The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #7

"Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,

and whether you take documents, data, or dollars."

It is not true. It's obviously not true.

I'm not saying it's harmless,

and I'm not saying that we shouldn't criminalize stealing of information,

but you got to be much more subtle

in trying to figure out exactly which kinds of harms are harmful here.

So the thing about a crowbar is, every time I break into a place with a crowbar,

I do damage. There is no doubt about it.

But when Aaron writes a script that says

download download download, a hundred times in a second,

there's no obvious damage to anybody.

If he does that for the purpose of gathering an archive to do academic research on it,

there is never any damage to anybody.

He wasn't stealing. He wasn't selling what he got or giving it away.

He was making a point, for as far as I could tell.

The arrest took its toll on Swartz.

He just wouldn't talk about it.

I mean, he was very stressed.

If you would thought that the FBI was going to come to your doorstep any day,

anytime you went down the hall, even to do your laundry,

and they'd break in into your apartment 'cause you left the door unlocked,

like...I'd be pretty stressed,

and it was clear, and so Aaron was always sort of like in a dour mood.

He wouldn't give off any sensitive information about his whereabouts during this time,

because he was so afraid that the FBI would be waiting for him.

It was a time of unprecedented social and political activism.

Time Magazine would later name, as their 2011 Person of the Year, "The Protester".

There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.

WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables,

Manning had been under arrest at the time,

it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak.

Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble that

has a lot of hackers in its ranks,

were going on various sprees of sorts.

If you compare that to what he did,

this stuff should have been left behind for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,

in a kind of private, professional matter.

It should have never gotten the attention of the criminal system.

It just didn't belong there.

Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal

that involved three months in prison, time in an halfway house,

and a year of home detention,

all without the use of a computer.

It was on the condition that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.

Here we are:
we have no discovery, no evidence whatsoever

about what the government's case is,

and we have to make this immense decision

where the lawyer is pushing you to do this,

the government is giving you a non-negotiable demand,

and you're told that your likelihood of prevailing is small,

so whether you're guilty or not, you're better off taking the deal.

Boston has its own Computer Crimes Division,

lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need.

So, you know, you can imagine all sorts of cases that will be really hard to prosecute,

because you've got some criminals in Russia,

or you've got some people inside of a corporation

that are gonna five hundred dollar lawyers or seven hundred dollar-an-hour lawyers

sitting down against you, and then you've got this case with this kid,

which is pretty easy to prove that he did something,

and he's already marked himself as a troublemaker with the FBI,

so why not go as tough as you can against that guy?

It's good for you the prosecutor. It's good for the Republic,

'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types.

I was so scared.

I was so scared of having my computer seized.

I was so scared of going to jail because of my computer being seized.

I had confidential material from sources from my previous work on my laptop,

and that is, above all, my priority--is to keep my sources safe.

I was so scared of what was going to happen to Ada.

Aaron told me that they'd offered him a deal,

and he finally just said that he would take it if I told him to,

and I say--I came real close to saying, "Take it."

He had these--he had developed, like, serious political aspirations

in the intervening time, between when, you know,

that moment when he ended that entrepreneurial start-up life,

and begun this new life that had come to this political activism,

and he just didn't believe that he could continue in his life with a felony.

You know, he said to me one day, we were walking by the White House,

and he said to me, "They don't let felons work there."

And you know he really--he really wanted that to be his life.

He hadn't killed anybody. He hadn't hurt anybody.

He hadn't, like, stolen money.

He hadn't done anything that seemed felony-worthy, and...

there is this idea that there is no reason that he should be labelled a felon,

and taken away his right to vote in many states

for doing what he did. That's just outrageous.

It makes sense for him to be maybe fined a bunch of money,

or asked not to come back to MIT again.

But to be a felon? To face jail time?

Swartz turned down the plea deal.

Heymann redoubled his efforts.

Heymann continued to press us at all levels.

Even with the physical evidence seized from Aaron's

Acer computer harddrive and USB drive,

the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.

Why was Aaron Swartz downloading articles from JSTOR,

and just what did he plan to do with them?

The government claim was that he was planning to publish these.

We don't really know whether that was his real intention

because Aaron also had a history of doing projects where he'd analyze giant data sets of articles

in order to learn interesting things about them.

The best evidence for that was that when he was at Stanford,

he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.

In a project with Stanford law students,

Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

He uncovered troubling connections between funders of legal research

and favorable results.

He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies

giving money to law professors who wrote law review articles

which were then beneficial to, like, Exxon during an oil spill.

So it was a very corrupt system of funding, you know, vanity research.

Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.

In theory, he could have been doing the same thing about the JSTOR database.

That would have been completely okay.

If he were, on the other hand, intending to create a competitive service to JSTOR,

like, we're going to set up our own, you know,

access to the Harvard Law Review and charge, you know, money for it,

then, okay, now it seems like criminal violation

because you are commercially trying to exploit this material,

but it's kind of crazy to imagine that that was what he was doing.

So, but then there's the middle case: well, what if he was just trying to liberate it for all of the developing world?

But depending on what he was doing, it creates a very different character

to how the law should be thinking about it. The government was prosecuting him

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes