##########################################
Welcome and welcome to the celebration of the life and work of Aaron Schwartz a man who was a spark for many of us i would like to thank that's after the internet archive Lisa Ryan the organizer Shannon Lee Steve walling carl malamud and Cindy Cohn for helping pull this together.
As you probably know there are memorials going on all over the world hackathons going on there's an errand SW IRC chat uh for those that are following that that the hackathons and these proceedings are in the public domain this isn't the type of event we imagined for this space but I can think of no better to the organizer and coordinator for this evening is shannon lee and we'll start our program thank you very much.
Thank you all for being here Aaron sorts of left behind a challenging legacy tonight we're going to talk about Aaron and what he left behind and what we can do to carry it forward we're going to have an array of speakers beginning with Daniel Bryan and ending with Carl mode and after that we'll have an opportunity to share right here i will see you at the end of the speakers I'm so I first met Aaron in 2001 when Aaron was I guess 14 and was already a leading light working with tim berners-lee are on what on the project that we know is the Semantic Web an incredibly ambitious idea to encode in in machine-readable form all of the the world's knowledge and of course being a journalist at the time I i seized on this opportunity to sneak an explanation of the Semantic Web past my editor it's almost impossible to get any edited to understand semantic web but the idea of a fourteen-year-old boy helping tim berners-lee will always pass muster even if they don't know who tim berners-lee is the editor of course is in charge of titling the article and with that supreme lack of understanding he actually titled it a teenager in a million which of course was to miss the point entirely the point was that Aaron's age wasn't particularly unique thing and Aaron himself wasn't the exceptional part of this the exceptional part of this was an institution that allowed someone like Aaron to walk in through its door and before anyone had noticed where he came from or what age he was or what his background was they allowed him to start contributing good work and learning from his his peers an institution is not truly open until somebody you could never even imagine exists walks through the door and when Tim berners-lee describe these moments at aarons funeral a week ago you you could see in a way that only tim berners-lee can convey the sort of be he had that last this system was working these open mailing lists this open discussion this exchange of information was bringing new people into building the web.
He told me then I was worried about revealing my age and I did my best to keep it a secret.
Now I let my words speak for themselves and since then so many words some written in machine-readable form in Python for computers some written in brimstone and sulfur.
For Congress readable forms and all of it in plain text all of it in plain language for everyone to read and if you could not read enough words himself his programs red and scraped and pass the rest.
Aaron loved beautiful code i think the only time I really ever paint him was when I said some program that he'd written and I looked at was unreadable it turned out that it wasn't actually his code at all he does he'd written some code that had intern written that code and yet i think it still hurt that that that somehow his own child had not inherited his own delicate sensitivities where words fail.
Tell me now even though i have them written down here I mean try as hard as Aaron did I I don't think you could ever in code all of his experience in words and i don't think that all of the relationships that he built between so many different peers and so many new people coming in could be ever expressed in any number of RDF triplets I mean I can I can sort of try and convey that that that the look on errands place when he he played with my daughter aerin nine there was some pictures downstairs that you may have sign but you can't really convey that childish glee that most of us lose well long before we begin work on the semantic web at least and I can't really describe to you that the the pain and frustration when Aaron so effectively demolished and defense i had of John cells Chinese room argument that I actually picked through down my knife and fork and stormed out of my own china christmas dinner leaving of course the turkey for Aaron to fail to eat there was always sort of pleasure and ease in in forgiving errand for those sort of arguments and also to watch him so easily forgive the rest of us and I don't think any any archive can can hold those moments but if I can share with you some code if I can't share with you the code that made up Aaron I can I hope share with you the code that Aaron believe could make more errands.
Aaron became Aaron because of his unfettered access to information and the knowledge and sharing of of his peers he was very lucky in that respect he had an incredibly loving family who who supported him who would pay for him to fly out to meetings he had a computer he had all the privileges and benefits that being a young man in the united states of america in the end of the 20th century have but he also had something new he had a new advantage which was that the gates of the construction of this technology that was beginning to share information with beginning to open up and he was one of the first yes the youngest but one of the first to take advantage of that and use his curiosity and his his dr even at that age to nip in through there and begin sharing almost immediately with his peers and if anything bound together all of errands Crusades it was his belief that he was not alone in this.
He was not exceptional and he believed he was not unique and that there were more than him out there with his curiosity and talent people say when we talked about Aaron's work of taking the content of academic papers or the content of the US legal system and opening it up for anyone to use and see and crunchy and peruse you know who really is this for who who wants to know about the legal system can't in some way.
Ask a friend or a contact to get access to 22 pacer who really has a craving for academic knowledge can't find somebody and sneak their way into MIT or another institution and just get that information or more work to access it and those people forget up they forget that if erin was a teenager in a million that soon very soon as we continue the great work that were indulged in here that there will be six billion people that we will connect to the world information networks and out of those six billion people that will be 1.2 billion teenagers and if my editors statistics are correct and he never understood statistics either then there will be 1200 errands out there are 1,200 errands out there right now who are smart and engaged in is curious and as driven as erin was but they simply don't have access to that information there is no closed archives no carefully guarded ivory tower the conceit billions but the open society the open and world-wide-web the free culture that Aaron work for is for all of those people and if we give them what they need.
If we give them the knowledge to feed their curiosity and the care that we must never forget they need that that that amazing source of future errands from Cabrera from gang zuo us on all of those people will come and they will build the kind of things that aren was dreaming of and so even though we've we've lost one errand we do have a potential by continuing his work to find so many more Aaron told me back in 2001 the one of the things that the web teaches is that everything is connected hyperlinks and that we should all work together standards too often schoolteachers is that everything is separate and that we should all work alone at one of the many many tragedies of the situation that we find ourselves in now is that at least in some moment of Erin's life his belief that he was not alone failed him and for a few moments he believed himself to be alone and I'm sure out there there are many many 14 year old children who feel the same way that they have that binding curiosity that fascination and that urge to change the world and they worried for a moment that it's just there that there alone and there are no tools and no capabilities and no friends to help them continue in that path I don't think it's ever too soon to begin working with the rest of the world and I think we all need to stay together and never ever again leave our friends to alone.
The boys will is the winds will and the thoughts of youth a long long thought the night before Aaron died he and I shared a girl-child grilled cheese sandwich.
This is one of his favorite foods is probably many of you know they weren't there weren't that many of those favorite foods it was a really good grilled cheese sandwich he was really happy about it a week before he died we woke up one morning and he said we really need to talk about Bayesian statistics and I said right now it's sunday morning it's like 7am can't wait and he said no it's really important and we spent the next couple hours working through a naughty bayesian statistics problem he'd already asked the internet with no no YouTube no useful responses i have the notes we ended up with a naughty double integral that neither of us can solve but anybody here want to help me with the solution let me know he was really excited the last couple months he was working on a drug policy research with a friend of his Matt Stoller forgive well and he would read these articles all the academic literature talk to the experts he got really into this one particular study about a hawaii an intervention that have been tried in hawaii for alcoholism controlled tests should indicated that it it you know got ninety percent of alcoholics dry in the first month and he just was so bubbling over with excitement about all of it we went to burlington vermont / new years he got the flu but he came out and played mafia one evening with the friends that we rented a house with and i was really surprised because he didn't like playing games at all but ido Danny's daughter was there with us and he really wanted to see what would happen if a DOA was the Mafia and and unfortunately nobody selected as the mafia which ad was really annoyed about but um one of the things that I loved about erin was the sheer number and variety and multitude of wonderful fascinating people who animated his life i had the great privilege of sharing that life with him for the last 20 months but I know that I only met a small fraction of the people whose lives he touched and that's why I came out here today was because i know that many of you were important to him and I wanted to meet you and I want to tell you the stories like the stories i just told because i think it's really important that his friends his family his colleagues his admirers know that he had a lot to live for and that he had a lot of happy moments in those last few weeks and months i'm also here with another message.
Aaron's death should radicalize us the trial in the case hungover our entire relationship we started dating a few weeks before he was indicted couple months after he had been arrested I met his parents for the first time at twelve-thirty a.m. the night before the indictment and spent five hours with him in the courthouse the next day they didn't know existed before that so that was a interesting first meeting huh he he had told me he hadn't told me what was going on when we first started dating all I knew that there was there was something bad happening in his life and that I was a good distraction from it he called it the bad thing and I had wild speculation about what it might be my leading candidate theory at one point was that he was having an affair with elizabeth warren i was going to ruin her career huh.
He called me one night when I was at frisbee practice in DC and he was in boston and he said the bad thing might be in the news tomorrow do you want to hear what it is for me or do you want to read about it in the news and i said i want to hear from you and he said well I've been arrested for downloading too many academic journal articles and they're trying to make an example out of me and I said that doesn't actually sound like a very big deal and he paused for a second and he said yeah I guess it's not like anybody has cancer and the end kind of was like that the only time I was ever really worried about him before the last week was when he was trying to decide whether accept accept the plea bargain and just the whole thing was so hard and so stressful and he felt he carried so much the weight of it on his own he didn't want to involve any of his friends he wanted to protect people but he wasn't very good at protecting himself I went to Boston with him last month in december for a hearing and the trial gotta the judge granted granted another evidentiary hearing about whether evidence should be it's an admitted and the trial was delayed for another couple of months and he came out of the courthouse and I tried to give him a hug a courtroom I tried to give him a hug and he pushed me away he said not in front of my men not in front of Steve Heymann the prosecutor said I don't want to show him that I want to show him any vulnerability.
I think Aaron made the wrong choice two weeks ago I think the odds were decent at the trial and I think even if he hadn't won that life still was worth living.
But I think he woke it up two years after this ordeal started and I think he just couldn't face another day of the stress the uncertainty the lack of control of his own destiny Aaron's death should radicalize us and I mean that specifically about us about you if you're here in this room or if you're watching this online Aaron died because of deep in justice in this world Aaron love to talk about the five wise of the Toyota management system so i'm going to ask why why did Aaron died Aaron died in part because we live in a system where the constitutional rights we've all come to believe in through civic classes and through watching law and order.
Can actually apply in the real world there's no right to a speedy trial there have been two years since Aaron was arrested we still didn't have all the evidence that the government the government still hadn't turned over all the evidence to us that there was constitutionally required to do so why does that happen and parts because the system is so clogged up with cases and has so few human resources it takes years for practically anybody who actually wants to go to trial to find out what him guilty from a jury of their peers take some years because the system is so clogged up and so under resourced with drug cases and with you know senseless senseless overcrowding of our criminal justice system prosecutors not used to going to trial last year only three percent of all federal charges were taken to trial.
Most of the rest were resolved in plea bargaining plea-bargaining processes give prosecutors enormous amount of power.
Imagine being totally innocent of any crime and not having the resources that Aaron had at his disposal and the networks and the support many people feel they have no choice but to accept a plea bargain they can't afford lawyers for two years you could say in that in some sense that Aaron's death was caused by the war on drugs he wasn't a victim directly but he was a casualty of that war that's aimed actually quite different people from aaron Aaron's death should radicalize us he died because of a prosecutor and a US Attorney had immense individual power over his life and we're more interested in making a high-profile example out of Aaron an injustice or and mercy why did they do it in the case of the prosecutors Steve Hyman the best theory I can offer is it is simply a vindictive old man who really doesn't like young upstart whippersnappers like Aaron who are trying to save the world I'm is the kind of guy who wants to claim a notch on his belt and high five other prosecutors at lunch but we have to follow the wise.
Why does this man have the power to ruin the life of someone like Aaron can trace the problem too tough on crime initiatives that have systematically transferred power from the hands of joy just to prosecutors we can trace it to punitive sentencing guidelines and ambiguous over-reaching laws like the CFAA to give prosecutors the power to charge someone with decades in crime doesn't decades in prison for a victimless crime in the case of Carmen Ortiz the US Attorney's hymens boss Aaron's case was a stepping stone to higher political ambitions Ortiz wanted to be a judge or a governor or senator someday she probably still wants to be unfortunately in our society one of the well-trodden paths to put two elected offices through the prosecutor's office that means that from mayor's offices to Congress leaders are disproportionately people who made their name and being tough on crime the people who spent the bulk of their career trying to lock people up there people whose job it is to punitive and not just our merciful that's how we end up with these kinds of laws to begin with the people there people who embody a legal system that locks up more than twenty-five percent of the prisoners in the world we have only three percent of the world's population.
Why do we vote for these people why do we provide them with the incentives we do why do we as a country applauded and reward them and build structures around them as they lock up more than one-third of the black men in our country Aaron's death should radicalize this because he's probably the first person that most people in this room have ever met who got swept up by this system but there are literally millions of others whose lives are destroyed in this country and Aaron would have been the last person who would want us to fetishize his experiences to treat him as exceptional in response to Aaron's death and his family are calling for five things first Steve hyman and Carmen Ortiz must be held accountable second mit has lost its way and it must find it again mig could have saved Aaron with a single public statement and it refused third all academic research from all time she made openly accessible to anyone with an internet connection fourth we have to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse acts to prevent prosecutors from these kinds of overreaches and fifth we have to reform a criminal justice system where we incarcerate millions of people and prosecutors throw the book at someone like Aaron but not a single banker has gone to prison since the financial crisis.
Errands life should also radicalize us in a very different way one of erin's favorite shows was Louie there's an episode and i'm going to do my best Louie impression which probably isn't very good episode where Louie gives a little stand-up routine i drive an infiniti that's really evil there are people who just starve to death that's all they ever did the people who are like born and go I'm hungry then they die and that's all they ever got to do.
Meanwhile i'm driving in my car having a great time and I sleep like a baby it's totally my fault because I could trade my infinity and for any other car and I get back like $20,000 and I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money and every day I don't do it every day I make them die with my car.
Aaron love that routine and he realized something when you want when we watched it together he realized that Louie copied this bit right out of peter singer is a beer singer SI as a comedy routine Peter Singer was one of erin's favorite philosophers and he's a really uncomfortable philosopher a lot of people don't like thinking about Peter Singer here's why.
Let's say you knew that you had the power to change a law that would save innocent people's lives may be stopping a carcinogen from polluting groundwater near town let's say you knew it would save 10 people's lives and you chose to do something else instead something that didn't have much bearing or impact on the world are you culpable peter singer would say yes most of us studiously avoid answering that question because the truth is were faced with questions like should we trade in our infinity or should we work on the carcinogen every day it's really hard to live your life thinking about that but Aaron Erin's life should radicalize us Aaron lived as a scenario in life more than anyone else i've ever met Aaron had money we all know he could have had a lot more if you tried but he lived at backpacks and he stayed on people's couches sometimes I'll admit when a little too far like the time we've been dating for a few months and we're meeting up in Boston it was his responsibility to find us a place to stay he thought that an air mattress on his brother knows bathroom floor was perfectly sufficient but i respected him for it he didn't buy an infinity you can get a nice apartment when he died he left his estate primarily to give well probably the most scenarios of all charities but living a life of personal austerity and charity isn't enough Aaron felt responsible not just for the direct cost of his lifestyle but for the opportunity cost he felt responsible for the carcinogens he wasn't stopping here in Silicon Valley the idea of changing the world is no Mirage you see examples all around you every day of people who changed the world and erin was one of those people but the question is how are they changing the world.
Facebook has changed the world sure what is the world better off because of facebook and even more importantly if you're deciding whether to take a job at Facebook is that the place in the world where you can do the most good Aaron wanted to do the most good he wanted to apply the lean startup framework to impact he was learning and iterating he thought we all need to think both bigger and smaller he said some few of my friends once the revolution will be a be tested that's what he was trying to do so i'm here to ask the hard questions today you're not already working to change the criminal justice system in the US what are you working on is it more important than that it might be there are more important things there are places where you can have more impact but there are so many ways so many things that need to be changed about this world which one of them are you working on Aaron's death should radicalize us and his life should radicalize us fact is we live in a world in which very few people we know pay the ultimate price for their political beliefs we live in a world in which very few p.
But we know even suffer serious life-altering consequences for their political beliefs but we live in a runaway global political economy that's taking people's lives every day Aaron wasn't trying to become a martyr when he downloaded those chaser articles but he was taking a risk on behalf of the billions of people around the world who grew up without his privilege more of us need to do that there's so many ways to have impact so many ways to help people.
Aaron had an exchange with David Siegel who runs David demand progress the group that he founded the many of you know from the sofa fight and loved recounting this conversation David called him one night and said to Aaron remember that year when we defeated sopa got indefinite detention detention ruled unconstitutional and got both political parties to incorporate Internet freedom into their on into their platforms at the conventions that was aaron david siegel and a couple other people they did all that in one year everybody here is capable of that kind of change there are so many places in our world where that kind of change can happen just from having somebody there somebody paying attention somebody pushing your programmer technologist like many of you in the audience today you have special powers and special responsibilities that I went to a talk once that Aaron gave we spoke to a dozen maybe a couple dozen people like the people in this room to programmers who was trying to convince to work in politics he told them you can do magic.
Aaron really could do magic and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death I hope you'll join me I first met Aaron online on various w3c mailing lists for xml and rdf he kind of came out of nowhere at the end of 2001 far as I could tell.
Aaron's commons were thoughtful and informative and it became clear pretty quickly that he had a better understanding of markup languages and data modeling than a lot of others on the list even some of the veterans Aaron had a talent for simplifying things and getting to the heart of everyone's concerns he was also rather politically disarming because he was well a kid a kid with no ulterior motives except wanting to be included and taken seriously as seriously as others in April 2002 during the very early stages of the creative commons I let Aaron know that we were having a technical meeting at Harvard that I wanted him to attend that was it i really wanted to include him in the whole project almost as deeply as i was involved in the project I told him this was happening for real and with him included it was then that you let me know that he was only 14 years old and that I needed to give his mother call so we can figure things out when I first insisted that Aaron attend this meeting everybody even lawrence lessig at first thought that was really weird.
Do you need errand to do your job was a pretty popular question and the answer was clearly yes I needed Aaron to make sure that our licensing markup was the absolute best that it could be people were usually skeptical about aaron and his abilities when they first found out he was only 14.
But once they spoke to him for even a little while he would always win them over.
I knew if Lessig met him in person that that would be that and it was erin was growing up to become quite the technological statesman so my strategy in the spring of 2002 was to introduce Aaron to as many people as I could and two and introduce him to the right this included people from the eff and the internet archive mainly and also include going to cool events like south by southwest in 2003 when he tried to get his own room and the cool hotel right across from the venue and but ended up getting a room in the janky hotel down the road with me where I could be his official adult supervision in october two thousand to Aaron flew out to Washington DC to camp out in front of the Supreme Court with me and about eight other people this was the night before Lauren's lessons oral argument in Eldred vs ashcraft this is that Eldridge shirt from that we were rather surprised the Aaron convinced his mother to let him go but there he was staying in the same bed and breakfast where I was staying I told them he was sort of like my little brother and that wasn't very far from the truth.
He was a little brother that I ended up looking up to yet this if steph technologist Seth showing took over as Aaron's chaperone pretty quickly during that trip to washington DC there was a moment at about 1am when Aaron asked if he could walk around the block with Seth I thought they were kidding at first that were they serious where they crazy but then I realized it was one of those rite of passage moments plus I realize he wouldn't be by himself he was with cess i think at that moment i passed on the torch to seth has errands west coast guardian but we always stayed in touch his birthday was two days before mine and he would remember my birthday almost every year and we'd send me a nice little email wishing me a good next year thank you.
As Lisa is just recounting I met Aaron at the Supreme Court in October of 2002 and we had gone to hear the oral argument Andres Ashcroft most of us non-lawyers had to spend the night sleeping in the street in line in front of the court in order to get a ticket the line for the oral argument starts the night before but even though Aaron was a teenager he was Larry Lessig's personal guest at the argument so since he had a ticket he had the luxury of spending the night in a hotel which is parents apparently really appreciated but Aaron decided to spend most of the night and most of the morning before the argument hanging out with us at the encampment in front of the court in part to show solidarity with the people who hadn't received a ticket and in part for the thrill of meeting actual grown-up copyright activists erin was truly starstruck to meet people he thought of his legendary copyright reform activists but within a decade Aaron himself would be among the most effective grassroots copyright activists in the whole world at that moment he was the little kid markup and metadata expert that Larry Lessig admired enough to give him a front-row Supreme Court seat and Aaron spent the evening with us as we ordered pizza which he could actually eat for delivery to the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court which was apparently not a very unusual request for pizzerias in DC and all of us gossiped about copyright law for a couple of hours i saw iron again in December my friends Leonard and soon i found a picture he's visiting my house and I come like some people here from a book family and I have a lot of books and we spent about three hours with Leonard and soon and Aaron and I just sitting on my bed sort of manually following hyperlinks between books with that book.
Oh well that's a reference to that book um Aaron was there because Larry Lessig was unveiling his Creative Commons project in san francisco and lessen get invited aaron clad in a t-shirt probably the youngest person in the entire haul up on stage to talk about metadata it was very awkward.
Erin was trying to describe why it was useful to be able to represent bibliographic information in a machine-readable format and in fact erin was always trying to describe why it was bibliographic information in machine-readable format the audience had a few drinks I think and wasn't as focused as it might have been and didn't really care to envision this beautiful future in which search engines would make it easy for everyone to find works they could legally reuse and build upon which they now can thanks errands work but the audience didn't seem to get it unless it was very gracious and he basically said to the crowd see our project is going to succeed and it's going to succeed because we have this genius creating our infrastructure Aaron reminded me how frustrating it is to be curious about things that other people don't understand or that other people regard as trivial or bizarre he wrote a blog post about a theory that one's degree of nearsightedness is affected by blood oxygen levels and that it might be possible to use I exercises to systematically reduce nearsightedness Aaron he wrote was already experimenting on himself to see if it would work and he said he wished he could meet a girl who wouldn't laugh at this project later Aaron met seth roberts a researcher who advocate self-experimentation as a way of generating potentially useful wild ideas about health roberts and aaron got along extremely well I think that Roberts like many other people felt that era naturally generated potentially useful wild ideas about absolutely everything i visited Aaron in his dorm at Stanford a few years later I was thrilled that he had the opportunity to study at such a great university but erin was alienated from Stanford he had few friends and the students around him weren't curious.
About the things he was curious about this wasn't the way his Stanford adventure was supposed to pan out I helped him pack for his flight to boston for his interview with Paul Graham who is starting a fund to invest in young people just like Aaron it went well Aaron dropped out of Stanford moved to boston in 2006 just after conde nast acquired reddit just before they fired erin erin and i were a hacker conference together in Berlin to larry lessig chagrin Aaron Lessig had at that time fallen out of touch.
Perhaps neither of them were deeply involved in the day-to-day work of Creative Commons which had brought them Aaron had gone off to work in the startup world while simultaneously deepening his study of left-wing politics macro economics and sociology lesson Aaron were both planning to tell America as a matter of some urgency what had gone wrong with the American project but they had slightly different diagnoses a friend and i took Aaron out to vons a where lesson was spending a year at the american academy in Berlin lesson looked extraordinarily proud to see Aaron their meeting had for me the sense of an extraordinarily poignant reunion as if they hadn't seen each other in 20 years of course they had actually seen each other a few months before but my friend and i left the two of them alone for an hour or so and i remember as we walked away seeing less again Aaron leaning against a wall at the Vance a train station talking animatedly to each other it reminded me of the scene at the climax of the german film goodbye lenin where we can see but not here the actors talking about incredibly urgent matters and we have to imagine for ourselves what they must be saying to each other and I thought less it is so proud his protege is all grown up and he's come back to show his respect for his teacher Aaron was a free speech absolutist free speech absolutist an idealist idealist an activist activists and I must say a libertarian socialists libertarian socialists his credo was that bits are not a bug that come hell or high water we should celebrate and not fear people's ability to communicate to each other whatever they might choose to communicate and the infrastructure that supports that ability Aaron came of age a long time after the end of the cyberpunk movement but he always seemed like a cyberpunk and lived up to the notion that cypherpunks write code he channeled all sorts of different idealisms of supposedly bygone eras you would have thought he was too young to know about those idealisms and he did it in a way that mixed intelligence creativity and humor in the long run errand felt that he was going to fix the world mainly by clearly explaining it to people i believe aaron grew up to be exactly the person that he would have been most astonished and excited to meet in the line in front of the Supreme Court I've never known anyone else like it so I know we have all been spending a lot of time thinking about aaron and his life and what kind of person he was and what he did know many of you in the room knew him knew him well others probably never got to meet him in person sorry my mailing list or read his blog posts and are now trying to figure out what we've lost who we've lost and for me you know i was lucky enough i got to live with Aaron for a while and we got to be good friends and work on things together but I found I was always trying to figure out exactly who he was and what he was up to because he was such a complicated and contradictory human being and he'd get you in these ways that you weren't expecting some of that some of this was simple obvious stuff you're right look here and I'm had met before but we moved to San Fran San Francisco at the same time I came here to work for the eff he was just in the process of selling read it and going to Conde Nast I'm going through them the messy divorce that he had with the other fit co-founders and so I sent him an email and said hey I'm setting up a share house do you want to like do a place to live and he said yes and so we have this is rambling victorian in this apartment building.
I said always you know open rooms we need to fill he's like all this is tiny little one in the corner i'll take that is this room was the size of a it was a closet basically and he was the we're pretty sure he was the wealthiest person in the building he just sold reddit but he wanted this this tiny little thing and getting getting to know him was weird like I'd I knew him and his blog I'd met him before but living with him in the first experience was he was so shy.
Like he just be that and like he's on a little world struggling to talk to people until the the conversation took the right turn say the right thing to him and he would come alive and he would come so alive.
I know Danny mentioned the Chinese room argument but I remember that the the day that somehow i prodded him about that and then for the next week you know like we were going at it like I think he was totally wrong about the Chinese room argument actually still as still dirt his position was crazy he defended a crazy position very well and I had to argue it into so many we had corners to get anywhere i remember another scene we had a film crew showed up and stay in our house and film this this thing steal this film you can go and see it on the internet you can see and it and we realized that they were documentary crew talking about copyright and trying to trying to film these takes in the middle of the night and I cramped little living room and everyone was kind of drunk and there was chaos and I remember some of us were really struggling to say anything coherent to a camera but someone pointed a camera Aaron and he caught fire like he just he taught me how to like speak to a room or speak to speak to a a television or whatever it was he has had a message that he'd simplified out of the ether and could deliver and that was the same skill he turned to politics & 2 so much else that he didn't his intellectual life and it was beautiful to watch so and he paired that with this you know honestly had a flair for self-promotion there wouldn't be hundreds of people in this room and hundreds of people in all ultimate rooms for all the memorials that he's had in differences and millions of people reading about him if he didn't have some little talent at getting the things he was doing out to the world in a way that people would notice people notice his 16-year old self.
Fourteen-year-old so.
But he wasn't just a giant eager to kind of without that promoting himself because he thought he was awesome he actually the one thing he failed to care about often was taking care of himself and I removal like living with him and and trying to get get him to eat and eat you wouldn't that he had he had medical things that he was struggling with and I said Aaron you're like how this work like let's talk about it surely you've read the research on this condition like we can go through through the you-know-whats been trying and he said no i haven't read anything like I don't know anything about it I said Aaron you devour books i can see you to varying books you've read five this week like you have a stacker academic journal articles by your bed.
What you know what what we're talking about half of them.
Why haven't you read anything about this condition that is making your own life harder just said I don't think I'm not important the world important like and you know watching that happened was was kind of hard you know your struggle to take care of him and he also had these days that were down I mean I guess it was a down day in the end that got him in between the days when he was doing amazing amount of stuff you don't know how much he was too young to possibly have done a third of the things he managed and with who knows what he would have achieved with another 50 years but in between those days that be there be days when he was just blur and I remember I caught him on one of those and said Aaron like this amazing stuff we can go and do it right now and he just said no right.
The currents all terrible ugly it's broken like okay we know let's do some science and.
It's a nor like you know the day doesn't work sucks like it's too hard and I said surely there must be something that you'd be happy doing that really like would feel ride he stopped for a while and said yes actually typography.
I could do typography anyway so he was contradictory you never knew exactly what to make of him he was brilliant and sometimes infuriating right and wrong with the Chinese room argument but then sometimes you know i guess i'm talking about paradoxes and Aaron sometimes he was infuriating and wrong and brilliant at the same time and I have one story about a paradox you know he and I were talking about moral philosophy ethical force we were both interested in these ideas the sitting area and ideas of you know actually we have a responsibility to find the thing that we can do that that makes the most different to the universe to the world and makes it better whatever that means but I had had just read up a paper about a paradox showing that actually if you write down all of our most compelling intuitions about what it is for the world to be good so that we can know how to make it better.
You write them all down you can actually mathematically prove its a recent result 10 years old by a Swedish philosopher out our deepest intuitions about this flatly contradictory to paradox like there is actually not completely coherent definition of what makes the world better and aaron just looked at me and said that's completely wrong like actually no it's like this this and this and I said Aaron you're arguing with the mathematical theorem I've approve of it right here like you're not pointing out any flaws in the logic in this paper and he said no no it's like a night that I stopped twice i stared at him for awhile i said i'm not sure you're right but actually maybe we can find a way out of this theorem like it's not an impossibility theorem it's not a paradox actually it's maybe it's more like an uncertainty theorem we can rehabilitate it as a kind of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for morality you can't be completely sure about what's right but you can actually pin the amount of uncertainty down to a min moment and still get the right answers too obvious moral dilemmas and so he and I like actually sat down and wrote a paper about this which we still haven't published like I now actually have a this is a thing I promised to aarons ghost i'm going to finish that paper and maybe people will read it but he was paradoxical and yet he got so much done did so many amazing things at the same time there's a lot more i want to say and there are a lot of things that we all need to do because Aaron's lost reminded us of pointed out that they needed to be done some of them things that matter a lot to this community here in this room we need to free the literature the scientific literature that Aaron died trying to free and we also need to figure out what we can what we can do to fix the insane criminal justice system in the United States.
But I've said enough for tonight and there are other people who will take up these streets.
I've been asked how is a publisher who has an online service that you know puts content behind the paywall could possibly be a supporter of Aaron Schwartz this guy who you know downloads content from you know services like that and my answer is that we're trying to invent the future and the future does not look like the past and the future is uncovered by struggle to figure out what works and what doesn't work and the people who figure that out our people to whom we owe an enormous debt was trying to think of you know past experiences with Erin when I first met him he came to our food camp and re tech conferences but what I decided to share with you is a palm that i read as part of a talk that I gave Ari tech conference in 2008 and I checked and i just refresh memory error was there and the poem was part of the talk entitled why i love hackers and I started out with a picture of some berries some poisonous ones and some ones that are good to eat and I said somewhere way back in time somebody had the courage to figure out which of these things were good to eat and we talked about i talked about you know people wanting to fly that was this crazy dream and eventually we figured it out and lots of other stories from the history of hacking and then I ended with a poem which seems singularly appropriate for Aaron because it's about both the courage to try to do what hasn't been done to change the world but also how hard that is.
And the challenge of its palm called the man watching bye Randy maria rilke translation by robert bly he said I can tell by the way the trees beat after so many dull days on my worried windowpanes the storm is coming and I hear the far-off field say things i can't bear without a friend I can't love without a sister the storm the shifter of shapes drives on across the woods and across time and the world looks as if it had no age the landscape like a line in the sand book is seriousness and weight and eternity what we choose to fight is so tiny.
What fights with us is so great if only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do buy some immense storm we would become strong too and not need names when we win is with small things and the triumph itself makes us small what is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us I mean the angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament when the wrestler sinews grew long like metal strings he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music whoever was beaten by this angel who often simply decline the fight went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand that needed him as if to change his shape winning does not tempt that man this is how he grows by being defeated decisively by constantly greater beings i don't know whether erin was defeated or victorious but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with I didn't know Aaron quite as well as many who have been so generous in sharing their memories but as a member of the board of directors of Creative Commons i am honored to be here to convey cc's grief our gratitude and our commitment to continuing to work toward the world of openness and sharing that Aaron work to architect for all of us many of you recently helped to celebrate the 10th birthday of creative comments commemorating the launched in december 2002 of our first suite of open content licenses at the party that self-described but of course there was a gestation period before the birth of CC and that's when I met Aaron thanks to Lisa think he was 15 when I met him but appear to be about 11 as most of you know creative commons is a steward of a set of public content licenses they have license deeds and legal code and rdf metadata that is designed to make the licenses human readable and lawyer readable and machine-readable that's the beauty of the CC vision but it's also a challenge it's a challenge to find any one person who can really wrap their heads around and talk about this idea a person who understands humans and lawyers and machines so when Lisa and I first described CC at the o'reilly emerging technology conference in may 2002 we needed some help.
Speaking for myself I was human and I was a lawyer but I didn't read or speak machine so the idea of explaining what cc would have to do with HTML XML RTF and the w3c terrified me so i gave a presentation which I said some boring things about law and some vague things about metadata Lisa gave a demonstration that I think was more exciting when the complicated questions from the audience started we handed the mic down to little errand with some trepidation I just met the kid but it was an act for me of pure desperation I couldn't answer those questions about rdf and I figured well at least he's adorable of course I found errands notes on the presentation still online afternoon they read almost like poetry we did the creative commons intro in the morning Lisa forgot the vga dongle for her I book so i donated mine instead whole thing seemed to go over pretty well I answered a couple of questions at the end I think Aaron answered all of the questions and I was wrong to be nervous about it of course he could answer the questions and delight the audience not with his adorableness not only that with his vision and with his ability to communicate it to all of us we were finally hearing from someone who could explain to humans and even two lawyers how to harness the power of machines to overcome unnecessary limits on sharing errands vision more powerful than I could explain or even comprehend how to harness the power of machines to overcome unnecessary limits on sharing it was a visionary and pursued for cc but far beyond CC as well as many of you can attest better than I but erin was not a machine and she was not a lawyer he was a human and tragically mortal but his vision was not the answers he gave to our questions were not be shared them and so we still have them and the people in this room are dedicated to sharing them forward and to making the machines for sharing them forward work better and better and to making the law for sharing them forward work better and I want to end with something else that Aaron shared it's just a casual email to a w3c list from august 2002 to me it captures his brilliance his gift for communicating his vision of sharing and his generous spirit.
Hi there if you haven't already heard Creative Commons is a new nonprofit organization working to make it easier for copyright holders to share their work by dedicating it to the public domain or licensing it to the public on generous terms as part of that effort we've been working hard to develop our licenses and metadata strategy over the past few months when we launched our site we want to not only give our users licenses but also a sample of RDF that they can add to their webpage we're hoping that by spreading these chunks of RDF around the web will provide a useful base that interesting projects and applications can exploit for more information please check out our website we'd appreciate your comments thoughts and code please send them to the CC metadata mailing list will be monitoring the list and responding to your questions thanks Erin will be monitoring questions.
I hope that somehow aaron is monitoring this list.
I hope we returned to his words and his vision to help answer our questions and that we share those answers with our fellow humans to Erin thank you thank you for sharing.
So unlike a lot of people here I didn't know Aaron never met him didn't speak to him on the phone never even got to exchange email with him which ironically is why I'm here the fact that i didn't know him is the reason why i was going to be the person that was put forth to objectively explain to the jury of what Aaron did and i think i was able to hold onto that objectivity until the the last week and a half and / Terrence comments I perhaps become much more radical than I was before which you can tell because i'm wearing my radical time today but you know my what we were going to do is we were I was objectively going to go in front of that jury and explain to them that these horrible hacking crimes erin was accused of is functionally the same as putting the incorrect email address to an airport Wi-Fi or going down the street to starbucks to change your IP address and Dan Purcell was going to get up there and grilled MIT and JSTOR witnesses and talk to them about how this kind of thing happens dozens and dozens of times a year at MIT and yet aaron is the first person to ever have the Secret Service get involved in that JSTOR witnesses and talk about how other wasn't really any damage we were little ticked off but this isn't a big deal for us we don't want this to happen and then Elliot Peters is going to get up and give this fiery defense attorney speech pounding the table and pointing to boston harbor and invoking the American Revolution and the spirit of freedom and how Aaron lives up to that the greatest ideals in our founding documents and then errands future was going to be in the hands of 12 normal people i mean normal people who couldn't get out of jury duty but hopefully people who I think would have had the sense to understand that there is a huge chasm between the way Aaron was being portrayed by the government and the young man who is sitting there at that table and I had faith in them and we're not going to get that chance to do those things and we can't help Aaron anymore but i think we and by we I mean everybody who's listening to this we can help the next errand and we don't have to wait very long for the next errand right the next Erin is the chinese-american man who is accused of stealing source code from hedge fund is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act the next Erin is the Canadian student who was expelled from his university for pointing out security flaws to the University in their software that exposed his personal information the next Aaron is going to be that young lady whose defcon speech is interrupted by the clink of handcuffs or that Gramp grandfather who is mystified by the demand for fifty thousand dollars to pay for copyright violations because his next-door neighbor uses open Wi-Fi to do a little bit torrent those are the next errands and those are the people we can help and one of the reasons i think we really need to help him as well I think all of us feel gratified about the outpouring of love and care and the feeling of momentum that has come out of the last week and a half we also have to be really aware that we want that when people face the same kind of odds Aaron face and many of them without errands resources that we want them not to think of errands final moments of weakness and out to be the kind of thing that they need to do to bring about change right and there's two things we need to do for that one one we need to give those people as much support as erin was able to give right that those people don't know Larry Lessig they don't hang out with harvard law professors I'm an MIT professors but yet they need the kind of support that Aaron was able to muster in one of things i realized that this whole thing is we never considered computer science to be the kind of thing that is a profession that changes lives and something that we have this is demonstrated is that being able to make an argument of whether a mac address is this is just something that used to keep collisions from happening on a network and is not equivalent to the serial number on the gun that making that argument is the kind of thing that can mean spending decades in prison and then there are other professions that are life-changing medicine and law and in those professions people have an idea about equal access in helping people and that doesn't happen in reality but at least they try right there's the idea that right has defense lawyers idea they can go and get treated by a doctor and they have an ethical obligation to you and I think those of us in the computer world need to see via errands tragedy that we have the same kind of obligation and.
That the second thing we all need to do is when we are up here speaking or commenting on reddit or hacker news or talking to people about Aaron while we talk about the positive change that is going to come out of his death we have to make it clear that all of those positive things pale in comparison to what he would have done had he lived right and that's that's an important part of the message because we don't want those young people to think that their only way out is to sacrifice themselves that they deserve to live too and that they have people who are standing behind them so thank you good evening thank you everybody we're all starting with how we met Aaron and I think I met Aaron before this but my first real memory of him is on the steps of the United States Supreme Court on the night before the Eldred argument in 2002 and I remember thinking does your mother know you're here and i recently found his account of that night and it reminded me of how very young he was how excited he was to be at the court and yet his understanding of the nuances of the copyright term extension act were better than mine at that time and i also realize that by having our first at least the first I'd met really fanboy that we were building a movement since the early morning of January 12 when I learned that Aaron had passed away I feel like I've had a little errand on my shoulder reminding me that we are still part of a movement and demanding that we push forward push further that the tragedy of his death be parts of the roots of something good and something better.
I don't think Aaron named his organization demand progress by accident and eff we feel this intensely and I think we feel it in two directions first we feel the need to continue his work opening access to publicly funded and public domain information for all people so that you don't have to be in an ivory tower to learn.
And the second though is the one that I've spent most of my time on for the last few weeks and and that was number four on Terrence list which is trying to fix the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act eff has a draft of some modest fixes that would reduce the ability of prosecutors to use the CFAA and similar computer laws to ratchet up threats on people like Karen it's on our website it's on read it.
Representative Zoe Lofgren as many of you knows has led the way and remains willing to help but we have to create the space for real change not-not-not real change and that that's remains to be done her initial proposals are not sufficient we have a lot of work to do to get this where it will be but we need to ensure that what happened to Aaron never happens to another bright idealistic geeky kid who wants to make the world a better place and if we can't do it in Congress then we need to do it in the courts but we need your help in fact we need the help of everyone you all know we need to marshal the same sort of support for this fight that we were able to marshal was so bad about sopa and pipa and maybe even more since this involves not just Hollywood the federal prosecutors and federal power and we won't have aaron i was hesitant to kind of make this kind of bold pitch errands memorial but honestly I don't think Aaron would forgive me if I didn't we can't help Aaron directly anymore but we can help the next errand and the one after that and all of us who would be the beneficiaries of what those next errands will create for us and the knowledge that they will make available to all the rest of us and all the people around the world.
I think we built the movement that I first saw by seeing the little fan boy Aaron Schwartz in 2002 so now let's use it.
Well.
I learned from Aaron what living in open-source life was like thank you really did live that way he floated and helped others he gave everything away you really wasn't tied to an institution he really was not a company man in any sense he was really quite pure uh in his motivations and it made him incredibly effective of cutting through a lot of the stuff that most of us deal with an open-source life he was able to keep his self-interested Bay which is kind of remarkable arm for a lot of us but he was able to do it and he was able to search communicate well with an open smile and a kind heart he had is a way of spending time and his energy on things that mattered and he had a genius at finding things that mattered to millions of people there are lots of things to work on but the things that he worked on were incredibly effective we first met i think in 2002 at the Eldred on supreme court case in washington DC when we drove a book mobile across celebrating the public domain by giving away books that kids made of and also then at the creative commons launch but I really got to know Aaron when he said I'd really like to help make the open library website with the internet archive to go and give books and integrate books into the Internet itself and you said I've got this cool technology called infogami it made really possible to make read it happen let's use it again for this other thing and it was wonderful to work with him but it was really unlike working with anybody also if ever I've ever met he is it certainly can tell them what to do he just kind of did what was the right thing to do.
And he was right is certainly a lot more often than I was.
He also we worked together in other areas when he was a champion of open access especially of the public domain bringing public access to the public domain.
Most people think that's kind of an obvious thing is in the public domain mean that it's publicly accessible of course all of us know we sort of like there are these national parks with moats and walls and guns and Treach sort of pointing out in case somebody might want to come near the public domain on and Aaron didn't think this was right and he spent a lot of time and effort freeing this materials one of the first ones that we were actively working together on was freeing government court cases so that anybody could see this without having to have special privilege or money and also to make it so you could data-mine it and go and look at these things in a very different way so he freed and liberated the lot of court cases and from the pacer system and uploaded them in bulk to the internet archive so that people could have access to these are now four million documents from 800 thousand cases that have been used by six million people because of the project that Aaron Schwartz and others helped start.
It was an interesting project because it went over many different organizations each playing a role in all cooperating in a very non corporate way is a very Aaron style way of making things happen and the idea of making court documents on legal documents available more easily struck a chord with me because in college I was trying to figure out how I was going to try to get out of the draft and my college didn't have our illegal collection and the only way i could try to get to legal court documents was to get an ID from my professor and break in to the Harvard Law Library to go and read court documents that sucked I it really makes no sense and Aaron not only sort of saw that it doesn't make sense.
He decided he was going to try to help solve this not just for himself but for everyone then there's other public domain collections like the google books collection google books are was a library project to go and digitize lots and lots of books arm a lot of the more public domain google would make them available from their website but really really painfully it would make it so that if you wanted one book you can get one book he wanted a hundred books they turn off your IP address forever um this is no way to have public access to the public domain and the internet archive started getting these uploads of google books going faster and faster and faster like well where are these coming from.
Well it turns out it's aaron on and he and a bunch of friends figured out that they could go and get a bunch of computers to go slowly enough to just clock through.
Tons of google books and upload them to the Internet Archive interestingly google never got upset about it the libraries on the other hand grumbled which is it LOL anyway they'll get over um good so we when this started happening we said okay what's going on what should we be concerned no its public domain we just made sure that we got the cataloging data right and we linked back to google so that if you're on the book you can go back to the original page and see the Dada arm and it all armed worked well but there was Aaron doing it again bringing public access to the public domain what is crushing to me is that Aaron got ensnared by the federal government for doing something that the internet archive actively encourages others to do for our collections and we think all libraries should encourage which is bulk downloading to support data mining and other research using computers this is just the way the world works the first step is for a computer to read and analyze materials is a download a set of documents when Aaron did this from one library JSTOR they strongly objected and demanded that MIT find and stop that user which then led us prosecutors to pull out their worst techniques.
Did anybody stop to ask if bulk downloading is a crime i say no bulk downloading is not in itself a crime let's stop and Curt let's stop this from let's stop this practice of discouraging bulk downloading because there are encouraging projects that are learning amazing new things by having computers be part of the research process let's not stop this and discourage young people from coming up with new and different ways to make access to learn things from our libraries what resulted was true in this case was tragic and not necessary really what we want is computers to be able to read Arryn knew this were all building this and he got ensnared anyway let's let our computers read because of this tragedy JSTOR I talked to this morning and the internet archive have agreed to meet to discuss the broad issue of data mining and web crawling i hope that we really make progress at least there's reasons to be positive this assault on Aaron would disillusion discourage and depress any principal young man and if there ever was a principal young man it was Aaron Schwartz we miss you and we will carry on your important work do not do not think for a moment do not think for a moment that Aaron's work on JSTOR with the random act of a lone hacker some kind of crazy spur-of-the-moment bulk download JSTOR headlong come in for withering criticism from the net larry lessig called JSTOR a moral outrage in a talk and I suppose I have to confess he was quoting me and we weren't the only ones Fanning those flames sequestering knowledge behind paywalls making scientific journals only available to a few kids fortunate enough to be at fancy universities and charging $20 an article for the remaining 99% of us was a festering wound it offended many people it embarrassed many who wrote those articles that their work had become somebody's profit margin a members-only country club of knowledge many of us help fan those flames and many of us feel guilty today for fanning those frames but JSTOR was just one of many battles they tried to pain aaron has some kind of lone wolf hacker young terrorist went on a crazy IP killing spree that cause 92 million dollars in damages but Aaron wasn't alone wolf he was part of an army and I the honor of serving with him for a decade you've heard many things about his remarkable life but I want to focus tonight on just one.
Erin was part of an army of citizens that believes democracy only works when the citizenry are informed and we know about our rights and our obligations and army that believes we must make justice and knowledge available to all not just a Wellborn or those that have grabbed the reins of power so that we may govern ourselves more wisely he was part of an army of citizens that reject kings and generals and believes in rough consent sis and running code.
We worked together on a dozen government databases when we worked on something the decisions weren't rash our work often took months sometimes years sometimes a decade and Aaron Swartz did not get his proper serving of decades we looked at and poked at the US copyright database for a long time it was a system so old it was still running ways the government had believe it or not asserted copyright on the copyright database now how you copyright a database that is specifically called out in the United States Constitution is beyond me but we knew we were playing with fire by violating our terms of use so we were careful we grab that data and it was used to feed the open library here at the internet archive and it was used to feed google books and we got a letter from the Copyright Office waving copyright on that copyright database but before we did that we had to talk to many lawyers and worry about the government hauling us in for malicious premeditated bulk downloading these were not random acts of aggression we worked on databases to make them better to make our democracy work better to help our government we were not criminals when we brought in 20 million pages of US district court documents from behind there eight cent per page pacer paywall we found those public filings infested with privacy violations names of minor children names of informants medical records mental health records financial records and tens of thousands of social security numbers we were whistleblowers and we sent our results to the Chief judges of 31 district courts and those judges were shocked and dismayed and they redacted those documents and they yelled at the lawyers that filed them and the Judicial Conference changed their privacy rules but you know what the bureaucrats did you know what the bureaucrats did who ran the administrative office of the United States courts to them we weren't citizens that made public data better we were thieves that took 1.6 million dollars of their property so they call the FBI they said they were hacked by criminals and organized gang that was imperiling their 120 million dollar per year revenue stream selling public government documents the FBI sat outside aaron's house they call them up and tried to sucker him into meeting them without his lawyer.
The FBI said two armed agents down in an interrogation room with me to get to the bottom of this alleged conspiracy but we weren't criminals we were only citizens we did nothing wrong.
They found nothing wrong we did our duty as citizens and the government investigation had nothing to show for it but a waste of a whole lot of time and money if you want a chilling effect sit somebody down with the couple FBI agents for a while and see how quickly their blood runs cold there are people who faced danger every day to protect us police officers and firefighters and emergency workers and I am grateful and amazed by what they do but the work that people like Karen and I did slinging dvds and running shell scripts on public materials should not be a dangerous profession we weren't criminals but there were crimes committed crimes against a very idea of justice when the US attorney told aaron he had to plead guilty to 13 felonies for attempting to propagate knowledge before she'd even consider a deal that was an abuse of power a Miss use of the criminal justice system.
That was a climb against justice and that US attorney does not act alone she is part of a posse intent on protecting property not people all over the United States those without access to means don't have access to justice and faces abuses of power every day it was a crime against learning when a nonprofit corporation like JSTOR charged with advancing knowledge turned a download that cause no harm and no damage into a 92 million dollar federal case and the JSTOR corporate monopolies on knowledge is not alone all over the United States corporations have staked their fences on the field of education for-profit colleges that steal from our veterans nonprofit standards bodies that ration Public Safety codes while paying million dollar salaries multinational conglomerates that measure the work of scientific papers and legal materials by their gross margins in the JSTOR case was the overly aggressive posture of the Department of Justice prosecutors and law enforcement officials revenge because they were embarrassed that in their view at least we somehow got away with something in the Pacer incident was the merciless JSTOR prosecution The Revenge of embarrassed bureaucrats because they look stupid in the New York Times because the United States Senate called them on the carpet we will probably never know the answer to that question but it sure looks like they destroyed a young man's life in a petty abuse of power.
This was not a criminal matter erin was not a criminal if you think you own something and I think that thing is public i'm more than happy to meet you in a court of law and if you're right i'll take my lumps if I've wronged you but when we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access mr. knowledge we've broken the rule of law we've desecrated the temple of Justice Aaron Swartz was not a criminal Aaron Swartz was a citizen any was a brave soldier in a war which continues today a war in which corrupt and vino profit ears try to steal and hoard and starve our public domain for their own private game when people try to restrict access to the law or they try to collect tolls on the road and knowledge or deny education to those without means those people are the ones who should face the stern gaze of an outraged public prosecutor what the Department of Justice put Aaron through for trying to make our world better is the same thing they can put you through our army isn't one lone wolf it is thousands of citizens many of you in this room who are fighting for justice and knowledge i say we are an army and I use the word with cause because we faced people who want to imprison us for downloading a database to take a closer look we faced people who believe they can tell us what we can read and what we can say but when i see our army i see an army that creates instead of destroys I see the army of mahatma gandhi walking peacefully to the sea to make salt for the people i see the army of Martin Luther King walking peacefully but with determination to Washington to demand their rights because change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability it comes through continuous struggle when I see our army i see an army that creates new opportunities for the poor an army that makes our society more just and more fair and army that makes knowledge universal when I see our army i see the people who have created the wikipedia and the internet archive the people who coded good new and apache and bind and linux I see the people who made the eff and the creative commons I see the people who created our internet as a gift to the world when I see our army i see Aaron Swartz and my heart is broken we've truly lost one of our better angels.
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 thank you.
##########################################
No comments:
Post a Comment