All language subtitles for The.Internets.Own.Boy.The.Story.of.Aaron.Swartz.2014.1080p.WEB-DL.x264-RadenSandy

radioaktif.blogspot.com

RadenSandy

The co-founder of the social news and entertainment
website 'Reddit' has been found dead...

He certainly was a prodigy, althought
he never kind of thought of himself like that.

He was totally unexcited about
studying businesses and making money.

There's a profound sense of loss tonight
in Highland Park, Aaron Swartz's hometown...

...as loved ones say goodbye
to one of the Internet's brightest lights...

...Open Access and computer activits
are mourning his loss...

...an astonishing intellect;
you talk to people who knew him...

...he was killed by the government,
and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles...

...they wanted to make an example out of it,
ok?

Governments have insatiable desire to control.

...he was potentially facing 35 years in prison,
and a 1 million dollar fine...

...raising questions of prosecutorial zeal,
and I would say even misconduct.

Have you looked into that particular matter
and reached any conclusions?

Growing up, you know,
I slowly had this process of realising

that all the things around me,
that people had told me

were just the natural way things were,
the way things always would be.

They weren't natural at all.
They were things that could be changed.

And they were thing that, more importantly,
were wrong and should change.

And once I realised that,
there was really kind of no going back.

Welcome to story-reading time!

The name of the book is
'Paddington at the fair'.

Well, he was born in Highland Park
and grew up here.

Aaron came from a family of three brothers,
all extraordinarly bright.

Oh, the box is tipping over!

So, we were all, you know,
not the best behaved children,

you know, three boys running around all the time,
causing trouble...

Mom: Hey, no, no, no... Aaron!?
Aaron: What?

But, I've come to the realization:
Aaron learned how to learn at a very young age.

Knock, knock!?

Who's here?

Aaron!

Aaron who?

Aaron funny man.

He knew what he wanted,
he always wanted to do it.

He always accomplished what he wanted.

His curiosity was endless.

Here's a little picture of
what the planets are,

and each planet has a symbol...
[continues]

One day he said to Susan:

"What's this free family entertainment,
downtown Highland Park?"

Free family entertainment,
downtown Highland Park!

He was three at the time.

She said:
"What are you talking about?"

He said:
"Look, it says here on the refrigerator!"

Free family entertainment;
downtown Highland Park.

And so, she was floored and astonished
that he could read.

It's called: 'My family seder'.

The seder night is different
from all other nights.

I remember once we were
at the University of Chicago library.

I pulled a book off the shelf
that was from, like, 1900...

and showed to him, and I said:
"You know, this is, really, just an extraordinary place!"

We all were curious children, but Aaron
really liked learning and really liked teaching.

Today we're going to learn the ABC backwards:
z, y, x, w, [...]

I remember he came home
from his first algebra class,

and he was like:
"Noah, let me teach you algebra!"

And I'm like: "What is algebra?"

And he was always like that.

Now its press... now I press button... click button,

there, now it's got that, now it's in pink.

When he was 'bout 2 or 3 three years old,
and Bob introduced him to computers,

then he just took off, like, crazy on them.

[baby talk]

We all had computers, but Aaron really took to them,
really took to the Internet.

Working at the computer?
Nah...

How come... mommy, why is nothing working?

He started programming from a really young age.

I remember the first program
that I wrote with him was in Basic,

and it was a Star Wars trivia game.

He sat down with me in the basement,
were the computer was,

for hours, programming this game.

The problem that I kept having with him is
there was nothing that I wanted done,

and to him there was always something to do,

always something that programming could solve.

The way that Aaron always saw it,
is that programming is magic, right?...

...you can accomplish these things
that normal humans can't.

Aaron made an ATM using, like,
a Macintosh and, like, a cardboard box.

One year for Halloween I didn't
know what I wanted to be,

and he thought it'd be really really cool if I dressed up

like his new favourite computer,
which at the time was the original iMac.

I mean, he hated dressing up for Hallowen,

but he loved convincing other people
to dress up as things that he wanted to see.

[...] Host Aaron, stop!
Guys, come on, look at the camera! [...]

He made this website called 'The Info',

where people could just fill in information.

Like, I'm sure someone out there
knows all about gold, gold leafing.

Why don't they write about that on this website?

And then other people could come there,
at a later point,

and read those... read that information,

and edit the information if they thought it was bad.

Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right?

And this was before Wikipedia begun.

And this was developed by a 12 year old,

in his room, by himself,

running on this tiny server using ancient technology.

You know, one of the teacher's response was like:

"This is a terrible idea, you can't just, like,
let anyone author the diction..."

"...like, author the encyclopedia."

"The whole reason we have scholars,
is to write these book for us."

"How did you ever had such a terrible idea?"

And me and my other brother would be like:
"Oh, you know..."

"...yeah, Wikipedia is cool but, you know,
we had that in our house, like, 5 years ago."

Aaron's website 'theinfo.org'
wins a school competition,

hosted by the
Cambridge-based webdesign firm ArsDigita.

We all went to Cambridge for the...
when he won the ArsDigita Prize,

and, you know, we had no clue
of what Aaron was doing.

It was obvious that the prize was really important.

Aaron soon became involved
with online programming communities.

Then, in the process of shaping a new tool for the Web.

He comes up to me and is like: "Ben,
there's a really awesome thing that I'm working on!"

"You need to hear about it!"

I'm like: "Yeah, what is it?"

He says: "Is this thing called RSS!"

And he explains me what RSS is.
And I'm like:

"Why is that useful?
Aaron, is any site using it?
Why would I want to use it?"

There was this mailing new list
for people who were working on RSS,

and XML more generally; and there was
a person on it, named Aaron Swartz,

who was combative but very smart,
and who had lots of good ideas;

and he did never come to the face-to-face meetings;
and they said:

"You know, when are you gonna come out
to one of those face-to-face meetings?"

and he said: "You know, I don't think
my mom would let me, you know, I just turned 14."

And so their first reaction was, well, you know,

this person, this colleague,
we've been working with, all year,

was 13 years old when we were working with him,
and is only 14 now!

And their second reaction was:
"Christ, we really want to meet him!"

"You know, that's extraordinary!"

He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.

What he was doing was
to help build the plumbing for modern hypertext,

and the piece that he was working on, RSS,

was a tool that you can use to get summaries

of things that are going on in other web pages.

And, most commonly, you would use this for a blog:

you might have 10 or 20 people's blogs
you wanna read,

you use their RSS feeds, these summaries
of what's going on on those other pages,

to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on.

Aaron was really young,
but he understood the technology,

and he saw that it was imperfect,
and looked for ways to help make it better.

So his mom started bundling him on planes in
Chicago; we'd pick him up in San Francisco,

we'd introduce him to interesting people
to argue with,

and we marvelled at his horrific eating habits:

he only ate white food, only like,
you know, steamed rice,

and not fried rice,
because that wasn't sufficiently white,

and white bread, and so on, and, you know,

you kind of marvel at this...
the quality of the debate

emerging from this...
what appeared to be a small boy's mouth.

And you think, you know, this is a kid,

is really going to go somewhere,
if he doesn't die of scurvy.

Aaron, you're up!

I think the difference is that now
you can't make companies like that, per-se;

you can't have companies that just, you know:

"Let's sell dog food over the Internet,
let's sell dog food over the cellphones!"

But there's still lot of innovation going on,

I think, if you don't see the innovation,
maybe your head is in the sand.

He takes on this alpha-nerd personality,
where he's sort of like:

"I'm smarter than you,
and because I'm smarter than you,"

"I'm better than you, and I can tell you what to do."

It's an extension of, like,
him being kind of, like, a twerp.

So you aggregate all these computers together,
and now they're solving big problems,

like searching for aliens or trying to cure cancer.

First I met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat;
he didn't just write code,

he also got people excited about
solving problems he got; he was a connector.

The free culture movement has had a lot of his energy.

I think Aaron was trying to make the world work.
He was trying to fix it.

He had a very kind of strong personality,

that definitely ruffled feathers at times,

and it wasn't necessarily the case that
he was always confortable in the world,

and the world wasn't always confortable with him.

Aaron got into high school,
and was really just sick of school.

He didn't like it,
he didn't like any of the classes he had been taught,

he didn't like the teachers.

And he really knew, like, how to get information.

He was like, I don't need to go to these teachers
to learn how to do geometry.

I can just read the geometry book.

And I don't need to go to the teacher to learn
their version of American history.

Like, I have, like, three historical compilations here,
like, I can just read them.

And I'm not interested in that,
I'm interested in the Web.

I was very frustrated with school.

I thought, you know,
the teachers didn't know what they were talking about.

And they were very domineering and controlling,
and homework was kind of a sham.

And it was just like, you know,
all a way to pin students together,

and force them to do busy work.

And, you know,
I started reading books about the history of education,

and how this educational system was developed,

and, you know, alternatives to it,
in ways that people could actually learn things,

as opposed to just regurgitating facts
that teachers told them.

And that kind of led me down this path
of questioning things, you know?

And once I questioned the school I was in,
I questioned the society that built the school,

I questioned the businesses
that the schools were training people for,

and I questioned the government that, you know,
setup this whole structure.

One of them thing he was most passionate about
was copyright,

especially in those early days.

Copyright has always been something of a burden
on the publishing industry and on readers,

but it wasn't an excessive burden.

It was a reasonable institution to have in place,
to make sure that people got paid.

What Aaron's generation experienced,

was the collision
between this antique copyright system,

and this amazing new thing we were trying to build,
the Internet and the Web.

These things collided, and what we got was chaos.

He then met Harward law professor Lawrence Lessig,

who was then challenging copyright law
in the supreme court.

A young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington
to listen to the supreme court hearings.

I'm Aaron Swartz, and I'm here to listen to the Eldred...
to see the Eldred argument.

Why did you fly out here from Chicago,
and come all this way to see the Eldred argument?

That's a more difficult question.

[...] I don't know,
I'm very excited to see the supreme court,

especially such a prestigious case as this one.

Lessig was also moving forward with a new way
to define copyright on the Internet;

it was called Creative Commons.

So the simple idea of Creative Commons is
to give people, creators,

a simple way to mark their creativity,

with the freedoms they intended to carry.

So, if copyright is all about 'all rights reserved';

then this is a kind of 'some rights reserved' model.

It's I want a simple way to say to you:
"Here's what you can do with my work,"

"even if there are other things which you need
to get my permission before you could do."

And Aaron's role was the computer part,

like how do you architect the licenses,

so they would be simple and understandable,
and expressed in a way that machines could process it.

And people are like:
"Why do you have this fifteen year old kid,"

"writing the specifications for the Creative Commons?"

Like, "Don't you think that's a huge mistake?"

And Larry was like:
"The biggest mistake we would have,
is not listening to this kid."

He barely is not even tall enough
to get over the podium,

and it was this movable podium,

so is this embarrassing thing where,
once he put his screen up, nobody could see his face.

When you come to your... come to our website here,

and you've got to choose licence,

it gives you this list of options, explains what it means,

and you've got three simple questions:

Do you want to require attribution?

Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?

Do you want to allow modifications of your work?

I was floored;

just completely flabbergasted
to that these adults regarded him as an adult.

And Aaron stood up there in front of
a whole audience full of people,

and just started talking about the platform
that he created for Creative Commons.

And they where all listening to him, just...

I was sitting at the back thinking:
"He's just a kid, why're listening to him?"

But they did!

Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully.

Though critics have said it does little to ensure
artists get payed for their work,

the success of Creative Commons
has been enourmous.

Currently on the website 'Flickr' alone,

over 200 million people use some form
of Creative Commons license.

He contributed through his technical abilities,

and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.

Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

I think deeply about things,
and I want others to do likewise.

I work for ideas and learn from people.
I don’t like excluding people.

I’m a perfectionist, but I won’t let that get
in the way of publication.

Except for education and entertainment,

I’m not going to waste my time on things
that won’t have an impact.

I try to be friends with everyone,
but I hate it when you don’t take me seriously.

I don’t hold grudges (it’s not productive)
but I learn from my experience.

I want to make the world a better place.

In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park,
and enrolls in Stanford University.

He'd had also ulcerative colitis,
which was very troubling,

and we were concerned about him
taking his medication.

He got hospitalized,
and he would take this cocktail pills everyday,

and one of these pills was a steroid,
which taunted his growth, and...

made him feel different
from any of the other students.

Aaron, I think,
shows up at Stanford ready to scholarship,

and finds himself in, effectively,
a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers,

who, in four years, are meant to become,
you know, captains of industry and one-percenters.

And, like, I think it just made him bananas.

In 2005, after only one year of college,

Swartz was offered a spot
at a new startup incubation firm, called:

'Y-Combinator', led by Paul Graham.

And he's like:
"Hey, I have this idea for a website!"

And Paul Graham likes him enough,

and says: "Yeah, sure!" And so Aaron
drops out of school, moves to this apartment.

So this used to be Aaron's apartment
when he lived here.

I have vague memories of my father,
telling me how difficult it was to get a lease,

'cause Aaron had no credit,
and he dropped out of college.

Aaron lived in what's now the living room,

and some of the posters are left over
from when Aaron lived here,

and in the library there are more books,
but a lot of them are Aaron's.

Aaron's Y-Combinator site was called 'Infogami',
a tool to build websites.

But infogami struggles to find users,

and Swartz eventually merges his company,

with another Y-Combinator project in need of help.

It was a project headed by
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian called 'Reddit'.

There we were, starting from almost nothing:
no users, no money, no code,

and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,

and it shows no signs of letting up.

First we had a thousand users, than 10.000,
then 20.000, and on and on, it's just incredible.

Reddit becomes huge, and it's a real sort of
'geeky corner' of the Internet.

There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art,

and there's just people who flocked to the site,

and made that site the main site they go to,
every morning, to get their news.

Reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some level,

so, on the one hand, it's a place where people discuss...

...news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

and yet, there is a lot of kind of
'not-safe-for-work' material,

offensive material, there're some subreddits where
'Trolls find a welcome home',

and so, in that sense, reddit has been
kind of home to controversies as well.

It kind of sits on the edge of chaos.

Reddit catches the attention
of the corporate magazine giant 'Condé Nast',

who makes an offer to buy the company.

Some large amount of money,

large enough that my dad was getting
bugged with questions about like:

"How do I... store... this money?"

Interviewer: Well, like a lot of money?
Noah: Like a lot of money!

Like... probably... more than a million dollars.
But I don't actually know.

And he's how old at the time?

Nineteen, twenty?

So he was in this apartment; they are, like,
sat around on what predated this couches,
hacking on 'Reddit' and...

when they sold reddit they had to threw a giant party,
and then all flew out to California, the next day,

and left the keys with me.

It was funny, you know, he just sold a startup, so we
all kind of presumed he was the richest person around,

but he.. uh.. he said: "Oh, no, I'll take this tiny
little shoe-box-sized room, that's all I need!"

like, it was barely larger than a closet.

The idea of him spending his money on
fancy objects just seems so implausible.

He explains it like: "I like living in apartments,"

"so I'm not gonna spend lot of money on
a new place to live, I'm not gonna buy a mansion,"

"and I like wearning jeans and t-shirt,"

"so I'm not gonna spend any more money on clothes;
so, like, it's really no big deal."

What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic flows
on the Internet, and what commands our attention.

In the old system of broadcasting,
you're fundamentally limited by the amount of
space in the airwaves, you know...

You could only send out 10 channels
over the airwaves for televisions, right?

Even with cable you have 500 channels;
on the Internet everybody can have a channel!

Everyone can get a blog or a myspace page,
everyone has a way of expressing themselves.

And so what you see now is not a question of:

"Who gets access to the airwaves?",
it's the question of:
"Who gets control over the ways you find people?"

You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites
like Google, these sort of gatekeepers that tell you

where on the Internet you want to go; the people
who provide you your sources of news and information.

So it's not, you know, only certain people have a
license to speak, now everyone has a license to speak.

It's a question of: "Who gets heard?"

After he started working in San Francisco,
at Condé Nast, he comes into the office,

and they want to give him a computer with all
this crap installed on it, and say that he can't

install any new things on this computer,
which to a developer is outrageous, right?

From the first day he was complaining
about all this stuff.

Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first day
I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.

By lunch time I had literally locked myself
in a bathroom stall and started crying.

I can't imagine staying sane with someone
buzzing in my ear all day,

let alone getting any actual work done;
nobody else seems to get work done here either:

everybody's always coming into our room
to hang out and chat,

or invite us to play the new videogame system
that 'Wired' is testing.

He really had different aspirations,
that were politically oriented,

and Silicon valley just doesn't really quite
have that culture that orients technical activity
for the purposes of political goals.

Aaron hated working for a corporation.

They all hated working for Condé Nast, but Aaron is,
like, the only one who is not going to take it.

And Aaron basically got himself fired,
by not showing up to work ever.

It was said to be a messy breakup.

Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman
declined to be interviewed for this film.

He rejected the business world.

One of the really important things to remember about

that choice when Aaron decided
to kind of leave the startup culture,

is that he was also leaving behind
the things that had made him...

famous, and well loved and, you know,
he was at risk of letting down fans.

He got to where he was supposed to be going,

and had the self-awareness
and the orneriness to realise...

that he had climbed that mountain of shit
to pluck a single rose,

and discover that he lost his sense of smell;

and, rather than sit there,
and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed,

- and he did get the rose in any event -
he climbed back down again; which is pretty cool!

The way that Aaron always thought
is that programming is magic, right?

You can accomplish these things that
normal humans can't, by being able to program.

So, if you had magical powers, would you use them
for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

Swartz was inspired by
one of the visionaries he had met as a child,

the man who had invented the World Wide Web:
Tim Berners-Lee.

In the 1990s Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on one
of the most lucrative inventions of the 20th century,

but instead of profiting
from the invention of the World Wide Web,

he gave it away for free.

It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.

Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.

Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet
genious who doesn't in any sense cash-out.

Is not at all interested in how he's going to
figure out how to make a billion dollars.

People would have seen:
"Oh, there's money to be made there!"

So there would have been lots of 'little webs',
instead of one 'big one'.

And one little web... lots of little webs, doesn't work,

because you can't follow links from one to the other.

Now you had to have the critical mass
that this thing was in the entire planet,

so is not gonna work unless
the whole planet can get onboard.

I mean, I, you know, feel very strongly that
it's not enough to just live in the world as it is,

to just, kind of, take what you're given and, you know,
follow the things that adults told you to do,

and, you know, your parents told you to do,
and that society tells you to do.

I think you should always be questioning, you know?
I take this very scientific attitude,

that everything you've learned is just provisional;

that, you know, it's always open
to recantation or refutation or questioning.

And I think the same applies to society.

Once I realised that there where real serious problems,

fundamental problems,
that I could do something to address,

I didn't see a way to forget that,
I didn't see a way not to.

We just started spending a lot of time,
just kind of as friends.

We would just talk for hours into the night.

I definetely should have understood
that he was flirting with me.

I think just to some degree I was like:

"This is a terrible idea, and impossible,
and therefore I will pretend it is not happening."

As my marriage was breaking down,
and I was really stuck without anywhere to go,

we became roommates and brought my daughter over.

We moved in and furnish the house...
and it was really peaceful, like,
my life had not been peaceful for a while,

and really neither had his.

We were extremely close,
from the beginning of our romantic relationship.

We just... we were in constant contact.

But we were both...
really difficult people to deal with. [laughs]

In a very Ally McBeal discussion,

he confessed he had a theme song,
and I made him play it for me.

It was 'Extraordinary Machine' by Fiona Apple.

I think it was just that sense of, kind of,
being a little bit embattled,

that the song has, umm...
and it also had, like, this hopefulness too.

'Cause, in many ways,
Aaron was tremendously optimistic about life.

Even when he didn't feel it,

he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

Aaron: Hey, what are you doing?
Quinn: Flickr has video now... [laughs]

Swartz threw his energy into a string of new projects,
involving access to public information,

including an accountability website, called:
'watchdog.net',

and a project called the 'Open Library'.

So the open library project is a website,

you can visit it at 'openlibrary.org',
and the idea is to be a huge wiki,

an editable website with one page per book.

So for every book ever published,
you wanna have a webpage about it

that combines all the information from publishers,

from book sellers, from libraries, from readers,

under one site,
and then gives you links so you can buy it,

you can borrow it or you can browse it.

I love libraries, you know,
I'm the kind of person who goes

to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.

That's the dream of the Open library,
is building this website

where both you can leap from book to book,
from person to author,

from subject to idea;
you go through this vast tree of knowledge

that's has been embedded and lost
in big physical libraries,

that's hard to find,
that's not very well accessible online;

it's really important,
because books are our cultural legacy,

you know, books are the place people go
to write things down,

and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation,

it's kind of scary.

How can you bring public access to the public domain?

It may sound obvious,
that you'd have public access to public domain,

but in fact is not true;
so the public domain should be free to all,

but it's often locked up!

There's often, you know, guard cages, it's...
it's like having a national park,

but with a moat around it,
and gun turrets pointed to out,

in case somebody might want actually
come and enjoy the public domain.

One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in,

was bringing public access to the public domain.

This is one of the things
that got him into so much trouble.

I had been trying to get access to
federal court records in the United States.

What I discovered was a puzzling system called:
'PACER',

which stands for:
'Public Access to Court Electronic Records'.

I started googling,
and that's when I ran across Carl Malamud.

Access to legal materials in the United States
is a 10 billion dollar-per-year business.

PACER is just this incredible abomination
of government service.

It's 10 cents a page,
it's this most brain-dead code you've ever seen,

you can't search it, you can't bookmark anything,
you got to have a credit card.

And these are public records, it's, you know,
US district courts are very important,

it's where a lot of our... our seminal litigations starts,
you know, civil right cases,

patent cases, all sort of stuff...
and journalists, and students,

and citizens, and lawyers, all need access to PACER,
and it fights 'em, every step of the way.

People without means can't see the law,

as readily as people that have
that gold American express card.

It's a poll tax on access to justice.

You know, the Law is the operating system
of our democracy, and you have to pay to see it?

You know, that's not much of a democracy.

They make about a 120 million dollars a year
on the PACER system,

and it doesn't cost anything near that,
according to their own records.

In fact, it's illegal!

The 'e-Government Act' of 2002 states
that the courts may charge

only to the extent necessary
in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER.

As the founder of 'public.resource.org',

Malamud wanted to protest the PACER charges.

He started a programme called:
'The PACER Recycling Project',

where people could upload
PACER documents they had already paid for,

to a free database, so others could use them.

The PACER people were getting
a lot of flak from congress

and others about public access,
and so they put together a system

in 17 libraries accross the country,
where was free PACER access.

You know, that's 1 library
every 22,000 square miles, I believe.

So, it wasn't, like, really convenient.

I encouraged volunteers to join the so called:
'ThumbDrive Corps',

and download docs from the public access libraries,
and upload them to the PACER recycling site.

So, people take a ThumbDrive
into one of these libraries,

and they download a bunch of documents,
and they send them to me.

And, nothing... I mean, it was just a joke!

In fact, when you click on ThumbDrive Corps,
there was a 'Widard of Oz'...

...you know,
the Munchkins singing videoclip came up.

But, of course, I get this phone call
from Steve Schultze and Aaron,

saying:
"Geez! We'd like to join the Thumbdrive Corps."

Around that time, I ran into Aaron at a conference.

This is something that really has to be
a collaboration between a lot of different people.

So, I approached him and I said:

"Hey, I am thinking about an intervention
on the PACER problem."

Schultze had already developed a program,

that could automatically download
PACER documents from the trial libraries.

Swartz wanted to take a look.

So I showed him the code, and...
I didn't know what would come next.

But, as it turns out, over the course
of the next few hours of that conference,

he was off-sitting in the corner, improving my code,

recruiting a friend of his,
that lived near one of these libraries,

to go into the library and
to begin to test his improved code.

At which point the folks at the courts realized:
"Something is not going quite according to plan."

And data started to come in...
and come in... and come in...

and soon there were 760 GigaBytes of PACER docs,
about 20 million pages.

Using informations retrieved from the trial libraries,

Swartz was conducting massive
automated parallel downloading of the PACER system.

He was able to acquire
nearly 2.7 million federal court documents.

Almost 20 million pages of text.

Now, I'll grant you that 20 million pages had perhaps

exceeded the expectations
of the people running the pilot access project,

but surprising a beaurocrat isn't illegal.

Aaron and Carl decided to go talk
to the New York Times about what happened.

They also caught the attention of the FBI,

who began to stakeout Swartz's parents house
in Illinois.

And I get a tweet from his mother, saying: "Call me!"

So I thought: "What the hell is going on here?"

And so I finally got a hold of Aaron and, you know,

Aaron's mother was like: "Oh my god, FBI! FBI! FBI!"

An FBI agent drives down our home's driveway,
trying to see if Aaron is, like, in his room.

And I remember being home that day,

and wondering why this car was driving down
our driveway, and just driving back out.

I was like: "That's weird!"

Like, 5 years later, I read this FBI file and I'm like:

"Oh, my goodness!"

That was the FBI agent,

in my driveway.

He was terrified. He was totally terrified.

He was way more terrified after the FBI, actually,

called him up on the phone,
and tried to sucker him into...

coming down to a coffee shop without a lawyer.

He said he went home and laid down on the bed,

and, you know, was shaking.

The downloading also uncovered massive

privacy violations in the court documents.

Ultimately, the courts were forced
to change their policies as a result.

And the FBI closed their investigation,
without bringing charges.

To this day I find it remarkable that anybody,

even at the most remote
podunk field office of the FBI,

thought that a fitting use for taxpayer dollars

was investigating people for criminal theft

on the grounds that they had made the law public.

How can you call yourself a lawman,

and think that there can possibly be
anything wrong in this whole world

with making the law public?

Aaron was willing to put himself at risk

for the causes that he believed in.

Bothered by wealth disparity,

Swartz moves beyond technology

into a broader range of political causes.

I went into congress, and I invited him to

come and hangout and intern for us for a while,

so that he could learn, you know, the political process.

He was sort of learning about a new community,

a new set of skills,

and kind of learning to hack politics.

It seems ridiculous that miners

should have to hammer away
until they whole bodies are dripping with sweat,

faced with the knowledge that if they dared to stop,

they won't be able to put food on the table that night,

while I get to make
larger and larger amounts of money each day,

just by sitting and watching TV.

But apparently the world is ridiculous.

So, I co-founded a group called:

'the Progressive Change Campaign Committee',

and what we're trying to do,
is we're trying to organise people over the Internet,

who care about progressive politics,

and moving the country
in a more progressive direction,

to kind of come together,

join our e-mail list, join our campaign,

and help get progressive candidates elected,
all across the country.

The group is responsible
for igniting the grassroots efforts

behind the campaign to elect Elizabeth Warren
to the Senate.

He might have thought it was a dumb system,

but he came in and he said:
"I need to learn this system,"

"because it can be manipulated, like any,
you know, like any social system."

But his passion for knowledge and libraries

didn't take a back seat.

Aaron began to take a closer look

at institutions that publish academic journal articles.

By a virtue of being students at a major US univerity,

I assume that you have access
to a wide variety of scholarly journals.

Pretty much every major university
in the United States,

pays these sort of licencing fees

to organizations like JSTOR and Thomson ISI,

to get access to scholarly journals that

the rest of the world can't read.

These scholarly journals and articles,

are essentially the entire wealth
of human knowledge online.

And many had been payed for with taxpayer money,

or with government grants.

But to read them you often have to pay again,

handing over steep fees to publishers like:
Reed-Elsevier.

These licensing fees are so substantial that

people who are studying in India,

instead of studying in the United States,

don't have this kind of access.

They're left out from all of these journals.

They're left out from our entire scientific legacy.

I mean, a lot of these journal articles,
they go back to the enlightenment.

Everytime someone
has written down a scientific paper,

it has been scanned,
digitized and put in these collections,

that is a legacy that has been brought to us

by the history of people doing interesting work.

The history of scientists.

It's a legacy that should belong to us as a common,
as a people,

but instead, it's been locked-out and put online

by an handful of for-profit corporations,

who then try and get
the maximum profit they can out of it.

So, a researcher paid by the University or the people,

publishes a paper,
and in the very very last step of that process,

after all the work is done,
after that all the original research is done,

the thinking, the lab work, the analysis,

after everything is done, at that last stage,

then the researcher has to handover
his or her copyright

to this multi-billion dollar company.

And it's sick!

It's an entire economy built on volunteer labour.

And then the publishers stay at the very top
and scrape off the cream.

Talk about a scam!

One publisher in Britain made a profit of
3 billion dollars last year.

I mean, what a racket!

JSTOR is just a very very small player in that story,

but, for some reason,
JSTOR is the player that Aaron decided to confront.

He'd gone to some conference
around Open Access and Open Publishing,

and I don't know who the person from JSTOR was,

but I think they...
at some point Aaron asked the question, like:

"How much would it cost
to open up JSTOR in perpetuity?"

and they gave some... I think is 200 million dollars.

Something that Aaron thought was totally ridiculous.

Working on a fellowship at Harward,

he knew users on MIT's
famously open and fast network next door,

had authorized access to the riches of JSTOR.

Swartz saw an opportunity.

You have a key to those gates;

and, with a little bit of shellscript magic,

you can get those journal articles.

On September 24th 2010,

Swartz registered a newly purchased Acer laptop

on the MIT network, under the name Gary Host.

The client name was registered as 'ghost_laptop'.

He doesn't hack JSTOR
in the traditional sense of hacking;

the JSTOR database was organised,

so it was completely trivial to figure out

how you could download all the articles in JSTOR,

because those are basically numbers!

It was basically, you know, '/' '/' '/', number article:

444024, and... 25, and... 26!

He wrote a python script called “keepgrabbing.py”,

which was, like, keep grabbing one article after another.

The next day ghost_laptop begins grabbing articles.

But, soon, the computer's IP address is blocked.

For Swartz is barely a bump in the road:

he quickly reassigns his computer IP address,

and keeps downloading.

Well, JSTOR and MIT take a number of steps
to try and interfere with this,

when they noticed that this was happening.

And when the more modest steps
don't work in a certain stage they...

JSTOR just cuts off MIT
from having access to the JSTOR database.

So, this is a kind of cat-mouse game,
around getting access to the JSTOR database.

Aaron, ultimately, obviously, is the cat,

because he has more technical capabilities than
the JSTOR database people doing... defending them.

Eventually, there was an unlocked supply closet
in the basement of one of the buildings,

and he went, instead of going through WiFi,

he went down there and he just
plugged this computer directly into the network,

and just left it there with an external hard drive,
dowloading these articles to the computer.

Unkown to Swartz, his laptop and hard drive
had been found by authorities.

They didn't stop the downloads;
instead, they installed a surveillance camera.

They found that computer in this room
in the basement of an MIT building.

They could have unplugged it,
they could have waited for the guy to come back,

and say: "Dude, what are you doing?",
you know: "Cut it out. Who are you?"

And they could have done all that kind of stuff,
but they didn't!

What they wanted to do was
film it to gather evidence to make a case.

That's the only reason you film something like that.

At first, the only person caught
on the glitchy surveillance camera,

was using the closet
as a place to store bottles and cans.

But days later, it caught Swartz.

Swartz is replacing a hard drive;
he takes it out of his backpack,

leans out of frame for about 5 minutes,
and then leaves.

And then they, like, organise, like, a stakeout,
whereas he was biking home from MIT.

These cops came out from, like, either side of the road,
or something like that, and started going after him.

He describes that he was pressed down and
assaulted by the police.

He tells me that they...
it's unclear if they were police,

that were after him;
he thought that someone was trying to attack him.

He does tell me they beat him up.

I was just devastated.

The notion of any kind of criminal prosecution
of anyone in our family or anything,

was so foreign and uncomprehensible,
I didn't know what to do.

Well, they executed search warrants at Aaron's house,

his apartment in Cambridge, and his office at Harward.

Two days before the arrest, the investigation had
gone beyond JSTOR and the local Cambridge police.

They had been taken over
by the United States secret service.

The secret service began investigating
computer and credit card fraud in 1984,

but 6 weeks after the attack on 9/11,
their role expanded.

President Bush used the 'Patriot Act',

to establish a network of what they called:
'Electronic Crimes Task Forces'.

The bill before me takes account of the new realities
and dangers posed by modern terrorists.

According to the secret service, they are primarily
engaged in activities with economic impact,

organized criminal groups,
or use of schemes involving new technology.

The secret service turns Swartz's case over
to the Boston US attorney's office.

There was a guy in the US attorney's office,

who had the title:
'Head of the computer crimes' division or task force.

I don't know what else he had going,

but you're certainly not much
of a computer crimes prosecutor,

without a computer crime to prosecute;
so he jumped on it.

Kept it for himself, didn't assign it
to someone else within the office, or the unit;

and that's Stephen Heymann.

Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been largerly
out of public view since the arrest of Aaron Swartz.

But he can be seen here, in an episode
of the television show 'American Greed',

filmed around the time of Aaron's arrest.

He is describing his previous case,
against the notorious hacker Alberto Gonzalez,

a case that garnered Heymann
enourmous press attention and accolades.

Gonzalez masterminded the theft of over
a hundred million credit card and ATM numbers,

the largest such fraud in history.

Here Heymann, describing Gonzalez,
gives his view on the hacker mindset.

These guys are driven by a lot of the same things
that we're driven by:

they have an ego, they like challenge,
and, of course, they like money,

and everything you can get from money.

One of the suspects implicated in the Gonzalez case,

was a young hacker named Jonathan James.

Believing Gonzalez's crimes would be pinned on him,

James committed suicide during the investigation.

In an early press release describing
the government's position in the case of Aaron Swartz,

Heymann's boss, US attorney for the disctrict
of Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, said this:

It's not true. It's obviously not true.

I'm not saying it's harmless,

and I'm not saying that we shouldn't
criminalise stealing of information,

but you gotta be much more subtle
in trying to figure out

exactly which kind of harms are harmful here.

So, the thing about a crowbar is,

everytime I brake into a place with a crowbar,

I do damage, there's no doubt about it.

But when Aaron writes a script

that says: 'download, download, download'
hundreds times at a second,

there's no obvious damage, to anybody.

If he does that for the purpose of gathering

archive to do academic research on it,

there's never any damage to anybody.

He wasn't stealing,
he wasn't selling what he got, or giving it away.

He was making a point, for as far as I could tell.

The arrest took its toll on Swartz.

He just won't want talk about it,
and he's, like, very stressed.

If you thought, like, the FBI was, like,
going to come to your doorstep,

any day, any time you went down the hall,
even to do your laundry,

and it would brake in to your apartment,
because you left the door unlocked,

like, I'd be pretty stressed.
And it was clear.

And so Aarorn was always sort of, like in, dour mood.

He wouldn't give up any sensitive information

about his whereabouts during this time,

because he was so afraid that
the FBI will be waiting for him.

It was a time of unprecedented
social and political activism.

Time magazine would later name
as their 2011 person of the year:

There was a kind of hotbed of hacker activity going on.

WikiLeaks had released a trove of diplomatic cables...

Manning had been under arrest at the time,

it was unknown whether he was the source of the leak...

Anonymous, which is a kind of protest ensemble

that has a lot of hackers in its ranks,

were going on various sprees of sorts...

If you compare that to what he did,

this stuff should have been left behind
for MIT and JSTOR to deal with,

in a kind of private, professional matter.

It should have never gotten the attention of
the criminal system.

It just didn't belong there.

Before he was indicted, Swartz was offered a plea deal,

that involved three months in prison,
time in a halfway house,

and a year of home detention.

All, without the use of a computer.

It was on the condition
that Swartz plead guilty to a felony.

Here we are: we have no discovery,
no evidence whatsoever,

about what the government case is.

And we have to make this immense decision.

Where the lawyer is pushing you to do this,

the government is giving you
a non-negotiable demand,

and you're told that
your likelihood of prevailing is small.

So weather you're guilty or not,
you're better off taking the deal.

Boston has it's own computer crimes division.

Lots of lawyers, probably more lawyers than they need.

So, you know, you can imagine all sort of cases,

where it would be really hard to prosecute,

cause you've got some criminals in Russia,

or you've got some people inside of a corporation
who are gonna have 500 dollars (per hour) lawyers

or 700 dollars-an-hour lawyers
sitting down against you.

And then you got this case with this kid,

which is pretty easy to prove that he did something.

And he has already marked himself
as a troublemaker with the FBI,

so why not go as tough as you can,
in hearing against that guy?

It's good for you, the prosecutor,

it's good for the republic,
'cause you're fighting all those terrorist types.

I was so scared,

I was so scared of having my computer ceased,

I was so scared of going to jail,

because of my computer being ceased,

I had confidential material from sources,

from my previous work on my laptop...

and that is above all my priority,

is to keep my sources safe.

I was so scared of what was gonna happen to Ada.

Aaron told me that they'd offered him a deal.

And he finally just said,
that he would take it, if I told him to.

And I said... I came real close to saying: "Take it!"

He had this... he had developed, like,
serious political aspirations,

in the intervening time between when,
you know, that moment,

when he ended that entrepreneurial startup life,

and begun this new life,
that had come to this political activism.

And he just didn't believe that he could continue,
in his life,

with a felony, you know? He said to me, one day...

we were walking by the white house, and he said to me:

"They don't let felons work there!"

I mean, you know, he really wanted that to be his life.

He hadn't killed anybody, he hadn't hurt anybody,

he hadn't, like, stolen money,

he hadn't done anything that seemed
felony-worthy, right?

And... there's this idea that, like,

there's no reason that he should be labeled a felon

and taken away his right to vote, in many states,

for doing what he did, like,

that's just outrageous, like,
it makes sense for him to be,

you know, maybe fined a bunch of money or,

you know, asked not to come back at MIT again.

But, like, to be a felon? To face jail time?

Swartz turned down the plea deal.

Heymann were doubled his efforts.

Heymann continued to press us at all... at all levels.

Even with the physical evidence,

ceased from Aaron's Acer computer,
hard drive and usb drive,

the prosecutors needed evidence of his motives.

Why was Aaron Swartz
downloading articles from JSTOR?

And just what did he planned to do with them?

The government claimed
that he was planning to publish these.

We don't really know whether that was
his real intention,

because Aaron also had a history of

doing projects where
he'd analyzed giant datasets of articles,

in order to learn interesting things about them.

The best evidence for that
was that when he was at Stanford,

he also downloaded the whole Westlaw legal database.

In a project with Stanford law students,

Swartz had downloaded the Westlaw legal database.

He uncovered troubling connections between

funders of legal research and favorable results.

He did this amazing analysis of for-profit companies,

giving money to law professors,
who wrote law review articles,

which would then beneficial to, like, Exxon,
during an oil spill, right?

So it was a very corrupt system of funding,
you know, vanity research.

Swartz had never released the Westlaw documents.

In theory he could have been doing
the same thing about the JSTOR database.

That would have been completely OK.

If he were, on the other hand, intending to

create a competitive service to JSTOR,

like, we're gonna set up our own, you know,
access to the Harward law review,

and charge, you know, money for it,

then, you know, ok, now it seems like criminal violation,

because you're commercially
trying to exploit this material.

But it's kind of crazy to imagine
that that's what he was doing.

So, but than there's a middle case:

what if he was just trying to liberate it
for all of the developing world?

But depending on what he was doing,

it creates a very different character
to how the law should be thinking about it.

The government was prosecuting him

as if this was like a commercial criminal violation,

like stealing a whole bunch of credit card records,

like it was that kind of crime.

I don't know what he was gonna do with that database,

but I heard from a friend of his,

that Aaron had told him
he was going to analyze the data

for evidence of corporate funding
of climate change research,

that led to biased results.

And I totally believe that.

I was just told that Steve wanted to talk to me.

And I tought:
"Maybe this is a way I can get out of this."

Just to exit the situation.

And I didn't want to leave in fear
of having my computer ceased.

I didn't want to leave in fear of having to go to jail,

on a contempt of court charge,

if they tried to compel me to decrypt my computer.

When they came to me and said:
"Steve wants to talk to you...",

that seemed reasonable.

They offered Norton what is known as:

a 'queen-for-a-day' letter,
or 'proffer' (letter).

It allowed prosecutors
to ask questions about Aaron's case.

Norton would be given immunity
from prosecution herself,

for any information she revealed during the meeting.

I didn't like it.

I told my lawyers repeatedly that I didn't...

this seemed fishy, I didn't like this,

I didn't want immunity, I didn't need immunity,

I hadn't done anything.

But they were really really stringent,
that there was...

they didn't want me meeting the prosecutor,
without immunity.

Interviewer: but, just to make clear,
this is a queen-for-a-day deal, or proffer.

Right, a proffer letter.

Interviewer: in which you basically
handed information over to them,

in exchange for protection from prosecution.

So, it wasn't handing information over.

It was, at least that's not how I saw it, it was just

having a discussion, having an inteview with them.

Interviewer: Well, they're asking you questions...
Quinn: They're asking me questions.

Interviewer: ...and they can ask you
about whatever they want.
Quinn: Right.

Interviewer: ...and, whatever they learned,
they could have you prosecute for that.

...right, and I repeatedly tried to go in naked.

I repeatedly tried to turn down the proffer letter.

I was ill, I was being pressured by my lawyers,

I was confused.

I was not doing well by this point.

I was depressed, and I was scared,

and I didn't understand the situation I was in.

I had no idea why I was in this situation.

I hadn't done anything interesting, much less wrong.

We were out of our minds.

Aaron was clearly very distraught about it,

we were very distraught about it,

Aaron's attorneys were very distraught about it.

We tried to get Quinn to change attorneys.

I was very unused to beeing in a room with
large men, well armed,

that are continuously telling me I'm lying,

and that I must have done something.

I told them that this thing that they were prosecuting,

wasn't a crime,

I told them that they were on the wrong side of history.

I used that phrase, I said:

"You're on the wrong side of history."

And they looked bored,

they didn't even look angry, they just looked bored.

And it... uh... it began

to occure to me
that we weren't having the same conversation.

I mean, I told them plenty of things about, you know,

why people would donwload journal articles,
and eventually...

- I don't remember what was around it -

...I mentioned that he'd had done this blog post:

'the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto'.

This is the guerilla open access manifesto,

supposedly written in July 2008, in Italy.

Information is power.

But like all power,

there are those who want to keep it for themselves.

The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage,

published over centuries in books and journals,

is increasingly being digitized and locked up

by a handful of private corporations.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out
are not standing idly by.

You have been sneaking through holes
and climbing over fences,

liberating the information locked up by the publishers,

and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark,
hidden underground.

It's called stealing or piracy,

as if sharing a wealth of knowledge
were the moral equivalent

of plundering a ship and murdering its crew.

But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative.

Only those blinded by greed

would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

There is no justice in following unjust laws.

It's time to come into the light and,

in the grand tradition of civil disobedience,

declare our opposition to this private theft
of public culture.

The manifesto itself was allegedly written
by four different people

and also edited by Norton.

But it was Swartz who had signed his name to it.

When it's over, I go immediately to Aaron

and tell him everything I can remember about it.

And he gets very angry.

The things that I'd done
shouldn't have added up that way.

I hadn't done anything wrong,

and everything had gone wrong.

But I was never...

I'm still angry.

I'm still angry.

You can... try your best with these people
to do the right thing,

and they turn everything against you,

and they will hurt you, with anything they can.

And, in that moment, I regret that I said what I did.

But my much larger regret,
is that we have settled for this.

That we're OK with this.

That we're ok with the justice system,
a system which tries to game people

into like traps, so that they can ruin your lives.

So, yeah, I wish I hadn't said that,

but I'm much, much angrier that this is where I am.

That this is what we, as a people, think is OK.

They used every method that
I think they could think of,

to get her to provide information which would be

unhelpful to Aaron,
and helpful to the prosecution of Aaron.

But, you know, I don't think she had information
that was helpful to the government.

Months go by, as Swartz's friends and family
await a looming indictment.

In the meantime, Swartz was becoming
a go-to expert on a series of Internet issues.

Do you think that the Internet is something
that should be considered a human right,

and something that the government
can not take away from you.

Yes. Definitely. I mean, this...

...notion that national security
is an excuse to shut down the Internet.

That's exactly what we heard in Egypt,
in Syria, and all these other countries.

And so, yeah, it's true,
sites like WikiLeaks are going to be putting up

some embarassing material
about what the US government does,

and people are going to be organizing
to protest about it,

and try and change their government.

You know, and that's a good thing.

That's what all these First Amendment rights
of free expression,

and freedom of association, are all about.

And so the notion that
we should try and shut those down,

I think, just goes against
the very basic American principles.

A principle, I think, is one that
our founding fathers would have understood.

If the Internet had been around back then,

instead of putting Post Offices in the constitution,
they would have put ISPs.

Swartz meets activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman,
and the two begin to date.

...we need a massive global public outcry...

...if there is no massive global public outcry,
it won't create any change...

...you know, 4 people in this city
should cause a massive global public outcry...

...you know, we need a petition signer...

Without telling her specifics,

he warned her he was involved in something
he called simply 'the bad thing'.

And I had, sort of, crazy theories, like,

that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Warren,
or something...

I speculated both
Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, actually...

So, sometime in, probably, late July, Aaron called me.

And I happen to pick up, and he said:

"You know, the bad thing
might be in the news tomorrow."

"Do you want me to tell you,
or do you want to read about it in the news?"

And I said: "I want you to tell me."

Aaron, he said: "Well, I've been arrested,"

"for downloading too many academic journal articles,"

"and they want to make an example out of me."

And I was like: "That's it? That's the big fuss? Really?"

"It doesn't sound like a very big deal."

On July 14th, 2011, Federal prosecutors
indict Swartz on 4 felony counts.

He gets indicted.

On the same day there're, like, 2 people in England,
who are part of LulzSec, get arrested,

and, like, a few other real hackers.

And Aaron is just like someone
who kind of looks like a hacker,

enough that they can, like, you know,
put his head on a stake, and put it on the gates.

Aaron went to surrender, and they arrested him.

They then strip-searched him,

took away his shoelaces, took away his belt,

and left him in solitary confinement.

The District of Massachusetts US Attorney's Office,

releases a statement, saying:

"Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison,"

"to be followed by 3 years of supervised release,"

"restitution, forefeiture,
and a fine of up to 1 million dollars."

He is released on a $100,000 bail.

The same day the primary victim in the case, JSTOR,

formally drops all charges against Swartz,
and declines to pursue the case.

JSTOR, they weren't our friends.
They weren't helpful or friendly to us,

but they also were just kind of like:
"We are not part of this."

JSTOR, and their parent company Ithica,

also sidestepped requests to talk with this film.

But at the time,
they released a statement saying it was

the government's decision weather to prosecute,
not JSTOR's.

And so it was our belief that, with that,
the case would be over,

that we should be able to get Stephen Heymann
to drop the case,

or settle in some rational way.

And the government refused.

Interviewer: Why?

Well, because, I think,
they wanted to make an example out of Aaron.

and they said they wanted to...
the reason why they wouldn't move on,

requiring a felony conviction and jail time,

was that they wanted to use this case,
as a case for deterrence.

They told us that.

Interviewer: They told you that?

Yes.

Interviewer: This was gonna be an example?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

Interviewer: He was gonna be an example?
Aaron's Father: Yes. Stephen Heymann said that.

Deterring who? Like...

...there is a lot of other people, out there,
running around and loggin onto JSTOR,

and downloading the articles to make a political
statement? I mean, who are they deterring?

It would be easier to understand
the Obama Administration's posture of,

supposedly, being for deterrence,
if this was an Administration that, for instance,

prosecuted arguably the biggest economic crime
this country has seen in the last 100 years,

the crimes that were committed,
that led to the financial crisis, on Wall Street.

When you start deploying the non-controversial idea
of deterrence only selectively,

you stop making a dispassionate analysis
of law breaking,

and you started deciding to deploy
law enforcement resources,

specifically on the basis of political ideology,

that's not just un-democratic,
it's supposed to be un-American.

Prosecutor Stephen Heymann,
later reportedly told MIT's outside counsel,

that the straw that broke the camel's back,
was a press release,

sent out by an organization Swartz founded,
called 'Demand Progress'.

According to the MIT account,

Heymann reacted to the short statement of support,

calling it a wild Internet campaign,

and a foolish move, that moved the case
from a human one-on-one level,
to an institutional level.

That was a poisonous combination.

A prosecutor who didn't want to lose face,
who had a political career in the offing, maybe,

and didn't want to have this
to come back and haunt them.

You spent how many tax dollars, arresting someone
for taking too many books out of the library,

and then got your ass handed to you in court.
No way!

I then moved
to try and put pressure on MIT in various ways,

to get them to go to the government,

and request the government to stop the prosecution.

Interviewer: What was MIT's reaction then?

There doesn't seem to be any reaction from MIT,
at that point.

MIT doesn't defend Aaron,

which to people inside of the MIT community
seems outrageous,

because MIT is a place that encourages hacking,
in the biggest sense of the word.

At MIT the idea of going and running around
in routes and tunnels

that you weren't allowed to be in,
was not only a rite of passage,

it was part of the MIT tour,

and lock-picking was a winter course at MIT.

They had the moral authority to stop it in its tracks.

MIT never stood up,
and took a position of saying to the Feds:

"Don't do this. We don't want you to do this."

"You're over-reacting, this is too strong!",
that I'm aware of.

They acted kind of like... like any corporation would.

They sort of...
they helped the government, they didn't help us,

unless they felt they had to, and...
and they never tried to stop it.

MIT declined repeated requests to comment.

But they later released a report, saying
they attempted to maintain a position of neutrality,

and believed Heymann and the US Attorney's office
did not care what MIT thought or said about the case.

MIT's behaviour seemed really at odds
with the MIT ethos, right?

You could argue that MIT turned a blind eye,
and that was okay for them to do.

But taking that stance, taking that neutral stance,
in and of itself, was taking a pro-prosecutor stance.

If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack,
they started by selling a bluebox,

which was a thing designed
to defraud the phone company.

If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen,

they initially started their business,
by using computer time at Harvard,

which was pretty clearly against the rules.

Difference between
Aaron and people that I just mentioned,

is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place,
he didn't just want to make money.

Swartz continues to be outspoken,
on a variety of Internet Issues.

You know, the reason Internet works,
is because of the competitive marketplace of ideas.

And what we need to be focussing on,
is getting more information about our government,

more accessibility, more discussion, more debate.

But instead, it seems, like,
what Congress is focussed on, is shutting things down.

Aaron thought he could change the world,

just by explaining the world very clearly to people.

FLAME can literally control
your computer and make it spy on you.

Welcome Aaron,
good to have you back on the show here.

You know, just like spies used to, in olden days,

put microphones and tap what people were saying,

now they are using computers to do the same things.

Swartz's political activity continues,

his attention turning to a bill moving
through Congress, designed to curb online piracy.

It was called SOPA.

Activists like Peter Eckersley
saw it as an enormous over-reach,

threatening the technical integrity
of the Internet itself.

And one of the first things I did was to call Aaron,

and I said:
"Can we do a big online campaign against this?"

"This isn't a bill about copyright."

It's not?

"No, he said.
It's a bill about the freedom to connect."

Now I was listening.

And he thought about it for a while and then said yes,

and he went and founded Demand Progress.

Demand Progress in an online activism organization.

We got around a million and half members now.

But started in the fall on 2010.

Aaron was one of the most prominent people

in a community of people who helped lead-organizing

around social justice issues
at the federal level in this country.

SOPA was the bill that was intended to
curtail online piracy of music and movies,

but what it did was, basically, take a sledge hammer

to a problem that needed a scalpel.

If passed, the law would allow a company
to cut off finances to entire websites,

without due process or even
to force Google to exclude their links.

All they needed was a single claim
of copyright infringment.

It pitted the titans of traditional media
against the new,

and now far more sophisticated remix culture.

It makes everyone who runs a website
into a policeman.

And if they don't do their job
of making sure nobody on their site

uses it for anything that's even potentially illegal,

the entire site could get shutdown,
without even so much as a trial.

This was over the top.
I mean, this was a catostrophy.

This bill poses a serious threat to speech,
and civil liberties,

for all who use the Internet.

It were only a handful of us who said:
"Look, we're not for piracy either,"

"but it makes no sense to destroy
the architecture of the Internet,"

"the domain name system, and so much,
that makes it free and open,"

"in the name of fighting piracy."

And Aaron got that right away.

The freedoms guaranteed in our constitution,

the freedoms our country has been built on,
would be suddenly deleted.

New technology,
instead of bringing us greater freedom,

would have snuffed out fundamental rights,
we'd always taken for granted.

And I realized, that day, talking to Peter,
that I couldn't let that happen.

When SOPA was introduced in October 2011,
it was considered inevitable.

Our strategy, when it first came out,
was to hopefully slow the bill down,

maybe weaken it a little bit,

but even we didn't think that
we would be able to stop this bill.

Having worked in Washington, what you learn is that,

typically in Washington, the legislative fights,

are fights between
different sets of corporate monied interests,

and all duking it out to pass legislation.

And the fights that are the closest,
are when you have one set of corporate interest,

against another set of corporate interests,
and they are financially

equally matched in terms of
campaign contributions and lobbying.

Those are the closest ones.

The ones that aren't even fights, typically,

are ones where all the money is on one side,

all the corporations are on one side,

and just millions of people on the other side.

I haven't seen anything like PIPA and SOPA,
in all my time in public service.

There were more than 40 US senators
on that bill as co-sponsors.

So there were already a long long way
to getting the 60 votes to have it cleared
all the procedural hoops.

Even I began to doubt myself.
It was a rough period.

Swartz and Demand Progress
were able to marshall enormous support,

using traditional outreach, combined
with commonly used Voice over IP,

to make it very easy for people to call Congress.

I've never met anybody else who
was able to operate at his level,

both on the technological side,
and on the campaign strategy side.

Millions of people contacted Congress,
and signed anti-SOPA petitions.

Congress was caught off guard.

There was just something about watching those
clueless member of Congress debate the bill,

watching them insist they could regulate the Internet,

and a bunch of nerds couldn't possibly stop them.

I'm not a nerd.

I am just not enough of a nerd.

...maybe we ought to ask some nerds
what this thing really does. [laughter]

Let's have a hearing, bring in the nerds. [laughter]

Really? [laughter]

Nerds? [laughter]

You know, I think, actually,
the word you're looking for is: experts. [laughter]

To enlighten you, so your laws won't backfire,
break the Internet.

We used the term Geek, but we are allowed
to use that, because we are geeks.

The fact that it got as far as it did,
without them talking to any technical experts,

reflects the fact that there is a problem in this town.

I'm looking for somebody to come before this body,
and testify in a hearing,

and say: "This is why they're wrong."

There used to be an office that provided
Science and Technology advice,

and members could go to them and say:
"Help me understand XYZ."

And Gingrich killed it.
He said it was waste of money.

Every since then,
Congress has plunged into the dark ages.

I don't think anybody really thought
that SOPA could be beaten, including Aaron.

He knew it was worth trying,
but it doesn't seem winnable.

And I remember, maybe a few months later,
I remember him

just turning to me and being like:
"I think we might win this!"

And I was like: "That would be amazing!"

Calls to Congress continue;
when the Domain hosting site GoDaddy
becomes a supporter of the bill,

tens of thousands of users
transfer their Domain Names in protest.

Within a week, a humbled GoDaddy
reverses their position on SOPA.

When the Congress people that supported these...

the record and movie industries,
realize that there was this backlash,

they kind of scaled the bill back a little bit.

You could see the curve happening.

You could see that our arguments
were starting to resonate.

It was like Aaron had been, like, striking a match
and it was being blown out...

striking another one, and being blown out,

and finally he, like, managed to catch enough
kindling that the flame actually caught,

and then, like, it turned into this roaring blaze.

On January 16th, 2012,
the White House issued a statement saying

they didn't support the bill.

And then this happened.

I'm a big believer that we should be dealing
with issues of piracy,

and we should deal with them in a serious way,

but this bill is not the right bill.

When Jimmy Wales put his support
towards blacking out Wikipedia,

the number 5 most popular website in the world,

this is a website that's... 7% of all
of the clicks on anywhere on the Internet.

Wikipedia went black,

Reddit went black,

Craigslist went black,

phonelines on Capitol Hill flat out melted,

members of Congress started rushing
to issue statements,

retracting their support for the bill,
that they were promoting just a couple days ago.

Within 24 hours,
the number of opponents of SOPA, in Congress,

went from this...

...to this.

To see Congressmen and Senators slowly flipside

throughout the day of the blackout
was pretty unbelievable,

there was, like, a hundred representatives swing.

And that was when, as hard as it was
for me to believe, after all this...

...We had won!

The thing that everyone said was impossible,

that some of the biggest companies in the world
had written off as kind of a pipe dream, had happened.

We did it!

We won!

This is a historic week in Internet politics,
maybe American politics.

The thing that we heard from
people in Washington D.C.,

from staffers on Capitol Hill was,
they received more emails and more phone calls

on SOPA blackout day,
than they ever received about anything.

I think that was an extremely exciting moment,

this was the moment when
the Internet had grown up politically.

It was exhilarating, because
it's hard to believe it actually happened.

It's hard to believe,
a bill with so much financial power behind it,

didn't simply sail through the Congress.

And not only did not sail through,
it didn't pass at all.

It's easy sometimes to feel like you are powerless.

Like, when you come out on the streets,
and you march and you yell,

and nobody hears you.

But I'm here to tell you today: You are powerful!

So, yeah, maybe sometimes you feel like
you're not being listened to,

but I'm here to tell you that you are,
that you are being listened to,

You are making a difference.
You can stop this bill if you don't stop fighting.

Stop PIPA! Stop SOPA!

Some of the biggest Internet companies,
to put it frankly, would benefit

from a world in which their little
competitors could get censored.

We can't let that happen.

For him it was more important to be
sure that you made a small change,

than to play a small part in a big change.

But SOPA was, like,
playing a major part in a major change.

And so, for him, it was kind of
his proof of concept; it was like...

okay, you know, what I wanna do,
with my life, is change the world.

I think about it in this really scientific way of,
like, I'm measuring my impact,

and this shows that it is possible, right?

That the thing that I wanna do with my life
is possible.

I have proved that I can do it.
That I, Aaron Swartz, can change the world.

For a guy who never really thought
he had done much,

which was Aaron,

it was one of the few moments
where you could really see

that he felt like
he had done something good.

Feeling like here is his, maybe,
one and only victory lap.

Everyone said there was no way
we could stop SOPA: We stopped it.

This are 3 outrageously good victories,
and the year isn't even over yet.

I mean, if there's a time to be positive, it's now.

You know, he wins at SOPA a year after he is arrested.

It's not an unambiguously happy moment.

There's a lot going on.

He is so attuned towards participating
in the political process, you can't stop him.

The list of organizations Swartz founded,
or co-founded, is enourmous.

and years before Edward Snowden would expose
widespread Internet surveillance,

Swartz was already concerned.

It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax,

that they don't even have a sort of basic statistics

about how big this spying programme is.

And if the answer is:
"Oh, we're spying on so many people,
we can't possibly even count them."

...then that's an awful lot of people.

...one thing that they said: "Look, you know,
we know the number of telephones we're spying on,"

"we don't know exactly
how many real people that corresponds to."

But they just came back and said:
"We can't give you a number at all."

That's pretty...
I mean, that's scary, is what it is.

And then they put incredible pressure on him,
took away his... all of the money he had made,

they... tried to take away his physical freedom.

Why'd they do it?
Why are they going after whistleblowers?

Why are they going after people who tell the truth

about all sorts of things: from the banks, to the...

to war, to just sort of government transparency.

So secrecy serves those who are already in power,
and we are living in an era of secrecy,

that coincides with an era
where the government is doing also

a lot of things that are probably
illegal and unconstitutional.

So, those two things are not coincidences.

It's very clear that this technology has been developed

not for small countries overseas, but right here,

for use in the United States, by the US government.

The problem with the spying programme,
is that it's this sort of long, slow expansion,

you know, going back to the
Nixon Administration, right?

Obviously it became big after 9/11,
under George W. Bush,

and Obama has continued to expand it,

and the problems have slowly grown
worse and worse...

But there's never been this moment
you can point to, and say:

"Okay, we need to galvanize opposition today,
because today is when it matters."

The prosecution, in my estimation, of Aaron Swartz,

was about sending a particular
laser-like message to a group of people,

that the Obama Administration
sees as politically threatening.

And that is essentially the hacker,
the information and the democracy activist community.

And the message that the Obama Administration
wanted to send,

to that particular community, was, in my estimation:

"We know you have the ability
to make trouble for the establishment,"

"and so we are going to try to make
an example out of Aaron Swartz,"

"to scare as many of you as possible,
into not making that trouble."

And the governement said:

"Oh, the legal opinions we are using
to legalize the spying programme are also classified,"

"so we can't even tell you
which laws we are using to spy on you."

Everytime they can tell:
"Oh, this is another instance of cyber war,"

"the cyber criminals are attacking us again,"

"we're all in danger, we're all under threat."

They use those as excuses,
to push through more and more dangerous laws.

Interviewer: And so, just to follow it up, like,
personally, how do you feel the fight is going?

It's up to you.

You know, there's sort of these two
polarizing perspectives, right:

everything is great, the Internet has created
all this freedom and liberty,

and everything's gonna be fantastic, or...

everything is terrible,

the Internet has created all these tools
for cracking down,

and spying and, you know, controlling what we say.

And I think these both are true, right?

The Internet has done both,
and both are kind of amazing and astonishing.

And which one will win out in the long run is up to us.

It doesn't make sense to say:
"Oh, one is doing better than the other..."

You know, they are both true.

And it's up to us which one we emphasize,
and which one we take advantage of,

because they're both there,
and they're both always gonna be there.

On September 12th, 2012, Federal prosecutors
filed a superseeding indictment against Swartz,

adding additional counts of wire fraud,
unauthorized access to a computer,
and Computer Fraud.

Now, instead of 4 felony counts,
Swartz was facing 13.

The prosecution leverage had dramatically increased,

as did Swartz's potential jail time and fines.

They filed a seperate indictment to add more charges,

and they had a theory about why this conduct
constituted a number of federal crimes,

and that a very significant sentence
could attach to it under the law.

That theory,
and much of the prosecution case against Swartz,

involved a law created originally in 1986.

It is called: 'the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act'.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
was inspired by the movie 'War Games',

with Matthew Broderick, a great movie.

In this movie, a kid gets the ability,
through the magic of computer networks,

to, like, launch a nuclear attack.

Now, that's not actually possible,
and it certainly wasn't possible in the 80s,

but, apparently, this movie scared Congress enough to

pass the original Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

This is a law that's just behind the times,

for example it penalises
a Terms of Service kind of arrangement,

you have something like eHarmony or match.com,

and somebody sort of inflates
their own personal characteristics,

and, all of a sudden,
depending on the jurisdiction and the prosecutors,

they could be in a whole host of troubles.

We all know what Terms of Use are.

Most people don't read them,
but not abiding by their terms,

could mean you are committing a felony.

The website terms of service often say things like:
'Be nice to each other', or:

'Dont do anything that's improper'.

The idea that the criminal law has
anything to say about these kinds of violations,

I think strikes most people as crazy.

The examples get even more crazy.

Until it was changed in March of 2013,

the Terms of Use on the website
of hearst's 'Seventeen' magazine
said you had to be 18 in order to read it.

I would say that the way the CFAA
has been interpreted by the Justice Department,

we are all probably all breaking the law.

Vague and prone to misuse,
the CFAA has become a 'one size, fits all' hammer,

for a wide range of computer related disputes.

Though not the only factor in his case,
11 of the 13 charges against Swartz,

involved the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The question 'Why?'
hangs over much of the story of Aaron Swartz.

Just what was motivating the goverment,
and what would their case have been?

The Department of Justice
declined requests for answers.

But professor Orin Kerr is a former prosecutor
who has studied the case.

So, I think I come about this case from a different
direction than other people on a number of reasons.

I was a federal prosecutor at the justice
department for 3 years, before I started teaching.

The government came forward with an indictment,

based on what crimes they thought were committed.

Just as a purely lawyer's matter,
looking at the precedents,

lookings at the statues, looking at the history,

looking at the cases that are out there so far,

I think it was a fair indictment, based on that.

You can debate
whether they should have charged this case.

There is just a lot of disagreement.

Some people are on the Open Access side,
some people are not.

I think the government took Swartz's
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto very seriously.

And I think they saw him as somebody
who was committed, as a moral imperative,

to breaking the law,
to overcome the law that Swartz saw as unjust.

And, in a democracy, if you think a law is unjust,
there are ways of changing that law;

there is going to congress,
as Swartz did so masterfully with SOPA;

or you can violate that law,
in a way to try to nullify that law.

And I think what was driving the prosecution,

was the sense that Swartz was committed
not just to breaking the law, but
to really making sure that law was nullified.

That everyone would have have access
to the database, in a way that

you couldn't put the toothpaste back into the tube,

it would be done, and Swartz's side would win.

There is a big disagreement, in society,
as to whether that is an unjust law,

and ultimately that's a decision for the
American people to make, working through Congress.

And than the second problem is, I think,
we're still trying to figure out

what's the line between
less serious offenses and more serious offenses.

We're now entering that different environment
of computers and computer misuse,

and we don't yet have a really strong sense
of exactly what these lines are,

because we are just woking that out.

This is a poor use of prosecutorial discretion.

The hammer that the Justice Department has,
to scare people with, just gets bigger and bigger.

And so most people, you know...
you can't roll the dice with your life, like that.

Should we tap somebody's phone?
Should we film them?

Should we turn somebody and get them to testify
against these other people?

That's how federal agents and prosecutors think.

They build cases, they make cases.

Swartz was caught in the gears
of a brutal criminal justice system,

that could not turn back.

A machine that has made America
the country with the highest rate of incarceration
in the world.

We have, in this country, allowed ourselves
to be captured by the politics of fear and anger.

And anything we're afraid of,
like the future of the Internet and access,

and anything we're angry about, instinctively, creates

a criminal justice intervention.

And we've used jail, prison and punishment,

to resolve a whole host of problems that,
historically,

were never seen as criminal justice problems.

And the impulse to threaten, indict, prosecute,

which is part of what has created
this debate and controversy over
online access and information on the Internet,

is very consistent with what we've seen in other areas;

the one difference is... is that the people
who are usually targeted and victimized,

by these kinds of criminal and carceral responses,
are typically poor and minority.

Swartz's isolation from friends and family increased.

He had basically stopped working on anything else.

And the case was, in fact, like,
taking over sort of his whole life.

One of Aaron's lawyers, apparently,
told the prosecutors that he...

he was emotionally vulnerable,

and that that was something
that they really needed to keep in mind,
so that they... they knew that.

It was weighing on him very heavily.

He did not like having his actions and movements
restricted in any way,

and the threat of jail,
which they pounded him with a lot,

was terrifying to him.

Completely exhausted his financial resources, and...

it cost us a lot of money also - and he
raised a substantial amount of money...

so it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

Interviewer: The legal defence?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

Interviewer: Was in millions?
Aaron's Father: Yes.

Yeah, I think he didn't want to be a burden to people,
I think that was a factor...

like, I have my normal life,
and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with,

and I try to, like,
keep the two of them as seperate as possible.

But they were just beginning to blur together,
and everything was becoming shitty.

Swartz faced a tough choice,
that was only getting tougher.

Do you admit guilt and move on with your life,
or do you fight a broken system.

With his legal case the answer was simple:
he rejects the final plea deal,
and a trial date is set.

Aaron was resolute
that he didn't want to knuckle under,

and accept something that he didn't believe was fair,

but I also think he was scared.

I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

I think we would have walked him
out of that courthouse, and...
I would have given him a big hug, and...

we would have walked across that little river
in Boston, and gone and had a couple of beers.

I really thought that we were right.

I thought that we were gonna win the case.

I thought that we could win the case.

He didn't talk about it very much, but you could see
the enourmous pain that he was going through.

No time, in his childhood, did Aaron have any
severe mood swings or, like, depressive episodes,

or anything that I would describe to
as severe depression.

And it's possible, you know,
he was depressed, people get depressed.

Very early in our relationship,
like 3 or 4 weeks in or something,

I remember him saying to me
that I was a lot stronger than he was.

You know, he was brittle in lot of ways...
things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

It was part of his brilliance, too.

I think, he probably had something, like,
clinical depression in his early 20s.

I don't think he did when I was with him.

He wasn't a joyful person...
but that's different from being depressed.

He was just under such,
such enourmous pressure for two years straight.

He just didn't want to do it anymore.

He was just, like.. I just think it was too much.

I got a phone call late at night.

I could tell something was wrong,
and then I called, and I realized what had happened.

The co-founder of the social news and entertainment
website 'Reddit' has been found dead.

Police say 26 year old Aaron Swartz
killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.

I just thought we've lost
one of the most creative minds of our generation.

I was, like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.

It was one of the hardest nights in my life.

It was like I was screaming: "I can't hear you...
what did you say... I can't hear you."

I can't. That's it.

Like, yeah, none of it made any sense,
and really still doesn't.

I was so frustrated and angry...

You know, I tried to explain it to my kids.

My 3 year old told me that the doctors would fix him.

I've known lots of people who have died,
but I've never lost anybody like this.

Because everybody feels, and I do too,
there's so much we could've... more to do, like...

I just didn't know he was there.
I didn't know this was what he was suffering.

He was part of me.

And I just wanted it to not be real, and then...

And then I just looked at his Wikipedia page,
and I saw the end date.

02.02.2013

My first thought was: "What if nobody even notices?"

You know, 'cause it wasn't clear to me how...
salient he was.

I had never seen anything
quite like the outpouring I saw.

The net just lit up.

I mean, everyone was trying to...
to explain it in their own way,

but I've never seen people grieve on Twitter before.

People were visibly grieving online.

He was the Internet's Own Boy...
and the whole world killed him.

We are standing in the middle of a time
when great injustice is not touched.

Architects of the financial meltdown
have dinner with the President, regularly.

In middle of that time, the idea that 'this'...

was what the government had to prosecute...

it just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.

The question is:
"Can we do something, given what's happened,"

"...to make the world a better place,"

"...and how can we further that legacy?"
That's the only question one can ask.

All over the world there are starting to be
hackathons and gatherings...

Aaron Swartz has in some sense
brought the best out us,

in trying and say: "How do we fix this?"

He was, in my humble opinion, one of the true

extraordinary revolutionaries
that this country has produced.

I don't know weather Aaron was defeated or victorious,

but we are certainly shaped by the hand

of the things that he wrestled with.

When we turned armed agents of the law

on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,

we've broken the rule of law,

we've desecrated the temple of justice.

Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

Change does not roll-in on the wheels of inevitability,

it comes through continuous struggle.

Aaron really could do magic,

and I'm dedicated to making sure

that his magic doesn't end with his death.

He believed that he could change the world.

And he was right.

Out of the last week, and out of today,

phoenixes are already rising.

Since Swartz's death,
Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Sen. Ron Wyden

have introduced legislations that would reform

the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,

the outdated law that formed the majority

of the charges against Swartz.

It's called 'Aaron's Law'.

Aaron believed that, like, you literally
ought to be asking yourself all of the time:

"What is the most important thing
i could be working on in the world right now?"

And if you are not working on that, why aren't you?

I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.

But we can change the future and we must.
We must do so for Aaron. We must do so for ourselves.

We must do so to make our world a better place,
a more humane place,

a place where justice works,

and access to knowledge becomes a human right.

So there was a kid, back in february, from Baltimore...

...14 years old...

...who had access to JStor, and he'd been
spelunking through JStor, after reading something.

And he figured out a way
to do early tests for Pancreatic Cancer.

And Pancreatic Cancer kills the shit out of you,

because we detect it way to late, and by the time we
detect it, it's already too late to do anything about it.

And, he sent e-mails off to the entire
oncology department at John Hopkins,

you know, hundreds of them; and every...
Interviewer: Did you say a 14 years old?

14 year old kid, yeah.
And most of them ignored it, right?

But one of them, like, sent him a e-mail back.

And said, "This is not an entirely stupid idea;
why don't you come on over?"

This kid worked evenings and weekends with this
researcher and, in February, I heard him on the news,

just a couple of weeks after Aaron died,
when Aaron was in the news a lot.

Sorry.

And he said the reason he was on the news
is 'cause they'd done it.

They were shipping an early test
for pancreatic cancer that was gonna save lives.

And he said:
"This is why what Aaron did was so important."

Because you never know, right?

This truth of the universe is not only something
that policymakers use to figure out,

you know, what the speed limit should be.

It's where the thing that's gonna keep, you know,
your kid from dying of Pancreatic Cancer comes from.

And, without access, the person who might
come up with the thing that's got

your number on it, may never find that answer.

He sleeped so well, he didn't fall out
[baby talk], not even when he dreamed
he was back on the spacecraft.

Very good, Aaron! Good, good! Yay, Aaron!

Okay! Now it's song time!

Translated by Raden Sandy
radioaktif.blogspot.com