Aaron Swartz: Champion for Internet Freedom and Global Intelligence

Tags: Aaron Swartz, free information movement, Occupy Wall Street, activism, civil disobedience, control

Aaron Swartz is a martyr for the Free Information Movement.

The recent suicide of the computer programmer and activist for Internet Freedom has been distracting me from working on my honors thesis. 

Not to make light of the situation. 

It has been little over 10 days now since I heard the news, and I've put around a month of research into my thesis on collective action demonstrated by Occupy Wall Street. It's been a tempting consideration to switch my topic – not because I don't care about analyzing the #Occupy movement, but because what they so stubbornly sat around protesting, Aaron embodied with his life as well as his death.

The majority of Occupiers were protesters: sleeping in the streets, holding up signs, shouting, complaining, struggling to make their voices heard and pounding their fists against the walls of corporations – sometimes smashing their windows with bricks. I am trying to find merit in their methods (as opposed to their cause), but it has been difficult. Frankly, it has been hard to glean much more from Occupiers than a thorough laundry list of complaints. (However, I'm not giving up on #Occupy. My graduation depends on it.)

Occupiers' demands do make sense, at the root:

End corporate greed.

Give us jobs.

Tell us the truth.

But they're just demands; (justifiably) frustrated feet stomping the ground for change. 

Please don't be mistaken – I'm not hating on the movement. In fact, without Occupy's strong response to unfairness in this country, it would be much more difficult for [empathizers, organizers, and those truly motivated enough to make change] to actually act for the foot-stompers.

My question is, how many people with complaints about #theSystem #theGovernment #CorporateAmerica have actually done anything about it? (I will eventually find an answer to this question. It's basically my thesis' thesis statement.)

Aaron Swarts did more than simply embody both the OWS and Internet Freedom movements. What he accomplished by the time he was 14 is more than most of will in a career #RSSfeed. By the time he was 18, he had helped cofound Reddit, a popular news/social media sites on the Internet. 

And while it would be unfair to compare all Occupiers to Swartz (Aaron undeniably had more than a knack for what he did) he worked in a very real fight for the freedom of information. The fight for information is essentially a fight for human intelligence. It is one for which Swartz shouldered not just political and financial repercussions; it cost him his life.  

He believed that information should be accessible and affordable (arguably, free), and he applied his talents to make real steps forward for mankind. I'm not talking about a website, single bits of information or a web-browser add-on; Swartz was fighting for the advancement of the human race. 

Swartz accessed the online academic digital library JSTOR via MIT computers to download millions of scholarly articles. JSTOR stores published articles on its servers and provides free access to students, libraries and a few other groups (though universities pay to allow students this access). Those outside the "free" realm have to pay to access the articles. To Swartz this must have seemed wrong – after all, much of the research stored in the archive was funded by federal dollars. Essentially, taxpayers were having to pay to fund much of the research, and again to access it.

Swartz' prosecutor (the Department of Justice – NOT the "victims" of the crime: MIT, JSTOR or JSTOR's publishers) assumed that he was intending to make these articles free to the public. Some would say he was close to the spirit of JSTOR's mission: "Our mission involves expanding access to scholarly content as broadly as possible, in ways that are sustainable and consistent with the interests of our publishers who own the rights to the content" –JSTOR FAQ. But the DOJ considered him a felon for his actions. 

"From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way," said Frank Lessig, a lawyer and friend of Swartz. "The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar." 

"What offended Swartz and others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at public expense*," said Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Guardian. "This system offended Swartz (and many other free-data activists) for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors, and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and universities."  

*In this quote (not the second), Greenwald was referring to Swartz' successful download and share of court documents from Pacer (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which charged the public for court documents created at the public's expense.

However, Swartz was caught before he could make the articles accessible. He was threatened with an overzealous sentence: felonies, a million dollar fine, and decades in prison.

Some try to make Swartz out to be thief, greedy to profit from the work of others. Civilly disobedient, yes. But greedy, no. There is obvious merit to the notion that what Swartz was assumed to be doing would potentially lessen the money that JSTOR's publishers earned from the site's access fees. But note that the profit was going to the publishers – the owners of the content – and not to the authors. From what I've heard, published authors make no money directly from publishing articles. This is part of the "system" that must reform to allow for freedom of information at the same time that creators can still earn a livelihood from their intellectual property.

Greenwald continues, "Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded articles. He never intended to profit even a single penny from anything he did, and never did profit in any way. He had every right to download the articles as an authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to violate the company's 'terms of service' by making the articles available to the public. Once arrested, he returned all copies of everything he downloaded and vowed not to use them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors that it had no intent to see him prosecuted, though MIT remained ambiguous about its wishes."

In the recent buzz of Swartz' suicide, JSTOR has made a move to free up some of its articles to registered users. I think this shows progress for Swartz' and other Internet activists' efforts. Some people and organizations understand that it is wrong to withhold information from the public that they essentially helped fund. 

The issue is not black or white, though some make it out to be. One one hand, "Information should be free to everyone" and on the other, "Aaron Swartz stole intellectual property that did not belong to him." 

"The system has got to change!"

And HERE is where I feel like one of the Occupiers. America's governing and judicial systems have simply not caught up to speed with the Internet. The Internet is a place for networking, learning, sharing. Many people have come to appreciate how powerful it is and embrace the Internet (*cough* DTC majors). Others see the Internet's potential for sharing information as a serious threat to their power. Keeping information from people is a form of control, and the DOJ obviously saw Swartz as a direct threat to that control. 

"Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a 'justice' system that fully protects the most egregious criminals as long as they are members of or useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness those who lack power and, most of all, those who challenge power... his real crime in the eyes of the US government: challenging its authority and those of corporate factions to maintain a stranglehold on that information. In that above-referenced speech on SOPA, Swartz discussed the grave dangers to internet freedom and free expression and assembly posed by the government's efforts to control the internet with expansive interpretations of copyright law and other weapons to limit access to information" (Greenwald).

To wrap up, I'd like to post a comment from one of my friends in a debate that happened on my facebook page on a thread about Swartz. Nick said 

"How brainwashed are we by our beliefs to make such strife when this guy just died. As in passed to the next realm of conscious existence. As in people are losing their lives over this issue... you seriously cannot see the bigger picture? 

The future of bio-technology, nano-technology, cold-fusion, solar cells, quantum computing, medicine are in those journals stored [on] private servers like JSTOR. Basically holds the goldmine of future inventions. Are you that selfish that you cant see that one invention invented by man is an accomplishment for all mankind? Should we all have to invent the wheel after we are born?"

By today's rhetoric, Swartz was making copies of others' property and giving it indiscriminately to others. By tomorrow's rhetoric, Swartz will be known as not just an advocate, but a champion for the intellectual evolution of our species.