Aaron Swartz – a Fighter Against the Privatization of Knowledge

January 15, 2013

TRNN Replay: Remembering Aaron Swartz who died three years ago this week. Two colleagues and friends of Aaron Swartz talk about his activism and vision of technology in the service of a more democratic and just society



Story Transcript



Now joining us to talk about Aaron the man and the significance of this case: first of all, Roy Singham. He’s the founder and chairman of Thoughtworks Inc., the company that Aaron most recently worked for. And Brian Guthrie. Brian was a coworker with Aaron, and he’s also a software developer and internet activist.

Thank you both for joining us.




By the way, these documents are academic documents. These are not, you know, corporate secrets, they’re not state secrets. These are oftenâ€”most of these documents were created over, you know, centuries of human knowledge. And so the idea that there was an economic benefit to be gained is not true. So there was no economic motivation. There was no damage done to any of the institutions. JSTOR, which was the actual company fromâ€”organization from which the documents were downloaded, was quite frankly aghast at the end that this wouldâ€”’cause they would have said, we’d settle, we don’t believe in any charges.





What this individual prosecutor did, however, in Boston, in addition to whatever political issues are undoubtedly underlying his caseâ€”this was a vindictive, mean office ofâ€”and remember, this is the federal prosecutor’s office. It is theâ€”you know, this was not a state issue. The state prosecutors in Massachusetts was not going after him. This was a federal prosecutor, you know, of Massachusetts, Carmin Ortiz. And the particular prosecutor, they were vicious over a two-year period in attempting to drive this young, beautiful boy, man, into jail.


And so a number of issues have to be called into play, in our opinion, and certainly in my opinion and Brian’s opinion, who also worked closely, you know, with Aaron. If this is allowed unchallenged, we will lose the next generation of Aarons, the next generation of the most important intellectual leaders of the planet. That’s what’s at stake. I have some personal views, which I would agree, you know, in terms of what was the underlying political motive. But I think first that the family really, you know, would want us to say this. You know, why was nobody in the federal government blocking the federal prosecution from taking on this [incompr.]

JAY: Brian, you worked alongside Aaron. Tell us a little bit about the man. What motivated him, first of all, do you think, to take these documents in the first place? I don’t think he ever denied doing it. But it was part of a broader vision he had about the world. What was that?





For example, the PACER database is a database of court documents that he helped to bring out into the open internet that PACER was charging money for. Those documents are public domain. They are funded and produced by the United States people. There’s no reason why they should be behind a paywall.

And that was the sort of thing that Aaron did. He was looking for the disconnect between the laws that we have about our information and the way in which regular people have access to that information. And that’s what he was doing here. He was trying to bring an important database of documents that should have been opened out into the world.

SINGHAM: And there’s all kinds of even [incompr.] nuances. For example, most academics who write these journals, they’re not getting paid for these materials. They’re often funded by state institutions. And soâ€”and/or the copyright has expired and these kind of things. In fact, JSTOR just last week released millions of documents, becauseâ€”.

GUTHRIE: Twenty percent of their archive.

SINGHAM: Twenty percent. One of the things that he said in his speech, I think, in 2011 was, you know, here we have the last hundreds of years of human knowledge. I as a student in a wealthy country, in a wealthy institution, I have access to this, but, you know, a young girl in India, she has no access to the world’s scientific and literary culture. I mean, this is a really dramatic change in how we think of knowledge. I mean, there was a library, and you can go read this. Now we’re saying that a poor, you know, child in some country, in Brazil, has no access to the world’s intellectual legacy. This really morally offended him. And he also understood, you know, the damage that it was going to do to society.

GUTHRIE: [incompr.] JSTOR has a mission to do public good, and they were certainly founded with good intentions. And I think that we’ve been a lot happier with the way they’ve comported themselves here than with some of the other institutions that were involved.

But Aaron’s point was that academics share access to that knowledge already. JSTOR started to charge a prescription fee to institutions to gain access to their databases. And academics already share access to that. They invite people into their networks. They’ll share passwords in order to give other people access. Academics form a community around sharing with the intent to bring that knowledge out into the world. They’re not, most of them, reflexively protective people of their research. They want more people to go out and read their research.

But people growing up and living in places without access to those expensive subscriptions don’t have the same wherewithal to gain access to that knowledge. And he wanted to change that in a really big way.

JAY: So, Roy, why does this prosecutorâ€”and as you said, it’s not likely just one prosecutor here. There’s got to be other people in the justice department that are aware of all this. Why do they go after him (same question again) so strongly? Why do they consider this so threatening?

SINGHAM: So, I mean, you know, obviously we don’t have the chanceâ€”I mean, Heymann, who is the particularly egregious prosecutor, he worked for Ortiz. He was the head of the office. The two of them have, in my opinion, a 100Â percent culpability for the overreach and for what happened here. Whether or not, you know, Holder or other people discussed this case, it’s highly implausible to me that they didn’t.

And if you look at the timing of when these charges were filed against Aaron, it was exactly at the time of, you know, Assange and Manning, and there was just this paranoia, you know, in the Justice Department, in Homeland Security, that [incompr.] There’s a generation of hackers out there that if we do not suppress and grab these people, our national security is in threat. And so the mood at the time was really, let us go out and guarantee [incompr.] even says this, not only Aaron, I mean, Jeremy Hammond, the Anonymous, a lot of these guys whoâ€”and [incompr.] who have been very active in internet freedom, they are being hunted down globally.

I mean, this isâ€”so if you ask me as a socialâ€”an historic thing, I had an internal debate with some of our colleagues last night about the press statement that we issued, because, you know, there is this question of why would Thoughtworks care as the company, ’cause we are very much calling for an investigation of prosecutorial overreach, and we’re calling also for an apology by MIT to the family and for changes in policy.

Why is that important? Isn’t internet access important? Yes. If we allow the 12-year-oldâ€”and if you look at Aaron’s site, for example, there’s a 14-year-old who posted about how Aaron is their hero. Imagine if that 14-year-old who could be the next Aaron reads this thing about, you know, hisâ€”you know, the threats of imprisonment and what happened to Aaron. That young, you know, future humanist internet, you know, revolutionary is crushed.

We have been forced into a defensive position to fight the suppression of civil resistance and disobedience. And unfortunately we, some of usâ€”that’s why it was just amazing, the last two days, some of the most creative and intelligent responses of the community towards these egregious acts.

JAY: Is part of this that, you know, the United States has military superiority over just about everybody, they have financial superiority over just about everybody? But is itâ€”and when it comes to computer technologyâ€”and they are so vulnerable on that frontâ€”that maybe they don’t have intellectual superiority, and that leaves them feeling open?

GUTHRIE: We have a narrative that we’ve constructed because technology is new and because it seems scary of the rogue hacker who can gain access to any system and do what they want with it at will, which simply isn’t true. I mean, our understanding of technology is certainly still evolving. But I think Aaron got sucked into that narrative that prosecutors can use to their advantage if they’re trying to bring home a prosecution, if they can paint Aaron in a particular way that makes him part of this unnoble, vast conspiracy of hackers. And Aaronâ€”.

JAY: Yeah. You explained something to me off-camera which is important, which is that Aaron actually didn’t hack anything. I mean, he had a password. What Aaron did is akin to somebody going into a library with their library card and photocopying books and then, you know, planning to hand out the copies, isn’t it?

SINGHAM: But remember, he didn’t even make the copies. In that case, he didn’t even make the copies.

GUTHRIE: Right. It’s equivalent to checking out a lot of books very quickly, right? Unfortunately, it impacted the system for other people because he was downloading the papers very quickly. But he didn’t do anything that any reasonable person would characterize as hacking. He didn’t break into any systems. He didn’t change any passwords. He didn’t do anything that the website he was accessing didn’t already allow people to access. He didn’t so much as change the URL, which is an extremelyâ€”

SINGHAM: Obvious.

GUTHRIE: â€”an extremely obviousâ€”it’s something that increasingly has come to be used as a tool to accuse people of hacking. If you ever changed the URL of a YouTube video, there are people who would claim that under the wrong circumstances that’s hacking. And Aaron didn’t even go that far. He simply wasn’t that person.

JAY: So doesn’t this meanâ€”I mean, if an ordinary student that had no history of internet activism, of having had such high-level skills, if an ordinary student had done the same thing, it seems like it’s not likely to have had the same kind of prosecutorial effort here. Were they not going after him because he’s Aaron Swartz and because they’re afraid of what people like Aaron are capable of?

SINGHAM: I mean, that’s my opinion, that this is a calculated move be the authorities to suppress the next generation. And, by the way, these civil disobedience are the same as Dr.Â King, the same as Gandhi, right? The argument that, you know, Gandhi broke the law because he called for the salt tax or, you know, Dr.Â King violated the law by, you know, breaking segregation, if a small transgression of an unjust lawâ€”. I mean, Aaron, you know, was a risk-taker. He believedâ€”you know, and whether or not he could have possibly foreseen this [incompr.] absurd response is probably unlikely. But he understood that the laws that were no longer keeping up with the changes of technology, that laws that had passed 30 or 40 years ago had no relevance in this new area, were being used by a small group of very large corporations to privatize and monetize what was the human legacy of intellectual capital. That’s why even The Economist, not known for its progressive views, called him the “commons man” and not [incompr.] in the sense of the defender or one of the great defenders of the concept of the commons [incompr.] and, as we know, that complete erosion. So Aaron in that sense was taking on directly the economic interests of the people who are trying to privatize human knowledge.


JAY: Yeah. Brian, talk a little bit about the other areas that Aaron worked in, ’cause you told me off-camera this actually was really a very small piece of Aaron’s activism.

GUTHRIE: Yeah. I mean, Aaronâ€”again, we know him as a technologist, but technology to him was a tool. It’s something that he wanted to leverage to really make change in the world. The work we were doing with him at Thoughtworks involved building a piece of software using the same tools and techniques that your startups in Silicon Valley are using to get people to post more on Facebook, applying that same level of analytical detail to encourage people to do good in the world and bring their voice out into the collective of people who are trying to change things.

And so to that end, they’re working on a piece of software that he intended to bring out and makeâ€”it’s available for free now. You can download it yourself. It’s released under an open-source license. He wanted to use that to bring the most advanced tools for social activism on the internet in the world to people who might not otherwise have access to them without a subscription fee.

SINGHAM: Yeah. I mean, [incompr.] people think of him in some ways as a global Western hero. He was deeply an internationalist. I mean, in this particular [incompr.] he realized that the knowledge about campaigning and structuring right now is a wealthy-country phenomenon, and that even the progressives, there’s a risk that the agendas are set not by the people themselves, but by an elite, even an elite that’s pretending to speaking on behalf of the people. And so he was fiercely a democrat in the small-D sense of saying, what happens if I’m a villager in Burundi and I want to have my campaign around whatever my issues are, and I don’t want that agenda to be [incompr.] by somebody in Washington, or even [incompr.] person in New York, how do they use that [incompr.] cell phones and all these things. He was an incredibly advanced thinker about the nature of political power, how to democratize access, how the internet ought to have been used to disempower wealth accumulation and power accumulation. He was really one of the last standing, you know, in that sense, humanists who fought aggregated power and totalitarian states.

JAY: Brian, people like Aaron usually are able to make a lot of money, and that’s what they focus on. But he never seemed all that interested in it, if that’s whatâ€”if I understand correctly.

GUTHRIE: Yeah. Itâ€”to his enormous credit, you know, I think he could have gone almost anywhere and done almost anything. I think he fell into money rather than seeking it. And, you know, it’s to his enormous credit that he continued to pursue opportunities, wherever he could find them, to do good rather than make money. And he actively pursued that, rather than staying with the company helped found, Reddit.com, after it sailed to CondÃ© Nast, he parted ways with them and used that money the same way we’d use oxygen, not to help propel him into the ranks of the wealthy, but to keep him going and give him the freedom to do what he needed to do to improve the world.

SINGHAM: Yeah, I mean, justâ€”you know, I mean, I think peopleâ€”I mean, Larry said it in his pieces. It wasn’t a lot of money. It wasn’t as much money as people think.


SINGHAM: And he was only one of the owners. And he pretty much decimated that in the cause of all these things, PACER, livingâ€”you know, he wasn’t a man of means.


SINGHAM: Right? And so there’s a little bit of a misleading thing thatâ€”to believe that he sat there. So, therefore, here is this guy. And Iâ€”as a technologist, I’m very worried that young technical people are given the beautiful pictures of Steve Jobs as an icon. The human race needs Aaron Swartz as an icon, not Steve Jobs, because we are lucky, I mean, in our industry, because we get to do things we like for a living [inaud.] What do you use that for? And Aaron, in that sense, [incompr.] in my mind, the most important role model of your generation, certainly in the United States, and, I would argue, for somebody of privilege in the world, that there cannot beâ€”.

And, you know, it’s hard for me. And I think Aaronâ€”and, I mean, you know, you and I are in this incredibly fortunate thing, ’cause we spent a lot of time with Aaron in the last, you know, six or eight months. And I have cried for two days straight, as you have. And it’s only today, in day three, that we can sort of begin to rebuild Aaron’s legacy in the way that we know he would want us to.

The thing that really disturbs me in all this kind of stuff is that they want to pigeonhole Aaron into too many narrow sets, right? It’s the hacker or the internet guy. I have metâ€”you and I have met lots of people. Can you imagine a deeper-caring person? I mean, it’s just incredible. I mean, I still cry. I mean, he would touch anybody and do anything. Iâ€”we had a meeting, you know, recently about how could we change American views towards Muslims. Here’s this young, beautiful Jewish kid. He walks into a room with a bunch of, you know, Muslim activists saying, we have to do something to change American opinion. He gets up on a white board and he says, listen, what we need to do is have a war against the merchants of hate. [incompr.] He walked in there forâ€”what, you guys were in there for an hour or two.


SINGHAM: He would do those kind of things. His breadth of the issues that he would concern with were truly astounding. And a lot of the people, because he was in that sense quite a radicalâ€”I mean, he read Chomsky when he was 15. And those kind of things, again, people don’t want to talk about. He was deeply unsatisfied. In fact, one of his speeches on SOPA, you know, when he first called about it, he says, listen, I’m not interested in copyright law; I want to deal with health care access, you know, I want to deal with this financial crisis, I want to understand how we don’t have the Congress in the pay of these military contractors. I mean, he was thinking about every issue.

JAY: Roy, a lot of people watching are going to askâ€”you know, are going to be asking the question, you know, why didn’t he want to fight this case. Now, we know that Aaron suffered from depression. And soâ€”I mean, it’s not one and one equals two that he was facing a jail sentence and this was his choice; he wasn’tâ€”you know, I mean, the depression obviously played a major role here.

GUTHRIE: One of the things that’s come out into the internet after his passing is thatâ€”one of the things I’ve learnedâ€”I had no the problem was this bigâ€”is that the minimum amount of money to fight a federal grand jury case, even if you’re completely innocent, even if you do, I guess, one day of trial and then walk away, you’re looking at $1.5Â million. I can’t imagine the kind of [crosstalk]

SINGHAM: Money he didn’t have.


SINGHAM: And we were trying to help raise that money for him. I kept on personally saying, Aaron, the community will come to your defense. But he was such a polite, private person, that was just inconceivable to him. Yeah. And I think, you know, one never knows what happened to somebody’sâ€”in their brain. And, you know, I’ve had to deal with it in my personal life, people who I know are depressed. And I’ve thought a lot about this question of depression. So I’m aware that depression is a complex thing. And he was very open about it. I mean, very few people of his stature would have been as open and honest as he was about this thing. You know.

And I feel that, you know, I can say safely that he was loved. I mean, you know, his partner and his parents are just amazing people. You know, he knew that he was loved. But it is difficult, no matter what anybody says, to have somebody who’s thinking about the most deepest future of the human race to have this distraction, to be embarrassed about himself, to know there’s a possibility of going to jail. I haveâ€”none of us in the family or in the company allege a direct correlation. But, you know, we did care for him. [incompr.] loved him.

And, of course, any time you have a tragic thing, we all had to go through a self-realizationâ€”did we do enough, could we have done more. I mean, there’s no way around that as a grieving process. But that misses the point. What if he hadn’t? Would that change the outcome of going after prosecutorial reach? Would that excuse what MIT did? Would not the same terror to a young person fearing a jail sentence have occurred?

It doesn’t in the end matter, really, about the thing. It’s personally a tragedy for Aaron and personally a tragedy for all of us who loved him. And that’s a horrible thing, and we want accountability for that.

But the broader is much deeper: intimidate the next generation of intellectual fighters, and we have created the world’s greatest totalitarian state that dwarfs 1984.

JAY: Alright. Thank you both for joining us.

GUTHRIE: Thank you.



ADAM SWARTZ: The internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work and it’s our job just to go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well, then next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen.

TEXT ON SCREEN: Aaron Swartz 1986-2013.

