The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #5

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 a system in 17 libraries across the country that 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 Corps,

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. I mean, it was just a joke.

In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Corps, there was a Wizard of Oz,

you know, the Munchkins singing, so a videoclip came up:

We represent the lollipop guild...

But of course, I get this phone calls from Steve Shultz and Aaron, saying,

"Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps."

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 am thinking about an intervention on the PACER problem."

Schultz had already developed a program that could automatically download PACER documents

from the trial libraries.

Swartz 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 is not going quite according to plan.

And data started to come in, and come in, and come in

and soon there was 760 GB of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.

Using information retrieved from the trial libraries,

Swartz 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 exceed 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 Swartz's parents' house in Illinois.

And I get a tweet from his mother, saying, "Call me!!"

So, I think, like, what the hell's going on here?

And so, finally I get 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 in his room.

I remember being home that day, and wondering why this car was driving down our driveway,

and just driving back up. That's weird!

Like, five years later I read this FBI file, 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 called him up on the phone,

and tried to sucker him into coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.

He said he went home and lay 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 could 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, Swartz moves beyond technology, and 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 the political process.

He was sort of learning about new community and new sets 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 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 to organize people over the Internet who care about progressive politics

and moving the country toward a more progressive direction

to kind of come together, join our e-mail list, join our campaigns

and help us to 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,

because it can be manipulated like any social system."

But his passion for knowledge and libraries didn't take a back seat.

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 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 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 licenses fees are so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in United States,

don't have this kind of access. They are locked out from all of these journals.

They are 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, 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 has been locked up and put online by an handful of for-profit corporations

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