Aaron Swartz: The Internet's Own Boy

Abstract

Aaron Swartz helped build the open internet before he was old enough to drive, and he argued all his life that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly accessible. At 14 he was one of the authors of the RSS 1.0 specification. At 15 he worked with Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons. At 25 he helped kill SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. At 26 he was facing up to 35 years in federal prison for downloading academic articles over MIT’s network. On January 11, 2013, he hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. The prosecution, widely condemned as disproportionate, became the standard example of computer-crime law applied to conduct it was never written for.

Aaron Swartz at a Wikipedia meetup in Boston, 2009. Image: Sage Ross, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Prodigy Arrives Early

Aaron Hillel Swartz was born on November 8, 1986, in Highland Park, Illinois. His father, Robert Swartz, had founded the software company Mark Williams Company. In 1999, at twelve, Aaron built a website called “The Info Network”, an encyclopedia that let users contribute articles, about two years before Wikipedia. It won the ArsDigita Prize.

At fourteen, he joined the RDF Site Summary (RSS) working group (RSS-DEV), a collection of mostly adult engineers and web developers who were trying to standardize a format for syndicating web content. He read the technical discussions, identified inconsistencies in the draft specification, and began contributing corrections. The group’s participants did not initially know he was fourteen. When they found out, some were skeptical; most, encountering the quality of his contributions, decided it didn’t matter.

The RSS 1.0 specification, published in December 2000 and revised through May 2001, lists Aaron Swartz of “The Info Network” among its twelve authors; he was fourteen and handled the 2001 revisions. The contributions of Dave Winer to the parallel RSS 0.9x/2.0 track ran concurrently; the RSS standards world was fractious, but Swartz’s technical contribution to the RDF-based branch was substantive and documented.

He skipped most of high school and enrolled at Stanford in 2004 at seventeen. He lasted one year before leaving; the social and intellectual rhythms of university life did not suit a person who had spent half his teenage years operating as a peer contributor to serious technical projects.

Creative Commons

At fifteen, still in high school, Swartz caught the attention of Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar who was building Creative Commons, a set of copyright licenses designed to give creators a middle ground between full copyright and public domain. The standard copyright system’s default (all rights reserved) was increasingly unsuited to the remix culture of the web, where building on others’ work was technically trivial but legally fraught.

Swartz worked with Lessig and the Creative Commons team on the technical infrastructure underlying the licenses, including the RDF metadata that allowed CC-licensed works to be machine-readable and searchable. Beyond writing code, he took part in deciding how the licenses should work and how they should be expressed in markup. Lessig later called him “one of the early architects of Creative Commons.”

The Creative Commons collaboration deepened Swartz’s conviction that the default legal regime for information was broken: copyright law, designed in the pre-internet era, was being used to restrict access to knowledge in ways that served no one’s legitimate interests and harmed the public. That conviction shaped every major project of his adult life, including the downloads that led to his prosecution.

Reddit, Infogami, and a Brief Acquisition

In 2005, Swartz applied to Y Combinator, the startup accelerator just being established by Paul Graham. He was accepted and worked on a web framework project called Infogami. When Infogami failed to gain traction, Graham arranged a merger with Reddit, the social link-sharing site that two other Y Combinator founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, were building.

Swartz became a co-owner through the merger and was given the title of co-founder, a label that has been argued over ever since because Huffman and Ohanian had started the site before he arrived. He wrote code for Reddit during a critical period and was part of the company when Condé Nast acquired it in 2006. Working inside a media company did not suit him, and in January 2007 he was asked to resign. He was twenty years old and already impatient with anything that did not advance the project of building a more open information ecosystem.

PACER

The federal court system maintained a database called PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) which charged eight cents per page to access documents that were public records of a public institution. In 2008, the Government Printing Office ran a pilot program giving free PACER access through 17 public libraries.

Between September 4 and 20, 2008, a Perl script Swartz ran on Amazon cloud servers, using a Sacramento library’s credentials, downloaded roughly 2.7 million documents (nearly 20 million pages) of federal court records so they could be made freely available. The GPO suspended the trial on September 29. A New York Times report claimed he had grabbed about 20% of PACER’s database. With PACER then holding some 500 million documents, the real share was under 1%. The documents were public records, and the free access period was legitimate. The FBI investigated for two months and closed the case without charges.

His 2008 “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto” stated his position plainly: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.” He called for people with database access to download and share everything, a romantic and illegal vision that he appeared to take literally.

The JSTOR Affair

In September 2010, Swartz registered for a guest account at MIT (he was then a fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics) and connected a laptop to MIT’s network in a wiring closet. He wrote a script that systematically downloaded articles from JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals. Over four months, the script downloaded what the first indictment put at approximately 4.8 million articles; the superseding indictment dropped the number and spoke of “a major portion” of the archive.

MIT discovered the hidden laptop on January 4, 2011, and set up a camera. Swartz was filmed entering the wiring closet that day, and again on January 6, 2011, when he was spotted on the live feed and arrested near the Harvard campus by MIT police and a Secret Service agent.

After Swartz returned the downloaded files, JSTOR declined to pursue civil or criminal action against him and said it considered the matter closed. The federal prosecutors went ahead anyway.

The Prosecution

The Department of Justice, under US Attorney Carmen Ortiz in Massachusetts and Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann, pursued the case despite JSTOR’s non-participation. The first indictment, on July 11, 2011, charged Swartz with four counts of wire fraud and computer fraud under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1986 law originally designed to prosecute malicious hackers. The CFAA’s broad language (criminalizing “unauthorized access” and “exceeding authorized access” to computer systems) was being stretched to cover conduct that most legal scholars argued was at most a civil violation.

A superseding indictment in September 2012 added nine charges, bringing the total to thirteen felony counts and raising his theoretical maximum exposure to roughly 50 years in federal prison and $1 million in fines. (The figure most cited at the time, including in many obituaries, was the 35 years of the original four-count indictment.) Heymann reportedly offered a plea deal requiring six months in prison; Swartz’s lawyers indicated he was willing to accept a deal involving no prison time. No agreement was reached.

The prosecution attracted immediate and sustained criticism from legal scholars, computer scientists, and civil liberties advocates. The CFAA’s application (treating JSTOR’s terms-of-service violation as a federal computer crime) was widely characterized as prosecutorial overreach. Swartz had arguably violated MIT’s network terms of service. He had arguably violated JSTOR’s terms of service. He had not broken into a government facility, stolen classified information, disrupted critical infrastructure, or profited from his actions. JSTOR’s database was not physically damaged. JSTOR itself wanted the matter dropped.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

The CFAA’s defining problem, demonstrated starkly by the Swartz prosecution, is its reliance on the concept of “unauthorized access”, a phrase that can be read so broadly that any violation of a website’s terms of service becomes a federal crime. Academic lawyers, including Orin Kerr, had argued for years that this interpretation was wrong, dangerous, and constitutionally suspect. Post-Swartz, legislative reform proposals (including “Aaron’s Law,” introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Sen. Ron Wyden in 2013) attempted to narrow the CFAA’s scope. Aaron’s Law stalled in committee and never became law.

January 11, 2013

Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment on January 11, 2013. He was twenty-six years old.

His partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, his family, and his friends described someone who had been in severe depression, terrified of prison, and exhausted by two years of legal proceedings. At the funeral on January 15, his father, Robert Swartz, said: “Aaron was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.”

Lawrence Lessig, who had mentored Aaron since he was a teenager, wrote a post the next day (January 12, 2013) titled “Prosecutor as Bully.” Swartz, he wrote, had been “driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying.” On the charges themselves: “I get wrong. But I also get proportionality.”

MIT commissioned an independent review; the report led by professor Hal Abelson (Report to the President: MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz, released July 30, 2013) found that MIT had stayed neutral throughout and “missed an opportunity to demonstrate the leadership that we pride ourselves on,” but cleared it of wrongdoing. A White House petition demanding Carmen Ortiz’s removal drew more than 50,000 signatures; the White House declined it in January 2015. Ortiz stayed in office until January 13, 2017, when she stepped down ahead of the change of administration.

After His Death

SecureDrop, the encrypted whistleblower submission system that Swartz had built in 2011–2012 with journalist Kevin Poulsen and James Dolan under the name DeadDrop, went live at The New Yorker as Strongbox in May 2013; the Freedom of the Press Foundation then took over its development. It is now used by major news organizations worldwide (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and dozens of others) to allow sources to transmit sensitive documents anonymously.

The Internet Archive and the Open Library project (which Swartz had contributed to) continued and expanded. The Internet Archive’s “controlled digital lending” programs and book digitization projects carried forward his vision of making accumulated human knowledge accessible without paywalls.

In September 2011, two months after the first indictment, JSTOR made its early journal content (about 500,000 articles published before 1923 in the US, or before 1870 elsewhere) free to anyone. JSTOR said it had been preparing the release before the case, while conceding that “it would be inaccurate to say that these events have had no impact on our planning.” Part of what Swartz had been charged for downloading was now free to read.

Open-access policy moved on without him. In February 2013, a month after his death, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told every federal agency spending more than $100 million a year on research to make the resulting papers free to read within twelve months of publication. A second memo, in August 2022, dropped the embargo altogether and extended the rule to all federal research funders, effective by the end of 2025. Swartz did not invent the cause, but he was its best-known casualty.

“The Internet’s Own Boy”

The 2014 documentary The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, directed by Brian Knappenberger, tells the story of Swartz’s life and prosecution. The film argues that the prosecution was a political act by ambitious prosecutors who did not understand what they were punishing, in service of institutional interests (copyright holders, academic publishers) that had captured law enforcement. The title plays on a double meaning: Swartz as a product of the early internet’s idealism and as a casualty of the interests that idealism opposed.