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Schwartz, February 11, and the NSA
Illustration: Noted Republican Computer Analyst
The kid has been buried for nearly a year now, but he
left RSS behind as a monument, fittingly binary
instead of marble. He
had announced the actions of the NSA about a year prior to
Edward Snowden’s massive release of information that finally
convinced people that they were, indeed, being spied
on by their own government with blithe indifference to the
fourth amendment, using the legacy of Dick Cheney and Georgie
Bush as the rationale tucked away in a corner somewhere of
the so pretentiously and contemptibly named “Patriot
Act.”
It
is meaningless to repeat here that this spying had
been underway for decades as we have already done that to
the extent that the extra typing is a loathsome chore, but it
seems the right thing to do. The day, FEB11, is scheduled for a mass demonstration of some sort.
President Obama announced that the “vast reforms” of this process will take place quickly. This
change will take place immediately after Congress
“reaches a broad consensus” on the issue, and this is
widely seen as quickly, but actually means when Hell freezes
over, and we have seen signs of the impending freeze right here
on this planet. Hell, as if seems to have evolved in the popular imagination, must be extremely exuberant at the possibility.
The Chair of the Congressional Committee for Intelligence or
Homeland Security (Republican), announced that Snowden had to have
Russian help in downloading all those documents. This Congressman
looked as if he would experience immense difficulty in installing
Firefox on his own PC. Fortunately, an ex-security analyst for the
government said there is no reason to believe that, and he mentioned
several storage and encryption methods, sounding reasonably literate in
the field.
A rotund Governor of New Jersey is suspected of the unimaginable practice of “corruption.” In
an effort to reduce the pressure on him, he no doubt
announced that the George Washington bridge will be
open for the Super Bowl, duration of such opening pending
negotiations with the National Football League.
A
very well-groomed ex-Governor of Virginia with a
charming family and immaculately handsome demeanor
that screamed “Christian” so blatantly that one expected some
scandalous sex-crime has been charged with “Corruption”. No sex is involved, so coverage is likely to be limited.
It seems that “Black Widows” are haunting southern Russia, threatening bombings. The
city is surrounded by a “ring of steel,” as the
Russians proclaim, so you will be as safe there was you would
be using a credit card at a Target store. This
is extremely safe as only small farmers have the wisdom to
leave the door open after their valuable livestock has
escaped.
Now for the interview concerning Aaron Schwartz:
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2014
The Internet’s Own Boy: Film on Aaron Swartz Captures Late Activist’s Struggle for Online Freedom
One
year ago this month, the young Internet freedom
activist and groundbreaking programmer Aaron Swartz took his
own life. Swartz died shortly before he was set to go to trial
for downloading millions of academic articles from
servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
based on the belief that the articles should be freely available
online. At the time he committed suicide, Swartz was facing
35 years in prison, a penalty supporters called
excessively harsh. Today we spend the hour looking at the new
documentary, "The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron
Swartz." We play excerpts of the film and speak with Swartz’s
father Robert, his brother Noah, his lawyer Elliot
Peters, and filmmaker Brian Knappenberger.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re
broadcasting from Park City TV in Utah, home of the
Sundance Film Festival, the largest festival for independent
cinema in the United States. This is our fifth year covering
some of the films here, and the people and topics they
explore.
Today,
we spend the hour with the people involved in an
incredible documentary that just had its world premiere here
yesterday. It’s called The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.
It comes as Aaron’s loved ones and friends mark the
first anniversary of his death. It was just over a
year ago, on January 11th, 2013, that the young Internet freedom
activist took his own life. He was 26 years old. This is a
clip of Aaron Swartz from the film.
AARON SWARTZ: I
mean, I, you know, feel very strongly that it’s not
enough to just live in the world as it is, to just kind of take
what you’re given and, you know, follow the things that adults
told you to do and that 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
refutation 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 forget that. I didn’t
see a way not to.
AMY GOODMAN: That
was Aaron Swartz in his early twenties. By that time,
Aaron was already an Internet legend. At the age of 14, Aaron
helped develop RSS,
Really Simple Syndication, which changed how people get online
content, allowing them to subscribe to different
sources of information like blogs and podcasts. He
also helped develop the Creative Commons alternative to
copyright, which encourages authors and publishers to share
content. He founded a company, Infogami, that merged
with Reddit, which allows users to collectively rank and
promote contributed content, is now one of the most popular
websites globally.
In
2010, Aaron Swartz became a fellow at Harvard
University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. It was around
this time that he used the Internet at nearby MIT,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to download
millions of digitized academic articles run by a nonprofit
company called JSTOR.
Aaron believed the articles should be freely available online.
Although Aaron did not give or sell the files to
anyone, the federal government filed multiple felony
charges against him. At the time he committed suicide, Aaron was
facing 35 years in prison, a penalty supporters called
excessively harsh.
Now,
despite promises of reform, the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act used to charge Swartz remains unchanged. A
bill proposed by Congressmember Zoe Lofgren, called "Aaron’s
Law," remains stalled in committee. It’s meant to ensure
victimless computer activities are not charged as felonies.
On
the Sunday after the first anniversary of Swartz’s
death, the hacker group Anonymous attacked a number of
MIT’s websites and posted messages criticizing Swartz’s
prosecution and calling for a reform of Internet regulation.
The message said, quote, "We call for this tragedy to
be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a
free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with
equality of access and franchise for all."
The
same weekend, a group of activists inspired by Aaron
also launched what they called the "New Hampshire
Rebellion," a two-week walk across New Hampshire to
protest government corruption. Campaign finance reform was
another one of the many issues Aaron cared deeply about.
In
a minute, we’ll be joined by Aaron’s brother, Noah
Swartz; his lawyer, Elliot Peters; and by Brian
Knappenberger, the director of The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz;
as well as Aaron’s father, Robert Swartz. But first, I
want to play an extended clip from what, well,
recalls a happier time in Aaron’s life as an activist. It begins
with Trevor Timm with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and
then Senator Ron Wyden. We also hear from Aaron
himself and then his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman.
TREVOR TIMM: SOPA 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.
REP. ZOE LOFGREN: There’s collateral damage in the digital...
SEN. RON WYDEN: 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 of the Internet, the domain name system and so
much that makes it free and open, in the name of
fighting piracy. And Aaron got that right away.
AARON SWARTZ: 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 had always taken for
granted. And I realized that day that I couldn’t let
that happen.
TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: I don’t think anybody really thought that SOPA could be beaten. I remember him just turning to me and being like, "I think we might win this."
DAVID SEGAL: Aaron
was one of the most prominent people in a community
of people who helped lead organizing around social justice
issues at the federal level in this country.
BEN WIKLER: It
was like Aaron had been like striking a match, and it
was being blown out, striking another one, was being blown out,
and finally he’d like manage to catch enough kindling that
the flame actually caught, and then it turned into
this roaring blaze.
AARON SWARTZ: 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. 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.
DECLAN McCULLAGH: This is a historic week in Internet politics, maybe American politics.
PETER ECKERSLEY: The
thing that we heard from people in Washington, D.C.,
from staffers on Capitol Hill, was they received more emails and
more phone calls on SOPA 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.
AARON SWARTZ: 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
powerful.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,
that recalls a happier time in Aaron’s life as an
activist. We also heard from Aaron’s friend David Segal,
founder of Demand Progress; and Ben Wikler, a friend of Aaron’s.
When we come back, we’ll be joined by Aaron’s brother Noah
and his father Robert. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah, from the Sundance
Film Festival, where a film on Aaron Swartz has just premiered.
Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Extraordinary
Machine" by Fiona Apple. Aaron Swartz reportedly said
it was his theme song. And this is_Democracy Now!_,
democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah,
where the Sundance Film Festival is underway. We’re spending the
hour today looking at the life of the young Internet
activist, Aaron Swartz. It was a year after he
tragically took his own life, and now a new film about him has
premiered at Sundance, called The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. We’re joined now by Aaron’s brother, Noah, and his father, Robert.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! It’s
a year later, but it’s so important to share
condolences because of the just tremendous loss that you
have suffered. Robert, talk about Aaron and what you feel it’s
most important for people to understand.
ROBERT SWARTZ: I
think—I mean, there’s lots of things to understand, and
it’s complicated. I think Aaron was interested in making the
world a better place and changing the world for the better.
And I think that’s all that we have to do and can do
to remember his legacy.
AMY GOODMAN: He
took his own life. He committed suicide just over a
year ago. Talk about the circumstances leading up to his death,
what he was facing.
ROBERT SWARTZ: Well,
he was facing trial for a felony—on felony charges
from the federal government, and a—a really vindictive and, in
many respects, nearly sadistic prosecution by the federal
government, and which turned his whole life upside
down, drained his financial resources, and terrified him with
the prospect of destroying his future.
AMY GOODMAN: Noah,
you, too, are a computer programmer. You’ve grown up
in this household with computers since you were tots. Talk about
the significance of Aaron’s work.
NOAH SWARTZ: As
Ben Wikler is quoted in the movie, Aaron thought very
firmly that he should work on what was most important in the
world at any given time, and he really felt that he could do
this through computers and through technology. And
much of his work in the last four years had been around this.
With Demand Progress and the SOPA protest,
he built a whole framework for—specifically for Demand
Progress, but basically for any activist organization
that wants to maintain an email list, wants to be able
to send actions to people, and sort of revolutionized this
space with technology, in addition to working on things like
SecureDrop and—
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what SecureDrop—
NOAH SWARTZ: SecureDrop
is a tool to protect journalistic sources by allowing
them to submit articles anonymously and through an encrypted
connection—or documents rather than articles.
AMY GOODMAN: Noah, you have organized hackathons. Explain what they are.
NOAH SWARTZ: So,
after Aaron’s death, we decided that there was lots of
work still to be done, work specifically that Aaron had touched
and work done by people that he had worked with that needed
help, and so we organized a number of hackathons to
help people figure out what they could do with
technology and with activism. So, we organized a number of
hackathons. The idea is to have it either yearly or twice a
year to continue Aaron’s legacy and work.
AMY GOODMAN: Bob,
talk about Aaron’s growing up, his worldview. It’s a
little odd to say, you know, when he’s growing up, his
worldview, as five-year-old, but Aaron really did have a
worldview.
ROBERT SWARTZ: I
don’t know. I find these questions a little difficult. I
mean, his worldview seemed to me to be normal and ordinary. And
when people ask why he acted the way he did, it just seems
to me peculiar, because isn’t that the way everyone
would? He was very curious. He was certainly very interested
in computers.
AMY GOODMAN: A deep questioner, questioning, when he was growing up, school and its role?
ROBERT SWARTZ: I
don’t think that’s a particularly deep question. I mean,
that’s an obvious question. Deep questions are much—are much
more serious. There are much more serious deep questions than
that. I mean, that’s not a deep—that’s just clear.
AMY GOODMAN: Like
father, like son. As Aaron grew older, the kind of
work he did, truly remarkable, I mean, one of the founders of
Reddit, and moving on, though, to talk about what happened in
2010, how you came to know what happened when Aaron
was arrested, and the weight of the state on Aaron?
ROBERT SWARTZ: Well,
I was—I had landed in San Francisco for some
meetings, and I got a call from my wife that Aaron had been
arrested, and was just shattered by that news. I couldn’t
really think at all the rest of the day, and tried to
learn more about what was going on. I guess, initially, on
the one hand, we were devastated, because any—the notion that
Aaron would be arrested and be involved in the criminal
justice system was completely incomprehensible, but on
the other hand, the notion was that we could get this
resolved in some rational way. As time went on, that became
clear that it was much more complicated than we had ever
imagined and much more difficult. And the weight—the
weight on Aaron, in particular, was immense, as we struggled to
try to resolve this.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain
what you came to understand he did. I mean, when we
talk about JSTOR—well, students in college understand what JSTOR is, but most people don’t. Explain what it is and what he did.
ROBERT SWARTZ: JSTOR is
a repository for scholarly journals. So, if you take
something like the American Mathematical Association’s journal, JSTOR makes that available electronically on a subscription basis to primarily academic libraries.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, they didn’t produce these articles, right? There are millions of articles that are gathered.
ROBERT SWARTZ: Right,
right. No, the articles are produced for free by the
academics, and the journals are edited and produced by the
academic societies, in general, for free. JSTOR is
not-for-profit, but nonetheless they charge both universities
and their subscribers and individual users for access
to those journals. So it’s very different than, say, a
Disney movie, where there are people who are paid to
produce the content. The people who produce this content are
never paid, and I’ve never met an academic who wants to see
their work behind a pay wall. The notion that the
knowledge of mankind, that is—that is provided for free, should
be behind a pay wall is completely wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what Aaron did.
ROBERT SWARTZ: So Aaron downloaded a substantial portion of the JSTORdatabase—or at least that’s what’s alleged—onto a computer.
AMY GOODMAN: I
wanted to turn to comments of Aaron himself made at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October of 2010.
He spoke aboutJSTOR.
AARON SWARTZ: I
am going to give you one example of something not as big
as saving Congress, but something important that you can do
right here at your own school. It just requires you willing to
get your shoes a little bit muddy. By virtue of being
students at a major U.S. 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 JSTOR and Thomson and ISI to
get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the
world can’t read. And these licensing fees are
substantial. And they’re 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. Now, there are people, good people, trying to change this
with the open access movement. So, all journals, going forward,
they’re encouraging them to publish their work as
open access, so open on the Internet, available for
download by everybody, available for free copying, and perhaps
even modification with attribution and notice.
AMY GOODMAN: After Aaron Swartz’s suicide, JSTOR expressed
deep condolences to the Swartz family and maintained
that the case had been instigated by the U.S.
attorney’s office. They wrote, quote, "The case is one that we
ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since
JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the
world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same
time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in
the world, we must be careful stewards of the information
entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that
content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in
his possession and JSTORsettled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011." Bob Swartz, soJSTOR did not have a beef with Aaron.
ROBERT SWARTZ: That’s correct.
AMY GOODMAN: But MIT—explain. Now, this is a place, MIT, that you worked for, and you were part of the MIT community. Your father did, as well?
ROBERT SWARTZ: My father didn’t work for MIT.
AMY GOODMAN: Your father had no relationship with MIT, but you did.
ROBERT SWARTZ: I still do.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about MIT’s role in this.
ROBERT SWARTZ: Well, first of all, MIT brought
in the federal authorities. They worked at the direction of
the federal authorities. Rather than, as was their
custom, just—which they did with another instance of
this, of downloading of academic journals that was going on at
the same time—disconnecting the computer and stopping it, they
put a camera in order to build a case against him, and
then continued to collaborate and cooperate with the
U.S. attorney’s office in that, in the making of that case,
where they fundamentally stonewalled us in terms of all our
inquiries. We pleaded with them to intervene on Aaron’s
behalf and advocate that the case be dropped, in a
similar fashion to JSTOR, which went to the U.S. attorney and asked that the charges against Aaron be dropped, and they refused.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you had, presumably, a sort of a way to talk to the higher-ups at MIT. You had worked there for years.
ROBERT SWARTZ: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: What was their response to you?
ROBERT SWARTZ: Their response was that MIT was neutral, which was nonsense and which—
AMY GOODMAN: Why is that nonsense?
ROBERT SWARTZ: Because
they cooperated with the prosecutor. They provided
the prosecutor evidence without a subpoena and a warrant. They
violated any number of laws, including the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act, Aaron’s Fourth Amendment rights, the
Massachusetts wiretap statute, the U.S. wiretap statute,
among others, the Stored Computer Act, in their—in the way that
they proceeded in the case. They also refused to cooperate
with us, give us evidence, and we had very significant
difficulty even getting them to respond. And when we asked
them to intervene on Aaron’s behalf, they said they were unable
to do that because there were multiple, different
perspectives about this on MIT’s part, and therefore
they must remain neutral. But in the report, the report makes
clear that MIT did not remain neutral, and worked with the government.
AMY GOODMAN: Noah, what would you like to see MIT do now?
NOAH SWARTZ: Lots of things, mainly change the way they deal with this sort of playful hacking that goes on at MIT all the time.
AMY GOODMAN: Hadn’t
something like this just happened, a massive
downloading of information, where the student got a slap on the
wrist?
NOAH SWARTZ: I mean, things like this happen at MIT all the time. And if you’re—
AMY GOODMAN: It’s MIT, after all. It’s—
NOAH SWARTZ: If you’re an MIT student,
you can typically get out of the way. And if you’re not,
apparently this is what happens. And if you’re an MIT student
who does this off campus, you get sort of the same result that
Aaron did, which is a very overprotective response
from the university, trying to distance themselves
from any sort of backlash or association with, you know, not
illegal, but questionable activities.
AMY GOODMAN: Aaron’s partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, joined us onDemocracy Now! about
a week after Aaron’s suicide in January of 2013. I
asked her to talk about Aaron, who he was, what he
wanted, also how the upcoming trial had affected him.
TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: Aaron
was the most—person most dedicated to fighting social
injustice of anyone I’ve ever met in my life, and I loved him
for it. He used to say—I used to say, "Why don’t you—why we do
this thing? It will make you happy." And he would say,
"I don’t want to be happy. I just want to change the
world."
Open
access to information was one of the causes that he
believed in, but it was far from the only one. He
fought for—during the course of this two-year ordeal, he led
the fight against SOPA,
the Internet censorship bill, which no one thought could be
defeated when it was first introduced and which Aaron
and millions of others, together, managed to fight
back. And he did that all while under the burden of this—this
bullying and false charges.
He
was just the funniest, most lovely person. He—sorry.
He—he loved children. He loved reading out loud. That
was one of his favorite things. He loved David Foster Wallace.
He started trying to read me Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon
Johnson out loud from the first volume. We didn’t get
that far because it’s very, very long. One of his
favorite—favorite books was Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fanfic. We would read it to each other as chapters came out online.
AMY GOODMAN: That is Aaron’s partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, who was with us on Democracy Now! about
a week after Aaron died last year. Your last
thoughts? In a moment, after break, we’ll be joined by Aaron’s
lawyer, as well as the filmmaker who did The Internet’s Own Boy.
But, Bob, if you could talk about Aaron’s goals and
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a little more about it, the CFAA,
what Aaron’s Law would be and why it’s stuck in
committee right now, and what you think needs to be
done?
ROBERT SWARTZ: Well,
I mean, I don’t really understand Congress that well
to explain why things don’t get through, but gridlock in
Congress is very well known. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
makes it a felony to violate terms of use of a
website. So, for example, if you give your HBO password
to someone else, both of you could become felons. And
the revision of the act, among other things, is to
change it so that this act can’t be used by prosecutors to
destroy people like Aaron.
AMY GOODMAN: Aaron, in the end, could have pled and maybe gotten six months in jail, is that right?
ROBERT SWARTZ: Yes. I mean, it was more complicated than that, but yes.
AMY GOODMAN: He would have pled to felonies.
ROBERT SWARTZ: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And why was that—did that mean so much to Aaron, what it would have meant to be a felon?
ROBERT SWARTZ: It’s
just incomprehensible, the notion that Aaron should
be a felon and go to jail for something that was clearly not
illegal, and he did nothing wrong. He was innocent. And to be
railroaded on this basis was a complete distortion and
corruption of the criminal justice system.
AMY GOODMAN: Noah, what do you feel people can do to continue Aaron’s legacy?
NOAH SWARTZ: I
feel that in the film and in one of the clips I think we
played on the show, Aaron says, "I’m here to tell you—you may
feel powerless, but I’m here to tell you: You are powerful."
And with the work that I’m trying to do with these
hackathons, a lot of people are and have been
justifiably upset recently with Snowden’s revelations, with
WikiLeaks, with all these things that they’re learning about
how the world works. And I think Aaron’s message that
we can all take on with us is that there are things we can
do about this. We can actually have an impact, and we can—we can
see the change we want to see in the world by
participating, rather than feeling helpless and
useless. And so, watching the documentary, I see Aaron, but I
also see all the work that he did and all the work that I could
be doing and all of us could be doing. And I think
that’s the most important message to take out.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Bob, as you watched the premiere of The Internet’s Own Boy,
the story of your son, the story of Aaron Swartz, with
hundreds of people yesterday, what were your feelings?
ROBERT SWARTZ: Just being completely shattered.
AMY GOODMAN: I
want to thank you both for being with us, Bob and Noah
Swartz, the father and brother of Aaron Swartz. When we come
back, we’re going to find more out about the legal case against
Aaron, what happened in the last months of his life,
and we’re going to talk to the filmmaker who did this
remarkable film,Internet’s Own Boy. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from the Sundance
Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Yesterday, a new film
premiered called The Internet’s Own Boy. I want to play another clip from The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.
In this extended clip, we hear from Tim Berners-Lee,
who invented the World Wide Web; Aaron himself;
Aaron’s friend, Matt Stoller; Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig,
who founded the Creative Commons and was a mentor to Aaron;
and Cory Doctorow, an author, activist and friend of
Aaron’s.
TIM BERNERS-LEE: I think Aaron was trying to make the world work. He was trying to fix it. So he was a bit ahead of his time.
AARON SWARTZ: It
is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax
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. It would be one
thing if they said, "Look, you know, 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.
MATT STOLLER: They
put incredible pressure on him, took away his—all of
the money he had made. They, you know, threatened to take away
his physical freedom. Why did 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
truth about all sorts of things, I mean, from the banks to
the—you know, to war, to just sort of government transparency?
DAVID SIROTA: 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.
AARON SWARTZ: 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 U.S. government. The problem with the
spying program is it’s this sort of long, slow
expansion, you know, going back to the Nixon administration,
right? Obviously, it became big after 9/11 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, "OK, we need to
galvanize opposition today, because today is when it matters."
Instead, it’s mattered for a long time.
LAWRENCE LESSIG: So he was just doing what he thought was right, to produce a world that was better.
CORY DOCTOROW: I
guess the one thing that I would say to people who are
feeling the—you know, for whom the black dog is visiting, is
that Aaron’s problems didn’t get solved when he died. Even now,
as we try to honor Aaron’s legacy, it’s us, it’s not
him. The one thing that being alive tells you is that you
have the power to make things better.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt of The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.
We are broadcasting from Park City, Utah, where the
Sundance Film Festival is underway, spending the hour
looking at the life of this young Internet freedom activist,
Aaron Swartz. It’s one year since he tragically took his own
life. Now a new film about him has premiered. The Internet’s Own Boy premiered yesterday. We’re joined by Brian Knappenberger, the director of the film. He also directed We are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. And we’re joined by attorney Elliot Peters, who represented Aaron.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Why did you make the film, Brian?
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Well,
I was powerfully moved by Aaron’s story, on so many
levels. I think that some of his early life is a very poignant
chronology of Internet history. His contributions to RSS,
Creative Commons, being co-founder of Reddit, it all
just suggests somebody with this vision you mentioned earlier,
this kind of worldview at a very young age. But I think what
happened after he sold Reddit is particularly
interesting to me, because he turned his back on startup
culture. You know, we have a culture, a startup culture, that’s
about creating, you know, companies and selling them, and
he turned his back on it.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain. A lot of people might say, when he sold Reddit—he was one of the founders of Reddit.
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah,
right. So he’s—yeah, he started a site with Y
Combinator called Infogami. Infogami merged with Reddit, and so
he became one of three—what they call co-founders of Reddit.
And when Condé Nast bought Reddit, Aaron became a
19-year-old, probably, more or less—I mean, we don’t
know how much he made, but he was a very rich 19-year-old. And
that startup culture didn’t sit well with him. I didn’t think—I
don’t think it merged well with his sort of sense of
social justice and the kind of political—the areas
that he wanted to go in. You know, and let’s face it, startup
culture often says they want to change the world, but it
becomes a kind of slogan of sorts. It’s really about
build to flip—you know, create a company, sell it to a big
corporation, and do the whole thing again. I think Aaron, at
that—that part of his life was really interesting to me,
because he shifted to using his skills and energy to
his—towards political organizing, towards the causes that he
really cared about.
AMY GOODMAN: Elliot
Peters, explain when you got involved in Aaron
Swartz’s life. I mean, you’ve represented Google. You
represented Lance Armstrong. Talk about what happened with
Aaron.
ELLIOT PETERS: I
got involved with Aaron after the government filed
what’s called a superseding indictment against him, and he was
charged with 13 felonies, including wire fraud and violations
of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It could have put
him in jail for an absurdly long time. And I met—so I
met Aaron in the kind of the middle of 2012. I took over his
case from some other lawyers that were handling it, and started
getting ready to defend it and try it. And I got to
know Aaron, and I got to know his dad, and I got to know
even better the U.S. government that was chasing him.
AMY GOODMAN: All
right, so talk about the pressure that Aaron was
under. Talk about the 35 years of prison he faced, the
million-dollar fine, the plea bargain offers that were being
made, and Aaron’s attitude towards it all.
ELLIOT PETERS: Well,
just the preface to that is, in my view, Aaron was
innocent. I don’t believe Aaron committed a crime, and I think
that we could have successfully defended him at trial. But he
was under tremendous pressure, facing 13 felony
counts, and they had added charges to ratchet up his exposure
to jail. The prosecutor insisted that in any plea or any
agreement in the case Aaron would have to go to jail and that
the government would seek jail time. And I said to
him the proper disposition of this case is to tell Aaron to do
community service in Brooklyn by teaching high school students
in the public schools in Brooklyn about computer
programming, and after he’s done some of that, dismiss
the case. And they said, "Absolutely not. He needs to plead
guilty to 13 felonies, and he needs to go to jail." And the kind
of person that Aaron was, he never struck me as a very
good candidate for federal prison. I think that the
thought of that was very frightening to him. I thought it was
tremendously cruel and unfair. And given my line of work, I was
very eager to fight them and defend Aaron, because he
deserved it.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the prosecutor, what he prosecuted before.
ELLIOT PETERS: Well, he was a computer crimes prosecutor, or so he said.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Michael Heymann?
ELLIOT PETERS: His name is Stephen.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen.
ELLIOT PETERS: Steve
Heymann in Boston. And as I said in Brian’s terrific
film, you’re not much of a computer crimes prosecutor if you
don’t have a computer crime to prosecute. And when MIT referred
this case to this task force, which included a Secret Service
agent, Heymann immediately got involved. He took over
the case. They turned it into an investigation. And
they tried to turn it into the biggest case they could for
their own purposes, with no regard, in my mind, to what was
fair, or even any appreciation of who Aaron Swartz was. I’m
not even sure that they cared.
AMY GOODMAN: You warned the prosecutor that they could break Aaron.
ELLIOT PETERS: He
was aware that Aaron—there was a certain fragility
about Aaron. But they were trying to put pressure on Aaron. They
were trying, in a different way, to break Aaron. I’m not
saying that they were trying to cause him to commit
suicide, but they were trying to bring him to his knees so
that he would knuckle under to the pressure that they were
putting on him. And they were aware of that. They were
intentionally maximizing the pressure on this young
man. And to what end, I really don’t understand.
AMY GOODMAN: The
main prosecutor in the case, Ortiz, said, "Stealing
is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,
and whether you take documents, data or dollars," said Carmen
Ortiz.
ELLIOT PETERS: So
facile, so ignorant, so stupid. Aaron wasn’t a thief.
He was making a political statement. They charged him with fraud
as if he was stealing something for profit. He wasn’t. He
was an authorized user of the MIT computer network. He didn’t hack into anything. He logged in as any guest on the MIT campus could. He certainly downloaded more of JSTOR than
they wanted, but it wasn’t to steal anything. These are a
bunch of old academic journals that exist now for the
purposes of increasing people’s knowledge. The idea to
call Aaron a thief is just pandering to the lowest instincts
of people, of viewers or listeners of Carmen Ortiz’s press
conference.
AMY GOODMAN: We just played—Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney in Boston who Steve Heymann worked for.
ELLIOT PETERS: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: We just played a clip of Aaron talking about his philosophy and talking about JSTOR,
and being concerned about the disparity of resources,
intellectual resources, for people, say, in India versus in the
United States. Brian?
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah, absolutely. It was a huge concern of his, this walling-up of the world’s information behind a pay wall.
AMY GOODMAN: You are one of the people involved in the February 11th action that will be taking place. Explain what it is.
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Well,
we’re leading up to some actions. You know, it’s part
of a group called Stop Watching Us that was formed to protest NSA overreach
and, you know, this kind of surveillance state that’s
been revealed to us by Edward Snowden. And so, we
are—
AMY GOODMAN: Amazing to listen to him, a year before Edward Snowden, talk about NSA surveillance.
BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Well, when we found that clip of Aaron, it was chilling, actually. We found Aaron talking quite a bit about NSA overreach,
the amount of searching that they were doing, the
amount of people that they were surveilling at that
point. And those clips come about a year and a week or so before
the main Snowden revelations. And he even says in the clip,
there’s never been a moment when we really mobilize,
that really sparks action. And he just didn’t live to
see that moment.
AMY GOODMAN: Well,
I want to thank you both for being with us, and for
your film, Brian Knappenberger. The film is called—well, his
first film, We are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, but this film is called The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. And Elliot Peters, Aaron’s lawyer.
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