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A cofounder of the social, news and entertainment
website Reddit has been found dead.

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

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He was totally unexcited

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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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Freedom, open access, and computer
activists are mourning his loss.

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"An astonishing intellect", if 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, okay?

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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 one 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, I slowly had this process of
realizing that all the things around me that

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people had told me were just the natural way
things were, the way things always would be,

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they weren't natural at all,
there were things that could be changed

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and there were things that more importantly
were wrong and should change,

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and once I realized that,
there was really 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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"Oh, the box is tipping 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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"Hey, no, no no!"

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– Aaron!
– What?

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But I've come to the realization that 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!
- Who's there?

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- Aaron.
- Aaron who?

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- Aaron Funnyman.

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He knew what he wanted,
and he always wanted to do it.

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He always accomplished what he wanted.

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His curiosity was endless.

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

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

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One day he said to Susan, "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 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 at
the University of Chicago Library.

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

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and showed to him and 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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"And we're going to learn the ABC backwards."

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

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I remember, he came home
from his first Algebra class.

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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 let's press click button,
there! Now it's got that!"

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"Now it's in pink!"

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

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then he just took off like crazy on them.

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

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- Working at the computer?
- Nah...

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

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He started programming from
a really young age.

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

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and it was a Star Wars trivia game.

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

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for hours, programming this game.

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The problem that I kept having with him 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 saw it, is that
programming is magic.

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

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Aaron made an ATM using 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 like his new favorite computer,

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which at the time was the original iMac.

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

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to dress up as things that he wanted to see.

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

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"Spiderman looks at the camera!"

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

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

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

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

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Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right?

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

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

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And one of the teachers responds,

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"This is a terrible idea, you can't just
let anyone author the encyclopedia!"

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

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

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Me and my other brother would be like,
"Oh, you know, yeah Wikipedia is cool, but..."

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

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

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hosted by the Cambridge-based
web design firm ArsDigita.

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We all went to Cambridge when
he won the ArsDigita prize

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and we had no clue what Aaron was doing.

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It was obvious that the prize
was really important.

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Aaron soon became involved with
online programming communities,

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

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He comes up to me and is like, "Ben, there's this
really awesome thing that I'm working on."

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"You need to hear about it!"

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"Yeah, what is it?"

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"It's this thing called RSS."

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And he explains to me what RSS is.
I'm like, "Why is that useful, Aaron?"

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

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

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and there was a person on it named
Aaron Swartz who was combative but very smart,

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and who had lots of good ideas, and

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

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

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

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

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was thirteen years old while we were
working with him, and he's only fourteen now."

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And their second reaction was:

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"Christ, we really want to meet him.
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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The piece that he was working on, RSS,
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 and he saw that it was imperfect

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and looked for ways to help make it better.

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

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

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

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and white bread, and so on...

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

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what appeared to be a small boy's mouth,

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

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Aaron, you're up!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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and I can tell you what to do."

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

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

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like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.

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

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

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He was a connector.

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

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

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

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

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and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.

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

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

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Aaron really knew how to get information.

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

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I can just read the geometry book,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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and how this educational system was developed,

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

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as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them,

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

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

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I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.

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

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

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

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to make sure that people got paid.

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

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

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These things collided, and what we got was chaos.

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He then met Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig,

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who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court.

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

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I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the Eldred—to see the Eldred document.

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

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That's a more difficult question...

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

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especially in such a prestigious case as this one.

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

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It was called Creative Commons.

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

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

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

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

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

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And Aaron's role was the computer part.

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Like, how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable

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and expressed in a way so that machines can process it?

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

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Don't you think that's a huge mistake?"

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And Larry is like, "The biggest mistake we would have done is not listening to this kid."

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

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and it was this movable podium so it was this embarrassing thing,

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where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face.

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When you come to our website here, and you go to "Choose License".

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It gives you this list of options, it explains what it means, and you've got 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, just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult,

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and Aaron stood up there in front of a whole audience full of people, and just started talking

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about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons,

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and they were 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?

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But they did...

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

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

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the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.

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

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

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Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

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I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

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I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

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I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

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

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on things that won't have an impact.

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

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I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

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I want to make the world a better place.

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In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

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

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

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and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth,

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and made him feel different from any of the other students.

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Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

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and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

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who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters

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and I think it just made him bananas.

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In 2005, after only one year of college,

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

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He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a a website."

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And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure."

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So Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment...

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So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here.

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I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

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'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

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Aaron lived in what's now the livingroom and some of the posters are leftover from when Aaron lived here.

247
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And then the library... there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

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Aaron's Y Combinator site was called "infogami", a tool to build websites.

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But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

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merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

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It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called "Reddit".

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There we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

253
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and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,

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And it showed no signs of letting up.

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First we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on... It was just incredible.

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Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

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There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flock to the site,

258
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and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

259
00:19:08,480 --> 00:19:12,605
reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

260
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so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

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and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

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there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home,

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and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well.

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00:19:34,480 --> 00:19:37,355
It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

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reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Condé Nast,

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who makes an offer to buy the company.

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Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

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about like: "How do I store this money?"

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- Like a lot of money...
- Like a lot of money.

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Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

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- And he's how old at the time?
- 19, 20.

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So it was in this apartment. They sat around
on what predated these couches,

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hacking on Reddit, and when they sold Reddit

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they threw a giant party, and then all flew
out to California the next day,

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and left the keys with me.

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It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start-up so we all presumed

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he was the richest person around

278
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but he said, "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little
shoebox-sized room. That's all I need."

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It was barely larger than a closet.

280
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The idea of him spending his money on
fancy objects just seemed so implausible.

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

282
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and I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt,

283
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so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes.

284
00:20:52,522 --> 00:20:55,063
So it's really no big deal."

285
00:20:55,063 --> 00:20:58,438
What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic
flows on the internet,

286
00:20:58,605 --> 00:21:01,147
and what commands our attention.

287
00:21:01,313 --> 00:21:04,730
In the old system of broadcasting, you're
fundamentally limited by the amount of

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space in the airwaves. You could only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television

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or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

290
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On the Internet, everybody can have a channel.
Everyone can get a blog, or a MySpace page.

291
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Everyone has a way of expressing themselves.

292
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What you see now is not a question of who gets
access to the airwaves,

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it's a question of who gets control over the
ways you find people.

294
00:21:25,563 --> 00:21:29,730
You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, theses sort of gatekeepers that tell you

295
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where on the internet you want to go.

296
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The people who provide you your sources of news and information.

297
00:21:34,688 --> 00:21:38,730
So it's not only certain people have a license to speak, now everyone has

298
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a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard.

299
00:21:45,605 --> 00:21:50,230
After he started working in San Francisco
at Condé Nast, he comes into the office

300
00:21:50,230 --> 00:21:54,188
and they want to give him a computer with all
this crap installed on it

301
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and say he can't install any new things
on this computer,

302
00:21:57,688 --> 00:21:59,772
which to developers is outrageous.

303
00:21:59,772 --> 00:22:02,522
From the first day, he was complaining
about all the stuff.

304
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"Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first
day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.

305
00:22:11,563 --> 00:22:15,897
By lunchtime, I had literally locked myself
in a bathroom stall and started crying.

306
00:22:15,897 --> 00:22:18,688
I can't imagine staying sane with someone
buzzing in my ear all day

307
00:22:18,688 --> 00:22:21,980
Let alone getting any actual work done.

308
00:22:21,980 --> 00:22:24,480
Nobody else seems to get work done here either

309
00:22:24,480 --> 00:22:27,980
Everybody's always coming into our room to
hang out and chat, or invite us to play

310
00:22:27,980 --> 00:22:30,313
the new video game system that Wired is testing."

311
00:22:33,355 --> 00:22:38,230
He really had different aspirations that were politically-oriented,

312
00:22:38,355 --> 00:22:42,230
and Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture

313
00:22:42,230 --> 00:22:47,313
that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals.

314
00:22:47,605 --> 00:22:49,980
Aaron hated working for a corporation.

315
00:22:49,980 --> 00:22:54,022
They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron
is the only one who is not going to take it.

316
00:22:54,063 --> 00:22:56,230
And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

317
00:22:56,272 --> 00:22:58,647
By not showing up to work, ever.

318
00:23:01,522 --> 00:23:05,772
It was said to be a messy breakup.
Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

319
00:23:05,772 --> 00:23:08,605
declined to be interviewed for this film.

320
00:23:09,605 --> 00:23:16,230
He rejected the business world. One of the really important things to remember about

321
00:23:16,230 --> 00:23:22,980
that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up
culture is that he was also leaving behind

322
00:23:22,980 --> 00:23:31,647
the things that had made him famous and well-loved, and he was at risk of letting down fans.

323
00:23:31,730 --> 00:23:36,188
He got to where he was supposed to be going, and had the self-awareness

324
00:23:36,188 --> 00:23:43,355
and the orneriness to realize that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck

325
00:23:43,355 --> 00:23:46,147
the single rose and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell,

326
00:23:46,147 --> 00:23:50,688
and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed,

327
00:23:50,688 --> 00:23:53,980
and he did get the rose in any event,

328
00:23:53,980 --> 00:23:57,688
he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool.

329
00:23:58,313 --> 00:24:02,022
The way Aaron always saw it, is that
programming is magic—

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you can accomplish these things that normal
humans can't, by being able to program.

331
00:24:07,397 --> 00:24:13,605
So if you had magical powers, would you use
them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

332
00:24:15,272 --> 00:24:18,730
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries
he had met as a child.

333
00:24:18,730 --> 00:24:22,647
The man who had invented the World Wide Web,
Tim Berners-Lee.

334
00:24:22,647 --> 00:24:26,188
In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on

335
00:24:26,188 --> 00:24:29,522
one of the most lucrative inventions of
the 20th century,

336
00:24:29,522 --> 00:24:35,397
but instead of profiting from the invention
of the World Wide Web, he gave it away for free.

337
00:24:36,313 --> 00:24:39,938
It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.

338
00:24:41,355 --> 00:24:45,522
Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.

339
00:24:45,522 --> 00:24:51,147
Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genius, who doesn't in any sense cash out.

340
00:24:51,147 --> 00:24:56,105
He's not at all interested in how he's going to figure out how to make a billion dollars.

341
00:24:56,105 --> 00:24:58,063
People were saying, "Ah, there's money to be made there,"

342
00:24:58,063 --> 00:25:00,855
so there would have been lots of little webs,

343
00:25:00,855 --> 00:25:02,355
instead of one big one,

344
00:25:02,355 --> 00:25:05,272
and one little web, and all sorts of webs doesn't work,

345
00:25:05,272 --> 00:25:08,313
because you can't follow links from one to the other.

346
00:25:10,397 --> 00:25:14,313
You had to have the critical masses—the thing was the entire planet,

347
00:25:14,313 --> 00:25:17,397
so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board.

348
00:25:24,355 --> 00:25:28,563
I feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is,

349
00:25:28,897 --> 00:25:34,938
to just kind of take what you're given, and you know, follow the things that adults told you to do,

350
00:25:34,938 --> 00:25:39,230
and that your parents told you to do, and that society tells you to do. I think you should always be questioning.

351
00:25:39,230 --> 00:25:43,313
I take this very scientific attitude, that
everything you've learned is just provisional,

352
00:25:43,605 --> 00:25:49,438
that it's always open to recantation or refutation or
questioning, and I think the same applies to society.

353
00:25:49,438 --> 00:25:53,647
Once I realized that there were real serious problems—fundamental problems—

354
00:25:53,647 --> 00:25:58,772
that I could do something to address, I didn't see a way to forget that. I didn't see a way not to.

355
00:26:02,772 --> 00:26:04,980
We just started spending a lot of time,

356
00:26:04,980 --> 00:26:06,772
just kind of as friends.

357
00:26:09,063 --> 00:26:12,022
We would just talk, for hours, into the night.

358
00:26:14,563 --> 00:26:18,272
I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me. I think to some degree,

359
00:26:18,272 --> 00:26:24,147
I was, like, this is a terrible idea, and impossible, and therefore I will pretend it is not happening.

360
00:26:25,313 --> 00:26:29,063
As my marriage was breaking down, and I was
really stuck without anywhere to go,

361
00:26:29,063 --> 00:26:33,063
we became roommates, and I brought my daughter over.

362
00:26:34,230 --> 00:26:37,397
We moved in, and furnished the house, and it
was really peaceful.

363
00:26:37,397 --> 00:26:40,938
My life had not been peaceful for a while, and really neither had his.

364
00:26:46,355 --> 00:26:54,188
We were extremely close from the beginning of our romantic relationship.

365
00:26:54,188 --> 00:26:57,730
We just... we were in constant contact.

366
00:26:57,730 --> 00:27:02,522
But we're both really difficult people to deal with.

367
00:27:04,605 --> 00:27:10,980
In a very Ally McBeal discussion, he confessed he had a theme song, and I made him play it for me.

368
00:27:12,438 --> 00:27:16,605
It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple.

369
00:27:16,605 --> 00:27:24,230
I think it was just that sense of kind of being a little bit embattled that the song has,

370
00:27:25,147 --> 00:27:27,772
and it also had, like, this hopefulness to it.

371
00:27:36,772 --> 00:27:44,563
In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic
about life. Even when he didn't feel it,

372
00:27:44,563 --> 00:27:47,105
he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

373
00:27:53,313 --> 00:27:58,355
- What are you doing?
- Flicker has video now.

374
00:27:59,772 --> 00:28:01,772
Swartz threw his energy into a string of new

375
00:28:01,772 --> 00:28:04,772
projects involving access to public information,

376
00:28:04,772 --> 00:28:08,230
including an accountability webside called
Watchdog.net,

377
00:28:08,230 --> 00:28:10,855
and a project called The Open Library.

378
00:28:11,022 --> 00:28:15,313
So, the Open Library Project is a website you can visit at openlibrary.org,

379
00:28:15,313 --> 00:28:19,813
and the idea is to be a huge wiki, an editable website with one page per book.

380
00:28:19,813 --> 00:28:23,938
So for every book ever published, we want to have a web page about it that combines

381
00:28:23,938 --> 00:28:29,563
all the information from publishers, from booksellers, from libraries, from readers

382
00:28:29,563 --> 00:28:34,605
onto one site, and then gives you links where
you can buy it, you can borrow it, or you can browse it.

383
00:28:34,605 --> 00:28:39,980
I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who
goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.

384
00:28:39,980 --> 00:28:44,063
That's the dream of Open Library, is building this website where both you can leap

385
00:28:44,063 --> 00:28:49,313
from book to book, from person to author, from subject to idea, go through this vast tree

386
00:28:49,313 --> 00:28:54,105
of knowledge that's been embedded and lost in big physical libraries, that's hard to find,

387
00:28:54,188 --> 00:28:59,063
that's not very well-accessible online. It's really important because books are our cultural legacy.

388
00:28:59,063 --> 00:29:01,272
Books are the place people go to write things down,

389
00:29:01,272 --> 00:29:05,813
and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary.

390
00:29:06,730 --> 00:29:10,730
How can you bring public access to the public domain?

391
00:29:10,730 --> 00:29:14,813
It may sound obvious that you'd have public access to the public domain,

392
00:29:14,813 --> 00:29:21,355
but in fact it's not true. So the public domain should be free to all, but it's often locked up.

393
00:29:21,355 --> 00:29:26,730
There's often guard cages. It's like having a national park but with a moat around it,

394
00:29:26,730 --> 00:29:33,188
and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain.

395
00:29:33,188 --> 00:29:39,397
One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in was bringing public access to the public domain.

396
00:29:39,397 --> 00:29:43,188
This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble.

397
00:29:46,188 --> 00:29:52,730
I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States.

398
00:29:54,397 --> 00:29:59,022
What I discovered was a puzzling system called PACER.

399
00:29:59,438 --> 00:30:03,063
Which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

400
00:30:03,063 --> 00:30:07,230
I started Googling, and that's when I ran
across Carl Malamud.

401
00:30:08,813 --> 00:30:14,897
Access to legal materials in the United States is a ten billion dollar per year business.

402
00:30:14,897 --> 00:30:22,897
PACER is just this incredible abomination
of government services. It's ten cents a page,

403
00:30:22,897 --> 00:30:27,355
it's this most braindead code you've ever seen. You can't search it. You can't bookmark anything.

404
00:30:27,355 --> 00:30:31,772
You've got to have a credit card, and these are public records.

405
00:30:31,772 --> 00:30:37,313
U.S. district courts are very important; it's
where a lot of our seminal litigation starts.

406
00:30:37,313 --> 00:30:44,272
Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists, students, citizens and lawyers

407
00:30:44,272 --> 00:30:48,522
all need access to PACER, and it fights them every step of the way.

408
00:30:48,522 --> 00:30:55,105
People without means can't see the law as readily as people that have that Gold American Express card.

409
00:30:55,105 --> 00:30:57,647
It's a poll tax on access to justice.

410
00:30:57,813 --> 00:31:03,980
You know, the law is the operating system of our democracy, and you have to pay to see it?

411
00:31:04,105 --> 00:31:06,980
You know, that's not much of a democracy.

412
00:31:06,980 --> 00:31:11,730
They make about 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system,

413
00:31:11,730 --> 00:31:18,105
and it doesn't cost anything near that, according to their own records. In fact, it's illegal.

414
00:31:18,772 --> 00:31:25,688
The E-Government Act of 2002 states that the courts may charge only to the extent necessary,

415
00:31:25,688 --> 00:31:29,438
in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER.

416
00:31:34,438 --> 00:31:39,980
As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges.

417
00:31:39,980 --> 00:31:43,147
He started a program called The PACER Recycling Project,

418
00:31:43,147 --> 00:31:47,105
where people could upload PACER documents they had already paid for

419
00:31:47,105 --> 00:31:50,147
to a free database so others could use them.

420
00:31:50,147 --> 00:31:55,147
The PACER people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access,

421
00:31:55,147 --> 00:32:00,730
and so they put together a system in 17 libraries across the country that was free PACER access.

422
00:32:01,688 --> 00:32:07,438
You know, that's one library every 22,000 square miles, I believe, so it wasn't like really convenient.

423
00:32:07,897 --> 00:32:11,980
I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Corps,

424
00:32:11,980 --> 00:32:16,938
and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the PACER recycling site.

425
00:32:16,938 --> 00:32:20,605
People take a thumb drive into one of these libraries, and they download a bunch of documents,

426
00:32:20,605 --> 00:32:24,855
and they send them to me. I mean, it was just a joke.

427
00:32:24,855 --> 00:32:28,397
In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Corps, there was a Wizard of Oz,

428
00:32:28,397 --> 00:32:31,897
you know, the Munchkins singing, so a videoclip came up:

429
00:32:35,022 --> 00:32:39,147
But of course, I get this phone calls from Steve Shultz and Aaron, saying,

430
00:32:39,397 --> 00:32:42,813
"Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps."

431
00:32:43,147 --> 00:32:47,313
Around that time, I ran into Aaron at a conference.

432
00:32:47,313 --> 00:32:51,397
This is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.

433
00:32:51,397 --> 00:32:53,105
So I approached him and I said,

434
00:32:53,105 --> 00:32:57,938
"Hey, I am thinking about an intervention on the PACER problem."

435
00:32:59,605 --> 00:33:04,188
Schultz had already developed a program that could automatically download PACER documents

436
00:33:04,188 --> 00:33:06,188
from the trial libraries.

437
00:33:06,188 --> 00:33:08,522
Swartz wanted to take a look.

438
00:33:08,522 --> 00:33:13,230
So, I showed him the code, and I didn't know what would come next,

439
00:33:13,230 --> 00:33:18,772
but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference,

440
00:33:18,772 --> 00:33:24,313
he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his

441
00:33:24,313 --> 00:33:31,855
that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library, and to begin to test his improved code.

442
00:33:31,855 --> 00:33:38,147
At which point the folks at the courts realized something is not going quite according to plan.

443
00:33:38,147 --> 00:33:42,605
And data started to come in, and come in, and come in

444
00:33:42,605 --> 00:33:47,355
and soon there was 760 GB of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.

445
00:33:48,563 --> 00:33:51,813
Using information retrieved from the trial libraries,

446
00:33:51,813 --> 00:33:56,980
Swartz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the PACER system.

447
00:33:56,980 --> 00:34:04,063
He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million Federal Court documents, almost 20 million pages of text.

448
00:34:04,063 --> 00:34:09,563
Now, I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps exceed the expectations of the people

449
00:34:09,563 --> 00:34:14,230
running the pilot access project, but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal.

450
00:34:14,522 --> 00:34:18,772
Aaron and Carl decided to go talk to The New York Times about what happened.

451
00:34:19,397 --> 00:34:26,147
They also caught the attention of the FBI, who began to stake out Swartz's parents' house in Illinois.

452
00:34:26,313 --> 00:34:30,730
And I get a tweet from his mother, saying, "Call me!"

453
00:34:30,730 --> 00:34:33,772
So, I think, like, what the hell's going on here?

454
00:34:33,772 --> 00:34:38,647
And so, finally I get a hold of Aaron and, you know, Aaron's mother was like, "Oh my God, FBI, FBI, FBI!"

455
00:34:39,938 --> 00:34:45,480
An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway, trying to see if Aaron is in his room.

456
00:34:46,813 --> 00:34:51,522
I remember being home that day, and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway,

457
00:34:51,522 --> 00:34:54,730
and just driving back up. That's weird!

458
00:34:56,355 --> 00:35:04,563
Like, five years later I read this FBI file, like, oh my goodness: that was the FBI agent, in my driveway.

459
00:35:04,813 --> 00:35:08,647
He was terrified. He was totally terrified.

460
00:35:09,563 --> 00:35:14,522
He was way more terrified after the FBI actually called him up on the phone,

461
00:35:14,897 --> 00:35:18,897
and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.

462
00:35:18,938 --> 00:35:23,272
He said he went home and lay down on the bed and, you know, was shaking.

463
00:35:25,105 --> 00:35:29,605
The downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents.

464
00:35:29,855 --> 00:35:34,522
Ultimately, the courts were forced to change their policies as a result,

465
00:35:34,522 --> 00:35:39,438
and the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges.

466
00:35:39,438 --> 00:35:42,313
To this day, I find it remarkable

467
00:35:42,313 --> 00:35:47,397
that anybody, even at the most remote podunk field office of the FBI

468
00:35:47,397 --> 00:35:51,897
thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars was investigating people

469
00:35:51,897 --> 00:35:55,063
for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public.

470
00:35:55,063 --> 00:35:57,313
How can you call yourself a lawman,

471
00:35:57,647 --> 00:36:01,605
and think that there could possibly be anything wrong in this whole world

472
00:36:01,605 --> 00:36:03,397
with making the law public?

473
00:36:03,397 --> 00:36:09,022
Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in.

474
00:36:09,022 --> 00:36:15,147
Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology, and into a broader range of political causes.

475
00:36:15,147 --> 00:36:21,355
I went into Congress, and I invited him to come and hang out and intern for us for a while

476
00:36:21,355 --> 00:36:24,730
so that he could learn the political process.

477
00:36:24,730 --> 00:36:30,730
He was sort of learning about new community and new sets of skills and kind of learning to hack politics.

478
00:36:30,730 --> 00:36:36,022
It seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away until their whole bodies are dripping with sweat

479
00:36:36,022 --> 00:36:40,813
faced with the knowledge that if they dare to stop, they won't able to put food on the table that night,

480
00:36:40,855 --> 00:36:46,105
while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day just by sitting and watching TV.

481
00:36:46,188 --> 00:36:48,438
But apparently the world is ridiculous.

482
00:36:48,563 --> 00:36:52,563
So, I co-founded a group called "The Progressive Change Campaign Committee",

483
00:36:52,563 --> 00:36:57,813
and what we try and do is we try to organize people over the Internet who care about progressive politics

484
00:36:57,813 --> 00:37:00,063
and moving the country toward a more progressive direction

485
00:37:00,063 --> 00:37:03,313
to kind of come together, join our e-mail list, join our campaigns

486
00:37:03,313 --> 00:37:05,813
and help us to get progressive candidates elected all across the country.

487
00:37:05,813 --> 00:37:12,147
The group is responsible for igniting the grassroots effort behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate.

488
00:37:12,313 --> 00:37:17,397
He might have thought it was a dumb system but he came in and he said, "I need to learn this system,

489
00:37:17,397 --> 00:37:20,980
because it can be manipulated like any social system."

490
00:37:21,022 --> 00:37:25,313
But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat.

491
00:37:25,355 --> 00:37:30,647
Aaron began to take a closer look at institutions that publish academic journal articles.

492
00:37:30,980 --> 00:37:35,105
By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume you have access

493
00:37:35,105 --> 00:37:38,230
to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

494
00:37:38,230 --> 00:37:43,313
Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like

495
00:37:43,313 --> 00:37:50,397
JSTOR and Thompson Isi to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read.

496
00:37:50,522 --> 00:37:56,730
These scholarly journals and articles are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online,

497
00:37:56,730 --> 00:38:01,730
and many have been paid for with taxpayer money or with government grants,

498
00:38:01,855 --> 00:38:08,063
but to read them, you often have to pay again handing over steep fees to publishers like Reed-Elsevier.

499
00:38:08,230 --> 00:38:14,147
These licenses fees are so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in United States,

500
00:38:14,563 --> 00:38:18,355
don't have this kind of access. They are locked out from all of these journals.

501
00:38:18,688 --> 00:38:22,688
They are locked out from our entire scientific legacy.

502
00:38:22,688 --> 00:38:26,772
I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to The Enlightenment.

503
00:38:26,772 --> 00:38:31,897
Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it's been scanned, digitized, and put in these collections.

504
00:38:31,897 --> 00:38:39,188
That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists.

505
00:38:39,188 --> 00:38:42,563
It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people,

506
00:38:42,563 --> 00:38:47,522
but instead, it has been locked up and put online by an handful of for-profit corporations

507
00:38:47,522 --> 00:38:52,438
who then try to get the maximum profit they can out of it.

508
00:38:52,855 --> 00:38:58,147
So a researcher paid by the university or the people publishes a paper,

509
00:38:58,147 --> 00:39:01,688
and at the very, very last step of that process, after all the work is done,

510
00:39:01,688 --> 00:39:06,397
after all the original research is done—the thinking, the lab work, the analysis, after everything is done,

511
00:39:06,397 --> 00:39:12,730
at that last stage, then the researcher has to hand over his or her copyright to this multi-billion dollar company.

512
00:39:13,855 --> 00:39:17,605
And it's sick. It's an entire economy built on volunteer labor,

513
00:39:17,605 --> 00:39:20,438
and then the publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream.

514
00:39:21,313 --> 00:39:28,313
Talk about a scam. One publisher in Britain made a profit of three billion dollars last year.

515
00:39:28,313 --> 00:39:29,855
I mean, what a racket!

516
00:39:29,855 --> 00:39:33,688
JSTOR is just a very, very small player in that story

517
00:39:33,688 --> 00:39:40,397
but for some reason, JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront.

518
00:39:40,397 --> 00:39:44,355
He'd gone to some conference around Open Access and Open Publishing,

519
00:39:44,355 --> 00:39:46,397
and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,

520
00:39:46,397 --> 00:39:49,688
but I think they—at some point, Aaron asked the question,

521
00:39:49,688 --> 00:39:53,938
"How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"

522
00:39:53,938 --> 00:39:57,563
And they gave some—I think it was two hundred million dollars,

523
00:39:57,563 --> 00:39:59,772
something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.

524
00:40:00,480 --> 00:40:06,772
Working on a fellowship at Harvard, he knew users on MIT's famously open and fast network next door

525
00:40:06,772 --> 00:40:11,563
had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR. Swartz saw an opportunity.

526
00:40:11,563 --> 00:40:13,730
You have a key to those gates,

527
00:40:13,730 --> 00:40:19,022
and with a little bit of shell script magic, you can get those journal articles.

528
00:40:20,605 --> 00:40:22,813
On September 24, 2010,

529
00:40:22,813 --> 00:40:26,605
Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop

530
00:40:26,605 --> 00:40:30,772
on the MIT network, under the name "Garry Host".

531
00:40:30,772 --> 00:40:35,480
The client name was registered as "GHost laptop".

532
00:40:35,480 --> 00:40:38,272
He doesn't hack JSTOR in the traditional sense of hacking.

533
00:40:38,272 --> 00:40:40,230
The JSTOR database was organized,

534
00:40:40,230 --> 00:40:43,772
so it was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in JSTOR,

535
00:40:43,772 --> 00:40:45,855
because it was basically numbered.

536
00:40:45,855 --> 00:40:51,647
It was basically slash slash slash... number article 444024 and -25 and -26.

537
00:40:51,647 --> 00:40:55,063
He wrote a Python script called keepgrabbing. pi,

538
00:40:55,063 --> 00:40:57,897
which was like, keeping grabbing one article after another.

539
00:40:57,897 --> 00:41:01,480
The next day, GHost laptop begins grabbing articles,

540
00:41:01,480 --> 00:41:08,022
but soon, the computer's IP address is blocked. For Swartz, it's barely a bump in the road.

541
00:41:08,022 --> 00:41:12,897
He quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading.

542
00:41:12,897 --> 00:41:17,438
Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps to try to interfere with this,

543
00:41:17,438 --> 00:41:19,022
when they notice that this is happening,

544
00:41:19,022 --> 00:41:21,438
and when the more modest steps don't work,

545
00:41:21,438 --> 00:41:26,397
then at a certain stage, JSTOR just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database.

546
00:41:26,397 --> 00:41:28,938
So there's a kind of cat-and-mouse game around

547
00:41:28,938 --> 00:41:33,105
getting access to the JSTOR database.

548
00:41:33,105 --> 00:41:39,147
Aaron, ultimately, obviously is the cat because he has more technical capability

549
00:41:39,147 --> 00:41:42,147
than the JSTOR database people do in defending them.

550
00:41:42,147 --> 00:41:46,438
Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement of one of the buildings,

551
00:41:46,438 --> 00:41:50,730
and he went, instead of going through WiFi, he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network

552
00:41:50,730 --> 00:41:55,772
and just left it there with an external hard drive downloading these articles to the computer.

553
00:41:55,772 --> 00:42:01,022
Unknown to Swartz, his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities.

554
00:42:02,105 --> 00:42:04,938
They didn't stop the downloads.

555
00:42:04,938 --> 00:42:08,188
Instead, they installed a surveillance camera.

556
00:42:09,772 --> 00:42:13,730
They found the computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building.

557
00:42:14,563 --> 00:42:18,938
They could have unplugged it. They could have waited for the guy to come back and said,

558
00:42:18,938 --> 00:42:22,938
"Dude, what are you doing, you know, cut it out. Who are you?"

559
00:42:22,938 --> 00:42:25,063
They could have done all that kind of stuff, but they didn't.

560
00:42:25,063 --> 00:42:29,355
What they wanted to do was film it to gather evidence to make a case.

561
00:42:29,355 --> 00:42:35,647
That's the only reason you film something like that.

562
00:42:36,855 --> 00:42:41,230
At first, the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera

563
00:42:41,230 --> 00:42:45,647
was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans.

564
00:42:52,355 --> 00:42:56,188
But days later, it caught Swartz.

565
00:43:05,313 --> 00:43:09,813
Swartz is replacing the hard drive. He takes it out of his backpack,

566
00:43:10,397 --> 00:43:13,647
leans out of frame for about five minutes,

567
00:43:14,147 --> 00:43:20,980
and then leaves.

568
00:43:36,355 --> 00:43:40,897
And then they organized, like, a stakeout where, as he was biking home from MIT,

569
00:43:41,022 --> 00:43:43,647
these cops came out from either side of the road,

570
00:43:43,730 --> 00:43:47,522
or something like that, and started going after him.

571
00:43:48,313 --> 00:43:53,522
He describes that he was pressed down and assaulted by the police.

572
00:43:54,313 --> 00:43:57,480
He tells me that they—it's unclear that they were police that were after him.

573
00:43:57,480 --> 00:44:01,897
He thought that someone was trying to attack him.

574
00:44:01,897 --> 00:44:04,980
He does tell me they beat him up.

575
00:44:07,480 --> 00:44:14,480
It was just devastating. The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution of anyone in our family or anything

576
00:44:14,480 --> 00:44:17,438
was so foreign and incomprehensible, I didn't know what to do.

577
00:44:17,480 --> 00:44:23,313
Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house, his apartment in Cambridge, in his office at Harvard.

578
00:44:27,022 --> 00:44:32,647
Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police.

579
00:44:33,022 --> 00:44:36,730
It had been taken over by the United States Secret Service.

580
00:44:37,105 --> 00:44:41,563
The Secret Service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984,

581
00:44:41,855 --> 00:44:45,105
but six weeks after the attack on 9/11, their role expanded.

582
00:44:48,563 --> 00:44:55,105
President Bush used The Patriot Act to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces".

583
00:44:55,813 --> 00:45:00,355
The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists.

584
00:45:00,688 --> 00:45:05,605
According to the Secret Service, they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact,

585
00:45:05,855 --> 00:45:10,188
organized criminal groups, or use of schemes involving new technology.

586
00:45:10,397 --> 00:45:14,897
The Secret Service turned Swartz's case over to the Boston U.S. Attorney's office.

587
00:45:15,272 --> 00:45:17,730
There was a guy in the U.S. attorney's office who had the title:

588
00:45:18,063 --> 00:45:20,897
"Head of the Computer Crimes Division or Task Force"

589
00:45:21,188 --> 00:45:23,313
I don't know what else he had going,

590
00:45:23,480 --> 00:45:28,480
but you're certainly not much of a "Computer Crimes Prosecutor" without a computer crime to prosecute,

591
00:45:28,980 --> 00:45:34,105
so he jumped on it, kept if for himself, didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit

592
00:45:34,563 --> 00:45:36,647
and that's Steve Heymann.

593
00:45:36,813 --> 00:45:40,897
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,

594
00:45:40,897 --> 00:45:45,772
but he can be seen here, in an episode of the television show "American Greed",

595
00:45:45,772 --> 00:45:48,522
filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.

596
00:45:48,522 --> 00:45:52,355
He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzales,

597
00:45:52,647 --> 00:45:55,855
a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades.

598
00:45:56,230 --> 00:46:00,980
Gonzales masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers,

599
00:46:01,188 --> 00:46:03,522
the largest such fraud in history.

600
00:46:03,813 --> 00:46:08,938
Here, Heymann, describing Gonzales, gives his view on the hacker mindset:

601
00:46:09,230 --> 00:46:15,147
These guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by.

602
00:46:15,480 --> 00:46:23,730
They have an ego, they like challenge, and of course they like money and everything you can get for money.

603
00:46:24,063 --> 00:46:28,813
One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzales case was a young hacker named Jonathan James.

604
00:46:29,188 --> 00:46:32,063
Believing Gonzales' crimes would be pinned on him,

605
00:46:32,355 --> 00:46:35,855
James committed suicide during the investigation.

606
00:46:36,063 --> 00:46:39,813
In an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,

607
00:46:40,063 --> 00:46:44,897
Heymann's boss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusets, Carmen Ortiz, said this:

608
00:46:45,438 --> 00:46:49,022
"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,

609
00:46:49,022 --> 00:46:51,938
and whether you take documents, data, or dollars."

610
00:46:52,647 --> 00:46:54,522
It is not true. It's obviously not true.

611
00:46:54,938 --> 00:46:56,647
I'm not saying it's harmless,

612
00:46:57,397 --> 00:47:03,022
and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalize stealing of information,

613
00:47:03,230 --> 00:47:05,605
but you got to be much more subtle

614
00:47:07,980 --> 00:47:13,147
in trying to figure out exactly which kinds of harms are harmful here.

615
00:47:13,772 --> 00:47:17,855
So the thing about a crowbar is, every time I break into a place with a crowbar,

616
00:47:17,855 --> 00:47:20,647
I do damage. There is no doubt about it.

617
00:47:20,647 --> 00:47:22,897
But when Aaron writes a script that says

618
00:47:23,105 --> 00:47:27,230
download download download, a hundred times in a second,

619
00:47:27,230 --> 00:47:29,938
there's no obvious damage to anybody.

620
00:47:29,938 --> 00:47:35,022
If he does that for the purpose of gathering an archive to do academic research on it,

621
00:47:35,105 --> 00:47:37,480
there is never any damage to anybody.

622
00:47:37,522 --> 00:47:41,772
He wasn't stealing. He wasn't selling what he got or giving it away.

623
00:47:41,772 --> 00:47:44,522
He was making a point, for as far as I could tell.

624
00:47:44,522 --> 00:47:47,022
The arrest took its toll on Swartz.

625
00:47:47,105 --> 00:47:48,563
He just wouldn't talk about it.

626
00:47:48,688 --> 00:47:50,313
I mean, he was very stressed.

627
00:47:50,563 --> 00:47:55,272
If you would thought that the FBI was going to come to your doorstep any day,

628
00:47:55,272 --> 00:47:58,438
anytime you went down the hall, even to do your laundry,

629
00:47:58,438 --> 00:48:02,022
and they'd break in into your apartment 'cause you left the door unlocked,

630
00:48:02,022 --> 00:48:05,397
like... I'd be pretty stressed,

631
00:48:05,397 --> 00:48:11,563
and it was clear, and so Aaron was always sort of like in a dour mood.

632
00:48:17,647 --> 00:48:22,938
He wouldn't give off any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time,

633
00:48:22,938 --> 00:48:27,147
because he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him.

634
00:48:30,272 --> 00:48:34,272
It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism.

635
00:48:34,522 --> 00:48:40,605
Time Magazine would later name, as their 2011 Person of the Year, "The Protester".

636
00:48:41,147 --> 00:48:45,730
There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.

637
00:48:47,855 --> 00:48:52,230
WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables,

638
00:48:52,688 --> 00:48:55,272
Manning had been under arrest at the time,

639
00:48:55,313 --> 00:48:58,730
it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak.

640
00:48:59,355 --> 00:49:03,605
Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble that

641
00:49:03,605 --> 00:49:05,897
has a lot of hackers in its ranks,

642
00:49:06,605 --> 00:49:10,147
were going on various sprees of sorts.

643
00:49:10,522 --> 00:49:12,897
If you compare that to what he did,

644
00:49:12,897 --> 00:49:16,688
this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,

645
00:49:17,355 --> 00:49:20,813
in a kind of private, professional matter.

646
00:49:21,147 --> 00:49:26,438
It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system.

647
00:49:27,188 --> 00:49:30,647
It just didn't belong there.

648
00:49:35,397 --> 00:49:38,480
Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal

649
00:49:38,897 --> 00:49:41,980
that involved three months in prison, time in an halfway house,

650
00:49:41,980 --> 00:49:44,272
and a year of home detention,

651
00:49:44,355 --> 00:49:46,730
all without the use of a computer.

652
00:49:46,897 --> 00:49:51,188
It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.

653
00:49:51,563 --> 00:49:55,522
Here we are: we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever

654
00:49:55,813 --> 00:49:57,522
about what the government's case is,

655
00:49:57,688 --> 00:50:00,563
and we have to make this immense decision

656
00:50:00,688 --> 00:50:04,188
where the lawyer is pushing you to do this,

657
00:50:04,480 --> 00:50:08,438
the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand,

658
00:50:08,772 --> 00:50:12,063
and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small,

659
00:50:12,313 --> 00:50:17,272
so whether you're guilty or not, you're better off taking the deal.

660
00:50:17,605 --> 00:50:19,647
Boston has its own Computer Crimes Division,

661
00:50:20,022 --> 00:50:23,897
lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need.

662
00:50:24,688 --> 00:50:29,355
So, you know, you can imagine all sorts of cases that will be really hard to prosecute,

663
00:50:29,438 --> 00:50:31,605
because you've got some criminals in Russia,

664
00:50:31,938 --> 00:50:34,688
or you've got some people inside of a corporation

665
00:50:34,938 --> 00:50:38,730
that are gonna five hundred dollar lawyers or seven hundred dollar-an-hour lawyers

666
00:50:38,730 --> 00:50:42,522
sitting down against you, and then you've got this case with this kid,

667
00:50:42,855 --> 00:50:46,688
which is pretty easy to prove that he did something,

668
00:50:46,730 --> 00:50:51,397
and he's already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI,

669
00:50:51,522 --> 00:50:55,230
so why not go as tough as you can against that guy?

670
00:50:55,230 --> 00:50:58,397
It's good for you the prosecutor. It's good for the Republic,

671
00:50:58,397 --> 00:51:00,897
'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types.

672
00:51:01,313 --> 00:51:02,647
I was so scared.

673
00:51:02,647 --> 00:51:04,730
I was so scared of having my computer seized.

674
00:51:04,730 --> 00:51:08,897
I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being seized.

675
00:51:08,980 --> 00:51:13,938
I had confidential material from sources from my previous work on my laptop,

676
00:51:14,105 --> 00:51:19,147
and that is, above all, my priority—is to keep my sources safe.

677
00:51:19,313 --> 00:51:23,855
I was so scared of what was going to happen to Ada.

678
00:51:24,063 --> 00:51:26,397
Aaron told me that they'd offered him a deal,

679
00:51:26,772 --> 00:51:31,480
and he finally just said that he would take it if I told him to,

680
00:51:31,813 --> 00:51:36,105
and I say—I came real close to saying, "Take it."

681
00:51:36,313 --> 00:51:41,230
He had these—he had developed, like, serious political aspirations

682
00:51:41,355 --> 00:51:44,230
in the intervening time, between when, you know,

683
00:51:44,272 --> 00:51:49,855
that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial start-up life,

684
00:51:50,022 --> 00:51:55,063
and begun this new life that had come to this political activism,

685
00:51:55,688 --> 00:52:02,438
and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony.

686
00:52:02,772 --> 00:52:05,980
You know, he said to me one day, we were walking by the White House,

687
00:52:05,980 --> 00:52:10,980
and he said to me, "They don't let felons work there."

688
00:52:16,397 --> 00:52:20,605
And you know he really—he really wanted that to be his life.

689
00:52:20,980 --> 00:52:24,022
He hadn't killed anybody. He hadn't hurt anybody.

690
00:52:24,355 --> 00:52:26,897
He hadn't, like, stolen money.

691
00:52:27,063 --> 00:52:31,147
He hadn't done anything that seemed felony-worthy, and...

692
00:52:33,355 --> 00:52:37,897
there is this idea that there is no reason that he should be labelled a felon,

693
00:52:37,938 --> 00:52:41,438
and taken away his right to vote in many states

694
00:52:41,938 --> 00:52:44,355
for doing what he did. That's just outrageous.

695
00:52:44,355 --> 00:52:48,647
It makes sense for him to be maybe fined a bunch of money,

696
00:52:48,647 --> 00:52:53,022
or asked not to come back to MIT again.

697
00:52:53,022 --> 00:52:58,022
But to be a felon? To face jail time?

698
00:53:00,063 --> 00:53:02,605
Swartz turned down the plea deal.

699
00:53:02,897 --> 00:53:05,730
Heymann redoubled his efforts.

700
00:53:06,063 --> 00:53:10,980
Heymann continued to press us at all levels.

701
00:53:11,563 --> 00:53:14,188
Even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's

702
00:53:14,522 --> 00:53:16,938
Acer computer harddrive and USB drive,

703
00:53:17,272 --> 00:53:20,022
the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.

704
00:53:20,438 --> 00:53:23,355
Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR,

705
00:53:23,730 --> 00:53:26,897
and just what did he plan to do with them?

706
00:53:27,813 --> 00:53:30,688
The government claim was that he was planning to publish these.

707
00:53:31,230 --> 00:53:34,605
We don't really know whether that was his real intention

708
00:53:34,813 --> 00:53:41,563
because Aaron also had a history of doing projects where he'd analyze giant data sets of articles

709
00:53:41,813 --> 00:53:43,938
in order to learn interesting things about them.

710
00:53:44,230 --> 00:53:46,605
The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford,

711
00:53:46,855 --> 00:53:51,522
he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.

712
00:53:51,897 --> 00:53:54,438
In a project with Stanford law students,

713
00:53:54,605 --> 00:53:56,938
Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

714
00:53:57,147 --> 00:54:01,313
He uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research

715
00:54:01,313 --> 00:54:03,022
and favorable results.

716
00:54:03,230 --> 00:54:06,563
He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies

717
00:54:06,563 --> 00:54:10,188
giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles

718
00:54:10,188 --> 00:54:13,980
which were then beneficial to, like, Exxon during an oil spill.

719
00:54:14,105 --> 00:54:17,855
So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research.

720
00:54:17,897 --> 00:54:21,147
Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.

721
00:54:21,522 --> 00:54:24,063
In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.

722
00:54:24,438 --> 00:54:26,147
That would have been completely okay.

723
00:54:26,397 --> 00:54:31,980
If he were, on the other hand, intending to create a competitive service to JSTOR,

724
00:54:32,063 --> 00:54:34,355
like, we're going to set up our own, you know,

725
00:54:34,522 --> 00:54:37,772
access to the Harvard Law Review and charge, you know, money for it,

726
00:54:37,772 --> 00:54:41,063
then, okay, now it seems like criminal violation

727
00:54:41,063 --> 00:54:43,480
because you are commercially trying to exploit this material,

728
00:54:43,480 --> 00:54:46,772
but it's kind of crazy to imagine that that was what he was doing.

729
00:54:47,272 --> 00:54:52,647
So, but then there's the middle case: well, what if he was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world?

730
00:54:52,772 --> 00:54:55,647
But depending on what he was doing, it creates a very different character

731
00:54:55,647 --> 00:54:59,147
to how the law should be thinking about it. The government was prosecuting him

732
00:54:59,147 --> 00:55:02,105
as if this was like a commercial criminal violation,

733
00:55:02,355 --> 00:55:05,272
like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records, that it was that kind of crime.

734
00:55:05,438 --> 00:55:08,813
I don't know what he was going to do with that database,

735
00:55:09,022 --> 00:55:12,272
but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him

736
00:55:12,438 --> 00:55:17,022
that he was going to analyze the data for evidence of corporate funding of climate change research

737
00:55:17,147 --> 00:55:22,605
that led to biased results, and I totally believe that.

738
00:55:23,730 --> 00:55:27,022
I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me,

739
00:55:27,438 --> 00:55:31,355
and I thought maybe this was a way I could get out of this,

740
00:55:31,855 --> 00:55:33,522
just exit the situation,

741
00:55:33,897 --> 00:55:36,605
and I didn't want to live in fear of having my computer seized.

742
00:55:36,980 --> 00:55:41,272
I didn't want to live in fear of having to go to jail on a contempt of court charge

743
00:55:41,272 --> 00:55:45,063
if they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer.

744
00:55:45,522 --> 00:55:48,938
When they came to me and said, "Steve wants to talk to you,"

745
00:55:49,105 --> 00:55:51,230
that seemed reasonable.

746
00:55:51,605 --> 00:55:56,022
They offered Norton what is know as a "Queen For A Day" letter or a proffer.

747
00:55:56,188 --> 00:55:59,188
It allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case.

748
00:55:59,480 --> 00:56:02,230
Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself,

749
00:56:02,522 --> 00:56:04,938
for any information she revealed during the meeting.

750
00:56:05,147 --> 00:56:08,063
I didn't like it. I told my lawyers repeatedly

751
00:56:08,272 --> 00:56:12,313
that I didn't... this seemed fishy, I didn't like this, I didn't want immunity,

752
00:56:12,563 --> 00:56:14,688
I didn't need immunity, I hadn't done anything,

753
00:56:14,938 --> 00:56:17,355
but they were really, really stringent that there was—

754
00:56:17,522 --> 00:56:20,230
they did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity.

755
00:56:20,480 --> 00:56:23,147
But just to be clear, this is a "Queen For A Day" deal, a proffer.

756
00:56:23,147 --> 00:56:24,813
Right, a proffer letter.

757
00:56:24,813 --> 00:56:28,688
- In which you basically handed information to them in exchange for protection from prosecution.

758
00:56:28,772 --> 00:56:34,063
- So, it wasn't handing information over. It was—at least that's not how I saw it—

759
00:56:34,272 --> 00:56:36,647
it was just having a discussion, having an interview with them.

760
00:56:36,647 --> 00:56:39,313
- Well, they're asking you questions...
- They're asking me questions.

761
00:56:39,355 --> 00:56:41,355
- and they can ask about whatever they want...
- Right.

762
00:56:41,355 --> 00:56:43,897
- and whatever they learn...
- I really...

763
00:56:44,063 --> 00:56:48,313
- They can't have you prosecuted.
- Right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked.

764
00:56:48,688 --> 00:56:51,772
I repeatedly—I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter.

765
00:56:52,147 --> 00:56:54,938
I was ill. I was being pressured by my lawyers.

766
00:56:55,188 --> 00:56:58,022
I was confused. I was not doing well by this point.

767
00:57:00,897 --> 00:57:03,730
I was depressed, and I was scared, and I didn't understand the situation I was in.

768
00:57:04,147 --> 00:57:07,272
I had no idea why I was in this situation.

769
00:57:07,647 --> 00:57:11,480
I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong.

770
00:57:11,772 --> 00:57:13,647
We went out of our minds.

771
00:57:14,022 --> 00:57:17,563
Aaron was clearly very distraught about it. We were very distraught about it.

772
00:57:17,647 --> 00:57:19,480
Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it.

773
00:57:19,688 --> 00:57:21,855
We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys.

774
00:57:22,272 --> 00:57:26,605
I was very unused to being in a room with large men, well-armed,

775
00:57:26,605 --> 00:57:31,480
that are continually telling me I'm lying, and that I must have done something.

776
00:57:31,855 --> 00:57:35,147
I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting

777
00:57:35,438 --> 00:57:37,980
wasn't a crime.

778
00:57:39,022 --> 00:57:41,772
I told them that they were on the wrong side of history.

779
00:57:41,980 --> 00:57:45,522
I used that phrase. I said, "You're on the wrong side of history."

780
00:57:45,605 --> 00:57:50,563
And they looked bored. They didn't even look angry. They just looked bored,

781
00:57:50,730 --> 00:57:55,855
and it began to occur to me that we weren't having the same conversation.

782
00:57:55,855 --> 00:58:00,397
I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know, why people would download journal articles,

783
00:58:00,397 --> 00:58:04,230
and eventually—I don't remember what was around it—

784
00:58:04,230 --> 00:58:10,480
I mentioned that he'd done this blog post, the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto".

785
00:58:10,980 --> 00:58:14,355
This is the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto",

786
00:58:14,730 --> 00:58:18,272
supposedly written in July, 2008 in Italy.

787
00:58:18,897 --> 00:58:23,063
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."

788
00:58:23,480 --> 00:58:28,355
"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,
published over centuries in books and journals,

789
00:58:28,355 --> 00:58:31,855
is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

790
00:58:32,605 --> 00:58:36,522
"Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by."

791
00:58:36,605 --> 00:58:39,313
"You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences,

792
00:58:39,313 --> 00:58:42,855
liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends."

793
00:58:43,022 --> 00:58:46,022
"But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground."

794
00:58:46,272 --> 00:58:49,438
"It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were

795
00:58:49,438 --> 00:58:52,855
"the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew."

796
00:58:53,147 --> 00:58:55,647
"But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative."

797
00:58:55,855 --> 00:58:59,438
"Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy."

798
00:58:59,897 --> 00:59:02,522
"There's no justice in following unjust laws."

799
00:59:02,897 --> 00:59:06,605
"It's time to come into the light and, in a grand tradition of civil disobedience,

800
00:59:06,813 --> 00:59:09,897
declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture."

801
00:59:10,813 --> 00:59:16,730
The Manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people, and also edited by Norton.

802
00:59:16,730 --> 00:59:19,772
But it was Swartz who had signed his name to it.

803
00:59:20,147 --> 00:59:26,563
When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron and tell him everything I can remember about it,

804
00:59:27,272 --> 00:59:30,563
and he gets very angry.

805
00:59:32,647 --> 00:59:35,813
The things that I'd done shouldn't have added up that way.

806
00:59:38,230 --> 00:59:43,522
I hadn't done anything wrong, and everything had gone wrong,

807
00:59:45,397 --> 00:59:47,772
but I was never...

808
00:59:55,438 --> 00:59:58,272
I'm still angry.

809
00:59:58,938 --> 01:00:04,730
I'm still angry that you could try your best with these people to do the right thing,

810
01:00:04,730 --> 01:00:07,438
and they'd turn everything against you.

811
01:00:07,438 --> 01:00:11,688
And they will hurt you with anything they can.

812
01:00:13,313 --> 01:00:17,397
And in that moment, I regret that I said what I did.

813
01:00:18,105 --> 01:00:21,605
But my much larger regret is that we have settled for this.

814
01:00:21,730 --> 01:00:24,063
That we are okay with this.

815
01:00:24,272 --> 01:00:26,105
That we are okay with the justice system,

816
01:00:26,105 --> 01:00:30,188
a system that tries to game people into little traps so they can ruin our lives.

817
01:00:31,188 --> 01:00:33,272
So yeah, I wish I hadn't said that.

818
01:00:33,688 --> 01:00:38,897
But I'm much, much angrier that this is where I am.

819
01:00:40,980 --> 01:00:45,605
That this is what we, as a people, think is okay.

820
01:00:46,438 --> 01:00:50,272
They used every method that I think they could think of

821
01:00:50,605 --> 01:00:55,063
to get her to provide information which would be unhelpful to Aaron,

822
01:00:55,313 --> 01:00:58,230
and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron,

823
01:00:58,647 --> 01:01:05,313
but I don't think she had information that was helpful to the government.

824
01:01:06,313 --> 01:01:10,105
Months go by, as Swartz's friends and family await a looming indictment.

825
01:01:10,647 --> 01:01:15,188
In the meantime, Swartz was becoming a go-to expert on a series of internet issues.

826
01:01:15,188 --> 01:01:17,897
[RT interviewer} ... a question to you then: Do you think that the internet is something

827
01:01:17,897 --> 01:01:23,230
that should be considered a human right, and something that the government cannot take away from you?

828
01:01:23,480 --> 01:01:28,480
Yes, definitely, I mean this notion that national security is an excuse to shut down the internet,

829
01:01:28,605 --> 01:01:32,063
that's exactly what we heard in Egypt and Syria and all these other countries,

830
01:01:32,063 --> 01:01:36,730
and so, yeah, it's true, sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up some embarassing material

831
01:01:36,772 --> 01:01:40,563
about what the U.S. government does, and people are going to be organizing to protest about it,

832
01:01:40,563 --> 01:01:43,688
and try and change their government. You know, and that's a good thing,

833
01:01:43,688 --> 01:01:48,313
that's what all these First Amendment Rights of free expression, of freedom of association are all about,

834
01:01:48,313 --> 01:01:53,147
and so the notion that we should try and shut those down I think, just goes against very basic American principles.

835
01:01:53,272 --> 01:01:56,147
A principle, I think, is one that our Founding Fathers would have understood.

836
01:01:56,230 --> 01:01:58,147
If the internet had been around back then,

837
01:01:58,147 --> 01:02:01,272
instead of putting "post offices" in the Constitution, they would have put "ISPs".

838
01:02:01,355 --> 01:02:03,897
Well, it's definitely interesting to see how far...

839
01:02:03,980 --> 01:02:08,563
Swartz meets activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and the two begin to date.

840
01:02:08,688 --> 01:02:10,605
We need a massive global public outcry.

841
01:02:10,647 --> 01:02:13,147
If there's no massive global public outcry, it won't create any change.

842
01:02:13,272 --> 01:02:16,522
- You know, four people in this city should cause a massive global public outcry.

843
01:02:16,688 --> 01:02:19,938
- You know, we need a petition signer.

844
01:02:20,355 --> 01:02:23,813
Without telling her specifics, he warned her he was involved in something

845
01:02:23,813 --> 01:02:25,605
he called simply "The Bad Thing".

846
01:02:25,897 --> 01:02:31,022
And I had sort of crazy theories, like, that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or something.

847
01:02:31,063 --> 01:02:35,855
I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, actually, but...

848
01:02:36,272 --> 01:02:39,397
So, sometime in probably late July, Aaron called me,

849
01:02:39,772 --> 01:02:45,397
and I happened to pick up, and he said, "The Bad Thing" might be in the news tomorrow.

850
01:02:45,397 --> 01:02:47,772
Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to read about it in the news?"

851
01:02:47,772 --> 01:02:50,397
And I said, "Well, I want you to tell me."

852
01:02:51,397 --> 01:02:56,438
Aaron said, "Well, I've been—I've been arrested

853
01:02:56,438 --> 01:03:01,355
for downloading too many academic journal articles, and they want to make an example out of me."

854
01:03:02,272 --> 01:03:09,105
And I was like, "That's it? That's the big fuss? Really? It just doesn't sound like a very big deal."

855
01:03:09,147 --> 01:03:15,230
On July 14, 2011, federal prosecutors indict Swartz on four felony counts.

856
01:03:15,397 --> 01:03:22,105
He gets indicted on the same day that two people in England who are part of LulzSec get arrested,

857
01:03:22,563 --> 01:03:28,063
and a few other real hackers. And Aaron is just someone who kind of looks like a hacker,

858
01:03:28,272 --> 01:03:32,813
enough that they can, you know, put his head on a stake and put it on the gates.

859
01:03:32,938 --> 01:03:35,813
Aaron went to surrender, and they arrested him.

860
01:03:36,147 --> 01:03:39,897
They then strip searched him,

861
01:03:40,438 --> 01:03:46,147
took away his shoelaces, took away his belt, and left him in solitary confinement.

862
01:03:48,355 --> 01:03:52,147
The District of Massachusetts United States Attorney's office released a statement

863
01:03:52,480 --> 01:03:55,730
saying, "Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison,

864
01:03:55,938 --> 01:03:58,813
to be followed by three years of supervised release,

865
01:03:59,022 --> 01:04:02,897
restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to one million dollars."

866
01:04:04,688 --> 01:04:07,230
He is released on one hundred thousand dollars bail.

867
01:04:07,313 --> 01:04:10,188
The same day, the primary victim in the case, JSTOR,

868
01:04:10,605 --> 01:04:15,647
formally drops all charges against Swartz, and declines to pursue the case.

869
01:04:16,022 --> 01:04:19,438
JSTOR—they weren't our friends; they weren't helpful or friendly to us,

870
01:04:19,438 --> 01:04:23,480
but they also were just kind of like, "We're not part of this."

871
01:04:23,522 --> 01:04:28,355
JSTOR, and their parent company, ITHAKA, also sidestepped requests to talk with this film.

872
01:04:28,730 --> 01:04:31,397
But at the time, they released a statement saying,

873
01:04:31,563 --> 01:04:35,563
"It was the government's decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR's."

874
01:04:36,355 --> 01:04:40,522
And so it's our belief that, with that, the case will be over.

875
01:04:41,022 --> 01:04:46,063
That we should be able to get Steve Heymann to drop the case, or settle it in some rational way.

876
01:04:46,480 --> 01:04:48,605
And the government refused.

877
01:04:48,980 --> 01:04:50,688
Why?

878
01:04:53,647 --> 01:04:55,897
Well, because I think they wanted to make an example out of Aaron,

879
01:04:56,188 --> 01:04:59,147
and they said they wanted—the reason why they wouldn't

880
01:04:59,355 --> 01:05:03,480
move on requiring a felony conviction and jail time

881
01:05:03,688 --> 01:05:11,063
was that they wanted to use this case as a case for deterrence. They told us that.

882
01:05:11,063 --> 01:05:13,022
They told you that?
- Yes.

883
01:05:13,147 --> 01:05:14,980
- This was going to be an example?
- Yes.

884
01:05:15,063 --> 01:05:17,522
- He was going to be made an example?
- Yes.

885
01:05:17,938 --> 01:05:19,647
Steve Heymann said that.

886
01:05:19,980 --> 01:05:24,272
Deterring who? There's other people out there running around logging onto JSTOR,

887
01:05:24,480 --> 01:05:27,980
and downloading the articles to make a political statement? I mean, who are they deterring?

888
01:05:28,188 --> 01:05:32,355
It would be easier to understand the Obama administration's

889
01:05:32,397 --> 01:05:35,313
posture of supposedly being for deterrence

890
01:05:35,563 --> 01:05:38,563
if this was an administration that, for instance,

891
01:05:38,647 --> 01:05:41,397
prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime

892
01:05:41,438 --> 01:05:43,313
that this country has seen in the last hundred years.

893
01:05:43,313 --> 01:05:47,397
The crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street.

894
01:05:47,897 --> 01:05:49,938
When you start deploying

895
01:05:50,230 --> 01:05:54,105
the non-controversial idea of deterrence

896
01:05:54,272 --> 01:05:56,022
only selectively

897
01:05:56,230 --> 01:05:59,688
you stop making a dispassionate analysis of law-breaking

898
01:05:59,897 --> 01:06:04,438
and you started deciding to deploy law enforcement resources

899
01:06:04,647 --> 01:06:07,980
specifically on the basis of political ideology,

900
01:06:08,188 --> 01:06:12,605
and that's not just undemocratic, it's supposed to be un-American.

901
01:06:17,063 --> 01:06:22,147
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel

902
01:06:22,355 --> 01:06:25,063
that the straw that broke the camel's back

903
01:06:25,063 --> 01:06:29,188
was a press release sent out by an organization Swartz founded called "Demand Progress".

904
01:06:29,355 --> 01:06:33,605
According to the MIT account, Heymann reacted to the short statement of support,

905
01:06:33,772 --> 01:06:37,772
calling it a "wild internet campaign" and a "foolish move"

906
01:06:37,772 --> 01:06:42,063
that moved the case from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.

907
01:06:42,230 --> 01:06:46,355
That was a poisonous combination: a prosecutor who didn't want to lose face,

908
01:06:46,480 --> 01:06:51,188
who had a political career in the offing, maybe, and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them.

909
01:06:51,313 --> 01:06:55,480
You spend how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library,

910
01:06:55,730 --> 01:06:59,188
and then got your ass handed to you in court? No way!

911
01:06:59,313 --> 01:07:03,563
I then moved to try to put as much pressure on MIT in various ways to get them

912
01:07:03,688 --> 01:07:08,438
to go to the government, and request the government to stop the prosecution.

913
01:07:09,188 --> 01:07:12,230
What was MIT's reaction to that?

914
01:07:12,397 --> 01:07:16,980
There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point.

915
01:07:20,813 --> 01:07:23,605
MIT doesn't defend Aaron

916
01:07:23,938 --> 01:07:28,272
which, to people inside of the MIT community, seems outrageous,

917
01:07:28,397 --> 01:07:33,355
because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word.

918
01:07:33,647 --> 01:07:38,813
At MIT, the idea of going and running around on roofs and tunnels that you weren't allowed to be in

919
01:07:38,980 --> 01:07:44,188
was not only a rite of passage, it was part of the MIT tour,

920
01:07:44,647 --> 01:07:48,730
and lockpicking was a winter course at MIT.

921
01:07:49,022 --> 01:07:53,397
They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks.

922
01:07:53,897 --> 01:07:59,730
MIT never stood up and took a position of saying to the Feds, "Don't do this."

923
01:07:59,855 --> 01:08:04,063
"We don't want you to do this. You're overreacting. This is too strong."

924
01:08:04,063 --> 01:08:06,563
that I'm aware of.

925
01:08:06,730 --> 01:08:12,105
They acted kind of like any corporation would. They sort of—they helped the government,

926
01:08:12,355 --> 01:08:18,730
they didn't help us, unless they felt they had to, and they never tried to stop it.

927
01:08:20,188 --> 01:08:23,480
MIT declined repeated requests to comment,

928
01:08:23,730 --> 01:08:27,980
but they later released a report saying they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality,

929
01:08:28,188 --> 01:08:33,688
and believed Heymann and the U.S. Attorney's office did not care what MIT thought or said about the case.

930
01:08:33,855 --> 01:08:39,480
MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos.

931
01:08:39,772 --> 01:08:44,813
You could argue that MIT turned a blind eye, and that was okay for them to do,

932
01:08:44,980 --> 01:08:50,188
but taking that stance—taking that neutral stance, in and of itself—was taking a pro-prosecutor stance.

933
01:08:50,438 --> 01:08:53,438
If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,

934
01:08:53,438 --> 01:08:59,022
they started by selling a Blue Box, which was a thing designed to defraud the phone company.

935
01:08:59,230 --> 01:09:02,438
If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen,

936
01:09:02,730 --> 01:09:06,438
they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard,

937
01:09:06,605 --> 01:09:09,022
which was pretty clearly against the rules.

938
01:09:09,188 --> 01:09:11,355
The difference between Aaron and the people I just mentioned

939
01:09:11,355 --> 01:09:15,522
is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place, he didn't just want to make money.

940
01:09:16,563 --> 01:09:20,730
Swartz continues to be outspoken on a variety of internet issues.

941
01:09:21,188 --> 01:09:26,438
You know, the reason the internet works is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas,

942
01:09:26,563 --> 01:09:30,605
and what we need to be focusing on is getting more information about our government, more accessibility,

943
01:09:30,605 --> 01:09:36,022
more discussion, more debate, but instead it seems like what congress is focused on is shutting things down.

944
01:09:36,522 --> 01:09:41,855
Aaron thought he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people.

945
01:09:42,188 --> 01:09:46,272
Flame can literally control your computer, and make it spy on you.

946
01:09:46,688 --> 01:09:50,063
Welcome, Aaron. Good to have you back on the show here.

947
01:09:50,063 --> 01:09:54,438
You know, just like spies used to in olden days, put microphones and tap what people were saying,

948
01:09:54,522 --> 01:09:57,272
now they're using computers to do the same things.

949
01:09:57,355 --> 01:09:59,438
Swartz's political activity continues,

950
01:09:59,480 --> 01:10:04,188
his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy.

951
01:10:04,397 --> 01:10:06,230
It was called "SOPA".

952
01:10:06,563 --> 01:10:10,688
Activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous overreach,

953
01:10:10,772 --> 01:10:13,772
threatening the technical integrity of the Internet itself.

954
01:10:13,855 --> 01:10:16,313
And one of the first things I did was to call Aaron.

955
01:10:16,355 --> 01:10:19,855
And I said, "Can we do a big online campaign against this?"

956
01:10:19,938 --> 01:10:22,480
"This isn't a bill about copyright."

957
01:10:22,647 --> 01:10:24,063
"It's not?"

958
01:10:24,147 --> 01:10:27,897
"No," he said, "it's a bill about the freedom to connect."

959
01:10:28,313 --> 01:10:29,980
Now I was listening.

960
01:10:30,188 --> 01:10:33,605
And he thought about it for a while, and then said, "Yes."

961
01:10:33,772 --> 01:10:36,230
And he went and founded Demand Progress.

962
01:10:36,313 --> 01:10:41,688
Demand Progress is an online activism organization, we've got around a million and a half members now,

963
01:10:41,688 --> 01:10:44,730
but started in the fall of 2010.

964
01:10:44,897 --> 01:10:48,105
Aaron was one of the most prominent people in a community of people

965
01:10:48,188 --> 01:10:53,272
who helped lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country.

966
01:10:53,397 --> 01:10:58,897
SOPA was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies,

967
01:10:59,022 --> 01:11:04,438
but what it did was basically take a sledgehammer to a problem that needed a scalpel.

968
01:11:04,605 --> 01:11:10,813
If passed, the law would allow a company to cut off finances to entire websites without due process,

969
01:11:11,063 --> 01:11:14,272
or even to force Google to exclude their links.

970
01:11:14,272 --> 01:11:18,605
All they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement.

971
01:11:18,605 --> 01:11:24,605
It pitted the titans of traditional media against a new and now far more sophisticated remix culture.

972
01:11:24,730 --> 01:11:27,938
It makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman,

973
01:11:28,147 --> 01:11:31,605
and if they don't do their job of making sure that nobody on their site uses it for anything

974
01:11:31,730 --> 01:11:36,230
that's even potentially illegal, the entire site can get shut down without even so much as a trial.

975
01:11:36,397 --> 01:11:41,147
This was over the top, I mean, this was a catastrophe.

976
01:11:41,355 --> 01:11:49,105
This bill poses a serious threat to speech and civil liberties for all who use the internet.

977
01:11:49,355 --> 01:11:53,022
There were only a handful of us who said, "Look, we're not for piracy either,

978
01:11:53,313 --> 01:11:57,938
but it makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet,

979
01:11:57,938 --> 01:12:02,980
the domain name system and so much that makes it free and open in the name of fighting piracy,

980
01:12:03,313 --> 01:12:05,438
and Aaron got that right away.

981
01:12:05,522 --> 01:12:09,355
The freedoms, guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on

982
01:12:09,438 --> 01:12:11,897
would be suddenly deleted.

983
01:12:12,063 --> 01:12:16,188
New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights

984
01:12:16,230 --> 01:12:18,772
we'd always taken for granted.

985
01:12:18,897 --> 01:12:24,647
And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.

986
01:12:25,855 --> 01:12:30,897
When SOPA was introduced in October, 2011, it was considered inevitable.

987
01:12:31,105 --> 01:12:34,980
Our strategy, when it first came out, was to hopefully slow the bill down,

988
01:12:34,980 --> 01:12:39,147
maybe weaken it a little bit but, even we

989
01:12:39,147 --> 01:12:42,188
didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill.

990
01:12:43,605 --> 01:12:49,397
Having worked in Washington, what you learn is that, typically in Washington,

991
01:12:49,605 --> 01:12:55,188
the legislative fights are fights between different sets of corporate monied interests.

992
01:12:55,563 --> 01:12:59,563
They're all duking it out to pass legislation, and the fights that are the closest

993
01:13:00,022 --> 01:13:04,480
are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests,

994
01:13:04,688 --> 01:13:08,605
and they're financially equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying.

995
01:13:08,772 --> 01:13:10,605
Those are the closest ones.

996
01:13:10,688 --> 01:13:13,730
The ones that aren't even fights, typically, are ones

997
01:13:13,730 --> 01:13:18,022
where all the money is on one side, all the corporations are on one side,

998
01:13:18,022 --> 01:13:20,938
and it's just millions of people on the other side.

999
01:13:22,563 --> 01:13:27,688
I haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service.

1000
01:13:27,980 --> 01:13:33,897
There were more than forty United States senators on that bill as co-sponsors,

1001
01:13:34,188 --> 01:13:37,855
so they were already a long, long way to getting the

1002
01:13:37,855 --> 01:13:41,272
sixty votes to have it clear all the procedural hoops.

1003
01:13:41,772 --> 01:13:44,897
Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period.

1004
01:13:45,397 --> 01:13:50,688
Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal enormous support using traditional outreach,

1005
01:13:50,897 --> 01:13:56,563
combined with commonly used voiceover IP, to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

1006
01:13:57,313 --> 01:14:01,147
I've never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level

1007
01:14:01,147 --> 01:14:05,272
both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side.

1008
01:14:06,147 --> 01:14:09,938
Millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-SOPA petitions.

1009
01:14:10,230 --> 01:14:12,188
Congress was caught off guard.

1010
01:14:12,522 --> 01:14:17,522
There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill,

1011
01:14:17,730 --> 01:14:20,147
watching them insist they could regulate the internet,

1012
01:14:20,355 --> 01:14:22,522
and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them.

1013
01:14:22,522 --> 01:14:23,647
I am not a nerd.

1014
01:14:23,897 --> 01:14:25,355
I'm just not enough of a nerd...

1015
01:14:25,647 --> 01:14:28,397
Maybe we oughta ask some nerds what this thing really does.

1016
01:14:28,397 --> 01:14:30,688
Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds...

1017
01:14:33,147 --> 01:14:34,938
Really?

1018
01:14:37,522 --> 01:14:38,522
"Nerds"?

1019
01:14:39,605 --> 01:14:42,938
You know, I think, actually the word you're looking for is "experts"...

1020
01:14:44,522 --> 01:14:48,855
to enlighten you so your laws don't backfire

1021
01:14:48,855 --> 01:14:50,813
and break the internet.

1022
01:14:50,938 --> 01:14:54,272
We use the term "geek" but we're allowed to use that because we are geeks.

1023
01:14:54,563 --> 01:14:58,730
The fact that it got as far as it did, without them talking to any technical experts,

1024
01:14:59,147 --> 01:15:02,063
reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town.

1025
01:15:02,438 --> 01:15:09,355
I'm looking for somebody to come before this body, and testify in a hearing and say, "This is why they're wrong."

1026
01:15:09,647 --> 01:15:12,647
There used to be an office that provided science and technology advice,

1027
01:15:12,938 --> 01:15:16,438
and members could go to them and say, "Help me understand X,Y,Z."

1028
01:15:16,438 --> 01:15:19,563
And Gingrich killed it. He said it was a waste of money.

1029
01:15:19,563 --> 01:15:23,313
Ever since then, Congress has plunged into the Dark Ages.

1030
01:15:23,730 --> 01:15:26,772
I don't think anybody really thought that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron.

1031
01:15:27,647 --> 01:15:31,313
It was worth trying, but it didn't seem winnable,

1032
01:15:32,022 --> 01:15:35,855
and I remember, maybe a few months later, I remember him just turning to me and being like,

1033
01:15:35,855 --> 01:15:37,897
"I think we might win this."

1034
01:15:38,022 --> 01:15:41,147
And I was like, "That would be amazing."

1035
01:15:41,605 --> 01:15:43,313
Calls to Congress continue.

1036
01:15:43,480 --> 01:15:47,688
When the domain hosting site Go Daddy becomes a supporter of the bill,

1037
01:15:47,938 --> 01:15:52,063
tens of thousands of users transferred their domain names in protest.

1038
01:15:52,438 --> 01:15:57,272
Within a week, a humbled Go Daddy reverses their position on SOPA.

1039
01:15:57,563 --> 01:16:03,147
When the congress people that supported the record and movie industries,

1040
01:16:03,563 --> 01:16:07,855
realized that there was this backlash, they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit.

1041
01:16:08,022 --> 01:16:13,230
You could see the curve happening. You could see that our arguments were starting to resonate.

1042
01:16:13,522 --> 01:16:16,188
It was like Aaron had been striking a match and it was being blown out,

1043
01:16:16,188 --> 01:16:18,188
striking another one, and it was being blown out,

1044
01:16:18,188 --> 01:16:21,772
and finally he'd managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught,

1045
01:16:21,855 --> 01:16:24,730
and then it turned into this roaring blaze.

1046
01:16:24,980 --> 01:16:28,897
On January 16, 2012, the White House issued a statement

1047
01:16:28,897 --> 01:16:31,480
saying they didn't support the bill.

1048
01:16:31,480 --> 01:16:33,730
And then this happened:

1049
01:16:33,813 --> 01:16:37,313
I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy,

1050
01:16:37,313 --> 01:16:41,855
and we should deal with them in a serious way, but this bill is not the right bill.

1051
01:16:42,063 --> 01:16:46,105
When Jimmy Wales put his support toward blacking out Wikipedia,

1052
01:16:46,438 --> 01:16:49,647
the number five most popular website in the world,

1053
01:16:49,980 --> 01:16:55,897
this is a website that's seven percent of all of the clicks on anywhere on the internet.

1054
01:16:55,980 --> 01:16:57,188
Wikipedia went black.

1055
01:16:57,272 --> 01:16:58,230
Reddit went black.

1056
01:16:58,355 --> 01:17:00,313
Craigslist went black.

1057
01:17:00,438 --> 01:17:03,147
The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat out melted.

1058
01:17:03,272 --> 01:17:07,397
Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill

1059
01:17:07,897 --> 01:17:11,022
that they were promoting just a couple days ago.

1060
01:17:11,188 --> 01:17:14,772
Within 24 hours, the number of opponents of SOPA in Congress

1061
01:17:14,938 --> 01:17:16,313
went from this...

1062
01:17:16,563 --> 01:17:19,688
to this.

1063
01:17:19,897 --> 01:17:26,897
To see congressmen and senators slowly flip sides throughout the day of the blackout

1064
01:17:27,147 --> 01:17:28,897
was pretty unbelievable.

1065
01:17:29,272 --> 01:17:32,272
There was like a hundred representative swing.

1066
01:17:32,438 --> 01:17:35,813
And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this,

1067
01:17:35,980 --> 01:17:37,813
we had won.

1068
01:17:38,105 --> 01:17:40,272
The thing that everyone said was impossible,

1069
01:17:40,522 --> 01:17:43,563
that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipedream,

1070
01:17:43,855 --> 01:17:45,772
had happened.

1071
01:17:46,188 --> 01:17:47,522
We did it.

1072
01:17:47,980 --> 01:17:49,730
We won.

1073
01:17:52,980 --> 01:17:55,813
This is a historic week in internet politics—maybe American politics.

1074
01:17:56,147 --> 01:18:01,105
The thing that we heard from people in Washington, D.C., from the staffers on Capitol Hill was:

1075
01:18:01,522 --> 01:18:05,688
they received more emails and more phone calls on SOPA Blackout Day

1076
01:18:05,938 --> 01:18:08,105
than they'd ever received about anything.

1077
01:18:08,355 --> 01:18:10,272
I think that was an extremely exciting moment.

1078
01:18:10,438 --> 01:18:14,688
This was the moment when the internet had grown up, politically.

1079
01:18:14,980 --> 01:18:18,480
It was exhilarating because it's hard to believe it actually happened.

1080
01:18:18,688 --> 01:18:22,397
It's hard to believe a bill with so much financial power behind it

1081
01:18:22,688 --> 01:18:26,188
didn't simply sail through the Congress.

1082
01:18:26,563 --> 01:18:29,188
And not only did not sail through, it didn't pass at all.

1083
01:18:31,188 --> 01:18:33,688
It's easy sometimes to feel like you're powereless,

1084
01:18:33,688 --> 01:18:37,522
like when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell and nobody hears you.

1085
01:18:37,897 --> 01:18:40,563
But I'm here to tell you today, you are powerful.

1086
01:18:43,313 --> 01:18:47,938
So, yeah, maybe sometimes you feel like you're not being listened to, but I'm here to tell you that you are.

1087
01:18:47,980 --> 01:18:50,397
You are being listened to. You are making a difference.

1088
01:18:50,605 --> 01:18:53,980
You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.

1089
01:18:57,022 --> 01:18:58,147
Stop PIPA.

1090
01:18:58,147 --> 01:18:59,897
Stop SOPA.

1091
01:19:01,188 --> 01:19:04,647
Some of the biggest internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit

1092
01:19:04,647 --> 01:19:08,188
from a world in which their little competitors could get censored.

1093
01:19:09,480 --> 01:19:12,063
We can't let that happen.

1094
01:19:12,147 --> 01:19:16,272
For him, it was more important to be sure that you made a small change

1095
01:19:16,563 --> 01:19:20,230
than to play a small part in a big change.

1096
01:19:20,688 --> 01:19:25,147
But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change,

1097
01:19:25,147 --> 01:19:27,730
and so for him, it was kind of this proof of concept

1098
01:19:27,730 --> 01:19:32,022
like, "Okay, what I want to do with my life is change the world."

1099
01:19:32,272 --> 01:19:36,438
"I think about it in this really scientific way of measuring my impact,

1100
01:19:36,688 --> 01:19:39,772
and this shows that it's possible."

1101
01:19:40,022 --> 01:19:42,772
"The thing that I want to do with my life is possible."

1102
01:19:43,022 --> 01:19:45,688
"I have proved that I can do it,

1103
01:19:45,688 --> 01:19:47,938
that I, Aaron Swartz, can change the world."

1104
01:19:48,022 --> 01:19:54,438
For a guy who never really thought he had done much—which was Aaron—

1105
01:19:56,105 --> 01:20:01,022
was one of the few moments where you could really see

1106
01:20:01,022 --> 01:20:03,688
that he felt like he had done something good,

1107
01:20:03,897 --> 01:20:08,772
feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap.

1108
01:20:10,730 --> 01:20:12,980
Everyone said there was no way we could stop SOPA.

1109
01:20:13,105 --> 01:20:14,813
We stopped it.

1110
01:20:14,897 --> 01:20:19,480
This is three outrageously good victories, and the year isn't even over yet.

1111
01:20:19,647 --> 01:20:23,147
I mean, if there's a time to be positive, it's now.

1112
01:20:23,730 --> 01:20:26,605
You know, he wins at SOPA a year after he's arrested.

1113
01:20:26,897 --> 01:20:30,438
It's not unambiguously happy moments. There's a lot going on.

1114
01:20:30,688 --> 01:20:37,230
He's so attuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him.

1115
01:20:37,480 --> 01:20:41,397
The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous,

1116
01:20:41,730 --> 01:20:44,938
and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance,

1117
01:20:45,272 --> 01:20:47,855
Swartz was already concerned.

1118
01:20:48,105 --> 01:20:52,063
It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax

1119
01:20:52,272 --> 01:20:56,647
that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is.

1120
01:20:56,730 --> 01:21:00,730
And if the answer is: "Oh, we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them"

1121
01:21:01,063 --> 01:21:03,355
then that's an awful lot of people.

1122
01:21:03,688 --> 01:21:06,938
It'd be one thing if they said, "Look, we know the number of telephones we're spying on,

1123
01:21:06,938 --> 01:21:09,813
we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."

1124
01:21:09,897 --> 01:21:12,772
but they just came back and said, "We can't give you a number at all."

1125
01:21:13,063 --> 01:21:15,480
That's pretty—I mean, that's scary, is what it is.

1126
01:21:15,730 --> 01:21:22,355
And they put incredible pressure on him, took away all of the money he had made.

1127
01:21:22,647 --> 01:21:26,397
They, you know, threatened to take away his physical freedom.

1128
01:21:26,772 --> 01:21:30,605
Why'd they do it, you know? I mean, well, why are they going after whistleblowers?

1129
01:21:31,563 --> 01:21:35,647
You know, why are they going after people who tell the truth

1130
01:21:35,938 --> 01:21:42,938
about all sorts of things, I mean, from the banks, to war, to just sort of government transparency.

1131
01:21:43,563 --> 01:21:46,605
So secrecy serves those who are already in power,

1132
01:21:46,855 --> 01:21:51,897
and we are living in an era of secrecy that coincides with an era where the government is doing, also,

1133
01:21:52,105 --> 01:21:55,230
a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional.

1134
01:21:55,647 --> 01:21:58,730
So, those two things are not coincidences.

1135
01:21:58,980 --> 01:22:01,188
It's very clear that this technology has been developed

1136
01:22:01,522 --> 01:22:06,897
not for small countries overseas, but right here, for use in the United States, by the U.S. government.

1137
01:22:07,147 --> 01:22:11,147
The problem with the spying program is it's this sort of long, slow expansion, you know,

1138
01:22:11,397 --> 01:22:13,897
going back to the Nixon administation, right,

1139
01:22:14,105 --> 01:22:16,855
obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush,

1140
01:22:17,105 --> 01:22:20,313
and Obama has continued to expand it, and the problems have slowly grown worse and worse,

1141
01:22:20,813 --> 01:22:24,355
but there's never been this moment you can point to and say,

1142
01:22:24,480 --> 01:22:28,730
"Okay, we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters..."

1143
01:22:29,230 --> 01:22:35,730
The prosecution, in my estimation of Aaron Swartz, was about sending a particular, laserlike message

1144
01:22:36,147 --> 01:22:42,188
to a group of people that the Obama administration sees as politically threatening,

1145
01:22:44,105 --> 01:22:50,897
and that is, essentially, the hacker, the information, and the democracy activist community,

1146
01:22:51,188 --> 01:22:56,438
and the message that the Obama administration wanted to send to that particular community was,

1147
01:22:56,647 --> 01:23:01,855
in my estimation, "We know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment,

1148
01:23:02,063 --> 01:23:05,438
and so we are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz

1149
01:23:05,730 --> 01:23:10,147
to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."

1150
01:23:10,563 --> 01:23:13,897
And the government said, "Oh, the legal opinions we're using

1151
01:23:14,105 --> 01:23:17,188
to legalize the spying program are also classified,

1152
01:23:17,522 --> 01:23:20,397
so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you."

1153
01:23:20,730 --> 01:23:23,188
You know, every time they can say, "Oh, this is another instance of cyberwar.

1154
01:23:23,397 --> 01:23:26,938
The cybercriminals are attacking us again. We're all in danger. We're all under threat."

1155
01:23:27,230 --> 01:23:30,438
They use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws.

1156
01:23:32,272 --> 01:23:37,105
And so just to follow—personally, how do you feel the fight is going?

1157
01:23:37,647 --> 01:23:39,105
It's up to you!

1158
01:23:39,105 --> 01:23:42,980
- I know. It's just that we gotta, you know...

1159
01:23:44,522 --> 01:23:49,438
You know, there's sort of these two polarizing perspectives, right,

1160
01:23:49,647 --> 01:23:54,105
everything is great, the internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everything's going to be fantastic

1161
01:23:54,105 --> 01:23:55,772
or everything is terrible,

1162
01:23:55,772 --> 01:23:58,605
the internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying,

1163
01:23:58,647 --> 01:24:00,438
and controlling what we say.

1164
01:24:00,522 --> 01:24:02,397
And the thing is, both are true, right?

1165
01:24:02,647 --> 01:24:06,730
The internet has done both, and both are kind of amazing and astonishing

1166
01:24:07,063 --> 01:24:09,980
and which one will win out in the long run is up to us.

1167
01:24:10,105 --> 01:24:13,897
It doesn't make sense to say, "Oh, one is doing better than the other." You know, they're both true.

1168
01:24:14,188 --> 01:24:17,772
And it's up to us which ones we emphasize and which ones we take advantage of

1169
01:24:17,897 --> 01:24:20,272
because they're both there, and they're both always going to be there.

1170
01:24:25,605 --> 01:24:31,647
On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Swartz,

1171
01:24:31,647 --> 01:24:36,813
adding additional counts of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer, and computer fraud.

1172
01:24:37,480 --> 01:24:42,188
Now, instead of four felony counts, Swartz was facing thirteen.

1173
01:24:42,522 --> 01:24:45,480
The prosecution's leverage had dramatically increased,

1174
01:24:45,688 --> 01:24:48,938
as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines.

1175
01:24:48,938 --> 01:24:52,063
They filed a separate indictment to add more charges,

1176
01:24:52,438 --> 01:24:58,147
and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes,

1177
01:24:58,522 --> 01:25:02,647
and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law.

1178
01:25:03,938 --> 01:25:07,063
That theory, and much of the prosecution's case against Swartz

1179
01:25:07,522 --> 01:25:10,480
involved a law created originally in 1986.

1180
01:25:10,980 --> 01:25:13,272
It is called the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act".

1181
01:25:13,605 --> 01:25:15,272
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

1182
01:25:15,272 --> 01:25:18,855
was inspired by the movie "War Games" with Matthew Broderick—great movie.

1183
01:25:19,105 --> 01:25:20,563
I have you now.

1184
01:25:20,563 --> 01:25:24,480
In this movie, a kid gets the ability, through the magic of computer networks

1185
01:25:24,730 --> 01:25:27,063
to launch a nuclear attack.

1186
01:25:30,355 --> 01:25:34,272
You know, that's not actually possible, and it certainly wasn't possible in the '80s

1187
01:25:34,438 --> 01:25:38,522
but apparently this movie scared Congress enough to

1188
01:25:38,605 --> 01:25:41,563
pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1189
01:25:41,855 --> 01:25:45,272
This is a law that's just behind the times, for example, it penalizes

1190
01:25:46,022 --> 01:25:50,563
a terms of service kind of arrangement. You can have something like

1191
01:25:50,688 --> 01:25:57,688
eHarmony or Match.com, and somebody sort of inflates their own personal characteristics,

1192
01:25:57,980 --> 01:26:01,813
and all of a sudden, depending on the jurisdiction and the prosecutors,

1193
01:26:02,063 --> 01:26:04,522
they could be in a whole host of troubles.

1194
01:26:04,730 --> 01:26:06,813
We all know what "Terms of Use" are.

1195
01:26:07,147 --> 01:26:10,772
Most people don't read them, but not abiding by their terms could mean

1196
01:26:10,980 --> 01:26:13,022
you are committing a felony.

1197
01:26:13,272 --> 01:26:15,563
The website Terms of Service often say things like:

1198
01:26:15,813 --> 01:26:19,022
"Be nice to each other", or "Don't do anything that's improper."

1199
01:26:19,355 --> 01:26:24,022
The idea that the Criminal Law has anything to say about these kinds of violations,

1200
01:26:24,230 --> 01:26:27,272
I think strikes most people as crazy.

1201
01:26:27,480 --> 01:26:30,022
The examples get even more "crazy":

1202
01:26:30,397 --> 01:26:36,105
Until it was changed in March of 2013, the Terms of Use on the website of Hearst's Seventeen magazine

1203
01:26:36,397 --> 01:26:39,772
said you had to be eighteen in order to read it.

1204
01:26:39,855 --> 01:26:43,188
I would say that the way the CFAA has been interpreted by the Justice Department,

1205
01:26:43,188 --> 01:26:45,730
we are probably all breaking the law.

1206
01:26:46,105 --> 01:26:51,438
Vague and prone to misuse, the CFAA has become a one-size-fits-all hammer

1207
01:26:51,522 --> 01:26:54,522
for a wide range of computer-related disputes.

1208
01:26:54,647 --> 01:26:56,938
Though not the only factor in his case,

1209
01:26:57,105 --> 01:27:01,438
eleven of the thirteen charges against Swartz involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

1210
01:27:03,730 --> 01:27:07,980
The question "Why?" hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz.

1211
01:27:08,313 --> 01:27:12,522
Just what was motivating the government, and what would their case have been?

1212
01:27:12,688 --> 01:27:16,438
The Department of Justice declined requests for answers,

1213
01:27:16,563 --> 01:27:20,147
but Professor Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case.

1214
01:27:20,563 --> 01:27:24,605
So, I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons:

1215
01:27:24,855 --> 01:27:27,772
I was a federal prosecutor at the Justice Department for three years

1216
01:27:27,938 --> 01:27:30,647
before I started teaching. The government came forward

1217
01:27:30,647 --> 01:27:34,938
with an indictment based on what crimes they thought were committed,

1218
01:27:34,980 --> 01:27:38,647
just as a purely lawyer's matter, looking at the precedents, looking at the statute,

1219
01:27:38,980 --> 01:27:42,230
looking at the history, looking at the cases that are out there so far,

1220
01:27:42,438 --> 01:27:45,730
I think it was a fair indictment based on that.

1221
01:27:45,980 --> 01:27:47,980
You can debate whether they should have charged this case.

1222
01:27:48,272 --> 01:27:53,272
There's just a lot of disagreement. Some people are on the Open Access side, some people are not.

1223
01:27:54,147 --> 01:27:59,563
I think the government took Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" very seriously,

1224
01:28:00,522 --> 01:28:06,147
and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed, as a moral imperative,

1225
01:28:06,480 --> 01:28:11,563
to breaking the law, to overcome a law that Swartz saw as unjust,

1226
01:28:11,772 --> 01:28:17,397
and in a democracy, if you think a law is unjust, there are ways of changing that law.

1227
01:28:17,563 --> 01:28:20,897
There's going to Congress as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA,

1228
01:28:21,105 --> 01:28:24,855
or you can violate that law in a way to try to nullify that law,

1229
01:28:25,272 --> 01:28:30,397
and I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was committed,

1230
01:28:30,605 --> 01:28:36,105
not just to breaking the law, but to really making sure that law was nullified.

1231
01:28:36,397 --> 01:28:40,313
That everyone would have access to the database in a way that

1232
01:28:40,480 --> 01:28:43,522
you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the tube.

1233
01:28:43,772 --> 01:28:47,605
It would be done, and Swartz's side would win.

1234
01:28:49,230 --> 01:28:52,563
There's a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law,

1235
01:28:52,855 --> 01:28:56,730
and ultimately, that is a decision for the American people to make, working through Congress.

1236
01:28:57,022 --> 01:28:59,938
And then the second problem is, I think, we're still trying to figure out:

1237
01:29:00,147 --> 01:29:04,105
What's the line between less serious offences and more serious offences?

1238
01:29:04,397 --> 01:29:08,688
We're now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse,

1239
01:29:08,938 --> 01:29:13,230
and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are

1240
01:29:13,397 --> 01:29:15,647
because we're just working that out.

1241
01:29:16,022 --> 01:29:18,772
This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion.

1242
01:29:19,022 --> 01:29:22,272
The hammer that the Justice Department has to scare people with

1243
01:29:22,355 --> 01:29:25,063
just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,

1244
01:29:25,272 --> 01:29:29,480
and so most people just—you know, you can't roll the dice with your life like that.

1245
01:29:29,688 --> 01:29:32,313
Should we tap somebody's phone? Should we film them?

1246
01:29:32,480 --> 01:29:35,772
Should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people?

1247
01:29:36,022 --> 01:29:38,730
That's how federal agents and prosecutors think.

1248
01:29:38,855 --> 01:29:41,313
They build cases. They make cases.

1249
01:29:43,272 --> 01:29:47,772
Swartz was caught in the gears of a brutal criminal justice system that could not turn back,

1250
01:29:48,105 --> 01:29:53,522
a machine that has made America the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

1251
01:29:53,897 --> 01:29:58,855
We have, in this country, allowed ourselves to be captured by the politics of fear and anger,

1252
01:29:59,230 --> 01:30:04,313
and anything we're afraid of, like the future of the internet and access,

1253
01:30:04,772 --> 01:30:09,563
and anything we're angry about, instinctively creates a criminal justice intervention,

1254
01:30:10,022 --> 01:30:15,230
and we've used jail, prison, and punishment to resolve a whole host of problems

1255
01:30:15,522 --> 01:30:19,313
that, historically, were never seen as criminal justice problems.

1256
01:30:19,522 --> 01:30:24,897
The impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute, which is part of what

1257
01:30:25,105 --> 01:30:28,438
has created this debate and controversy over online access and information on the internet,

1258
01:30:29,230 --> 01:30:31,980
is very consistent with what we've seen in other areas.

1259
01:30:32,230 --> 01:30:36,230
The one difference is that the people who are usually targeted and victimized

1260
01:30:36,605 --> 01:30:42,188
by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority.

1261
01:30:44,022 --> 01:30:47,147
Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.

1262
01:30:47,480 --> 01:30:49,772
He had basically stopped working on anything else,

1263
01:30:49,813 --> 01:30:53,563
and the case was, in fact, taking over sort of his whole life.

1264
01:30:53,563 --> 01:30:58,730
One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he was emotionally vulnerable,

1265
01:30:59,480 --> 01:31:03,605
and that that was something they really needed to keep in mind so that they knew that.

1266
01:31:03,605 --> 01:31:05,855
It was weighing on him very heavily.

1267
01:31:06,063 --> 01:31:11,147
He did not like having his actions and his movements restricted in any way,

1268
01:31:12,022 --> 01:31:17,147
and the threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot,

1269
01:31:18,147 --> 01:31:20,188
was terrifying to him.

1270
01:31:20,188 --> 01:31:22,772
Completely exhausted his financial resouces,

1271
01:31:22,772 --> 01:31:28,397
and it cost us a lot of money also, and he raised a substantial amount of money,

1272
01:31:28,730 --> 01:31:32,730
so it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

1273
01:31:32,980 --> 01:31:34,772
The legal defence?
- Yes.

1274
01:31:34,772 --> 01:31:37,063
- Was in millions?
- Yes.

1275
01:31:37,688 --> 01:31:40,230
I think he didn't want to be a burden to people.

1276
01:31:40,480 --> 01:31:44,022
I think that was a factor like, "I have my normal life,

1277
01:31:44,397 --> 01:31:46,522
and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with,

1278
01:31:46,688 --> 01:31:49,480
and I try to keep the two of them as separate as possible,

1279
01:31:49,688 --> 01:31:53,688
but they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty."

1280
01:31:55,563 --> 01:31:58,897
Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher:

1281
01:31:58,938 --> 01:32:01,355
Do you admit guilt and move on with your life,

1282
01:32:01,355 --> 01:32:03,647
or do you fight a broken system?

1283
01:32:03,813 --> 01:32:05,855
With his legal case, the answer was simple:

1284
01:32:05,855 --> 01:32:09,272
He rejects a final plea deal and a trial date is set.

1285
01:32:09,480 --> 01:32:13,355
Aaron was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something

1286
01:32:13,563 --> 01:32:17,813
that he didn't believe was fair, but I also think he was scared.

1287
01:32:29,230 --> 01:32:31,105
I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

1288
01:32:31,272 --> 01:32:34,938
I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse, and I would have given him a big hug,

1289
01:32:35,147 --> 01:32:40,522
and we would have walked across that little river in Boston, and gone and had a couple of beers.

1290
01:32:41,897 --> 01:32:46,272
I really thought that we were right. I thought that we were going to win the case.

1291
01:32:46,272 --> 01:32:48,188
I thought that we could win the case.

1292
01:32:48,188 --> 01:32:50,772
He didn't talk about it very much, but you could see

1293
01:32:50,772 --> 01:32:53,688
the enormous pain that he was going through.

1294
01:32:58,105 --> 01:33:01,272
No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings

1295
01:33:01,522 --> 01:33:06,980
or depressive episodes or anything that I would describe as "severe depression"

1296
01:33:07,272 --> 01:33:10,105
and it's possible, you know, he was depressed. People get depressed.

1297
01:33:15,230 --> 01:33:19,522
Very early in our relationship, three or four weeks in or something,

1298
01:33:20,188 --> 01:33:22,855
I remember him saying to me

1299
01:33:23,897 --> 01:33:26,813
that I was a lot stronger than he was.

1300
01:33:27,063 --> 01:33:29,772
You know, he was brittle in a lot of ways.

1301
01:33:29,938 --> 01:33:33,105
Things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

1302
01:33:33,313 --> 01:33:35,938
That was part of his brilliance, too.

1303
01:33:37,313 --> 01:33:43,022
I think he probably had something like clinical depression in his early twenties.

1304
01:33:43,313 --> 01:33:45,813
I don't think he did when I was with him.

1305
01:33:46,063 --> 01:33:51,355
He wasn't a "joyful" person, but that's different from being depressed.

1306
01:33:52,938 --> 01:33:57,688
He was just under such enormous pressure for two years straight.

1307
01:33:57,938 --> 01:34:00,272
He just didn't want to do it anymore.

1308
01:34:00,480 --> 01:34:03,813
He was just—I just think it was too much.

1309
01:34:10,647 --> 01:34:13,397
I got a phone call late at night.

1310
01:34:13,897 --> 01:34:19,147
I could tell something was wrong, and then I called, and I realized what had happened.

1311
01:34:20,063 --> 01:34:25,105
A co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "Reddit" has been found dead.

1312
01:34:25,313 --> 01:34:27,772
Police say twenty-six-year-old Aaron Swartz

1313
01:34:27,897 --> 01:34:31,647
killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.

1314
01:34:33,605 --> 01:34:42,563
I just thought, we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation.

1315
01:34:43,022 --> 01:34:47,147
I was like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.

1316
01:34:53,105 --> 01:34:56,313
It was one of the hardest nights of my life.

1317
01:34:56,563 --> 01:35:00,897
I just kept screaming, "I can't hear you! What did you say? I can't hear you!"

1318
01:35:03,730 --> 01:35:05,272
I can't. That's it.

1319
01:35:05,272 --> 01:35:07,105
Okay.

1320
01:35:12,438 --> 01:35:18,563
Yeah, none of it made any sense,

1321
01:35:18,772 --> 01:35:21,188
and really still doesn't.

1322
01:35:21,188 --> 01:35:23,563
I was so frustrated, angry.

1323
01:35:34,188 --> 01:35:39,313
You know, I tried to explain it to my kids.

1324
01:35:39,855 --> 01:35:43,188
My three-year-old told me that the doctors would fix him.

1325
01:35:48,563 --> 01:35:52,813
I've known lots of people that have died, but I've never lost anybody like this,

1326
01:35:52,938 --> 01:35:59,980
because everybody feels, and I do too, there is so much we could have—more to do like...

1327
01:36:01,063 --> 01:36:07,147
I just didn't know he was there. I didn't know this was what he was suffering and...

1328
01:36:07,605 --> 01:36:10,313
He was part of me.

1329
01:36:12,522 --> 01:36:16,813
And I just wanted it to not be real, and then...

1330
01:36:21,063 --> 01:36:25,313
and then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date:

1331
01:36:29,188 --> 01:36:31,688
"to 2013".

1332
01:37:10,855 --> 01:37:15,522
My first thought was: what if nobody even notices?

1333
01:37:15,522 --> 01:37:19,980
You know, because it wasn't clear to me how salient he was.

1334
01:37:20,397 --> 01:37:25,938
I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw.

1335
01:37:25,938 --> 01:37:27,980
The Net just lit up.

1336
01:37:27,980 --> 01:37:33,563
Everyone was trying to explain it in their own way, but I've never seen

1337
01:37:34,147 --> 01:37:36,230
people grieve on Twitter before.

1338
01:37:36,230 --> 01:37:39,772
People were visibly grieving online.

1339
01:37:42,397 --> 01:37:45,522
He was the internet's own boy,

1340
01:37:45,980 --> 01:37:49,980
and the old world killed him.

1341
01:37:51,605 --> 01:37:57,147
We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched.

1342
01:37:58,063 --> 01:38:02,397
Architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the president, regularly.

1343
01:38:02,397 --> 01:38:08,813
In the middle of that time, the idea that this is what the government had to prosecute,

1344
01:38:10,605 --> 01:38:13,688
It just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.

1345
01:38:13,688 --> 01:38:19,480
The question is: Can we do something, given what's happened,

1346
01:38:19,480 --> 01:38:22,522
to make the world a better place,

1347
01:38:22,522 --> 01:38:24,647
and how can we further that legacy?

1348
01:38:24,647 --> 01:38:28,105
That's the only question one could ask.

1349
01:38:29,147 --> 01:38:33,605
All over the world there are starting to be hack-a-thons, gatherings,

1350
01:38:33,772 --> 01:38:39,397
Aaron Swartz has, in some sense, brought the best out of us, in trying to say:

1351
01:38:39,855 --> 01:38:42,897
How do we fix this?

1352
01:38:43,813 --> 01:38:48,688
He was, in my humble opinion, one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries

1353
01:38:48,688 --> 01:38:51,605
that this country has produced.

1354
01:38:51,605 --> 01:38:55,313
I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious,

1355
01:38:55,522 --> 01:39:01,730
but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with.

1356
01:39:01,855 --> 01:39:08,188
When we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,

1357
01:39:08,397 --> 01:39:12,938
we've broken the rule of law—we've desecrated the temple of justice.

1358
01:39:13,105 --> 01:39:15,438
Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

1359
01:39:17,522 --> 01:39:21,272
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,

1360
01:39:21,272 --> 01:39:24,855
it comes through continuous struggle.

1361
01:39:26,063 --> 01:39:28,480
Aaron really could do magic,

1362
01:39:28,730 --> 01:39:32,063
and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death.

1363
01:39:32,063 --> 01:39:36,147
He believed that he could change the world, and he was right.

1364
01:39:36,522 --> 01:39:40,688
Out of the last week, and out of today, phoenixes are already rising.

1365
01:39:42,730 --> 01:39:47,355
Since Swartz's death, Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden

1366
01:39:47,355 --> 01:39:51,230
have introduced legislation that would reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—

1367
01:39:51,563 --> 01:39:56,272
the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Swartz.

1368
01:39:56,563 --> 01:39:59,230
It's called "Aaron's Law".

1369
01:39:59,230 --> 01:40:03,022
Aaron believed that you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time:

1370
01:40:03,022 --> 01:40:06,438
What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now?

1371
01:40:06,647 --> 01:40:08,938
And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?

1372
01:40:08,938 --> 01:40:11,480
This is what democracy looks like!

1373
01:40:11,480 --> 01:40:12,980
We are the people too!

1374
01:40:12,980 --> 01:40:16,813
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

1375
01:40:16,813 --> 01:40:18,522
Stand up, fight back!

1376
01:40:18,522 --> 01:40:21,647
Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

1377
01:40:21,647 --> 01:40:26,647
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! NROC has got to go!

1378
01:40:29,438 --> 01:40:33,022
I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.

1379
01:40:33,022 --> 01:40:35,605
But we can change the future and we must.

1380
01:40:35,605 --> 01:40:39,813
We must do so for Aaron, we must do so for ourselves.

1381
01:40:39,813 --> 01:40:44,480
We must do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place,

1382
01:40:44,480 --> 01:40:49,855
a place where justice works, and access to knowledge becomes a human right.

1383
01:40:50,272 --> 01:40:57,397
So there was a kid, back in February, from Baltimore, fourteen years old,

1384
01:40:57,772 --> 01:41:04,105
who had access to JSTOR, and he'd been spalunking through JSTOR after reading something,

1385
01:41:04,147 --> 01:41:10,022
and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer,

1386
01:41:10,522 --> 01:41:15,272
and pancreatic cancer kills the shit out of you because we detect it way too late

1387
01:41:15,272 --> 01:41:18,688
by the time we detect it, it's already too late to do anything about it,

1388
01:41:18,813 --> 01:41:24,730
and he sent emails off to the entire oncology department at Johns Hopkins,

1389
01:41:24,772 --> 01:41:28,022
you know hundreds of them, and every—
- Did you say fourteen years old?

1390
01:41:31,022 --> 01:41:31,480
- Fourteen-year-old kid, yeah, and most of them ignored it but one of them sent him an email back,

1391
01:41:31,480 --> 01:41:34,438
and said this is not an entirely stupid idea, why don't you come on over?

1392
01:41:34,438 --> 01:41:39,105
This kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher, and in February I heard him on the news

1393
01:41:39,105 --> 01:41:44,438
just a couple of weeks after Aaron died, when Aaron was in the news a lot..

1394
01:41:46,522 --> 01:41:48,605
Sorry...

1395
01:41:49,147 --> 01:41:55,147
and he said the reason he was on the news was 'cause they'd done it. They were shipping

1396
01:41:55,772 --> 01:41:59,563
an early test for pancreatic cancer that was going to save lives,

1397
01:41:59,563 --> 01:42:05,522
and he said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important."

1398
01:42:06,063 --> 01:42:10,938
Because you never know, right? This truth of the universe is not only something

1399
01:42:10,938 --> 01:42:15,188
that policymakers use to figure out, you know, what the speed limit should be.

1400
01:42:15,188 --> 01:42:19,980
It's where the thing that's gonna keep your kid from dying of pancreatic cancer comes from,

1401
01:42:21,772 --> 01:42:26,980
and without access, the person who might come up with the thing that's got your number on it,

1402
01:42:28,272 --> 01:42:30,063
may never find that answer.

1403
01:42:31,855 --> 01:42:41,855
He sleeped so well, he didn't fall out of, not even when he dreamed he was back on the spacecraft.

1404
01:42:43,605 --> 01:42:47,355
Very good, Aaron. Very good. Yay, Aaron!

1405
01:42:47,355 --> 01:42:52,147
Okay, now it's song time.

1406
01:43:14,897 --> 01:43:19,522
AARON SWARTZ, 1986-2013