The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #10

Aaron thought he could change the world just by explaining the world very clearly to people.

[RT interviewer] 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.

[Narrator] Swartz'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.

[Ekersley] And one of the first things I did was to call Aaron.

And 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,

but started in the fall of 2010.

Aaron was one of the most prominent people in a community of people

who helped 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 that 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 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 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 monied 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 it's 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 forty United States senators on that bill as co-sponsors,

so they were already a long, long way to getting the

sixty votes to have it clear all the procedural hoops.

Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period.

Swartz and Demand Progress were able to marshal enormous support using traditional outreach,

combined with commonly used voiceover IP, to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

I've 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 oughta ask some nerds what this thing really does. [laughter]

Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds...

[laughter]

Really?

[laughter]

"Nerds"?

[laughter]

You know, I think, actually the word you're looking for is "experts"...

[laughter]

to enlighten you so your laws don't backfire [audience laughter and applause]

and 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 X,Y,Z."

And Gingrich 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.

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 Go Daddy becomes a supporter of the bill,

tens of thousands of users transferred their domain names in protest.

Within a week, a humbled Go Daddy reverses their position on SOPA.

When the congress people that supported the record and movie industries,

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 our arguments were starting to resonate.

It was like Aaron had been striking a match and it was being blown out,

striking another one, and it was being blown out,

and finally he'd managed to catch enough kindling that the flame actually caught,

and then it turned into this roaring blaze.

On January 16, 2012, the White House issued a statement

saying they didn't support the bill.

And then this happened:

I'm a big believer that we should be dealing with issues of piracy,

and we should deal with them in a serious way, but this bill is not the right bill.

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