February 6, 2013 • 63 mins
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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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from hof
dot com. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tex Stuff.
My name is Jonathan Strickland. I am the host ordinaire.
My name is Lauren foc Obama and I does that
make me the host extraordinary at this time? Extra extra extraordinary? Yeah. Well,
(00:26):
today we we have a topic that's both happy and sad.
It's sad in that the world lost UH 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
(00:47):
news a whole bunch, and you've probably been hearing about
him for years because he's done some really breakthrough work
in technology. Yeah yeah, and both from a actual technological
standpoint and from 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
(01:09):
policy side and from actual zeros in ones. Yeah, 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
(01:31):
if you guys have never gone to The Verge, it's
a fantastic It's one of my favorite sites out there
right now. It's really really well done. And a fellow
by the name of Tim Carmody wrote an exhaustive article
about Schwartz's life and was very thorough and very respectful,
and it was a really gorgeous piece of journalism, honestly,
(01:51):
and it was it was a very personal piece of
journalism that it led a few lines into editorial, but
it was and gave you a gave you insight to
what it's like being a journal 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 kind of an inside look to what it's
(02:13):
like being a journalist and covering a story like this.
And also he's very good at breaking down the myths
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
(02:33):
times they told it. Sure the same way to say
Steve Jobs. That's a good, good example, although we should
also had Swarts was was tragically very 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 eighty six, his father, Robert Swartz,
(02:55):
founded a software company which was called Mark Williams, which
actually name after Aaron's grandfather and uh and Mark Williams.
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
(03:18):
that brings me back because I remember when when computers
were either called Apple or IBM compatible or you know,
eventually kind of specificity doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah, No,
IBM compatible became a term, like I was referring to
PCs as IBM compatible as long after that was appropriate
because sometimes things stick with you. But anyway, Robert Swartz
(03:41):
would eventually become an intellectual property consultant for M I T. S.
Media Lab, and intellectual property was something that Aaron became
very interested in and very passionate about UH and the
idea of is information property doesn't belong to one person
or one to ty in the case of say a
(04:01):
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 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
(04:24):
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
you know, if, for example, if they need that money
to eat, I would rather 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
(04:45):
much in the realm of information wants to be free,
that sort of idea that that that data needs to
be out there for people to make use of it
and to make lives better. Be 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
(05:06):
to jump ahead too far. Tim's work in the Verge.
There was one little piece of information that I thought
was adorable, which is that when Aaron was eight years old.
Keep in mind out this is early days. Okay, so
six plus eight that means in in, in and and wait.
I got nineteen nineteen ninety four. Liberal arts education has
(05:34):
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 world Wide Web,
so don't write me. But he was going on usenet,
which was a news group database essentially kind of like
a network database where you could go and have discussions
(05:54):
about different topics. And apparently when exactly when he was eight,
he went on to Eustat and his first post was
to a news group 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
(06:16):
the last one 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 really wish that
(06:36):
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 me, y'all really, But anyway. He was
also fans of other things like I went visited his
(06:57):
blog in preparation of 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
(07:19):
about the Dark Night, and the most recent, the last
and the Christopher Nolan series. Actually it was the second
one was 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.
(07:42):
And he 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
(08:03):
the same idea once or twice, because I I know
about games, and yeah, 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
(08:24):
art and and and entertainment even if you even if
you 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.
(08:47):
Certainly 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
and I say that with full love. I say that
as a man who has Lord of the Rings tattoo
on his left arm. Okay, I love the geek. I
(09:08):
learned things about you every day. John. You didn't know
I had a tattoo with the Lord of the Things.
I don't think I did. Right here, Um, I can't
show you up wearing 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, he begins to work on the Info Network,
(09:31):
which is 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 the had the potential to be like
(09:54):
the Guide in 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. That movie was so bad. Martin Freeman was
(10:17):
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 Network.
He's he's working on this this project, and the work
gets him some attention. He actually becomes a finalist in
(10:40):
the second Ours 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
the bracket bracket with people who are big names today
in technology and who were adults. Many of these people
(11:01):
knew his work. Yeah, they knew him. They knew him
on online as as it stood at the time Aaron
s W. But they did not know that Aaron s W.
They're like, whoa am I being punked? Yeah? Is that that?
That's a really dated reference. That's point in around two
thousand they might have been saying it. Maybe okay, so
(11:21):
ask your parents. So he he ended up winning 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 work 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
(11:43):
the World Wide Web back when he was 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
(12:06):
also a fellow of the I E E E or
as long time 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
(12:27):
discussion as well. Abelson himself, Um so big deal. You know,
he got to meet some people who were definitely influential
in the technolog 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
(12:49):
these are big ideas for a thirteen year old, and
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. Oh wow,
(13:11):
look at you. Yes, that's exactly right. It's a it's
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 podcaster. And it's it's what it's what
(13:31):
the Internet uses to syndicate itself. Yeah. Yeah, so 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 r S S 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
(13:53):
pre RSS and other syndication formats, the way you would
get information on the net is you would go visit
a website. Yeah, you would. You would type in the
r L and you would click go, and you would
visit the website right, and you would look and you
you would actually scan the website to see if anything
you had popped up. This applied for everything from website
that was about a specific company you were interested in,
(14:15):
or a community. Blogs were kind of not a thing yet,
but but we web comics maybe, or a new 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
(14:38):
that instead of you going to these sites, the sites
would send little bits of information to some sort of
portal page a reader aggregator. Yeah, 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 a new piece of nation came in and you
(15:00):
could just look at a glance and see, oh, this
one website I'm interested in published a new article and
you could read the headline and think, oh, is that
something I want to look into more? And depending upon
the way they syndicated their feet, 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 websites like that, because it meant that you could
(15:21):
read their content without visiting the site, which often meant
that they were not looking at their ads. 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 latest information
(15:42):
as you 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 um created by by essentially Netscape.
So the Netscape group was working on RSS, and they
(16:02):
came out with things 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
(16:23):
it doesn't matter 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, yes, our
acronym no longer means r d F r d F. Uh,
you know sites syndication. We gotta call it something else.
And uh, that's when we became rich site syndication. Uh.
(16:46):
And then of course eventually became really simple syndication UM
or 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,
(17:07):
so the thing was there are a lot of people
were saying this was kind of a god. 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
(17:28):
r 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
(17:48):
that trademark did not go through. The r S S
Dev Working Group ended up publishing RSS one point oh.
And that was part of that working group they were
they were originally I think about twelve or fourteen people
on it. Yeah, it was basically the Hobbit Party. Yeah.
One one of those people was fourteen year old Aaron Sports. Yeah,
(18:10):
so Aaron Swart, 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,
(18:33):
semantic being that it would 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 they handle, right, so
(18:57):
you have to create information about that information so computers
can start to make associations, can 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 that's semantic element into it. That was
kind of what he was specifically interested in. Meanwhile, just
to kind of wrap up the RSS stuff, um Winer
(19:21):
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
o ended up eventually taking over. Yeah, and so one
point I wasn't really it's still really impressive that they
(19:43):
were creating it, and a lot of the work that
that sports especially did 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 say, w R, yes he invented RSS,
which one is not accurate and two is certainly not accurate. Uh,
once you go forward a couple of years when RSS
(20:05):
two point out takes over. But but his contributions were
nonetheless important, and as you 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 what I
was up to when I was fourteen years old, because
(20:28):
none of it is even remotely as impressive as that
one accomplished. 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
I'm old. As Lauren has pointed out from the Star
(20:49):
Wars discussion one per episode, one 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
uh already showing so much promise. Uh, It's not not unusual.
(21:12):
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. Oh, you know, it's I think
that he It sounds like Aaron had a lot of
support from his family and that he was, you know,
(21:36):
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 to his. I was pretty bored in
high school and I'm not that smart, so you know,
I was also pretty bored in high school. When we
weren't talking about Shakespeare. When we were talking about Shakespeare,
(21:56):
it was very much engaged. Um No, I had some
great teachers in high will 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. You know, he decided
that he needed to learn some more coding language. Um
(22:17):
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 u uh Eric Eldridge Eldredge rather
and they they were they had just weren't banded together
(22:38):
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 because traditional copyright in the
United States, at least, um, 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
(23:01):
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 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
(23:23):
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 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
(23:44):
less eg 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, 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
(24:05):
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 this work, but
not in a commercial sense, or you can use this
work but you must attribute the creator. So um. It
(24:28):
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 on the 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
(24:50):
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 of commons and it's a 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
(25:12):
to embed that information again 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, 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
(25:35):
a very important part early on the Creative Commons world
to make sure that it made sense from a technical perspective,
technological perspective, and yeah, huge influence on that. And again
talking with people like Lessig and A. Wilson and Eldred
gave him an even greater appreciation for this idea that
(25:55):
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 in two thousand one he co wrote a paper
with James Hendler, was a professor at the University of Maryland.
(26:18):
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
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
(26:40):
this is when he was still four on the right
around that age, Yeah, kind of crazy. And then um,
just to kind of illustrate his philosophy on licensing. He
he had a very um clever sense of humor, and
he could he could word things in such a way
(27:02):
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,
and he was trying to explain what what these different
approach is meant in a very simple way. So, for example,
(27:25):
for the public domain, public domain meaning that it is
not under copyright and anyone can access it without fear
of any you know, exactly do what you feel like,
since the work is abandoned, the law doesn't care. That
was hik Number one might tease approach, take my code
(27:48):
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 Association Industry Association America in
this little litigious group UH you might have heard, famously
famously infamously opposed to UH to digital distribution, or at
(28:11):
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, alright, double A.
They're also infamously uh known for getting involved in policy decisions,
advocating for policy decisions. His take on their approaches. If
you touch this file, my lawyers will come kill you,
(28:35):
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 the show. So
we're gonna skip ahead to when he was the ripe
old age of seventeen, and that's when he began to
work on a project called info Gummy. And this was
(28:58):
a wiki 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 called Reddit. Ye. Reddit.
I know some people who think of Reddit as really
it really is at their front page to the Internet,
you know, because Reddit, of course divides things up into
(29:19):
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 can vote up or vote down
stories so that the ones that you think are particularly
well written or pertinent are at the top, and ones
that are not applicable or whatever get voted down. A
(29:42):
free flowing sharing of information yeah, uh, and ideally it
works really well, although depending upon which read commentary bits
and pieces, if it can be retch, it has 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
(30:03):
technically he was a co creator, a co creator of redding. Yeah.
So so redd It as a company existed before Aaron
came on board because the company's merged. But it wasn't
it wasn't what it is. It wasn't what it is
today we know, yeah, exactly. So he ended up creating
it a special kind of web development library, uh, that
(30:24):
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 Condie Nast 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
(30:45):
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 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
(31:06):
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 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
(31:26):
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 how fictional it was. That
that some people began to interpret as a potential suicide
(31:46):
note a police for help, and people began to check
on him and um he then was essentially asked to
resign and or fired, depending upon the report, depending on
the right the terminology you really want either way, the
it was it was clear that his his his happiness
(32:09):
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 probably for the best because again it
was just clear that it was not a good fit. Um.
(32:32):
And in two thousand seven he ended up joining 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 facilities and other organizations. It takes the meta data
(32:52):
about those books and creates a web page based on
the metadata. So you're not getting necessarily the content of
the book, but for mationg Yeah. So so it's a
useful tool. And uh it also allows anyone to add
to that tool, to the open library project, which again
it's involving metadata, it's involving sharing information. We're starting to
(33:15):
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 theme that goes on frequently in Aeron's life
of of just just small I mean, okay, not even small,
(33:36):
because that's kind of big, big activism, big peaceful informational activism. Yeah. 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,
he he wrote what he called the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,
and this was this this really kind of kicked off
(34:00):
his m 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
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 that was blinded by greed would refuse
(34:21):
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 little kerfuffle uh, alright. So so to explain the kerfuffle,
we have to talk about the PACER system, and that's
(34:42):
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.
And by by definition, they are uncopyrightable. They are public access. Yes,
because these are you know, the government cannot copyright information.
(35:04):
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
sort of thing here. But the database, what it was
doing was is trying to solve a problem. You've got
so much information that's very difficult to track down specific
(35:24):
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 idea of let's create an electronic system one that
will 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
(35:44):
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
law firms or corporations were downloading large amounts of that data.
If you were an individual, you could get something for
(36:06):
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 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
(36:26):
or pay right exactly and uh and Swarts philosophy was
that why should you be forced to pay for something
that should be publicly accessible? It is, it is the
public and right so so if it's you know, if
it's not under copyright, then why so PACER kind of
(36:47):
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 any one could
download as many documents within PACER. So Aaron decided that
(37:07):
he he had a 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 if I just uncopyrightable files, if
I just write a script to do that for me,
(37:28):
that's much faster. I don't have to sit there and
set up the little uh, the little ducking birdie thing
that Homer Simpson used to click 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,
(37:53):
he downloaded almost twenty million pages of text, or about
twenty cents about one point five million dollars worth if
you're going by that eight cents right, which you know,
again you can debate on what the actual value is.
But the way he downloaded all of this, and once
(38:13):
once they hit around that that much, someone over at
Pacers said, WHOA, something something funky is going down. Something's wrong.
Someone is 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 so that the they would
(38:36):
no 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
(38:57):
not good at eliminated personal data out of court files.
So this is data that should be that should be
private and secret. It should be anonymous, should be protected here, right,
So the court filings themselves are not necessarily anonymous, but
the personal data about the people in them it should be.
So it began to raise some questions about the PACER system,
(39:19):
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 that perhaps this gave the United
States government, or at least certain agencies within the government,
(39:39):
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 sports said he
got hold of and found uh entertaining. Um, but yeah,
it was so some would argue that this kind of
(40:00):
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,
(40:20):
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 corporation
(40:43):
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.
(41:09):
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 specific committee, the specific committee tends to
lean democrat. Um. So just in the full, full disclosure,
full disclosure information there uh and in uh Swartz Swartz
(41:31):
was not afraid of 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.
(41:52):
And if you aren't familiar with the story of Bradley Manning,
Bradley Manning 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 of communication cables
(42:16):
that were 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 in the Marine Corps
brig in Quantico, Virginia, which was similar to being held
(42:41):
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 between the hours of five am and
(43:03):
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 his cell. Um.
His his cell had I think no window. I think
it had a sink, a toilet, and a bed, and
the bed had a mattress that had a pillow incorporated
(43:25):
in the mattress. 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,
those were taken away as well. So this is the
(43:46):
reason why UH Sworts was sitting in this Freedom of
Information Act request. He 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 didn't not deserve the sort of treatment before he
had even gone to trial. Certain um so Manning, for
his part, by the way, was pleading not guilty. So
(44:08):
to be treated this way, uh, Sports, I'm sure felt
passionately was completely wrong, complete um. And 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,
(44:30):
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 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
(44:52):
he was in in Quantico. Um So, anyway, that was
another thing Sports got involved in, and UH again, some
con r theorists suggests that that the government, the grudge
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
(45:14):
ask for this incation. UM, 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 Sports was also an advocate against the SOAPA
campaign Stop Online Piracy Act in two thousand eleven that
was proposed. Yeah, the general idea behind this act was
(45:39):
that a lot of the stuff, a lot of the
computers that host the files that violate intellectual property rights
of companies and 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
(45:59):
those sites from distributing illegal copies of stuff within the
United States? And SOPA's approach was to break links to
those sites, essentially, 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,
you would get an error. Essentially, you would get redirected
(46:19):
to the FBI homepage, which would in theory, scare you
and to stop you have to stop looking for ways
to do it. There were definitely work arounds to this
um and a lot 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
(46:40):
could break the Internet in unintended ways. I think Swarts
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, but more like more if
it's wrong to shut down information where information exists. Yeah so,
but he was definitely on the anti SOPA side, and
(47:02):
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 is not a not a new idea.
It's something that's been tried multiple times and we will
be tried again. Yeah. So, but that that leads us
to to the I guess the last part of this
(47:25):
the saga, the story about j Store, which actually started
back in November, so this predates the SOPA stuff, but
it kind of it envelopes it 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
(47:48):
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, books and
papers that are from primary sources. These are the people
who are doing the ReScience research, medical research, all kinds
of really terrific stuff, isn't Jason. Essentially, all the blogs
(48:10):
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 four 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 G. G. Bowen or Bowen,
(48:32):
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 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
(48:52):
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 whatever you have to you have to
pay to access behind a paywall. And uh and and
again Swartz Uh, Sworts didn't necessarily think that it needed
(49:13):
to be behind a paywall or they needed or that
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 to a computer at in m
T which was fine. He had he had authorization to
access right he was currently a fellow at the Center
(49:35):
for Ethics at Harvard. Yeah, which some people would say
is ironic, but yeah, he got access to a computer
in m TY. Um, and he began to use again
another kind of algorithm to start downloading documents from j store.
I think it was a Python script actually, which you
had mentioned that he learned when he dropped out of
(49:57):
high school. Relying on that Python college uh and not
the Monty kind. Um. He managed to download around four
million journals out of jay store, and jay Store was
able to identify that it was Swartz and essentially confronted
him with this, and ultimately Swartz and J Store ended
(50:20):
up settling this this dispute out of court. Uh and
Swarts 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 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
(50:42):
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, 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 ste
and he's at M I T. If someone had had
hacked our system and started downloading this amount of information
(51:05):
from such a terrific database, Jay Store, we would have
we would have congratulated them, we would have given given
them a certificate and and and it's a little parade, yeah,
um 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 and they did certainly call
(51:27):
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, which
included things like wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information,
theft of information, this kind of stuff. Um and uh.
(51:47):
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. Yeah, many of many of the accounts,
I say, say thirty five several Well, yeah, there's one
(52:08):
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 could also would
have faced up to maybe as much as four million
dollars and fines. Now it's far more likely that the
government would have ended up reducing that to just six months.
(52:31):
And some say that, yeah, it would have been. They
were offering a a plea based on the fact that
there was no personal gain intended from actions, right and Um,
so some have said that the government was essentially using
sworts as an example to scare the heck out of
(52:52):
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
getting pulled into a court case where the fine would
have been, you know, an astronomicals like five dollars per
song or something like that, and it's a similar situation
(53:16):
in that sense. It could have been that, you know
that the whole goal here was not so much to
punish sports into next century, but rather to act as
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.
(53:40):
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
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
(54:01):
was another question. And and in in this case, Um
and again, like like we said at the beginning of
the podcast, and like I'm sure that you've heard on
the news. On January eleventh, thirteen, Sports was found dead
in his apartment. Uh. He had he had apparently committed suicide. Uh.
And Uh, you know, there's been a lot of people
(54:23):
raising suggestions about what it was that specifically led to
his decision to end his life. And again, because we
are not Aaron, we can't we can't know 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
(54:45):
that again his depression was something that was was was
really plaguing him at that time. Uh. 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,
(55:06):
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 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
(55:30):
it's all it's all speculation. And you know, the U. S.
Attorney's Office of it's Carmen Orts is in fact office,
She's the U. S. Attorney of Massachusetts has said that, um,
that that their office is contact conduct was not in
fact inappropriate. Yeah. They they have maintained that what everything
(55:50):
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, uh 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
(56:13):
been a lot of outcry on the internet on behalf
of Sworts. There's also been some resistance, Uh, some people
who have criticized Swartz and 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
(56:35):
could argue that, you know, maybe the hackers really do
feel that Swarts was not the person that other people
are making him out to be. In other cases, I think,
you know, it could just be you know, making a
play for attention. For 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 Westboro Baptist Church when
(56:58):
they announced that they would pick its Worts funeral, which
they backed off of. They did not, they did not
show up. Yeah, and 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
(57:20):
act u 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 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
(57:45):
there was a little bit more of a threat there too,
because anonymous has been known to make people's lives difficult
if they if they oppose the ideals that the group
follows UM And in slightly slightly more positive action, Representative
Zoe Lofgren of California wants to propose Aaron's Law, which
would be a bill to amend the cf A and uh,
(58:10):
you know, change it so that so that these violations
of terms of service and network use UM cannot be
federally prosecuted unless they really should be right. 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
(58:32):
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 to paint with a wide brush and then find
out that, oh, you know, we needed to take a
much more precise approach to this UM. And also, you know,
a lot of luminaries. Technology luminaries have come out and
(58:53):
spoken on this subject. Lawrence Lessig has said several things
about He's criticized the process, Accution's approach to going after
Swords and tim Berners Lee wrote a very poignant tweet,
really gorgeous tweet. Yeah, if if I can, I'm 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
(59:17):
have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are
one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let
us weep. I'm like, oh, Timmerners Lee, 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 Swarts had committed suicide,
(59:39):
I appeared on an episode of Tech News Today and
we discussed the the the story and uh uh yeah
it was. I mean, it 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 AM I he for m I T
(01:00:01):
s part, they decided to create a review panel to
look into how M 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
might standards. And the man who has put in charge
of this review panel is how Abelson, who again was
(01:00:25):
one of those two men, the other being Tim Burners
Lee back when 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
(01:00:47):
I T and said, 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 sore 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,
(01:01:08):
and it's the only thing that that is appropriate considering
the circumstances. Um. So yeah, and uh, and it's while
we don't know all the tales 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.
(01:01:30):
Um yeah, yeah without Jonathan and I wanted to stay
without making this too 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 there's help out there. There is help
out there. If you are ever feeling overwhelmed, Please please
(01:01:52):
talk to someone. There are people who care about you.
We care about you. You probably shouldn't talk to us
because we are not mental health professionals. Yeah, 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 on two seven, 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,
(01:02:16):
we want to leave you guys with because, like Lauren said,
this is not this is not an unfamiliar subject to
us and UH, and it can when you're in the
middle of a depression, it can feel like there's nowhere
to turn. And the truth is that's that's not the case.
So um, yeah, let's let's wrap this up. Guys. UH,
if you would like to hear about a particular subject,
(01:02:39):
if there's someone that we should cover, or a particular
technology that you really want to know more about, I
highly recommend you get in touch with us and let
us know. You can write us an email. Our email
address is text stuff at Discovery dot com, or you
can send us a message on Twitter or Facebook. Our
handle at both those locations is text H S W
(01:03:01):
and Lauren and I will talk to you again really
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Because it has staff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from hof
dot com. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tex Stuff.
My name is Jonathan Strickland. I am the host ordinaire.
My name is Lauren foc Obama and I does that
make me the host extraordinary at this time? Extra extra extraordinary? Yeah. Well,
(00:26):
today we we have a topic that's both happy and sad.
It's sad in that the world lost UH 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
(00:47):
news a whole bunch, and you've probably been hearing about
him for years because he's done some really breakthrough work
in technology. Yeah yeah, and both from a actual technological
standpoint and from 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
(01:09):
policy side and from actual zeros in ones. Yeah, 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
(01:31):
if you guys have never gone to The Verge, it's
a fantastic It's one of my favorite sites out there
right now. It's really really well done. And a fellow
by the name of Tim Carmody wrote an exhaustive article
about Schwartz's life and was very thorough and very respectful,
and it was a really gorgeous piece of journalism, honestly,
(01:51):
and it was it was a very personal piece of
journalism that it led a few lines into editorial, but
it was and gave you a gave you insight to
what it's like being a journal 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 kind of an inside look to what it's
(02:13):
like being a journalist and covering a story like this.
And also he's very good at breaking down the myths
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
(02:33):
times they told it. Sure the same way to say
Steve Jobs. That's a good, good example, although we should
also had Swarts was was tragically very 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 eighty six, his father, Robert Swartz,
(02:55):
founded a software company which was called Mark Williams, which
actually name after Aaron's grandfather and uh and Mark Williams.
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
(03:18):
that brings me back because I remember when when computers
were either called Apple or IBM compatible or you know,
eventually kind of specificity doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah, No,
IBM compatible became a term, like I was referring to
PCs as IBM compatible as long after that was appropriate
because sometimes things stick with you. But anyway, Robert Swartz
(03:41):
would eventually become an intellectual property consultant for M I T. S.
Media Lab, and intellectual property was something that Aaron became
very interested in and very passionate about UH and the
idea of is information property doesn't belong to one person
or one to ty in the case of say a
(04:01):
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 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
(04:24):
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
you know, if, for example, if they need that money
to eat, I would rather 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
(04:45):
much in the realm of information wants to be free,
that sort of idea that that that data needs to
be out there for people to make use of it
and to make lives better. Be 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
(05:06):
to jump ahead too far. Tim's work in the Verge.
There was one little piece of information that I thought
was adorable, which is that when Aaron was eight years old.
Keep in mind out this is early days. Okay, so
six plus eight that means in in, in and and wait.
I got nineteen nineteen ninety four. Liberal arts education has
(05:34):
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 world Wide Web,
so don't write me. But he was going on usenet,
which was a news group database essentially kind of like
a network database where you could go and have discussions
(05:54):
about different topics. And apparently when exactly when he was eight,
he went on to Eustat and his first post was
to a news group 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
(06:16):
the last one 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 really wish that
(06:36):
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 me, y'all really, But anyway. He was
also fans of other things like I went visited his
(06:57):
blog in preparation of 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
(07:19):
about the Dark Night, and the most recent, the last
and the Christopher Nolan series. Actually it was the second
one was 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.
(07:42):
And he 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
(08:03):
the same idea once or twice, because I I know
about games, and yeah, 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
(08:24):
art and and and entertainment even if you even if
you 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.
(08:47):
Certainly 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
and I say that with full love. I say that
as a man who has Lord of the Rings tattoo
on his left arm. Okay, I love the geek. I
(09:08):
learned things about you every day. John. You didn't know
I had a tattoo with the Lord of the Things.
I don't think I did. Right here, Um, I can't
show you up wearing 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, he begins to work on the Info Network,
(09:31):
which is 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 the had the potential to be like
(09:54):
the Guide in 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. That movie was so bad. Martin Freeman was
(10:17):
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 Network.
He's he's working on this this project, and the work
gets him some attention. He actually becomes a finalist in
(10:40):
the second Ours 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
the bracket bracket with people who are big names today
in technology and who were adults. Many of these people
(11:01):
knew his work. Yeah, they knew him. They knew him
on online as as it stood at the time Aaron
s W. But they did not know that Aaron s W.
They're like, whoa am I being punked? Yeah? Is that that?
That's a really dated reference. That's point in around two
thousand they might have been saying it. Maybe okay, so
(11:21):
ask your parents. So he he ended up winning 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 work 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
(11:43):
the World Wide Web back when he was 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
(12:06):
also a fellow of the I E E E or
as long time 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
(12:27):
discussion as well. Abelson himself, Um so big deal. You know,
he got to meet some people who were definitely influential
in the technolog 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
(12:49):
these are big ideas for a thirteen year old, and
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. Oh wow,
(13:11):
look at you. Yes, that's exactly right. It's a it's
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 podcaster. And it's it's what it's what
(13:31):
the Internet uses to syndicate itself. Yeah. Yeah, so 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 r S S 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
(13:53):
pre RSS and other syndication formats, the way you would
get information on the net is you would go visit
a website. Yeah, you would. You would type in the
r L and you would click go, and you would
visit the website right, and you would look and you
you would actually scan the website to see if anything
you had popped up. This applied for everything from website
that was about a specific company you were interested in,
(14:15):
or a community. Blogs were kind of not a thing yet,
but but we web comics maybe, or a new 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
(14:38):
that instead of you going to these sites, the sites
would send little bits of information to some sort of
portal page a reader aggregator. Yeah, 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 a new piece of nation came in and you
(15:00):
could just look at a glance and see, oh, this
one website I'm interested in published a new article and
you could read the headline and think, oh, is that
something I want to look into more? And depending upon
the way they syndicated their feet, 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 websites like that, because it meant that you could
(15:21):
read their content without visiting the site, which often meant
that they were not looking at their ads. 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 latest information
(15:42):
as you 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 um created by by essentially Netscape.
So the Netscape group was working on RSS, and they
(16:02):
came out with things 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
(16:23):
it doesn't matter 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, yes, our
acronym no longer means r d F r d F. Uh,
you know sites syndication. We gotta call it something else.
And uh, that's when we became rich site syndication. Uh.
(16:46):
And then of course eventually became really simple syndication UM
or 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,
(17:07):
so the thing was there are a lot of people
were saying this was kind of a god. 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
(17:28):
r 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
(17:48):
that trademark did not go through. The r S S
Dev Working Group ended up publishing RSS one point oh.
And that was part of that working group they were
they were originally I think about twelve or fourteen people
on it. Yeah, it was basically the Hobbit Party. Yeah.
One one of those people was fourteen year old Aaron Sports. Yeah,
(18:10):
so Aaron Swart, 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,
(18:33):
semantic being that it would 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 they handle, right, so
(18:57):
you have to create information about that information so computers
can start to make associations, can 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 that's semantic element into it. That was
kind of what he was specifically interested in. Meanwhile, just
to kind of wrap up the RSS stuff, um Winer
(19:21):
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
o ended up eventually taking over. Yeah, and so one
point I wasn't really it's still really impressive that they
(19:43):
were creating it, and a lot of the work that
that sports especially did 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 say, w R, yes he invented RSS,
which one is not accurate and two is certainly not accurate. Uh,
once you go forward a couple of years when RSS
(20:05):
two point out takes over. But but his contributions were
nonetheless important, and as you 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 what I
was up to when I was fourteen years old, because
(20:28):
none of it is even remotely as impressive as that
one accomplished. 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
I'm old. As Lauren has pointed out from the Star
(20:49):
Wars discussion one per episode, one 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
uh already showing so much promise. Uh, It's not not unusual.
(21:12):
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. Oh, you know, it's I think
that he It sounds like Aaron had a lot of
support from his family and that he was, you know,
(21:36):
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 to his. I was pretty bored in
high school and I'm not that smart, so you know,
I was also pretty bored in high school. When we
weren't talking about Shakespeare. When we were talking about Shakespeare,
(21:56):
it was very much engaged. Um No, I had some
great teachers in high will 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. You know, he decided
that he needed to learn some more coding language. Um
(22:17):
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 u uh Eric Eldridge Eldredge rather
and they they were they had just weren't banded together
(22:38):
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 because traditional copyright in the
United States, at least, um, 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
(23:01):
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 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
(23:23):
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 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
(23:44):
less eg 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, 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
(24:05):
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 this work, but
not in a commercial sense, or you can use this
work but you must attribute the creator. So um. It
(24:28):
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 on the 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
(24:50):
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 of commons and it's a 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
(25:12):
to embed that information again 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, 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
(25:35):
a very important part early on the Creative Commons world
to make sure that it made sense from a technical perspective,
technological perspective, and yeah, huge influence on that. And again
talking with people like Lessig and A. Wilson and Eldred
gave him an even greater appreciation for this idea that
(25:55):
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 in two thousand one he co wrote a paper
with James Hendler, was a professor at the University of Maryland.
(26:18):
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
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
(26:40):
this is when he was still four on the right
around that age, Yeah, kind of crazy. And then um,
just to kind of illustrate his philosophy on licensing. He
he had a very um clever sense of humor, and
he could he could word things in such a way
(27:02):
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,
and he was trying to explain what what these different
approach is meant in a very simple way. So, for example,
(27:25):
for the public domain, public domain meaning that it is
not under copyright and anyone can access it without fear
of any you know, exactly do what you feel like,
since the work is abandoned, the law doesn't care. That
was hik Number one might tease approach, take my code
(27:48):
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 Association Industry Association America in
this little litigious group UH you might have heard, famously
famously infamously opposed to UH to digital distribution, or at
(28:11):
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, alright, double A.
They're also infamously uh known for getting involved in policy decisions,
advocating for policy decisions. His take on their approaches. If
you touch this file, my lawyers will come kill you,
(28:35):
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 the show. So
we're gonna skip ahead to when he was the ripe
old age of seventeen, and that's when he began to
work on a project called info Gummy. And this was
(28:58):
a wiki 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 called Reddit. Ye. Reddit.
I know some people who think of Reddit as really
it really is at their front page to the Internet,
you know, because Reddit, of course divides things up into
(29:19):
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 can vote up or vote down
stories so that the ones that you think are particularly
well written or pertinent are at the top, and ones
that are not applicable or whatever get voted down. A
(29:42):
free flowing sharing of information yeah, uh, and ideally it
works really well, although depending upon which read commentary bits
and pieces, if it can be retch, it has 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
(30:03):
technically he was a co creator, a co creator of redding. Yeah.
So so redd It as a company existed before Aaron
came on board because the company's merged. But it wasn't
it wasn't what it is. It wasn't what it is
today we know, yeah, exactly. So he ended up creating
it a special kind of web development library, uh, that
(30:24):
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 Condie Nast 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
(30:45):
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 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
(31:06):
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 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
(31:26):
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 how fictional it was. That
that some people began to interpret as a potential suicide
(31:46):
note a police for help, and people began to check
on him and um he then was essentially asked to
resign and or fired, depending upon the report, depending on
the right the terminology you really want either way, the
it was it was clear that his his his happiness
(32:09):
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 probably for the best because again it
was just clear that it was not a good fit. Um.
(32:32):
And in two thousand seven he ended up joining 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 facilities and other organizations. It takes the meta data
(32:52):
about those books and creates a web page based on
the metadata. So you're not getting necessarily the content of
the book, but for mationg Yeah. So so it's a
useful tool. And uh it also allows anyone to add
to that tool, to the open library project, which again
it's involving metadata, it's involving sharing information. We're starting to
(33:15):
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 theme that goes on frequently in Aeron's life
of of just just small I mean, okay, not even small,
(33:36):
because that's kind of big, big activism, big peaceful informational activism. Yeah. 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,
he he wrote what he called the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,
and this was this this really kind of kicked off
(34:00):
his m 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
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 that was blinded by greed would refuse
(34:21):
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 little kerfuffle uh, alright. So so to explain the kerfuffle,
we have to talk about the PACER system, and that's
(34:42):
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.
And by by definition, they are uncopyrightable. They are public access. Yes,
because these are you know, the government cannot copyright information.
(35:04):
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
sort of thing here. But the database, what it was
doing was is trying to solve a problem. You've got
so much information that's very difficult to track down specific
(35:24):
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 idea of let's create an electronic system one that
will 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
(35:44):
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
law firms or corporations were downloading large amounts of that data.
If you were an individual, you could get something for
(36:06):
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 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
(36:26):
or pay right exactly and uh and Swarts philosophy was
that why should you be forced to pay for something
that should be publicly accessible? It is, it is the
public and right so so if it's you know, if
it's not under copyright, then why so PACER kind of
(36:47):
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 any one could
download as many documents within PACER. So Aaron decided that
(37:07):
he he had a 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 if I just uncopyrightable files, if
I just write a script to do that for me,
(37:28):
that's much faster. I don't have to sit there and
set up the little uh, the little ducking birdie thing
that Homer Simpson used to click 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,
(37:53):
he downloaded almost twenty million pages of text, or about
twenty cents about one point five million dollars worth if
you're going by that eight cents right, which you know,
again you can debate on what the actual value is.
But the way he downloaded all of this, and once
(38:13):
once they hit around that that much, someone over at
Pacers said, WHOA, something something funky is going down. Something's wrong.
Someone is 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 so that the they would
(38:36):
no 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
(38:57):
not good at eliminated personal data out of court files.
So this is data that should be that should be
private and secret. It should be anonymous, should be protected here, right,
So the court filings themselves are not necessarily anonymous, but
the personal data about the people in them it should be.
So it began to raise some questions about the PACER system,
(39:19):
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 that perhaps this gave the United
States government, or at least certain agencies within the government,
(39:39):
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 sports said he
got hold of and found uh entertaining. Um, but yeah,
it was so some would argue that this kind of
(40:00):
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,
(40:20):
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 corporation
(40:43):
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.
(41:09):
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 specific committee, the specific committee tends to
lean democrat. Um. So just in the full, full disclosure,
full disclosure information there uh and in uh Swartz Swartz
(41:31):
was not afraid of 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.
(41:52):
And if you aren't familiar with the story of Bradley Manning,
Bradley Manning 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 of communication cables
(42:16):
that were 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 in the Marine Corps
brig in Quantico, Virginia, which was similar to being held
(42:41):
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 between the hours of five am and
(43:03):
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 his cell. Um.
His his cell had I think no window. I think
it had a sink, a toilet, and a bed, and
the bed had a mattress that had a pillow incorporated
(43:25):
in the mattress. 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,
those were taken away as well. So this is the
(43:46):
reason why UH Sworts was sitting in this Freedom of
Information Act request. He 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 didn't not deserve the sort of treatment before he
had even gone to trial. Certain um so Manning, for
his part, by the way, was pleading not guilty. So
(44:08):
to be treated this way, uh, Sports, I'm sure felt
passionately was completely wrong, complete um. And 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,
(44:30):
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 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
(44:52):
he was in in Quantico. Um So, anyway, that was
another thing Sports got involved in, and UH again, some
con r theorists suggests that that the government, the grudge
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
(45:14):
ask for this incation. UM, 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 Sports was also an advocate against the SOAPA
campaign Stop Online Piracy Act in two thousand eleven that
was proposed. Yeah, the general idea behind this act was
(45:39):
that a lot of the stuff, a lot of the
computers that host the files that violate intellectual property rights
of companies and 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
(45:59):
those sites from distributing illegal copies of stuff within the
United States? And SOPA's approach was to break links to
those sites, essentially, 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,
you would get an error. Essentially, you would get redirected
(46:19):
to the FBI homepage, which would in theory, scare you
and to stop you have to stop looking for ways
to do it. There were definitely work arounds to this
um and a lot 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
(46:40):
could break the Internet in unintended ways. I think Swarts
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, but more like more if
it's wrong to shut down information where information exists. Yeah so,
but he was definitely on the anti SOPA side, and
(47:02):
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 is not a not a new idea.
It's something that's been tried multiple times and we will
be tried again. Yeah. So, but that that leads us
to to the I guess the last part of this
(47:25):
the saga, the story about j Store, which actually started
back in November, so this predates the SOPA stuff, but
it kind of it envelopes it 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
(47:48):
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, books and
papers that are from primary sources. These are the people
who are doing the ReScience research, medical research, all kinds
of really terrific stuff, isn't Jason. Essentially, all the blogs
(48:10):
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 four 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 G. G. Bowen or Bowen,
(48:32):
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 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
(48:52):
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 whatever you have to you have to
pay to access behind a paywall. And uh and and
again Swartz Uh, Sworts didn't necessarily think that it needed
(49:13):
to be behind a paywall or they needed or that
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 to a computer at in m
T which was fine. He had he had authorization to
access right he was currently a fellow at the Center
(49:35):
for Ethics at Harvard. Yeah, which some people would say
is ironic, but yeah, he got access to a computer
in m TY. Um, and he began to use again
another kind of algorithm to start downloading documents from j store.
I think it was a Python script actually, which you
had mentioned that he learned when he dropped out of
(49:57):
high school. Relying on that Python college uh and not
the Monty kind. Um. He managed to download around four
million journals out of jay store, and jay Store was
able to identify that it was Swartz and essentially confronted
him with this, and ultimately Swartz and J Store ended
(50:20):
up settling this this dispute out of court. Uh and
Swarts 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 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
(50:42):
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, 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 ste
and he's at M I T. If someone had had
hacked our system and started downloading this amount of information
(51:05):
from such a terrific database, Jay Store, we would have
we would have congratulated them, we would have given given
them a certificate and and and it's a little parade, yeah,
um 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 and they did certainly call
(51:27):
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, which
included things like wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information,
theft of information, this kind of stuff. Um and uh.
(51:47):
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. Yeah, many of many of the accounts,
I say, say thirty five several Well, yeah, there's one
(52:08):
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 could also would
have faced up to maybe as much as four million
dollars and fines. Now it's far more likely that the
government would have ended up reducing that to just six months.
(52:31):
And some say that, yeah, it would have been. They
were offering a a plea based on the fact that
there was no personal gain intended from actions, right and Um,
so some have said that the government was essentially using
sworts as an example to scare the heck out of
(52:52):
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
getting pulled into a court case where the fine would
have been, you know, an astronomicals like five dollars per
song or something like that, and it's a similar situation
(53:16):
in that sense. It could have been that, you know
that the whole goal here was not so much to
punish sports into next century, but rather to act as
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.
(53:40):
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
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
(54:01):
was another question. And and in in this case, Um
and again, like like we said at the beginning of
the podcast, and like I'm sure that you've heard on
the news. On January eleventh, thirteen, Sports was found dead
in his apartment. Uh. He had he had apparently committed suicide. Uh.
And Uh, you know, there's been a lot of people
(54:23):
raising suggestions about what it was that specifically led to
his decision to end his life. And again, because we
are not Aaron, we can't we can't know 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
(54:45):
that again his depression was something that was was was
really plaguing him at that time. Uh. 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,
(55:06):
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 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
(55:30):
it's all it's all speculation. And you know, the U. S.
Attorney's Office of it's Carmen Orts is in fact office,
She's the U. S. Attorney of Massachusetts has said that, um,
that that their office is contact conduct was not in
fact inappropriate. Yeah. They they have maintained that what everything
(55:50):
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, uh 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
(56:13):
been a lot of outcry on the internet on behalf
of Sworts. There's also been some resistance, Uh, some people
who have criticized Swartz and 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
(56:35):
could argue that, you know, maybe the hackers really do
feel that Swarts was not the person that other people
are making him out to be. In other cases, I think,
you know, it could just be you know, making a
play for attention. For 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 Westboro Baptist Church when
(56:58):
they announced that they would pick its Worts funeral, which
they backed off of. They did not, they did not
show up. Yeah, and 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
(57:20):
act u 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 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
(57:45):
there was a little bit more of a threat there too,
because anonymous has been known to make people's lives difficult
if they if they oppose the ideals that the group
follows UM And in slightly slightly more positive action, Representative
Zoe Lofgren of California wants to propose Aaron's Law, which
would be a bill to amend the cf A and uh,
(58:10):
you know, change it so that so that these violations
of terms of service and network use UM cannot be
federally prosecuted unless they really should be right. 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
(58:32):
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 to paint with a wide brush and then find
out that, oh, you know, we needed to take a
much more precise approach to this UM. And also, you know,
a lot of luminaries. Technology luminaries have come out and
(58:53):
spoken on this subject. Lawrence Lessig has said several things
about He's criticized the process, Accution's approach to going after
Swords and tim Berners Lee wrote a very poignant tweet,
really gorgeous tweet. Yeah, if if I can, I'm 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
(59:17):
have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are
one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let
us weep. I'm like, oh, Timmerners Lee, 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 Swarts had committed suicide,
(59:39):
I appeared on an episode of Tech News Today and
we discussed the the the story and uh uh yeah
it was. I mean, it 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 AM I he for m I T
(01:00:01):
s part, they decided to create a review panel to
look into how M 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
might standards. And the man who has put in charge
of this review panel is how Abelson, who again was
(01:00:25):
one of those two men, the other being Tim Burners
Lee back when 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
(01:00:47):
I T and said, 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 sore 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,
(01:01:08):
and it's the only thing that that is appropriate considering
the circumstances. Um. So yeah, and uh, and it's while
we don't know all the tales 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.
(01:01:30):
Um yeah, yeah without Jonathan and I wanted to stay
without making this too 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 there's help out there. There is help
out there. If you are ever feeling overwhelmed, Please please
(01:01:52):
talk to someone. There are people who care about you.
We care about you. You probably shouldn't talk to us
because we are not mental health professionals. Yeah, 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 on two seven, 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,
(01:02:16):
we want to leave you guys with because, like Lauren said,
this is not this is not an unfamiliar subject to
us and UH, and it can when you're in the
middle of a depression, it can feel like there's nowhere
to turn. And the truth is that's that's not the case.
So um, yeah, let's let's wrap this up. Guys. UH,
if you would like to hear about a particular subject,
(01:02:39):
if there's someone that we should cover, or a particular
technology that you really want to know more about, I
highly recommend you get in touch with us and let
us know. You can write us an email. Our email
address is text stuff at Discovery dot com, or you
can send us a message on Twitter or Facebook. Our
handle at both those locations is text H S W
(01:03:01):
and Lauren and I will talk to you again really
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com