The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #11

When Jimmy Wales put his support toward blacking out Wikipedia,

the number five most popular website in the world,

this is a website that's seven 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 Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill

that they were promoting just a couple days ago.

Within 24 hours, the number of opponents of SOPA in Congress

went from this...

to this.

To see congressmen and senators slowly flip sides throughout the day of the blackout

was pretty unbelievable.

There was like a hundred representative swing.

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 pipedream,

had happened.

We did it.

We won.

This is a historic week in internet politics--maybe American politics.

The thing that we heard from people in Washington, D.C., from the staffers on Capitol Hill was:

they received more emails and more phone calls on SOPA Blackout Day

than they'd ever received about anything.

I think that was an extremely exciting moment.

This was the moment when the internet had grown up, politically.

It was exhilarating because it's hard to believe it actually happened.

It's hard to believe a bill with so much financial power behind it

didn't simply sail through the Congress.

And not only did not sail through, it didn't pass at all.

It's easy sometimes to feel like you're powereless,

like when you come out on the streets and you march and you yell and nobody hears you.

But I'm here to tell you today, you are powerful.

[Crowd cheers]

So, yeah, maybe sometimes you feel like you're not being listened to, but I'm here to tell you that you are.

You are being listened to. You are making a difference.

You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.

[Crowd cheers]

Stop PIPA.

Stop SOPA.

[Crowd cheers]

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.

For him, it was more important to be sure that you made a small change

than to play a small part in a big change.

But SOPA was like playing a major part in a major change,

and so for him, it was kind of this proof of concept

like, "Okay, what I want to do with my life is change the world."

"I think about it in this really scientific way of measuring my impact,

and this shows that it's possible."

"The thing that I want to do with my life is possible."

"I have proved that I can do it,

that I, Aaron Swartz, can change the world."

For a guy who never really thought he had done much--which was Aaron--

was one of the few moments where you could really see

that he felt like he had done something good,

feeling like here is his maybe one and only victory lap.

Everyone said there was no way we could stop SOPA.

We stopped it.

This is three outrageously good victories, and the year isn't even over yet.

I mean, if there's a time to be positive, it's now.

You know, he wins at SOPA a year after he's arrested.

It's not unambiguously happy moments. There's a lot going on.

He's so attuned towards participating in the political process, you can't stop him.

The list of organizations Swartz founded or co-founded is enormous,

and years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance,

Swartz was already concerned.

It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax

that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying program is.

And if the answer is: "Oh, we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them"

then that's an awful lot of people.

It'd be one thing if they said, "Look, we know the number of telephones we're spying on,

we don't know exactly how many real people that corresponds to."

but they just came back and said, "We can't give you a number at all."

That's pretty--I mean, that's scary, is what it is.

And they put incredible pressure on him, took away all of the money he had made.

They, you know, threatened to take away his physical freedom.

Why'd they do it, you know? I mean, well, why are they going after whistleblowers?

You know, why are they going after people who tell the truth

about all sorts of things, I mean, from the banks, to war, to just sort of government transparency.

So secrecy serves those who are already in power,

and we are living in an era of secrecy that coincides with an era where the government is doing, also,

a lot of things that are probably illegal and unconstitutional.

So, those two things are not coincidences.

It's very clear that this technology has been developed

not for small countries overseas, but right here, for use in the United States, by the U.S. government.

The problem with the spying program is it's this sort of long, slow expansion, you know,

going back to the Nixon administation, right,

obviously it became big after 9/11 under George W. Bush,

and Obama has continued to expand it, and the problems have slowly grown worse and worse,

but there's never been this moment you can point to and say,

"Okay, we need to galvanize opposition today because today is when it matters..."

The prosecution, in my estimation of Aaron Swartz, was about sending a particular, laserlike message

to a group of people that the Obama administration sees as politically threatening,

and that is, essentially, the hacker, the information, and the democracy activist community,

and the message that the Obama administration wanted to send to that particular community was,

in my estimation, "We know you have the ability to make trouble for the establishment,

and so we are going to try to make an example out of Aaron Swartz

to scare as many of you as possible into not making that trouble."

And the government said, "Oh, the legal opinions we're using

to legalize the spying program are also classified,

so we can't even tell you which laws we're using to spy on you."

You know, every time they can say, "Oh, this is another instance of cyberwar.

The cybercriminals are attacking us again. We're all in danger. We're all under threat."

They use those as excuses to push through more and more dangerous laws.

[Interviewer] And so just to follow--personally, how do you feel the fight is going?

It's up to you!

-I know. It's just that we gotta, you know...

You know, there's sort of these two polarizing perspectives, right,

everything is great, the internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everything's going to be fantastic

or everything is terrible,

the internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying,

and controlling what we say.

And the thing is, both are true, right?

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