Aaron Swartz, the internet pioneer behind Reddit and Creative Commons, faced a federal conspiracy charge after downloading 5 million JSTOR articles to expose paywall injustices. Despite legal access, prosecutors used his "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto" and testimony from journalist Quinn Norton to seek 35 years in prison, ignoring that he intended political reform rather than profit. While Swartz successfully mobilized crowds against SOPA, his refusal of a plea deal led to his suicide in January 2013, prompting posthumous legislative efforts like "Aaron's Law" and immediate policy shifts by JSTOR and the Biden administration to expand public access to knowledge. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Migrant Camps GoFundMe Efforts00:03:11
This is an iHeart podcast.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Hey, everybody, Robert here.
It's the Christmas 2 Parter, and every year we try to use our holiday episodes to do something good.
This year, we're asking you to support the mutual aid project that James Stout over at It Could Happen Here has been a part of for nearly six months in a remote part of the U.S.-Mexico border near Yacumba, California.
While you're hopefully warm and dry, the Border Patrol is detaining thousands of migrants, including children and the elderly, in the desert without food, water, or shelter when overnight temperatures drop below freezing.
Volunteers provide hot meals, blankets, and toys for children.
They build shelters, even though the Border Patrol destroys them and keep rebuilding them so that people have a place to sleep out in the freezing wind.
Everyone there, including James, has spent a lot of their own money supporting this effort.
And you can hear more about the efforts of volunteers over on It Could Happen Here.
But your support would mean the world to James and the other people trying to help migrants over at the border.
And of course, those migrants themselves.
You can donate to this effort at GoFundMe.
If you just type Yacoomba, J-A-C-U-M-B-A, migrant camps, GoFundMe, Yacumba Migrant Camps, GoFundMe, you'll get it.
Or you can use the link tinyurl.com/slash border a GFM.
That'll take you right to the fundraiser.
Illegal File Access Plans00:15:40
So thank you.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
Welcome back.
Why are you doing your radio, boys?
Super slam edition.
Yeah, why are you doing this?
Welcome back.
What is the holidays?
This is the morning podcast.
Yeah.
With Robert Evans and Robert Evans and Sophie Lichterman and Margaret Killjoy.
We're the Opie and Anthony of not having one of our people clearly be a sex pest.
Wow.
Wow.
What an introduction.
I think you might have saved the best one for the end of the year.
Great job, Robert.
I went into it.
I actually like Opie and And I remember them from when I was like, I can't, right?
They were, they were big.
And I had been aware of a few of their sketches.
I was never a regular listener.
So I just, you know, I was aware they were thinking.
I was like, I wonder what happened to them.
It feels like they should be a big thing in podcasts, given where they were.
I read up and I was like, oh, that's what happened to them.
Oh, my.
As an end of the year treat.
Great job, Robert.
Yes, I wasn't surprised.
It wasn't like one of those things that you hear and you're like, oh my God, how could that have been going?
Like, yeah, that completely scants.
Yeah.
When are we surprised by when people who have too much power abuse that power?
Yeah.
Well, particularly men in media, men in comedy, right?
Yeah.
Where it's like, yeah, very close.
Men in bands.
It's roughly the same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're when they're one of them is not a sex pest.
Yeah.
We'd love to see the statistic by occupation.
Yes.
Anyway, we're back.
We're continuing our series on Aaron Schwartz, one of the people who invented the internet as we know it.
And where we are right now, Aaron's in his early 20s, you know, less than a decade into his career.
He's been part of the creation of RSS.
He's been part of the creation of the open library.
He's one of the founders of Reddit.
And he's helped to create the Creative Commons, right?
If that is what you can say about your life at the end of 40 years of full-time work, you have had a full career, right?
Aaron is like eight or nine, less than a decade in, right?
Like just an astonishing CV, you know, if you want to think of it that way.
Yeah.
The next thing he's going to get on after he bounces, you know, from Reddit, he goes to this thing.
He writes, helps write the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.
Aaron returns to Cambridge Mass and he gets involved with a new project, public.resource.org, which wanted to increase access to public legal documents.
Court documents are collectively owned by all of us here in the old loss of status unitas, right?
We own them all.
None of them are property of a court, of a lawyer, or whatever, right?
If it's introduced in court, it's everybody's.
That is the way this shit works with very few exceptions.
But that doesn't mean you can just get access to it for free, right?
Theoretically, if you like go to a legal library or something, you can get it.
But like if you want to get it from the government, the government provides access to all this stuff that we all own via a system called PACER.
And as a journalist, having used PACER, I can tell you it sucks boiling dog shit.
It is a fucking horrible program.
It's really badly coded.
It's very expensive to use if you're trying to get any meaningful amount of information.
And this is a problem because this is access to stuff people need for their own legal cases.
Lawyers need to defend their clients.
Journalists need to report on things that involve the law.
This is all critical part of engaging with the legal system and it's paywalled effectively, right?
And in fact, because of how expensive it is, the government was profiting at this point by about $150 million a year, you know, off of the fees they cause.
It's not insignificant.
And, you know, in addition to that, it's just a fucking nightmare to use.
So the plan that this organization, Aaron doesn't found it, but he's like one of the first people on it.
The plan that the public.resource.org has is we want to get journalists, lawyers, researchers, people who are using PACER and getting access to documents to send them to us, which is perfectly legal, right?
You get a document from PACER, belongs to all of us, send it to us and we will digitize it and put it online, right?
And over time, we can collect as much of this stuff as possible in a place that's free to use and well-coded and searchable so that people can get better.
Like, right?
Very good idea.
And again, absolutely 100% no, no legal problems with this plan, right?
Well, I mean, it might piss people off.
Yeah, it might piss people off, right?
Because the government's got a vig on this, but that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong by having people do this.
Right around this time, though, the government has launched a project to allow, the idea was like, we want to increase access to PACER files for free.
And so a handful of libraries basically had access to PACER without using money.
So you could go to those libraries, access documents, print them out if you wanted, right?
Or save them on a hard drive or whatever, right?
Aaron writes some code for this organization to allow him to automate this process.
So in very short order, he has downloaded 20% of the database of all American legal filings, right?
A lot of stuff.
Again, not at all illegal.
This is everybody's property.
There's nothing that makes this at all.
But the FBI gets on his ass, right?
Because PACER notices one guy is doing an awful lot of downloading.
What's going on?
And the Fed starts.
They send a federal agent to his house to stalk him, to see if it's like his family's house.
And he is eventually confronted by the FBI about the downloads, right?
And they let him know, like, yeah, we have been following you.
There's a file on you.
And again, Aaron has not done anything wrong.
He has not done anything that there is any way this could be illegal, right?
What do you think about it?
How possibly could you be committing a crime by wanting to have more access to the law?
Right.
What is, what is the potential?
But the feds be the feds and they come after him.
You're fucking with the money.
You know, it doesn't matter about law.
Yeah.
And I think they're also just like, they don't know what's going on.
And that's just, you know, if you're the FBI, you handle every problem by sending a federal agent out after somebody, right?
Aaron doesn't get any trouble for this because he has, again, he's done nothing wrong.
But this makes him very paranoid, right?
And it makes him very angry because this is his first interaction with how fucking scary the feds are, right?
That like, they were surveilling my home.
They have a file on me because I wanted to increase access that people have to the law.
I wanted to give people more access to the law.
And the law came out.
Like, yeah, this fucks him up somewhat, right?
Yeah.
Not hard to understand why.
It's like if you took a bunch of pictures of national parks and were like, here's a bunch of free pictures of national parks.
And then the federal government was like, how dare you take copies of the thing that we all own?
Yeah, yeah.
So Aaron's on the government's radar now.
And unfortunately, the fact that he has not done anything wrong is not a defense to the feds continuing to look at you, right?
And once you're on their radar, you tend to stay there.
And I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again.
A year later, in September 2010, Schwartz connected a refurbished Acer laptop to MIT's terminal in Building 16, a modernist glassed and concrete structure on the campus.
Registered as a guest on the system he had used most of his life, he signed on to JSTOR, an online library of academic journals that universities pay yearly subscription fees of up to tens of thousands to access.
Using a script he had built, not unlike the PACER crawler, Schwartz began to download an extraordinary volume of articles.
Over the course of the next three months, he found ways to circumvent attempts to block his connection, eventually hardwiring his laptop directly to the school's servers from a restricted utility closet.
By January of 2011, he had downloaded nearly 5 million documents from JSTOR's database.
Hell yeah.
Now, this is cool.
And a reasonable person might say, what's the big deal, right?
Aaron is allowed to access this stuff.
He is a Harvard fellow at this point.
And MIT gives them access to their stuff.
So he is allowed to go to MIT, use their JSTOR access, download as many files as he wants.
That is not a crime.
It is a violation of policy that I think the school probably could have chosen to like maybe press charge if they'd wanted to for going.
But even then, it's kind of, he did, it doesn't break in.
He doesn't like bust a lock.
He just opens a closet he's not supposed to be in and leaves a laptop there hardwired in.
It's, we could say sketchy.
I'm not surprised that the school took an interest in this.
Yeah.
But it's not, this is not a matter of because they didn't think they didn't think we need to make sure that someone who has free access doesn't download 5 million files.
Right, right.
And it is, depending on what he had intended to do with those files, it could be illegal.
A lot of those files are public resources.
Yeah.
Copyright free.
There's stuff that is old enough that there's no copyright on it.
A lot of those files are things he could have given out to whoever wanted.
Not all of them, though.
A lot of them are not.
If he had chosen to digitize all of that and put it up for free, that would have been illegal.
Not saying it's wrong.
I don't believe it is wrong, but that would have been a crime, right?
But he doesn't do that.
He doesn't ever get to that point.
And we don't know that that's what he intended to do.
This is a very important point.
What happens is that MIT notices what's going on, that this laptop's been put here.
Someone's in here.
Somebody's downloading all these files.
They put a hidden camera in the closet.
The camera captures Schwartz going in and changing out the hard drive once it fills up to put a new one in.
And they contact law enforcement and he gets busted, right?
There's a grand jury thing that's formed and they, you know, the feds present evidence as to kind of like what is, you know, he's been doing and he's going to end up getting indicted.
And again, we don't know why Aaron wanted those files.
For one thing, you know, if the feds had really cared about, if the concern was actual criminality, they would have waited to see if he was going to break the law.
They did not.
They come after him before that can ever happen.
They are just trying to catch this kid because he's on their radar, right?
Yeah.
And they don't give a shit if he's doing anything.
And again, I don't morally think it would have been wrong if he stole those, but that is illegal, right?
That is a crime, right?
But if they, if they waited until he broke the law, then it would be the cat would be out of the bag and the files would all be uploaded.
And so they wanted to stop him before he broke the law, which should be, it would be morally, it's morally wrong of the feds to stop someone before they break the law out of a situation.
And again, we don't know that he, and I'm going to explain why we don't know that he would have done that.
I think they didn't want to wait in case he wasn't going to break the law, right?
That's kind of where I am.
You know, I don't know.
We're talking about it.
No, totally, because he could have just had them been like, I want a database of this in case the laws change around it or whatever.
And we'll talk about, there's a couple other things he could have been doing.
What's important is that when he gets in trouble for this, he has not actually broken a law, right?
The feds are going to argue he is.
He has not actually yet done anything that is definitely criminal activity.
And now there are some theories as to why he might have wanted these files.
By this point, Aaron has, again, had another shift in his interests.
He's less interested, actually, at this point.
A lot of his friends will say he's not really that big into copyright stuff at this point.
He's moved on.
He writes some stuff about this too, where he's like, that was, you know, an earlier point to me.
That's not my focus right now.
He has gotten obsessed with having an impact in politics using his knowledge of code and technology to further progressive politics, right?
That is what Aaron is into right now.
One of the things he is doing is actually, a lot of it's kind of open source journalism, right?
He has just recently finished a massive project where he basically built a database of all of these publications of legal scholars and he used the algorithms he was crafting to comb through them to find connections between legal scholars who have been hired as consultants by various corporations and are receiving money from those corporations and then produce legal filings that become part of legal theory that benefits those corporations.
This is the kind of thing you can only do when you have a massive data set and you are able to build connections between the data, right?
And as a result of this, he's able to prove that legal theory is being crafted for pay by capitalists who are using legal scholars in a way that is very fucked up to push changes in the laws, right?
They are hiring these people.
These people then independently publish stuff that is helping these companies, right?
That's the kind of thing you have to have a huge data set to show, right?
That is something Aaron does.
He proves this beyond a shadow of a fucking doubt.
Not that that surprises anybody who listens to this show, but like, and that is a potential use of the files he was using that is in no way illegal.
That makes so much sense.
That's this is kind of mind-blowing because I, again, I only had the Cliff Notes version of Aaron's life.
And like, so I had the like and that, you know, download them to share them or whatever.
And I, I did, I liked it then, but this is like, yeah, yeah.
It is a good point.
And like, yeah.
That would have been heroic and illegal, which again, you and I, I don't give a shit morally that it's illegal.
I think that would have been a perfectly ethical thing to do.
But there's a very good chance based on what he was doing, he had absolutely no intent to carry out.
He was doing something else that's rad, but that was in no way illegal.
And he's also, he's real smart and he knows the feds are on him, which does make it seem less likely that he was specifically planning on breaking the law, especially breaking a law that like because this took a long time, right?
He was like going and replacing the hard drive and shit, right?
And so he knew that the feds were on him.
So if he was like, oh, I got to do this and get them up and it doesn't matter if I go down because I did it.
He would have done it a lot.
He would have done that a lot faster, maybe.
I think one of the things Quinn Norton will say also is that like, if he had been planning to do this big illegal thing, I knew a bunch of hackers.
There were other ways to crack that data and get it that would not have involved him personally doing it.
Yeah.
This was a thing he knew the people to get to get involved with, right?
There would have been a way if that had been his plan.
I do think based on what I have read, based on what he was doing at this point, I think it's likelier he had some sort of plan to analyze the data and use it for a project as opposed to he wanted to post it up, right?
Again, I would have had no issue if he had of.
I just, that's what seems most likely to me based on what he was doing, right?
Oh, that's fascinating.
And as the new, again, as the New Yorker notes, this was part of a pattern in his career.
And I'm going to quote from that again.
Five or six years ago, at an education and democracy meetup, he asked if anyone was going to be in Washington, D.C. and could pick up some files.
He was compiling a report about the relation between candidates' wealth and their electoral success.
And while successful candidates' financial disclosure records were available on the internet, unsuccessful candidates' records, while public, were not online.
If you wanted to see them, you were supposed to make paper copies in a library, but he wanted digital files so he could analyze the data.
Alec Resnick was planning to be in D.C. and volunteered for the task.
Resnick spent a couple of days in a library attempting to steal the files in digital form, got caught, lied about it, and was held there for most of the night by police.
He wasn't put out by the experience.
The police had been very nice about it, he said.
Schwartz found the story endearing and hilarious, and he and Resnick became close friends.
And so to the extent, again, if that's what Aaron was doing, he probably thought if I get caught, that's the worst case scenario, right?
Library Data Theft Attempt00:03:46
You know, they, they are a little sketched out.
They take me into custody and then they find out I didn't have, I wasn't planning to do anything illegal with it, right?
I have an, I have a right to this data and I have a right to do what I was doing with it.
It was just kind of sketchy the way I went about it because I didn't want to ask, right?
And that is, you know, you can say the safer thing to do would have been to have approached MIT and say, hey, I want to use your JSTOR to download fucking 10 million files to do this big, large data analysis.
He had the right to do that.
It probably would have worked.
But you know, Aaron, right?
Yeah, he's a professional break things person.
And he's a.
He has a bit of that to him, right?
Yeah.
And he's also kind of, he is enough of a child of privilege where he's not used to, even probably with the feds after him.
Maybe I'm, I don't know him and I might, but like neither, neither do I.
Yeah.
That seems plausible based on what we do know about him, right?
Yeah.
So to do whatever work he had planned next, there's a very good chance he was looking at this as like, I need these massive data sets for some reason and I want to do an analysis on it.
Right.
And that is, again, within his rights.
I think it's unlikely he thought what he was doing was illegal or that if it was, it was the kind of thing he might get like yelled at about a little slap on the wrist, right?
He also doesn't think MIT is going to have an issue with this because MIT is where a lot of hacker culture comes from, right?
The school has a history of like people are allowed to kind of push some boundaries because that's what makes MIT famous, right?
Yeah, totally.
People who push boundaries, right?
So it's not all going to work out that way.
And to talk about how, before we talk about how it worked out, let's talk about some products that you can purchase using currency.
Which is like points.
It is like points, Mara.
It is like points.
The higher your point value, the more important you are.
That's exactly how I feel.
Gold points are worth more than paper points.
Yes.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Conspiracy Case Logic00:16:10
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
So, you know, yeah, Aaron probably did not think this was going to be an issue.
Certainly didn't think that if it was, the school was going to have a serious problem with what he'd done.
But the response to what was at the most a minor indiscretion by Aaron in terms of like not asking, going into that closet, was met with the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
And I'm going to quote from the New Yorker again here.
He was arrested after leaving the closet.
The police took away his shoes and put him in a cell.
Soon after his arrest, he returned the data he had taken and JSTOR considered the matter settled.
MIT, however, cooperated with the prosecution despite many efforts, internal and external, to dissuade it.
The prosecutor, Stephen Heyman, told Schwartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, that if Schwartz pleaded guilty to all counts, he would spend six months in jail.
If he lost at trial, it would be much worse.
He said the value of what was taken from JSTOR was $2 million.
And under the sentencing guidelines, that would equate to a sentence in the neighborhood of seven years, Peters says.
And I said, what he took from JSTOR wasn't worth anything.
It was a bunch of like the 1942 edition of Journal of Botany.
The idea that Aaron should be sentenced the same way as someone who tries to beat someone out of $2 million in a security fraud scam, someone who steals money from people.
And, you know, that is a reasonable thing to be angry about.
And Aaron, by the way, gets, he will claim, I see no reason to doubt this, that he is like physically abused by the police during his arrest.
That's it.
During one of his arrests.
That seems very likely, knowing the cops.
The situation Aaron now found himself in was deliberately bewildering and vague.
You have to remember that, as Tim McVeigh said, the only language the federal government understands is force, right?
And when they charge you with a crime like this, their tactic is shock and awe.
The vast majority of federal prosecutions succeed.
So any intelligent defendant knows this.
And when the federal prosecutors and whatnot say, hey, if you plead guilty, you get six months.
If not, we're going to push for the maximum sentence.
And it's this many fucking gonzo ass years.
Yeah.
A lot of people, most people take the plea, even innocent people, right?
That's part of why their conviction is so good.
A lot of innocent people plead guilty because it's like, well, they're offering me three months, six months, and that's better than the possibility of 20 years, even if I know.
I mean, especially with something like this.
Yeah.
Because you're not putting anyone else at risk if you plead out.
Exactly.
You're not fucking over anyone else's cases.
It ends with me.
I can handle that much time, right?
Aaron does not want to do this.
For one thing, he's innocent.
Hard not to see why.
He's also not a compromise guy.
He hasn't had too much in his life, right?
He doesn't feel like that.
His life has not provided his not his life thus far.
One of the things his life thus far has not prepared him for is the kind of no-win scenario that the federal government can trap you in, right?
Yeah.
He's not, that's just not a thing.
Anything that he's dealt with has given him sort of training in.
Yeah.
Another issue is that the best plea deal he could possibly get, and there's some debate as to whether or not he was even likely to get much of a plea deal.
That kind of goes back and forth, but the best possible plea deal he could have gotten would have still left him with a felony record.
And right at this point, Aaron is like, I want to work in politics.
I want to change the political system as an activist.
I want to maybe work at the White House, right?
I have that potential.
I have those connections.
I could be in the White House helping to shape tech policy in a way that helps people.
Can't work at the White House with a fucking felony, right?
That may be changing soon, right?
But at this point in time, that's how he sees it.
This is what he says to Quinn Norton, right?
I can't work at the White House with a, I can't, I can't take this plea deal because it'll lock me out of this thing that I want.
And again, it's part of like Aaron is not a compromiser.
He can't compromise this current dream of his.
Yeah.
Right.
Even though maybe that's the thing that guarantees he suffers the least, right?
And that would end this horrible legal process, you know?
Now, it's worth noting that today, I see this on Twitter every time stuff about Aaron Schwartz comes up, right?
Every time the anniversary of his death comes around, all that stuff, that JSTOR hounded him in prosecution to his death.
I don't think that's accurate.
I'm not saying they don't deserve some blame.
I don't even like JSTOR, right?
Like there's a lot that's bad about that.
But they are, as soon as he gives the files back, they're like, we consider this done.
We have no desire to prosecute him, right?
They do not push to prosecute him, right?
This is a decision.
MIT is a part of this.
MIT is part of his, why he suffers from this.
And largely, it's federal prosecutors, right?
Even local prosecutors who have the option of charging him with some stuff are uninterested in pursuing the matter in part because I think they're like, well, this is MIT, right?
This is like what we do here, tech.
Like this kid hasn't done anything really that bad.
If we wanted to, we could fuck him over.
But like that doesn't help us as fucking, you know, Cambridge, Massachusetts, right?
Yeah.
Like we don't benefit from hurting this guy who's a tech genius.
That doesn't, you know, I'm not saying they're altruists here, but it is the feds who decide this needs to move, right?
They, and that, as far as I can tell, that is the primary blame here in terms of why this keeps being a fucking thing.
I wonder why that motivation is, is it because he's a progressive?
Is it like we're going to talk about that?
Oh, okay, cool.
Maybe I'm not going to say none of, I'm not going to say there aren't multiple things that factor into it, but I think the actual reason is so much sadder and more banal than that, as is often the case with terrible evil, right?
We talk about, you know, this is a case.
We talk about Joseph Mengele, right?
Who has reputation in pop cultures?
He was just this insane mad scientist carrying out these nightmare experiments because of his sick mind, right?
Yeah.
The reality is there were a lot of errant scientific beliefs.
Scientists and doctors who were highly placed in the medical establishment at the time needed access to human test subjects that they couldn't get through willing test subjects.
He had access to human beings and he wanted to help his career.
He wanted to set himself up for a scientific career.
So he did that, right?
That's why Mengele did what he did.
He wasn't just like some sadist who was getting off on it, right?
There's really not the evidence for that.
He was, he was doing, he didn't, he was just the kind of person who didn't care what he had to do to further his career and to like build a career for him.
That's what's behind this.
Okay.
So as far as I see.
Someone wants to land a big fish case.
That is a lot of what's happening here.
The federal government is at this point in the middle of its second great crackdown on so-called hackers.
Right.
Some of this is because Anonymous, the digital activist collective online, has spooked the olds at this point.
Right.
There's a lot of, you know, it's a sexy thing that like you can scare people on Fox News about, right?
These hacker gangs and shit.
And a prosecutor can make a name for themselves by going after cybercrime, right?
Stephen Heyman is the prosecutor here, and he takes the case to a grand jury who indicts Aaron on four felony counts, including wire fraud and computer fraud.
Nine more felony counts are added later.
Aaron could have faced 30 years in prison, you know, or more.
Yeah.
Like I think up to 50 is possible, but like very good chance, like at least like 10 years and probably, you know, serious potential for more had he been convicted.
Yeah.
Much of the prosecution's arguments had to do with the fact that Aaron had shielded his face with a bike helmet when he walked past a security camera, right?
Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts and Obama appointee, compared what Aaron had done to robbery, saying, stealing is stealing, whether he's a computer command or a crowbar.
Now, it's not.
That's fucking nonsense because if you use a crowbar to break into a store and steal shit, right?
And have whatever opinions about the ethics of that, but you have damaged something.
You've damaged the storefront.
You've taken assets.
People have to replace those assets.
There is a harm to that business, right?
I'm not making a moral judgment about this, but there's a harm.
If you download files from JSTOR and you have them on your hard drive and you have legal access to those files for free, you haven't hurt JSTOR.
They're not out anything, right?
And like, they still have the, he didn't delete them.
He didn't hack in and delete them from their servers, you know?
Yeah.
Like stealing is when you take something from someone and then they no longer have it.
That is that, yes.
That is how I define stealing is when you take something and then the other person no longer has it.
I agree.
Illegal copying can be a crime and it can, and you can materially, you can monetarily damage someone if you if you pirate someone else's shit and then you start selling it, you might make money instead of the other person.
Right.
Like there's, or if, you know, if they have people have access to it for free and you don't get paid, you can argue there's a harm there.
Now, I don't think that's how it actually works out.
You're not taking the files from someone.
Exactly.
He is not, it is not like using a crowbar because you use a crowbar to break things.
He has not broken anything, right?
He did not hack his way into the system, right?
He had access to it, you know?
The fact that this logic is nonsense and the fact that Aaron, again, there's no proof he had intended to contravene the law in any way.
You know, that's what I would say, what you would say.
But, you know, what matters is what the feds are trying to say.
And this, unfortunately, is where Quinn Norton comes into the story again.
Okay.
Now, again, Quinn is a journalist whose beat at this point heavily focuses on the hacker community and that corner of digital culture.
She and Aaron had an on-again-off-again relationship for years, and she was a major part of his emotional support system after he got arrested and charged.
Her close relationship with him and her history writing about hackers makes her a target for the feds.
And one of the things I don't really understand about her is she's working with these people who are very much in danger, right?
And who are very much breaking the law, right?
Some of the people she reports on are not people who stay within the lines the way Aaron had his whole life.
Not making a judgment.
That's just the truth.
She has dog shit OPSEC.
She will admit that, by the way, her OPSEX not.
For one thing, she takes, as a habit, notes on basically every conversation she ever has and stores them on her computer, along with interviews and stuff with sources, which is not a good idea, right?
Really dangerous.
So when this happens, the feds start looking into her and Quinn realizes this is happening as like, if they get my laptop, not only am I potentially in some danger, because I don't know, maybe she had been into some shit, or it doesn't even matter if she had, right?
Because the feds are going after Aaron and he hasn't broken the law, but also all of her sources are in danger if they get this laptop.
That's a bad situation to be in, very scary situation to be in as a journalist.
And I have some sympathy for that.
She's also a single mother.
And man, if you know anything about the feds and they love single moms.
Yeah.
Nothing against that, but that's a weak point because they can come after you and say, you know, they don't even have to say it.
They know if you're looking into them, well, that you could lose your kid.
You could be away for years.
You could miss their whole life, right?
And you're that if you're single parent, single dad too, you're the like, it is a thing.
It's the same thing like the feds go after addicts, right?
It's an easy way to get some charges on someone and an easy way to try to roll someone, right?
It's just the way they work.
I'm absolutely not making moral judgment here.
It's one of the reasons why the system is so scary, right?
Because these are not vulnerabilities that mean you're not a bad person for being vulnerable to this.
It's understandable that you'd be vulnerable.
You have a person to take care of, you know?
Right.
But fortunately, she put her laptop hard drive into a microwave and they didn't get it.
Unfortunately, that is not where this goes.
So the Secret Service, and for a variety of complicated reasons that have a lot to do with 9-11, they are the feds who wind up investigating this, right?
Okay.
That's because of the interstate of computer fraud shit.
You know, it's just, it's a thing, right?
Sure.
It's in part because of wire fraud and stuff.
Like there's that.
Anyway, it's the Secret Service that is, that is, that are the feds coming out in this particular case.
They show up at her door.
She invites them in to talk.
Never, ever do this.
Quinn herself, she has written an article in The New Yorker and was like, this was a horrible mistake that I made.
You should never, ever do this.
Terrible mistake.
The logic she's acting under, I'm not defending this because this was a horrible decision.
The logic that she says she was acting under is, I haven't committed a crime.
If I can explain that to them, maybe they'll go away, right?
Now, the kind of feds who do this job, who go door to door to people, have an understanding of how to be an interviewer, a major strategy, anyone who does that job will tell you, is to leave your, and this is true for journalists too.
What matters most is keeping your subject talking, right?
You do whatever you can to keep them talking because the more you get from them, the higher the chance they're going to say something you can take advantage of.
They might admit to a crime.
They also, if you're a federal agent, they could lie to you, right?
And it doesn't matter if you're lying about something that's not illegal, lying to a federal agent is a fucking crime.
If it's if they're interviewing you about, you know, a case, right?
You can get people on that, and then you have a thing to hold over their head.
You have a thing you can get them to roll on, right?
So she talks to these guys, right?
Bad thing to do, bad idea.
Don't, don't do this.
The conversation ends with them saying, you have been subpoenaed and commanded to go to a grand jury.
She lawyers up.
She doesn't have, she's very, not rich, does not have much money.
And unfortunately, the lawyers she get, one of them is a former prosecutor.
They are not good lawyers to have in this situation.
They urge her to comply with all of the requests the feds make, right?
Most lawyers will.
Sorry, I know too much about grand juries.
Most lawyers will push you to that.
This is not uncommon.
The situation she is in is not an uncommon one.
I'm not saying that to defend the choices she makes.
This is just not a weird situation.
The end result of all this is what is called a proffer letter, right?
This is where the prosecutor says, we will give you immunity.
It's usually like, we'll give you immunity for a day, basically.
We'll give you, you know, potentially we can extend this.
You can have this conversation where basically nothing can hurt you.
And if we find out you have information we want, then we won't keep fucking with you, right?
Yeah.
That's more or less the offer, right?
Quinn says she talks this through to some extent with Aaron.
It's unclear to me exactly how much he knows about what she's doing at this point in time.
She decides to do this.
And again, her logic is, I am not aware that Aaron has broken the law in any way.
And I have not broken the law in any way.
What could this hurt?
If I answer their questions and they know I don't know anything, then all this ends.
And this is also one of the only circumstances where if she had remained silent, there are many systems by which she could go to jail without having committed a crime in civil contempt.
Of course.
So like she is risking something if she decides to talk, which is this is a fucking scary situation for her.
No way around that.
Bad Decision Consequences00:03:00
Every other country with grand juries, I think, I think all of them abolished it.
It comes from old British law.
And everyone else is like, oh, this is a clear, this clearly leads to abuse of power.
Let's get rid of it.
And the U.S. was like, nah, we fuck it.
This is, that's why we like it.
Yeah.
So she does this, has this conversation.
It's going to turn out to be another bad decision.
And again, she's in the position a lot of people are in this where you give them, because you haven't done anything and you don't think your friend has, you give them a lot of information.
And unfortunately, she says exactly the wrong thing, which is she mentions at one point the existence of the guerrilla open access manifesto and that Aaron had been one of the people who worked on it.
That includes lines saying what people should do is gain access to this paywalled stuff that they have legal access to and put it up online for free.
And so now you have a conspiracy case.
Exactly.
Because conspiracy cases don't involve anyone.
Conspiracy rules, it's terrible.
You don't have to break the law.
Like saying I am interested in the following crime is not illegal.
And then doing something that's legal that is in furtherance of that crime is also not illegal unless you put the two together and then it's conspiracy.
Yep.
So that is the situation, right?
And the feds, who I think are at this point, because the feds aren't dumb, right?
That's one of the things you have to understand about these people.
Not dumb, often lazy.
And it's lazy that they didn't know about this, right?
Because I know it's a secret, right?
Not hard to find out that Aaron had been one of the people who worked on this thing.
They just, you know, especially at that point, there's a lot less people who are feds who know the internet, you know?
So they're not good at finding this stuff, right?
Once she mentions that, this thing that is public knowledge, right?
They're like, bam, we got a case, right?
This is, this is, this is evidence that we can argue in court is intent.
He has intent to distribute, right?
Yeah.
So intent to commit a crime, right?
Again, the reality, as far as we can tell, Aaron seems to have moved on from that as a central issue in his life.
He's kind of flighty about this stuff.
You know, we don't fully, we'll never fully know what he intended to do with it, but the reality didn't matter.
The feds had the argument, the ammo they needed to make a case, and that's what they're going to do, right?
Her involvement in all of this is among the most controversial parts of it.
Many who were close to Aaron will say that she snitched on him.
Certainly not.
And I see why people say that.
Not an unjust interpretation.
For his part, Aaron is furious.
He also doesn't stop being close with her, right?
Furious that people are calling her a snitch or furious at her.
No, furious at her, right?
For what he's done.
He also seems to have forgiven her at some point.
I don't know the guy.
That's what people who know them will say.
They continue to be close, I think, for the remainder of his life.
You know, I'm not going to say any more about that or make a more kind of judgmental stance there.
Obviously, a number of people close to them both have.
That's totally fair.
It's just, you know, I'm trying to just present the facts of what happened and as much as I can.
So that's the situation here.
Furious Aaron Reaction00:02:16
And again, they are going to remain, you know, close for the remainder of Aaron's life, which is not going to be a long time, but it is going to include one fairly substantial achievement.
And we are going to talk about that when we come back after some ads.
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I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
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And we're back.
So, Margaret, one more good thing to talk about.
On October 26th, 2011, Representative Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act into Congress.
This act, written at the behest of Hollywood Studios, would have basically given the government freedom to block access to websites that included any copyrighted material.
It was draconian in scope and enforcement and would have essentially killed the internet as we know it.
The bill was widely supported by all of the people with money, and it was initially expected to pass without comment, right?
Yeah.
It was, this was supposed to happen and not be a big fight, right?
Aaron Schwartz, who by this point is fighting in secret, most of the people who know him do not know that he is being charged, right?
Do not know that this is ongoing.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
He is keeping a lot of that secret for a while, right?
Which makes some sense if you're facing any kind of conspiracy shit, you know?
Yeah.
Like not bringing other people under risk by.
And you don't want to talk about your case.
He's trying to do, he's trying to affect political change.
He's dealing with serious people in politics.
He doesn't want him to know that he's dealing with this, right?
Yeah.
So shortly after SOPA gets introduced, he has a meeting with Senator Leahy, with his office, not with the senator himself, and a guy at Senator Leahy's office named Aaron Cooper.
Cooper is today a contributor to the Federalist Society.
I don't like him.
He served at this point as chief counsel for intellectual property and antitrust law to Leahy.
And Cooper listens to Aaron's arguments for why SOPA was a bad idea.
Aaron's friend Peter Eckersley later claimed, quote, Aaron Cooper replied, oh yes, but what you don't understand is that copyright and copyright enforcement is more important than the internet.
Sure, you've got this internet thing, but actually this thing is more important.
And it doesn't matter if things break or need to be reorganized.
The priority of this country is going to be making sure that files cannot be shared, songs cannot be copied, movies cannot be copied.
And we'll break things if that's the easiest way to do it.
We're going to have to do it, right?
This makes Aaron angry.
Yeah.
Not hard to see why.
So he founds an organization with his friend David Siegel called Demand Progress, right?
Today, Demand Progress is still in existence.
It is a 501c4 that supports internet freedom, civil liberties, all that good stuff.
They oppose attempts to crack down on whistleblowers and the like.
And their first big fight is stopping SOPA.
Now, a lot of people are involved in this battle.
And I don't want to do a thing that sometimes gets done and make it out like Aaron is the lone hero who holds back the tide of corporate bloodsuckers trying to kill the internet.
But he does play a very massive role in the fight against SOPA.
He is one of the people who organizes the response to this attempt to pass this law.
And part of why he is so important is that he understands before most people do how to use the internet and harness the power of a crowd to turn it against the enemy, to stop bad things from happening and to do this in a way that matters more than just making people angry on social media, right?
He is successful ultimately in this.
Demand progress is still around, still influential.
One of the things that can claim to be one of Aaron's many gifts to the world.
And SOPA is stopped, right?
Aaron plays a major role in stopping this.
That is kind of the last big thing that he accomplished.
That fucking rules.
I remember.
Yeah, I remember when SOPA was up.
I mean, it felt like for a while, it was like every couple of years, they were like, here's this new thing that will completely.
Because they wanted so desperately to trash the open internet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And eventually it did get trashed, but not that way.
I know.
I did it in the insidious way instead of the.
Yeah.
But that's a story for another day.
Yeah.
For a race.
So bastards.
Yeah.
Kind of the capstone of Aaron's career in public life.
And unfortunately, you know, his success in every other field of endeavor did not protect him ultimately from the long arm of the law.
The prosecution against him rolled forward, inevitable as the tide and cruel as a hurricane wind.
This gets Heyman a lot of press attention.
It's sexy because going after hackers is sexy.
The whole reason why he's on board to go after Aaron is because he's politically ambitious and he wants, you know, to campaign on bringing down these scary young hacker kids who scare old people.
I'm going to quote from a write-up in CNET here.
Alex Stamos, who the defense had planned to call as an expert witness on computer intrusion, said, I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron's downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.
Law professor Tim Wu added that Ortiz's legal authority to take down Schwartz was shaky after a federal appeals court ruling last year.
There is then a very good chance that had the case gone to court, Aaron would have been found innocent.
And when he does make public what he's doing, a lot of people rally around him.
They start trying to support him, help him go through this.
Aaron kind of hates this because, again, he hates asking people for help.
He hates being dependent.
He hates people talking about him.
Right.
This is miserable for him.
It fucks with a lot of stuff that's just he's, you know, he's always kind of struggled with.
And it, you know, I think it's pretty close to a guarantee that he would have been found innocent.
Or if he had been convicted, it would have been overturned before too terribly long.
Right.
Not that that's not a lot to deal with.
Right.
But this is, he just can't handle this.
Right.
Not only is the dealing with this incredibly stressful, his money is all gone.
It's, it's been eaten up by the legal fees, right?
Yeah.
Which is more stress, more dependency.
And he has recurrent health issues, right?
And kind of after he wakes up feeling bad one morning, he can't get out of bed.
You know, his girlfriend at the time can't get him to get up.
You know, she leaves for the day to do her stuff.
And while she's gone, he hangs himself on January 11th, 2013.
It's, it's, um, you know, again, as is always the case with suicide, the only thing going on here is not the prosecution.
His ongoing depression, which is influenced and brought on by his, his physical pain is a part of this.
It's part of his mindset.
It affects him.
The stuff, some of the stuff going on in his head and how it relates to all this affects this.
But fundamentally, I don't think anyone who knows him denies that the prosecution against him was ultimately why he takes his own life.
Yeah.
Right.
That's that's why this happens.
Um, you know, and that's that's you know, just like I don't think stealing shit from JSTOR to put it up online would have been immoral in my book.
That's murder in my book.
Yeah.
It's at least the equivalent of drunk driving, right?
The legal equivalent of that.
Yeah, totally.
It's manslaughter.
Yeah, manslaughter, maybe.
Yeah.
And that we don't, it's the we don't care.
It's reckless endangerment, but actually killing someone with it.
It's like it's, it's drunkenly killing someone with your car if you were trying to build a career as like the best drunk driver in the country, right?
That was your life goal.
Yeah.
Like that, that's kind of what's going on.
Like, yeah, I don't know.
Weird to compare it to that, but we need some levity, I guess.
Now, as a side note here, a couple of side notes.
On January 9th, two days before he took his own life, JSTOR made its archives of more than 1,200 journals free to the public in part due to the backlash when people found out why Aaron was in trouble.
Recently, last earlier this year, the Biden administration made some changes to massively increase access to a lot of scientific papers and whatnot that were publicly funded.
A lot of that has to do with activism that has occurred by Aaron's friends and the result of his death.
You know, there have been a number of, there's also a website that exists right now.
If you want to get access to studies, academic papers, chapters from textbooks in a lot of cases, any kind of not just science, but like a lot of history and stuff publications, a lot of politics that are paywalled, that you don't normally have access to, find either what's called the DOI, which is the number that lists those kind of publications, or just the link to the paywall publication and type Sci-Hub into Google and go to a website called Sci-Hub.
And it more often than not will return you a free version of that paper that it has access to.
It's not clear to me if they're breaking the law or not, but you're able to do that.
It's fine.
I use it all the fucking time and it's dope.
Very much is part of his legacy.
I'm sure the people, whoever they are who make Sci-Hub, would agree with that.
Yeah.
Couple of things to note here.
One of them is that the role that MIT played in this, as I noted, JSTOR, they're certainly not an angel here, but they seem to about as early as they could have said, we have no desire in this being prosecutable.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, they probably didn't want the heat either.
They didn't want the, yeah, sure.
Again, I'm not saying this is because they're good guys, right?
Yeah, but still, whatever.
They didn't do the bad and whatever their motivation is.
They did not.
MIT did, again, I think most of this is on the prosecutors.
MIT does some of the bad here.
Yeah.
Right.
And Robert Schwartz, Aaron's father, is a consultant to the MIT lab, right?
He asks MIT to aid in getting the charges dropped or helping Aaron secure a plea deal.
This is people get angry at MIT, especially after Aaron's suicide.
And so MIT makes a report about this.
Robert Schwartz later tells Wired, the report makes clear that MIT was not neutral, but they should not, was not neutral, but they should not have been neutral.
They should have advocated on Aaron's behalf because the law under which he was charged was wrong.
Lawrence Lessig, who we talked about earlier, would later say this, neutrality, which is what MIT claims, is one of those empty words that somehow has achieved sacred and contract text-free acceptance, like transparency.
But there are obviously plenty of contexts in which to be neutral is simply to be wrong.
For example, this context.
The point the report makes in criticizing the prosecutors is that they were at minimum negligent and not recognizing that under MIT's open access policies, Aaron's access was likely not unauthorized.
MIT knew something here that at minimum could have cut short a prosecution and which it turns out could also have saved someone's life.
Neutrality does not justify failing to pick up the phone and telling the prosecutor, hey, in fact, his access was authorized.
Yeah.
It is also worth noting that the law that Aaron was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was and remains an absolutely draconian piece of legislation that gives the federal government the freedom to go fucking ape shit on people if they feel like a computer was probably used to commit a crime.
A bill known colloquially as Aaron's Law was introduced to amend the CFAA in 2013.
It did not pass into law, but the parameters that it was based around continue to be influential in the fight to limit the power of the federal government to do this kind of shit.
And that is where the story ends.
Yeah.
He's cool.
I've, I'm really excited to get to learn this stuff because, I mean, I've actually been, he's been on my, like, I have my like big master list of cool people who did cool stuff to eventually get to, you know, and I'm like, I'm really excited to get to learn this because I've always wanted to know more.
I've always been like, I know some people who knew him and like, I've always been influenced by that era of internet optimism.
You know, like a lot of the sci-fi I was reading, like, I mean, I love Corey Doctro, for example, you know, and a lot of this like, hey, we can do, this could have been beautiful, you know, and like maybe it can be beautiful again.
And like holding on to that feels really important to me.
And Aaron Schwartz is such a important part of all of that.
Unfortunately, in that way, we're like, you know, kind of as a martyr to it.
And I didn't know as I, there was so much that I didn't know about it.
And it's like also the chronic illness thing.
I think that it's something that people don't talk about enough because people don't know how to talk about it.
I don't really know how to talk about it, but like the way that chronic influence, chronic pain and stuff like that influences people's decisions.
And making people particularly susceptible to, well, I mean, it's the same as when trolls try and drive people to suicide, really.
Yeah, same playbook in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
A much more powerful version of the Zayn playbook, at least.
Yeah.
Well, I thought Santa Claus was going to be completely different.
I thought Santa Claus was from Finland.
I thought Santa, but it turns out that was Linus, the hacker, Diana, the hacker.
Yeah.
Trying to make a Linus.
Linus Torvalds and Santa Torrell.
I get where you were going.
I get where you're going.
Yeah, no, Santa Claus younger and did even more stuff than just reindeer.
That's right.
Pretty cool.
That's what's to know about Santa.
Do you have a pluggable for us?
Oh, I do.
I actually run a bunch of podcasts.
You'll be, listeners, you will be shocked to know that one of the guests on this podcast also has a podcast.
But I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
It comes out every Monday and Wednesday in which I talk about cool people who did cool stuff, in which I often reuse academic articles.
CoolZone Media Podcasts00:02:50
And I also have a podcast on, well, they're all on CoolZone Media, but the CoolZone Media Book Club comes out every Sunday on both the Cool People Did Cool Stuff feed and it could happen here feed.
And that's where I read fiction to you.
And if you want to hear me read you a story, then that is a place you can go because like I'm not comparing myself to Santa Claus or Aaron in this case, but I also write fiction.
And so you can hear my novellas and stuff.
Robert also writes fiction.
I do.
I do.
I'll have my second novel out soon, theoretically.
All right, everybody.
That's the podcast.
Go to hell.
I love you.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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