Aaron Swartz and the open web

I didn’t know Aaron Swartz. I’ve been trying to work out why his death on January 11th hit me as hard as it did, and I think it’s because so much of the web I use every day has his fingerprints on it in ways I’d never stopped to notice.

He helped write the RSS 1.0 spec when he was fourteen, and I read most of the internet through RSS. He worked with Lawrence Lessig on the technical side of Creative Commons. He wrote web.py, he was part of the early Reddit team, he co-founded Demand Progress and was one of the loudest voices against SOPA last year, a fight a lot of us cheered on from the sidelines while people like him did the actual work.

The case, as best I understand it: in 2010 and 2011 he used MIT’s network to download a huge number of academic articles from JSTOR, eventually from a laptop hidden in a wiring closet he wasn’t supposed to be in. JSTOR settled with him and said it didn’t want to pursue it. The federal prosecutors in Massachusetts did. He was facing wire fraud and a pile of Computer Fraud and Abuse Act counts, thirteen felonies in all, and a theoretical maximum of decades in prison. The trial was supposed to start in April.

I’m not a lawyer and I’m not going to pretend what he did was obviously legal. But the gap between what he did and the response is enormous. This was academic research, a lot of it publicly funded, the organization that held it had already settled, and the government went at him with a statute written for breaking into computers and a sentence that would make a violent criminal wince. His family’s statement called his death “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach”, and I find it hard to argue with them. Zoe Lofgren has proposed “Aaron’s Law” to stop terms-of-service violations being treated as crimes under the CFAA. I hope it passes, I’m not holding my breath.

What keeps bugging me is how lopsided my own ledger is. I’ve built my whole career on open source libraries, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, RSS, free tutorials written by people who just wanted to share what they’d figured out. I’ve given back a few patches, some answers, this blog. Compared to what I’ve taken that’s a rounding error. Aaron spent his life on the giving side of that ledger, often at real personal cost, and the system he was trying to make better treated him like a criminal. He was 26.

I’ve set up a monthly donation to the EFF, which has been fighting CFAA abuse for years, and started paying for a couple of the open source tools I use every day instead of just starring them on GitHub.

If you’re struggling, please talk to someone. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.