Aaron Swartz was nothing short of a child prodigy.
At the age of 14, he helped create RSS, a popular tool for keeping up with the latest
news and blog posts before the advent of social media.
He formed a company that merged with Reddit and is credited with making Reddit one of
the most popular sites on the internet.
Yet that’s not what he was known for.
He was known for his internet activism, which led to the ultimate tragedy.
I couldn’t wait until the whole world was on the internet and I never had to call anybody
again.
The computer was his favorite toy growing up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago.
His father worked in the tech industry, so computers were always a part of his life.
They were also a distraction from the serious bowel condition that often crippled him with
stomach pain.
As a result, he only ate bland food like rice and pasta.
He hated fruits and veggies.
Aaron thought the internet was magical.
One of the exciting things about Wikipedia is that it doesn’t just have an article
on the 100 most popular things, or the thousand most popular things.
You can pick the most obscure subject on the world and there’s an article about it.
Because for everything there’s someone who cares a great deal about it.
And that’s what television, that’s what radio doesn’t provide, but the internet
does.
Yet he also felt there were barriers that limited the ability of people to share and
distribute knowledge freely, like strict copyright laws.
We have the right as American citizens to have this sort of free and open communication
to share what we think, what we feel, what we’ve created.
I think that’s a huge part of our culture.
This notion that we’ve become a permission-asking society that every time you do something you
have to ask permission.
That’s basically against the freedom culture we have here.
That’s the opposite of a free country.
Aaron believed no one should be deprived of information and sought to break down these
barriers.
He dropped out of Stanford after a year to pursue his interest in internet freedom.
In 2008, he wrote this manifesto:
“Information is power.
But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.
The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books
and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
the world.”
That year, he took on the U.S. government’s online court records system, PACER, which
stores information about cases, court filings, and docket details.
He was frustrated that PACER charged for documents -- 8 cents per page at the time – 10 cents
today.
Aaron believed the documents should be free because they were produced at the taxpayer’s
expense.
So he set out to republish these documents on a public website for anyone to access.
He visited one of the few public libraries that did allow free downloads of PACER documents
and installed code he'd written to request a new document every three seconds.
This way, he got his hands on nearly 20 million pages of documents - or around 20% of the
database, and uploaded the files to Amazon’s cloud computing service.
When the court system’s IT department realized something was up, the FBI got involved, and
contacted Amazon, which provided his name, phone number, and address as their user agreement
allows them to do so at the government’s request.
Aaron recalled in an interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door,
taking everything away.”
The feds investigated but didn’t prosecute him.
Two years later, it would be a different story…when authorities say he hacked the servers at MIT
to steal millions of files from a digital library.
In September 2010, federal authorities say Aaron broke into MIT’s computer network
by accessing a restricted utility closet on campus in the basement of Building 16, which
housed network equipment and cabling.
The room was reportedly left unlocked.
He hardwired his laptop into the network and hid it under a cardboard box.
The laptop ran a script called “keepgrabbing.py” which set it to automatically download academic
journals from the digital library JSTOR.
Aaron used a guest account to access JSTOR.
At the time, any computer connected to MIT’s open wireless network could access the digital
library.
Many institutions pay a lot of money so their students can subscribe for free.
Otherwise, plans for individuals cost $19.50 a month for just 10 PDF downloads.
He created the fake guest identity “Gary Host” which prompted the computer network
to identify his computer as “ghost” when shortened - an apparent reference to its ability
to disappear.
Although Aaron used a legitimate guest account, he violated JSTOR’s terms of use by using
an automated program to access articles.
At one point, he downloaded about 700 articles a minute!
Between September 2010 to January 2011, he downloaded nearly 5 million articles or 80%
of JSTOR’s database, valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A federal indictment claims he intended to upload all of the documents to a peer-to-peer
file-sharing site where anyone could access them for free.
But he never got the chance.
JSTOR noticed the huge spike in downloads and alerted MIT, which launched an investigation
alongside the Cambridge Police Department and the U.S. Secret Service.
Blocking the IP address from which the requests originated didn’t work; the person responsible
simply switched IPs to continue the mass downloading.
A second computer then connected to MIT’s network.
Both laptops downloaded articles at such a staggering rate that several of JSTOR’s
servers crashed.
JSTOR then blocked access to all MIT users for several days.
On January 4, 2011, authorities discovered a laptop hidden in the utility closet in Building
16.
They decided to leave the laptop in place to see if the person who put it there would
return.
They also installed a hidden camera in the closet to identify the intruder.
30 minutes later, Aaron is captured on video entering the closet to purportedly replace
the hard drive.
The video you’re watching was originally published by Wired.com, which obtained it
through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service.
Two days later, on January 6, 2011, someone entered the closet again, covering their face
with a bike helmet.
They removed the laptop and hard drive and left.
The MIT police weren’t able to reach the closet in time to apprehend the person.
But the suspect didn’t leave the campus immediately.
The same laptop then connected to MIT’s Student Center.
Perhaps to access the network from a different location to avoid detection.
Later that afternoon, an MIT police officer who saw the surveillance footage recognized
the same guy riding his bike on campus.
When the officer approached Aaron, Aaron leaped off his bike and ran away.
But MIT police and a secret service agent caught up with him and arrested him for breaking
and entering.
At the time of his arrest, Aaron was found to possess a USB drive containing the program
“keepgrabbing.py” - the same software program found on the laptop in the closet.
There was no doubt they had the right person.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston charged Aaron with numerous counts of wire fraud and
violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse act.
The charges carried a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1
million.
His supporters called it ludicrous; they argued he simply wanted to make academic research
more widely available.
They believed the punishment didn’t fit the crime.
However, Carmen Ortiz, the then U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts who oversaw
Aaron’s prosecution, argued:
“Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether
you take documents, data or dollars.”
JSTOR chose NOT to press charges after Aaron turned over his hard drives.
The prosecution offered Aaron a plea deal.
Had he accepted it, he would have gone to prison for only six months.
His girlfriend Taren reflected on the difficult decision he had to make.
The whole thing was so hard and so stressful.
And he felt - he carried so much of the weight of it on his own.
He didn’t want to involve his friends.
He wanted to protect people but he wasn’t very good at protecting himself.
Aaron refused the plea bargain because he didn’t want to be labeled a felon.
A close friend and former girlfriend recalled to Rolling Stone how they were standing outside
the White House one day when Aaron turned to her and said, “‘You know, they don’t
allow felons to work there.'”
At the time he was charged, he had been a research fellow at Harvard.
Harvard then suspended his fellowship and banned him from campus.
Aaron settled into a studio apartment in Brooklyn, awaiting trial.
He grew increasingly isolated and depressed.
He had struggled for years with depression, often triggered by his stomach issues.
Long before the JSTOR incident, he wrote a blog on his personal website that described
his state of mind:
“Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any
better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel.
Everything gets colored by the sadness.”
“You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you
search for some escape but find none.”
On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment in New York City.
He was 26 years old.
I think he woke up two years after this ordeal started, and I think he couldn’t face another
day of the stress, the uncertainty, the lack of control over his own destiny.
Aaron’s partner and family blamed his death on prosecutors, declaring in a statement:
“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.”
There were calls for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz to be removed.
She defended her handling of the case this way:
“...this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence
that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting.
While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence
of probation.
Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge.
At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it
intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law.”
Aaron leaves a lasting legacy.
He was an early contributor to the development of the Creative Commons license, which provides
a legal framework for creators to share their work with others under certain conditions.
It has since become an important tool for promoting open access to information – his
goal all along.
I have personally benefited from the use of creative commons.
If I couldn’t access this vast library of free and open content, I would have had to
spend much more time sourcing material, making videos like this one much more difficult to
produce.
Aaron’s belief in limiting the power of institutions has influenced debates on free
speech and whether social media companies have gone too far in censoring information.
He had co-founded an advocacy group dedicated to protecting civil liberties and fighting
censorship.
People often ask me, what’s going to happen?
And the answer is: it’s up to you.
You get to decide what will happen.
This isn’t something playing out on a stage somewhere where big giants fight each other,
and you get to sit and munch popcorn.
This is a fight you can join in.
It’s up to you.
The case against Aaron wasn’t the first of its kind to challenge online civil disobedience.
The same year of Aaron’s death, Ross Ulbricht was arrested and charged with running the
dark web online marketplace Silk Road.
The harsh sentence Ross received has been the topic of widespread discussion.
You can check out my video on that, which I’ve linked in my description.
The computer science skills of Aaron Swartz and Ross Ulbricht played a huge role in their
attempt to change the world.
Although their actions led to legal consequences, their stories demonstrate the power that STEM
can have to make an impact.
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You can dive deeper into more advanced topics as you progress through their lessons.
Brilliant supports you every step of the way.
If you’re stuck, you can view the explanation to see where you went wrong.
There are thousands of lessons to choose from, everything from foundational and advanced
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I personally use Brilliant to go through their logic puzzles to improve my analytical thinking.
Brilliant is FREE for you to try out for 30 days if you head to my custom link in my description:
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And the first 200 people who sign up with my link will get 20% off their annual subscription.
Thanks for watching, I’m Cindy Pom.