The Internet's Own Boy: Aaron Swartz Documentary (2014) | Digital Rights & Activism

[00:00:02][Music] a co-founder of the social news and entertainment website Reddit has been found dead he certainly was a prodigy although he never kind of thought of himself like that he was totally unexcited about starting businesses and making money there's a profound sense of loss tonight in Highland Park Aaron Schwarz Hometown as loved ones say goodbye to one of the internet's brightest lights Open Access and computer activists are mourning his loss an astonishing intellect you talked to people who knew him he was killed by the government and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles wanted to make an example out of him okay governments have insatable desire to control he was potentially facing 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine raising questions of prosecutorial Zeal and I would say even misconduct um have you looked into that particular matter and reached any [Music] conclusions growing up you know I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were the way things always would be they weren't natural at all they were things that could be changed and they were things that more importantly were wrong and should change and once I realized that there was really kind of No Going [Music] Back welcome to story reading time the name of the book is Paddington at the fair well he was born in Highland Park and grew up here Aaron came from a family of three brothers all extraordinarily bright Bo over so we were all you know not the best behaved children and you know three boys running around all the time causing trouble hey no no no what but I've come to the realization Aaron learned how to learn at a very very young age 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 who's there Aon Aon who Aaron funny man he knew what he wanted and he always wanted to do it he always accomplished what he [Music] wanted his curiosity was endless here's a little picture of what's a planet sign and each planet has a symbol Mercury symbol the Venus's symbol Earth symbol my symbol symbol one day he said to Susan what's this free family entertainment in downtown Highland Park free family entertainment downtown Hall Park there was three at the time and she said what are you talking about he said look it says here on the refrigerator free family entertainment on downtown H and so she was floored U and astonished that he could read it's called my family svor the night is different from all other nights I remember once we were at the University of Chicago Library I pulled a book off the shelf that was from like 1900 um and showed him and said you know this is really just an extraordinary place we all were curious children but Aaron really liked learning and really liked teaching and they were going to warn the ABC's backwards Z YX w we you I remember he came home from his first algebra class and he was like Noah let me teach you algebra and I'm like what is algebra and he was always like that now it's press now you press the click button there now it's got that now it's in pink when he was about 2 or 3 years old and Bob introduced him to computers and he just took off like crazy on them go back onec we all H computers uh but Aaron really took to them um really took to the internet IDE working at the computer uhuh how how Mommy why is nothing working he started programming from a really young age I remember the first uh program that I wrote with him was in basic and it was a Star Wars trivia game he sat down with me in the basement where the computer was uh for hours programming this game the problem that I kept having with him is there was nothing that I wanted done and to him there was always something to do always something that programming could [Music] solve the way Aaron always saw it is that programming is Magic right you can accomplish these things that normal humans can't Aaron made an ATM using like a Macintosh and like a cardboard box one one year for Halloween I didn't know what I wanted to be and he thought it'd be really really cool if I dressed up like his new favorite computer which at the time was the original iMac I mean he hated dressing up for Halloween but he loved convincing other people to dress up his things that he wanted to see host and St guys come on look at the [Music] camera he made this website called the info where people can just fill in information like I'm sure someone out there knows all about gold gold leafing why don't they write about that on this website and then other people could come at a later point and read those read that information and and edit the information if they thought it was uh bad uh not too dissimilar from Wikipedia right and this was this was before Wikipedia had begun and this was developed by a 12-year-old in his room by himself running on you know this tiny server using ancient technology and one of the teachers responds like this is a terrible idea you can't just like let anyone author the diction like author the encyclopedia the whole reason we have Scholars is to write these books for us how could you ever have such a terrible idea me and my other brother would be like oh you know yeah Wikipedia is cool but we had that in our house like 5 years ago Aaron's website the info.org wins a school competition hosted by the cambridge-based web design firm RS dig we all went to to Cambridge for the when he won the artist digital prize and you know we had no clue what Aaron was doing it was obvious that the prize was really important Aaron soon became involved with online programming communities then in the process of shaping a new tool for the web he comes up to me it's like Ben there's this really awesome thing that I'm working on you need to hear about it I'm like yeah what is it says say thing called RSS and he explains to me what RSS is I'm like like why is that useful Aron like is any site using it like why would I want to use it there was this mailing list for people who were working on RSS and XML more generally and there was a there was a person on it named Aon Schwartz who was combative but very smart and who had lots of good ideas and um he didn't ever come to the face t- face meetings and they said you know are when are you going to come out to one of these face Toof face meetings and he said you know I don't think my mom would let me I uh you know I'm I'm 14 I just turned 14 and so their first reaction was well you know this person this colleague we've been working with all year is was 13 years old while we were working with him and he's only 14 now and their second reaction was Christ we really want to meet him you know that's extraordinary he was part of the committee that drafted an RSS what he was doing was to help build the plumbing for modern hypertext the piece that he was working on um RSS was a tool that you can use to get summaries of things that are going on in other web pages uh most commonly you would use this for a Blog you might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you want to read you use their RSS feeds these summaries of what's going on on those other pages to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on Aaron was really young uh but he he understood the technology and he saw that it was imperfect and looked for ways to help make it better [Music] so his mom started bundling mom planes in Chicago we pick them up in San Francisco we'd introduce him to interesting people to argue with and we'd Marvel at his horrific eating habits he only ate white food only like uh you know steamed rice and not fried rice cuz that wasn't sufficiently white and white bread and and and so on and you know you kind of Marvel at this the quality of the debate emerging from this what what appeared to be a small boy's mouth and you think you know this is a kid who's really going to go somewhere if he doesn't die scurvy Aaron you're up um I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like Doc was saying you can't have companies that just you know let's sell dog food over the Internet let sell dog food over cell phones but there's still a lot of innovation going on I think if you don't see the Innovation maybe your head is in the S he takes on this Alpha nerd personality where he's sort of like I'm smarter than you and because I'm smarter than you I'm better than you and I can tell you what to do it's an extension of like him being kind of like a twerp so you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems like searching for aliens and trying to cure [Music] cancer first met him on IRC on internet Rel chat he didn't just write code he also was sort of got people got people excited about solving problems he got he was a he was a connector the free culture movement has had a lot of his energy I think Aon was trying to make the world work he was trying to fix it he had a very kind of strong personality that definitely ruffled feathers at times it wasn't necessarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world and the world wasn't always comfortable with [Music] him Ain got into high school and was really just sick of school he didn't like it he didn't like any of the classes that were being taught he didn't like the teachers Aon really knew like how to get information he was like I don't need to go to this teacher to learn how to do geometry I can just read the Geometry book and I don't need to go to the teacher to learn their version of American History like I have like three historical compilations here like I could just read them and I'm not interested in that I'm interested in the web I was very frustrated with school I thought you know the teachers didn't know what they were talking about and they were very domineering and controlling and the homework was kind of a sham and it was just like you know all the way to pin and together and forc them to do busy work and you know I started reading books about like the history of education and how this educational system was developed and you know alternatives to it in ways that people could actually learn things as opposed to just regurgitating facts their teachers told them and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things you know once I questioned the school I was in I questioned the society that built the school I questioned the businesses the schools were training people for and I questioned the government that you know set up this whole structure one of the things he was most passionate about was copyright especially in those early days copyright has always been something of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers um but it wasn't an excessive burden it was a reasonable institution to have in place uh to make sure that people got paid what Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system and this amazing new thing we were trying to build the internet and the web these things collided and what we got was chaos he then met Harvard law professor Lawrence lek who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court a young Aaron Schwarz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings I am Ain Schwarz and I'm here to listen to the to see the Elder argument why did you fly out here from Chicago and come all this way to see the Ed argument that's a more difficult question I I don't know very exciting to see the Supreme Court especially such a prestigious case as this one leig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the internet it was called creative comments so the simple idea of creative comments is to give people creators uh a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry so if copyright is all about all rights reserved um then this is a kind of some rights reserved model it's I want a simple way to say to you here's what you can do with my work um even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do and Aaron's role was the computer part like how do you architect the licenses so they would be simple and understandable and expressed in a way that machines could process it and people are like why do you have this you know 15-year-old kid writing the specifications for the creative comments like don't you think that's a huge mistake and Larry's like the biggest mistake we would have is not listening to this kid barely is not even tall enough to get over the podium and it wasn't these movable Podium so it it's this embarrassing thing where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face when you come to your come to our website here and you go to choose license it gives you this list of options explains what it means and you fill out three simple questions do you want to require attribution do you want to allow commercial uses of your work do you want to allow modifications of your work I was floored just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult and Aaron stood up there in front of a whole audience full of people and just started talking about the platform that he' created for Creative Commons and they were all listening to him just I was sitting at the back thinking he's just a kid why are they listening to him but they did well I don't think I comprehended it fully though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work the success of Creative Commons has been enormous currently on the website Flickr alone over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license he contributed through his technical abilities uh and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him Aaron often wrote candid in his personal blog I think deeply about things and I want others to do likewise I work for ideas and learn from people I don't like excluding people I'm a perfectionist but I won't let that get in the way of publication except for education and entertainment I'm not going to waste my time on things that won't have an impact I try to be friends with everyone but I hate it when you don't take me seriously I don't hold grudges it's not productive but I learn from my experience I want to make the world a better place in 2004 Schwarz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University he had had all sort of colitis which was very troubling and we were concerned about him taking his medication uh he got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day and one of those pills was a steroid which Ed his growth and made him feel different from many of the other students Aaron I think shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high schoolers who uh in four years are meant to become um you know captains of industry uh and and one centers and like I think he just it just made him bananas in 2005 after only one year of college Schwarz was offered a spot at a new startup incubation firm called y combinator led by Paul Graham and he's like hey I have this idea for a website and Paul Graham likes him enough and says yeah sure so and drops out of school moves to this apartment so this used to be aon's apartment when he moved here I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease um because Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college Aaron lived in what's now the living room and some of the posters are left over from when Aaron lived here and then the library there are more books but a lot of them are erands Aaron's y combinator sign was called infogami a tool to build websites but infogami struggles to find users and Schwarz eventually merges his company with another YC combinator project in need of help it was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian called Reddit there we were starting from almost nothing no users no money no code and growing day by day into a hugely popular website and it showed no signs of letting up first we had a th000 users then 10,000 then 20,000 and on and on it was just incredible Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the internet there's a lot of uh humor there's a lot of Art and there's just people who to flock to the site and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news Reddit kind of just borders on on chaos at some level so on the one hand it's a a place where people discuss uh news of the day technology politics and issues and yet there is a lot of kind of not safe for work material offensive material there's some subreddits where uh trolls find a welcome home home and so in that sense Reddit has been kind of home to controversy as well it kind of sits on that edge of chaos Reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant K Nast who makes an offer to buy the company some large amount of money large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions about like how do I store this money like a lot of money like a lot of money like probably more than a million dollars but I don't actually know and he is how old at the time 1920 so it was in this apartment they like sat around on what predated these couches hacking on Reddit and when they sold Reddit they had they threw a giant party and then all flew out to California the next day and left the keys with make it was funny you know he just saw a startup so we all kind of Presumed he was the richest person around but he uh he said oh no I'll take this tiny little shoe box sized room that's all I need like it was barely larger than a closet the idea of him spending his money on fancy objects just seems so implausible he explains it's like I like living in apartment so I'm not going to spend a lot of money on a new place to live I'm not going to buy a mansion and I like wearing jeans and a t-shirt so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes so like it's you know really no big deal what is a big deal to Schwarz is how traffic flows on the internet and what commands our attention in the old system of broadcasting you're fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves you know you could only send out 10 channels over the airwaves of Television right or even with cable you had 500 channels on the internet everybody can have a channel everyone can get a blog or a MySpace page everyone has a way of expressing themselves and so what you see now is not a question of who gets access to the airwaves it's a question of who gets control over the ways you find people you know you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google these sort of Gatekeepers that tell you where on the internet you want to go the people who provide you your sources of news and information so it's not you know only certain people have a license to speak now everyone has a license to speak it's a question of who gets [Applause] heard after he started working in San Francisco at K Nast he comes into the office and they want to give him a computer with all this crap installed on it and say that he can't install any new things on his computer which to developers outrageous right right from the first day he was complaining about all this stuff gray walls gray desks gray noise the first day I showed up here I simply couldn't take it by lunchtime I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying I can't imagine staying sane with someone buzzing in my ear all day let alone getting any actual work done nobody else seems to get work done here either everybody's always coming into our room to hang out and chat or invite us to play the new video game system that wired is testing he really had different aspirations that were politically oriented and Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture that orients uh technical activity for the purposes of political goals Aaron hated working for a corporation they all hate working for conas but Aaron is like the only one who's not going to take it and Aaron basically gets himself fired by not showing up to work ever it was said to be a messy breakup both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman declined to be interviewed for this film he rejected the business world one of the really important things to remember about that choice when Aaron decided to kind of leave startup culture is that he was also leaving behind the things that had made him you famous and well-loved and you know he was was at risk of letting down fans he got to where he was supposed to be going and had the self-awareness and the ordinariness to uh realize that he had climbed the mountain of [ __ ] to pluck the single rows and discovered that he' lost his sense of smell and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed uh and and he did get the rose in any event uh he climbed back down again uh which is pretty cool the way Aaron always saw it is that programming is Magic right you can accomplish these things that normal humans can't by being able to program so if you had magical powers would you use them for good or to make you mountains of cash Schwarz was inspired by one of The Visionaries he had met as a child the man who had invented the worldwide web Tim burner Lee in the 1990s burner's Lee was arguably sitting on one of the most lucrative inventions of the 20th Century but instead of profiting from the invention of the worldwide web he gave it away for free it is the only reason the worldwide web exists today Ain is certainly deeply influenced by Tim Tim is certainly a very prominent early internet genius who doesn't in any sense cash out is not at all interested in how he's going to figure out how to make a billion dollars people would have seen oh there's money being made there so there would be there would have been lots of little webs instead of one big one and one little web lots of little webs doesn't work because you can't follow links from one of the other you know you had to have the the critical mass of this thing was the entire planet so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board I mean I you know feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is is to just kind of take what you're given and you know follow the things that adults told you to do and that you know your parents told you to do and that Society tells you to do I think you should always be questioning you know I take this very scientific attitude that everything you've learned is just provisional that you know it's always open to recantation or reputation or questioning and I think the same applies to society once I realized that there were real serious problems fundamental problems that I could do something to address I didn't see a way to to forget that I didn't see a way not to [Music] we just started spending a lot of time just kind of as friends we would just talk for hours into the [Music] night I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me I think to some degree I was like this is a terrible idea and impossible and therefore I will pretend it is not happening as my marriage was breaking down and I was really stuck with that anywhere to go we became roommates and brought my daughter over we moved in and furnished the house and it was really peaceful like my life had not been peaceful for a while and really neither had [Music] his we were extremely close uh from the beginning of our romantic relationship we just we were in constant contact but we're both really difficult people to deal with in a very Ali mcel discussion uh he confessed he had a theme song and I made him play it for me it was Extraordinary Machine by Fiona Apple I think it was just that sense of kind of being a little bit embattled that the song has um and it also had like this hopefulness to it it's a slow climb but I'm good at being uncomfortable so I can't stop changing all the time cuz in many ways Aaron was tremendously optimistic about life even when he didn't feel it he could be tremendously optimistic about [Music] lifein what are you doing flicker has video now Schwartz threw his energy into a string of new projects involving access to public information including an accountability website called watchdog.org and the idea is to be a huge Wiki an editable website with one page per book so for every every book ever published we want to have a web page about it that combines all the information from Publishers from book sellers from libraries from readers onto one site and then gives you links where you can buy it you can borrow it or you can browse it I love libraries you know I'm the kind of person who goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library that's the dream of open library is building this website where both you can leap from book to book from person to author from subject to idea go through this vast tree of knowledge that's been embedded and lost in big physical libraries that's hard to find that's not very well accessible online is really important because books are a cultural Legacy you know books are the place people go to write things down and to have all that swallowed up by one Corporation is kind of scary how can you bring public access to the public domain it may sound obvious that you'd have public access the public domain but in fact it's not true so the public domain should be free to all but it's often locked up there's often you know guard cages it's it's like having a national park but with a moor around it and gun turrets pointed to out in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain one of the things Aaron was particularly interested in is bringing public access to the public domain this is one of the things that got him into so much trouble I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States what I discovered was a puzzling system called called Pacer which stands for public access to court electronic records I started Googling and that's when I ran across Carl malam access to Legal materials in the United States is A10 billion perear business Pacer is just this incredible abomination of government service it's 10 cents a page it's it's this most brain dead code you've ever seen you can't search it you can't bookmark anything you got to have a credit card um and these are public records it's it's you know us district courts are very important it's where a lot of our our seminal litigation starts you know civil rights cases patent cases um all sorts of stuff and journalists and students and citizens and lawyers all need access to Pacer and it it fights them every step of the way people without means um can't see the law as readily as people that have that gold American Express card it's it's a pole tax on access to Justice you know the law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it uh you know that's not much of a democracy they make about $120 million a year on the Pacer system and it doesn't cost anything near that according to their own records in fact it's illegal the e-government act of 2002 states that the courts May charge only to the extent necessary in order to reimburse the cost of running [Music] Pacer as the founder of public.resource.org malamud wanted to protest the Pacer charges he started a program called the Pacer recycling project where people could upload Pacer documents they had already paid for to a free database so others could use them the Pacer people were getting a lot of a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access and so they put together this system in 17 l liaries across the country there was free Pacer access you know that's that's one one Library every 22,000 square miles I believe so it wasn't like really convenient I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called thumb drive Corp and download docs from the public access libraries upload them to the Pacer recycling site people take a thumb drive into one of these libraries and they download a bunch of documents and they send them to me and nothing I mean it was just a joke um in fact when you clicked on thumb drive core there was a wizard of as you know the munchkin singing um so little video clip came up weent lollipop but of course I get this phone call from Steve Schultz and and Aaron saying gee we'd like to join the thumb drive Corp around that time I ran into Aaron at a conference this is something that really has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people so I approached him and I said hey I'm thinking about an intervention on the Pacer problem [Music] Schultz had already developed a program that could automatically download Pacer documents from The Trial libraries Schwarz wanted to take a look so I showed him the code and I didn't know what would come next but as it turns out over the course of the next few hours at that conference he was off sitting in a corner improving my code recruiting a friend of his that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library and to begin to test his improved code at which point the folks at the courts realized something's not going quite according to plan and data started to come in and come in and come in and soon there were 760 GB of Pacer docs about 20 million Pages using information retrieved from The Trial libraries Schwarz was conducting massive automated parallel downloading of the Pacer system he was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million federal court documents almost 20 million pages of text now I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps exceeded the expectations of the people running the pilot Access Project but surprising a bureaucrat isn't illegal Aon and Carl decided to go talk to the New York Times about what happened they also caught the attention of the FBI who began to stake out schwarz's parents house in Illinois but I get a tweet from his mother saying call me it's like oh my god what the hell's going on here and so I finally got a hold of Aaron and and you know Aaron's mother was like oh my God FBI FBI FBI an FBI agent drives down our homes driveway trying to see if Aaron is like in his room and I remember being home that day and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway and just driving back out I was like that's [Music] weird like 5 years later I read this FBI file and I'm like oh my goodness that was the FBI agent in my driveway he was terrified he he was totally terrified he was way more terrified after the the FBI actually um called him up on the phone and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer um he said he went home and laid down on the bed and and you know was was shaking the downloading also uncovered massive privacy violations in the court documents ultimately the courts were forced to change their policies as a result and the FBI closed their investigation without bringing charges to this day I find it remarkable that anybody even at the most remote Podunk field office of the FBI thought that A fitting use for taxpayer dollars was investigating people for criminal theft on the grounds that they had made the law public how can you call yourself a law man and think that there can possibly be anything wrong in this whole world with making the law public Aaron was willing to put himself at risk for the causes that he believed in bothered by wealth disparity Schwarz moves Beyond technology in into a broader range of political causes I went into Congress and I invited him to come and hang out and intern for us for a while so that he could learn you know the political process uh he was sort of learning a new commity a new set of skills and kind of learning to hack politics it seems ridiculous that miners should have to hammer away until their whole bodies are dripping with sweat faced with the knowledge that if they dare to stop they won't be able to put food on the table that night while I get to make larger and larger amounts of money each day just by sitting and watching TV but apparently the world is ridiculous so I co-founded a group called the progressive change Campaign Committee and what we try and do is we try and organize people over the Internet who care about Progressive politics and moving the country in a more Progressive direction to kind of come together join our email list join our campaigns and help get progressive candidates elected all across the country the group is responsible for igniting the Grassroots effort behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate he might have thought it was a dumb system but he came in and he said I need to learn this system cuz it can be manipulated like any you know like any social system but his passion for knowledge in libraries didn't take a backseat Aaron began to take a closer look at institutions that publish academic Journal articles by virtue of being students at a major US University I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of Licensing fees to organizations like jar and Thompson and isi to get access to scholing journals that the rest of the world can't read these scholarly journals and articles are essentially the entire wealth of human knowledge online and many have been paid for with taxpayer money or with government grants but to read them you often have to pay again handing over steep fees to Publishers like Reed ele these licensing fees are so substantial that people who are studying in India instead of studying in the United States don't have this kind of access they're locked out from all of these journals they're locked out from our entire scientific Legacy I mean a lot of these Journal articles they go back to the enlightenment every time someone has written down a scientific paper it's been scanned and digitized and put in these collections that is a legacy that has been brought To Us by the history of people doing interesting work the history of scientists it's a legacy that should belong to us as a Commons as a people but instead it's been locked up and put online by a handful of for-profit Corporations who then try and get the maximum profit they can out of it so a researcher paid by University or or the people publishes a paper and in the very very last step of that process after all the work is done after all the original research is done the thinking the lab work the analysis after everything is done at that last stage then the researcher has to hand over his or her copyright to this multi-billion dollar company and it's sick it's an entire economy built on volunteer Labor uh and then the Publishers sit at the very top and scrape off the cream talk about a scam one publisher in in Britain made a profit of $3 billion last year I mean what a racket Jay store is just a very very small player in that story but for some reason J store is the player that Aaron decided to confront he'd gone to some conference around Open Access and open publishing and I don't know who the person from jar was but I think they at some point eron asked the question like how much would it cost to open up J store in perpetuity um and they gave some I think it was $100 million something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous working on a fellowship at Harvard he knew users on mit's famously open and fast Network next door had authorized access to the riches of J store Schwarz saw an opportunity you have a key to those Gates and with a little bit of shell script magic you can get those Journal articles on September 24th 2010 Schwarz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop on the the MIT Network under the name Gary host the client name was registered as ghost laptop he doesn't hack J store in the traditional sense of hacking the J store database was organized so it was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in J store because it was basically numbered it was basically you know SL SL SL number article 44424 and 25 then 26 he wrote a python script called keep grabbing dopy which was like keep grabbing one article after another the next day ghost laptop begins grabbing articles but soon the computer's IP address is blocked for Schwarz it's barely a bump in the road he quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading well J Stewart and uh MIT take a number of steps to try to interfere with this when they notice that this is happening and when the more modest steps don't work then in a certain stage they J store just cuts off MIT from having access to the J store database so the this kind of cat and mouse game around getting access to the uh J store database Aaron ultimately obviously is the cat because he has more technical capability than the J store database people do in defending them eventually there was an unlocked Supply Closet in the basement of of one of the buildings and he went instead of going through Wi-Fi he went down there and he just plugged his computer directly into the network and just left it there with an external hard drive downloading these articles to the to the computer unknown KNN to Schwartz his laptop and hard drive had been found by authorities they didn't stop the downloads instead they installed a surveillance camera they found the computer in this room in the basement of an MIT building they could have unplugged it they could have waited for the guy to come back and said dude what are you doing you know cut it out who are you and they could have done all that kind of stuff but they didn't what they wanted to do was film it to gather evidence to make a case that's the only reason you film something like [Music] that at first the only person caught on the Glitchy surveillance camera was using the closet as a place to store bottles and [Music] cans but days later it caught Schwartz [Music] sortz is replacing a hard drive he takes it out of his backpack leans out of frame for about 5 minutes and then leaves [Music] and then they like organized like a a stake out where as he was biking home from MIT these cops came out from like either side of the road or something like that and started going after him he he describes that he's he was pressed down and and assaulted by the police he tells me that they it's unclear that they were police that were after him he thought that someone was trying to attack him I he does tell me they beat him [Music] up I was just devastated the notion of any kind of criminal prosecution of anyone in in our family or anything was so foreign and incomprehensible I didn't know what to do well they execute search warrants at at Aaron's house his apartment in Cambridge in his office at Harvard two days before the arrest the investigation had gone beyond Jore and the local Cambridge Police it had been taken over by the United States Secret Service the Secret Service began investigating computer and credit card fraud in 1984 but six weeks after the attack on 911 their role expanded President Bush used the Patriot Act to establish a network of what they called electronic crimes task forces the bill for me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists according to the Secret Service they are primarily engaged in activity with economic impact organized criminal groups or use of schemes involving new technology the Secret Service turned schwarz's case over to the Boston us attorney's office there was a guy in the US attorney's office who had the title head of the computer crimes division or task force um I don't know what else he had going but you're certainly not much of a computer crimes prosec uter without a computer crime to prosecute so he jumped on it kept it for himself didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit and that's Steve Heyman prosecutor Steven Heyman has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Schwarz but he can be seen here in an episode of the television show American Greed filmed around the time of aon's arrest he is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzalez a case that garnered himman enormous press attention and accolades Gonzalez masterminded the theft of over a 100 million credit card and ATM numbers the largest such fraud in history here Hyman describing Gonzalez gives his view on the hacker mindset these guys are driven by a lot of the same things that we're driven by they have an ego they like Challenge and of course they like money and everything you can get from money one of the suspects implicated in the Gonzalez case was a young hacker named Jonathan James believing Gonzalez's crimes would be pinned on him James committed suicide during the investigation in an early press release describing the government's position in the case of Aaron Schwarz heyman's boss us attorney for the District of Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz said this stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar and whether you take documents data or dollars it's not true it's obviously not true uh I'm not saying it's harmless and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalize stealing of information but you've got to be much more subtle in trying to figure out exactly which kind of harms are harmful here um so the thing about a crowbar is every time I break into a place with a crowbar I do damage there's no doubt about it um but when Aaron writes a script that says download download download a hundred times in a second um there's no obvious damage to anybody uh if he does that for the purpose of gathering a archive to do academic research on it there is never any damage to anybody he wasn't stealing he wasn't selling what he got or giving it away he was making a point as far as I could tell the arrest took its toll on Schwarz he just wouldn't talk about it um and he's like very stressed if you thought like the FBI was like going to come to your doorstep any day anytime you went down on the hall even to do your laundry and they would break into your apartment cuz you left the door unlocked like I'd be pretty stressed um and it was clear and so Aaron was always sort of like in like a d [Music] mood he wouldn't give off any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time cuz he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him it was a time of unprecedented social and political activism Time Magazine would later name as their 2011 person of the year the protester there was a kind of hot bed of hacker activity going on Wikileaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables the Manning had been under arrest at the time time it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak uh Anonymous uh which is a kind of protest Ensemble that has a lot of hackers in its ranks were going on various sprees of sorts if you compare that to what he did his stuff should have been left behind for MIT and J store to deal with in a kind of private uh professional matter it should have never gotten the attention of the the criminal system it just didn't belong [Music] there before he was indicted Schwarz was offered a plea deal that involved 3 months in prison time in a halfway house and a year of home detention all without the use of a computer it was on the condition that Schwarz plead guilty to a felony here we are we have no Discovery no evidence whatsoever about what the government's case is and we have to make this immense decision where the lawyer is pushing you to do this the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small so whether you're guilty or not you're better off taking taking the deal Boston has its own computer crimes division lots of lawyers probably more lawyers than they need so you know you can imagine all sorts of cases where it would be really hard to prosecute because you've got some criminals in Russia or you've got some people inside of a corporation that are going to have $500 lawyers or $700 an hour lawyers sitting down against you and then you've got this case with this kid which is pretty easy to prove uh that he did something and he's already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI so why not go as tough as you can in here against that guy it's good for you the prosecutor it's good for the Republic cuz you're fighting all those terrorist types I was so scared I was so scared of having my computer seized I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being seized I had confidential material from from sources from my previous work on my laptop and that is above all my priority is to keep my sources safe I was so scared of of what was going to happen to aah Aaron told me that they offered him a deal and he finally just said that he would take it if I told him to and I said I came real close to saying take it he had these he had developed like serious political aspirations in the intervening time between when you know that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial startup life and begun this new life that had come to this political activism and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony you know he said to me one day we were walking by the White House and he said to me they don't let felons work [Music] there and you know he really he really wanted that to be his life he hadn't killed anybody he hadn't hurt anybody he hadn't like stolen money he didn't done anything that seemed felony worthy right and there is this idea that like there's no reason that he should be labeled a felon and taken away his right to vote in many states for doing what he did like that's just outrageous like it makes sense for him to be you know maybe find a bunch of money or you know asked not to come back to MIT again but like to be a felon to face jail time Schwarz turned down the plea deal hman redoubled his efforts Hyman continued to press us at all at all levels even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's Acer computer hard drive and USB drive the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives why was Aaron Schwarz downloading articles from J store and just what did he plan to do with them the government claims that he was planning to publish these uh we don't really know whether that was his real intention because Aaron also had a history of doing projects where he'd analyze giant data sets of articles in order to learn interesting things about them the best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database in a project with Stanford law students Schwarz had had downloaded the West law legal database he uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research and favorable results he did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles which were then beneficial to like Exxon during an oil spill right so it was a very corrupt system of of funding you know vanity research Schwarz had never released the West law documents in theory he could have been doing the same thing about the J store database that would have been complet completely okay if he were on the other hand intending to create a competitive service to J store like we're going to set up our own you know access to the Harvard Law review and charge you know money for it then you know okay now it seems like criminal violation uh because you're commercially trying to exploit this material but it's kind of crazy to imagine that's what he was doing so but then there's a middle case well what if he was just trying to liberate it for all the developing world but depending on what he was doing it creates a very different character to how the law should be thinking about it um the government was Prosecuting him as if this was like a commercial criminal violation like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records that it was that kind of crime I don't know what he was going to do with that database but I heard from a friend of his that Aaron had told him he was going to analyze the data for evidence of corporate funding of climate change research that led to biased results and I I I totally believe [Music] that I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me um and I thought maybe this is a way I could get out of this just just exit the situation and I didn't want to live in fear of having my computer seized um I didn't want to live in fear of having to go to jail on a contemp of Court charge if they tried to compel me to um decrypt my computer when they came to me and said you know Steve wants to talk to you that seemed reasonable they offered Norton what is known as a Queen for a Day letter or a profer it allowed prosecutors to ask questions about Aaron's case Norton would be given immunity from prosecution herself for any information she revealed during the meeting I didn't like it I I told my lawyers repeatedly that I didn't this seemed fishy I didn't like this I didn't want immunity I didn't need immunity I hadn't done anything but they were really really stringent that there was they did not want me meeting the prosecutor without immunity but just to make clear this is a Queen for a Day deal a profer right a profer letter in which basically handed information over them in exchange for protection from prosecution so um it wasn't handing information over it was at least that's not how I saw it it was just having a discussion having an interview with them well they're asking you questions they're asking me questions they ask them about whatever they want right and whatever they learn I really prosecuted for that right and I I repeatedly tried to go in naked I repeatedly I repeatedly tried to turn down the proper letter I was ill I was being pressured by my lawyers I was confused I was not doing well by this point I was depressed and I was scared and I didn't understand the situation I was in I had no idea why I was in this situation I hadn't done anything interesting much less wrong we went out of our minds Aaron was clearly very distraught about it we were very distraught about it Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it we tried to get Quinn to change attorneys I was very unused to being in a room with large men well-armed that are continually telling me I'm lying and that I must have done something I told them that this thing that they were Prosecuting wasn't a crime I told them that they were on the wrong side of History I used that phrase I said you're on the wrong side of History um and they look bored they didn't even look angry they just look bored and I I it began to occur to me that we weren't having the same conversation I mean I told them plenty of things about you know why people would download Journal articles and eventually I don't remember what was around it um uh I mentioned that he'd done this blog post the gorilla Open Access Manifesto uh this is the gorilla Open Access Manifesto uh supposedly written in July 2008 in Italy information is power but like all power there are those who want to keep it for themselves the world's entire scientific ific and cultural heritage published over centuries in books and journals is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations meanwhile those who have been locked out are not standing idly by you've been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences liberating the information locked up by the Publishers and sharing them with your friends but all this action goes on in the dark hidden underground it's called stealing or piracy as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew but sharing isn't immoral it's a moral imperative only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy there's no justice in following unjust laws it's time to come into the light and in the grand tradition of Civil Disobedience declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture the manifesto itself was allegedly written by four different people and also edited by Norton but it was Schwarz who had signed his name to it when it's over I go immediately to Aaron and tell him every I can remember about it and he gets very angry the things that I'd done shouldn't have added up that way I hadn't done anything wrong and everything had gone wrong but I was [Music] never I'm still angry I'm still angry that you can try your best with these people to do the right thing and they will turn everything against you and they will hurt you with anything they [Music] can and in that moment I regret that I said what I did but my much larger regret is that we have settled for this that we are okay with this that we are okay with a justice system that tries to game people into little traps so they can ruin their lives so yeah I wish I hadn't said that but I am much much angrier that this is where I am that this is what we as a people think is okay they used every method that I think they could think of to get her to provide information which would be unhelpful to Aaron and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron but but you know I don't think she had information that was helpful to to um to the government months go by as schwarz's friends and family await a looming indictment in the meantime Schwarz was becoming a go-to expert on a series of Internet issues to you then do you think that the internet is something that should be considered a human right and something that the government cannot take away from you yes definitely I mean this notion that National Security is an excuse to shut down the internet that's exactly what we heard in Egypt and Syria and all these other countries and so yeah it's true sites like Wikileaks are going to be putting up some embarrassing material about what the US government does and people are going to be organizing to protest about it and try and change their government you know and that's a good thing that's what all these First Amendment rights of free expression a freedom of Association are all about and so the notion that we should try and shut those down I think just goes against very basic American principles the principle I think is one that our founding fathers would have understood if the internet had been around back then instead of putting post offices in the Constitution they would have put isps well it's definitely interesting to see how Schwarz meets activist Taran Stein Brickner Kaufman and the two begin to date we need a massive Global public outcry if there's no massive Global public outcry it won't create any change you know four people in this city should cause a massive Global public outcry you know we need a petition signer without telling her specifics he warned her he was involved in something he called simply the bad thing and I had sort of crazy theories like that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren or something I I speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth waren actually but um so sometime in probably late July Aaron called me and I happened to pick up and he said you know the bad thing might be in the news tomorrow do you want me to tell you or do you want to read about it in the news and I said well I want you I want you to tell me um and he said uh well I've been I've been arrested for downloading too many academic Journal articles and they want to make an example out of me and I was like that's it that's the big fuss really like just doesn't sound like a very big deal on July 14th 2011 Federal prosecutors indict Schwarz on four felony accounts he gets indicted on the same day that like two people in England who are part of LC get arrested and like a few other real hackers and Aaron is just like someone who kind of looks like a hacker enough that they can like you know put his head on a steak and like put it on the gates Aaron went to surrender and they arrested him they then uh strip searched him uh took away his shoelaces took away his belt and left him in solitary confinement the District of Massachusetts United States attorney's office released a statement saying Schwarz faces up to 35 years in prison to be followed by 3 years of supervised release restitution forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million he is released on $100,000 bail the same day the primary victim in the case J store formally drops all charges against Schwarz and declines to pursue the case J store they weren't our friends they weren't helpful or friendly to us but they also were just kind of like we're not part of this J store and their parent company Ithaca also sidestepped requests to talk with this film but at the time they released a statement saying it was the government's decision whether to prosecute not J stor and so it's our belief that with that the case will be over that we should be able to get Steve Heyman to drop the case or settle it in some rational way and the government refused why well but because I think they wanted to make an example out of Aaron and they said they wanted to the reason why they wouldn't move on requiring a felony conviction in jail time was that they wanted uh they wanted to use this case as a case of deter for deter they told us that they told you that yes this was going to be an example yes he was going to be me an example yes the Steve Heyman said that deterring who like there's other people out there running around logging on to J store and downloaded the Articles to make a political statement I mean who are they deterring it would be easier to understand the Obama administration's posture of supposedly being for deterrence if this was an Administration that for instance prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime that this country has seen in the last 100 years the crimes that were committed that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street when you start deploying the non-controversial idea of detur only selectively you stopped making a dispassionate analysis of lawbreaking and you started de deciding to deploy law enforcement resources specifically on the basis of political ideology and and that's not just undemocratic it's supposed to be unamerican prosecutor Steven Heyman later reportedly told mit's outside Council that the straw that broke the camp back was a press release sent out by an organization Schwarz founded called demand progress according to the MIT account Heyman reacted to the short statement of support calling it a wild internet campaign and a foolish move that moved the case from a human one-on one level to an Institutional level that was a a poisonous combination a prosecutor who didn't want to lose face who had a political career and the offing maybe and and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them you spent how many tax dollars arrest someone for taking too many books out of the library and they got your ass handed to you in court no way I then mve to try to put his pressure on it in various ways to get them to go to the government and and request the government to to to stop the prosecution but what is mit's reaction that there doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT at that point MIT doesn't defend Aaron which to people inside of the MIT Community seems outrageous because MIT is a place that encourages hacking in the biggest sense of the word at MIT the idea of going and running around on roofs and tunnels that you weren't allowed to be in was not only a right of passage it was part of the MIT tour and lockpicking was a winter course at MIT they had the moral authority to stop it in it tracks MIT never stood up and took a position of saying to the feds don't do this we don't want you to do this you're you're overreacting this is too strong that I'm aware of they acted kind of like a like any Corporation would they they sort of they they helped the government they didn't help us unless they felt they had to and um and they never tried to stop it MIT declined repeated requests to comment but later released a report saying they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality and believed himman and the US attorney's office did not care what MIT thought or said about the case mit's Behavior seemed really at odds with the MIT ethos right you could argue that MIT turned a blind eye and that was okay for them to do but taking that stance taking that neutral stance in of itself was taking a pro prosecutor stance if you look at Steve Jobs and Steve wnc they started by selling a blue box which was a thing designed to defraud the phone company if you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard which was pretty clearly against the rules the difference between Aaron and the people I just mentioned is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place he didn't just want to make money shorts continues to be outspoken on a variety of Internet issues you know the reason the internet works is because of the competitive Marketplace of ideas and what we need to be focusing on is getting more information about our government more accessibility more discussion more debate but instead it seems like what Congress is focused on is shutting things down Aaron thought he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people flame can literally control your computer and make it spy on you welcome Aaron good to have you back on the show here you know just like spies used to in olden days put microphones and tap what people were saying now they're using computers to do the same things schwarz's political activity continues his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy it was called soapa activists like Peter Eckersley saw it as an enormous overreach threatening the technical Integrity of the internet itself and one of the first things I did was to call Aaron I said can we do a big online campaign against this this isn't a bill about copyright it's not not no he said it's a bill about the freedom to connect now I was listening and he thought about it for a while and then said yes and he went and founded demand progress demand progress is an online activism organization we' got around a million and a half members now um but started in the fall of 2010 Aaron was one of the most prominent people and a community of people who help lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country soapa was the bill that was intended to curtail online piracy of music and movies but what it did was basically take a sledgehammer to a problem that needed a scalpel if passed the law would allow a company to cut off finances to entire websites without due process or even to force Google to exclude their links all they needed was a single claim of copyright infringement it pitted the titans of traditional media against a new and now far more sophistic ated remix culture it makes everyone who runs a website into a policeman and if they don't do their job of making sure nobody on their site uses it for anything that's even potentially illegal the entire site can get shut down without even so much as a trial this was over the top I mean this was uh a catastrophe this bill poses a serious threat to speech and civil liberties for all who use the internet there were only a handful of us who said look we're not for piracy either but it makes no sense to destroy the architecture or the internet the domain name system and so much that makes it free and open in the name of fighting uh piracy and Aaron got that right away the freedoms guaranteed in our constitution the freedoms our country had been built on would be suddenly deleted new technology instead of bringing us greater Freedom would have snuffed out fundamental rights we'd always taken for granted and I realized that day talking to Peter that I couldn't let that happen when soapa was introduced in October 2011 it was considered inevitable our strategy when it first came out was to hopefully slow the bill down maybe weaken it a little bit uh but even we didn't think that we would be able to stop this bill having worked in Washington what you learn is that typically in Washington the legislative fights are fights between different sets of corporate moneyed interests they're all duking it out to pass legislation and the the fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests and they're financially equally matched in terms of campaign contributions and lobbying those are the closest ones the ones that aren't even fights typically are ones where all the money is on one side all the corporations are on one side and just millions of people on the other side I haven't seen anything like Pippa and soapa in all my time in public service there were more than 40 United State Senators on that bill as co-sponsors so they were already a long long way to getting the 60 votes to have it clear all the procedural Hoops even I began to doubt myself it it was a rough period Schwarz and demand progress were able to Marshall enormous support using traditional Outreach combined with commonly used voice Voiceover IP to make it very easy for people to call Congress I never met anybody else who was able to operate at his level both on the technological side and on the campaign strategy side millions of people contacted Congress and signed anti-sopa petitions Congress was caught off guard there was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill watching them insist they could regulate the internet and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them I am not a nerd I'm just not enough of a nerd maybe we ought to ask some nerds what this thing really does let's have a hearing bring in the Nerds really nerds you know I think actually the word you're looking for is experts to Enlighten you so your laws backfire break the internet we use the term geek but we're allowed to use that because we are Geeks the fact that it got as far as it did without them talking to any technical experts reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town I'm looking for somebody to come before this body and testify in a hearing and say this is why they're wrong there used to be an office that provided Science and Technology advice and members could go to them and say help me understand XYZ and gri killed it he said it was a waste of money ever since then Congress has plunged into the dark ages I don't think anybody really thought that soapa could be beaten including Aaron I think it was worth trying but it didn't seem winnable and I remember maybe a few months later I remember him just turning to me and being like I think we might win this and I was like that would be amazing calls to Congress continue when the domain hosting site GoDaddy becomes a supporter of the bill tens of thousands of users transferred their domain names in protest within a week a humbled GoDaddy reverses their position on sofa uh when the U Congress people that supported uh the the record in movie Industries uh realized that there was this backlash they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit you can see the curve happening you could see that we were that that our uh arguments were starting to resonate it was like Aaron had been like striking a match and it was being blown out striking another one is being blown out and finally he'd like managed to catch enough kindling that the the flame actually caught and then they turned into into this roaring Blaze on January 16th 2012 the White House issued a statement saying they didn't support the bill and then this happened I'm a big believer that uh we should be dealing with issues of piracy and we should deal with them in a serious way uh but this bill is not the right bill when Jimmy Wales uh put his support towards blacking out Wikipedia the number five most popular website in the world this is a website that's on several per of all of the clicks on anywhere on the internet Wikipedia went black Reddit went black Craigslist went black the phone lines on Capitol Hill flat out melted members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill that they were promoting just a couple days ago within 24 hours the number of opponents of soapa in Congress went from this to [Music] this to see congressman and Senators slowly flip sides throughout the day of the blackout was pretty unbelievable there was like a hundred representative swing and that was when as hard as it was for me to believe after all this we had won the thing that everyone said was impossible that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream had happened we did it we won this is a historic week in Internet politics maybe American politics the thing that we heard from people in Washington DC from staffers on Capitol Hill was they received more emails and more phone calls on so blackout day than they'd ever received about anything I think that was an extremely exciting moment this was the moment when the internet had grown up politically it was exhilarating because it's hard to believe it actually happened it's hard to believe a bill with so much Financial power behind it didn't simply sail through the Congress and not only did it not sail through it didn't pass at all you know it's easy sometimes to feel like you're powerless like when you come out in the streets and you march and you yell and nobody hears you but I'm here to tell you today you are [Applause] powerful so yeah maybe sometimes you feel like you're not being listened to but I'm here to tell you that you are you are being listened to you are making a difference you can stop this bill if if you don't stop [Music] fighting stop Pippa stop [Music] soapa some of the biggest internet companies to put it frankly would benefit from a world in which their little competitors could get censored we can't let that happen for him it was more important to be sure that you made a small change than to play a small part in a big change but Soo was like playing a major part in a major change and so for him it was kind of this proof of concept like okay I you know what I want to do with my life has changed the world I think about it in this really scientific way of like I'm measuring my impact and this shows that it's possible right that the thing that I want to do with my life is possible um I have proved that I that I can do it that iron sorts could change the world for a guy who um never really thought he had done much which was eron um it was one of the few moments where you could really see that he felt like he had he had done something good feeling like here is his maybe one and only Victory lap everyone said there was no way we could stop sofa we stopped it there a three outrageously good victories and the year isn't even over yet I mean if there's a time to be positive it's now [Music] you know he wins at soapa a year after he's arrested it's not unambiguously happy moment there's a lot going on he's so attuned towards participating in the political process you can't stop him the list of organizations Schwarz founded or co-founded is enormous and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance Schwarz was already concerned it is shocking to think that the accountability is so lacked that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is if the answer is oh we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them then that's an awful lot of people right one thing if they said look you know we we know the number of telephones we're spying on we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to but they just came back and said we can't give you a number at all that's pretty I mean it's scary is what it is well that's scary you know they put incredible pressure on him and took away his um you know his all of the money he had made they you know threatened to take away his physical Freedom why' they do it you know I mean well why why are they going after whistleblowers you know why are they going after people who tell the you know who tell the truth about all sorts of things I mean from the banks to the um you know to war to just sort of government transparency so secrecy serves those who are already in power and we are living in an era of secrecy that coincides with an era where the government is doing also a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional so those two things are not coincidences it's very clear that this technology has been developed not for small countries overseas but right here for use in the United States by the US government SP program is it's this sort of long slow expansion you know going back to the Nixon Administration right obviously it became big after 911 under George W bush and Obama has continued to expand it and the problems have slowly grown worse and worse but there's never been this moment you can point to say okay we need to Galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters instead it's mattered the prosecution in my estimation of Aaron Schwarz was about sending a particular laser-like message to a group of people that the Obama Administration sees as politically threatening and that is essentially the hacker the information and the Democracy activist community and the message that the O the Obama Administration wanted to send to that particular Community was in my estimation we know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment and so we are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Schwarz to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble and the government said oh the legal opinions we're using to legalize the spying program are also classified so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you you know every time say oh this is another instance of cyber War the Cyber criminals are attacking us again we're all in danger we're all under threat they use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws and so just to follow that up like personally how how do you feel the fight is going I guess it's up to you I know but we gotta like you know you know there's sort of these two polarizing perspectives right everything is great the internet has created all the this freedom and liberty and everything's going to be fantastic or everything is terrible the internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying and you know controlling what we say and I think is both are true right the internet has done both and both are kind of amazing and astonishing and which one will win out in the long run is up to us it doesn't make sense to say oh one is doing better than the other you know they're both true and it's up to us which ones we emphasize and which ones we take advantage of because they're both there and they're both always going to be there on September 12th 2012 Federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Schwarz adding additional counts of wire fraud unauthorized access to a computer and computer fraud now instead of four felony counts Schwarz was facing 13 The prosecution's Leverage had dramatically increased as did schwarz's potential jail time and fines they filed a separate indictment to had more charges and they had a theory about why this conduct constituted a number of federal crimes and that a very significant sentence could attach to it under the law that theory and much of the prosecution's case against Schwarz involved a law created originally in 1986 it is called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was inspired by the movie War Games with Matthew brck which a great movie I have you now in this movie kid gets the ability through the magic of computer networks to like launch a nuclear attack you know that's not actually possible and it certainly wasn't possible in the 80s but apparently this movie Scared Congress enough to um pass the the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act this is a law that's just behind the times for example that penalizes uh terms of service kinds of Arrangements you can have something like e-harmony or Match.com and somebody sort of inflates uh their own personal characteristics and all of a sudden depending on the jurisdiction and the prosecutors they could be in a whole host of troubles we all know what terms of use are most people don't read them but not abiding by their terms could mean you are committing a felony the website terms of service often say things like be nice to each other or don't do anything that's improper the idea that the criminal law has anything to say about these kinds of violations I think strikes most people as crazy the examples get even more crazy until it was changed in March of 2013 the terms of use on the website of hurst's 17 magazine said you had to be 18 in order to read it I would say that the way the CFA has been interpreted by the justice department we are probably all Breaking the Law vague and prone to misuse the cfaa has become a one-size fitsa small hammer for a wide range of computer related disputes though not the only factor in his case 11 of the 13 charges against Schwarz involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the question why hangs over much of the story of Aaron Schwarz just what was motivating the government and what would their case have been the Department of Justice declined requests for answers but Professor Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor who has studied the case so I think I come about this case from a different direction than other people on a number of reasons I was a federal prosecutor at the justice department for 3 years before I started teaching the government came forward with an indictment based on uh what crimes they thought were committed uh just as a purely lawyers matter looking at the Precedence looking at the statute looking at the history looking at the cases that are out there so far uh I think it was a fair indictment based on that you can debate whether they should have charged this case there's just a lot of disagreement some people are on you know the Open Access side some people are not I think the government took schwarz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto very seriously uh and I think they saw him as somebody who was committed as a moral imperative to breaking the law to overcome a law that Schwartz saw is unjust and in a democracy if you think a law is unjust there are ways of changing that law there're going to Congress as Schwartz did so masterfully with soapa uh or you can violate that law in a way to try to nullify that law and I think what was driving the prosecution was the sense that Schwarz was committed not just to breaking the law but to really making sure that law was nullified that everyone would have access to the database in a way that you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the TU it would be done and schwarz's side would win there's a big disagreement in society as to whether that is an unjust law and ultimately that's a decision for the American people to make working through Congress and then the second problem is I think we're still trying to figure out what's the line between less serious offenses and more serious offenses we're now entering this different environment of computers and computer misuse and we don't yet have a really strong sense of exactly what these lines are we're just working that out this is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion the hammer that the justice department has to scare people with is it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and so most people just you know you can't roll the dice with your life like that should we tap somebody's phone should we film them should we turn somebody and get them to testify against these other people that's how federal agents and prosecutors think they build cases they make cases Schwarz was caught in the gears of a brutal criminal justice system that could not turn back a machine that has made America the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world we have in this country allowed ourselves to be captured by the politics of fear and anger and anything we're afraid of like the future of the internet and access and anything we're angry about instinctively creates a criminal justice intervention and we've used jail prison and Punishment to resolve a whole host of problems that historically were never seen as criminal justice problems the impulse to threaten indict prosecute which is part of what has created this debate and controversy over online access and information on the Internet is very consistent with what we've seen in other areas the one difference is is that the people are usually targeted uh and victimized by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor in minority schwarz's isolation from friends and family increased he had basically stopped working on anything else and the case was was in fact like taking over sort of his whole life one of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he he was emotionally vulnerable and that that was something that they really needed to keep in mind so that they they knew that it was weighing on him very heavily he did not like having his actions and his movements restricted in any way and the threat of jail which they pounded him with a lot was terrifying to him completely exhausted his financial resources and it cost us a lot of money also and he raised a substantial amount of money so it was you know it was in the millions of dollars the legal defense yes was in millions yes yeah I think he didn't want to be a burden to people I think that was a factor like I have my normal life and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with and I try to like keep the two of them as separate as possible but they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty Schwarz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher do you admit guilt and move on with your life or do you fight a broken system with his legal case the answer was simple he rejects the final plea deal and a trial date is set Aaron was was Resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something that he didn't believe was fair but I also think he was [Music] scared [Music] I don't think they would have convicted Aaron I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse and I would have given him a big hug and we would have walked across that little river in Boston and gone and had a couple of beers I really thought that we were right I thought that we were going to win the case I thought that we could win the case he didn't talk about it very much but you could see the enormous pain that he was going [Music] through no time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings or like depressive episodes or anything that I would ascribe to severe depression and it's possible you know he was depressed people get depressed very early in our relationship like 3 or 4 weeks in or something remember him saying to me that I was a lot stronger than he was you know he he was he was brittle in a lot of ways things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people was part of his Brilliance too I think he probably had something like clinical depression in his early 20s I don't think he did when I was with him he wasn't a joyful person but that's different from being depressed was just under such such enormous pressure for 2 years straight he just didn't want to do it anymore he was just like I just think it was too [Music] much I got a phone call late at night I could tell something was wrong and then I I called and I realized what had happened a co-founder of the social news and entertainment website Reddit has been found dead police say 26-year-old Aaron Schwartz killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn [Music] apartment I just thought we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation is like the whole world fell apart in that moment [Music] um that was one of the hardest nights in my life so I kept screaming I can't hear you what did you say I can't hear you I can't that's it uh like yeah none of it made any sense and really still doesn't I was so frustrated [Music] angry you know I tried to explain it to my kids my three-year-old told me that the doctors would fix him I've known lots of people have died but I've never lost anybody like this because everybody feels than I do too there is so much we could have more to do like uh just didn't know he was there I didn't know this is what he was suffering and he was part of [Music] me and I just wanted it to not be real and then and then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date 2 [Music] 2013 Aon is dead Wanderers in this crazy world we have lost a mentor a wise Elder hackers for right we're one down we've lost one of our own nurturers carers listeners feeders parents all we have lost a child let us all weep my first thought was what if nobody even notices and you know because it wasn't clear to me how Salient he was I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw the net just lit up I mean everyone was trying to to explain it in their own way but I've never seen people grieve on Twitter before people were visibly grieving online he was The Internet's Own Boy and the old world killed him we are standing in the middle of a time when great Injustice is not touched architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the president regularly in the middle of that time the idea that this was what the government had to prosecute just seems absurd if it weren't tragic the question is can we do something given what's happened to make the world a better place and how can we further that Legacy that's the only question one can ask all over the world there were starting to be hackathons and Gatherings and Aaron Schwarz as some sense brought the best out of us and trying to say how do we fix this he was in my humble opinion one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries that this country has produced I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or Victorious uh but we are certainly shaped by the hand uh of the things that he wrestled with when we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge we've broken the rule of law we've desecrated the Temple of Justice Aaron Schwarz was not a criminal change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability it comes through continuous struggle Aaron really could do magic and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death he believed that he could change the world and he was right out of the last week and out of today phoenixes are already Rising since schwarz's death representative zo lran and Senator Ron weiden have introduced legislation that would form the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Schwarz it's called Aaron's law Aaron believed that like you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time what is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now and if you're not working on that why aren't youed stand internet freedom [Music] I wish we could change the past but we cannot but we can change the future and we must we must do so for Aaron we must do so for ourselves we must do so to make our world a better place a more Humane place a place where Justice works and access to knowledge becomes a human right so there was a kid back in February from uh Baltimore uh 14 years old who uh had access to J store and he'd been spelunking through J store after reading something and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer and pancreatic cancer kills the [ __ ] out of you because we detect it way too late by the time we detect it it's already too late to do anything about it uh and um he sent emails off to the entire on oncology department at John's Hopkins you know hundreds of them and every 14-year-old kid yeah and most of them ignored it right but one of them like sent him an email back and said this is not an entirely stupid idea would you comeing over this kid worked evenings and weekends with this researcher and in February I heard him on the news just a couple of weeks after Aaron died when Aaron was in the news a [Music] lot sorry and uh he said um the reason he was on the news is cu they'd done it they were shipping uh an early test for pancreatic cancer that was going to save lives and he said uh this is why what Aaron did was so important because you never know right um this this truth of the universe is not only something that policy makers use to figure out you know what the speed limit should be it's where the the thing that's going to keep you know your kid from dying of pancreatic cancer comes from and without access the person who might come up with a thing that's got your number on it may never find that answer he sleeped so well he didn't fall out of De once not even when he dreamed he was back on the spacecraft very good Aon very good yeah okay now it's gone [Music] time [Music] in [Music]