I've had a browser tab open since last Friday night that I still haven't closed. It's just a Wikipedia page, Aaron Swartz's, and I keep meaning to close it and I keep not doing it.
By now you've read the basic facts a dozen times over, so I won't do the whole recap. He was 26. He was found in his apartment in Brooklyn on January 11th. He'd been facing federal charges for downloading a huge pile of JSTOR articles through the MIT network, and prosecutors were pushing for something like 35 years and a million dollar fine for what amounted to, as far as I can tell, downloading too many PDFs too fast. That part of the story every tech blog on the internet has already covered this week, so I'm not going to pretend I have some fresh legal analysis to add on top of what Lessig and Doctorow already wrote.
What I keep thinking about instead is smaller and dumber, honestly. Swartz co-wrote the RSS 1.0 spec when he was fourteen years old. Fourteen. I'm sitting here at 2am typing this into a blog that, whether you know it or not, you are almost certainly reading because some piece of software somewhere fetched this post's feed and dropped it into your reader. I've used Google Reader every single day since I started this blog back in 2011, dozens of times a day probably, and until this week I don't think I'd ever once thought about who actually built the plumbing under that habit. Turns out one of the people who did was a kid who hadn't finished high school yet.
That's the thing that got me, more than the legal stuff, weirdly. Not that he was some genius (though he clearly was), but that a piece of infrastructure I touch without thinking, constantly, casually, was partly his. You don't usually get to know who built the pipes. Usually that's the point, you're not supposed to notice. This week I noticed.
It's a strange day to be writing this, actually. A year ago today, January 18th, was the SOPA blackout, the day Wikipedia went dark and Reddit put up that black overlay and a bunch of us spent the whole afternoon calling our senators' offices instead of doing whatever we were supposed to be doing. Swartz was a big part of why that day happened at all, through Demand Progress, the group he cofounded to fight exactly that kind of bill. So the timing here isn't lost on me. One year to the day after arguably his biggest organizing win, and he's gone.
MIT put out a statement on Sunday saying president Reif was ordering an internal review of the school's own role in the case, to be run by professor Hal Abelson. Good, I guess, though "we will investigate ourselves" always reads a little hollow to me, no matter who's doing the investigating. Somebody also defaced MIT's website with a memorial page and a call to reform computer crime law, which, sure, I'm not going to pretend that's an approach I'd endorse, but I understood the impulse behind it more than I expected to. There's also talk of a bill, people are calling it Aaron's Law, aimed at fixing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act so prosecutors can't stretch "exceeding authorized access" into a felony pile-on like this again. I hope it actually goes somewhere. I've watched enough well-intentioned tech legislation die quietly in committee to not get my hopes up too high, but I hope it anyway.
I don't really have a neat point to land on here, which feels appropriate somehow. I just wanted to say, on my own little blog that's been running since November 2011, that a guy who helped build a tiny unglamorous piece of the format that lets this blog reach anybody at all is gone, and that the government's appetite for turning a downloading spree into a decades-long prison sentence should bother you even if you've never heard of JSTOR and never will. Close your extra tabs if you want. I'm leaving mine open a while longer.