Aaron Swartz Didn't Have to Die. Presumptive Arrogance, Power and Intransigence Garroted Him
By now you know who Aaron Swartz was: RSS co-author, Internet wunderkind, creator of Infogami which merged with social news site Reddit, Demand Progress founder (open-democracy advocate) SOPA and PIPA activist (fought against internet censorship) President Obama Kill List critic and US and Israeli critic of joint cyber attacks on Iran. (Aaron's being Jewish didn't deter him.)
By now, you also know his girlfriend found him hanging by his belt just inside a window of his apartment in Crown Heights. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide and the family made a telling statement framing the suicide not only as a tragedy but a "product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." Their statement implies that the 26-year-old had been incredibly stressed out by the prosecution's case against him and was driven to suicide because of it.
According to reports, Swartz in the federal case against him attempted to reduce the charges below felony status repeatedly. Prosecutors (Citizens' petitions one with over 40,000 signatures are on the WhiteHouse.gov site calling for the firing of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and lead attorney on the case assistant, U. S. Attorney Stephen Heymann ) were unyielding. Swartz was a big fish and they would make their case backed not by JSTOR who archived the documents, but by M.I.T. in whose closet Aaron Swartz entered and left a computer uploading documents.
In what appears to be bullying him into submission, Heymann kept up the pressure, adding additional charges so that by September 2012, Swartz faced 13 felony counts and up to half a century in prison. The prosecutors' actions prompted family to include in their statement,
"The decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at M.I.T. contributed to his death. The U.S. Attorney's Office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over thirty years in prison to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, M.I.T. refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles."At Aaron's funeral on Tuesday, January 17, 2013, Aaron's father stated bluntly and clearly, Aaron "was killed by the government."
Aaron harmed no one. Aaron murdered no one, yet he was potentially facing 50 years in prison if convicted. What had Aaron done? He took online documents from JSTOR's archives and made them accessible to the public. Mind you, he did not do this to make money for himself. He did it to provide free and open access to the little people, to you and to me, to share the wealth of knowledge that universities have retained a monopoly over to enrich themselves. Aaron was kind of equalizing the playing field, an intellectual Robin Hood, shining the light on free access to information (these were public anyway) in keeping with his vision of providing the opportunity of gaining knowledge if you had the inclination to read and educate yourself.
Was this a crime? Well, for private corporations information and knowledge have a price. Say that pharmaceuticals want to find a way to patent herbal remedies to cure cancer that licensed Indian homeopaths and doctors have been using for 4000 years with great success. How do you patent something that has been around for 4000 years (like free knowledge) to make lots of money on it? You can't. If you can't patent these natural remedies to make money, then you create other remedies, patent them, charge huge swaths of money and offer them to doctors for use, regardless of their questionable results and high failure rates. Soon there's a monopoly of use of these patented "cures." What of the more efficacious remedies? Drug oligarchies crowd them out. Unadvertised and unknown or even discredited and banned as dangerous, they are forgotten or marginally kept in use in other countries. By controlling information in an elaborate process, companies make great profits, regardless of whether people die or live using their practices and services. They do not take kindly if you steal their information and will prosecute you. Aaron didn't "take" documents that were private.
Aaron, like all in the open access movement, knew knowledge is power and true, reliable information brings wealth into shrewd, deceitful, selfish and restrictive hands, as ignorance brings poverty, enslavement and oppression in all its horrific aspects. Information can also bring embarrassment to the powerful and change the course of a country's policies, i.e Bradley Manning's leaking information to Wiki leaks. Aaron stood for open access and open democracy to enlighten the world and make it a better place. It's inevitable that profit mongers who "get" knowledge by any means, legal or illegal, exploit their services to those without knowledge or technical skill. Aaron knew how to "get" knowledge, but he wasn't a profit monger.
For profit mongers and the protectionist DOJ who in the past have made smart career moves on cases such as this, what Aaron symbolized and what he did was and is anathema. In the large scale economies of profit and loss, there is no such thing as free access. But Aaron was not giving out private information or documents stolen from corporate sites. Yet, prosecutors went after and went after and went after him though JSTOR didn't want the case pursued.
These U.S. Attorneys mistakenly applied an economic construct of law against Aaron, instead of taking the high road, and acknowledging the Internet law they used against him needed reforming. Regardless, they barreled ahead relentlessly "seeing" that Aaron violated the very soul of protectionist laws of profit. He "stole" knowledge/information, and Ortiz stood by their case, claiming, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar." This overweaning response to what Aaron did (at best a misdemeanor) is of mythic, skewed proportion. It deserves analogical characterization, does it not? Who was this Aaron Swartz, a rebellious Prometheus who gave fire to man (a proponent of open access, making the documents public)? And like Prometheus, must he be punished for his most dire act?
Aaron dropped out of school because he was a genius. It held him back from learning. He was not, like others, leaping through training hoops to gain information. He was finding ways to gain access to information to innovate and create new forms, and whatever he discovered, he shared and made public. That was who he was. He was ethical. He was the new paradigm, and his sharing these documents was his last act of bravery in a corrupt system whose trade of knowledge for money represented everything Aaron repudiated.
Call him a visionary. Call him an innovator. At the very least to call him a thief is archaic, dull, unaware. It brings to mind the protagonist in "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London, who misses the signs, and doesn't read the little details of reality. in London's story, the protagonist's environment is in an extremity of cold. The protagonist should run for cover. But he "lacks imagination," and his inflexible ignorance and dullness leads him out into the wilderness and he freezes to death.
Well, the prosecutors, giving them every benefit of the doubt, were too blinded by the letter of the law to read the details of its spirit as it applied to Aaron's true intent. They refused to read the signs of this case. They refused to see the context in which Aaron operated. They were recalcitrant, inflexible, unyielding... stuck in an old paradigm. They, very simply, lacked imagination and were stupid. To assume they did this out of selfish, power-hungry ambition is too egregious to entertain.
Regardless of their motives, it will cost them. Let's call it their mistake of blindness and lack of imagination, not seeing what was truly at stake...Aaron's life. They underestimated the soul and spirit of their "thief." And like the Siege of Masada where the Jews decided it was better to commit suicide and die free than be taken by the Romans who'd be cheated out of the glory and honor of their capture and conquest, so it appears with Aaron Swartz. Ortiz and Heymenn intended to "win the case" and prove Aaron guilty by having him agree to a plea bargain.
For Aaron their glorious conquest would be too costly, so the case win would not be theirs. It would be his. "Dismissed!" He ransomed the case from them with his life. And what will they get? Surely no honor, certainly no glory. They get shame. In Aaron's most final and grave act, he has blown the whistle loudly on a broken judicial system. He has spearheaded a new push to reform internet law. He has shined the light once more on the obsolete paradigm of paid access to information and revealed its unseemly nature.
Aaron is receiving the glory. If any good can come out of his death, then let his act be transformed like alchemy. Let his death be a martyrdom for a just cause. Aaron Swartz died a free man. We mourn his choice. But for him it was vital necessity, a breath of fresh air. Death was better than living a lie in a paradigm that, for him, no longer exists.
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