To Aaron Swartz, the subject
of the documentary, The Internet’s Own
Boy (2014), the major concern in his day regarding the internet was not the
ability of a person to create a blog or use social media; rather, the problem
was in the trend of the power of the gate-keepers, who tell you were on the
internet you want to go, concentrating. In other words, the issue concerned
what commands our attention. More specifically, who gets access to the ways
people find things on the internet. “Now everyone has a license to speak; it’s
a question of who gets heard,” he said.
Although he was a computer wiz, he also had political aspirations; both
of which were on display as he lobbied against the Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA), which was introduced in Congress in October of 2011. Unfortunately, the
combination of his computer and political skills got the attention of the FBI,
which engaged in a relentless pursuit of him until, under the pressure, he
committed suicide at the age of 26. His short life was one of idealism that
should not have been squashed by an unstoppable criminal-justice system,
especially when influenced by political pressure from corporations and
politicians. Lest the overzealousness of law enforcement obscure a vision of
Aaron’s idealism, it can be viewed as public access being restored to the
public domain in terms of the internet.
Tim Lee, the founder of the
internet who notably did not cash out but rather kept the web open, influenced
Aaron. Although he bristled at the constraints in working at an internet
company, he was also not primarily motivated by money. Instead, he was
motivated by fairness as it applies to the public good. Whereas high-tech firms
are oriented to their own private good, the public good implies public access—something
about which Arron felt strongly. In other words, he detested the privatization
of the public internet by private gate-keepers. “The public domain should be
free to all, but it is often locked up” by corporations, said Brewster Kahle of
The Internet Archive. Aaron’s motivation and activity hinged on the question of
how public access could be brought to the public domain. This was “one of the
things that got him in so much trouble,” said Kahle.
Pacer, a company that made
about $120 million a year charging for access to the public records of courts,
caught Aaron’s attention. By law, the courts could charge only what is
necessary to run Pacer. As that company was interested in charging “customers”
much more, hence narrowing the public’s access, Aaron downloaded 20 million
pages of court documents. This was not illegal, and yet the FBI began staking
out his parents’ house. Once able to analyze the documents, he discovered “massive
privacy violations.” Yet is was the restricted public access, caused by wealth
disparity, that really caught his attention. As Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media
asked rhetorically in the film, “The law is the operating system of our
democracy and you have to pay to see it?” Put another way, the privatization of
the public domain can be viewed as the onslaught of plutocracy, the rule by
wealth, over democracy.
Besides access to common law,
knowledge is vital to a republic. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson agreed on
this point. Aaron looked at the gatekeepers of academic articles—private
companies like Jstor—which were charging substantial fees for public access
(whereas scholars working for universities could access the articles for free).
Such gatekeepers can be distinguished from the journals/publishers of the
articles. Although a journal rightfully charges for a copy, if a public library
(or government-sponsored university) has purchased one, shouldn’t the public
have access to the issue? Should libraries have to pay substantial fees to the
gatekeepers?
At MIT, Aaron downloaded
articles on Jstor. It is not clear what he would have done with them. He had
downloaded databases simply to analyze their content rather than make it
public. MIT found his computer in a computer closet and gathered evidence to
build a case. At the time, he was working at Harvard. If he didn’t have a
status at MIT and thus had to hack into the system, MIT had a case. After all,
people should not be allowed to unilaterally plug their laptops directly into
computer systems. Even so, that police assaulted him on his way home and that
U.S. Secret Service, which under the Patriot’s Act, can investigate “schemes using
new technology,” took over smacks as going too far, especially if the police
were MIT’s own. This would suggest too much power having been given to the
university administration whether by its board or the government of
Massachusetts. Having its own police power, a university administration can
find itself charged with the taint of abuse of power sans accountability. After all, a university is more like a
business than a government, hence democratic safeguards are not necessarily in
place.
Looking at Aaron’s downloading
itself, Carmen Ortesz of Massachusetts’ district attorney’s office says in the
film, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,
and whether you take documents, data, or dollars.” Aaron’s attorney retorts, He
wasn’t stealing; he wasn’t selling what he got or giving it away.” When he had
been a student at Stanford, Aaron had downloaded the Westlaw database to find
relationships between sponsoring organizations and favorable research results.
He didn’t release the documents. So the criminal prosecution of Aaron for
downloading Jstor articles was as a commercial violation yet no evidence of
motive existed; it could not be assumed that he would sell or otherwise make
the articles available to the public. The problem was that he had put his name
to a blog post, “Gorilla Manifesto,” in which open access is advocated.
For his part, Aaron points out
that sharing knowledge with friends is not stealing; rather, doing so is a
moral imperative because corporations act as gatekeepers to make money—essentially
clipping away at the public domain. This is none other than “theft of public
culture,” he says in the film. It is interesting the police felt the need to
assault him and yet the thefts by the powerful gatekeepers were somehow legal.
He told his girlfriend, “I’ve been arrested for downloading too many academic
journals,” as if acquiring knowledge were a crime worthy of the perpetrator
being held in solitary confinement as he was. Even Jstor must have viewed the
criminal justice system as going too far, for the company dropped the case,
saying it had been the government’s decision to prosecute. In fact, Stephen
Jeymann, the politically-aspiring assistant district attorney of Massachusetts
who interestingly kept the case for himself, told Aaron that he still could
face 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. This raises the ethical
question of whether an individual should be made to suffer inordinately to
serve as a deterrent.
If the public good is the
reason why, then what then of the for-profit companies that were essentially
privatizing parts of the public domain? MIT, which had moral authority, was
mute when the defense asked for assistance. The university characterized this
stance as neutral, but Aaron’s lawyer said it was actually pro-prosecutor.
In the film, David Sirota
points to the problem of selective deterrence from political ideology. He
points out that the Obama administration did not prosecute the financial
institutions and individuals for crimes that led to the financial crisis of
2008, yet while devoting resources to prosecuting selective deterrents, including Aaron’s case. It is no coincidence,
Sirota claims, that Obama left office as a billionaire, which he had not been
when he was a legislator in Illinois’ government and law instructor at the
University of Chicago. I would add that Goldman Sachs’ $1 million contribution to
Obama’s ’08 presidential campaign is also relevant. Clearly, Obama’s “Wall
Street Government” was doing the bidding of the powerful rather than standing
up for public access of knowledge.
Aaron hit his stride in spite
of his pending trial when he put his computer skills to use in lobbying against
the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which initially had many co-sponsors in the
U.S. Senate. Specifically, he wrote software making it easier for people to
contact Congress. The bill was ostensibly against online piracy of music and
movies, but, according to Aaron, the legislation was really about the freedom
to connect. A company could cut off a website from the internet or force Google
to cut links to the site; a claim of copyright infringement, without due
process (i.e., a trial), would be all that would be necessary. In the film,
U.S. Senator Wyden of Oregon says the bill poses a threat to freedom of speech
and civil liberties. “It makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the
internet to combat piracy,” he points out. In a particularly revealing “macro”
comment, the senator points to the power of private powers in the American
democratic system. “Typically, the legislative fights in Washington are fights
between different sets of corporate moneyed interests—all duking it out to pass
legislation. The fights that are the closest are when you have one set of
corporate interests against another set of corporate interests and they are
generally financially matched in campaign contributions and lobbying. The ones
that aren’t even fights typically are those where all the money is on one side—all
the corporations are on one side—and millions of people are on the other.” In
other words, under the rubric of popular sovereignty (i.e., representatives
representing their respective constituents as a group), the interests of
private concentrations of wealth (i.e., corporations) essentially own the
Congress and the White House.
In this case, constituents
spoke up and their representatives in Congress noticed. Suddenly all but a few
of the myriad co-sponsors (sponsored in turn by powerful private interests)
dropped their support. People boycotted GoDaddy for its pro-SOPA support. Obama
reversed his support, which interestingly suggests that he had been siding with the corporate interests rather than the People even though he was purportedly
for “real change,” including greater democracy. Obama was going after Arron’s
community, including not only hackers, but also democracy activists because
they are able to make trouble for those who are already in power, corporate and
governmentally. Obama’s administration went after Aaron in order to scare as
many in his community as possible so they would not make trouble. Secrecy
serves those who are already in power. Aaron was a threat because he was working
toward open access to the public square even though reasonable people can
disagree as to what rightly goes in there. Interestingly, Aaron had warned of
the inordinate NSA spying.
SOPA didn’t pass. In fact, it was withdrawn.
Aaron’s community won. Interestingly, the federal government charged Aaron with
nine additional counts. Eleven of the thirteen total charges were for violating
the terms of service of sites. Orin Kerr, a
lawyer, says in the film that such a type of indictment is unfair. Bryan
Stevenson of Equal Right Initiative laments the excessiveness that had taken
hold in the American criminal-justice system such that by Aaron’s day, “Anything
we are angry about instinctively triggers a criminal justice intervention.”
Even looking at a security guard the wrong way can trigger his “need” to call
the local police, who have come to be prone to “overkill” in over-estimating
degrees of threat. The impulse to “observe,” intimidate, threaten, indict, and
prosecute has come to be triggered by people who are merely mad at something.
The impulse, in other words, had become too sensitive even by Aaron’s time.
Unfortunately, countervailing accountability on the occupants of that system has
been hard to come by. The People en masse
can pressure governments to contain even the passive aggression inflicted
on citizens—particularly those who object. Though this is unlikely, considering
how much energy it takes to stimulate a large number of people such that their
elected representatives take notice. With regard to the People squeezing in
where the corporate-governmental axis is dominant (hegemonic), the corporate
lobbyists and the beneficiaries of corporate campaign contributions depend on
the illusion of public accountability even as publicly they pay homage to the
strong American democracy for and by the People.
