Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from hof
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 1: My name is Jonathan Strickland. I am the host ordinaire.
Speaker 1: My name is Lauren foc Obama and I does that
Speaker 1: make me the host extraordinary at this time? Extra extra extraordinary? Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: today we we have a topic that's both happy and sad.
Speaker 1: It's sad in that the world lost UH an activist
Speaker 1: and and legitimately a genius in January fellow by the
Speaker 1: name of Aaron Schwartz. And you may have heard this name,
Speaker 1: and you you may even be fairly aware of who
Speaker 1: he was and what he did. He's been in the
Speaker 1: news a whole bunch, and you've probably been hearing about
Speaker 1: him for years because he's done some really breakthrough work
Speaker 1: in technology. Yeah yeah, and both from a actual technological
Speaker 1: standpoint and from political standpoint, as it turns out, So
Speaker 1: we wanted to really talk about who he was, what
Speaker 1: sort of impact he's had on technology, both from a
Speaker 1: policy side and from actual zeros in ones. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: to kind of talk about why his his life and
Speaker 1: death matter in the world of tech. And to do this,
Speaker 1: we we wanted to kind of take an overview of
Speaker 1: his life. So first, before I really dive in, I
Speaker 1: have to give major props to The Verge, which is
Speaker 1: if you guys have never gone to The Verge, it's
Speaker 1: a fantastic It's one of my favorite sites out there
Speaker 1: right now. It's really really well done. And a fellow
Speaker 1: by the name of Tim Carmody wrote an exhaustive article
Speaker 1: about Schwartz's life and was very thorough and very respectful,
Speaker 1: and it was a really gorgeous piece of journalism, honestly,
Speaker 1: and it was it was a very personal piece of
Speaker 1: journalism that it led a few lines into editorial, but
Speaker 1: it was and gave you a gave you insight to
Speaker 1: what it's like being a journal to have to cover
Speaker 1: a story that has personal implications, because he had had
Speaker 1: met Sworts at least once, and so you know, it's
Speaker 1: a it's kind of an inside look to what it's
Speaker 1: like being a journalist and covering a story like this.
Speaker 1: And also he's very good at breaking down the myths
Speaker 1: because they you know, Aaron Swarts was sort of a
Speaker 1: legendary mythical figure in many ways, the kind of person
Speaker 1: who's whose contributions were huge and they got bigger depending
Speaker 1: upon who was telling the story and how how many
Speaker 1: times they told it. Sure the same way to say
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs. That's a good, good example, although we should
Speaker 1: also had Swarts was was tragically very young when he
Speaker 1: when he committed suicide, only twenty six years old. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so going back to his childhood, he was born
Speaker 1: in Chicago. In nineteen eighty six, his father, Robert Swartz,
Speaker 1: founded a software company which was called Mark Williams, which
Speaker 1: actually name after Aaron's grandfather and uh and Mark Williams.
Speaker 1: The company was all about creating a clone of the
Speaker 1: Unix operating system and also ce compilers, C language compilers
Speaker 1: and debuggers for IBM PCs. And that's that's a term
Speaker 1: that brings me back because I remember when when computers
Speaker 1: were either called Apple or IBM compatible or you know,
Speaker 1: eventually kind of specificity doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: IBM compatible became a term, like I was referring to
Speaker 1: PCs as IBM compatible as long after that was appropriate
Speaker 1: because sometimes things stick with you. But anyway, Robert Swartz
Speaker 1: would eventually become an intellectual property consultant for M I T. S.
Speaker 1: Media Lab, and intellectual property was something that Aaron became
Speaker 1: very interested in and very passionate about UH and the
Speaker 1: idea of is information property doesn't belong to one person
Speaker 1: or one to ty in the case of say a
Speaker 1: corporation or organization, or does it belong to the world.
Speaker 1: Should it belong to the world. And this is a
Speaker 1: philosophical debate that a lot of people have had, and
Speaker 1: I think most people fall somewhere in the spectrum of gray. Sure, well,
Speaker 1: you know it's we We all want to especially those
Speaker 1: of us who work in the media, want to be
Speaker 1: paid for our ideas because that's the only thing that
Speaker 1: we produce. But at the same time, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: if someone wants to learn something, I'm certainly not going
Speaker 1: to say, like, no, no, give me money first. If
Speaker 1: you know, if, for example, if they need that money
Speaker 1: to eat, I would rather them know things and eat. Yes. Yes,
Speaker 1: And so Aaron kind of we'll get into it. But
Speaker 1: Aaron kind of developed an idealistic philosophy that was very
Speaker 1: much in the realm of information wants to be free,
Speaker 1: that sort of idea that that that data needs to
Speaker 1: be out there for people to make use of it
Speaker 1: and to make lives better. Be called it a moral
Speaker 1: imperative yeah, and um, yes, so that that kind of
Speaker 1: gives you a quick philosophical overview, but we don't want
Speaker 1: to jump ahead too far. Tim's work in the Verge.
Speaker 1: There was one little piece of information that I thought
Speaker 1: was adorable, which is that when Aaron was eight years old.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind out this is early days. Okay, so
Speaker 1: six plus eight that means in in, in and and wait.
Speaker 1: I got nineteen nineteen ninety four. Liberal arts education has
Speaker 1: paid off people. When the World Wide Web was really
Speaker 1: just two years old. Um, he was actually going on usenet,
Speaker 1: which is not the same thing as world Wide Web,
Speaker 1: so don't write me. But he was going on usenet,
Speaker 1: which was a news group database essentially kind of like
Speaker 1: a network database where you could go and have discussions
Speaker 1: about different topics. And apparently when exactly when he was eight,
Speaker 1: he went on to Eustat and his first post was
Speaker 1: to a news group dedicated to Beakman's World, which is
Speaker 1: kind of awesome. That's wonderful. Yeah. Uh. He was also
Speaker 1: a big fan of the Star Wars movies, which I
Speaker 1: think is phenomenal because he was born three years after
Speaker 1: the last one came out, Return of the Jedi. As
Speaker 1: we have discussed before year old. Sorry, Yeah, well I
Speaker 1: saw Return of the Jedi in the theater when it
Speaker 1: was released, and man, I sure hope that one day
Speaker 1: Lucas comes out with movies that really explain how Anakin
Speaker 1: became Darth Vader. Yeah, wouldn't that be? That would be
Speaker 1: so great, that would be fantastic. I really wish that
Speaker 1: those movies existed, just like I hope one day they
Speaker 1: make a sequel to Highlander, the Matrix or the Matrix.
Speaker 1: These are, yeah, so many movies that I wish there
Speaker 1: were sequels to that. I'm not actively denying exist. Um,
Speaker 1: it's exhausting being me, y'all really, But anyway. He was
Speaker 1: also fans of other things like I went visited his
Speaker 1: blog in preparation of this podcast and and he had
Speaker 1: a way of taking pop culture and applying various thought
Speaker 1: experiments to it that was engaging and enlightening and funny.
Speaker 1: He has a great one in the final one Sadly
Speaker 1: about the Dark Night, and the most recent, the last
Speaker 1: and the Christopher Nolan series. Actually it was the second
Speaker 1: one was yeah, because it was all about the Joker.
Speaker 1: It was because he was he was going back to
Speaker 1: looking at that one it was written. It was written
Speaker 1: in November. Um. The blog post was uh, and it
Speaker 1: was about how the Joker applies game theory throughout the movie.
Speaker 1: And he breaks down almost scene by scene every time
Speaker 1: the Joker appears and and explains which game in game
Speaker 1: theory applies to that scene. And there's like a dozen
Speaker 1: different games that he specifically references, and he makes a
Speaker 1: case for every single one. And I looked at that
Speaker 1: and I thought, you know, I I kind of had
Speaker 1: the same idea once or twice, because I I know
Speaker 1: about games, and yeah, things like Prisoner's dilemma, the trolley problem,
Speaker 1: things like that. Um, but he broke it down for
Speaker 1: every single scene. I said, I never saw all of
Speaker 1: those connections. So he really had that ability to to
Speaker 1: to kind of look at the world around him and
Speaker 1: art and and and entertainment even if you even if
Speaker 1: you don't want to call it art, if you just
Speaker 1: want to call it entertainment. He's able to see the
Speaker 1: underlying thoughts that kind of maybe not consciously but guided
Speaker 1: that work. And uh, even if even if it was
Speaker 1: completely unintentional, he could draw parallels, which was really kind
Speaker 1: of an awesome thing. I really admire that quality. In people.
Speaker 1: Certainly I do not possess it, not to that extent anyway.
Speaker 1: So uh, skipping ahead of all that, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: so bottom line geeky guy. Okay, he's a geek, and
Speaker 1: and I say that with full love. I say that
Speaker 1: as a man who has Lord of the Rings tattoo
Speaker 1: on his left arm. Okay, I love the geek. I
Speaker 1: learned things about you every day. John. You didn't know
Speaker 1: I had a tattoo with the Lord of the Things.
Speaker 1: I don't think I did. Right here, Um, I can't
Speaker 1: show you up wearing long sleep today. Um. But anyway,
Speaker 1: skipping ahead a little bit too, when he was the
Speaker 1: ripe old age of thirteen years old, circle two thousand
Speaker 1: or so, he begins to work on the Info Network,
Speaker 1: which is his idea for the Info Network was sort
Speaker 1: of like what Wikipedia became. It's the idea of this
Speaker 1: an online encyclopedia storage of knowledge that anyone can can
Speaker 1: add to add to an edit, so essentially the same
Speaker 1: idea as Wikipedia. It's this, you know. He saw that
Speaker 1: the Internet was the had the potential to be like
Speaker 1: the Guide in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
Speaker 1: If you guys have not read the books, then that's okay,
Speaker 1: you go ahead and do that. Will wait, because they're
Speaker 1: worth it. Don't don't watch the movie, but you can
Speaker 1: watch the BBC television series or listen to the radio show.
Speaker 1: You can watch the movie. Alan Rickman was excellent in
Speaker 1: that film. That movie was so bad. Martin Freeman was
Speaker 1: excellent in that film where Don't Make Me. Performances were fine,
Speaker 1: the script was terrible. I am from the Internet. I
Speaker 1: will fight you about Martin Freeman. No, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: You're not gonna get any argument on me. I mean,
Speaker 1: Freeman was the best thing about the map I took
Speaker 1: during the hobbit. Um so anyway, uh, the Info Network.
Speaker 1: He's he's working on this this project, and the work
Speaker 1: gets him some attention. He actually becomes a finalist in
Speaker 1: the second Ours Digita Prize and as a finalist, um,
Speaker 1: you know, keeping mind, he's thirteen years old. He's he's competing,
Speaker 1: not necessarily competing, but he's he's in the same against
Speaker 1: the bracket bracket with people who are big names today
Speaker 1: in technology and who were adults. Many of these people
Speaker 1: knew his work. Yeah, they knew him. They knew him
Speaker 1: on online as as it stood at the time Aaron
Speaker 1: s W. But they did not know that Aaron s W.
Speaker 1: They're like, whoa am I being punked? Yeah? Is that that?
Speaker 1: That's a really dated reference. That's point in around two
Speaker 1: thousand they might have been saying it. Maybe okay, so
Speaker 1: ask your parents. So he he ended up winning as
Speaker 1: a finalist a thousand dollars and access to a web
Speaker 1: server for life and a two day trip to m
Speaker 1: I T to meet a couple of a couple of geeks,
Speaker 1: a couple of dudes who work a little, a little
Speaker 1: influential in technology. One of those two was Tim berners Lee,
Speaker 1: who most of us know as the guy who invented
Speaker 1: the World Wide Web back when he was working with
Speaker 1: a CERN kind of kind of a big deal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he's the one who kind of developed the framework
Speaker 1: that would become the World Wide Web, and yeah, big name.
Speaker 1: The other fellow that he got to meet on this
Speaker 1: two day trip was Hal Abelson, who was professor of
Speaker 1: electrical engineering and Computer Science at m I T. He's
Speaker 1: also a fellow of the I E E E or
Speaker 1: as long time listeners of tech stuff know how I
Speaker 1: pronounced it the because it's cajun um not cajun and
Speaker 1: then he was also a hal Abelson's also a founding
Speaker 1: director of Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation and
Speaker 1: Creative Commons will come in to play later in this
Speaker 1: discussion as well. Abelson himself, Um so big deal. You know,
Speaker 1: he got to meet some people who were definitely influential
Speaker 1: in the technolog technology space, as well as this idea
Speaker 1: that information is powerful and it's important and it's necessary
Speaker 1: and people should have access to it. Um these are
Speaker 1: these are big ideas for a thirteen year old, and
Speaker 1: he had embraced them already. Uh. A little bit later,
Speaker 1: he became interested in something called r S s rs S,
Speaker 1: of course, being m a rich site summary. I believe
Speaker 1: originally it stood for resource description framework site summary. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: look at you. Yes, that's exactly right. It's a it's
Speaker 1: sometimes also called really simple syndication. And you got it.
Speaker 1: You nailed it. And yes, I can read really good.
Speaker 1: I wrote it down. You do read really good. You
Speaker 1: don't speak so well, but to read really good. That's
Speaker 1: why I'm a podcaster. And it's it's what it's what
Speaker 1: the Internet uses to syndicate itself. Yeah. Yeah, so so
Speaker 1: I'll give you guys. A for those of you who
Speaker 1: are not aware of what RSS is or what it does. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's go back to the old days of the web now,
Speaker 1: pre r S S or pre any other syndication format,
Speaker 1: because RSS is not the only one, it's just it's
Speaker 1: sort of the one that came out on top. But
Speaker 1: pre RSS and other syndication formats, the way you would
Speaker 1: get information on the net is you would go visit
Speaker 1: a website. Yeah, you would. You would type in the
Speaker 1: r L and you would click go, and you would
Speaker 1: visit the website right, and you would look and you
Speaker 1: you would actually scan the website to see if anything
Speaker 1: you had popped up. This applied for everything from website
Speaker 1: that was about a specific company you were interested in,
Speaker 1: or a community. Blogs were kind of not a thing yet,
Speaker 1: but but we web comics maybe, or a new site.
Speaker 1: So you would you might think, oh, you know, I
Speaker 1: hadn't checked the news in a while, let me go,
Speaker 1: and then you would go and you would actually have
Speaker 1: to start kind of scanning through stuff and look, all right, well,
Speaker 1: what's what's new? What have I not read? I know,
Speaker 1: I think I read that one. So it was it
Speaker 1: was very time consuming. The idea behind the syndication was
Speaker 1: that instead of you going to these sites, the sites
Speaker 1: would send little bits of information to some sort of
Speaker 1: portal page a reader aggregator. Yeah, like Google Reader is
Speaker 1: a very popular one. You might log into this reader
Speaker 1: program or reader site really is what it was, uh,
Speaker 1: And then all that information would get fed to you
Speaker 1: whenever a new piece of nation came in and you
Speaker 1: could just look at a glance and see, oh, this
Speaker 1: one website I'm interested in published a new article and
Speaker 1: you could read the headline and think, oh, is that
Speaker 1: something I want to look into more? And depending upon
Speaker 1: the way they syndicated their feet, you might even be
Speaker 1: able to read the entire article within your reader without
Speaker 1: having to ever visit the site. Uh. Not a lot
Speaker 1: of websites like that, because it meant that you could
Speaker 1: read their content without visiting the site, which often meant
Speaker 1: that they were not looking at their ads. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: were getting ad impressions. So a lot of sites instead
Speaker 1: would allow the first paragraph and a half and then
Speaker 1: a click through. Yeah, and then you would have to
Speaker 1: click through. But the the idea was all about making
Speaker 1: sure that that you would be getting the latest information
Speaker 1: as you were as it was being generated so that
Speaker 1: you didn't have to keep checking. Yeah, and around around
Speaker 1: two thousand one, a version of RSS called RSS one
Speaker 1: point now was being developed. Yeah. Yeah, the RSS originally
Speaker 1: was kind of being um created by by essentially Netscape.
Speaker 1: So the Netscape group was working on RSS, and they
Speaker 1: came out with things like r s S zero point nine,
Speaker 1: which used r DF elements, which is that resource description
Speaker 1: framework that you were mentioning, Lauren. Um that by the way,
Speaker 1: it essentially is all about how links linked to each
Speaker 1: other and the information between the links. It's a meta
Speaker 1: data issue. Um, it's kind of complicated. So and ultimately
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter because they removed the r DF elements
Speaker 1: when they released RSS zero point nine one. Once they
Speaker 1: removed the r DF elements, they said, oops, yes, our
Speaker 1: acronym no longer means r d F r d F. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know sites syndication. We gotta call it something else.
Speaker 1: And uh, that's when we became rich site syndication. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then of course eventually became really simple syndication UM
Speaker 1: or rich site summary I should say, not syndication. Sorry,
Speaker 1: that's my brain is totally syndicated. So anyway, Netscape releases
Speaker 1: point nine and point nine one. Uh, it becomes rich
Speaker 1: Site Summary and then Netscape ends its development with the standard. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the thing was there are a lot of people
Speaker 1: were saying this was kind of a god. Yeah, guys,
Speaker 1: why why did we just put that down? Yeah, we
Speaker 1: kind of want that. So two different uh entities, I
Speaker 1: guess one person and one group began to work on
Speaker 1: developing RSS further. On one end you had the the
Speaker 1: r S S Dev Working Group, and on the other
Speaker 1: end you had a fellow by the name of Dave
Speaker 1: Winer and uh the they were independently working on creating
Speaker 1: and furthering the standard of r s S. Uh. Weiner
Speaker 1: attempted to trademark RSS, but due to a clerical technicality
Speaker 1: that trademark did not go through. The r S S
Speaker 1: Dev Working Group ended up publishing RSS one point oh.
Speaker 1: And that was part of that working group they were
Speaker 1: they were originally I think about twelve or fourteen people
Speaker 1: on it. Yeah, it was basically the Hobbit Party. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One one of those people was fourteen year old Aaron Sports. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Aaron Swart, He's working with people like people from
Speaker 1: the O'Reilly Media group who were working on this set
Speaker 1: of standards. At fourteen years old, he was one of
Speaker 1: the people helping define the standards of RSS one point oh. Specifically,
Speaker 1: he was looking at creating some semantic elements in RSS specification, Uh,
Speaker 1: semantic being that it would have a more almost like
Speaker 1: a natural language recognition ability to it. It's it's really
Speaker 1: all about meta data, the data about data, and how
Speaker 1: that helps aggregate information in a way that's useful to
Speaker 1: human beings, so that, you know, because computers don't understand
Speaker 1: the actual information that is that they handle, right, so
Speaker 1: you have to create information about that information so computers
Speaker 1: can start to make associations, can start filing. Yeah, for humans,
Speaker 1: it's natural. For computers, it takes a lot of work.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of what he was building out, was
Speaker 1: this whole um that's semantic element into it. That was
Speaker 1: kind of what he was specifically interested in. Meanwhile, just
Speaker 1: to kind of wrap up the RSS stuff, um Winer
Speaker 1: would go on to develop RSS two point oh, which
Speaker 1: would take the place of RSS one point oh, even
Speaker 1: though it was not based on one point oh at all,
Speaker 1: because he was developing his simultaneous Yeah, the development forked
Speaker 1: and on one branch you had one point oh and
Speaker 1: the other branch you had two point and two point
Speaker 1: o ended up eventually taking over. Yeah, and so one
Speaker 1: point I wasn't really it's still really impressive that they
Speaker 1: were creating it, and a lot of the work that
Speaker 1: that sports especially did with metadet data he ended up
Speaker 1: taking other places. Yes, Yeah, but it's kind of important
Speaker 1: to bring that into perspective because I've seen a lot
Speaker 1: of reports that just say, w R, yes he invented RSS,
Speaker 1: which one is not accurate and two is certainly not accurate. Uh,
Speaker 1: once you go forward a couple of years when RSS
Speaker 1: two point out takes over. But but his contributions were
Speaker 1: nonetheless important, and as you just pointed out, they were
Speaker 1: applicable to other elements of technology, not just the RSS project.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that was that was his involvement in that
Speaker 1: at age fourteen. I will not tell you what I
Speaker 1: was up to when I was fourteen years old, because
Speaker 1: none of it is even remotely as impressive as that
Speaker 1: one accomplished. I'm pretty sure I was like watching Mystery
Speaker 1: Science Theater three thousand and playing Mario Kart at fourteen,
Speaker 1: I was probably wishing there was something called Mystery Science
Speaker 1: Theater three thousand. It happens to all of us because
Speaker 1: I'm old. As Lauren has pointed out from the Star
Speaker 1: Wars discussion one per episode, one episode. Um, so this
Speaker 1: is about the same time that that Aaron Sports made
Speaker 1: a made a big decision in his life. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: decided to drop out of high school that year. Yeah
Speaker 1: that's um, that's a bold decision for someone who is
Speaker 1: uh already showing so much promise. Uh, It's not not unusual.
Speaker 1: And that I've seen a lot of prodigies. I mean,
Speaker 1: Steve Stephen Hawking I think did terribly in primary school.
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both dropped out, but they
Speaker 1: dropped out of college. They completed high school, but they
Speaker 1: dropped out of college. Oh, you know, it's I think
Speaker 1: that he It sounds like Aaron had a lot of
Speaker 1: support from his family and that he was, you know,
Speaker 1: being encouraged to take on these crazy projects. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I have a feeling he was also one of those
Speaker 1: people who the curriculum in a school just did not
Speaker 1: match up to to his. I was pretty bored in
Speaker 1: high school and I'm not that smart, so you know,
Speaker 1: I was also pretty bored in high school. When we
Speaker 1: weren't talking about Shakespeare. When we were talking about Shakespeare,
Speaker 1: it was very much engaged. Um No, I had some
Speaker 1: great teachers in high will please people if don't don't
Speaker 1: write me hate mail teachers. Um. So he also, while
Speaker 1: not in high school, taught himself how to code and Python,
Speaker 1: so that was kind of impressive. You know, he decided
Speaker 1: that he needed to learn some more coding language. Um
Speaker 1: and uh. Then he ended up meeting a couple of
Speaker 1: important people, including Abelson again, also Lawrence Lessig, who would
Speaker 1: become uh sort of a mentor and friend to him
Speaker 1: throughout his life and u uh Eric Eldridge Eldredge rather
Speaker 1: and they they were they had just weren't banded together
Speaker 1: to create um. Creative commons. Now. Creative comments is a
Speaker 1: way of licensing and copyrighting software that is not as
Speaker 1: restrictive as the traditional copyright because traditional copyright in the
Speaker 1: United States, at least, um, it's pretty much a one
Speaker 1: zero it's a yes no kind of permission thing, wherein
Speaker 1: it's it's very possessive and it lasts forever and not
Speaker 1: literally forever, but you might as well be it's and
Speaker 1: it gets It seems like every year there are more
Speaker 1: companies petitioning to lengthen the the era of copyright. Um.
Speaker 1: Often you'll hear people talk about Disney being one of
Speaker 1: the big ones that they never want Mickey Mouse to
Speaker 1: pass out of copyright, and uh, I mean from a
Speaker 1: from a business perspective, you can totally understand their point
Speaker 1: of view. From a creative perspective, and someone who wants
Speaker 1: to be able to take other creative works and do
Speaker 1: something new with them, it's a very frustrating experience because
Speaker 1: you might have a great idea that would make someone
Speaker 1: else's great idea a superlative idea, but you can't do
Speaker 1: it without the fear of being sued. And so what
Speaker 1: less eg Abelson and Eldred wanted to do was create
Speaker 1: a form of licensing that would allow people who are
Speaker 1: creating works to choose how those works could be protected,
Speaker 1: distributed and protected and remixed and exactly. Yeah, So that way,
Speaker 1: like if if Lauren were to create something really awesome,
Speaker 1: but she says, you know, I know there are people
Speaker 1: out there who are going to look at this in
Speaker 1: ways I never imagined, and I want to see what
Speaker 1: comes of it, she could choose to license it under
Speaker 1: creative comments in such a way that other people could
Speaker 1: use that work, possibly with some restrictions some and there
Speaker 1: were a lot of different options where you could do
Speaker 1: things like say, yes, you can use this work, but
Speaker 1: not in a commercial sense, or you can use this
Speaker 1: work but you must attribute the creator. So um. It
Speaker 1: gave a lot more flexibility. But they had a problem.
Speaker 1: While they were working out all the technical issues from
Speaker 1: the law side, the legal issues, the policy issues, they
Speaker 1: weren't sure how to incorporate this on the actual technological side,
Speaker 1: right because at the you know, at the end of
Speaker 1: a text article, you can throw in a tag that
Speaker 1: says copyright this person, or you know, you can you
Speaker 1: can use this work in these ways. But how do
Speaker 1: you do that on a music file video without without
Speaker 1: actually having it pop up as you know, someone say
Speaker 1: y'all of commons and it's a song about my dog. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to do that at the beginning of
Speaker 1: very file. And so what Aaron ended up doing was
Speaker 1: he began to work on code that would allow him
Speaker 1: to embed that information again meta data data about data. Uh.
Speaker 1: This code would be able to exist within a file
Speaker 1: and be readable and meaningful, so that when you were
Speaker 1: distributing this file, you would actually be able to see
Speaker 1: how it was distributed under the Creative Commons and make
Speaker 1: sure that it's following the right standards. So he played
Speaker 1: a very important part early on the Creative Commons world
Speaker 1: to make sure that it made sense from a technical perspective,
Speaker 1: technological perspective, and yeah, huge influence on that. And again
Speaker 1: talking with people like Lessig and A. Wilson and Eldred
Speaker 1: gave him an even greater appreciation for this idea that
Speaker 1: information is important and people needed. So once more reinforcing
Speaker 1: his own philosophy which again he had already started to
Speaker 1: develop before he began to work on this project. Um.
Speaker 1: Then in two thousand one he co wrote a paper
Speaker 1: with James Hendler, was a professor at the University of Maryland.
Speaker 1: The paper was called the Semantic Web, a Network of
Speaker 1: Content for the Digital City. So this again is that
Speaker 1: idea of a web that is almost intelligent in a
Speaker 1: way that everything is mapped to everything else in such
Speaker 1: a way that associations are made very naturally. Uh. He
Speaker 1: ended up going to co present this paper in Kyoto,
Speaker 1: so in two thousand one. Yeah again, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: this is when he was still four on the right
Speaker 1: around that age, Yeah, kind of crazy. And then um,
Speaker 1: just to kind of illustrate his philosophy on licensing. He
Speaker 1: he had a very um clever sense of humor, and
Speaker 1: he could he could word things in such a way
Speaker 1: where you get the meaning and you get the humor
Speaker 1: at the same time. For instance, he decided to to
Speaker 1: summarize certain organizations views on copyright in the form of haiku,
Speaker 1: and he was trying to explain what what these different
Speaker 1: approach is meant in a very simple way. So, for example,
Speaker 1: for the public domain, public domain meaning that it is
Speaker 1: not under copyright and anyone can access it without fear
Speaker 1: of any you know, exactly do what you feel like,
Speaker 1: since the work is abandoned, the law doesn't care. That
Speaker 1: was hik Number one might tease approach, take my code
Speaker 1: with you and do whatever you want, but please don't
Speaker 1: blame me. And then you have the r I double A.
Speaker 1: That's the the Recording Institutent Association Industry Association America in
Speaker 1: this little litigious group UH you might have heard, famously
Speaker 1: famously infamously opposed to UH to digital distribution, or at
Speaker 1: least digital digital distribution without some form of really restrictive
Speaker 1: d r M. Yeah, they really wanted everything to run
Speaker 1: off of d r M. Yeah. Anyway, alright, double A.
Speaker 1: They're also infamously uh known for getting involved in policy decisions,
Speaker 1: advocating for policy decisions. His take on their approaches. If
Speaker 1: you touch this file, my lawyers will come kill you,
Speaker 1: so kindly refrain out. Yeah, well, I think this is
Speaker 1: a good moment to take a quick break and hear
Speaker 1: from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna skip ahead to when he was the ripe
Speaker 1: old age of seventeen, and that's when he began to
Speaker 1: work on a project called info Gummy. And this was
Speaker 1: a wiki platform, yep, and it eventually merged with another
Speaker 1: company that has gone on to uh to some acclaim.
Speaker 1: You might have heard of it. It's called Reddit. Ye. Reddit.
Speaker 1: I know some people who think of Reddit as really
Speaker 1: it really is at their front page to the Internet,
Speaker 1: you know, because Reddit, of course divides things up into
Speaker 1: categories and then subcategories or reddits and subreddits if you prefer,
Speaker 1: and you can read all about these different headlines that
Speaker 1: are coming out all across the web from all sorts
Speaker 1: of different sources. You can vote up or vote down
Speaker 1: stories so that the ones that you think are particularly
Speaker 1: well written or pertinent are at the top, and ones
Speaker 1: that are not applicable or whatever get voted down. A
Speaker 1: free flowing sharing of information yeah, uh, and ideally it
Speaker 1: works really well, although depending upon which read commentary bits
Speaker 1: and pieces, if it can be retch, it has common villainy, right,
Speaker 1: and some some subreddit communities are fantastic, absolutely, and then
Speaker 1: some subreddit communities just are filled with flame wars um
Speaker 1: and it happens. But anyway, so he was he was
Speaker 1: technically he was a co creator, a co creator of redding. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so redd It as a company existed before Aaron
Speaker 1: came on board because the company's merged. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: it wasn't what it is. It wasn't what it is
Speaker 1: today we know, yeah, exactly. So he ended up creating
Speaker 1: it a special kind of web development library, uh, that
Speaker 1: they ended up switching to. They had it a previous one,
Speaker 1: they switched to the one that Sworts creates. And then
Speaker 1: the site kind of took off and in fact was
Speaker 1: purchased by Condie Nast and uh that purchased that deal
Speaker 1: ended up making Aaron wealthy overnight, extremely wealthy. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know the the entire Reddit team was moved into
Speaker 1: Wired's offices. Wired is owned by Conde Nasty. Wired's offices
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, because before that he had been working
Speaker 1: in other parts of California, which um he preferred. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was not a fan of San Francisco. He was
Speaker 1: not really a fan of the Wired offices or of
Speaker 1: the entire He didn't like the job. Like I have
Speaker 1: a feeling that anytime Swartz encountered constraints, he became frustrated,
Speaker 1: and the more constrained he was, the more frustrated he
Speaker 1: would become. And Uh. One of the other elements of
Speaker 1: Swartz's life, and it's a it's a tragic element, is
Speaker 1: that he was uh, he battled depression, and that in
Speaker 1: this environment where he was coming up against all these
Speaker 1: constraints that he did not like, depression was starting to
Speaker 1: get to him. Um. He wrote a story, a fictional story,
Speaker 1: but people began to question how fictional it was. That
Speaker 1: that some people began to interpret as a potential suicide
Speaker 1: note a police for help, and people began to check
Speaker 1: on him and um he then was essentially asked to
Speaker 1: resign and or fired, depending upon the report, depending on
Speaker 1: the right the terminology you really want either way, the
Speaker 1: it was it was clear that his his his happiness
Speaker 1: was not going to come into play while he's working there.
Speaker 1: He was not contributing to the company in the way
Speaker 1: that they wanted. And uh, no party in that relationship
Speaker 1: was happy. So he ended up leaving uh Reddit, but
Speaker 1: but that was probably for the best because again it
Speaker 1: was just clear that it was not a good fit. Um.
Speaker 1: And in two thousand seven he ended up joining the
Speaker 1: Internet Archive Project and launched a project called open Library.
Speaker 1: Now open library essentially it creates a web page for
Speaker 1: every book that's within the database of various libraries and
Speaker 1: research facilities and other organizations. It takes the meta data
Speaker 1: about those books and creates a web page based on
Speaker 1: the metadata. So you're not getting necessarily the content of
Speaker 1: the book, but for mationg Yeah. So so it's a
Speaker 1: useful tool. And uh it also allows anyone to add
Speaker 1: to that tool, to the open library project, which again
Speaker 1: it's involving metadata, it's involving sharing information. We're starting to
Speaker 1: see a real theme developed with Aaron's life and his work.
Speaker 1: He he also at that point, UM not quite with permission,
Speaker 1: posted all of the book cataloging data kept by the
Speaker 1: Library of Congress to open library. And this is this
Speaker 1: is another theme that goes on frequently in Aeron's life
Speaker 1: of of just just small I mean, okay, not even small,
Speaker 1: because that's kind of big, big activism, big peaceful informational activism. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he he would take initiative. Let's let's put it that way.
Speaker 1: That taking initiative is going to become a theme very
Speaker 1: quickly too, absolutely. And in two thousand and eight, in fact,
Speaker 1: he he wrote what he called the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,
Speaker 1: and this was this this really kind of kicked off
Speaker 1: his m his public persona I think of of being
Speaker 1: that kind of activist. There's a great quote from it
Speaker 1: that I want to read real quick. Um. He said,
Speaker 1: it's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth
Speaker 1: of knowledge where the moral equivalent of plundering a ship
Speaker 1: and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't moral, it's a
Speaker 1: moral imperative. Only that was blinded by greed would refuse
Speaker 1: to let a friend make a copy mm hmm. Interesting
Speaker 1: And then moving on from that, and the same year,
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight, uh, he got involved in
Speaker 1: a little kerfuffle uh, alright. So so to explain the kerfuffle,
Speaker 1: we have to talk about the PACER system, and that's
Speaker 1: the public Access to Court electronic record system and it's
Speaker 1: essentially a government run database and it's mostly court filing,
Speaker 1: so it's all the stuff that happens in open court.
Speaker 1: And by by definition, they are uncopyrightable. They are public access. Yes,
Speaker 1: because these are you know, the government cannot copyright information.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not allowed to. It's the same reason
Speaker 1: why if you go look at information that was generated
Speaker 1: by NASA, it's not protected by copyright. Um. So same
Speaker 1: sort of thing here. But the database, what it was
Speaker 1: doing was is trying to solve a problem. You've got
Speaker 1: so much information that's very difficult to track down specific
Speaker 1: files in a physical filing system. And also it generates
Speaker 1: a huge amount of material that you have to create
Speaker 1: physical space for it to store it. So PACER was
Speaker 1: the idea of let's create an electronic system one that
Speaker 1: will cut down on the amount of space we need
Speaker 1: to store all these files, and too it will make
Speaker 1: it way easier to find stuff. Sure. Sure in order
Speaker 1: to do that, however, I mean, because you know to
Speaker 1: to to run the servers to do all of that uploading.
Speaker 1: It was charging at the time an eight cent per
Speaker 1: page fee to access all of this information. Um and
Speaker 1: and that was I mean that was mostly for giant
Speaker 1: law firms or corporations were downloading large amounts of that data.
Speaker 1: If you were an individual, you could get something for
Speaker 1: for for a couple bucks or for free sometimes free.
Speaker 1: Frequently you were limited as an individual to how many
Speaker 1: times you could get court files within a certain span
Speaker 1: of times. So for example, every three months or four months,
Speaker 1: you might be able to download five files, but then
Speaker 1: you would have to wait to download more or pay
Speaker 1: or pay right exactly and uh and Swarts philosophy was
Speaker 1: that why should you be forced to pay for something
Speaker 1: that should be publicly accessible? It is, it is the
Speaker 1: public and right so so if it's you know, if
Speaker 1: it's not under copyright, then why so PACER kind of
Speaker 1: responded to criticisms about this database and began to create
Speaker 1: a pilot program and allowed seventeen libraries in the United
Speaker 1: States free access to the database, so any one could
Speaker 1: download as many documents within PACER. So Aaron decided that
Speaker 1: he he had a clever idea. He was like, well, so, well,
Speaker 1: I can get as many of these for free as possible,
Speaker 1: and then because they're not under copyright, I can upload
Speaker 1: them to a free database which anyone can access at
Speaker 1: any time for absolutely free, because and no one can
Speaker 1: come after me. Because if I just uncopyrightable files, if
Speaker 1: I just write a script to do that for me,
Speaker 1: that's much faster. I don't have to sit there and
Speaker 1: set up the little uh, the little ducking birdie thing
Speaker 1: that Homer Simpson used to click yes over and over
Speaker 1: again when he when he had that takeover for his job. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a great episode. But yeah, No, he created a
Speaker 1: script that would automatically and continuously download these files. Um,
Speaker 1: he downloaded almost twenty million pages of text, or about
Speaker 1: twenty cents about one point five million dollars worth if
Speaker 1: you're going by that eight cents right, which you know,
Speaker 1: again you can debate on what the actual value is.
Speaker 1: But the way he downloaded all of this, and once
Speaker 1: once they hit around that that much, someone over at
Speaker 1: Pacers said, WHOA, something something funky is going down. Something's wrong.
Speaker 1: Someone is downloading all of it. Yeah, And whether or
Speaker 1: not they thought that it was an attack or maybe
Speaker 1: the system itself was just malfunctioning, they decided to to
Speaker 1: pull the plug both on the servers. Literally they shut
Speaker 1: the servers down at first so that the they would
Speaker 1: no longer be serving up the information, and then they
Speaker 1: canceled the program. Though with the libraries, they canceled that
Speaker 1: program and then they they were not They also had
Speaker 1: to deal with a nasty pr problem because the documents
Speaker 1: that that Sworts got showed that the PACERS system was
Speaker 1: not good at eliminated personal data out of court files.
Speaker 1: So this is data that should be that should be
Speaker 1: private and secret. It should be anonymous, should be protected here, right,
Speaker 1: So the court filings themselves are not necessarily anonymous, but
Speaker 1: the personal data about the people in them it should be.
Speaker 1: So it began to raise some questions about the PACER system,
Speaker 1: and some critics said, you know, technologically, we should not
Speaker 1: have this problem. Uh, we are at a place now
Speaker 1: where this system should be way better than what it is.
Speaker 1: And so it kind of gave the government a black eye.
Speaker 1: Some people have said that perhaps this gave the United
Speaker 1: States government, or at least certain agencies within the government,
Speaker 1: the the inspiration to look more closely into Aaron Schwartz
Speaker 1: and his activities. Supposedly the FBI at that point created
Speaker 1: a profile on him, Yeah, which which sports said he
Speaker 1: got hold of and found uh entertaining. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it was so some would argue that this kind of
Speaker 1: created a grudge against Swarts on the on behalf of
Speaker 1: the government, and that perhaps some of the other things
Speaker 1: that unfold were part of that. I wouldn't I personally
Speaker 1: wouldn't go so far as to say that, But then
Speaker 1: I'm not intimate with all the details I know. Um,
Speaker 1: but then let's let's move ahead. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: he became part of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He
Speaker 1: was one of the original members. This was a campaign committee.
Speaker 1: It was really about UH campaign financing reforms, trying to
Speaker 1: do things like eliminate corporate UH contributions during election campaigns
Speaker 1: and to just limit political contributions in general from corporation
Speaker 1: saying that, well, one of the things they suggested was
Speaker 1: why don't you hold it up to a vote from
Speaker 1: shareholders whether or not you contribute to a particular political candidate. Um,
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. Uh. He was definitely very opinionated
Speaker 1: on that subject. Also, in case you're curious, I mean,
Speaker 1: just for full information, Uh, this committee mostly backs progressive Democrats.
Speaker 1: That's not to say that there aren't progressive Republicans. There are,
Speaker 1: There are progressive conservatives and progressive liberals, but in particular,
Speaker 1: this particularly this specific committee, the specific committee tends to
Speaker 1: lean democrat. Um. So just in the full, full disclosure,
Speaker 1: full disclosure information there uh and in uh Swartz Swartz
Speaker 1: was not afraid of of of poking the bear, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, and he was also very again, very
Speaker 1: passionate about information. And uh. He proved it again in
Speaker 1: when he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to
Speaker 1: learn about how Bradley Manning was being treated in US custody. Uh.
Speaker 1: And if you aren't familiar with the story of Bradley Manning,
Speaker 1: Bradley Manning was a U. S. Army soldier private actually
Speaker 1: who gained access to some some pretty high level security
Speaker 1: clearance information within the military and leaked it to wiki leaks.
Speaker 1: So when you heard about all those cables from a
Speaker 1: few years ago, thousands and thousands of of communication cables
Speaker 1: that were leaked to wiki leaks, a lot of that
Speaker 1: was traced back to Bradley Manning, and Manning has been
Speaker 1: held in confinement awaiting trial. The trial is supposed to
Speaker 1: take place this year in June. Um, but for a
Speaker 1: long time he was being held in the Marine Corps
Speaker 1: brig in Quantico, Virginia, which was similar to being held
Speaker 1: in solitary confinement. His conditions were uncomfortable, to say the least.
Speaker 1: He was by many reports, Uh, he was in a
Speaker 1: cell where he was unable to see any other prisoner.
Speaker 1: Within those cells, they could hear each other, but they
Speaker 1: could not see each other. Um. Supposedly he was not
Speaker 1: allowed to sleep between the hours of five am and
Speaker 1: eight pm at all um and then uh he was
Speaker 1: only allowed out of his cell to take a walk
Speaker 1: for one hour the first time he was in his cell. Um.
Speaker 1: His his cell had I think no window. I think
Speaker 1: it had a sink, a toilet, and a bed, and
Speaker 1: the bed had a mattress that had a pillow incorporated
Speaker 1: in the mattress. That when Manning made a comment about
Speaker 1: the only way he could hurt himself, they essentially started
Speaker 1: to take away all his clothing as well. According to
Speaker 1: the reports I read, when he made a comment saying
Speaker 1: that the only way he could possibly hurt himself at
Speaker 1: this point would be with his flip flops or underwear,
Speaker 1: those were taken away as well. So this is the
Speaker 1: reason why UH Sworts was sitting in this Freedom of
Speaker 1: Information Act request. He he felt that one that what
Speaker 1: Manning had done possibly was not as big a crime
Speaker 1: as everyone was making it out to be, and certainly
Speaker 1: he didn't not deserve the sort of treatment before he
Speaker 1: had even gone to trial. Certain um so Manning, for
Speaker 1: his part, by the way, was pleading not guilty. So
Speaker 1: to be treated this way, uh, Sports, I'm sure felt
Speaker 1: passionately was completely wrong, complete um. And I should also
Speaker 1: rush to add this is all based on what I've
Speaker 1: read about how how Manning was So again I wasn't there,
Speaker 1: and it could be that he was treated completely fairly,
Speaker 1: and this information has been fabricated for some reason. But
Speaker 1: this this was the information that was out there at
Speaker 1: the time and or that is out there now right
Speaker 1: and then um ultimately he was Manning was moved to
Speaker 1: the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility, which was a relatively
Speaker 1: new facility, and from what I understand his the cell
Speaker 1: that he is in is much improved over the one
Speaker 1: he was in in Quantico. Um So, anyway, that was
Speaker 1: another thing Sports got involved in, and UH again, some
Speaker 1: con r theorists suggests that that the government, the grudge
Speaker 1: that the government had back in the Pacers situation was
Speaker 1: up to mega grudge after this uh this request, although
Speaker 1: Sports was not the only person in the world to
Speaker 1: ask for this incation. UM, So, I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't really buy into that. Uh, skipping ahead just a
Speaker 1: little bit. We're gonna backtrack in a second. But he
Speaker 1: was also Sports was also an advocate against the SOAPA
Speaker 1: campaign Stop Online Piracy Act in two thousand eleven that
Speaker 1: was proposed. Yeah, the general idea behind this act was
Speaker 1: that a lot of the stuff, a lot of the
Speaker 1: computers that host the files that violate intellectual property rights
Speaker 1: of companies and people within the United States, a lot
Speaker 1: of those computers exist in countries outside the US jurisdiction,
Speaker 1: and so how do you and how do you stop
Speaker 1: those sites from distributing illegal copies of stuff within the
Speaker 1: United States? And SOPA's approach was to break links to
Speaker 1: those sites, essentially, to remove those sites from domain name
Speaker 1: servers here in the United States, so that if you
Speaker 1: were to try and navigate to one of those sites,
Speaker 1: you would get an error. Essentially, you would get redirected
Speaker 1: to the FBI homepage, which would in theory, scare you
Speaker 1: and to stop you have to stop looking for ways
Speaker 1: to do it. There were definitely work arounds to this
Speaker 1: um and a lot of people protested SOPA because they
Speaker 1: said that one it would not stop pirates from pirating
Speaker 1: because they could find ways around it, and too it
Speaker 1: could break the Internet in unintended ways. I think Swarts
Speaker 1: was more of more of information wants to be free,
Speaker 1: not so much like it will break the Internet or
Speaker 1: we can get around this, but more like more if
Speaker 1: it's wrong to shut down information where information exists. Yeah so,
Speaker 1: but he was definitely on the anti SOPA side, and
Speaker 1: he gave a very eloquent speech when SOPA failed to pass,
Speaker 1: and and really was passionate about telling people don't rest
Speaker 1: because this idea is not a not a new idea.
Speaker 1: It's something that's been tried multiple times and we will
Speaker 1: be tried again. Yeah. So, but that that leads us
Speaker 1: to to the I guess the last part of this
Speaker 1: the saga, the story about j Store, which actually started
Speaker 1: back in November, so this predates the SOPA stuff, but
Speaker 1: it kind of it envelopes it J Store the company. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it stands for journal storage, right, and it's a it's
Speaker 1: a library of publicly funded academic articles. Yeah, so we're
Speaker 1: talking again about scholarly information. So this is kind of
Speaker 1: similar to the the the the information that was in PACER.
Speaker 1: Of course, that was court filings, not scholar scholarship. But
Speaker 1: in this case we're talking about academic journals, books and
Speaker 1: papers that are from primary sources. These are the people
Speaker 1: who are doing the ReScience research, medical research, all kinds
Speaker 1: of really terrific stuff, isn't Jason. Essentially, all the blogs
Speaker 1: you read are based off of the academic papers that
Speaker 1: are stored in databases like j store, and j store
Speaker 1: has about well a little bit over four journal titles
Speaker 1: and more than fifty disciplines are represented in j stores database.
Speaker 1: And it was the whole purpose of j store. Well, first,
Speaker 1: it was founded by William G. G. Bowen or Bowen,
Speaker 1: who was president of Princeton University, and it was again
Speaker 1: trying to solve that same problem that PACER was trying
Speaker 1: to solve. How do you make this vast amount of
Speaker 1: academic information searchable and feasible to store because it takes
Speaker 1: up so much space. Libraries were having trouble storing all
Speaker 1: this stuff, of course, so j store was kind of
Speaker 1: the solution. And most of the stuff, not all of it,
Speaker 1: like anything that's in the public domain is publicly accessible
Speaker 1: through j store, but anything that's currently under you know,
Speaker 1: the copyright or whatever you have to you have to
Speaker 1: pay to access behind a paywall. And uh and and
Speaker 1: again Swartz Uh, Sworts didn't necessarily think that it needed
Speaker 1: to be behind a paywall or they needed or that
Speaker 1: needed to just exist uh on j store and uh.
Speaker 1: And there's some arguments about exactly what he did, but
Speaker 1: essentially he got access to a computer at in m
Speaker 1: T which was fine. He had he had authorization to
Speaker 1: access right he was currently a fellow at the Center
Speaker 1: for Ethics at Harvard. Yeah, which some people would say
Speaker 1: is ironic, but yeah, he got access to a computer
Speaker 1: in m TY. Um, and he began to use again
Speaker 1: another kind of algorithm to start downloading documents from j store.
Speaker 1: I think it was a Python script actually, which you
Speaker 1: had mentioned that he learned when he dropped out of
Speaker 1: high school. Relying on that Python college uh and not
Speaker 1: the Monty kind. Um. He managed to download around four
Speaker 1: million journals out of jay store, and jay Store was
Speaker 1: able to identify that it was Swartz and essentially confronted
Speaker 1: him with this, and ultimately Swartz and J Store ended
Speaker 1: up settling this this dispute out of court. Uh and
Speaker 1: Swarts actually handed over the information he had downloaded from
Speaker 1: J Store, and J Store, for its part, essentially said
Speaker 1: all right, we're cool. You know what. We don't agree
Speaker 1: with what you did, but we understand why you did it,
Speaker 1: and you returned everything. So where everything's cool, and it
Speaker 1: could have ended right then and there. Sure, but but
Speaker 1: um well, people people argue a little bit about what
Speaker 1: role m I T has had in all of this,
Speaker 1: and some people say that the administration they're really cracked
Speaker 1: down unnecessarily hard on him, and a lot of I
Speaker 1: think a lot of alumni have come out saying like, well,
Speaker 1: in my day, you know, earlier in the nineteen ste
Speaker 1: and he's at M I T. If someone had had
Speaker 1: hacked our system and started downloading this amount of information
Speaker 1: from such a terrific database, Jay Store, we would have
Speaker 1: we would have congratulated them, we would have given given
Speaker 1: them a certificate and and and it's a little parade, yeah,
Speaker 1: um yeah. And and there's some who say that M
Speaker 1: I T. Did not actively pursue a case against Sports,
Speaker 1: but also did not discourage and they did certainly call
Speaker 1: the cops on him. Yeah, so that's when the government
Speaker 1: gets involved. And uh, the government essentially charges Sports with
Speaker 1: thirteen Ultimately it was thirteen criminal court criminal counts, which
Speaker 1: included things like wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information,
Speaker 1: theft of information, this kind of stuff. Um and uh.
Speaker 1: He was released on a hundred thousand dollars bail. The charges,
Speaker 1: depending upon the accounts you read, could have resulted in
Speaker 1: him serving a prison sentence of between thirty and fifty
Speaker 1: years at max. Um. Yeah, many of many of the accounts,
Speaker 1: I say, say thirty five several Well, yeah, there's one
Speaker 1: I think CNN article that said fifty and I think
Speaker 1: I think that people are adding them up in different ways.
Speaker 1: But but um, and this is all under the Computer
Speaker 1: Fraud and Abuse Act. And uh. He could also would
Speaker 1: have faced up to maybe as much as four million
Speaker 1: dollars and fines. Now it's far more likely that the
Speaker 1: government would have ended up reducing that to just six months.
Speaker 1: And some say that, yeah, it would have been. They
Speaker 1: were offering a a plea based on the fact that
Speaker 1: there was no personal gain intended from actions, right and Um,
Speaker 1: so some have said that the government was essentially using
Speaker 1: sworts as an example to scare the heck out of
Speaker 1: any of anyone else who would want to try something similar.
Speaker 1: So you could kind of compare this to stories about
Speaker 1: cases where people who downloaded some music files ended up
Speaker 1: getting pulled into a court case where the fine would
Speaker 1: have been, you know, an astronomicals like five dollars per
Speaker 1: song or something like that, and it's a similar situation
Speaker 1: in that sense. It could have been that, you know
Speaker 1: that the whole goal here was not so much to
Speaker 1: punish sports into next century, but rather to act as
Speaker 1: a deterrent for anyone else to scare people, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, government and everybody else, that rarely works. More
Speaker 1: often than not, you get people more angry terrible things. UM.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that you aren't you know, you don't
Speaker 1: have a right to act on things that are against
Speaker 1: the law. I'm just saying think about the way you
Speaker 1: do it, because you could end up making a worse
Speaker 1: enemy for yourself. You might find a better way of
Speaker 1: working around it, is my point. So again not saying
Speaker 1: that they're in the wrong, I mean Sports was in
Speaker 1: the wrong, but how much he was in the wrong
Speaker 1: was another question. And and in in this case, Um
Speaker 1: and again, like like we said at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the podcast, and like I'm sure that you've heard on
Speaker 1: the news. On January eleventh, thirteen, Sports was found dead
Speaker 1: in his apartment. Uh. He had he had apparently committed suicide. Uh.
Speaker 1: And Uh, you know, there's been a lot of people
Speaker 1: raising suggestions about what it was that specifically led to
Speaker 1: his decision to end his life. And again, because we
Speaker 1: are not Aaron, we can't we can't know what led
Speaker 1: to it. And his family has come out as being
Speaker 1: very very passionately saying that it was because of this persecution. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that he was feeling a huge amount of stress, and
Speaker 1: that again his depression was something that was was was
Speaker 1: really plaguing him at that time. Uh. That and you
Speaker 1: can sort of imagine that if you are this person
Speaker 1: who has this idealistic view of how the world should be,
Speaker 1: and then you start to encounter so much, so much
Speaker 1: persecution and resistance to to your dream where you know,
Speaker 1: you you can see in your mind, you think there's
Speaker 1: this idealistic world we could be living in and it
Speaker 1: would be so easy. But I'm I'm hitting resistance all
Speaker 1: the way and every time I try and make a change,
Speaker 1: I get ten more obstacles in my way. You can
Speaker 1: kind of see where that sort of hopelessness could creep
Speaker 1: in if if that was, you know, in fact, what
Speaker 1: Aaron was thinking. And again this is just kind of
Speaker 1: it's all it's all speculation. And you know, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Attorney's Office of it's Carmen Orts is in fact office,
Speaker 1: She's the U. S. Attorney of Massachusetts has said that, um,
Speaker 1: that that their office is contact conduct was not in
Speaker 1: fact inappropriate. Yeah. They they have maintained that what everything
Speaker 1: they did was well within the limits of the law
Speaker 1: and in ethics, which because again just because something's legal
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's ethical, uh and vice versa. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's been there's been a huge pushback against her office.
Speaker 1: There's a White House dot gov petition out right now
Speaker 1: as of as of late January with over forty six
Speaker 1: thousand signatures to remove her from office. Yeah, and there's
Speaker 1: been a lot of outcry on the internet on behalf
Speaker 1: of Sworts. There's also been some resistance, Uh, some people
Speaker 1: who have criticized Swartz and his his ideals. I've seen
Speaker 1: some of that. There have been some hackers who have
Speaker 1: kind of made you know, they've defaced some memorials online.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's a complex thing. Some sometimes you
Speaker 1: could argue that, you know, maybe the hackers really do
Speaker 1: feel that Swarts was not the person that other people
Speaker 1: are making him out to be. In other cases, I think,
Speaker 1: you know, it could just be you know, making a
Speaker 1: play for attention. For Yeah, this is a high profile instance.
Speaker 1: On the flip side. M I t s website has
Speaker 1: been hacked twice since Swarts of suicide, once by Anonymous,
Speaker 1: who also threatened action against the Westboro Baptist Church when
Speaker 1: they announced that they would pick its Worts funeral, which
Speaker 1: they backed off of. They did not, they did not
Speaker 1: show up. Yeah, and again when we say that Anonymous
Speaker 1: does something, keep in mind that's you know, that's a
Speaker 1: group that has no real uh well, there's there's no
Speaker 1: real structure to it, so sometimes members of Anonymous may
Speaker 1: act u Yeah, it's always hard to say that Anonymous
Speaker 1: did anything because it could just be a group of people,
Speaker 1: could be one person. But anyway, yes, uh, they did
Speaker 1: definitely send out a message saying that if if the
Speaker 1: WBC showed up at Swartz's funeral, they would block them
Speaker 1: from from view of the grieving parties. UM and probably
Speaker 1: there was a little bit more of a threat there too,
Speaker 1: because anonymous has been known to make people's lives difficult
Speaker 1: if they if they oppose the ideals that the group
Speaker 1: follows UM And in slightly slightly more positive action, Representative
Speaker 1: Zoe Lofgren of California wants to propose Aaron's Law, which
Speaker 1: would be a bill to amend the cf A and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, change it so that so that these violations
Speaker 1: of terms of service and network use UM cannot be
Speaker 1: federally prosecuted unless they really should be right. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a complex issue, right, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: this is that was part of the whole argument in
Speaker 1: the whole Creative Commons approach was that it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: that one party is absolutely in the wrong or absolutely
Speaker 1: in the right. It is a complex issue, and so
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where you know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to paint with a wide brush and then find
Speaker 1: out that, oh, you know, we needed to take a
Speaker 1: much more precise approach to this UM. And also, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of luminaries. Technology luminaries have come out and
Speaker 1: spoken on this subject. Lawrence Lessig has said several things
Speaker 1: about He's criticized the process, Accution's approach to going after
Speaker 1: Swords and tim Berners Lee wrote a very poignant tweet,
Speaker 1: really gorgeous tweet. Yeah, if if I can, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: probably gonna tear up in the middle of this tweet.
Speaker 1: And if I don't, it's going to be a miracle.
Speaker 1: But he he tweeted, um Aaron dead world wanderers, we
Speaker 1: have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are
Speaker 1: one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let
Speaker 1: us weep. I'm like, oh, Timmerners Lee, what are you
Speaker 1: doing to me? Yeah, he's uh yeah, he definitely definitely
Speaker 1: summed it up really well for a lot of people. UM.
Speaker 1: Shortly after after the discovery that Swarts had committed suicide,
Speaker 1: I appeared on an episode of Tech News Today and
Speaker 1: we discussed the the the story and uh uh yeah
Speaker 1: it was. I mean, it was a tough discussion even then,
Speaker 1: and that was fresh after finding out about it. Um,
Speaker 1: and it has not become easier as time has gone on.
Speaker 1: Also over at AM I he for m I T
Speaker 1: s part, they decided to create a review panel to
Speaker 1: look into how M I T handled the whole situation
Speaker 1: and whether or not the people at m T as
Speaker 1: a whole behaved in a way that is up to
Speaker 1: might standards. And the man who has put in charge
Speaker 1: of this review panel is how Abelson, who again was
Speaker 1: one of those two men, the other being Tim Burners
Speaker 1: Lee back when he was thirteen he got to meet
Speaker 1: and also a man who worked with him on the
Speaker 1: Creative Commons projects. So Abelson definitely has um firsthand knowledge
Speaker 1: of sports and and his contributions to the world. And
Speaker 1: so uh, he wrote a very eloquent letter to M
Speaker 1: I T and said, you know what his intentions were
Speaker 1: as part of this review process, and say that he
Speaker 1: wants to take a very honest look. He does not
Speaker 1: want it to become a witch hunt. At the same time,
Speaker 1: he does not want to just cover up anything that
Speaker 1: might be an ugly sore spot for M I T.
Speaker 1: He wants the truth and he says that you know,
Speaker 1: really that's the only thing that will serve in this situation,
Speaker 1: and it's the only thing that that is appropriate considering
Speaker 1: the circumstances. Um. So yeah, and uh, and it's while
Speaker 1: we don't know all the tales about what led sports
Speaker 1: to make this decision, we do know that he had
Speaker 1: battled depression. He had a history of it, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's a it's kind of a lifelong, lifelong issue.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, yeah without Jonathan and I wanted to stay
Speaker 1: without making this too much of an after school special,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's depression is something that both of
Speaker 1: us have dealt with in our lives. And uh, you
Speaker 1: know it's it's it's rough and it's terrible, but um
Speaker 1: but to borrow a phrase, it gets better and you
Speaker 1: know so, and there's help out there. There is help
Speaker 1: out there. If you are ever feeling overwhelmed, Please please
Speaker 1: talk to someone. There are people who care about you.
Speaker 1: We care about you. You probably shouldn't talk to us
Speaker 1: because we are not mental health professionals. Yeah, Honestly, googling
Speaker 1: suicide prevention is the best way to find help in
Speaker 1: your area. But if you're in the US, you can
Speaker 1: also call on two seven, eight to five. It's it's
Speaker 1: free and confidential and they will absolutely hook you up
Speaker 1: with helps. So yeah, it's it's definitely something that you know,
Speaker 1: we want to leave you guys with because, like Lauren said,
Speaker 1: this is not this is not an unfamiliar subject to
Speaker 1: us and UH, and it can when you're in the
Speaker 1: middle of a depression, it can feel like there's nowhere
Speaker 1: to turn. And the truth is that's that's not the case.
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, let's let's wrap this up. Guys. UH,
Speaker 1: if you would like to hear about a particular subject,
Speaker 1: if there's someone that we should cover, or a particular
Speaker 1: technology that you really want to know more about, I
Speaker 1: highly recommend you get in touch with us and let
Speaker 1: us know. You can write us an email. Our email
Speaker 1: address is text stuff at Discovery dot com, or you
Speaker 1: can send us a message on Twitter or Facebook. Our
Speaker 1: handle at both those locations is text H S W
Speaker 1: and Lauren and I will talk to you again really
Speaker 1: soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Because it has staff works dot com