We Need More Hackers
Up until a few months ago, I had never heard the name Aaron Swartz. My sister encouraged me to look up his Ted Talks, or check out one of the documentaries that have been made about him. At first glance he looked like a little bit like a "too cool for school" left leaning complainer, but I decided to give him a chance. I found myself drawn into “Anonymous – The Story of Aaron Swartz” a documentary film by Brian Knappenberger.
Aaron was born in Illinois, to a middle class Jewish family. As a child he possessed an uncommon intellect. He created his first award winning website at 13, and before he was 20 was already a programmer of some renown. Although very impressive, it wasn’t Aaron’s intellect, or his programming prowess that impressed me. It was his approach to life, and especially his approach to working through problems. Since becoming more familiar with this unique and brilliant young man, my understanding of the term “hacker” has evolved.
Swartz didn’t just hack computers, he hacked life. And not in a "35 uses for a pool noodle" sort of way. When confronted with a problem, he seemed to have an intuitive ability to see the “programming” in which the problem existed. Challenges and difficulties to him, were just bugs in the program that could (an should) be fixed.
One such problem (at least in Swartz’s mind) was a proposed piece of legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) of 2011. This legislation was introduced as a solution to rampant online copyright infringement. However, many people believed that the bill went to far in requiring every website that openly shared content to police all of that content, or risk being completely shut down. Opponents felt that if it became law, SOPA could fundamentally suppress the open exchange of ideas that the Internet had come to symbolize. Websites like YouTube and Facebook would end up creating systems and regulations to protect themselves that would ultimately make it too cumbersome to communicate in the way we've become used to.
Instead of resigning himself to the idea that “you can’t fight City Hall”, Swartz determined to do something about it. He organized like-minded friends and colleagues. He used his programming skills to create automated ways for interested people to sign petitions. He made it simple to get informed, sign a petition, and dial your local congressman or senator, all from one coordinated website. He organized and spoke at rallies. He educated people on how best to apply pressure to the lawmakers who would ultimately be making the decision. Most importantly he passionately educated anyone who would listen about what he felt were the real dangers of the proposed law. He spent very little time bemoaning the unfairness of the system, or complaining that it was too hard to make your voice heard. He simply identified what he saw as the problem, and focused on it with laser like intensity.
Swartz did something else very unique in these types of situations – he WON. He worked hard during the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, culminating on January 18, 2012 when more than one hundred and fifteen thousand websites participated in a protest, including Google, Mozilla, Reddit and Wikipedia. Sites either went off line completely, or displayed a black screen and provided links to information on SOPA. Within two days, the momentum for the bill had completely reversed and the bill was removed from further voting, effectively stopping it in it's tracks. Many political insiders were shocked and amazed that a bill, which had significant lobbying efforts, and well funded advocates, was quashed by a groundswell of grassroots activism.
Whether you agree with Swartz’s opposition to the bill, or the outcome, I believe everyone should admire the process. It has become fashionable to believe that the deck is stacked against us. You hear the laments on social media and frequently in conversation.
Legislation is all bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists. The Tax code is too complicated for lay people to understand, and therefore we are slaves to it. People in power are trying to keep us in fear, so that they can control us. The main stream media is in league with politicians, and only give us the information they want us to hear. The system is designed so that normal people can't have a voice.
While there are certainly situations that tend to discourage our sense of our individual ability to influence the governmental system that we live and work within, this is still the United States of America with 232 years of operation under the same management – namely the People and the Constitution. Situations are complex, but there IS a process whereby individuals can seek justice and groups can seek change.
This doesn’t mean it’s a perfect system, either in terms of fairness OR efficiency. Aaron Swartz found this to be the case when he sought to make a change on another front. In this case, he wondered at the system that was in place to allow people to get access to court documents and other electronic files that were public record. A private company called JSTOR was contracted by the government to digitize and make available such documents. In return they were allowed to charge a reasonable fee per document to cover their costs. In Swartz’s opinion JSTOR's fee system was anything but "reasonable”. He felt that public information ought to be more easily accessible to the public.
JSTOR had agreements with a handful of universities whereby their students and faculty could access JSTOR records at no cost at university libraries and through university networks. Aaron created a guest account on MIT’s system and wrote a computer script that started downloading documents as fast as the network could handle. He would then make the documents available elsewhere, free of charge. When the volume of downloads was noticed, that account was shut down, and Swartz then resorted to placing a laptop with an external hard drive in an unlocked storage closet with internet access. Running a similar program, he was able to download a significant amount of data. When MIT became aware, they placed a camera in the closet, and caught Aaron red-handed coming into the closet to monitor the computer and change hard drives.
This evidence eventually led to 13 criminal charges which carried potential maximum penalties of one million dollars, and thirty-five years in prison. This all happened about one year prior to Swartz’s involvement in the defeat of the SOPA legislation. A year after SOPA was mothballed, on January 9, 2013, Aaron was told he needed to accept a deal in which he would plead guilty to all 13 charges and serve 6 months. Otherwise, he could end up serving 7 years or more. Two days later Aaron was found dead in his New York Apartment where he had killed himself.
It is not my intent to pass judgment on whether the prosecutors in this case acted properly. I don't know whether MIT, JSTOR or any other party ought to be thought of as contributors to Aaron’s untimely death. Each of my readers can do their own research, and decide for themselves whether the government (or bureaucrats within the government) were seeking to make an example of, or take revenge on Aaron because he was a successful critic of government policies.
One thing seems to be clear though. Aaron Swartz had far more influence than he probably thought he would. Reflecting on that January Day, when he watched Senators and Congressmen switch their positions on SOPA, he remarked,
"Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill they were supporting just a couple days ago... And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this, we had won. The thing that everyone said was impossible, that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream had happened. We did it. We won."
A year later, on the same day that Aaron received his ultimatum from federal prosecutors, JSTOR announced it was starting a beta program that would allow anyone to download up to 6 articles per month for free. Since then, and in the wake of COVID-19, JSTOR has increased that number to 100 articles per month.
The lesson that I have learned from studying Aaron’s story, is that we all should strive to be hackers instead of ideologues. Each of us have personal experiences that provide reasons to complain about injustice, unfairness, and our seeming powerlessness. We ally ourselves with different ideologies that we hope might wield some magical power to remake society into a version that will better serve our needs.
We rail against politicians, and talk about term limits or "draining the swamp"... and why? Because they make careers out of voting for, and passing thousand-page pieces of legislation without even having read them. It's easy to call them lazy. It might even be true. But what we can NOT call them, are bad representatives. If our system works, then they would represent us in the aggregate. And I think they do. We repost memes without researching their validity. We vote for candidates based on their party affiliation instead of their campaign platforms. We allow media to spoon feed us our opinions rather than doing the hard work to come up with them on our own. We make vague complaints about our representatives, but rarely bother to reach out to them, study their voting records, or read the legislation that they champion. So why should we expect our representatives to be so much better informed... so much more engaged than those they represent?
Our republic needs more people like Aaron Swartz. Our Republic needs hackers. Our Republic needs us.
“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.” - James 1:22-25
