In part two of our mini-series on "Young American Outlaws", we'll look at the tragic story of Aaron Swartz.
He was a brilliant young computer programmer who co-founded Reddit and became a vocal advocate for free access to information on the internet. But his mission put him at odds with the US government and led to a legal battle that ended in tragedy.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is part two of our three-part mini-series on “Young, American Outlaws”.
[00:00:28] In case you missed part one, it was on Ross Ulbricht, the man who founded the world’s biggest online drug marketplace, Silk Road.
[00:00:36] Next up, part three will be on Luigi Mangione, the young man who gunned down the CEO of one of America’s largest health insurance companies.
[00:00:46] And this episode, part two, will be on a man called Aaron Swartz. He was one of the most gifted technical minds of his generation, a founding team member of the website Reddit and a vocal advocate for a free and open internet.
[00:01:03] In this quest, however, he got on the wrong side of the law, and it ended in tragedy.
[00:01:10] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:15] If you were going to picture the scene of a great crime, the campus at MIT–The Massachusetts Institute of Technology–might not be the first thing that comes to mind.
[00:01:27] Young men and women studying together, hunched over laptops, furiously trying to make a deadline for a paper, their eyes only remaining open thanks to copious amounts of energy drinks and coffee.
[00:01:42] Yet it was here, or to be precise, in a utility closet on campus, that one of the greatest thefts of intellectual property in history was committed.
[00:01:54] Or, if you ask someone else, that a young man did something that harmed nobody, from which he made no personal gain, and the goal of which was to make knowledge freely available to anyone who wanted to learn.
[00:02:10] That criminal, or hero, was Aaron Swartz, a then 24-year-old computer programmer and internet activist.
[00:02:19] What followed was a two-year battle with the US Justice Department, a national debate on censorship, copyright, and freedom of information, and tragically ended in Swartz being found dead in his Brooklyn apartment at the age of 26.
[00:02:38] His life was short, but his contributions, not just to the debate on copyright but also to the technology and systems we still use today, were significant.
[00:02:51] He was born in 1986, so he was very much part of the generation that grew up as the Internet was just getting started.
[00:03:01] He was closer to “the action” than most, as his father worked in technology, so there was always a computer at home he could tinker around with.
[00:03:11] And from an early age, he was very interested in computers and how they worked.
[00:03:18] It’s fascinating listening to him talk about this early period of his life–the early years of the World Wide Web–and his hopes and dreams about what this might become, how it would democratise access to information, how anyone from anywhere in the world could connect with anyone else over shared, mutual interests, no matter how niche.
[00:03:43] He grew up in a small community, and there were only a handful of people like him, with the same interests and hobbies.
[00:03:51] But on the internet, this growing magical community, he found kindred spirits, people who shared the same interests as he did. He found his people.
[00:04:04] And this wasn’t just a boy posting messages on forums; he was an active contributor to the architecture of the Internet, not just building websites but also working on the systems and technologies behind them.
[00:04:20] When he was only 12 years old, he built something called The Info Network, which was a user-generated encyclopedia. Wikipedia, essentially, but 3 years before Wikipedia.
[00:04:33] Just a few years later, he became a core contributor to the group that made RSS.
[00:04:40] Now, without getting too technical, RSS is the technology that allows users to get information in a standardised format. It’s used for news syndication, it’s also used for podcasts, and it means that you can open up a podcast app, subscribe to different podcasts, and new episodes automatically appear in your feed.
[00:05:04] It’s probably something you’ve never thought too much about before, but someone had to envision and create this standardised feed technology, and that person, or at least one of the people in that group, was a then-teenage Aaron Swartz.
[00:05:21] Importantly, this technology is Open Source; it’s free.
[00:05:27] As a publisher, podcaster or user of RSS, you don’t need to pay RSS.com, the creators of RSS, or anyone to use it. It’s free.
[00:05:40] Swartz and his fellow contributors behind RSS believed this technology should exist; they built it, and they decided it should be freely accessible to everyone.
[00:05:53] So that’s what it is.
[00:05:56] These contributions made him something of a household name in certain programming circles; he would be invited to speak at conferences and give interviews, and people who didn’t know anything about him would be somewhat surprised when the name “Aaron Swartz” would be announced and a 15-year-old boy would take to the stage.
[00:06:18] But he spoke with great clarity, he was exceptionally talented, and was treated as a peer by some of the most influential people in the early days of the World Wide Web.
[00:06:31] He was accepted at Stanford at the age of 17, but quickly dropped out, later saying he was disillusioned with what he saw as a culture more focused on status and lifestyle than on learning
[00:06:46] At the age of 19, he founded a start-up called Infogami, which shortly afterwards merged with another fledgling site called Reddit.
[00:06:57] Reddit, as you probably know, is now one of the most visited websites in the world, with hundreds of millions of users posting, voting, and commenting every day.
[00:07:11] It is, essentially, what Aaron Swartz had always hoped the internet would be, a place for people to find like-minded souls and connect over shared interests, no matter how niche and obscure.
[00:07:26] After this merger, he became part of the small founding team, and when Reddit was bought by the giant publishing house Condé Nast in 2006, he suddenly found himself with seven figures in his bank account and working inside one of America’s largest media corporations.
[00:07:46] This was not where Aaron Swartz wanted to be.
[00:07:50] He didn’t care about the money or the prestige of working for a big company.
[00:07:55] His lifestyle didn’t change in the slightest, and this newly minted millionaire continued to live in a flatshare, in a bedroom so small it was referred to as “the closet”.
[00:08:09] What he cared about was freedom of information, the power of the internet, and the potential for technology to change society.
[00:08:20] Anyone who knew him knew that he wouldn’t hack it in the corporate world, and sure enough, he left Condé Nast after just a year, saying he felt stifled by the corporate environment.
[00:08:34] Afterwards, and now financially free and not beholden to anyone, he threw himself into his true passion: activism.
[00:08:44] He worked with Creative Commons, the organisation that allows authors and artists to license their work freely so that others can build upon it. He started groups campaigning for government transparency and accountability.
[00:08:59] And he became deeply involved in the debate over copyright law, arguing that copyright was too restrictive and unfairly limited access to knowledge.
[00:09:12] In 2008, he published what became known as the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”.
[00:09:20] In it, he argued that scientists and researchers had a moral responsibility to share their work freely, and that ordinary people should take action if necessary to liberate information that was being unjustly restricted.
[00:09:38] In his words: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past.”
[00:09:58] It was a radical message, and it was one he would soon try to put into action.
[00:10:05] His first target was the millions of American public court documents that were not covered by any kind of copyright, but for which the US government charged $0.08 per page for users to access.
[00:10:20] Swartz believed these should be free, especially as the court system made a $150 million a year profit from selling them.
[00:10:32] He wrote a script that downloaded them en masse and managed to download 20 million pages of court documents—an estimated 20% of the total.
[00:10:45] His intention was to make them publicly available, free of charge, because they were items of public record, after all.
[00:10:54] He was caught and questioned by the FBI, but no charges were pressed.
[00:11:01] It would be his first brush with the law, but unfortunately not the last.
[00:11:07] A year later, he set his sights on JSTOR, which, if you went to university at any point in the last 20 years or so, you might remember as one of the largest digital libraries of academic papers.
[00:11:22] JSTOR contains millions of articles from thousands of journals, covering virtually every field of knowledge.
[00:11:31] Swartz thought it was morally wrong that these millions of academic papers and journals, which had often been funded by taxpayers’ money, were locked away behind expensive paywalls.
[00:11:45] This was…wrong.
[00:11:48] Knowledge, he believed, should not be locked up by governments or corporations. It should be open and available to everyone, everywhere.
[00:11:59] JSTOR kept the gates closed.
[00:12:02] So Swartz set out to do something about it. As he put in his earlier manifesto, “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world”
[00:12:16] Using the network at MIT, he began systematically downloading articles from JSTOR.
[00:12:24] This wasn’t “stealing”, per se; he had a valid individual JSTOR account via Harvard, where he was a research fellow.
[00:12:34] The difference was that he wasn’t using his account as it was intended; he wasn’t downloading single files, manually going to each one and clicking “download” with his mouse.
[00:12:46] Using similar techniques to those he had used to download millions of pages of court documents, he wrote automated scripts to download millions of research papers from the JSTOR database.
[00:12:59] At first, he used his own laptop, sitting in campus libraries. It was fast, but not fast enough.
[00:13:08] Eventually, he went so far as to sneak into a locked utility closet, where he hid a laptop connected directly to MIT’s network so it could download files around the clock.
[00:13:21] Over the course of a few weeks, JSTOR engineers noticed strange activity.
[00:13:28] Their servers were being hammered with download requests, far more than a normal user would ever make. They traced it back to MIT, and eventually to the closet where Swartz’s laptop was hidden.
[00:13:43] The police were called in. They located the closet and found the laptop. But instead of taking the computer away and trying to find its owner by hacking into it, they did something less high-tech but more effective.
[00:13:59] They planted a hidden camera, assuming that they would be able to catch the perpetrator red-handed, in the act.
[00:14:08] And sure enough, shortly afterwards, Swartz could be plainly seen coming into the closet and taking the laptop.
[00:14:17] Police didn’t arrive in time to arrest him in the closet, but he was spotted shortly afterwards, and in January 2011, he was arrested. The laptop was seized, and the FBI soon became involved.
[00:14:34] Importantly, he hadn’t yet done anything with the files he had downloaded, and he returned them all.
[00:14:41] And JSTOR, the supposed victim of the crime, decided not to press charges.
[00:14:48] They quickly settled, and the organisation even released a public statement saying it did not wish to see Swartz punished.
[00:14:58] And it was assumed that MIT–the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the home of many a hacker–would be supportive of Swartz, keen for him to get off with a slap on the wrist and nothing more, and would intervene on his behalf.
[00:15:15] It did not.
[00:15:17] And Swartz found himself up against the full weight of the U.S. Department of Justice.
[00:15:24] Federal prosecutors stepped in and charged him with multiple counts of computer fraud and wire fraud, which carried a maximum possible sentence of 35 years in prison.
[00:15:36] For downloading academic articles.
[00:15:40] To many people, not just his friends and supporters, but people finding out about Swartz for the first time, this seemed absurd.
[00:15:50] Thirty-five years in prison was the kind of sentence given to violent criminals–to armed robbers, murderers, and rapists–not to a young man who had downloaded publicly accessible academic journals.
[00:16:06] And remember, he hadn’t sold the files, hadn’t shared or published them, hadn’t made a cent from any of it.
[00:16:14] His goal was ideological, not financial.
[00:16:18] He believed that this knowledge should not be locked away, it should be free for anyone, anywhere, who wanted to learn.
[00:16:27] But prosecutors didn’t see it that way.
[00:16:30] They wanted to make an example of him. In their eyes, he wasn’t a principled activist. He was a thief, someone who had broken into a system to steal millions of documents.
[00:16:44] As the lead federal prosecutor put it, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar.”
[00:16:53] A crowbar, by the way, is a metal bar often used by criminals to force their way into something.
[00:17:01] As the months went on, the pressure grew.
[00:17:05] Each time his lawyers tried to negotiate a deal, prosecutors pushed for harsher terms. He faced the possibility of decades in prison and ruinous financial penalties unless he pleaded guilty to a felony.
[00:17:21] This plea deal would mean spending six months behind bars.
[00:17:26] Still, for someone who was only 24, it was a terrifying prospect.
[00:17:32] Pleading guilty would mean admitting guilt, admitting he had committed a crime.
[00:17:38] He would be marked for life as a felon, something he simply didn’t believe he was.
[00:17:45] During all this time, he didn’t stop his campaign for internet freedom.
[00:17:50] In 2012, while his trial was still looming, he played a central role in one of the most successful online protests in history.
[00:18:00] That year, the U.S. Congress was preparing to vote on a law called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.
[00:18:09] On the surface, it was about preventing copyright theft.
[00:18:13] But in practice, it gave the government sweeping new powers to shut down websites, block domain names, and censor online content. To Swartz and many others, it was a direct threat to the open internet.
[00:18:30] He co-founded an organisation called Demand Progress, which mobilised millions of people online to protest against SOPA.
[00:18:40] On 18 January 2012, websites including Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of others went dark in protest. The result was extraordinary. Within days, politicians who had supported the bill backed down, and SOPA was dead.
[00:19:01] He had helped stop what he and many others believed would have been the end of the free internet. He was hailed as a hero by activists, programmers, and ordinary internet users alike.
[00:19:15] But even as his reputation in those circles grew, the criminal case against him dragged on.
[00:19:23] The prosecutors didn’t care that JSTOR had dropped its complaint.
[00:19:27] They didn’t care about his contributions to the public internet or how well-respected he was in the programming community.
[00:19:34] They cared that he had broken the law, and they were determined to win.
[00:19:40] By early 2013, Swartz was exhausted.
[00:19:44] He had struggled with depression for years.
[00:19:48] Friends described him as brilliant but often fragile, deeply idealistic but weighed down by the injustices he saw in the world.
[00:19:59] The looming trial magnified these struggles, these demons he couldn’t shake.
[00:20:05] Friends said he was deeply depressed, worn down by the endless legal battle and the weight of the possible sentence hanging over him.
[00:20:16] He had spent two years fighting, and it seemed like there was no way out. It looked highly likely that he was going to prison for a long time, and he was powerless to stop it.
[00:20:28] On 11 January 2013, his girlfriend came back to their Brooklyn apartment to find him dead, hanging by his belt.
[00:20:38] He was 26 years old.
[00:20:40] His death sent shockwaves through the world of technology and beyond. There was grief, anger, and disbelief.
[00:20:50] To many, it seemed like the U.S. government had hounded a young, brilliant technologist to his death.
[00:20:59] MIT and the Department of Justice came under heavy criticism.
[00:21:04] Why had they pursued the case so aggressively, especially when the supposed victim, JSTOR, wanted no part in it?
[00:21:13] Why had they refused to offer a fairer plea deal, one that didn’t involve prison time? He was the least violent person imaginable.
[00:21:22] In the aftermath, he became a symbol. A symbol of the dangers of government overreach, of the harshness of America’s criminal justice system, but also of the potential of the internet to challenge power and change the world.
[00:21:39] His legacy lives on in the technology he helped build and in the movements he inspired: the fight for open access to knowledge, for transparency, and for a truly free internet.
[00:21:53] Yet his story also leaves us with important, sometimes uncomfortable, questions.
[00:22:00] Should acts of digital civil disobedience be punished like violent crime?
[00:22:06] Is there any moral difference between a crime committed for personal enrichment and one committed for the common good?
[00:22:14] And what does Aaron Swartz’s death tell us about the society we live in, and the price of fighting for freedom in the digital age?
[00:22:23] Depending on how you answer those questions, there is probably another one.
[00:22:28] Was Aaron Swartz a dangerous criminal or one of the great martyrs of the Internet age?
[00:22:35] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Aaron Swartz.
[00:22:39] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:43] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:46] Had you heard of Aaron Swartz before? What did you make of this story?
[00:22:50] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is part two of our three-part mini-series on “Young, American Outlaws”.
[00:00:28] In case you missed part one, it was on Ross Ulbricht, the man who founded the world’s biggest online drug marketplace, Silk Road.
[00:00:36] Next up, part three will be on Luigi Mangione, the young man who gunned down the CEO of one of America’s largest health insurance companies.
[00:00:46] And this episode, part two, will be on a man called Aaron Swartz. He was one of the most gifted technical minds of his generation, a founding team member of the website Reddit and a vocal advocate for a free and open internet.
[00:01:03] In this quest, however, he got on the wrong side of the law, and it ended in tragedy.
[00:01:10] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:15] If you were going to picture the scene of a great crime, the campus at MIT–The Massachusetts Institute of Technology–might not be the first thing that comes to mind.
[00:01:27] Young men and women studying together, hunched over laptops, furiously trying to make a deadline for a paper, their eyes only remaining open thanks to copious amounts of energy drinks and coffee.
[00:01:42] Yet it was here, or to be precise, in a utility closet on campus, that one of the greatest thefts of intellectual property in history was committed.
[00:01:54] Or, if you ask someone else, that a young man did something that harmed nobody, from which he made no personal gain, and the goal of which was to make knowledge freely available to anyone who wanted to learn.
[00:02:10] That criminal, or hero, was Aaron Swartz, a then 24-year-old computer programmer and internet activist.
[00:02:19] What followed was a two-year battle with the US Justice Department, a national debate on censorship, copyright, and freedom of information, and tragically ended in Swartz being found dead in his Brooklyn apartment at the age of 26.
[00:02:38] His life was short, but his contributions, not just to the debate on copyright but also to the technology and systems we still use today, were significant.
[00:02:51] He was born in 1986, so he was very much part of the generation that grew up as the Internet was just getting started.
[00:03:01] He was closer to “the action” than most, as his father worked in technology, so there was always a computer at home he could tinker around with.
[00:03:11] And from an early age, he was very interested in computers and how they worked.
[00:03:18] It’s fascinating listening to him talk about this early period of his life–the early years of the World Wide Web–and his hopes and dreams about what this might become, how it would democratise access to information, how anyone from anywhere in the world could connect with anyone else over shared, mutual interests, no matter how niche.
[00:03:43] He grew up in a small community, and there were only a handful of people like him, with the same interests and hobbies.
[00:03:51] But on the internet, this growing magical community, he found kindred spirits, people who shared the same interests as he did. He found his people.
[00:04:04] And this wasn’t just a boy posting messages on forums; he was an active contributor to the architecture of the Internet, not just building websites but also working on the systems and technologies behind them.
[00:04:20] When he was only 12 years old, he built something called The Info Network, which was a user-generated encyclopedia. Wikipedia, essentially, but 3 years before Wikipedia.
[00:04:33] Just a few years later, he became a core contributor to the group that made RSS.
[00:04:40] Now, without getting too technical, RSS is the technology that allows users to get information in a standardised format. It’s used for news syndication, it’s also used for podcasts, and it means that you can open up a podcast app, subscribe to different podcasts, and new episodes automatically appear in your feed.
[00:05:04] It’s probably something you’ve never thought too much about before, but someone had to envision and create this standardised feed technology, and that person, or at least one of the people in that group, was a then-teenage Aaron Swartz.
[00:05:21] Importantly, this technology is Open Source; it’s free.
[00:05:27] As a publisher, podcaster or user of RSS, you don’t need to pay RSS.com, the creators of RSS, or anyone to use it. It’s free.
[00:05:40] Swartz and his fellow contributors behind RSS believed this technology should exist; they built it, and they decided it should be freely accessible to everyone.
[00:05:53] So that’s what it is.
[00:05:56] These contributions made him something of a household name in certain programming circles; he would be invited to speak at conferences and give interviews, and people who didn’t know anything about him would be somewhat surprised when the name “Aaron Swartz” would be announced and a 15-year-old boy would take to the stage.
[00:06:18] But he spoke with great clarity, he was exceptionally talented, and was treated as a peer by some of the most influential people in the early days of the World Wide Web.
[00:06:31] He was accepted at Stanford at the age of 17, but quickly dropped out, later saying he was disillusioned with what he saw as a culture more focused on status and lifestyle than on learning
[00:06:46] At the age of 19, he founded a start-up called Infogami, which shortly afterwards merged with another fledgling site called Reddit.
[00:06:57] Reddit, as you probably know, is now one of the most visited websites in the world, with hundreds of millions of users posting, voting, and commenting every day.
[00:07:11] It is, essentially, what Aaron Swartz had always hoped the internet would be, a place for people to find like-minded souls and connect over shared interests, no matter how niche and obscure.
[00:07:26] After this merger, he became part of the small founding team, and when Reddit was bought by the giant publishing house Condé Nast in 2006, he suddenly found himself with seven figures in his bank account and working inside one of America’s largest media corporations.
[00:07:46] This was not where Aaron Swartz wanted to be.
[00:07:50] He didn’t care about the money or the prestige of working for a big company.
[00:07:55] His lifestyle didn’t change in the slightest, and this newly minted millionaire continued to live in a flatshare, in a bedroom so small it was referred to as “the closet”.
[00:08:09] What he cared about was freedom of information, the power of the internet, and the potential for technology to change society.
[00:08:20] Anyone who knew him knew that he wouldn’t hack it in the corporate world, and sure enough, he left Condé Nast after just a year, saying he felt stifled by the corporate environment.
[00:08:34] Afterwards, and now financially free and not beholden to anyone, he threw himself into his true passion: activism.
[00:08:44] He worked with Creative Commons, the organisation that allows authors and artists to license their work freely so that others can build upon it. He started groups campaigning for government transparency and accountability.
[00:08:59] And he became deeply involved in the debate over copyright law, arguing that copyright was too restrictive and unfairly limited access to knowledge.
[00:09:12] In 2008, he published what became known as the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”.
[00:09:20] In it, he argued that scientists and researchers had a moral responsibility to share their work freely, and that ordinary people should take action if necessary to liberate information that was being unjustly restricted.
[00:09:38] In his words: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past.”
[00:09:58] It was a radical message, and it was one he would soon try to put into action.
[00:10:05] His first target was the millions of American public court documents that were not covered by any kind of copyright, but for which the US government charged $0.08 per page for users to access.
[00:10:20] Swartz believed these should be free, especially as the court system made a $150 million a year profit from selling them.
[00:10:32] He wrote a script that downloaded them en masse and managed to download 20 million pages of court documents—an estimated 20% of the total.
[00:10:45] His intention was to make them publicly available, free of charge, because they were items of public record, after all.
[00:10:54] He was caught and questioned by the FBI, but no charges were pressed.
[00:11:01] It would be his first brush with the law, but unfortunately not the last.
[00:11:07] A year later, he set his sights on JSTOR, which, if you went to university at any point in the last 20 years or so, you might remember as one of the largest digital libraries of academic papers.
[00:11:22] JSTOR contains millions of articles from thousands of journals, covering virtually every field of knowledge.
[00:11:31] Swartz thought it was morally wrong that these millions of academic papers and journals, which had often been funded by taxpayers’ money, were locked away behind expensive paywalls.
[00:11:45] This was…wrong.
[00:11:48] Knowledge, he believed, should not be locked up by governments or corporations. It should be open and available to everyone, everywhere.
[00:11:59] JSTOR kept the gates closed.
[00:12:02] So Swartz set out to do something about it. As he put in his earlier manifesto, “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world”
[00:12:16] Using the network at MIT, he began systematically downloading articles from JSTOR.
[00:12:24] This wasn’t “stealing”, per se; he had a valid individual JSTOR account via Harvard, where he was a research fellow.
[00:12:34] The difference was that he wasn’t using his account as it was intended; he wasn’t downloading single files, manually going to each one and clicking “download” with his mouse.
[00:12:46] Using similar techniques to those he had used to download millions of pages of court documents, he wrote automated scripts to download millions of research papers from the JSTOR database.
[00:12:59] At first, he used his own laptop, sitting in campus libraries. It was fast, but not fast enough.
[00:13:08] Eventually, he went so far as to sneak into a locked utility closet, where he hid a laptop connected directly to MIT’s network so it could download files around the clock.
[00:13:21] Over the course of a few weeks, JSTOR engineers noticed strange activity.
[00:13:28] Their servers were being hammered with download requests, far more than a normal user would ever make. They traced it back to MIT, and eventually to the closet where Swartz’s laptop was hidden.
[00:13:43] The police were called in. They located the closet and found the laptop. But instead of taking the computer away and trying to find its owner by hacking into it, they did something less high-tech but more effective.
[00:13:59] They planted a hidden camera, assuming that they would be able to catch the perpetrator red-handed, in the act.
[00:14:08] And sure enough, shortly afterwards, Swartz could be plainly seen coming into the closet and taking the laptop.
[00:14:17] Police didn’t arrive in time to arrest him in the closet, but he was spotted shortly afterwards, and in January 2011, he was arrested. The laptop was seized, and the FBI soon became involved.
[00:14:34] Importantly, he hadn’t yet done anything with the files he had downloaded, and he returned them all.
[00:14:41] And JSTOR, the supposed victim of the crime, decided not to press charges.
[00:14:48] They quickly settled, and the organisation even released a public statement saying it did not wish to see Swartz punished.
[00:14:58] And it was assumed that MIT–the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the home of many a hacker–would be supportive of Swartz, keen for him to get off with a slap on the wrist and nothing more, and would intervene on his behalf.
[00:15:15] It did not.
[00:15:17] And Swartz found himself up against the full weight of the U.S. Department of Justice.
[00:15:24] Federal prosecutors stepped in and charged him with multiple counts of computer fraud and wire fraud, which carried a maximum possible sentence of 35 years in prison.
[00:15:36] For downloading academic articles.
[00:15:40] To many people, not just his friends and supporters, but people finding out about Swartz for the first time, this seemed absurd.
[00:15:50] Thirty-five years in prison was the kind of sentence given to violent criminals–to armed robbers, murderers, and rapists–not to a young man who had downloaded publicly accessible academic journals.
[00:16:06] And remember, he hadn’t sold the files, hadn’t shared or published them, hadn’t made a cent from any of it.
[00:16:14] His goal was ideological, not financial.
[00:16:18] He believed that this knowledge should not be locked away, it should be free for anyone, anywhere, who wanted to learn.
[00:16:27] But prosecutors didn’t see it that way.
[00:16:30] They wanted to make an example of him. In their eyes, he wasn’t a principled activist. He was a thief, someone who had broken into a system to steal millions of documents.
[00:16:44] As the lead federal prosecutor put it, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar.”
[00:16:53] A crowbar, by the way, is a metal bar often used by criminals to force their way into something.
[00:17:01] As the months went on, the pressure grew.
[00:17:05] Each time his lawyers tried to negotiate a deal, prosecutors pushed for harsher terms. He faced the possibility of decades in prison and ruinous financial penalties unless he pleaded guilty to a felony.
[00:17:21] This plea deal would mean spending six months behind bars.
[00:17:26] Still, for someone who was only 24, it was a terrifying prospect.
[00:17:32] Pleading guilty would mean admitting guilt, admitting he had committed a crime.
[00:17:38] He would be marked for life as a felon, something he simply didn’t believe he was.
[00:17:45] During all this time, he didn’t stop his campaign for internet freedom.
[00:17:50] In 2012, while his trial was still looming, he played a central role in one of the most successful online protests in history.
[00:18:00] That year, the U.S. Congress was preparing to vote on a law called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.
[00:18:09] On the surface, it was about preventing copyright theft.
[00:18:13] But in practice, it gave the government sweeping new powers to shut down websites, block domain names, and censor online content. To Swartz and many others, it was a direct threat to the open internet.
[00:18:30] He co-founded an organisation called Demand Progress, which mobilised millions of people online to protest against SOPA.
[00:18:40] On 18 January 2012, websites including Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of others went dark in protest. The result was extraordinary. Within days, politicians who had supported the bill backed down, and SOPA was dead.
[00:19:01] He had helped stop what he and many others believed would have been the end of the free internet. He was hailed as a hero by activists, programmers, and ordinary internet users alike.
[00:19:15] But even as his reputation in those circles grew, the criminal case against him dragged on.
[00:19:23] The prosecutors didn’t care that JSTOR had dropped its complaint.
[00:19:27] They didn’t care about his contributions to the public internet or how well-respected he was in the programming community.
[00:19:34] They cared that he had broken the law, and they were determined to win.
[00:19:40] By early 2013, Swartz was exhausted.
[00:19:44] He had struggled with depression for years.
[00:19:48] Friends described him as brilliant but often fragile, deeply idealistic but weighed down by the injustices he saw in the world.
[00:19:59] The looming trial magnified these struggles, these demons he couldn’t shake.
[00:20:05] Friends said he was deeply depressed, worn down by the endless legal battle and the weight of the possible sentence hanging over him.
[00:20:16] He had spent two years fighting, and it seemed like there was no way out. It looked highly likely that he was going to prison for a long time, and he was powerless to stop it.
[00:20:28] On 11 January 2013, his girlfriend came back to their Brooklyn apartment to find him dead, hanging by his belt.
[00:20:38] He was 26 years old.
[00:20:40] His death sent shockwaves through the world of technology and beyond. There was grief, anger, and disbelief.
[00:20:50] To many, it seemed like the U.S. government had hounded a young, brilliant technologist to his death.
[00:20:59] MIT and the Department of Justice came under heavy criticism.
[00:21:04] Why had they pursued the case so aggressively, especially when the supposed victim, JSTOR, wanted no part in it?
[00:21:13] Why had they refused to offer a fairer plea deal, one that didn’t involve prison time? He was the least violent person imaginable.
[00:21:22] In the aftermath, he became a symbol. A symbol of the dangers of government overreach, of the harshness of America’s criminal justice system, but also of the potential of the internet to challenge power and change the world.
[00:21:39] His legacy lives on in the technology he helped build and in the movements he inspired: the fight for open access to knowledge, for transparency, and for a truly free internet.
[00:21:53] Yet his story also leaves us with important, sometimes uncomfortable, questions.
[00:22:00] Should acts of digital civil disobedience be punished like violent crime?
[00:22:06] Is there any moral difference between a crime committed for personal enrichment and one committed for the common good?
[00:22:14] And what does Aaron Swartz’s death tell us about the society we live in, and the price of fighting for freedom in the digital age?
[00:22:23] Depending on how you answer those questions, there is probably another one.
[00:22:28] Was Aaron Swartz a dangerous criminal or one of the great martyrs of the Internet age?
[00:22:35] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Aaron Swartz.
[00:22:39] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:43] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:46] Had you heard of Aaron Swartz before? What did you make of this story?
[00:22:50] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is part two of our three-part mini-series on “Young, American Outlaws”.
[00:00:28] In case you missed part one, it was on Ross Ulbricht, the man who founded the world’s biggest online drug marketplace, Silk Road.
[00:00:36] Next up, part three will be on Luigi Mangione, the young man who gunned down the CEO of one of America’s largest health insurance companies.
[00:00:46] And this episode, part two, will be on a man called Aaron Swartz. He was one of the most gifted technical minds of his generation, a founding team member of the website Reddit and a vocal advocate for a free and open internet.
[00:01:03] In this quest, however, he got on the wrong side of the law, and it ended in tragedy.
[00:01:10] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:15] If you were going to picture the scene of a great crime, the campus at MIT–The Massachusetts Institute of Technology–might not be the first thing that comes to mind.
[00:01:27] Young men and women studying together, hunched over laptops, furiously trying to make a deadline for a paper, their eyes only remaining open thanks to copious amounts of energy drinks and coffee.
[00:01:42] Yet it was here, or to be precise, in a utility closet on campus, that one of the greatest thefts of intellectual property in history was committed.
[00:01:54] Or, if you ask someone else, that a young man did something that harmed nobody, from which he made no personal gain, and the goal of which was to make knowledge freely available to anyone who wanted to learn.
[00:02:10] That criminal, or hero, was Aaron Swartz, a then 24-year-old computer programmer and internet activist.
[00:02:19] What followed was a two-year battle with the US Justice Department, a national debate on censorship, copyright, and freedom of information, and tragically ended in Swartz being found dead in his Brooklyn apartment at the age of 26.
[00:02:38] His life was short, but his contributions, not just to the debate on copyright but also to the technology and systems we still use today, were significant.
[00:02:51] He was born in 1986, so he was very much part of the generation that grew up as the Internet was just getting started.
[00:03:01] He was closer to “the action” than most, as his father worked in technology, so there was always a computer at home he could tinker around with.
[00:03:11] And from an early age, he was very interested in computers and how they worked.
[00:03:18] It’s fascinating listening to him talk about this early period of his life–the early years of the World Wide Web–and his hopes and dreams about what this might become, how it would democratise access to information, how anyone from anywhere in the world could connect with anyone else over shared, mutual interests, no matter how niche.
[00:03:43] He grew up in a small community, and there were only a handful of people like him, with the same interests and hobbies.
[00:03:51] But on the internet, this growing magical community, he found kindred spirits, people who shared the same interests as he did. He found his people.
[00:04:04] And this wasn’t just a boy posting messages on forums; he was an active contributor to the architecture of the Internet, not just building websites but also working on the systems and technologies behind them.
[00:04:20] When he was only 12 years old, he built something called The Info Network, which was a user-generated encyclopedia. Wikipedia, essentially, but 3 years before Wikipedia.
[00:04:33] Just a few years later, he became a core contributor to the group that made RSS.
[00:04:40] Now, without getting too technical, RSS is the technology that allows users to get information in a standardised format. It’s used for news syndication, it’s also used for podcasts, and it means that you can open up a podcast app, subscribe to different podcasts, and new episodes automatically appear in your feed.
[00:05:04] It’s probably something you’ve never thought too much about before, but someone had to envision and create this standardised feed technology, and that person, or at least one of the people in that group, was a then-teenage Aaron Swartz.
[00:05:21] Importantly, this technology is Open Source; it’s free.
[00:05:27] As a publisher, podcaster or user of RSS, you don’t need to pay RSS.com, the creators of RSS, or anyone to use it. It’s free.
[00:05:40] Swartz and his fellow contributors behind RSS believed this technology should exist; they built it, and they decided it should be freely accessible to everyone.
[00:05:53] So that’s what it is.
[00:05:56] These contributions made him something of a household name in certain programming circles; he would be invited to speak at conferences and give interviews, and people who didn’t know anything about him would be somewhat surprised when the name “Aaron Swartz” would be announced and a 15-year-old boy would take to the stage.
[00:06:18] But he spoke with great clarity, he was exceptionally talented, and was treated as a peer by some of the most influential people in the early days of the World Wide Web.
[00:06:31] He was accepted at Stanford at the age of 17, but quickly dropped out, later saying he was disillusioned with what he saw as a culture more focused on status and lifestyle than on learning
[00:06:46] At the age of 19, he founded a start-up called Infogami, which shortly afterwards merged with another fledgling site called Reddit.
[00:06:57] Reddit, as you probably know, is now one of the most visited websites in the world, with hundreds of millions of users posting, voting, and commenting every day.
[00:07:11] It is, essentially, what Aaron Swartz had always hoped the internet would be, a place for people to find like-minded souls and connect over shared interests, no matter how niche and obscure.
[00:07:26] After this merger, he became part of the small founding team, and when Reddit was bought by the giant publishing house Condé Nast in 2006, he suddenly found himself with seven figures in his bank account and working inside one of America’s largest media corporations.
[00:07:46] This was not where Aaron Swartz wanted to be.
[00:07:50] He didn’t care about the money or the prestige of working for a big company.
[00:07:55] His lifestyle didn’t change in the slightest, and this newly minted millionaire continued to live in a flatshare, in a bedroom so small it was referred to as “the closet”.
[00:08:09] What he cared about was freedom of information, the power of the internet, and the potential for technology to change society.
[00:08:20] Anyone who knew him knew that he wouldn’t hack it in the corporate world, and sure enough, he left Condé Nast after just a year, saying he felt stifled by the corporate environment.
[00:08:34] Afterwards, and now financially free and not beholden to anyone, he threw himself into his true passion: activism.
[00:08:44] He worked with Creative Commons, the organisation that allows authors and artists to license their work freely so that others can build upon it. He started groups campaigning for government transparency and accountability.
[00:08:59] And he became deeply involved in the debate over copyright law, arguing that copyright was too restrictive and unfairly limited access to knowledge.
[00:09:12] In 2008, he published what became known as the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”.
[00:09:20] In it, he argued that scientists and researchers had a moral responsibility to share their work freely, and that ordinary people should take action if necessary to liberate information that was being unjustly restricted.
[00:09:38] In his words: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past.”
[00:09:58] It was a radical message, and it was one he would soon try to put into action.
[00:10:05] His first target was the millions of American public court documents that were not covered by any kind of copyright, but for which the US government charged $0.08 per page for users to access.
[00:10:20] Swartz believed these should be free, especially as the court system made a $150 million a year profit from selling them.
[00:10:32] He wrote a script that downloaded them en masse and managed to download 20 million pages of court documents—an estimated 20% of the total.
[00:10:45] His intention was to make them publicly available, free of charge, because they were items of public record, after all.
[00:10:54] He was caught and questioned by the FBI, but no charges were pressed.
[00:11:01] It would be his first brush with the law, but unfortunately not the last.
[00:11:07] A year later, he set his sights on JSTOR, which, if you went to university at any point in the last 20 years or so, you might remember as one of the largest digital libraries of academic papers.
[00:11:22] JSTOR contains millions of articles from thousands of journals, covering virtually every field of knowledge.
[00:11:31] Swartz thought it was morally wrong that these millions of academic papers and journals, which had often been funded by taxpayers’ money, were locked away behind expensive paywalls.
[00:11:45] This was…wrong.
[00:11:48] Knowledge, he believed, should not be locked up by governments or corporations. It should be open and available to everyone, everywhere.
[00:11:59] JSTOR kept the gates closed.
[00:12:02] So Swartz set out to do something about it. As he put in his earlier manifesto, “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world”
[00:12:16] Using the network at MIT, he began systematically downloading articles from JSTOR.
[00:12:24] This wasn’t “stealing”, per se; he had a valid individual JSTOR account via Harvard, where he was a research fellow.
[00:12:34] The difference was that he wasn’t using his account as it was intended; he wasn’t downloading single files, manually going to each one and clicking “download” with his mouse.
[00:12:46] Using similar techniques to those he had used to download millions of pages of court documents, he wrote automated scripts to download millions of research papers from the JSTOR database.
[00:12:59] At first, he used his own laptop, sitting in campus libraries. It was fast, but not fast enough.
[00:13:08] Eventually, he went so far as to sneak into a locked utility closet, where he hid a laptop connected directly to MIT’s network so it could download files around the clock.
[00:13:21] Over the course of a few weeks, JSTOR engineers noticed strange activity.
[00:13:28] Their servers were being hammered with download requests, far more than a normal user would ever make. They traced it back to MIT, and eventually to the closet where Swartz’s laptop was hidden.
[00:13:43] The police were called in. They located the closet and found the laptop. But instead of taking the computer away and trying to find its owner by hacking into it, they did something less high-tech but more effective.
[00:13:59] They planted a hidden camera, assuming that they would be able to catch the perpetrator red-handed, in the act.
[00:14:08] And sure enough, shortly afterwards, Swartz could be plainly seen coming into the closet and taking the laptop.
[00:14:17] Police didn’t arrive in time to arrest him in the closet, but he was spotted shortly afterwards, and in January 2011, he was arrested. The laptop was seized, and the FBI soon became involved.
[00:14:34] Importantly, he hadn’t yet done anything with the files he had downloaded, and he returned them all.
[00:14:41] And JSTOR, the supposed victim of the crime, decided not to press charges.
[00:14:48] They quickly settled, and the organisation even released a public statement saying it did not wish to see Swartz punished.
[00:14:58] And it was assumed that MIT–the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the home of many a hacker–would be supportive of Swartz, keen for him to get off with a slap on the wrist and nothing more, and would intervene on his behalf.
[00:15:15] It did not.
[00:15:17] And Swartz found himself up against the full weight of the U.S. Department of Justice.
[00:15:24] Federal prosecutors stepped in and charged him with multiple counts of computer fraud and wire fraud, which carried a maximum possible sentence of 35 years in prison.
[00:15:36] For downloading academic articles.
[00:15:40] To many people, not just his friends and supporters, but people finding out about Swartz for the first time, this seemed absurd.
[00:15:50] Thirty-five years in prison was the kind of sentence given to violent criminals–to armed robbers, murderers, and rapists–not to a young man who had downloaded publicly accessible academic journals.
[00:16:06] And remember, he hadn’t sold the files, hadn’t shared or published them, hadn’t made a cent from any of it.
[00:16:14] His goal was ideological, not financial.
[00:16:18] He believed that this knowledge should not be locked away, it should be free for anyone, anywhere, who wanted to learn.
[00:16:27] But prosecutors didn’t see it that way.
[00:16:30] They wanted to make an example of him. In their eyes, he wasn’t a principled activist. He was a thief, someone who had broken into a system to steal millions of documents.
[00:16:44] As the lead federal prosecutor put it, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar.”
[00:16:53] A crowbar, by the way, is a metal bar often used by criminals to force their way into something.
[00:17:01] As the months went on, the pressure grew.
[00:17:05] Each time his lawyers tried to negotiate a deal, prosecutors pushed for harsher terms. He faced the possibility of decades in prison and ruinous financial penalties unless he pleaded guilty to a felony.
[00:17:21] This plea deal would mean spending six months behind bars.
[00:17:26] Still, for someone who was only 24, it was a terrifying prospect.
[00:17:32] Pleading guilty would mean admitting guilt, admitting he had committed a crime.
[00:17:38] He would be marked for life as a felon, something he simply didn’t believe he was.
[00:17:45] During all this time, he didn’t stop his campaign for internet freedom.
[00:17:50] In 2012, while his trial was still looming, he played a central role in one of the most successful online protests in history.
[00:18:00] That year, the U.S. Congress was preparing to vote on a law called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.
[00:18:09] On the surface, it was about preventing copyright theft.
[00:18:13] But in practice, it gave the government sweeping new powers to shut down websites, block domain names, and censor online content. To Swartz and many others, it was a direct threat to the open internet.
[00:18:30] He co-founded an organisation called Demand Progress, which mobilised millions of people online to protest against SOPA.
[00:18:40] On 18 January 2012, websites including Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of others went dark in protest. The result was extraordinary. Within days, politicians who had supported the bill backed down, and SOPA was dead.
[00:19:01] He had helped stop what he and many others believed would have been the end of the free internet. He was hailed as a hero by activists, programmers, and ordinary internet users alike.
[00:19:15] But even as his reputation in those circles grew, the criminal case against him dragged on.
[00:19:23] The prosecutors didn’t care that JSTOR had dropped its complaint.
[00:19:27] They didn’t care about his contributions to the public internet or how well-respected he was in the programming community.
[00:19:34] They cared that he had broken the law, and they were determined to win.
[00:19:40] By early 2013, Swartz was exhausted.
[00:19:44] He had struggled with depression for years.
[00:19:48] Friends described him as brilliant but often fragile, deeply idealistic but weighed down by the injustices he saw in the world.
[00:19:59] The looming trial magnified these struggles, these demons he couldn’t shake.
[00:20:05] Friends said he was deeply depressed, worn down by the endless legal battle and the weight of the possible sentence hanging over him.
[00:20:16] He had spent two years fighting, and it seemed like there was no way out. It looked highly likely that he was going to prison for a long time, and he was powerless to stop it.
[00:20:28] On 11 January 2013, his girlfriend came back to their Brooklyn apartment to find him dead, hanging by his belt.
[00:20:38] He was 26 years old.
[00:20:40] His death sent shockwaves through the world of technology and beyond. There was grief, anger, and disbelief.
[00:20:50] To many, it seemed like the U.S. government had hounded a young, brilliant technologist to his death.
[00:20:59] MIT and the Department of Justice came under heavy criticism.
[00:21:04] Why had they pursued the case so aggressively, especially when the supposed victim, JSTOR, wanted no part in it?
[00:21:13] Why had they refused to offer a fairer plea deal, one that didn’t involve prison time? He was the least violent person imaginable.
[00:21:22] In the aftermath, he became a symbol. A symbol of the dangers of government overreach, of the harshness of America’s criminal justice system, but also of the potential of the internet to challenge power and change the world.
[00:21:39] His legacy lives on in the technology he helped build and in the movements he inspired: the fight for open access to knowledge, for transparency, and for a truly free internet.
[00:21:53] Yet his story also leaves us with important, sometimes uncomfortable, questions.
[00:22:00] Should acts of digital civil disobedience be punished like violent crime?
[00:22:06] Is there any moral difference between a crime committed for personal enrichment and one committed for the common good?
[00:22:14] And what does Aaron Swartz’s death tell us about the society we live in, and the price of fighting for freedom in the digital age?
[00:22:23] Depending on how you answer those questions, there is probably another one.
[00:22:28] Was Aaron Swartz a dangerous criminal or one of the great martyrs of the Internet age?
[00:22:35] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Aaron Swartz.
[00:22:39] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:43] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:46] Had you heard of Aaron Swartz before? What did you make of this story?
[00:22:50] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
