“Unjust laws exist;
Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded…….,
or shall we transgress them at once?”
- Henry David Thoreau
Did you know that Tim Berners-Lee, is the sole man responsible for the existence of the World Wide Web that you’re using right now? In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was sitting on one of the most lucrative inventions of the 20th century! Instead of profiting off of the invention of the World Wide Web he chose to give it away….. for free.
It is why we all exist are hosted in this one global system of interlinked hypertext documents (the World Wide Web) today , instead of several different global systems of interlinked hypertext documents (that we’d without a doubt, have to buy into).
There is truly power in knowledge. Just like any kind of power (money, influence) there will be an oppressive entity who will always work to gatekeep and keep it all for themselves.
You should always be skeptical and fearful of a government hiding educational, revolutionizing, liberating, eye opening texts/articles/studies/records dating back to the start of civilization, from us commoners behind paywalls.
& you should also be angry.
Aaron was willing and had the guts to put himself at risk for a cause he believed in, for what was is right.
“Growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the
things around me that people had told me were just the natural way
things were, the way things always would be, they weren’t natural at all!
They were things that could be changed, and they were things that, more
importantly, were wrong and should change! Once I realized that there
was really no going back……”
- Aaron Swartz
* * *
Aaron Swartz took his life, at 26 years old in his New York apartment on January 11th, 2013 just 1 1/2 years after his indictment for what would’ve became a precedent case; UNITED STATES of America, v. Aaron SWARTZ, Defendant.
Aaron Swartz was no criminal. He wasn’t a killer, or rapist. He wasn’t an abuser running rampant on the streets inflicting harm to whomever. No conman, or a manipulative lowlife. Aaron wasn’t no thief either!
It is America, it’s forefathers and successors who are the true thieves!
Aaron is was known as the cofounder of Reddit. He was also known to have made Wikipedia, from his bedroom 5 years before the creation of “Wikipedia). He was also known as an entrepreneur, a computer programmer, a political organizer, a teacher, a visionary. The (14 year old) kid who helped create RSS. Aaron was many things, but most importantly Aaron Swartz was an unapologetic Hacktivist. In a world where people just stand around content in ignorance, blinded by greed, or just preaching until they’re blue in the face Aaron Swartz took action.
On 11 July, 2011 Aaron was summoned to lay at the mercy of the unrelenting, savage, inhumane nation; America. To be persecuted for the vision, belief and will for true accessibility (not just accessible to those with the monetary means, but to everyone) of public information. You would think public access would be accessible on public domains, right? Like, what’s so revolutionary about the obvious? However, in reality that not the case at all (you know this first hand if you’ve had any formal education or schooling)! You will almost always end up face to face with a virtual (pay)wall.
It’s hard to elucidate just how revolutionizing, impactful, and larger than life Aaron Swartz was, and what a big devastation this sudden loss was without being privy to some history.
* * *
The 1st Amendment of The Constitution entitles us (the people) and bestows to us the right to obtain and publish information about defendants and trials. You can’t impose a fee on a right and monetize off of a right guaranteed by the US constitution……
can you?
Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is the public domain the U.S. Federal Courts’ system hosts for public electronic access to court records. Launched in the late 1900s it provides complete access to docket text, opinions, and all documents filed (except for sealed records). Very revolating during it’s time (no longer needing to do strenuous, time consuming research via several books and print. All court documents compiled in one easily, locatable place), but not truly accessible to the public. PACER charges citizens for downloading, viewing, and searching ($0.10 a page & you’re charged for every single search) for case materials. PACER has created a 10 billion dollar (per year) industry off of public court documents that the public are entitled to! The US District Court is where alot of our seminal, precedent litigation starts (civil rights cases, patent cases). People without the means don’t have to same accessibility to the law as someone who does have the financial means. Basically a poll tax.
“The law is the operating system of our [U.S.] democracy and you have to pay to see it”
- Tim O’Reilly
That is not a democracy, my friends!
In 2008, public domain advocate Carl Malamud decides to make a statement and take action with the creation of PACER Recycling. A public domain that would host all the (uploaded) all public court files obtained and downloaded from PACER, by various people on one domain for everyone to use and reference freely, free of charge. Coincidentally, This website would come into existence during the time the federal courts were running a free access trial at 17 libraries (nationwide). The program allowed anyone who walked into the library to browse PACER and download documents for free. With Carl’s budding public domain he was encouraging a “Thumb Drive Corps” (bring USB sticks into those libraries and download caches of PACER documents and send them to Carl Malamud).
Aaron would come across an online manifesto (that once existed here) about freeing PACER documents.
“The law contains the rules that govern our society. We just want to be
able to read our own user manual.”
- Carl Malamud
Aaron would not only be dedicated to the cause, he would also coincidentaly run into Steve Schultze (who is now a lawyer in D.C. according to his twitter that has been out of commision since 2022) in the Summer of 2008, a week after Steve Schultze devises a Perl script that’s able to run off a USB drive and automatically skim through PACER cases, downloading all of the documents in an organized fashion. That extracting script is shared with Aaron, who then builds upon it, improving its deficiencies. By the time Aaron is through with that Perl script he’s able to download 780 gigabytes of data (19,856,160 pages of text) from PACER (approx. 20% of PACER’s entire network, focusing on the most recent of each circuit) between September 4, 2008 and September 22, 2008. The government spooked by the speed and volume at which data was being extracted from PACER’s system, abruptly ended the free access trial.
(The PACER documents Swartz obtained used to be available for (free) download here).
The trove of information obtained by Aaron, would serve as the foundation (and the continuation of freeing court documents from paywalls) of RECAP (a Firefox extension to liberate court documents and store them in a public and free archive). The original website (of course no longer accessible) and mission can be read about here.
After the abrupt, unannounced take down of the 17-site national program (the free access trial) Carl thought it would be best to lay low (although a crime had not been committed, all they did was download public info/data and upload it publicly) and he advised Aaron to do the same. Aaron continues to curse the legacy system of academic publishing in which scholarly knowledge is guarded behind paywalls (a manifesto (dated July 2008) titled Guerilla Open Access detailing a call to action). Outraged (and rightfully so) about the monetization of access to scholarly publications. He calls for the downloading scientific journals and uploading them to file sharing networks.
“… books are our cultural legacy. You know, books are the place people go to write things down, and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary.”
- Aaron Swartz
A few months go by and Aaron grows curious to know if the FBI was actually looking into him for his little (legit) stint. So, he files a FOIA for a copy of his FBI record in August of 2009 (sharing it on his blog 5 October, 2009).
Aaron would go on to liberate millions of academic articles.
This time from from the academic database JSTOR using Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the vessel.
* * *
During the Fall of 2010, Aaron is able to aquire millions of academic papers from the JSTOR database using MIT's network. Law enforcement sets up a stakeout and unfortunately catches the Robin Hood (unbeknownst to him) in January of 2011.
On 19 July, 2011 24 year old Aaron Swartz is arrested (and beaten by officers during the arrest) on charges of:
wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
The internet pioneer facing accusations of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, violating its terms of use, and evading MIT's efforts to stop him from. The government pursues Aaron full fledged despite having no evidence to support the claim “Swartz intended to distribute a significant portion of JSTOR's archive of digitized journal articles through one or more file-sharing sites” and JSTOR releasing a statement stating:
"we secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed."
and that they’re not seeking the prosecution of Aaron Swartz.
**The difference between PACER and JSTOR is that (this puzzled me for a minute, because JSTOR is not privately owned, so I was like why…???)
PACER houses court records and publicly owned documents. JSTOR how ever hosts myriads of scholar/peer reviewed articles, and scientific journals that are 9/10 protected by copyrights (and thus illegal to redistribute).
In spite of all that, the feds continued to pile charges on the 24 year old, which if sticks can send Aaron away to prison for 50 years.
No one will know for sure, but it’s reasonable to assume that the heaviness of UNITED STATES of America, v. Aaron SWARTZ weighed heavy on his psyche and drove him into a deep depression. The uncertainty of his fate wearing, chipping away at the heroic figure until just a pile of finely grained sand remains. January 11th, 2013 being the day the wind blew, freeing Aaron Swartz of pain and despair, while sadly snatching a brilliant soul from the world in thin air..
A lot of the links discussing this no longer exist. It was really eerie looking for info and coming across links dating only 13 - 16 years back show “404 this page does not exist anymore” or “This site can’t be reached”. Pins you face to face with the reality that the internet is not as forever as our parents told us. This truth is so scary, but yet…… comforting to sy the least.
There are still a few living web domains that get into the specifics of Aaron’s morality, grit and very unjust demise:
The New York Times (I hate them I couldn’t read cause of the fucking paywall),
-The New York Time's blog
-Steve’s blog
-Larry Lessig mourned and discussed it on his blog as well.
-Aaron’s mother addresses his supporters.
-Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman (Aaron’s partner at the time) reaction.
You can also watch the documentary about Aaron Swartz for free here.
(you really should and watch how successful protesting has been time and time and time again. Also Aaron’s Open Library project can still be accessed here!
Carl Malamud is still embodying public access here. His free website many things including hosts 500+ government produced films/movies (FedFlix) that he is working to upload to YouTube.com
“I feel very strongly that it’s not enough to just live in the world as it is. To just kind of, take what you’re given, and you know, follow the things that adults told you to do and that, you know, your parents told you to do, and that society tells you to do. I think you should always be questioning, you know? I take this very scientific attitude that everything you’ve learned is just provisional, but you know its always open to recantation or refutation or questioning and I think the same applies to society.
Once I realized that there were real serious
problems, fundamental problems that I could do
something to address, I didn’t see a way to.. to
forget that, I didn’t see a way not to.”
An everlasting flame. Gone, but never forgotten. Rest in peace Aaron Swartz.
This reminds me of a book I need to read called Fahrenheit 451