Farewell to Aaron Swartz

[Magda Hassan]

The so called victim in the so called crime, JSTOR, had said that they suffered no loss and asked the government not to prosecute. Aaron was facing 50 years in prison and was being vindictively persecuted by the government. The academic journals he downloaded were from publicly funded research.

Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist

Yesterday Aaron Swartz, a close friend and collaborator of ours, committed suicide. This is a tragic end to a brief and extraordinary life.
Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way. His contributions were numerous, and some of them were indispensable. When we asked him in late 2010 for help in stopping COICA, the predecessor to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills, he founded an organization called Demand Progress, which mobilized over a million online activists and proved to be an invaluable ally in winning that campaign.

Other projects Aaron worked on included the RSSspecifications, web.py, tor2web, the Open Library, and the Chrome port of HTTPS Everywhere. Aaron helped launch the Creative Commons. He was a former co-founder at Reddit, and a member of the team that made the site successful. His blog was often a delight.
Aaron's eloquent brilliance was mixed with a complicated introversion. He communicated on his own schedule and needed a lot of space to himself, which frustrated some of his collaborators. He was fascinated by the social world around him, but often found it torturous to deal with.
For a long time, Aaron was more comfortable reading books than talking to humans (he once told me something like, "even talking to very smart people is hard, but if I just sit down and read their books, I get their most considered and insightful thoughts condensed in a beautiful and efficient form. I can learn from books faster than I can from talking to the authors."). His passion for the written word, for open knowledge, and his flair for self-promotion, sometimes producedspectacular results, even before the events that proved to be his undoing.
In 2011, Aaron used the MIT campus network to download millions of journal articles from theJSTOR database, allegedly changing his laptop's IP and MAC addresses when necessary to get around blocks put in place by JSTOR and MIT and sneaking into a closet to get a faster connection to the MIT network. For this purported crime, Aaron was facing criminal charges with penalties up to thirty-five years in prison, most seriously for "unauthorized access" to computers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
If we believe the prosecutor's allegations against him, Aaron had hoped to liberate the millions of scientific and scholarly articles he had downloaded from JSTOR, releasing them so that anyone could read them, or analyze them as a single giant dataset, something Aaron had done before. While his methods were provocative, the goal that Aaron died fighting for freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it is one that we should all support.
Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, and particularly their punishment regimes. Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism, and taking such an act in the physical world would, at most, have a meant he faced light penalties akin to trespassing as part of a political protest. Because he used a computer, he instead faced long-term incarceration. This is a disparity that EFF has fought against for years. Yesterday, it had tragic consequences. Lawrence Lessig has called for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them. We agree.
Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/fa...ron-swartz

[Magda Hassan]

Official statement from the Family of Aaron Swartz

Official Statement from the Family and Partner of Aaron Swartz:Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.
Aaron's insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitablethese gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We're grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.
Aaron's commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.
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. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.
_____
Aaron's funeral will be held on Tuesday, January 15 at Central Avenue Synagogue, 874 Central Avenue, Highland Park, Illinois 60035. Further details, including the specific time, will be posted at http://rememberaaronsw.com, along with announcements about memorial services to be held in other cities in coming weeks.
Remembrances of Aaron, as well as donations in his memory, can be submitted at http://rememberaaronsw.com

[Magda Hassan]

Aaron was also a critic of the Kill List and the cyber attacks on Iran by Israel and the US.

Prominent American blogger and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who spoke against US President Barack Obama's "kill list" and cyber attacks against Iran, has been found dead in New York.


Police found the body of the 26-year-old in his apartment in New York City borough of Brooklyn on Friday, said a spokeswoman for the city's chief medical examiner.

Brooklyn's chief medical examiner ruled the death a suicide by hanging, but no further detail is available about the mysterious death.

Last year, Swartz openly criticized the US and the Israeli regime for launching joint cyber attacks against Iran.

The blogger was also vocal in criticizing Obama's so-called kill list and other policies.

Obama has been reportedly approving the names put on the "kill lists" used in the targeted killing operations carried out by US assassination drones.

Every week or so, more than 100 members of the US national security team gather via secure video teleconference run by the Pentagon and go over the biographies of suspects in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, and "nominate" those who should be targeted in the attacks.

Obama is then provided with the identities of those put on the "kill list" and signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia as well as the risky strikes in Pakistan.

Swartz was also widely credited for co-authoring the specifications for the Web feed format RSS 1.0 (Rich Site Summary) which he worked on at age 14.

RSS is designed to deliver content from sites that change constantly, such as news pages, to users.

Swartz was critical of monopoly of information by corporate cartels and believed that information should be shared and available for the benefit of society.

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves," he wrote in an online "manifesto" in 2008.

Based on that belief, the computer prodigy founded the nonprofit group DemandProgress.

The group launched a successful campaign to block a 2011 bill that the US House of Representatives called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Had it been approved, the bill would have allowed court orders to restrain access to some websites considered to be involved in illegal sharing of intellectual property.

DemandProgress argued that the thwarted Stop Online Piracy Act would have broadly authorized the US government to censor and restrict legitimate Web communication.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/01/13/...ead-in-ny/

[Lauren Johnson]

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

http://blogs.providencejournal.com/arts-...at-26.html

[Lauren Johnson]

By NOAM COHEN

At an afternoon vigil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Sunday, Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old technology wunderkind who killed himself on Friday, was remembered as a great programmer and a provocative thinker by a handful of students who attended.

And he was recalled as something else, a hero of the free culture movement a coalition as varied as Wikipedia contributors, Flickr photographers and online educators, and prominent figures like Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and online vigilantes like Anonymous. They share a belief in using the Internet to provide easy, open access to the world's knowledge.

"He's something to aspire toward," said Benjamin Hitov, a 23-year-old Web programmer from Cambridge, Mass., who said he had cried when he learned the news about Mr. Swartz. "I think all of us would like to be a bit more like him. Most of us aren't quite as idealistic as he was. But we still definitely respect that."

The United States government has a very different view of Mr. Swartz. In 2011, he was arrested and accused of using M.I.T.'s computers to gain illegal access to millions of scholarly papers kept by Jstor, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals.

At his trial, which was to begin in April, he faced the possibility of millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison, punishments that friends and family say haunted him for two years and led to his suicide.

Mr. Swartz was a flash point in the debate over whether information should be made widely available. On one side were activists like Mr. Swartz and advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Students for Free Culture. On the other were governments and corporations that argued that some information must be kept private for security or commercial reasons.

After his death, Mr. Swartz has come to symbolize a different debate over how aggressively governments should pursue criminal cases against people like Mr. Swartz who believe in "freeing" information.

In a statement, his family said in part: "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 M.I.T. contributed to his death."

On Sunday evening, M.I.T.'s president, L. Rafael Reif, said he had appointed a prominent professor, Hal Abelson, to "lead a thorough analysis of M.I.T.'s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present." He promised to disclose the report, adding, "It pains me to think that M.I.T. played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy."

M.I.T.'s Web site was inaccessible at times on Sunday. Officials there did not provide a cause.
While Mr. Swartz viewed his making copies of academic papers as an unadulterated good, spreading knowledge, the prosecutor compared Mr. Swartz's actions to using a crowbar to break in and steal someone's money under the mattress. On Sunday, she declined to comment on Mr. Swartz's death out of respect for his family's privacy.

The question of how to treat online crimes is still a vexing one, many years into the existence of the Internet.

Prosecutors have great discretion on what to charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law cited in Mr. Swartz's case, and how to value the loss. "The question in any given case is whether the prosecutor asked for too much, and properly balanced the harm caused in a particular case with the defendant's true culpability," said Marc Zwillinger, a former federal cybercrimes prosecutor.

The belief that information is power and should be shared freely which Mr. Swartz described in a treatise in 2008 is under considerable legal assault. The immediate reaction among those sympathetic to Mr. Swartz has been anger and a vow to soldier on. Young people interviewed on Sunday spoke of the government's power to intimidate.

"Using certain people as poster children for deterring others from doing that same action, ultimately it won't work," Jennifer Baek, a third-year student at New York Law School, said by telephone, referring to Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been charged with multiple counts in the leaking of confidential documents, and Mr. Swartz. Ms. Baek, a member of the board of Students for Free Culture, said the comments on blogs and discussion boards she had visited since Mr. Swartz's death showed that "people aren't afraid to say this is what the injustice was."

The ingredients for trouble perhaps lay in Mr. Swartz's personal and direct approach to solving problems. As one mentor, Cory Doctorow of the popular Web site Boing Boing, wrote in tribute, he was highly impressionable and sought after and was forgiven by those he worked with and worked for.

A permanent "kid genius," Mr. Swartz had often put his skills to the task of making information more accessible. At 14 he was a co-creator of RSS, a tool that allows online content to be distribute, and then made a tidy sum as one of the creators of the social-news site Reddit, now part of Condé Nast.

But even before, and certainly after, he crusaded for open access to information. His projects include a range of influential efforts like the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Wikipedia and the Recap collection of legal documents.

He also began more traditional projects for subjects he took an interest in. At 19, he volunteered to upload the archive of a defunct magazine he loved, Lingua Franca. In 2005, he called up the writer Rick Perlstein to offer to create a Web page for him after reading a book of his he liked.

"I smelled a hustle, asking him how much it would cost, and he said, no, he wanted to do it for free," Mr. Perlstein wrote in The Nation over the weekend. "I thought: What a loser this guy must be. Someone with nothing better to do.' " Mr. Perlstein writes that he ended up becoming friends, and he sent chapters of his next book, "Nixonland," to Mr. Swartz before he showed them to anyone else.

Mr. Swartz outlined his views in the manifesto: "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."

And he said the stakes were clear: "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks."

Still, even many of his allies concede that Mr. Swartz's passion for free information may have taken him too far in the Jstor downloads. According to the government's indictment, in September 2010 Mr. Swartz broke into a computer-wiring closet on the M.I.T. campus; when retrieving a computer he connected, he hid his face behind a bicycle helmet, peeking out through the ventilation holes. At the time, he was a student at nearby Harvard.

Some would say that perhaps a punishment for trespassing would have been warranted, but the idea that he could have seen serious prison time was infuriating. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Law professor who founded Creative Commons to advocate greater sharing of creative material online, called the prosecution's case absurd and said that boxing in Mr. Swartz with an aggressive case and little ability to mount a defense "made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it."

E.J. Hilbert, a former cybercrimes investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that the broader issues around such activist transgressions raise many complex questions that are subject to "a lot of discretion from prosecutors." He added that the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts has long been renowned for a particularly aggressive pursuit of cybercrimes.

Jstor, for its part, declined to pursue the case and posted a note over the weekend describing Mr. Swartz as "a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the Internet and the Web from which we all benefit."

Michael McCarthy, a 30-year-old animator from Providence who was also at the M.I.T. vigil, said Mr. Swartz was let down by the university. "If places like M.I.T. aren't safe for people to be a little miscreant in their quest for truth and understanding, then we're in a lot of trouble," he said.

It's unclear how much the impending case contributed to Mr. Swartz's decision to take his own life. Years back, he wrote about his struggle with depression in his blog, Raw Thoughts.

The last post he wrote on that blog, in November, was a detailed analysis of the final installment of the "Batman" series.

Having warned his readers that he was about to reveal the conclusion of the movies, he ended the post by writing: "Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it's no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide."

Jess Bidgood and Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/techno...nted=print

[Lauren Johnson]

Aaron suffered from depression, but that is not why he died. Aaron is dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, because the values he sought openness, justice, curiosity are values these institutions now oppose. In previous generations, people like Aaron would have been treasured and recognized as the remarkable gifts they are. We do not live in a world like that today. And Aaron would be the first to point out, if he could observe the discussion happening now, that the pressure he felt from the an oppressive government is felt by millions of people, every year. I'm glad his family have not let the justice system off the hook, and have not allowed this suicide to be medicalized, or the fault of one prosecutor. What happened to Aaron is not isolated to Aaron, but is the flip side of the corruption he hated.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html#dp8StH7HAHhXlr4F.99

[Peter Lemkin]

The good, they die young........

[Magda Hassan]

]

Academics Are Tweeting Out PDFs of Journal Articles in Memory of Aaron Swartz

Eric Limer

There's been a pretty big outpouring of grief following Aaron Swartz's suicide, even from those who didn't actually know him. And the trend is continuing. Many researchers and academics are now tweeting links to PDF files of their papers as a tribute.
At the time of his death, Swartz had been facing charges for attempting to publicly release academic papers from JSTOR, and in a statement, his family accuses the intensity of the charges for contributing in part to his suicide. The show of support, consolidated under the hashtag #pdftribute, now involves hundreds of participants working to make hundreds (if not more) papers freely available to the public, much as Swartz had been trying to do.
There's yet to be any consolidated archive of the links or PDFs, but chatter on Twitter suggests that there are multiple parties trying to organize one. The hashtag is now getting over 500 tweets per hour, so rounding up all those links could prove to be difficult, but even with no hub of articles (yet), the tribute is making a splash. [Neuroconscience via Techmeme]
http://gizmodo.com/5975543/academics-are...socialflow

[Peter Lemkin]

Great effort in response to a very sad event! It seems to me that the suppression of information, generally, and especially the TRUTH of important historical/political events [and the analytical skills and background information necessary for same] have been the PLAN of TPTB for a VERY long time, and getting more ruthless since 911. Aaron was a victim of this Jihad against the dissemination of information, IMHO. Other's heads are figuratively on the 'block' as well.....the list is too long to name them all...... They want to control information and replace it with disinformation. Those who insist on spreading real information effectively will be targeted with long imprisonment or worse. Aaron sadly chose to bow out before he had to face the 'firing squad' being assembled for him and so many others. It is an information war at the heart of all we discuss here on this Forum.

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: We spend today's broadcast remembering the life and work of cyber activist, computer programmer, social justice activist and writer, Aaron Swartz. At the age of 14, he co-developed the Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, web protocol, the key component of much of the web's entire publishing infrastructure. By the time he was 19, he had co-founded a company that would merge with Reddit, now one of the world's most popular sites. He also helped develop the architecture for the Creative Commons licensing system and built the online architecture for the Open Library. Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Friday. He hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old.

His death occurred just weeks before he was to go on trial for using computers at MITthat's the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyto download millions of copyrighted academic articles from JSTOR, a subscription database of scholarly papers. JSTOR declined to press charges, but prosecutors moved the case forward. Aaron Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and a million dollars in fines for allegedly violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. When the case first came to light, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, said, quote, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."

In a statement, Swartz's family criticized federal prosecutors pursuing the case against him. They said, quote, "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death," they said. On Sunday, MIT President Rafael Reif said the university will conduct an internal investigation into the school's role in Swartz's death.

Aaron Swartz was a longtime champion of an open Internet. Last year, he helped organize a grassroots movement to defeat a House bill called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and a Senate bill called PIPA, the Protect IP Act. During a speech he delivered last May in Washington D.C., he explained the challenges he saw the Internet facing.

AARON SWARTZ: There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?

AMY GOODMAN: Later in the broadcast, we'll play that full speech. That was Aaron Swartz speaking in May of last year. Well, he took his own life on Friday. A funeral will be held in Chicago on Tuesday.

For more, we now go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Harvard Kennedy School of Government to speak with Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. He knew Aaron for 12 years. He was a friend and mentor. Lawrence Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Lessig. Tell us about Aaron.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, thank you. Thank you, Amy, for having me here to talk about this incredible, incredible soul.

You know, I think the thing to remember about Aaron is that from the youngest age, from the age of 12, his work has beenhis work was dedicated solely to making the world a better place for the ideas that he had. He started with the idea that maybe we needed to make the Internet easier to share information, so that's what led to RSS. And then, with Creative Commons, it was: How do we license people to make the freedom to share legally protected? And then, after that, it was with the public library: How do we make books available? And when that wasn't enough, he started pushing in the social activist and progressive space, first with working with Stephanie Taylor and Adam Green at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and then with his own Demand Progress with David Segal. In all of these areas, what he was doing was advancing ideals. He was an idealist who believed we had to live up to something better, and he was an incredible soul, an incredible soul who inspired millions who now weep, as we've seen across the Internet, in outrage and devastation that he would have been driven to the cliff that he stepped over.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what the case against Aaron was? Explain what happened.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, I have to be very careful, because when Aaron was arrested, he came to me, and Ithere was a period of time where I acted as his lawyer. So, I know more about the case than I'm able to talk about.

But here's what was alleged. Aaron was stopped as he left MIT. He had a computer in his possession, which there was tape that indicated that he had connected the computer to a serverto a closet in MIT, and the allegation was he had downloaded a significant portion of JSTOR. Now, JSTOR is a nonprofit website that has been forsince about 1996, has been trying to build an archive of onlinegiving online access to academic journal articles, you know, like the Harvard Law Review or journal articles from geography from the 1900s. It's an extraordinary library of information. And the claim was Aaron had downloaded a significant portion of that. And the question, the obvious question that was in everybody's mind, was: Why? What was he doing this for? And so, the Cambridge police arrested Aaron.

JSTOR said, "We don't want to prosecute. We don't want to civilly prosecute. We don't want you to criminally prosecute." But MIT was not as clear. And the federal governmentremember, at the time, there was the Bradley Manning and the WikiLeaks issue going on. The federal government thought it was really important to makemake an example. And so, they brought this incredibly ridiculous prosecution that had multipleyou know, I think it was something like more thanmore than a dozen counts claiming felony violations against Aaron, threatening, you know, scores of years in prison. But, you know, it's not the theoretical claims about what he might have gotten; it was the practical burden that for the last two years, you know, his wealth was bled dry as he had to negotiate to try to finally settle this matter, because the government was not going to stop before he admitted that he was a felon, which I think, you know, in a world where the architects of the financial crisis dine regularly at the White House, it's ridiculous to think Aaron Swartz was a felon.

AMY GOODMAN: What was the scene where he was arrested? He was riding his bicycle?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah. You know, this is part of the incredibly ridiculous propaganda that the government put out. They released these, you know, badly takenbecause it was basically just a security cameraimages of Aaron and suggested that what Aaron was doing was hiding his face and he was trying to evadeto evade detection. All he was doing was walking out of MIT with his bike helmet attached to his backpack. And the image was, you know, just of the guy who had just previously been in MIT, using their network, leaving.

Now, you know, we have to keep this in context. MIT, for most of its history, has been a celebrator of open access to information. Indeed, the policy of MIT, at least most people thought, allowed anybody who was on the campus to have access to information on the campus. MIT houses Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, who has celebrated and defended MIT many, many times for their beliefs. And so, you know, a lot of people just wondered, what was MIT doing here?

Now, you know, I think we have towe have to sayI criticized MIT very strongly in a blog post that I posted called "Prosecutor as Bully," because of what they did before Aaron died, because of their refusal to recognize the craziness of what the federal government was doing and to stop it by saying, "We don't prosecution here, and you should stop prosecution." MIT should have done that, and they didn't. But what MIT has done on Sunday, I think, is extraordinarily important. By appointing Hal Abelson, who I think is the best possible person in the world to look at what MIT did and to report back about whether it was right or wrong, I think MIT has taken an important step to acknowledgeto acknowledge the wrong in what happened here. And we'll see what Hal Abelson says when he looks at it and reports back.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to break, and when we come back, we're going to read that statement of MIT and also the statement of JSTOR, that didn't want Aaron Swartz prosecuted, the company, the nonprofit, that ran this document archive that he was downloading, that ultimately is releasing it all to the public anyway. And we'll read the comments of his parents. Ultimately today, we'll play the speech that Aaron Swartz gave last year about freedom to connect. This is Democracy Now! Back in a moment.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are doing today's broadcast about the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old cyber activist, social justice activist, co-founder of Reddit. He developed RSS when he was 14 years old. Our guest today is Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, his mentor, his friend for many years, speaking to us from Harvard. I'm Amy Godman.

Over the weekend, Aaron's family released this statement. They said, quote, "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death."

MIT also released a statement, and I'd like to read that here. On Sunday, we reached out to MIT for comment. This is part of the statement the MIT president, Rafael Reif, sent to the MIT community regarding Aaron's death. He wrote, quote, "I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT. I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it."

I also want to read the statement of JSTOR. That's the nonprofit that is the archive of all of the documents that Aaron was downloading. Over the weekend, JSTOR expressed deep condolences to the Swartz family and maintained the case had been instigated by the U.S. attorney's office. They wrote, quote, "The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR's mission is to foster widespread access to the world's body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011."

And now I want to play a comment of Aaron Swartz himself about JSTOR, about these documents. This was a comment made by Aaron Swartz at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October of 2010. He spoke about JSTOR.

AARON SWARTZ: I am going to give you one example of something not as big as saving Congress, but something important that you can do right here at your own school. It just requires willing to get your shoes a little bit muddy. By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals. Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like JSTOR and Thomson and ISI to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read. And these licensing fees are substantial. And they're so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in the United States, don't have this kind of access. They're locked out from all of these journals. They're locked out from our entire scientific legacy. I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to the Enlightenment. Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it's been scanned and digitized and put in these collections.

That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists. It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people, but instead it's been locked up and put online by a handful of for-profit corporations who then try and get the maximum profit they can out of it. Now, there are people, good people, trying to change this with the open access movement. So, all journals, going forward, they're encouraging them to publish their work as open access, so open on the Internet, available for download by everybody, available for free copying, and perhaps even modification with attribution and notice.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Aaron Swartz speaking, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, October 2010, about JSTOR. That was before he was arrested. Professor Lawrence Lessig, the significance of what Aaron was dedicating his life to, before we move on to the speech that he gave last year to play in full?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah, he was dedicating his life to building a world, a nation at least, but a world that was as idealistic as he was. And he was impatient with us, and he was disappointed with us, with all of us, as we moved through this fight. And heas he grew impatient, he called on people to do more. And it is incredibly hard for all of us who were close to him to accept the recognition that maybe if we had done more, maybe if we had done more, this wouldn't have seemed so bleak to him, maybe if we had stopped this prosecution.

I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron died, from the president of JSTOR, announcing, celebrating that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles to anybody around the world who wanted accessexactly what Aaron was fighting for. And I didn't have time to send it to Aaron; I was onI was traveling. But I looked forward to seeing him againI had just seen him the week beforeand celebrating that this is what had happened. So, all of us think there are a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do, because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lessig, on November 27, 2007, Aaron blogged about his depressed mood. He said, "Surely there have been times when you've been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it's worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleakthe things you've done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn't come for any reason and it doesn't go for any either." What about Aaron's state of mind, how he kept up his spirits, especially during this very, very difficult time, also struggling with depression?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah, Aaron was depressed. He was rationally depressed. You know, he was losing everything, because his government was overreaching in the most ridiculous way to persecute him, not just because of this, but because of what he had done before, liberating government documents that were supposed to be in the public domain. Of course he was depressed. He wasn't depressed because he had no loving parentshe did have loving parents who did everything they could for himor because he didn't have loving friends. Every time you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or 10 different people who loved and respected and worked with him. He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn't enough. When he saw all of his wealth gone, and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist, as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States, when he saw that and he recognized howhow incredibly difficult that fight was going to be, of course he was depressed.

Now, you know, I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know whether there was something wrong with him because ofyou know, beyond the rational reason he had to be depressed, but I don'tI don'tI don't have patience for people who want to say, "Oh, this was just a crazy person; this was just a person with a psychological problem who killed himself." No. This was somebodythis was somebody who was pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government. A bullying by our government. And just as we hold people responsible when their bullying leads to tragedy, I hope Carmen Ortiz does what MIT did and hold

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. attorney.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: The U.S. attorneyand lead an investigation, ask somebody independent to look at what happened here and explain to America: Is this what the United States government is?

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lessig, we want to end with the words of Aaron himself. And we're not going to go to our second breakI want to warn all our stationsbecausein order to fit in this whole speech. This is a speech that Aaron Swartz gave, the cyber activist, computer programmer, who took his life on Friday, speaking last May about the battle to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.

AARON SWARTZ: So, for me, it all started with a phone call. It was Septembernot last year, but the year before that, September 2010. And I got a phone call from my friend Peter. "Aaron," he said, "there's an amazing bill that you have to take a look at." "What is it?" I said. "It's called COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act." "But, Peter," I said, "I don't care about copyright law. Maybe you're right. Maybe Hollywood is right. But either way, what's the big deal? I'm not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Healthcare, financial reformthose are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law." I could hear Peter grumbling in the background. "Look, I don't have time to argue with you," he said, "but it doesn't matter for right now, because 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.

Peter explained what you've all probably long since learned, that this bill would let the government devise a list of websites that Americans weren't allowed to visit. On the next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people. I said it was a great firewall of America. I said it was an Internet black list. I said it was online censorship. But I think it's worth taking a step back, putting aside all the rhetoric and just thinking for a moment about how radical this bill really was. Sure, there are lots of times when the government makes rules about speech. If you slander a private figure, if you buy a television ad that lies to people, if you have a wild party that plays booming music all night, in all these cases, the government can come stop you. But this was something radically different. It wasn't the government went to people and asked them to take down particular material that was illegal; it shut down whole websites. Essentially, it stopped Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups. There's nothing really like it in U.S. law. If you play loud music all night, the government doesn't slap you with an order requiring you be mute for the next couple weeks. They don't say nobody can make any more noise inside your house. There's a specific complaint, which they ask you to specifically remedy, and then your life goes on.

The closest example I could find was a case where the government was at war with an adult bookstore. The place kept selling pornography; the government kept getting the porn declared illegal. And then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down. But even that was eventually declared unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment.

So, you might say, surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional, as well. But I knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything else, more than slander or libel, more than pornography, more even than child pornography. Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright, it was like the part of the justices' brains shut off, and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. You got the sense that, deep down, they didn't even think the First Amendment applied when copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through.

And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere. If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, it's a bit of a stretch to claim that you're doing it because they have too much pornography, but it's not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the thing I'm giving right now, these words are copyrighted. And it's so easy to accidentally copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. So if even Orrin Hatch's Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, what's the chance that they wouldn't find something they could pin on any of us?

There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?

This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted. And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.

But it was going to happen. The bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20th, 2010, a Monday, and in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it was scheduled for a vote on September 23rd, just three days later. And while, of course, there had to be a voteyou can't pass a bill without a votethe results of that vote were already a foregone conclusion, because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it wasn't just introduced by one rogue eccentric member of Congress; it was introduced by the chair of the Judiciary Committee and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members, Republicans and Democrats. So, yes, there'd be a vote, but it wouldn't be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill before it was even introduced.

Now, I can't stress how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works. I'm not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock. I mean, this is not the way Congress actually works. I mean, I think we all know Congress is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse trading and hearings and stall tactics. I mean, you know, first you're supposed to announce that you're going to hold hearings on a problem, and then days of experts talking about the issue, and then you propose a possible solution, you bring the experts back for their thoughts on that, and then other members have different solutions, and they propose those, and you spend of bunch of time debating, and there's a bunch of trading, they get members over to your cause. And finally, you spend hours talking one on one with the different people in the debate, try and come back with some sort of compromise, which you hash out in endless backroom meetings. And then, when that's all done, you take that, and you go through it line by line in public to see if anyone has any objections or wants to make any changes. And then you have the vote. It's a painful, arduous process. You don't just introduce a bill on Monday and then pass it unanimously a couple days later. That just doesn't happen in Congress.

But this time, it was going to happen. And it wasn't because there were no disagreements on the issue. There are always disagreements. Some senators thought the bill was much too weak and needed to be stronger: As it was introduced, the bill only allowed the government to shut down websites, and these senators, they wanted any company in the world to have the power to get a website shut down. Other senators thought it was a drop too strong. But somehow, in the kind of thing you never see in Washington, they had all managed to put their personal differences aside to come together and support one bill they were persuaded they could all live with: a bill that would censor the Internet. And when I saw this, I realized: Whoever was behind this was good.

Now, the typical way you make good things happen in Washington is you find a bunch of wealthy companies who agree with you. Social Security didn't get passed because some brave politicians decided their good conscience couldn't possibly let old people die starving in the streets. I mean, are you kidding me? Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers' pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers? Now, my point is not that Social Security is a bad thingI think it's fantastic. It's just that the way you get the government to do fantastic things is you find a big company willing to back them. The problem is, of course, that big companies aren't really huge fans of civil liberties. You know, it's not that they're against them; it's just there's not much money in it.

Now, if you've been reading the press, you probably didn't hear this part of the story. As Hollywood has been telling it, the great, good copyright bill they were pushing was stopped by the evil Internet companies who make millions of dollars off of copyright infringement. But it justit really wasn't true. I mean, I was in there, in the meetings with the Internet companiesactually probably all here today. And, you know, if all their profits depended on copyright infringement, they would have put a lot more money into changing copyright law. The fact is, the big Internet companies, they would do just fine if this bill passed. I mean, they wouldn't be thrilled about it, but I doubt they would even have a noticeable dip in their stock price. So they were against it, but they were against it, like the rest of us, on grounds primarily of principle. And principle doesn't have a lot of money in the budget to spend on lobbyists. So they were practical about it. "Look," they said, "this bill is going to pass. In fact, it's probably going to pass unanimously. As much as we try, this is not a train we're going to be able to stop. So, we're not going to support itwe couldn't support it. But in opposition, let's just try and make it better." So that was the strategy: lobby to make the bill better. They had lists of changes that would make the bill less obnoxious or less expensive for them, or whatever. But the fact remained at the end of the day, it was going to be a bill that was going to censor the Internet, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

So I did what you always do when you're a little guy facing a terrible future with long odds and little hope of success: I started an online petition. I called all my friends, and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with an online petition opposing this noxious bill, and I sent it to a few friends. Now, I've done a few online petitions before. I've worked at some of the biggest groups in the world that do online petitions. I've written a ton of them and read even more. But I've never seen anything like this. Starting from literally nothing, we went to 10,000 signers, then 100,000 signers, and then 200,000 signers and 300,000 signers, in just a couple of weeks. And it wasn't just signing a name. We asked those people to call Congress, to call urgently. There was a vote coming up this week, in just a couple days, and we had to stop it. And at the same time, we told the press about it, about this incredible online petition that was taking off. And we met with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with them to withdraw their support for the bill. I mean, it was amazing. It was huge. The power of the Internet rose up in force against this bill. And then it passed unanimously.

Now, to be fair, several of the members gave nice speeches before casting their vote, and in their speeches they said their office had been overwhelmed with comments about the First Amendment concerns behind this bill, comments that had them very worried, so worried, in fact, they weren't sure that they still supported the bill. But even though they didn't support it, they were going to vote for it anyway, they said, because they needed to keep the process moving, and they were sure any problems that were had with it could be fixed later. So, I'm going to ask you, does this sound like Washington, D.C., to you? Since when do members of Congress vote for things that they oppose just to keep the process moving? I mean, whoever was behind this was good.

And then, suddenly, the process stopped. Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon, put a hold on the bill. Giving a speech in which he called it a nuclear bunker-buster bomb aimed at the Internet, he announced he would not allow it to pass without changes. And as you may know, a single senator can't actually stop a bill by themselves, but they can delay it. By objecting to a bill, they can demand Congress spend a bunch of time debating it before getting it passed. And Senator Wyden did. He bought us timea lot of time, as it turned out. His delay held all the way through the end of that session of Congress, so that when the bill came back, it had to start all over again. And since they were starting all over again, they figured, why not give it a new name? And that's when it began being called PIPA, and eventually SOPA.

So there was probably a year or two of delay there. And in retrospect, we used that time to lay the groundwork for what came later. But that's not what it felt like at the time. At the time, it felt like we were going around telling people that these bills were awful, and in return, they told us that they thought we were crazy. I mean, we were kids wandering around waving our arms about how the government was going to censor the Internet. It does sound a little crazy. You can ask Larry tomorrow. I was constantly telling him what was going on, trying to get him involved, and I'm pretty sure he just thought I was exaggerating. Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period. But when the bill came back and started moving again, suddenly all the work we had done started coming together. All the folks we talked to about it suddenly began getting really involved and getting others involved. Everything started snowballing. It happened so fast.

I remember there was one week where I was having dinner with a friend in the technology industry, and he asked what I worked on, and I told him about this bill. And he said, "Wow! You need to tell people about that." And I just groaned. And then, just a few weeks later, I remember I was chatting with this cute girl on the subway, and she wasn't in technology at all, but when she heard that I was, she turned to me very seriously and said, "You know, we have to stop 'SOAP.'" So, progress, right?

But, you know, I think that story illustrates what happened during those couple weeks, because the reason we won wasn't because I was working on it or Reddit was working on it or Google was working on it or Tumblr or any other particular person. It was because there was this enormous mental shift in our industry. Everyone was thinking of ways they could help, often really clever, ingenious ways. People made videos. They made infographics. They started PACs. They designed ads. They bought billboards. They wrote news stories. They held meetings. Everybody saw it as their responsibility to help. I remember at one point during this period I held a meeting with a bunch of startups in New York, trying to encourage everyone to get involved, and I felt a bit like I was hosting one of these Clinton Global Initiative meetings, where I got to turn to every startup in theevery startup founder in the room and be like, "What are you going to do? And what are you going to do?" And everyone was trying to one-up each other.

If there was one day the shift crystallized, I think it was the day of the hearings on SOPA in the House, the day we got that phrase, "It's no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works." 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. They really brought it home for people that this was happening, that Congress was going to break the Internet, and it just didn't care.

I remember when this moment first hit me. I was at an event, and I was talking, and I got introduced to a U.S. senator, one of the strongest proponents of the original COICA bill, in fact. And I asked him why, despite being such a progressive, despite giving a speech in favor of civil liberties, why he was supporting a bill that would censor the Internet. And, you know, that typical politician smile he had suddenly faded from his face, and his eyes started burning this fiery red. And he started shouting at me, said, "Those people on the Internet, they think they can get away with anything! They think they can just put anything up there, and there's nothing we can do to stop them! They put up everything! They put up our nuclear missiles, and they just laugh at us! Well, we're going to show them! There's got to be laws on the Internet! It's got to be under control!"

Now, as far as I know, nobody has ever put up the U.S.'s nuclear missiles on the Internet. I mean, it's not something I've heard about. But that's sort of the point. He wasn't having a rational concern, right? It was this irrational fear that things were out of control. Here was this man, a United States senator, and those people on the Internet, they were just mocking him. They had to be brought under control. Things had to be under control. And I think that was the attitude of Congress. And just as seeing that fire in that senator's eyes scared me, I think those hearings scared a lot of people. They saw this wasn't the attitude of a thoughtful government trying to resolve trade-offs in order to best represent its citizens. This was more like the attitude of a tyrant. And so the citizens fought back.

The wheels came off the bus pretty quickly after that hearing. First the Republican senators pulled out, and then the White House issued a statement opposing the bill, and then the Democrats, left all alone out there, announced they were putting the bill on hold so they could have a few further discussions before the official vote. And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this, we had won. The thing that everyone said was impossible, that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream, had happened. We did it. We won.

And then we started rubbing it in. You all know what happened next. Wikipedia went black. Reddit went black. Craigslist went black. The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat-out melted. Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill that they were promoting just a couple days ago. And it was just ridiculous. I mean, there's a chart from the time that captures it pretty well. It says something like "January 14th" on one side and has this big, long list of names supporting the bill, and then just a few lonely people opposing it; and on the other side, it says "January 15th," and now it's totally reversedeveryone is opposing it, just a few lonely names still hanging on in support.

I mean, this really was unprecedented. Don't take my word for it, but ask former Senator Chris Dodd, now the chief lobbyist for Hollywood. He admitted, after he lost, that he had masterminded the whole evil plan. And he told The New York Times he had never seen anything like it during his many years in Congress. And everyone I've spoken to agrees. The people rose up, and they caused a sea change in Washingtonnot the press, which refused to cover the storyjust coincidentally, their parent companies all happened to be lobbying for the bill; not the politicians, who were pretty much unanimously in favor of it; and not the companies, who had all but given up trying to stop it and decided it was inevitable. It was really stopped by the people, the people themselves. They killed the bill dead, so dead that when members of Congress propose something now that even touches the Internet, they have to give a long speech beforehand about how it is definitely not like SOPA; so dead that when you ask congressional staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads like it's all a bad dream they're trying really hard to forget; so dead that it's kind of hard to believe this story, hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing, hard to remember how this could have gone any other way. But it wasn't a dream or a nightmare; it was all very real.

And it will happen again. Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: The enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians' eyes hasn't been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren't a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that. Even some of the biggest companies, some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which their little competitors could get censored. We can't let that happen.

Now, I've told this as a personal story, partly because I think big stories like this one are just more interesting at human scale. The director J.D. Walsh says good stories should be like the poster for Transformers. There's a huge evil robot on the left side of the poster and a huge, big army on the right side of the poster. And in the middle, at the bottom, there's just a small family trapped in the middle. Big stories need human stakes. But mostly, it's a personal story, because I didn't have time to research any of the other part of it. But that's kind of the point. We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do. They didn't stop to ask anyone for permission. You remember how Hacker News readers spontaneously organized this boycott of GoDaddy over their support of SOPA? Nobody told them they could do that. A few people even thought it was a bad idea. It didn't matter. The senators were right: The Internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn't actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else's responsibility to do this work and it's our job just to go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well, then next time they might just win. Let's not let that happen.