The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #6

who then try to get the maximum profit they can out of it.

So a researcher paid by the university or the people publishes a paper,

and at 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,

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 three billion dollars 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,

"How much would it cost to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"

And they gave some--I think it was two hundred million dollars,

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. Swartz 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 24, 2010,

Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop

on the MIT network, under the name "Garry 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 slash slash slash...number article 444024 and -25 and -26.

He wrote a Python script called keepgrabbing.pi,

which was like, keeping grabbing one article after another.

The next day, GHost laptop begins grabbing articles,

but soon, the computer's IP address is blocked. For Swartz, 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 at a certain stage, JSTOR just cuts off MIT from having access to the JSTOR database.

So there's a 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 WiFi, 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 Swartz, 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?"

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 that.

At first, the only person caught on the glitchy surveillance camera

was using the closet as a place to store bottles and cans.

But days later, it caught Swartz.

Swartz is replacing the hard drive. He takes it out of his backpack,

leans out of frame for about five minutes,

and then leaves.

And then they organized, like, a stakeout where, as he was biking home from MIT,

these cops came out from 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.

He does tell me they beat him up.

It was just devastating. 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.

[applause]

President Bush used The Patriot Act to establish a network of what they called "Electronic Crimes Task Forces".

The bill before 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 Swartz'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"

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 if for himself, didn't assign it to someone else within the office or the unit

and that's Steve Heymann.

Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largely out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz,

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 Gonzales,

a case that garnered Heymann enormous press attention and accolades.

Gonzales masterminded the theft of over a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers,

the largest such fraud in history.

Here, Heymann, describing Gonzales, 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 for money.

One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzales case was a young hacker named Jonathan James.

Believing Gonzales' 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 Swartz,

Heymann's boss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusets, Carmen Ortiz, said this:

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