We spend today’s broadcast remembering the life and work of cyber activist, computer
programmer, social justice activist and writer, Aaron Swartz.
At the age of 14, he co-developed the Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, web protocol,
the key component of much of the web’s entire publishing infrastructure.
By the time he was 19, he had co-founded a company that would merge with Reddit, now
one of the world’s most popular sites.
He also helped develop the architecture for the Creative Commons licensing system and
built the online architecture for the Open Library.
Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Friday.
He hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.
He was 26 years old.
His death occurred just weeks before he was to go on trial for using computers at MIT—that’s
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—to download millions of copyrighted academic
articles from JSTOR, a subscription database of scholarly papers.
JSTOR declined to press charges, but prosecutors moved the case forward.
Aaron Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and a million dollars in fines for allegedly
violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
When the case first came to light, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts,
Carmen Ortiz, said, quote, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,
and whether you take documents, data or dollars."
In a statement, Swartz’s family criticized federal prosecutors pursuing the case against
him.
They said, quote, "Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy.
It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.
Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed
to his death," they said.
On Sunday, MIT President Rafael Reif said the university will conduct an internal investigation
into the school’s role in Swartz’s death.
Aaron Swartz was a longtime champion of an open Internet.
Last year, he helped organize a grassroots movement to defeat a House bill called SOPA,
the Stop Online Piracy Act, and a Senate bill called PIPA, the PROTECT IP Act.
During a speech he delivered last May in Washington D.C., he explained the challenges he saw the
Internet facing.
There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet
in terms of traditional things that the law understands.
Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store?
Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend?
Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent
smashing of shop windows?
Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?
Later in the broadcast, we’ll play that full speech.
That was Aaron Swartz speaking in May of last year.
Well, he took his own life on Friday.
A funeral will be held in Chicago on Tuesday.
For more, we now go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Harvard Kennedy School of Government to
speak with Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, the director of the Edmond J. Safra
Center for Ethics at Harvard.
He knew Aaron for 12 years.
He was a friend and mentor.
Lawrence Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Lessig.
Tell us about Aaron.
Well, thank you.
Thank you, Amy, for having me here to talk about this incredible, incredible soul.
You know, I think the thing to remember about Aaron is that from the youngest age, from
the age of 12, his work has been—his work was dedicated solely to making the world a
better place for the ideas that he had.
He started with the idea that maybe we needed to make the Internet easier to share information,
so that’s what led to RSS.
And then, with Creative Commons, it was: How do we license people to make the freedom to
share legally protected?
And then, after that, it was with the public library: How do we make books available?
And when that wasn’t enough, he started pushing in the social activist and progressive
space, first with working with Stephanie Taylor and Adam Green at the Progressive Change Campaign
Committee, and then with his own Demand Progress with David Segal.
In all of these areas, what he was doing was advancing ideals.
He was an idealist who believed we had to live up to something better, and he was an
incredible soul, an incredible soul who inspired millions who now weep, as we’ve seen across
the Internet, in outrage and devastation that he would have been driven to the cliff that
he stepped over.
Can you explain what the case against Aaron was?
Explain what happened.
Well, I have to be very careful, because when Aaron was arrested, he came to me, and I—there
was a period of time where I acted as his lawyer.
So, I know more about the case than I’m able to talk about.
But here’s what was alleged.
Aaron was stopped as he left MIT.
He had a computer in his possession, which there was tape that indicated that he had
connected the computer to a server—to a closet in MIT, and the allegation was he had
downloaded a significant portion of JSTOR.
Now, JSTOR is a nonprofit website that has been for—since about 1996, has been trying
to build an archive of online—giving online access to academic journal articles, you know,
like the Harvard Law Review or journal articles from geography from the 1900s.
It’s an extraordinary library of information.
And the claim was Aaron had downloaded a significant portion of that.
And the question, the obvious question that was in everybody’s mind, was: Why?
What was he doing this for?
And so, the Cambridge police arrested Aaron.
JSTOR said, "We don’t want to prosecute.
We don’t want to civilly prosecute.
We don’t want you to criminally prosecute."
But MIT was not as clear.
And the federal government—remember, at the time, there was the Bradley Manning and
the WikiLeaks issue going on.
The federal government thought it was really important to make—make an example.
And so, they brought this incredibly ridiculous prosecution that had multiple—you know,
I think it was something like more than—more than a dozen counts claiming felony violations
against Aaron, threatening, you know, scores of years in prison.
But, you know, it’s not the theoretical claims about what he might have gotten; it
was the practical burden that for the last two years, you know, his wealth was bled dry
as he had to negotiate to try to finally settle this matter, because the government was not
going to stop before he admitted that he was a felon, which I think, you know, in a world
where the architects of the financial crisis dine regularly at the White House, it’s
ridiculous to think Aaron Swartz was a felon.
What was the scene where he was arrested?
He was riding his bicycle?
Yeah.
You know, this is part of the incredibly ridiculous propaganda that the government put out.
They released these, you know, badly taken—because it was basically just a security camera—images
of Aaron and suggested that what Aaron was doing was hiding his face and he was trying
to evade—to evade detection.
All he was doing was walking out of MIT with his bike helmet attached to his backpack.
And the image was, you know, just of the guy who had just previously been in MIT, using
their network, leaving.
Now, you know, we have to keep this in context.
MIT, for most of its history, has been a celebrator of open access to information.
Indeed, the policy of MIT, at least most people thought, allowed anybody who was on the campus
to have access to information on the campus.
MIT houses Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, who has celebrated
and defended MIT many, many times for their beliefs.
And so, you know, a lot of people just wondered, what was MIT doing here?
Now, you know, I think we have to—we have to say—I criticized MIT very strongly in
a blog post that I posted called "Prosecutor as Bully," because of what they did before
Aaron died, because of their refusal to recognize the craziness of what the federal government
was doing and to stop it by saying, "We don’t prosecution here, and you should stop prosecution."
MIT should have done that, and they didn’t.
But what MIT has done on Sunday, I think, is extraordinarily important.
By appointing Hal Abelson, who I think is the best possible person in the world to look
at what MIT did and to report back about whether it was right or wrong, I think MIT has taken
an important step to acknowledge—to acknowledge the wrong in what happened here.
And we’ll see what Hal Abelson says when he looks at it and reports back.
We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we’re going to read that statement
of MIT and also the statement of JSTOR, that didn’t want Aaron Swartz prosecuted, the
company, the nonprofit, that ran this document archive that he was downloading, that ultimately
is releasing it all to the public anyway.
And we’ll read the comments of his parents.
Ultimately today, we’ll play the speech that Aaron Swartz gave last year about freedom
to connect.
This is Democracy Now!
Back in a moment.