So imagine you wake up one day, in the country where you've lived all your life,
some people turn up at the door saying another country you've never visited,
thinks you've committed some serious violations of their laws,
they'ed like very much to kidnap you, take you there and lock you up for the rest of your life.
To make matters worse your own government is conspiring to help them do this.
Nothing you can say, no amount of protestations of your innocence, will make any difference,
because they don't have to prove a single thing to have you removed from that country.
How would that make you feel and how would it make you feel knowing that it could happen to anyone,
who falls on the wrong side of the US government.
I don't sleep well, I have eczema which is related to my stress, so I quite often claw my face.
Some days I don't leave the house for a few days,
I keep a mental count of how many times I think about suicide,
it's a baseline of 3-5 times a day on a good day. I do suffer from the stress,
all my hair fell out when I was 15, that was just the stress of moving from Wiltshire to Suffolk.
I guess from a very early age I liked to take things apart and figure out how they work,
and then figure out what things they could do that you didn't originally assume they could do.
That's kind of all hacking it is: taking things apart and putting them together in a novel combination.
I quite enjoy playing games and then figured out some of the games were written in code that you could list,
instead of dying when the monster hit you, you don't die you win and get loads of points.
I was part of a community called the Cyber Army in the 90s and they were kind of do-gooder hackers.
We used to do campaigns to save the rainforest.
Aaron Swartz was probably one of the most principled people that I knew in my life.
At the age of 14 he co-authored one of the protocols still used on the internet.
From there he went on to co-found what became reddit, he also opposed some bad legislation in the USA.
He led the campaign agains those, eventually Google, Amazon, Wikipedia joined in,
blacked out their front pages. Congress got the message and gave up parsing the bad laws.
He then got into trouble for downloading too many scientific articles from an online journal archive at MIT.
Despite the university not wanting to press charges the US government stepped in & took over the prosecution.
He was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act facing 33 years in prison...
...he hanged himself.
it wasn't just the tragedy of losing a friend or losing such genius,
Aaron was also emblematic of the dream of the internet.
For a brief while it wasn't about money it wasn't about anything apart from ideas.
So when I got onto the Internet the only thing that mattered was the content of my ideas,
not that I was 12 years old and in the UK.
I could talk to someone from any country as long as we could overcome the language barrier.
it was a different way of doing things, without greediness,
without importing all of the baggage of ethnicity, religion, gender, race.
It was about creating something useful for all and we watched that dream slowly kind of fade away
as commercialisation and the people that were already powerful
began to use the Internet to become more powerful.
But (voice starts to break) Aaron was one of the people who never lost that dream.
After his death there were a lot of attempts to reform the coercive plea bargaining system that led him to
commit suicide and one of those protests took the form of a hacktivist campaign
in which some amount of US government networks were compromised.
Later on that year I was arrested by the National Crime Agency cunningly disguised as a UPS delivery person.
Last year we had a hearing at Westminster magistrates court in which all extradition cases are dealt with.
We had three days of painstaking examination of my life: the fact that I have lifelong difficulties of mental health.
I have Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism
and I've suffered from serious depression for as long as I've been alive.
In the UK if things had been done properly when I left that police station 4 years ago in October,
I'd have been charged; 36 months would be the expected sentence for the offences I'm accused of.
Whereas, were I to be extradited I'd be facing a max sentence for the offences of 99 years in prison.
Chelsea Manning was facing over 30 years in prison,
under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for letting the world know about war crimes committed.
If we're to have dissent at all, and dissent is necessary to prevent abuse by power,
justice reform needs to go back on the agenda.
I'm at risk of becoming more useful as an example,
more useful as a thing to be destroyed,
than a living thing full of potential.