TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Remembers Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was a young tech genius who was defining RSS specifications at age 14. Who was this young man, what did he believe in and why was the US government determined to prosecute him? Listen in to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. Today,
it is time for another tech Stuff classic episode that

(00:25):
published back in February two thirteen. It is styled tech
Stuff Remembers Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz, very important person, tragically
short life, and Lauren Vogelbaum and I sit down and
talk about who he is and why he was important.
So I hope you enjoy this episode. Well, today we
we have a topic that's both happy and sad. It's

(00:48):
sad and that the world lost an activist and and
legitimately a genius in January fellow by the name of
Aaron Schwartz. And you may have heard this name, and
you you may even be fairly aware of who he
was and what he did. He's been in the news
a whole bunch, and you've probably been hearing about him

(01:08):
for years because he's done some really breakthrough work in technology.
Yeah yeah, and both from a actual technological standpoint and
from a political standpoint, as it turns out, So we
wanted to really talk about who he was, what sort
of impact he's had on technology, both from a policy
side and from actual zeros in ones right physical, yeah,

(01:33):
and to kind of talk about why his his life
and death matter in the world of tech. And to
do this, we we wanted to kind of take an
overview of his life. So first, before I really dive in,
I have to give major props to The Verge, which
is if you guys have never gone to The Verge,
it's a fantastic It's one of my favorite sites out

(01:54):
there right now. It's really really well done. And a
fellow by the name of Tim Carmody wrote an exhaustive
article about Swartz's life and was very thorough and very respectful,
and see it was a really gorgeous piece of journalism, honestly,
and it was it was a very personal piece of
journalism that it bled a few lines into editorial, but

(02:15):
it was and gave you a gave you insight to
what it's like being a journalist to have to cover
a story that has personal implications. Because he had had
met Sworts at least once, and so you know, it's
a it's a kind of an inside look to what
it's like being a journalist and covering a story like this.
And also he's very good at breaking down the myths

(02:38):
because they you know, Aaron Swarts was sort of a
legendary mythical figure in many ways, the kind of person
who's whose contributions were huge, and they got bigger depending
upon who was telling the story and how how many
times they told it. Sure the same way to say
Steve Jobs a lot of That's a good, good example.
Although we should also add Swarts was was magically very

(03:00):
young when he when he committed suicide, only twenty six
years old. Yeah. So, so going back to his childhood,
he was born in Chicago. In nineteen six his father,
Robert Schwartz, founded a software company which was called Mark Williams,
which actually named after Aaron's grandfather and uh and Mark Williams.

(03:23):
The company was all about creating a clone of the
Unix operating system and also ce compilers, C language compilers
and debuggers for IBM PCs. And that's that's a term
that brings me back because I remember when when computers
were either called Apple or IBM compatible or you know,

(03:45):
eventually kind of specificity doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah, no,
IBM compatible became a term like I was referring to
PCs a IBM compatibles long after that was appropriate because
sometimes things stick with you. But anyway, Robert Swartz would
eventually become an intellectual property consultant for M I T S.
Media lab and intellectual property was something that Aaron became

(04:08):
very interested in and very passionate about. And the idea
of is information property. Does it belong to one person
or one entity in the case of say a corporation
or organization, or does it belong to the world. Should
it belong to the world? And this is a philosophical
debate that a lot of people have had, and I

(04:29):
think most people fall somewhere in the spectrum of gray. Sure, well,
you know it's we We all want to especially those
of us who work in the media, want to be
paid for our ideas because that's the only thing that
we produce. But at the same time, yeah, you know,
if someone wants to learn something, I'm certainly not going
to say, like, no, no, give me money first. If

(04:51):
you know, if for example, if they need that money
to eat, I would gather them know things and eat. Yes, yes,
And so Aaron kind of we'll get into it. But
Aaron kind of developed an idealistic philosophy that was very
much in the realm of information wants to be free,
that that sort of idea that that that data needs

(05:11):
to be out there for people to make use of
it and to make lives better. He called it a
moral imperative. Yeah and um yes, so that that kind
of gives you a quick philosophical overview, But we don't
want to jump ahead too far. Tim's work in the Verge.
There was one little piece of information that I thought

(05:32):
was adorable, which is that when Aaron was eight years old.
Keep in mind out this is early days, okay, so
s plus eight that means in in, in and and wait.
I got nineteen nineteen ninety four. Liberal arts education has

(05:53):
paid off people. When the World Wide Web was really
just two years old. Um, he was actually going on usenet,
which is not the same thing as Worldwide Web, so
don't write me. But he was going on usenet, which
was a newsgroup database essentially kind of like a network
database where you could go and have discussions about different topics.

(06:14):
And apparently when exactly when he was eight, he went
on to ustet and his first post was to a
newsgroup dedicated to Beakman's World, which is kind of awesome.
That's wonderful. Yeah. Uh. He was also a big fan
of the Star Wars movies, which I think is phenomenal
because he was born three years after the last one

(06:35):
came out, Return of the Jedi, as we have discussed before,
year old. Sorry, yeah, well I saw Return of the
Jedi in the theater when it was released. And man,
I sure hope that one day Lucas comes out with
movies that really explain how Anakin became Darth Vader. Yeah,
wouldn't that be That would be so great, that would
be fantastic. I love a follow up. I really wish

(06:55):
that those movies existed, just like I hope one day
they make a sequel to Highlander, the Matrix or The Matrix.
These are yeah, so many movies that I wish there
were sequels to that. I'm not actively denying exist. Um.
It's exhausting being Miguel, really, but anyway, he was also
fans of other things like I went visited his blog

(07:17):
uh in preparation for this podcast, and and he had
a way of taking pop culture and applying various thought
experiments to it that was engaging and enlightening and funny.
He has a great one in the final one, sadly

(07:38):
about the Dark Night. Uh. The most recent, the last
and the Christopher Nolan series actually was the second one.
Wasn't yeah because it was all about the Joker. It
was because he was he was going back to looking
at that one. It was written. It was written in November. Um.
The blog post was uh, and it was about how
the Joker applies game theory throughout the movie. And he

(08:01):
breaks down almost scene by scene every time the Joker
appears and and explains which game in game theory applies
to that scene. And there's like a dozen different games
that he specifically references, and he makes a case for
every single one. And I looked at that and I thought,
you know, I I kind of had the same idea

(08:23):
once or twice, because I I know about game theory
fleetingly and things like Prisoner's dilemma, the trolley problem, things
like that. Um, but he broke it down for every
single scene. I said, I never saw all of those connections.
So he really had that ability to to to kind
of look at the world around him and art and
and and entertainment. And even if you even if you

(08:45):
don't want to call it art, if you just want
to call it entertainment, He's able to see the underlying
thoughts that kind of maybe not consciously but guided that work.
And uh, even if even if it was completely unintentional,
he could draw parallels, which was really kind of an
awesome thing. I really admire that quality in people. Certainly

(09:06):
I do not possess it, not to that extent anyway. So, uh,
skipping ahead of all that, I mean, that's so bottom
line geeky guy. Okay, he's a geek, and I say
that with full love. I say that as a man
who has a Lord of the Rings tattoo on his
left arm. Okay, I love the geek. I learned things

(09:27):
about you every day. John didn't know I had a
tattoo with a Lord of the Things. I don't think
I did right here. Um, I can't show you up
wearing a long sleep today. Um. But anyway, skipping ahead
a little bit too. When he was the ripe old
age of thirteen years old, circle two thousand or so thirteen,
he begins to work on the Info Network, which is

(09:51):
his idea for the Info Network was sort of like
what Wikipedia became. It's the idea of this an online encyclopedia,
storage of knowledge that anyone can can add to add
to an edit, so essentially the same idea as Wikipedia.
It's this, you know, he saw that the Internet was
that had the potential to be like the guide in

(10:13):
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. If you guys
have not read the books, then that's okay. You go
ahead and do that. Will wait, because they're worth it.
Don't don't watch the movie, but you can watch the
BBC television series or listen to the radio show. You
can watch the movie. Alan Rickman was excellent in that film.

(10:34):
That movie was so bad. Martin Freeman was excellent in
that film where Don't Make Me. Performances were fine, the
script was terrible. I am from the Internet. I will
fight you about Martin Freeman. No, no, no no, no, You're
not gonna get any argument on me. I mean, Freeman
was the best thing about the map I took during
the hobbit um. So anyway, Uh, the Info Networks he's
working on this this project, and the work gets him

(10:56):
some attention. He actually becomes a finalist in the second
Our Digita Prize and as a finalist. Um, you know,
keeping mind, he's thirteen years old. He's he's competing, not
necessarily competing, but he's he's in the same against in
the Brackett bracket with people who are big names today
in technology and who were adults. Many of these people

(11:19):
knew his work. Yeah, they knew him. They knew him
on online as as it staid at the time, Aaron
sw but they did not know that Aaron sw was.
They're like, whoa who am I being punked? Yeah? Is
that that? That's a really dated reference. That's point in it. Yeah,
okay around two thousand they might have been saying it. Maybe, okay,
so ask your parents. So he he ended up winning

(11:43):
as a finalist, a thousand dollars and access to a
web server for life and a two day trip to
m I t to meet a couple of a couple
of geeks, a couple of dudes who a little, a
little influential in technology. One of those two was Tim
berners Lee, who most of us know as the guy
who invented the World Wide Web back when he was

(12:04):
working with a CERN. Kind of kind of a big deal. Yeah,
so he's the one who kind of developed the framework
that would become the World Wide Web, and yeah, big name.
The other fellow that he got to meet on this
two day trip was Hal Abelson, who was professor of
Electrical engineering and Computer Science at M I T. He's
also a fellow of the I E E E or

(12:28):
as longtime listeners of tech stuff, know how I pronounced
it the because it's cajun um not cajun And then
he was also a hal Abelson's also a founding director
of Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation and Creative
Commons will come in to play later in this discussion
as well. Abelson himself, Um, so big deal. You know,

(12:50):
he got to meet some people who were definitely influential
in the techno technology space as well as this idea
that information is powerful and it's important and it's necessary
and people should have access to it. Um these are
these are big ideas for a thirteen year old, and

(13:11):
he had embraced them already. Uh. A little bit later,
he became interested in something called r S s rs S,
of course being m a rich site summary. I believe
originally it stood for resource description framework Site summary. Wow,
look at you, Yes, that's exactly right. It's a it's

(13:32):
sometimes also called really simple syndication. And you got it.
You nailed it. And yes, I can read really good.
I wrote it down. You do read really good. You
don't speak so well, but to read really good. That's
why I'm a podcasters fair. And it's it's what it's
what the Internet uses to syndicate itself. Yeah. Yeah, So

(13:54):
so I'll give you, guys a for those of you
who are not aware of what RSS is or what
it does. Uh, let's go back to the old days
of the web now, pre RSS or pre any other
syndication format, because RSS is not the only one, it's
just it's sort of the one that came out on top.
But pre RSS and other syndication formats, the way you

(14:15):
would get information on the net is you would go
visit a website. Yeah, you would. You would type in
the URL and you would click go, and you would
visit the website right, and you would look and you
would actually scan the website to see if anything you
had popped up. This applied for everything from website that
was about specific company you were interested in or a community.

(14:35):
Blogs were kind of not a thing yet, but but
web web comics maybe, or a news site, so you
would you might think, oh, you know, I hadn't checked
the news in a while, let me go, And then
you would go and you would actually have to start
kind of scanning through stuff and look, all right, well,
what's what's new? What have I not read? I know,
I think I read that one. So it was it
was very time consuming. The idea behind the syndication was

(14:57):
that instead of you going to the site, the sites
would send little bits of information to some sort of
portal page, a reader aggregator like Google Reader is a
very popular one. You might log into this reader program
or reader site really is what it was, uh, and
then all that information would get fed to you whenever

(15:17):
a new piece of information came in and you could
just look at a glance and see, oh, this one
website I'm interested in published a new article and you
can read the headline and think, oh, is that something
I want to look into more, And depending upon the
way they syndicated their feed, you might even be able
to read the entire article within your reader without having
to ever visit the site. Uh. Not a lot of

(15:38):
websites like that, because it meant that you could read
their content without visiting the site, which often meant that
they were not looking at their as Yeah, they were
getting ad impressions. So a lot of sites instead would
allow the first paragraph and a half and then a
click through. Yeah, and then you would have to click through.
But the the idea was all about making sure that
that you would be getting the ist information as you

(16:01):
were as it was being generated, so that you didn't
have to keep checking. Yeah. And around around two thousand one,
a version of RSS called RSS one point now was
being developed. Yeah. Yeah. The RSS originally was kind of
being created by by essentially Netscape, So the Netscape group
was working on RSS, and they came out with things

(16:22):
like r s S zero point nine which used r
DF elements, which is that resource description framework that you
were mentioning, Lauren. Um that, by the way, it essentially
is all about how links linked to each other and
the information between the links. It's a meta data issue. Um.
It's kind of complicated. So and ultimately it doesn't matter

(16:42):
because they removed the r DF elements when they released
RSS zero point nine one. Once they removed the r
DF elements, they said, oops, we yes, our acronym no
longer means r D F r D F. Uh you know,
site syndication. We got to call it something else, and uh,
that's when we became rich site syndication. Uh, and then

(17:04):
of course eventually became really simple syndication. Um, a rich
site summary, I should say, not syndication. Sorry, that's my
brain is totally syndicated. So anyway, Netscape releases point nine
and point nine one. Uh, it becomes rich site Summary
and then Netscape ends its development with the standard. Okay,

(17:25):
So the thing was there are a lot of people
were saying this was kind of a guard Yeah, guys,
why why did we just put that down? Yeah, we
kind of want that. So two different uh entities, I guess,
one person and one group began to work on developing
RSS further. On one end you had the the r

(17:47):
S S Dev Working Group, and on the other end
you had a fellow by the name of Dave Winer
and uh the they were independently working on creating and
furthering the standard of r s S. UH. Weiner attempted
to trademark RSS, but due to a clerical technicality, that

(18:07):
trademark did not go through. The RSS dev Working Group
ended up publishing RSS one point oh, and that was
part of that working group. There were there were originally
I think about twelve or fourteen people on it. Yeah,
it was basically the Hobbit Party. Yeah. One of one
of those people was fourteen year old Aaron Swartz. Yeah,

(18:29):
so Aeron swarts En, he's working with people like people
from the O'Reilly media group who were working on this
set of standards at fourteen years old, he was one
of the people helping define the standards of RSS one
point oh. Specifically, he was looking at creating some semantic
elements in RSS specification, uh, semantic being that it would

(18:54):
have a more almost like a natural language recognition ability
to it. It's it's really all about meta data, the
data about data, and how that helps aggregate information in
a way that's useful to human beings, so that you know,
because computers don't understand the actual information that is that

(19:14):
they handle, right, so you have to create information about
that information so computers can start to make associations and
start filing. Yeah, for humans, it's natural. For computers, it
takes a lot of work. So that's kind of what
he was building out, was this whole um semantic element
into it that was kind of what he was specifically
interested in. Meanwhile, just to kind of wrap up the

(19:37):
RSS stuff, um Winer would go on to develop RSS
two point oh, which would take the place of RSS
one point oh, even though it was not based on
one point oh at all, because he was developing his
simultaneous Yeah, the development forked and on one branch you
had one point oh and the other branch you had
two point and two point oh ended up eventually taking over. Yeah,

(19:58):
and so one point I wasn't really it's still really
impressive that they were creating it, and a lot of
the work that that sports especialated with metadet data he
ended up taking other places. Yes, Yeah, but it's kind
of important to bring that into perspective because I've seen
a lot of reports that just says he invented RSS,
which one is not accurate and too is certainly not accurate.

(20:21):
Uh once you go forward a couple of years when
RSS two point out takes over. But but his contributions
were nonetheless important, and as you've just pointed out, they
were applicable to other elements of technology, not just the
RSS project. So yeah, that was that was his involvement
in that at age fourteen. I will not tell you

(20:43):
what I was up to when I was fourteen years old,
because none of it is even remotely as impressive as
that one accomplishment. I'm pretty sure I was like watching
Mystery Science Theater three thousand and playing Mario Kart at fourteen,
I was probably wishing there was something called Mystery Science
Theater three thousand. It happens to all of us because

(21:04):
I'm old. As Lauren has pointed out from the Star
Wars discussion, I wonder episode one per episode. Um, so
this is about the same time that that Aaron Sports
made a made a big decision in his life. Yeah,
he decided to drop out of high school that year. Yeah,
that's um that's a bold decision for someone who is

(21:25):
uh already showing so much promise. Uh, It's not not
an unusual and that I've seen a lot of prodigies.
I mean, Steve Stephen Hawking I think did terribly in
primary school. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both dropped out,
but they dropped out of college. They completed high school,
but they dropped out of college. Well, you know, it's

(21:47):
I think that he sounds like Aaron had a lot
of support from his family and that he was, you know,
being encouraged to take on these crazy projects. Yeah. And
I have a feeling he was also one of those
people who the curriculum in a school just did not
match up to this to his pretty bored in high school.
And I'm not that smart, you know. I was also

(22:10):
pretty bored in high school when we weren't talking about Shakespeare.
When we were talking about Shakespeare, was very much engaged.
Um No, I had some great teachers in high school.
Please people, if don't don't write me hate mail teachers. Um.
So he also, while not in high school, taught himself
how to code and Python, so that was kind of impressive.

(22:31):
You know, he decided that he needed to learn some
more coding language. Um and uh. Then he ended up
meeting a couple of important people, including Abelson again, also
Lawrence Lessig, who would become uh sort of a mentor
and friend to him throughout his life. And um uh

(22:52):
Eric Eldridge, Eldred Rather and they they were they had
just weren't banded together to create um creative commons. Now,
creative comments is a way of licensing and copyrighting software
that is not as restrictive as the traditional copyright right,
because traditional copyright in the United States, at least, um

(23:12):
it's pretty much a one zero it's a yes no
kind of permission thing, wherein it's it's very possessive and
it lasts forever and not literally forever, but you might
as well be it's and it gets it seems like
every year there are more companies petitioning to lengthen the
the era of copyright. Um. Often you'll hear people talk

(23:34):
about Disney being one of the big ones that they
never want Mickey Mouse to pass out of copyright, and uh,
I mean from a from a business perspective, you can
totally understand their point of view. From a creative perspective,
and someone who wants to be able to take other
creative works and do something new with them, it's a
very frustrating experience because you might have a great idea

(23:55):
that would make someone else's great idea a superlative idea,
but you can't do it without the fear of being sued.
And so what lessig Abelson and Eldred wanted to do
was create a form of licensing that would allow people
who are creating works to choose how those works could
be protected, distributed and protected and remixed and exactly. Yeah,

(24:16):
so that way, like if if Lauren were to create
something really awesome. But she says, you know, I know
there are people out there who are going to look
at this in ways I never imagined, and I want
to see what comes of it. She could choose to
license it under creative Comments in such a way that
other people could use that work, possibly with some restrictions
some and there were a lot of different options where
you could do things like say, yes, you can use

(24:38):
this work, but not in a commercial sense, or you
can use this work, but you must attribute the originational creator.
So um, it gave a lot more flexibility. But they
had a problem. While they were working out all the
technical issues from the law side, the legal issues, the
policy issues, they weren't sure how to incorporate this the

(25:00):
actual technological side, right because at the you know, at
the end of a text article you can throw in
a tag that says copyright this person, or you know,
you can you can use this work in these ways,
But how do you do that on a music file
video without without actually having it pop up as you know,
someone say, y'all, this is creative Commons and it's a

(25:20):
song about my dog. Um, yeah, you don't want to
do that at the beginning of very file. And so
what Aaron ended up doing was he began to work
on code that would allow him to embed that information
again data meta data, data about data. Uh. This code
would be able to exist within a file and be
readable and meaningful, so that when you were distributing this file,

(25:45):
you would actually be able to see how it was
distributed under the Creative Commons and make sure that it's
following the right standards. So he played a very important
part early on the Creative Commons world to make sure
that it made sense for him a technical perspective, technological
perspective and yeah, huge influence on that. And again talking

(26:07):
with people like Lessig and A. Wilson and Eldred gave
him an even greater appreciation for this idea that information
is important and people needed so once more reinforcing his
own philosophy which again he had already started to develop
before he began to work on this project. Um. Then

(26:27):
in two thousand one he co wrote a paper with
James Hendler, was a professor at the University of Maryland.
The paper was called the semantic web, a network of
content for the digital city. So this again is that
idea of a web that is almost intelligent in a
way that everything is mapped to everything else in such

(26:49):
a way that associations are made very naturally. Uh. He
ended up going to co present this paper in Kyoto
so in two thousand one. Yeah again, yeah, this is
this is when he was still fourteen on the right
around that age. Yeah, kind of crazy. And then um,
just to kind of illustrate his philosophy on licensing. He

(27:12):
he had a very um clever sense of humor, and
he could he could word things in such a way
where you get the meaning and you get the humor
at the same time. For instance, he decided to to
summarize certain organizations views on copyright in the form of haiku,

(27:34):
and he was trying to explain what what these different
approach is meant in a very simple way. So, for example,
for the public domain, public domain meaning that it is
not under copyright and anyone can access it without fear
of any you know, legal repercussion exactly says do what

(27:56):
you feel like, since the work is abandoned, the law
doesn't care. That was hiking Number one might tease approach,
take my code with you and do whatever you want,
but please don't blame me. And then you have the
r I double A. That's the the Recording Institutent Associate
Industry Association America in this little litigious group you might

(28:22):
have heard, famously infamously opposed to UH to digital distribution,
or at least digital digital distribution without some form of
really restrictive d r M. Yeah. They really wanted everything
to run off of d r M. Yeah. Anyway, R
double A. They're also infamously UH known for getting involved

(28:43):
in policy decisions, advocating for policy decisions, his take on
their approaches. If you touch this file, my lawyers will
come kill you, so kindly refrain out. Yeah. Well, I
think this is a good moment to take a quick
break and hear from our sponsors. And now back to

(29:12):
the show. So we're gonna skip ahead to when he
was the right old age of seventeen, and that's when
he began to work on a project called info Gummy
and this was a WEEKI platform, yep, and it eventually
merged with another company that has gone on to UH
to some acclaim. You might have heard of it. It's

(29:33):
called Reddit. Ye. Reddit. I know some people who think
of read it as really it really is at their
front page to the Internet, you know, because Reddit, of
course divides things up into categories and then subcategories or
reddits and subreddits if you prefer, and you can read
all about these different headlines that are coming out all
across the web from all sorts of different sources. You

(29:56):
can vote up or vote down stories, so that the
ones that you've think are particularly well written or pertinent
are at the top, and ones that are not applicable
or whatever get voted down. A free flowing sharing of information.
Yeah uh. And ideally it works really well, although depending
upon which reddit commentary pill bits and pieces if it

(30:17):
can be wretched, has this common villainy right, and some
some subreddit communities are fantastic, absolutely, and then some subreddit
communities just are filled with flame wars um and it happens.
But anyway, so he was he was technically he was
a co creator, a co creator of Reddit. Yeah so
so Reddit as a company existed before Aaron came on
board because the company's merged. But it wasn't. It wasn't

(30:38):
what it is. It wasn't what it is today. Exactly.
So he ended up creating it a special kind of
web development library, uh that they ended up switching to.
They had it a previous one, they switched to the
one that Sworts creates, and then the site kind of
took off and in fact was purchased by the Nast

(31:01):
and uh that purchased that deal ended up making Aaron
wealthy overnight, extremely wealthy. Yeah, and you know, the the
entire Reddit team was moved into Wired's offices. Wired is
owned by Conde Nasty. Wired's offices in San Francisco, because
before that he had been working in other parts of California,
which um he preferred. Uh. He was not a fan

(31:23):
of San Francisco. He was not really a fan of
the Wired offices or of the entire He didn't like
the job. Like I have a feeling that anytime Swartz
encountered constraints, he became frustrated, and the more constrained he was,
the more frustrated he would become. And Uh, one of

(31:43):
the other elements of Swartz's life, and it's a it's
a tragic element, is that he was, uh he battled
depression and that in this environment where he was coming
up against all these constraints that he did not like.
Depression was starting to get to him. Um he wrote
a story, a fictional story, but people began to question

(32:06):
how fictional it was that that some people began to
interpret as a potential suicide note a plea for help,
and people began to check on him and UM he
then was essentially asked to resign and or fired, depending
upon the depending on the right the terminology you really
want to use. Either way, the it was it was

(32:28):
clear that his his his happiness was not going to
come into play while he's working there. He was not
contributing to the company in the way that they wanted,
and UH, no party in that relationship was happy. So
he ended up leaving uh Reddit. But but that was

(32:52):
probably for the best because again it was just clear
that it was not a good fit. Um And in
two thousand seven he ended up joininging UH the Internet
Archive Project and launched a project called open Library now
open Library. Essentially, it creates a web page for every
book that's within the database of various libraries and research

(33:14):
facilities and other organizations. It takes the meta data about
those books and creates a web page based on the metadata.
So you're not getting necessarily the content come to book.
But yeah, so so it's a useful tool. And uh,
it also allows anyone to add to that tool to

(33:34):
the open library project, which again it's involving metadata, it's
involving sharing information. We're starting to see a real theme
developed with Aaron's life and his work. He he also
at that point, um, not quite with permission, posted all
of the book cataloging data kept by the Library of
Congress to open library. And this is this is another

(33:55):
theme that goes on frequently in Eron's life of of
just just small I mean, okay, not even small, because
that's kind of big, big activism, big peaceful informational activism. Yeah.
He he would take initiative. Let's let's put it that way.
That taking initiative is going to become a theme very
quickly too. Absolutely. And in two thousand and eight, in fact,

(34:17):
he he wrote what he called the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,
and this was this this really kind of kicked off
his um, his public persona I think of of being
that kind of activist. There's a great quote from it
that I want to read real quick. Um he said,
it's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth

(34:38):
of knowledge where the moral equivalent of plundering a ship
and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't moral, it's a
moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to
let a friend make a copy. Mm hmm. Interesting And
then moving on from that, and the same year, in
two thousand and eight, uh, he got involved in a

(34:59):
little kerfuffle. Uh, alright, So so to explain the kerfuffle,
we have to talk about the PACER system, and that's
the public Access to Court electronic record system, and it's
essentially a government run database and it's mostly court filing,
so it's all the stuff that happens in open court.

(35:19):
And by by definition, they are uncopyrightable. They are public access. Yes, yes,
because these are you know, the government cannot copyright information.
You know, it's not allowed to. It's the same reason
why if you go look at information that was generated
by NASA, it's not protected by copyright. Um. So, same

(35:40):
sort of thing here. But the database, what I was
doing was just trying to solve a problem. You've got
so much information that it's very difficult to track down
specific files in a physical filing system and Also, it
generates a huge amount of material that you have to
create physical space for it to store it. So Pacer
was the let's create an electronic system one that will

(36:02):
cut down on the amount of space we need to
store all these files. And too, it will make it
way easier to find stuff. Sure. Sure in order to
do that, however, I mean, because you know to to
to run the servers to do all of that uploading,
it was charging at the time an eight cent per
page fee to access all of this information. Um and
and that was I mean that was mostly for giant

(36:24):
law firms or corporations that were downloading large amounts of
that data. You were if you were an individual, you
could get something for for for a couple bucks or
for free sometimes free. Frequently you were limited as an
individual to how many times you could get court files
within a certain span of times. So for example, every

(36:45):
three months or four months, you might be able to
download five files, but then you would have to wait
to download more or pay or pay right exactly and
uh and Sworts philosophy was that why should you be
forced to pay for something that should be publicly possible?
It is, it is the public and it should be right,
So so if it's you know, if it's not under copyright,

(37:08):
then why you So Pacer kind of responded to criticisms
about this database and began to create a pilot program
and allowed seventeen libraries in the United States free access
to the database, so anyone could download as many documents
within Pacer. Yeah, so Aaron decided that he had a

(37:34):
clever idea. He was like, well, so, well, I can
get as many of these for free as possible, and
then because they're not under copyright, I can upload them
to a free database which anyone can access at any
time for absolutely free, because and no one can come
after me because there if I just uncopyrightable files, if
I just write a script to do that for me,
that's much faster. I don't have to sit there and

(37:57):
set up the little uh, the little ducking birdie thing
that Homer Simpson used to flick yes over and over
again when he when he had that takeover for his job. Um,
it's a great episode. But yeah. No, he created a
script that would automatically and continuously download these files. Um.

(38:18):
He downloaded almost twenty million pages of text, or about
about one point five million dollars worth if you're going
by that eight cents of right, which you know, again
you can debate on what the actual value is. But way,
he downloaded all of this, and once once it hit

(38:39):
around that that much, someone over at Pacers said, WHOA,
something something funky is going down. Something's wrong. Someone is
just downloading all of it. Yeah, And whether or not
they thought that it was an attack or maybe the
system itself was just malfunctioning, they decided to to pull
the plug both on the servers. Literally, they shut the
servers down at first of that the they would no

(39:02):
longer be serving up the information, and then they canceled
the program. Though with the libraries, they canceled that program
and then they they were not. They also had to
deal with a nasty pr problem because the documents that
that Sworts got showed that the Pacers system was not

(39:23):
good at eliminating personal data out of court files. So
this is data that should be the should be private
and secret, It should be anonymous, should be protected. Right,
So the court filings themselves are not necessarily anonymous, but
the personal data about the people in them should be.
So it began to raise some questions about the PACER system,

(39:45):
and some critics said, you know, technologically, we should not
have this problem. Uh, we are at a place now
where this system should be way better than what it is.
And so it kind of gave the government a black eye.
Some people have said it perhaps this gave the United
States government, or at least certain agencies within the government,

(40:05):
the the inspiration to look more closely into Aaron Schwartz
and his activities. Supposedly the FBI at that point created
a profile on him, Yeah, which which Swarts said he
got hold of and found uh entertaining. Um, but yeah,
it was so some would argue that this kind of

(40:25):
created a grudge against Swarts on the on behalf of
the government, and that perhaps some of the other things
that unfold were part of that. I wouldn't I personally
wouldn't go so far as to say that, But then
I'm not intimate with all the details I know. Um,
but then let's let's move ahead. In two thousand and eight,

(40:46):
he became part of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He
was one of the original members. This was a campaign committee.
It was really about UH campaign financing reforms, trying to
do things like eliminate corporate UH contributions during election campaigns
and to just limit political contributions in general from corporations,

(41:09):
saying that, well, one of the things they suggested was,
why don't you hold it up to a vote from
shareholders whether or not you contribute to a particular political candidate. Um,
that sort of stuff. Uh. He was definitely very opinionated
on that subject. Also, in case you're curious, I mean,
just for full information, Uh, this committee mostly backs progressive Democrats.

(41:35):
That's not to say that there aren't progressive Republicans. There are.
There are progressive conservatives and progressive liberals, but in particular,
this particularly this committee, the specific committee tends to lean democrat. Um.
So just in the full, full disclosure, full disclosure information
there and in two Swartz. Swartz was not afraid of

(41:58):
of of poking the bear, as it turns out, and
he was also very again, very passionate about information. And uh.
He proved it again in when he filed a Freedom
of Information Act request to learn about how Bradley Manning
was being treated in US custody. Uh. And if you
aren't familiar with the story of Bradley Manning, Bradley Manning

(42:21):
was a U. S. Army soldier private actually who gained
access to some some pretty high level security clearance information
within the military and leaked it to wiki leaks. So
when you heard about all those cables from a few
years ago, thousands and thousands of communication cables that were

(42:43):
leaked to wiki leaks, a lot of that was traced
back to Bradley Manning, and Manning has been held in
confinement awaiting trial. The trial is supposed to take place
this year in June. UM, but for a long time
he was being held and the Marine or brig in Quantico, Virginia,

(43:03):
which was similar to being held in solitary confinement. His
conditions were uncomfortable, to say the least. He was by
many reports. Uh, he was in a cell where he
was unable to see any other prisoner. Within those cells,
they could hear each other, but they could not see
each other. Um. Supposedly he was not allowed to sleep

(43:27):
between the hours of five am and eight pm at
all um and then uh he was only allowed out
of his cell to take a walk for one hour
the first time he was in a cell. Um. His
his cell had I think no window. I think it
had a sink, a toilet, and a bed, and the

(43:48):
bed had a mattress that had a pillow incorporated in
the mattress, and that when Manning made a comment about
the only way he could hurt himself, they essentially started
to take away all his clothing as well, according to
the reports I read, when he made a comment saying
that the only way he could possibly hurt himself at
this point would be with his flip flops or underwear,

(44:09):
those were taken away as well. Future Jonathan again, doubly future,
since I'm recording this in twenty nineteen, We're gonna take
another quick break. So this is the reason why uh
Swarts was sitting in this Freedom of Information Act request.

(44:30):
He felt that one that what Manning had done possibly
was not as big a crime as everyone was making
it out to be, and certainly he did not deserve
the sort of treatment before he had even gone to trial. Certainly,
um so Manning, for his part, by the way, was
pleading not guilty. So to be treated this way, uh Swarts,
I'm sure felt passionately was completely wrong, completely um And

(44:57):
I should also rush to add this is all based
on what I've read about how how Manning was so again,
I wasn't there, and it could be that he was
treated completely fairly. And this information has been fabricated for
some reason. But this this was the information that was
out there at the time and or that is out
there now right and then um, ultimately he was manning

(45:19):
was moved to the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility, which
was a relatively new facility. And from what I understand
his the cell that he is in is much improved
over the one he was in Quantico. Um. So, anyway,
that was another thing Sports got involved in. And uh. Again,
some conspiracy theorists suggests that that the government, the grudge

(45:42):
that the government had back in the Pacers situation was
up to mega grudge after this, uh this request, although
Sports was not the only person in the world to
ask for the suscormationum So, I don't know, I don't
really buy into that. Uh. Skipping ahead just a little bit.
We're gonna backtrack in a second. But he was also

(46:02):
Sports was also an advocate against the SOPA campaign Stop
Online Piracy Act in two thousand and eleven that was proposed. Yeah,
the general idea behind this act was that a lot
of the stuff, a lot of the computers that host
the files that violate intellectual property rights of companies and

(46:27):
people within the United States. A lot of those computers
exist in countries outside the US jurisdiction, and so how
do you and how do you stop those sites from
distributing illegal copies of stuff within the United States. And
SOPA's approach was to break links to those sites, essentially,

(46:48):
to remove those sites from domain name servers here in
the United States, so that if you were to try
and navigate to one of those sites, he would get
an error. Essentially, you would get redirected to the FBI
while page, which would in theory scare you and to
stop to stop looking for ways to do it. There
were definitely work arounds to this um and a lot

(47:10):
of people protested SOPA because they said that one it
would not stop pirates from pirating because they could find
ways around it, and too, it could break the Internet
in unintended ways. I think Swartz was more of more
of information wants to be free, not so much like
it will break the Internet or we can get around this,

(47:31):
but more like more of it's wrong to shut down
information where information exists. Yeah. So, but he was definitely
on the anti SOPA side, and he gave a very
eloquent speech when SOPA failed to pass, and and really
was passionate about telling people don't rest because this idea

(47:53):
is not a not a new idea, it's something that's
been tried multiple times and will be tried again. Yeah,
So that that leads us to to the I guess
the last part of this this saga the story about
j store, which actually started back in November, So this
predates the SOPA stuff, but it kind of it envelops it.

(48:14):
J Store the company Essentially, it stands for journal storage, right,
and it's a it's a library of publicly funded academic articles. Yeah,
so we're talking again about scholarly information. So this is
kind of similar to the the the the information that
was in Pacer. Of course that was court filings, not
scholar scholarship. But in this case we're talking about academic journals,

(48:37):
books and papers that are from primary sources. These are
the people who are doing the rescientific research, medical research,
all kinds of really terrific stuff is in Jason. Essentially,
all the blogs you read are based off of the
academic papers that are stored in databases like j store,
and j store has about well a little bit over

(48:57):
four hundred journal titles and more than fifty disciplines are
represented in j stores database. And it was the whole
purpose of J store. Well, first it was founded by
William J. G. Bowen or Bowen, who was president of
Princeton University, and it was again trying to solve that
same problem that Pacer was trying to solve. How do
you make this vast amount of academic information searchable and

(49:23):
feasible to store because it takes up so much space.
Libraries were having trouble storing all this stuff, of course,
so J store was kind of the solution. And most
of the stuff, not all of it, like anything that's
in the public domain is publicly accessible through j store,
but anything that's currently under you know, the copyright or

(49:43):
whatever you have to you have to pay to access
behind a paywall. And uh and and again Swartz Swarts
didn't necessarily think that it needed to be behind a paywall.
Um or they needed or then needed to just exist
uh on J store and uh and there's some arguments
about exactly what he did, but essentially he got access

(50:06):
to a computer at the Mighty, which was fine. He
had he had authorization to access right he was currently
a fellow at the Center for Ethics at Harvard. Yeah,
which some people would say is ironic, but yeah, he
got access to a computer at in mighty um, and
he began to use again another kind of algorithm to

(50:28):
start downloading documents from j store. I think it was
a Python script actually, which you had mentioned that he
learned he had learned when he dropped out of high school.
Relying on that Python knowledge, uh and not the Monty kind. Um,
he managed to download around four million journals out of
j Store, and Jay Store was able to identify that

(50:50):
it was Swartz and essentially confronted him with this, and
ultimately Swartz and j Store ended up settling this this
dispute out of court. Uh, and Swords actually handed over
the information he had downloaded from j Store, and j Store,
for its part, essentially said all right, we're cool. You

(51:11):
know what. We don't agree with what you did, but
we understand why you did it, and you returned everything.
So where everything's cool and it could have ended right
then and there. Sure, but but um, well, people people
argue a little bit about what role M I T
has had in all of this, and some people say
that the administration they're really cracked down unnecessarily hard on him,

(51:32):
and a lot of I think a lot of alumni
have come out saying like, well, in my day, you know,
earlier in the nineteen seventies at M I T, if
someone had had hacked our system and started downloading this
amount of information from such a terrific databases J store,
we would have we would have congratulated them, we would
have given given them a certificate. And and and it's

(51:52):
a little parade. Yeah, yeah, And and there's some who
say that M I T did not actively pursue a
case against Sports, but also did not discourage They did
certainly call the cops on him. Yeah, so that's when
the government gets involved. And uh, the government essentially charges
Sports with thirteen Ultimately it was thirteen criminal court criminal counts,

(52:17):
which included things like wire fraud, computer fraud, information, you
have to information, this kind of stuff. Um and Uh.
He was released on a hundred thousand dollars bail. The charges,
depending upon the accounts you read, could have resulted in
him serving a prison sentence of between thirty and fifty
years at max. UM. Many of many of the accounts

(52:41):
I say, CE say, thirty five several. Yeah, there's one
I think CNN article that said fifty and I think
I think that people are adding them up in different ways.
But but um, and this is all under the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act. And uh. He also would have
faced up to maybe as much as four million dollars

(53:02):
and fines, and now it's far more likely that the
government would have ended up reducing that to just six months.
And some fine say that it would have been they
were offering a a plea based on the fact that
there was no personal gain intended from right and um.

(53:22):
So some have said that the government was essentially using
Swarts as an example to scare the heck out of
any of anyone else who would want to try something similar.
So you could kind of compare this to stories about
cases where people who downloaded some music files ended up

(53:42):
getting pulled into a court case where the fine would
have been, you know, an astronomical billion dollars, five dollars
per song or something like that, And it's a similar
situation in that sense. It could have been that, you know,
that the whole goal here was not so much to
punish Swartz into next century, but rather to act as

(54:02):
a deterrent for anyone else to scare people, which, by
the way, government and everybody else that rarely works. More
often than not, you get people more angry terrible things. UM.
I'm not saying that you aren't you know, you don't
have a right to act on things that are against
the law. I'm just saying, think about the way you

(54:25):
do it, because you could end up making a worse
enemy for yourself. You might find a better way of
working around it, is my point. So again not saying
that they're in the wrong. I mean, Sports was in
the wrong, but how much he was in the wrong
was another question. And and in in this case, um
and again, like like we said at the beginning of

(54:47):
the podcast, and like I'm sure that you've heard on
the news on January eleven, Sports was found dead in
his apartment. Uh. He had he had apparently committed suicide.
Uh and um uh. You know, there's been a lot
of people raising suggestions about what it was that specifically
led to his decision to end his life. And again,

(55:07):
because we are not Aaron, we can't we can't be
sure what led to it. And his family has come
out as being very very passionately saying that it was
because of this persecution. Yeah, that he was feeling a
huge amount of stress and that again his depression was
something that was was was really plaguing him at that time.

(55:31):
That and you can sort of imagine that if you
are this person who has this idealistic view of how
the world should be and then you start to encounter
so much, so much persecution and resistance to to your
dream where you know, you you can see in your
mind you think, there's this idealistic world we could be
living in and it would be so easy. But I'm

(55:52):
I'm hitting resistance all the way and every time I
try and make a change, I get ten more obstacles
in my way. You can kind of see where that
sort of hopelessness could creep in if if that was
you know, in fact, what Aaron was thinking. And again
this is just kind of it's all it's all speculation.
And you know, the U. S. Attorney's Office of its
Carmen Orts is in fact office, She's the U. S.

(56:15):
Attorney of Massachusetts has said that um that that their
office is contact conduct was not in fact inappropriate. They
they have maintained that what everything they did was well
within the limits of the law and in ethics, which
because again, just because something's legal doesn't mean it's ethical,

(56:38):
and vice versa. Yeah, there's there's been there's been a
huge pushback against her office. There's a white House dot
gov petition out right now as of as of late
January with over forty six thousand signatures to remove her
from office. Yeah, and there's been a lot of outcry
on the internet on behalf of sports. There's also been
some resistance, uh, some people who have criticized Swartz and

(57:01):
his his ideals. I've seen some of that. There have
been some hackers who have kind of made you know,
they've defaced some memorials online. You know, it's it's a
complex thing. Some sometimes you could argue that, you know,
maybe the hackers really do feel that Swartz was not
the person that other people are making him out to be.
In other cases, I think, you know, it could just

(57:22):
be you know, making a play for attention, for attention. Yeah,
this is a high profile instance on the flip side.
M I T s website has been hacked twice since
Swarts of suicide, once by anonymous who also threatened action
against the Westbergo Baptist Church when they announced that they
would pick at swarts as funeral, which they backed off of.
They did not, They did not show up. Yeah, and

(57:45):
again when we say that Anonymous does something, keep in
mind that's you know, that's a group that has no
real uh well, there's there's no real structure to it.
So sometimes members of Anonymous may act. That's very true. Yeah,
It's always hard to say that Anonymous did anything because
it could just be a group of people, could be
one person. But anyway, yes, uh, they did definitely send

(58:10):
out a message saying that if if the WBC showed
up at Swartz's funeral, they would block them from from
view of the grieving parties. Um And probably there was
a little bit more of a threat there too, because
Anonymous has been known to make people's lives difficult, if
difficult if they oppose the ideals that the group follows

(58:34):
um and and slightly slightly more positive action. Representative Zoe
Lofgren off California wants to propose Aaron's Law, which would
be a bill to amend the cf A and uh,
you know, change it so that so that these violations
of terms of service and network use UM cannot be

(58:56):
federally prosecuted unless they really should be. It's it's it's
it's a complex issue, right, I mean, this is this
is That was part of the whole argument in the
whole Creative Commons approach was that it's not necessarily that
one party is absolutely in the wrong or absolutely in
the right. It is a complex issue, and so it's
one of those things where you know, you don't want

(59:17):
to paint with a wide brush and then find out that, oh,
you know, we need to take a much more precise
approach to this um And also, you know, a lot
of luminaries technology luminaries have come out and spoken on
this subject. Lawrence Lessig has said several things about He's
criticized the prosecution's approach to going after swords and tim berners.

(59:43):
Lee wrote a very poignant tweet, really gorgeous tweet. Yeah,
if if I can, I'm probably gonna tear up in
the middle of this tweet. And if I don't, it's
going to be a miracle. But he he tweeted, um
Aaron dead, world wanderers, we have lost a wise elder.
Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents always lost
a child. Let us a weep, oh timmer nurs Lee

(01:00:03):
what are you doing to me? Yeah, he's uh yeah.
He definitely definitely summed it up really well for a
lot of people. Um. Shortly after after the discovery that
Sports had committed suicide, I appeared on an episode of
Tech News Today and we discussed the the the story

(01:00:24):
and uh uh yeah it was. I mean, that was
a tough discussion even then, and that was fresh after
finding out about it. Um, and it has not become
easier as time has gone on. Also over at m
I T, for m I T S part, they decided
to create a review panel to look into how m

(01:00:45):
I T handled the whole situation and whether or not
the people at m T as a whole behaved in
a way that is up to m T standards. And
the man who was put in charge of this review
panel is how Abelson, who again was one of those
two men, the other being Tim berners Lee back when

(01:01:06):
he was thirteen he got to meet and also a
man who worked with him on the Creative Commons projects.
So Abelson definitely has um firsthand knowledge of sports and
and his contributions to the world. And so uh he
wrote a very eloquent letter to M I T and said,

(01:01:26):
you know, what his intentions were as part of this
review process and say that he wants to take a
very honest look. He does not want it to become
a witch hunt. At the same time, he does not
want to just cover up anything that might be an
ugly source spot for m I T. He wants the
truth and he says that, you know, really, that's the
only thing that will serve in this situation, and it's
the only thing that that is appropriate considering the circumstances. Um.

(01:01:52):
So yeah, and uh, and it's while we don't know
all the details about what led sports to make this decision,
we do know that he had battled depression. He had
a history of it, you know, and it's a it's
kind of a lifelong, lifelong issue. Um yeah, yeah without
Jonathan and I wanted to stay without making this too

(01:02:12):
much of an after school special. You know, it's it's
depression is something that both of us have dealt with
in our lives. And uh, you know, it's it's it's
rough and it's terrible. But um but to borrow a phrase,
it gets better, and you know so, and and there's
help out there. There is help out there if you
are ever feeling overwhelmed. Please please talk to someone. There
are people who care about you. We care about you.

(01:02:34):
You probably shouldn't talk to us because we are not
mental health professionals. Honestly, googling suicide prevention is the best
way to find help in your area. But if you're
in the US, you can also call one two seven, three,
eight to five. It's it's free and confidential and they
will absolutely hook you up with helps. So yeah, it's
it's definitely something that you know, we want to leave

(01:02:55):
you guys with, because, like Lauren said, this is not
this is not an unfamil. Are your subject to us.
I hope you guys got something out of this episode.
It's important to remember Aaron and his contributions and who
he was and what he believed in. I don't want
the memory of him to just fade away. So I
hope you got something from this. If you have suggestions

(01:03:18):
about future episode topics for tech Stuff, feel free to
get in touch with me. The email addresses tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop
a line on Facebook or Twitter. Both of those handles
would be text stuff h SW. You can also go
to our website that's tech Stuff Podcast. Dot com. I've

(01:03:38):
got a weird accent going on now. That's what happens
when I record. For a very long time, tech Stuff
podcast dot com is what I was trying to say people,
because that's where we have the archive of every episode
we've ever recorded. It's also where we have a link
to our online store where you can go and buy
up all the tech Stuff merchandise there is. Please, I

(01:03:59):
need coffee and it's my coffee fund. Seriously, every purchasing
make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it,
and I will talk to you again really soon. Y
text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit

(01:04:20):
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.