Law professor Larry Lessig mourns the suicide of his friend Aaron Swartz. Swartz was being prosecuted for allegedly downloading millions of documents from the academic article database JSTOR, which did not want Swartz prosecuted, through the MIT network, using a laptop hidden in a basement closet, with intent to redistribute them. Swartz was an internet prodigy– he co-wrote the RSS 1.0 specification at age 14 and was a co-founder of Reddit– who was deeply committed to an open internet. I pretty much agree with Larry Lessig’s take on this:
(Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.)
Since his arresting the early morning of January 11, 2011 — two years to the day before Aaron Swartz ended his life — I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer that morning. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.
The billions of snippets of sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us. But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain I wish we could resist:
Please don’t pathologize this story.
No doubt it is a certain crazy that brings a person as loved as Aaron was loved (and he was surrounded in NY by people who loved him) to do what Aaron did. It angers me that he did what he did. But if we’re going to learn from this, we can’t let slide what brought him here.
First, of course, Aaron brought Aaron here. As I said when I wrote about the case(when obligations required I say something publicly), if what the government alleged was true — and I say “if” because I am not revealing what Aaron said to me then — then what he did was wrong. And if not legally wrong, then at least morally wrong. The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too. But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine.
But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?
Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.
Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. 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. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.
Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”
In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.
Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.
One word, and endless tears.
Lessig’s account of prosecutors-as-bullies, pushing to notch their belts with demands of a felony conviction and claims of millions of dollars in “loses,” all with eye toward the sentencing guidelines, sounds hauntingly familiar.
The feds suck. I think it’s time for a reverse habeas so the states can save us from the feds.
This account by his friend Rick Perlstein is heartbreaking and well worth reading.
Worth noting, too, that Aaron Swartz was a contributing editor at the legendary culture-critique magazine The Baffler… Here’s a piece I re-read this morning from ‘Guernica’: http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/john_summers_and_george_sciala/
So sad, so tragic. He will be missed…
It’s a terrible shame. The Feds just chew people up once they set their sights on them. More and more, it’s becoming obvious to me that much of what they do is shameful and would be better left undone.
Speaking of shameful: did you see Laura Poitras’ powerful short film about the December homecoming of American murder victim Adnan Latif:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/opinion/death-of-a-prisoner.html?_r=1
Images of his uncle and his young son’s reaction as his body is recovered just a few days ago in Yemen are particularly moving.
Though repeatedly ordered released, Mr. Latif could not escape the cruel grip of the United States government, and so he died.
So we do it to foreigners, and we do it to our own citizens. We are becoming a shameful people.
Damn! why is the Obama/Holder Justice department so obtuse?!?
Because they are the government?
John Pittman Hey
For some reason the Guernica mag link isn’t working… But here’s the text I copied from my still open tab:
“The virtual impunity of the rich and powerful is a widely known fact. Why continue to rub our noses in it?
By **John Summers and George Scialabba**
“Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars,” said United States attorney Carmen M. Ortiz in announcing the indictment of our friend Aaron Swartz, a programmer, civil liberties activist, and Cambridge resident who is accused of breaking into a computer closet at MIT and downloading several million articles from the academic database JSTOR. “It is equally harmful to the victim, whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”
For a statement of intellectual property law at its most simple-minded, business-friendly, and injudicious, one could not do better than Ms. Oritz’s fulmination. Aaron, who is 24 years old, faces a maximum penalty of $1 million and 35 years in prison in spite of the (uncontested) facts that the data he allegedly purloined was returned before it was released; service interruption was minimal; and neither MIT nor JSTOR has taken legal action. This is a bogus indictment over a fictitious crime. What explains it?
Politics, for one thing. The real purpose of the indictment is to terrorize advocates for open access at a time when corporations and their allies in government feel themselves under siege by hackers. “Stealing is stealing” is phrase-making designed to confuse the legal and moral distinctions between the kind of cyber-crime everyone should oppose, such as stealing credit card and social security numbers, and efforts, like Aaron’s, to make knowledge more accessible to the educated public. Ms. Ortiz, incredibly, asks the public to ignore the motive behind the act. Lawrence Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, disagrees. “Aaron has never done anything in this context for personal gain,” Lessig told the New York Times. “This isn’t a hacking case, in the sense of someone trying to steal credit cards.”
We know Aaron as a person of exceptional intelligence and integrity, and we are far from alone. His agitation on behalf of a less secretive, more public-friendly policy toward commercial, academic, and government data has won him a fellowship at the Safra Center, the directorship of Demand Progress—an online activist group with 500,000 members—and the respect and regard of colleagues online and off. What looks like vandalism to government lawyers in fact honors the best of American traditions. “There is no justice in following unjust laws,” he has written. “It’s time to come into the light, and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”
Aaron, then, offers an excellent opportunity for the government to reassert its role as a security service for powerful institutions and their clients, a role that it’s been bungling of late. Threatening him with a long detention signals a coming counter-offensive against the more democratic culture for which he and others like him stand, and once again illustrates the Obama administration’s awful zeal for prosecuting whistleblowers and anti-secrecy activists.
However this case is resolved, the misapplication of government discretion should affront our collective moral intelligence. How many Bush administration officials have been indicted for misleading the country into a war of choice in Iraq? How many Wall Street executives have been indicted for the lucrative financial deceptions that cost millions of Americans their homes and livelihoods? How many British Petroleum executives have been indicted for the negligence and mismanagement that caused last year’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? The virtual impunity of the rich and powerful is a widely known fact; episodes like the prosecution of Aaron Swartz rub our noses in it.
The U.S. Attorney should withdraw the indictment, apologize to Aaron and his family, and busy her office with real criminals.”
John Summers, Cambridge
George Scialabba, Cambridge
Copyright 2011 John Summers and George Scialabba
________________________________________________________________________
George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For?
John Summers is the author of Every Fury on Earth and the editor of Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, by Dwight Macdonald, forthcoming in October from New York Review Books.
Another Holder-Obama disgrace.
Proportionality.
Isn’t that what’s missing?
Swartz had free access to the “stolen” documents … did he not? He could pick and choose and download and copy hither and thither … could he not? His “crime” was “taking too much.” Isn’t that what this boils down to?
I dined at Big Bad Breakfast. When I paid my tab at the front counter, I helped myself to a peppermint in the big jarful of peppermints. Stealing? Certainly not. But what if I took 2 … or 20 … or all 30 peppermints in the jar … or all 300 … or all 3000 … or …? When do I become a criminal actor?
DOJ has a lot to answer for on this one.