The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014 Documentary)

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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 Schwartz's 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 talk to people who knew him. He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles. They wanted to make an example out of him.

Okay, governments have an insatiable 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? Aon 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 symboler 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, um, 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 learn the ABC's backwards: Z, Y, X, W, V, U, I. 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, 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 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 as 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 leafing. Why don't they write about that on this website?"

And then other people could come at a later point and read that information and edit the information if they thought it was, uh, bad. Uh, not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right? And 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 Cambridge for 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 and 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?" He says, "It's a thing called RSS," and he explains to me what RSS is.

I'm like, "Like, why is that useful, Aaron? 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 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-to-face meetings, and they said, "You know, when are you going to come out to one of these face-to-face meetings?" And he said, "You know, I don't think my mom would let me. I, uh, you know, 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 understood the technology and he saw that it was imperfect and looked for ways to help make it better. [Music]

So as 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 'cause 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 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 of 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, 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 sand. 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. I first met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat. He didn't just write code; he also sort of got people excited about solving problems.

He got, he was a connector. The free culture movement has had a lot of his energy. I think Aaron 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. Aaron 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.

Aaron 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 force 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 Lessig, who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court. A young Aaron Schwartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings.

"I am Aaron Schwartz, and I'm here to listen to the oral argument." "Why did you fly out here from Chicago and come all this way to see the oral argument?" "That's a more difficult question. I don't know. Very exciting to see the Supreme Court, especially such a prestigious case as this one."

Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the internet. It was called Creative Commons. So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people, creators, 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 Creative Commons? 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 podiums. So it's this embarrassing thing where once he put his screen up, nobody could see his face.

When you come to our website here and you go to choose a 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 candidly 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, Schwartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University. He had had ulcerative colitis, which was very troubling, and we were concerned about him taking his medication. He got hospitalized, and he would take this cocktail of pills every day, and one of those pills was a steroid, which stunted 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.

And, and one centers, and like, I think he just, it just made him bananas. In 2005, after only one year of college, Schwartz 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 Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment.

So this used to be Aaron'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 Aaron's.

Aaron's Y Combinator sign was called Infogami, a tool to build websites, but Infogami struggles to find users, and Schwartz eventually merges his company with another Y 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 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 chaos at some level. So on the one hand, it's 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. 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 Condé 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? 19, 20? 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 shoebox-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 an 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 Schwartz 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 Condé 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 is outrageous.

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 Condé Nast, 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 famous and well-loved.

And, you know, he 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 rose 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 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?

Schwartz was inspired by one of the visionaries he had met as a child, the man who had invented the worldwide web, Tim Berners-Lee. In the 1990s, Berners-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. Aaron 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 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 to the other.

You know, you had to have the critical mass of this thing, which 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 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. 'Cause in many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic about life, even when he didn't feel it. He could be tremendously optimistic about [Music] life.

"What are you doing? Flickr 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 booksellers, 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: 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.

It's 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 to 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 like having a national park but with a moat 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 PACER, which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

I started Googling, and that's when I ran across Carl Malamud. Access to legal materials in the United States is a $10 billion per year business. PACER is just this incredible abomination of government service.

It's 10 cents a page. It's the most brain-dead code you've ever seen. You can't search it, you can't bookmark anything, you gotta have a credit card.

Um, and these are public records. It's, you know, U.S. District Courts are very important. It's where a lot of 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 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 a poll 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 flack from Congress and others about public access, and so they put together this system in 17 libraries across the country. There was free PACER access. You know, that's 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 Corp, there was a Wizard of Oz, 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 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. Schwartz 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. Soon there were 760 GB of PACER docs, about 20 million pages, using information retrieved from the trial libraries.

Schwartz 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. Aaron 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 Schwartz'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, you know, Aaron's mother was like, "Oh my God, FBI, FBI, FBI!" An FBI agent drives down our home's 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 five 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 was totally terrified. He was way more terrified after 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, you know, 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 lawman 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, Schwartz moves beyond technology 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 community, 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 'cause 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 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 Thompson and ISI to get access to scholarly 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 Elsevier.

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 a university 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 Britain made a profit of $3 billion last year.

I mean, what a racket. Jstor is just a very, very small player in that story, but for some reason, Jstor 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 Jstor was, but I think they at some point Aaron asked the question, "Like, how much would it cost to open up Jstor 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 Jstor.

Schwartz 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, Schwartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop on the MIT network under the name Gary.

Host, the client name was registered as Ghost Laptop. He doesn't hack Jstor in the traditional sense of hacking. The Jstor database was organized so it was completely trivial to figure out how you could download all the articles in Jstor because it was basically numbered.

It was basically, you know, SL, SL, SL number 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 Schwartz, it's barely a bump in the road. He quickly reassigns his computer's IP address and keeps downloading. Well, Jstor and 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 Jstor just cuts off MIT from having access to the Jstor database. So this kind of cat and mouse game around getting access to the Jstor database, Aaron ultimately, obviously, is the cat because he has more technical capability than the Jstor database people do in defending them.

Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet in the basement 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 computer.

Unknown 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]

Schwartz 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 stakeout 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 describes that he was pressed down 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 our family or anything was so foreign and incomprehensible. I didn't know what to do.

Well, they execute search warrants at Aaron's house, his apartment in Cambridge, in his office at Harvard. Two days before the arrest, the investigation had gone beyond Jstor 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 9/11, 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 Schwartz's case over to the Boston U.S. Attorney's Office.

There was a guy in the U.S. 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 prosecutor 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 Schwartz, but he can be seen here in an episode of the television show American Greed filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.

He is describing his previous case against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzalez, a case that garnered him enormous press attention and accolades. Gonzalez masterminded the theft of over 100 million credit card and ATM numbers, the largest such fraud in history.

Here, Heyman 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 Schwartz, Heyman's boss, U.S. 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 an 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 Schwartz. 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 'cause 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 'cause 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 hotbed of hacker activity going on. Wikileaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables.

Manning had been under arrest at the time. It was unknown whether he was the source of the leak. Uh, Anonymous, 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 Jstor to deal with in a kind of private, uh, professional matter. It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system. It just didn't belong [Music] there.

Before he was indicted, Schwartz 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 Schwartz 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 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 'cause 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 Aaron. 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 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 hadn'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 fined 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. Schwartz turned down the plea deal.

Heyman redoubled his efforts. Heyman continued to press us 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 Schwartz downloading articles from Jstor, 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. Schwartz had downloaded the Westlaw 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 funding, you know, vanity research. Schwartz had never released the Westlaw documents. In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the Jstor database.

That would have been completely okay if he were, on the other hand, intending to create a competitive service to Jstor, 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 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 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 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 contempt 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 proffer. 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 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 proffer, right? A proffer letter in which basically handed information over to 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 proffer 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 looked bored. They didn't even look angry; they just looked 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, 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 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 Schwartz who had signed his name to it. When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron and tell him everything 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 never [Music]

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, um, to the government. Months go by as Schwartz's friends and family await a looming indictment.

In the meantime, Schwartz was becoming a go-to expert on a series of internet issues. "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 U.S. 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 and 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 Schwartz 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 speculated both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, 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 Schwartz on four felony accounts.

He gets indicted on the same day that like two people in England who are part of LulzSec 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 stake 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 Schwartz 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, Jstor, formally drops all charges against Schwartz and declines to pursue the case.

Jstor, 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." Jstor 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 Jstor.

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 deterrence.

They told us that. They told you that? Yes, this was going to be an example. Yes, he was going to be made an example. Yes, Steve Heyman said that. Deterring who? Like there's other people out there running around logging on to Jstor and downloading 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 deterrence only selectively, you stop making a dispassionate analysis of lawbreaking, and you start deciding to deploy law enforcement resources specifically on the basis of political ideology.

And that's not just undemocratic; it's supposed to be un-American. Prosecutor Steven Heyman later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel that the straw that broke the camel's back was a press release sent out by an organization Schwartz 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 poisonous combination: a prosecutor who didn't want to lose face, who had a political career in the offing, maybe, and didn't want to have this come back and haunt them. You spent how many tax dollars arresting someone for taking too many books out of the library, and they got your ass handed to you in court? No way.

I then moved to try to put his pressure on it in various ways to get them to go to the government and request the government to stop the prosecution. But what is MIT's reaction? 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 rite 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 its 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 overreacting. This is too strong," that I'm aware of.

They acted kind of like any corporation would. They sort of, they helped the government; they didn't help us unless they felt they had to. And, um, 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 Heyman and the U.S. 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 Wozniak, 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. Schwartz 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."

Schwartz's political activity continues, his attention turning to a bill moving through Congress designed to curb online piracy. It was called SOPA. 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, 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've 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 in a community of people who help lead organizing around social justice issues at the federal level in this country.

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. 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 sophisticated 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 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 of 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 SOPA 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 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 PIPA and SOPA in all my time in public service. There were more than 40 United States 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 was a rough period. Schwartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal enormous support using traditional outreach combined with commonly used voice-over IP to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

I have 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 don't 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 Greg 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 SOPA 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 SOPA. Uh, when the U.S. Congress people that supported, uh, the record and movie industries, uh, realized that there was this backlash, they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit.

You could see the curve happening. You could see that we were, 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, it was being blown out, and finally, he'd like managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught.

And then they turned 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 percent 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

The government came forward with an indictment based on what crimes they thought were committed. 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, 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 the Open Access side, some people are not. I think the government took Schwarz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto very seriously, 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 as unjust.

In a democracy, if you think a law is unjust, there are ways of changing that law. There are going to Congress, as Schwartz did so masterfully with SOAPA, or you can violate that law in a way to try to nullify that law. 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 tube. 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.

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 just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. 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. 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.

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, and 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 that the people who are usually targeted and victimized by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses are typically poor and minority. Schwarz's isolation from friends and family increased. He had basically stopped working on anything else, and the case was, in fact, taking over sort of his whole life.

One of Aaron's lawyers apparently told the prosecutors that he was emotionally vulnerable and that that was something they really needed to keep in mind so that they knew 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.

It completely exhausted his financial resources, and it cost us a lot of money also. 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, 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 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 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 scared. I could tell something was wrong, and then 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 apartment. I just thought we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation. It's like the whole world fell apart in that moment.

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!" None of it made any sense, and really still doesn't. I was so frustrated, 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 who have died, but I've never lost anybody like this because everybody feels the way I do too. There is so much we could have done. We just didn't know he was there. I didn't know this is what he was suffering, and he was part of me. I just wanted it to not be real.

Then I just looked at his Wikipedia page, and I saw the end date: 2/11/2013. Aaron 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? 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 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? 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 Schwartz, in some sense, brought the best out of us, 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, but we are certainly shaped by the hand 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 Schwartz 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 Schwartz's death, Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden have introduced legislation that would reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Schwartz. It's called Aaron's Law.

Aaron believed that 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 you?

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 Baltimore, a 14-year-old who had access to JSTOR. He'd been spelunking through JSTOR after reading something, and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer kills the hell 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.

He sent emails off to the entire oncology department at Johns Hopkins, you know, hundreds of them. And every 14-year-old kid, yeah, most of them ignored it. Right? But one of them sent him an email back and said, "This is not an entirely stupid idea. Would you come in?"

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 lot. Sorry. He said the reason he was on the news is because they'd done it. They were shipping an early test for pancreatic cancer that was going to save lives.

He said, "This is why what Aaron did was so important, because you never know." This truth of the universe is not only something that policymakers use to figure out, you know, what the speed limit should be. It's where the thing that's going to keep your kid from dying of pancreatic cancer comes from.

Without access, the person who might come up with the thing that's got your number on it may never find that answer. He slept so well he didn't fall out of bed once, not even when he dreamed he was back on the spacecraft. Very good, Aaron. Very good.

Yeah, okay, now it's gone time.