▶ "Aaron Swartz: The Life We Lost and the Day We Fight Back." By Amy Goodman by Democracy Now!
▶ "Aaron Swartz: The Life We Lost and the Day We Fight Back." By Amy Goodman by Democracy Now!
https://soundcloud.com/democracynow/aaron-swartz-the-life-we-lost
Award-winning journalist and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman records a
podcast in conjunction with her weekly column, which you can read here:
owl.li/oBs8M.
January 24, 2013
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
PARK
CITY, Utah—A year after Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz’s
suicide at the age of 26, a film about this remarkable young man has
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, titled “The
Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” directed by Brian
Knappenberger, follows the sadly short arc of Aaron’s life. He committed
suicide while under the crushing weight of unbending, zealous federal
prosecutors, who had Aaron snatched off the street near the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accusing him of computer crimes.
At
the age of 14, Aaron helped develop RSS, “Really Simple Syndication,”
which changed how people get online content. He co-founded one of the
Internet’s most popular websites, Reddit. In the year before his death,
he helped defeat a notorious bill before Congress, the Stop Online
Piracy Act (SOPA), which would have granted corporations sweeping powers
of censorship over the Internet. Now, another fight for the freedom of
the Internet has begun. This one will have to be waged without Aaron.
A
coalition of Internet activists, technologists and policy experts are
joining together on Feb. 11 for “The Day We Fight Back.” As they say on
their website, reflecting on the victory against SOPA, “Today we face a
different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that
any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance. If Aaron
were alive, he’d be on the front lines, fighting against a world in
which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital
action.” Before Edward Snowden made “NSA” and “mass surveillance”
household terms, Aaron was speaking out against the National Security
Agency’s bulk collection programs. His brother, Noah Swartz, told me, “I
think Aaron’s message that we can all take with us is that ... we can
see the change we want to see in the world by participating, rather than
feeling helpless and useless.”
The legal case that was
overwhelming Aaron was brought by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen P.
Heymann and U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz. When Aaron was a fellow at
Harvard University, he went to nearby MIT, which allowed members of the
public to use its computer network, and to access resources on it,
including the database of digitized academic research articles
maintained by the nonprofit company JSTOR. He wrote a computer program
that allowed a laptop to automatically download articles, and proceeded
to download millions of them. JSTOR noticed and contacted MIT, and MIT
in turn contacted the police.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was
enacted in 1986 to prosecute people engaged in credit-card fraud or
threatening national security. Since Aaron, like any member of the
public, had permission to use MIT’s network, he was not committing
fraud. Aaron felt that the academic articles represented a cultural
commons that should be shared. JSTOR decided not to press charges. Yet
the federal prosecutors went ahead anyway.
Aaron’s father, Bob
Swartz (who, ironically, is a consultant for the MIT Media Lab), says
what followed was a “nearly sadistic prosecution.” Aaron’s defense
attorney, Elliott Peters, told me, “Aaron wasn’t a thief. ... He
certainly downloaded more of JSTOR than they wanted, but it wasn’t to
steal anything.” Aaron refused to accept a plea bargain, which would
have made him a felon. He was facing 35 years in prison and a $1 million
fine.
Bob Swartz is incensed at MIT, who, he said, “cooperated
with the prosecutor. They provided the prosecutor evidence without a
subpoena and a warrant. They violated any number of laws. ... They also
refused to cooperate with us, give us evidence, and we had very
significant difficulty even getting them to respond.” Peters alleges
prosecutorial misconduct, saying that Heymann withheld exculpatory
evidence and more. Even now, a year after Aaron’s death, Peters and the
Swartz family are still trying to get all the documentation from federal
prosecutors. They are also working with Congressmember Zoe Lofgren,
D-Calif., to pass “Aaron’s Law,” which would reform the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act to eliminate the overbroad language that gives prosecutors
a license to charge trivial computer behavior as a felony.
In the
meantime, his brother, Noah, is actively organizing for the Feb. 11 Day
We Fight Back against mass surveillance. In a speech after the defeat
of the SOPA bill, Aaron Swartz recounted the truly grassroots, global
nature of the protests. He left the crowd with this call to action: “If
we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we
start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work ...
then next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen.”
Amy
Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio
news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is
the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2014 Amy Goodman
------------------------------------------
ABOUT AMY GOODMAN:
Amy
Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist, syndicated
columnist, author and the host of Democracy Now! Goodman is the first
journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the
“Alternative Nobel Prize” for "developing an innovative model of truly
independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of
people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream
media." The Independent of London named Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!
"an inspiration"; pulsemedia.org placed Goodman at the top of their 20
Top Global Media Figures. Goodman is the author of four New York Times
best-sellers. Her latest book is called, "The Silenced Majority: Stories
of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope."
