,160
"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,

711
00:46:50,170 --> 00:46:53,090
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 criminalize stealing of information,

715
00:47:06,100 --> 00:47:09,565
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 --> 00:47:16,538
So the thing about a crowbar is,

718
00:47:16,548 --> 00:47:19,368
every time I break into a place with a crowbar,

719
00:47:19,497 --> 00:47:21,837
I do damage. There's no doubt about it.

720
00:47:21,988 --> 00:47:23,370
But when Aaron writes a script

721
00:47:23,380 --> 00:47:27,640
that says: "download, download, download", a hundred times in a second,

722
00:47:28,160 --> 00:47:30,440
there's no obvious damage, to anybody.

723
00:47:30,948 --> 00:47:33,567
If he does that for the purpose of gathering

724
00:47:33,577 --> 00:47:35,960
an archive to do academic research on it

725
00:47:35,970 --> 00:47:38,130
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 --> 00:47:45,654
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 --> 00:47:51,310
He just wouldn't talk about it, and he's like very stressed

730
00:47:51,320 --> 00:47:55,270
if you thought like the FBI was like, going to come to your doorstep

731
00:47:55,280 --> 00:47:59,030
any day, any time you went down the hall, even to do your laundry

732
00:47:59,040 --> 00:48:02,675
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 dour mood.

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

736
00:48:22,110 --> 00:48:23,870
about his whereabouts during this time,

737
00:48:23,880 --> 00:48:27,660
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 --> 00:48:59,898
it was unknown whether she 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 sprees of sorts.

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

749
00:49:14,342 --> 00:49:18,218
his 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 gotten 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 --> 00:49:39,910
Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal,

754
00:49:39,920 --> 00:49:43,440
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 --> 00:49:58,240
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 --> 00:50:13,098
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 --> 00:50:21,108
Boston has its own computer crimes 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 sorts of cases

768
00:50:28,674 --> 00:50:30,172
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 lawyers

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

772
00:50:41,290 --> 00:50:43,750
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 here[?] against that guy?

776
00:50:56,510 --> 00:50:57,818
It's good for you the prosecutor,

777
00:50:57,828 --> 00:51:02,190
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 --> 00:51:05,390
I was so scared of having my computer seized,

780
00:51:05,400 --> 00:51:07,327
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 --> 00:51:15,402
from my previous work on my laptop.

784
00:51:15,634 --> 00:51:18,760
And that is above all 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 --> 00:51:28,208
Aaron told me that they'd offered him 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 --> 00:51:46,408
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 --> 00:52:05,742
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 --> 00:52:09,960
"they don't let felons work there"

798
00:52:17,752 --> 00:52:21,052
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 --> 00:52:31,628
he hadn't done anything that seemed felony worthy, right?

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

803
00:52:36,960 --> 00:52:38,990
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 --> 00:52:44,798
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 to 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 --> 00:53:14,510
Even with the physical evidence

814
00:53:14,520 --> 00:53:18,180
seized from Aaron's Acer computer, hard drive, and usb drive,

815
00:53:18,448 --> 00:53:21,268
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 --> 00:53:27,344
and just what did he plan to do with them?

818
00:53:29,160 --> 00:53:32,454
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 --> 00:53:38,116
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 --> 00:53:45,238
in order to learn interesting things about them.

823
00:53:45,248 --> 00:53:48,640
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 --> 00:53:55,854
In a project with Stanford law students,

826
00:53:55,864 --> 00:53:58,702
Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

827
00:53:58,712 --> 00:54:00,910
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 --> 00:54:11,054
giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles,

831
00:54:11,064 --> 00:54:15,072
which were 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 --> 00:54:25,646
In theory he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.

835
00:54:25,656 --> 00:54:27,558
That would have been completely OK.

836
00:54:27,568 --> 00:54:29,982
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 --> 00:54:37,054
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 --> 00:54:42,030
then, you know, OK, now it seems like a 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 --> 00:54:48,254
but that's kind of crazy to imagine that's what he was doing.

843
00:54:48,264 --> 00:54:49,638
So, but than there's a middle case

844
00:54:49,648 --> 00:54:53,726
what if he was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world?

845
00:54:53,736 --> 00:54:55,350
But depending on what he was doing,

846
00:54:55,360 --> 00:54:59,174
it creates a very different character to how the law should be thinking about it.

847
00:54:59,184 --> 00:55:00,740
The government was prosecuting him

848
00:55:00,750 --> 00:55:03,550
as if this was like a commercial criminal violation

849
00:55:03,560 --> 00:55:05,590
like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records

850
00:55:05,600 --> 00:55:07,000
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 --> 00:55:12,350
but I heard from a friend of his

853
00:55:12,360 --> 00:55:14,940
that Aaron had told him he was going to analyze the data

854
00:55:14,950 --> 00:55:18,390
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 --> 00:55:28,096
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 exit the situation.

860
00:55:35,224 --> 00:55:38,662
And I didn't want to leave in fear of having my computer seized

861
00:55:38,672 --> 00:55:41,038
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 --> 00:55:50,156
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 --> 00:56:00,734
it allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case.

869
00:56:00,744 --> 00:56:03,870
Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself,

870
00:56:03,880 --> 00:56:06,342
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 repeatedly that I didn't,

873
00:56:10,920 --> 00:56:12,718
this seemed fishy, I didn't like this

874
00:56:12,728 --> 00:56:14,622
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 --> 00:56:18,022
But they were really, really stringent

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

878
00:56:21,800 --> 00:56:24,950
Interviewer: just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal proffer

879
00:56:24,960 --> 00:56:25,910
Right, a proffer letter

880
00:56:25,920 --> 00:56:28,230
Interviewer: In which you basically handed information over

881
00:56:28,240 --> 00:56:30,350
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 --> 00:56:36,334
it was, at least that's not how I saw it, it was just

884
00:56:36,344 --> 00:56:38,246
having a discussion, having an interview with them

885
00:56:38,256 --> 00:56:41,062
Interviewer: Well, they're asking you questions
Quinn: They're asking me questions

886
00:56:41,072 --> 00:56:42,400
Interviewer: And they can ask about whatever they want
Quinn: Right

887
00:56:42,410 --> 00:56:44,334
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 --> 00:56:56,550
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 --> 00:57:03,006
I was depressed, and I was scared,

894
00:57:03,016 --> 00:57:05,710
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 --> 00:57:15,084
We were out of our minds.

898
00:57:15,096 --> 00:57:17,220
Aaron was clearly very destroyed about it,

899
00:57:17,230 --> 00:57:19,014
we were very destroyed about it.

900
00:57:19,024 --> 00:57:21,166
Aaron's attorneys were very destroyed about it.

901
00:57:21,176 --> 00:57:23,696
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 --> 00:57:30,814
that are continually telling me I'm lying

904
00:57:30,824 --> 00:57:32,984
and that I must have done something.

905
00:57:33,736 --> 00:57:36,976
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 --> 00:57:43,222
I told them that they were on the wrong side of history

908
00:57:43,232 --> 00:57:44,518
I used that phrase, I said:

909
00:57:44,528 --> 00:57:46,748
"you're on the wrong side of history"

910
00:57:48,648 --> 00:57:49,702
And they looked bored,

911
00:57:49,712 --> 00:57:52,606
they didn't even 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 --> 00:57:57,334
we weren't having the same conversation.

914
00:57:57,344 --> 00:57:59,380
I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know

915
00:57:59,390 --> 00:58:02,870
why people would download journal articles, and eventually

916
00:58:03,120 --> 00:58:05,220
I don't remember what was around it

917
00:58:06,144 --> 00:58:08,390
I mentioned he had done this blog post

918
00:58:08,400 --> 00:58:10,560
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 --> 00:58:22,810
But like all power,

923
00:58:22,820 --> 00:58:25,150
there are those who want to keep it for themselves.

924
00:58:25,160 --> 00:58:27,318
The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,

925
00:58:27,328 --> 00:58:29,774
published over centuries in books and journals,

926
00:58:29,784 --> 00:58:32,070
is increasingly being digitized and locked up

927
00:58:32,080 --> 00:58:34,300
by a handful of private corporations.

928
00:58:34,320 --> 00:58:38,270
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by.

929
00:58:38,280 --> 00:58:40,494
You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences,

930
00:58:40,504 --> 00:58:42,610
liberating the information locked up by the publishers

931
00:58:42,620 --> 00:58:44,598
and sharing them with your friends.

932
00:58:44,608 --> 00:58:47,574
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground.

933
00:58:47,584 --> 00:58:49,334
It's called stealing or piracy,

934
00:58:49,344 --> 00:58:52,140
as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of

935
00:58:52,150 --> 00:58:54,610
plundering a ship and murdering its crew.

936
00:58:54,728 --> 00:58:57,670
But sharing isn't immoral - it's a moral imperative.

937
00:58:57,680 --> 00:58:59,102
Only those blinded by greed

938
00:58:59,112 --> 00:59:01,572
would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

939
00:59:02,168 --> 00:59:04,440
There is no justice in following unjust laws.

940
00:59:04,450 --> 00:59:06,278
It's time to come into the light and,

941
00:59:06,288 --> 00:59:08,318
in the grand tradition of civil disobedience,

942
00:59:08,328 --> 00:59:12,108
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 --> 00:59:21,576
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 --> 00:59:28,070
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 --> 00:59:38,176
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 --> 01:00:02,036
I'm still angry that you can...

955
01:00:03,110 --> 01:00:06,350
...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 much 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 --> 01:00:28,960
that we're OK with a justice system which tries to game people

962
01:00:28,970 --> 01:00:32,090
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 --> 01:01:12,292
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 --> 01:01:22,062
Do you think that the Internet is something that should be considered a human right

973
01:01:22,072 --> 01:01:25,130
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 --> 01:01:30,614
I mean, this notion that national security is an excuse to shut down the Internet,

976
01:01:30,624 --> 01:01:34,280
that's exactly what we heard in Egypt, in Syria and all these other countries.

977
01:01:34,290 --> 01:01:37,168
and so its true, sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up

978
01:01:37,178 --> 01:01:40,022
some embarrassing 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 --> 01:01:44,019
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 --> 01:01:48,251
Thats what all these First Amendment rights of free expression,

983
01:01:48,261 --> 01:01:49,940
of freedom of association are all about.

984
01:01:49,950 --> 01:01:52,360
and so the notion that we should try and shut those down

985
01:01:52,370 --> 01:01:55,110
I think, just goes against very basic American principles.

986
01:01:55,120 --> 01:01:58,128
a principle, I think, is one that our founding fathers would have understood.

987
01:01:58,138 --> 01:01:59,779
If the Internet had been around back then

988
01:01:59,789 --> 01:02:04,469
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 --> 01:02:12,427
...we need a massive public outcry.

991
01:02:12,437 --> 01:02:15,648
If there is no massive global public outcry. It won't create any change.

992
01:02:15,658 --> 01:02:19,008
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 --> 01:02:24,215
Without telling her specifics, he warned her

995
01:02:24,225 --> 01:02:27,790
he was involved in something he called simply "the bad thing".

996
01:02:27,800 --> 01:02:29,917
And I had, sort of, crazy theories, like

997
01:02:29,927 --> 01:02:33,270
that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or something

998
01:02:33,280 --> 01:02:36,580
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 --> 01:02:44,636
and I happened to pick up and he said:

1001
01:02:45,265 --> 01:02:47,524
"The bad thing might be in the news tomorrow"

1002
01:02:47,534 --> 01:02:49,662
"Do you want me to tell you or do you want to read about it in the news".

1003
01:02:49,672 --> 01:02:51,832
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 --> 01:03:00,830
"for downloading too many academic journal articles"

1006
01:03:00,840 --> 01:03:03,540
"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 --> 01:03:11,307
"it just 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 --> 01:03:29,910
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 --> 01:03:47,544
and left him in solitary confinement.

1019
01:03:50,290 --> 01:03:52,941
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 --> 01:04:00,656
to be followed by 3 years of supervised release

1023
01:04:00,666 --> 01:04:05,350
restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million dollars."

1024
01:04:06,248 --> 01:04:09,130
He is released on a $100,000 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 --> 01:04:21,661
JSTOR, they weren't our friends. They weren't helpful or friendly to us

1028
01:04:21,671 --> 01:04:25,270
but they also were just kind of like "We are not part of this".

1029
01:04:25,280 --> 01:04:27,560
JSTOR, and their parent company Ithica

1030
01:04:27,662 --> 01:04:30,780
also sidestepped requests to talk with this film.

1031
01:04:30,970 --> 01:04:33,341
But at the time they released a statement saying

1032
01:04:33,351 --> 01:04:37,371
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 --> 01:04:45,385
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 --> 01:04:50,409
And the government refused.

1037
01:04:51,137 --> 01:04:52,157
Interviewer: Why?

1038
01:04:55,315 --> 01:04:58,140
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 wouldn't move on

1040
01:05:03,235 --> 01:05:05,474
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 --> 01:05:14,212
Interviewer: They told you that?

1044
01:05:14,222 --> 01:05:15,000
Yes.

1045
01:05:15,315 --> 01:05:17,376
Interviewer: This was gonna be an example?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

1046
01:05:17,386 --> 01:05:21,945
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 --> 01:05:26,505
There's no other people running around logging onto JSTOR

1049
01:05:26,515 --> 01:05:29,710
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 --> 01:05:45,883
prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime that this country has seen in the last 100 years

1053
01:05:45,893 --> 01:05:50,114
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 --> 01:06:24,050
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel

1060
01:06:24,150 --> 01:06:27,456
that the straw that broke the camel's back was a press release

1061
01:06:27,466 --> 01:06:31,323
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 --> 01:06:35,981
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 --> 01:06:51,234
A prosecutor who didn't want to lose face, who had a political career in the offing maybe

1068
01:06:51,244 --> 01:06:53,492
and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them.

1069
01:06:53,502 --> 01:06:57,888
you spent how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library

1070
01:06:57,898 --> 01:07:00,960
and then 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 --> 01:07:06,381
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 --> 01:07:13,737
Interviewer: What was MIT's reaction then?

1075
01:07:14,275 --> 01:07:17,935
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 --> 01:07:39,740
At MIT the idea of going and running around on roofs and tunnels

1080
01:07:39,751 --> 01:07:43,711
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 --> 01:08:07,657
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 --> 01:08:30,198
but they later released a report saying that they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality

1092
01:08:30,208 --> 01:08:35,851
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 behavior 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 --> 01:08:52,747
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 blue box

1097
01:08:58,922 --> 01:09:01,700
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 --> 01:09:08,811
they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard

1100
01:09:08,826 --> 01:09:11,130
which was pretty clearly against the rules.

1101
01:09:11,140 --> 01:09:13,456
The difference between Aaron and the people that I just mentioned

1102
01:09:13,466 --> 01:09:18,806
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 --> 01:09:28,580
You know, the reason the Internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas.

1105
01:09:28,590 --> 01:09:31,838
and what we need to be focusing on is getting more information about our government

1106
01:09:31,848 --> 01:09:34,731
more accessibility, more discussion, more debate.

1107
01:09:34,741 --> 01:09:38,505
but instead, it seems what Congress is focused on, is shutting things down

1108
01:09:38,515 --> 01:09:40,478
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 --> 01:09:52,050
Welcome Aaron, good to have you back on the show here.

1112
01:09:52,060 --> 01:09:54,360
You know, just like spies used to, in olden days,

1113
01:09:54,370 --> 01:09:56,363
put microphones and tap what people were saying,

1114
01:09:56,373 --> 01:09:59,243
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 --> 01:10:06,838
his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb on-line piracy.

1117
01:10:06,848 --> 01:10:08,896
It was called SOPA.

1118
01:10:09,200 --> 01:10:12,980
Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous overreach,

1119
01:10:13,084 --> 01:10:15,883
threatening the technical integrity of Internet itself.

1120
01:10:15,893 --> 01:10:18,230
And 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 on-line campaign against this,

1122
01:10:21,955 --> 01:10:24,115
"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 --> 01:10:31,733
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 --> 01:10:38,115
and he went and founded Demand Progress.

1128
01:10:38,400 --> 01:10:40,710
Demand Progress in an on-line 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 --> 01:10:49,332
Aaron was one of the most prominent people

1132
01:10:49,342 --> 01:10:52,043
in a community of people who helped lead organizing

1133
01:10:52,053 --> 01:10:55,750
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 on-line 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 --> 01:11:11,918
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 --> 01:11:20,609
all they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement.

1140
01:11:20,808 --> 01:11:23,918
It pitted the titans of traditional media against a new

1141
01:11:23,928 --> 01:11:26,720
and now far more sophisticated remix culture.

1142
01:11:27,160 --> 01:11:30,340
It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman

1143
01:11:30,382 --> 01:11:33,056
and if they don't do their job of making sure nobody on their site

1144
01:11:33,066 --> 01:11:35,643
uses it for anything that's even potentially illegal

1145
01:11:35,653 --> 01:11:38,612
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 catastrophe.

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 --> 01:11:59,074
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 --> 01:12:07,670
and Aaron got that right away.

1154
01:12:07,680 --> 01:12:09,643
The freedoms guaranteed in our constitution,

1155
01:12:09,653 --> 01:12:13,840
the freedoms our country had been built on would be suddenly deleted.

1156
01:12:14,124 --> 01:12:16,932
New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom

1157
01:12:16,942 --> 01:12:21,382
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 --> 01:12:37,510
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 legislation

1167
01:13:00,650 --> 01:13:05,376
and the fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interests

1168
01:13:05,386 --> 01:13:08,158
against another set of corporate interests and they are financially

1169
01:13:08,168 --> 01:13:11,158
equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying.

1170
01:13:11,168 --> 01:13:12,788
Those are the closest ones.

1171
01:13:13,013 --> 01:13:15,518
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 --> 01:13:20,381
all the corporations are on one side,

1174
01:13:20,391 --> 01:13:23,391
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 they 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 --> 01:13:51,850
Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal 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 --> 01:13:59,310
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 --> 01:14:12,593
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 --> 01:14:20,670
There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill,

1187
01:14:20,680 --> 01:14:22,825
watching them insist they could regulate the Internet

1188
01:14:22,835 --> 01:14:25,083
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 --> 01:14:27,678
I am just not enough of a nerd.

1191
01:14:27,688 --> 01:14:30,859
...maybe we ought to ask some nerds what this thing really does.

1192
01:14:30,869 --> 01:14:33,329
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 --> 01:14:46,228
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 --> 01:14:56,790
We use the term Geek, but we're 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 --> 01:15:04,727
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 --> 01:15:12,288
and say this is why they're wrong.

1202
01:15:12,320 --> 01:15:15,536
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 --> 01:15:22,059
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 --> 01:15:30,212
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 --> 01:15:37,136
And I remember, maybe a few months later, I remember him

1209
01:15:37,146 --> 01:15:40,384
just turning to me and being like "I think we might win this"

1210
01:15:40,394 --> 01:15:42,734
and I was like "That would be amazing!"

1211
01:15:44,500 --> 01:15:50,238
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 transfered 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 --> 01:16:08,336
the record and movie industries realize that there was this backlash

1216
01:16:08,346 --> 01:16:10,420
they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit

1217
01:16:10,430 --> 01:16:11,678
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 --> 01:16:18,976
It was like Aaron had been like striking a match and it was being blown out...

1220
01:16:18,986 --> 01:16:21,100
striking another one and being blown out and finally

1221
01:16:21,110 --> 01:16:24,779
he managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught

1222
01:16:24,789 --> 01:16:27,019
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 --> 01:16:33,782
they didn't support the bill.

1225
01:16:34,048 --> 01:16:35,776
and then this happened.

1226
01:16:36,180 --> 01:16:39,883
I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy

1227
01:16:39,893 --> 01:16:42,550
and we should deal with them in a serious way

1228
01:16:42,560 --> 01:16:44,443
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 --> 01:17:03,044
Craigslist went black,

1235
01:17:03,306 --> 01:17:06,110
phone lines on Capitol Hill flat out melted,

1236
01:17:06,280 --> 01:17:09,412
members of Congress started rushing to issue statements

1237
01:17:09,422 --> 01:17:13,590
retracting their support for the bill, that they were promoting just a couple days ago.

1238
01:17:13,600 --> 01:17:17,973
Within 24 hours the number of opponents 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 unbelievable,

1243
01:17:31,271 --> 01:17:34,080
there was like a hundred representative swing,

1244
01:17:34,506 --> 01:17:38,571
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 --> 01:17:42,452
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 --> 01:17:58,816
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 --> 01:18:06,960
from staffers on Capitol Hill was, they received more emails and more phone calls

1253
01:18:06,970 --> 01:18:10,571
on SOPA blackout day than they'd ever received about anything.

1254
01:18:10,581 --> 01:18:12,918
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 --> 01:18:21,341
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 --> 01:18:32,976
and not only did it not sail through, it didn't pass at all.

1260
01:18:34,060 --> 01:18:36,301
It's easy sometimes to feel like you are powerless

1261
01:18:36,311 --> 01:18:39,065
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 --> 01:18:43,402
But I'm here to tell you today: you are powerful!

1264
01:18:46,053 --> 01:18:48,567
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 --> 01:18:56,610
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 --> 01:19:07,590
Some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit

1269
01:19:07,600 --> 01:19:11,560
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 --> 01:19:19,254
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 --> 01:19:30,411
and so for him it was kind of his proof of concept.

1275
01:19:30,862 --> 01:19:34,816
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 --> 01:19:46,034
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 --> 01:20:02,741
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 --> 01:20:16,346
Everyone said that there was no way we could 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 --> 01:20:31,968
it's not an unambiguously happy moment.

1290
01:20:31,978 --> 01:20:33,334
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 --> 01:20:44,342
The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous.

1293
01:20:44,352 --> 01:20:48,430
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 --> 01:20:57,127
that they don't even have basic statistics

1297
01:20:57,137 --> 01:20:59,190
about how big this spying program is.

1298
01:20:59,200 --> 01:21:03,584
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 --> 01:21:10,048
One thing that they said was "Look, we know the number of telephones we are spying on,

1301
01:21:10,058 --> 01:21:13,200
we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."

1302
01:21:13,210 --> 01:21:15,376
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, 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 --> 01:21:30,047
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 --> 01:21:51,610
So secrecy serves those who are already in power, and we are living in an era of secrecy

1311
01:21:51,620 --> 01:21:54,470
that coincides with an era where the government is doing

1312
01:21:54,480 --> 01:21:58,560
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 --> 01:22:04,301
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 --> 01:22:09,910
for use in the United States by the US government.

1317
01:22:09,920 --> 01:22:13,710
The problem with the spying program is its this sort of long, slow expansion

1318
01:22:13,720 --> 01:22:16,880
you know, going back to the Nixon Administration, right

1319
01:22:16,890 --> 01:22:19,963
obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush

1320
01:22:19,973 --> 01:22:21,838
and Obama has continued to expand it

1321
01:22:21,848 --> 01:22:23,981
the problems have slowly grown worse and worse

1322
01:22:23,991 --> 01:22:26,541
but there's never been this moment you can point to and say

1323
01:22:26,551 --> 01:22:31,231
"Okay we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters."

1324
01:22:32,230 --> 01:22:34,967
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 --> 01:22:57,323
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 --> 01:23:04,873
"we know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment

1331
01:23:06,910 --> 01:23:08,887
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 --> 01:23:14,878
And the government said

1334
01:23:14,888 --> 01:23:20,270
"Oh, the legal opinions we are using to legalize the spying program are also classified

1335
01:23:20,355 --> 01:23:23,480
so we can't even tell you which laws we are using to spy on you."

1336
01:23:23,490 --> 01:23:26,550
Every time they can say "Oh this is another instance of cyber war"

1337
01:23:26,560 --> 01:23:28,452
"the cyber criminals are attacking us again"

1338
01:23:28,462 --> 01:23:30,425
"we are all in danger, we are all under threat".

1339
01:23:30,435 --> 01:23:34,695
they use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws.

1340
01:23:37,320 --> 01:23:40,920
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 perspectives

1343
01:23:52,320 --> 01:23:55,447
Everything is great, Internet has created all this freedom and liberty,

1344
01:23:55,457 --> 01:23:57,074
and every thing's gonna be fantastic.

1345
01:23:57,084 --> 01:23:58,532
or everything is terrible.

1346
01:23:58,542 --> 01:24:00,487
the Internet has created all these tools for cracking down

1347
01:24:00,497 --> 01:24:03,474
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 --> 01:24:10,087
the Internet has done both and both are kind of amazing and astonishing

1350
01:24:10,097 --> 01:24:13,150
and which one will win out in the long run is up to us.

1351
01:24:13,160 --> 01:24:15,643
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 --> 01:24:21,701
and it's up to us which ones we emphasize and which ones we take advantage of

1354
01:24:21,711 --> 01:24:25,491
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 --> 01:24:40,496
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 --> 01:24:48,816
The prosecution's 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 separate 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 --> 01:25:06,039
and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law.

1363
01:25:07,048 --> 01:25:10,630
That theory and much of the prosecution's case against Swartz

1364
01:25:10,640 --> 01:25:13,857
involved a law created originally in 1986.

1365
01:25:14,044 --> 01:25:16,684
it is called "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".

1366
01:25:16,885 --> 01:25:19,972
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was inspired by the movie "War Games"

1367
01:25:19,982 --> 01:25:22,682
with Mathew Brodrick, which is a great movie.

1368
01:25:23,320 --> 01:25:27,884
In this movie, a kid gets 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 --> 01:25:37,690
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 --> 01:25:47,110
This is a law that's just behind the times

1374
01:25:47,120 --> 01:25:53,130
for example it penalizes 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 --> 01:26:05,942
and all of a sudden, depending on the jurisdiction and the 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 --> 01:26:13,607
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 --> 01:26:20,698
The website terms of service often say things like "Be nice to each other" or

1383
01:26:20,708 --> 01:26:22,594
"don't do anything that's improper".

1384
01:26:22,604 --> 01:26:27,600
The idea that the criminal law has anything to say about these kinds of violations

1385
01:26:27,697 --> 01:26:29,917
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 of 2013.

1388
01:26:36,202 --> 01:26:42,645
the Terms of Use on the website of Hearst's Seventeen magazine said you had to be 18 in order to read it.

1389
01:26:42,880 --> 01:26:46,754
I would say that the way the 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 --> 01:26:57,865
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 --> 01:27:05,346
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 --> 01:27:16,194
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 --> 01:27:23,483
but Prof. Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case.

1399
01:27:23,493 --> 01:27:28,267
I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons.

1400
01:27:28,277 --> 01:27:32,603
I was a federal prosecutor at the justice department for 3 years before I started teaching.

1401
01:27:32,613 --> 01:27:34,674
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 --> 01:27:41,154
just as a purely lawyers matter, looking at the precedents

1404
01:27:41,164 --> 01:27:43,230
looking at the statute, looking at the history,

1405
01:27:43,240 --> 01:27:45,687
looking at the cases that are out there so far

1406
01:27:45,697 --> 01:27:48,517
I think it was a fair indictment based on that.

1407
01:27:49,120 --> 01:27:51,563
You can debate whether they should have charged this case.

1408
01:27:51,573 --> 01:27:52,864
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 --> 01:28:24,715
there is, going to congress, as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA

1415
01:28:24,725 --> 01:28:28,448
or you can violate that law in a way to try 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 to 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 --> 01:28:56,167
There is a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law

1422
01:28:56,177 --> 01:29:00,427
and ultimately that's a decision for American people to make, working through Congress.

1423
01:29:00,437 --> 01:29:03,714
and than the second problem is I think, we are still trying to figure out

1424
01:29:03,724 --> 01:29:07,930
what's the line between less serious offenses and more serious offenses.

1425
01:29:07,940 --> 01:29:12,680
We are now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse

1426
01:29:12,850 --> 01:29:16,772
and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are

1427
01:29:16,782 --> 01:29:19,002
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 --> 01:29:32,994
and so most people, you know, you can't roll the  dice with your life like that

1431
01:29:33,004 --> 01:29:35,678
Should we tap somebody's phone? Should we film them?

1432
01:29:35,688 --> 01:29:39,744
Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?

1433
01:29:39,754 --> 01:29:42,411
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 --> 01:29:50,198
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 --> 01:29:57,074
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 --> 01:30:11,926
and anything we are angry about instinctively creates

1441
01:30:11,991 --> 01:30:13,810
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 --> 01:30:21,198
to resolve a whole host of problems that historically were never seen

1444
01:30:21,208 --> 01:30:22,896
as criminal justice problems.

1445
01:30:22,906 --> 01:30:26,702
The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute

1446
01:30:26,844 --> 01:30:32,992
which is part of what has created this debate and controversy over on-line access and information on the Internet.

1447
01:30:33,002 --> 01:30:35,501
It's very consistent with what we have seen in other areas

1448
01:30:35,511 --> 01:30:40,284
the one difference is people are usually targeted and victimized by

1449
01:30:40,328 --> 01:30:45,068
these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority.

1450
01:30:47,440 --> 01:30:50,620
Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.

1451
01:30:50,640 --> 01:30:53,287
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 --> 01:31:00,043
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 --> 01:31:06,896
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 the 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
...completely exhausted his financial resources and

1461
01:31:27,537 --> 01:31:32,097
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 it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

1463
01:31:36,378 --> 01:31:38,437
Interviewer: The legal defense?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

1464
01:31:38,447 --> 01:31:41,163
Interviewer: Was in millions?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

1465
01:31:41,173 --> 01:31:45,197
Yea, I think he didn't want to be a burden to people. I think that was a factor

1466
01:31:45,207 --> 01:31:49,572
Like I have my normal life, and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with.

1467
01:31:49,582 --> 01:31:53,062
and I try to keep the two of them as separate as possible.

1468
01:31:53,146 --> 01:31:58,006
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 --> 01:32:06,981
Do you admit guilt and move on with your life, or do you fight a broken system?

1471
01:32:06,991 --> 01:32:12,718
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 --> 01:32:19,056
and accept something that he didn't believe was fair

1474
01:32:19,066 --> 01:32:21,226
but I also think that he was scared.

1475
01:32:32,789 --> 01:32:34,372
I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

1476
01:32:34,382 --> 01:32:38,603
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 --> 01:32:44,313
and we would have walked across that little river in Boston and gone and had a couple of beers.

1478
01:32:46,044 --> 01:32:47,741
I really thought that we were right.

1479
01:32:47,751 --> 01:32:49,412
I thought that we were gonna win the case.

1480
01:32:49,422 --> 01:32:51,243
I thought we could win the case.

1481
01:32:51,253 --> 01:32:56,713
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 ascribe to severe depression.

1484
01:33:10,842 --> 01:33:14,922
And it's possible, you know, 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 --> 01:33:36,395
You know, he was brittle in a lot of ways, things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

1488
01:33:36,405 --> 01:33:38,445
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 --> 01:33:49,421
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 --> 01:34:03,094
He just didn't want to do it anymore.

1494
01:34:03,617 --> 01:34:07,290
He was just.. I just 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 --> 01:34:22,551
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 co-founder of the social news and entertainment website reddit has been found dead.

1498
01:34:29,075 --> 01:34:34,295
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 --> 01:35:04,422
I kept screaming "I can't hear you.. what did you 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 --> 01:35:56,235
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 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 on-line.

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 --> 01:38:06,259
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 --> 01:38:12,916
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 --> 01:38:25,252
to make the world a better place.

1537
01:38:26,389 --> 01:38:30,769
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 turn 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
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 --> 01:39:27,730
it comes through continuous struggle.

1553
01:39:30,026 --> 01:39:31,690
Aaron really could do magic

1554
01:39:32,000 --> 01:39:34,085
and I am dedicated to making sure...

1555
01:39:34,095 --> 01:39:36,176
... that his magic doesn't end with his death.

1556
01:39:36,186 --> 01:39:37,904
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 --> 01:39:44,550
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 --> 01:39:53,776
have introduced legislations that would reform

1561
01:39:53,786 --> 01:39:55,490
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 --> 01:40:07,664
be asking yourself all the time

1566
01:40:07,674 --> 01:40:11,397
"what is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now?"

1567
01:40:11,407 --> 01:40:14,467
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 --> 01:40:39,610
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 --> 01:40:50,399
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 February 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 --> 01:41:22,730
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 --> 01:41:31,460
you know hundreds of them.
Interviewer: A 14 year old?

1582
01:41:31,470 --> 01:41:33,850
14 year old kid yeah. And most of them ignored it.

1583
01:41:33,860 --> 01:41:35,834
But one of them, like, sent him a email back

1584
01:41:35,844 --> 01:41:38,340
And said, "this is not an entirely stupid idea. Why don't you come on over."

1585
01:41:38,350 --> 01:41:43,456
This kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher and in February, I heard him on the news

1586
01:41:43,466 --> 01:41:47,786
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 --> 01:42:03,616
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 --> 01:42:12,235
Because you never know, right.

1592
01:42:12,245 --> 01:42:17,264
This truth of the universe is not only something that policy makers use to figure out

1593
01:42:17,274 --> 01:42:19,269
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 slept so well, he didn't fall out of [baby talk] 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 --> 01:43:44,960
Contribute and help translating at:
https://github.com/iliasbartolini/the-internet-s-own-boy--aaron-swartz--subtitles