TarenSK

The CFAA could get even worse

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:54:04 -0400

The new draft bill to amend the CFAA that’s being floated by certain Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee is disgraceful. It’s an affront to Aaron’s memory and the countless concerned Internet users who’ve cried out since his passing about the unjust, ambiguous, and outdated law that was used to persecute Aaron. (Note: Some other Republicans on that committee seem likely to oppose this language, so we should be very careful not to paint everyone with the same brush.)

You can use Demand Progress’s action page to help beat it back.

While we’ve been pushing to reform the CFAA to reduce the potential it has to harm activists and innovators like Aaron, this proposal would instead stiffen certain CFAA penalties. It would make it even easier for many people to be charged under the CFAA. Even under the current CFAA, it’s possible for law enforcement to charge people for violating a website’s terms of service agreement or “exceeding authorized access” to a computer network. It’s entirely reasonable to think that some of the most prominent mainstream tech figures our our era — Steve Jobs (phone phreaking), Mark Zuckerberg (misusing Harvard’s network) — exposed themselves to potential criminal prosecution under the CFAA.

As conservative law professor and former prosecutor Orin Kerr has noted of the proposal:

This language is really, really broad. If I read it correctly, the language would make it a felony to lie about your age on an online dating profile if you intended to contact someone online and ask them personal questions. It would make it a felony crime for anyone to violate the TOS on a government website. It would also make it a federal felony crime to violate TOS in the course of committing a very minor state misdemeanor. If there is a genuine argument for federal felony liability in these circumstances, I hope readers will enlighten me: I cannot understand what they are.

There are many other problems with this proposal — including making it easier to consider somebody a conspirator towards violation of the CFAA, and increasing penalties to up to 30 years for single, broadly-defined offenses.

Let’s beat this bill — it’s still just a proposal, but a serious one. If we make enough noise now we can scare anybody from actually signing onto it. Click here to email your lawmakers ASAP.

MIT On About The #AaronSwartz Evidence: Misleading and Insufficient

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:01:00 -0400

Below is the response from Aaron’s father and me to MIT President Rafael Reif’s statement this morning, along with newly released email exchanges between MIT and Aaron’s lawyers about the evidence.

Edit: Read/watch my speech last week at MIT about its investigation, evidence, and the protective order here. Many relevant points.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

******

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tuesday, 19 March 2013

CONTACT:
Brett Abrams : 516-841-1105 : brett@fitzgibbonmedia.com

Aaron Swartz’s Lawyers File Motion to Lift Protective Order

As MIT Releases Redacted Documents, Activists Urge MIT to Support
Lifting the the Protective Order

WASHINGTON, DC - Today, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
announced they will release information on the case against Aaron
Swartz ,but will edit out names and other important information to the
case, in a letter released by MIT president Rafael Reif.

“I welcome President Reif’s commitment to transparency. However, this
announcement is misleading. MIT does not get to decide in what form
the evidence is released publicly. The judge does. MIT has already
given this evidence to the courts, at which point it gave up
proprietary control over the evidence. President Reif’s decision
simply foreshadows the inevitability that the judge will release at
least this much of the evidence. It sets a low bar, but it does not
decide the matter,” said Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron’s
partner. “The redacted documents MIT is releasing only tell one part
of the story. Huge amounts of information would still be hidden
beneath the protective order — information that MIT’s investigators
themselves will not have access to unless the protective order is
lifted. If MIT is really committed to transparency and having a full,
complete investigation, they need to join the call with Aaron’s
lawyers to lift the protective order.”

“This is not a change in MIT’s position. MIT could have no
expectation of privacy or security since this evidence was given to
the government with the understanding that it was evidence in a public
trial,” said Robert Swartz, Aaron’s father. “They understood when
they gave these documents to the government that they had no rights to
privacy or security. MIT should release all internal communications
related to this case whether or not they were provided to the
government including all internal communications they had related to
how they handled it and decided not to ask the government to drop the
case.”

“I am also concerned that this announcement does not fully live up
Reif’s stated commitment to transparency. After all, the people cited
in this evidence could have been called as witnesses at a public
criminal trial, and if MIT wished to protect these people’s privacy,
MIT should not have become involved in the criminal trial to begin
with. They made a calculated decision not to nip this case in the bud.
They don’t get to avoid the consequences now, after Aaron’s death,”
continued Stinebrickner-Kauffman. “Any redactions by MIT in the
version of the documents it releases, or ordered by the judge in the
version that the courts release, must be done in a way that leave the
documents understandable. For instance, names must be replaced with
consistent pseudonyms, not just blacked out in such a way that leaves
the evidence illegible in practice. Moreover, MIT must leave intact
the names of individuals at the senior management level, who are
public figures and who were responsible for the decision to take the
case to trial to begin with. Doing otherwise will make it impossible
for the MIT community and Aaron’s friends and family to determine what
actually happened.”

On Friday, March 15th, lawyers for Aaron Swartz filed a motion in
Federal Court to modify the protective order surrounding the Swartz
case and make the information from the hearing public. Swartz’s
defense team reasons that in light of Aaron’s death, there is no
longer a case to prosecute and no risk that disclosure would impede a
fair trial. Swartz’s lawyers argue that the protective order hinders
the public’s access to information without substantial justification.

View the Motion to Lift the Protective Order Here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/130617538/Swartz-Motion-to-Modify-Protective-Order-With-Decls-and-Exhs?secret_password=16856zwcgs6hevstv4rc

“The public has a right to know what happened in this case,” added
Stinebrickner-Kauffman. “The public has a right know how weak the
evidence against Aaron was, and how frivolous his persecution was. I,
personally, have a right to see this evidence, and I won’t feel
closure until I do. The bulk of this evidence would have been made
public in the event of a trial, which all parties were expecting.
Anyone opposing the lifting of this protective order is engaged in a
cover-up. There’s no other word for it.”

Swartz’s defense team has long opposed the existence of a protective
order. In October 2011, Swartz’s defense team filed an original
motion against the protective order.

View the Original Defendant Opposition to the Protective Order Here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/129179778/Government-Motion-for-a-Protective-Order?secret_password=4p3jf6wjwynk6jkwx90

After Aaron’s death, the House Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform sent a letter to Swartz’s attorney’s requesting documents and
information currently sealed under the protective order. In the
letter, Congress acknowledges important information currently limited
by the protective order is necessary to the public interest.

View Congress’ Request for Information in the Protective Order:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/129186015/2013-02-05-DEI-EEC-Re-Schwartz-Family-Attorney-Congress-Request-for-Files?secret_password=1se5kduo1705ylx05bbd

“Given the controversy surrounding this prosecution, and the ongoing
level of public and Congressional interest in learning the truth, the
only appropriate and responsible way to move forward is for there to
be complete transparency about what occurred in this case,” said
Elliot Peters, Swartz’s attorney. “We need sunlight. Anyone who
opposes that – MIT or the government, obviously fears having the truth
come out. On behalf of Aaron, we have no such fears.”

Swartz’s defense team has long been urging the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology to cooperate with public interest in the case and not
oppose the release of information under the protective order. Thus
far, MIT has argued to keep the protective order in place.

While MIT claims it is currently investigating its role in Swartz’s
death, without the protective order being lifted, the investigation
will lack key testimony from Swartz’s lawyers. They have declined to
be interviewed by the investigation until the protective order is
lifted because many of the things they would contribute to the
investigation are currently under the protective order, meaning they
cannot discuss them with MIT’s investigatory committee. You can view
email exchanges between MIT and Elliot Peters, Aaron Swartz’s
attorney, below:

Letter Exchanges between Swartz Defense Team and MIT:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/130354865/Letter-From-Elliot-to-MIT?secret_password=2042ia586mm2iyebk7w3

Email Exchanges Between Swartz Dense Team and MIT:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/129211557/Elliot-Peters-Email-With-MIT?secret_password=wkq0xbcbn6n56cwv5sl

Bombshell: New evidence that Steve Heymann committed serious prosecutorial misconduct

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:11:00 -0400

The prosecution didn’t just show poor judgment in its prosecution of Aaron. In addition, Steve Heymann actively broke the law and violated Aaron’s constitutional rights. Below, you can read the details, but the basic outline is that Heymann withheld evidence that would have been helpful to Aaron’s defense, and that he was legally and ethically bound to hand over from the very beginning of the case, until December 2012 — almost two years after Aaron was arrested.

A few additional notes to the release: Heymann appears to be lying to the DOJ, or else the DOJ is lying to Congress, about when Heymann turned over the exculpatory evidence in question. Ryan Grim reports that DOJ is insisting that Heymann turned over the exculpatory evidence during the status conference in December, rather than after. But I was there, and that is a lie.

Of course, Heymann had an obligation to turn over the evidence months if not years before that conference, but even in the very unlikely event of an honest mistake where he somehow “remembered” the evidence the very morning of the status conference, he would have been obliged to turn it over immediately instead of waiting til after the conference.

And finally, it seems entirely clear the Heymann would not have turned over this crucial piece of evidence if the judge had not ruled at the status conference that there would be an evidentiary hearing in January. That implies that there may well be more exculpatory evidence that Heymann has also illegally withheld, and that we don’t know about yet. That’s why Congress must subpeona all of Heymann’s files in this case, not just the evidence he submitted to the Court that we already know about.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

********

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Thursday, 14 March 2013

CONTACT:

Brett Abrams : 516-841-1105 : brett@fitzgibbonmedia.com

Aaron Swartz’s Lawyers Accuse US Prosecutor Stephen Heymann of Misconduct and Overreach

WASHINGTON, DC - In a letter to an internal Justice Department ethics unit from January 2013 made public yesterday, Aaron Swartz’s lawyers argue that US Prosecutor Stephen Heymann, the attorney who handled the case on a day-to-day basis, engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by withholding key evidence from Swartz’s defense team and overreaching in his attempt to coerce Aaron into waiving his right to trial.

View The Letter to the Justice Department Here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/130195421/2013-01-28-Redeacted-OPR?secret_password=so12oi0h97ttjzodvha

In the letter to the Justice Department, Swartz’s attorney, Elliot Peters, elaborates on a legal complaint made earlier in the month that indicates how Heymann had withheld exculpatory evidence at a December 2012 hearing that would have demonstrated whether the government had properly obtained a warrant to search Swartz’s computer and thumb drive. Email evidence later revealed that Heymann made false statements about his ability to provide and obtain those materials. In that December hearing, Swartz’s legal defense team was given that evidence only after the hearing had concluded.

View The Motion to Suppress Evidence Complaint, and email evidence involved here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/129179770/100-1-email-on-J7?secret_password=13wboon5jmf00xnzniyx

View the Government’s Response Here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/129185997/101-1-Govt-Response-to-100?secret_password=107q29glnwek5mim7s9m

Reacting to the withheld evidence and conflicting story by the Prosecutor, Swartz’s attorneys emailed Heymann on December 18, 2012, asking for any additional withheld evidence and verifying that important evidence had not been provided appropriately to Swartz’s defense team until after the hearing had concluded.

View The December 18th Email Exchange Here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/129186357/Emails-From-12-18?secret_password=94iw3l65dcxauryrzuy

In further email exchanges between Peters and Heymann from January 4th, 2013, Heymann argued that Peters had inferred a charge of prosecutorial misconduct. Swartz’s defense responded by saying that Heymann was “creating” that accusation so that he could “take offense” to it.

View The January 4th Email Exchange Here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/129180031/Emails-1-3-and-1-4?secret_password=254cw4w53h3qiavo1dse

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Swartz’s partner, responded to the revelations: “We now know that Steve Heymann would have gone to any lengths to put Aaron in prison — even violating his own legal, ethical, and professional obligations. Heymann turned over this one piece of exculpatory evidence in December as soon as he knew that we would have found it eventually anyway. What we don’t know is what exculpatory evidence he’s still hiding. Congress has already asked for the evidence that is under protective order. Congress must also subpeona Heymann’s entire case file and all records he kept related to the case, not just those he gave to the defense and put under protective order, so that we can find out what else he was illegally hiding from Aaron’s lawyers.”

Aaron would have been so proud of Chris Hayes

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:46:46 -0400

I just saw the news about Chris’s promotion to MSNBC’s 8pm weekday slot, and I’m experiencing what I’m calling a “grief spike.”

The first time Aaron and I lived together was in November and December of 2011 — we sublet a studio together on the Upper West Side as a trial run to see whether I should move to NYC to be with him. It was early days for Up with Chris Hayes, and we would get up every weekend morning to watch it together.

Aaron was so proud to be friends with Chris. When Chris had a baby, Aaron boasted to me about it — though he never got to meet the baby. He would have been so joyful about this promotion. I’m sure we would have watched the new 8pm show together a few times, either from the office or on some odd occasion when we were able to get home by 8pm.

I miss him terribly.

MIT Memorial Service

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:55:00 -0400

Below is the prepared version of the speech I gave at the MIT Media Lab last night, at the memorial service for Aaron. The video of the full event will be up later on the Media Lab’s website; for now we have videos of my speech and Aaron’s father’s speech.

It’s worth noting that the organizers of the event were clearly pressured to try to keep the event apolitical and noncontroversial — and especially to suppress any discussion of MIT’s role in Aaron’s case. To whomever was applying that pressure, you should know that no one at the Media Lab knew the contents of my speech in advance, and they cannot be blamed for them. No one could have stopped me from speaking. Second, I hope that my speech has persuaded you of the ethical problems with your decision to try to suppress free and open discussion of MIT’s mistakes.

Most important of all, Aaron’s life, legacy and ideals were all inherently political and controversial — as was his death. It’s not possible to honor him apolitically.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

***************

Remarks by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, MIT Media Lab, March 12, 2013

Like most of you, I have a strong affinity for MIT – I lived here for two summers, as a student and then later as a counselor at the Research Science Institute. My first kiss was on MIT campus (though not with Aaron).

When I first started dating Aaron, for probably our third or fourth date, I came up here from DC for July 4^th weekend. We walked down Mass Ave to the river to watch the fireworks. I had to go to the bathroom, and for some reason he waited for me out on the sidewalk as I ran into the cafeteria building instead of coming in with me. I didn’t think much of it at the time. There were other odd things he did – like insist that I not leave the door to his apartment unlocked if I had to run down the hall to the washing machines. But I didn’t understand how those things fit together until later.

One day in July, Aaron called me. I was at Frisbee practice in DC. He said, there’s this thing that might hit the news tomorrow about me. Do you want to hear it from me or do you want to read it in the news?” I said “Well, I guess I want to hear it from you.” He said, “I’m going to be indicted for downloading too many academic journal articles, and they want to make an example out of me.” And I said, “That doesn’t sound like a very big deal.” He paused for a second and thought about it and said, “Yeah, I guess it’s not like anybody has cancer.” In the end though, it kind of was like that. I called him back later that evening and said, I’m sorry, I feel like I might have underreacted. I’m sure this is really stressful, being arrested and so on. And he said, “No, no, that was actually the most helpful reaction anyone has had so far. Please stick with it.”

The case took its toll over the last two years of his life, and I don’t think any of us actually realized how much of a toll it had taken, until later, until after he died. He hid it from us well.

Yesterday was two months since Aaron died. It’s been a hard week already, and it’s only Tuesday. Yesterday, I spent a little bit of time going through Aaron’s stuff, which is now in storage here in Cambridge, and I came across a couple of to-do lists. He always wrote them on the back of envelopes. One was probably from October or November. In between items like “make a dentist appointment” and “talk to Brian on my team” there was an item that said “Taren test,” and I didn’t know what it was. And what was especially interesting about this item was that it was crossed off. So I’m not sure what that was about. But it did make me think of one of Aaron’s ideals.

*****

As the Media Lab said to me last week, the reason we’re here is to honor Aaron’s ideals. And this story made me think of one of Aaron’s ideals – iterative learning and testing, and in particular learning from mistakes. He was always testing things, especially his own assumptions. He was a scientist in the true sense of that word.

One of Aaron’s blog posts last year was called “Cherish Mistakes.” Let me read to you from it.

This is a tale of two nonprofits.

At one, they hate making mistakes. How else could it be? “We’re not ever going to enjoy screwing up,” they told me. But this attitude has a lot of consequences. Everything they do has to go through several layers of approval to make sure it’s not a mistake. And when someone does screw up, they try to hide it.

It’s only natural — you know you’re going to get in trouble for screwing up, so you try to fix it before anyone notices. And if you can’t do, then your boss or your boss’s boss tries. And if no one in the organization can fix it, and it goes all the way to the executive director, then he tries to figure out a way to keep it from the press or spin it appropriately, so the world never finds out they made a mistake.

At the other nonprofit, they have a very different attitude. You notice it the first time you visit their website. Right in their navigation bar, at the top of every page, is a link labeled “Mistakes.” Click it and you’ll find a list of all the things they screwed up, starting with the most horribly embarrassing one (they once promoted their group under false names).

And it goes on to discuss mistakes big and small, core and peripheral. They previously used flaky phones that would cut out during a call, annoying people. They were insufficiently skeptical in some of the most important claims they made. At times, their admissions have the tone of a chastised teenager forced to write an apology, but together they provide a remarkable record of all the mistakes, both crucial and mundane, you might reasonably make when starting something new.

It’s not that this group likes making mistakes — you can feel the annoyance and embarrassment seeping through the page — but they don’t shirk from them either. They identify their mistake, admit them publicly, and devise steps to avoid them next time. They use it as an opportunity to get better.

…

Mistakes are our friend.They can be an exasperating friend sometimes, the kind whose antics embarrass and annoy, but their heart is in the right place: they want to help. It’s a bad idea to ignore our friends.

That’s a hard attitude to take toward mistakes — they’re so embarrassing, our natural instinct is to want to hide them and cover them up. But that’s the wrong way to think about them. They’re actually giving us a gift, because they’re pointing the way toward getting better.

One of the really interesting things about this mandate to cherish your mistakes is how closely it aligns with MIT’s mandate. What do I mean by that? I mean that MIT is about science and about furthering human knowledge.

And there’s a funny thing about science, which is that you’re supposed to admit when you’re wrong. I heard a story once about an academic who’d been trying to prove a theory for decades. He got up at a conference on a panel with another academic. The second academic laid out a clear case, with convincing new evidence, for why the first person was wrong.

As an institution, MIT’s mission statement reads, in part:

The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge…in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges….We seek to develop in each member of the MIT community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

MIT’s core worldview is the worldview of science, and your mission is the dissemination of knowledge and the betterment of humankind. And that statement describes Aaron to a T. This alignment of missions is why MIT’s involvement in Aaron’s prosecution and death are so tragic – and so deeply ironic.

You are probably all familiar with the broad outlines of the prosecution against Aaron, but you may not be as familiar with MIT’s involvement. There were many decision points MIT faced. MIT called in the Secret Service for a matter that could have been handled internally. When JSTOR reached a settlement with Aaron and publicly called on the prosecution to drop the case, MIT refused to join JSTOR. For years, MIT cooperated with the prosecution, freely providing them with evidence, documents, and access to staff, while Aaron’s lawyers had to fight for over a year to get to interview the exact same staff the prosecution had already spoken with. At any point in the two years preceding Aaron’s death, MIT could have issued a public statement saying that it did not want the prosecution to proceed, and the case would have gone away. After repeated private entreaties that MIT do so, Aaron and I had given up hope that your General Counsel’s office would listen to reason of its own volition. So, over the last 6 weeks of Aaron’s life, he and I were beginning to work with students and alumni of MIT, friends and supporters of Aaron’s, who wanted to help. For the first time, we were willing to make the case public — for most of our relationship, Aaron had been actively avoiding press and public coverage. These supporters were going to launch a website called Save Aaron. They were going to poster the campus with a slogan I’m personally very proud of devising: “Nerd != Criminal.”

Aaron’s missions and MIT’s were aligned. You both believe in the dissemination of knowledge. You both believe in bettering the world. So where did MIT go wrong? Why were the General Counsel of MIT, Greg Morgan, and his staff so bent on helping Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz at the US Attorney’s Office try to make an example out of Aaron and lock him up?

*****

I think the answer lies in one of Aaron’s favorite books, Moral Mazes, by sociologist Robert Jackall. Jackall explores how managers and other actors in bureaucracies make decisions about moral questions — which at their root, most questions and decisions are. Let me tell you about it in Aaron’s own words, from another blog post in 2006:

Moral Mazes (one of my very favorite books) tells the story of a company, chosen essentially at random, and through careful investigation from top to bottom explains precisely how it operates, with the end result of explaining how so many well-intentioned people can end up committing so much evil.

This week’s scene takes place inside a textile processing plant at Weft Corporation, where the company’s poor low-paid workers are suffering from byssinosis. Byssinosis, also called Brown Lung Disease, is when your lungs fill up with cotton dust. Eventually your throat closes up and you suffocate to death. The company insists the whole thing is a stunt made up by Ralph Nader and other liberal do-gooders. But one day they change their tune:

“Weft, as well as all the other large and medium-sized American textile companies, was actually addressing the cotton dust problem, but in a characteristically indirect way. As part of a larger modernization effort, the firm invested $20 million in a few plants where executives knew such an investment would make money. … The investment had the side benefit of reducing cotton dust levels … One manager who was in charge of the project … comments on whether dust control was a principal factor in the decision…:

It was on these bases that the decision was made.

Publicly, of course, Weft Corporation, as do many other firms, claims that the money was spent entirely to eliminate dust, evidence of its corporate good citizenship. Privately, executives admit that without the productive return, they would not have—indeed, given the constraints under which they operate—could not have spent the money. And they have not done so in several other plants and only with great reluctance, if at all, in sections of otherwise renovated plants where it is more difficult to … achieve simultaneous cost and dust reduction.”

(Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes, 158f)

….

Corporate managers simply aren’t allowed to be moral, or even reasonable. And those who try are simply weeded out.

This book, I believe, helped Aaron articulate another of his core ideals: That we each have the same moral obligations in our professional lives as we do in our personal lives. That institutions per se do not deserve our loyalty. They deserve it only so long as they facilitate good in the world, and they lose it when they facilitate bad.

Most people don’t operate that way. Jackall put it like this:

What is right in the corporation is not what’s right in a man’s home or church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above wants from you…. Managers do not generally discuss ethics, morality, or moral-rules-in-use in a direct way with each other, except perhaps in seminars organized by ethicists…. (p.6, Moral Mazes, Oxford University Press, 1989)

And elsewhere:

Bureaucracy erodes internal and even external standards of morality not only in matters of individual success and failure but in all the issues that managers face in their daily work. (p.194, Moral Mazes)

Another of Jackall’s core points is that managers aren’t allowed to admit mistakes in bureaucracies. Most bureaucracies operate like the first of the two non-profits that Aaron wrote about in his blog post I read earlier. But scientists are supposed to operate like the second of the two non-profits.

*****

So my question for MIT is this: Which are you first and foremost? Are you scientists, or are you a bureaucracy?

I respect MIT’s mission and the people here a great deal. There is no doubt that MIT made mistakes. There is no doubt that the persecution that led to his death has made the world a much, much worse place.

Immediately after Aaron’s death, MIT’s President Reif announced an investigation into MIT’s involvement in the case, headed by esteemed professor Hal Abelson. I was hopeful. I was hopeful that this investigation might be in the spirit of genuine science, of acknowledging and learning from mistakes. We can never get Aaron back, but MIT can ensure that this kind of injustice and tragedy doesn’t happen again in its community.

But since then I have become less hopeful. I fear that the investigation will instead be in the spirit of a bureaucracy. I fear it will be the kind of “investigation” that Robert Jackall might have written about: A PR exercise, a whitewash. I fear this because of the fact that the General Counsel’s office is itself involved in running the investigation, of which it should be the primary subject. I fear this because it has been two months and my understanding is that neither Aaron’s lawyers nor Aaron’s father have been interviewed by the committee running the investigation, nor has there been any sign that the report will be released until after media interest has blown over.

Another of Aaron’s ideals was asking challenging questions. And that’s why I’m here to ask those questions today.

So here is my challenging question for those of you at this institution who care about its ideals and care about your own moral compasses. Is MIT a scientific enterprise, working to fulfill its mission of bettering the world? Or is MIT a bureaucracy, operating much like for-profit corporations, interested primarily in promoting and protecting itself as an organization?

Here is how you will be able to tell:

If MIT releases its report in a timely fashion. It’s already been two months – how much longer do we have to wait?
If the report represents MIT’s critics in this matter fully and fairly;
If the report acknowledges serious mistakes by MIT;
If the report holds specific people and organizational structures accountable for those mistakes;
If the report refers to the morality of the actions of people at MIT in the context of universal ethics, not in the context of organizational security;
If MIT implements clear, actionable changes that a reasonable person would believe would have prevented Aaron’s persecution and death, had they been implemented before his case.

And perhaps most of all, and I need to give a little bit of background for this one: Aaron’s lawyers are filing a motion this week to lift the protective order on the evidence against Aaron. So far, the press and people close to Aaron, including me, have not been able to see the evidence against him, because it is under protective order. Most of this evidence would have been introduced publicly at trial had there been a trial, which is what we were all expecting. It is critical for us to be able to understand what happened and the extent of the malfeasance by the prosecutors’ office for us to be able to see that evidence and for journalists to be able to see that evidence. If MIT opposes public access to the evidence against Aaron, then we can be quite sure that MIT’s investigation is not proceeding in good faith.

******

I had a nightmare a week after Aaron died. I dreamt that the two of us were living in a house, and we knew that there was somebody coming after us. It felt in the dream that if we could just secure the house, if we could just lock the doors, put furniture in front of them, board up the windows with 2 by 4s. We were running around, trying to secure the house. And I stopped for a moment, when it seemed like we had made a lot of progress, I stopped to make breakfast. I made Aaron’s favorite breakfast, scrambled eggs and Swiss cheese. And when I turned around, Aaron was suddenly dead.

In my dream I didn’t know who was coming after us. In real life, it was Steve Heymann, Carmen Ortiz, with the help of MIT General Counsel’s office. We all make mistakes, and nothing can bring Aaron back. But MIT has a chance to make a major course correction. Aaron would have respected an organization that could do so. The question is, will you?

Photos of Aaron and me from spring 2012. We were working on a...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:05:42 -0500

Photos of Aaron and me from spring 2012. We were working on a Friday afternoon from a house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, before spending the rest of the weekend with a whole bunch of progressive activist friends. My favorite memory of the weekend is the two of us taking kayaks out into the marshes at dusk, watching birds, feeling the breeze, breathing the stillness.

MIT/Boston memorial event: March 12, 4pm

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:00:00 -0500

Next Tuesday, March 12, at 4pm, the last of the memorial services for Aaron that I’m attending will take place in Boston at the MIT media lab (where Aaron’s father works). Speakers will include Larry Lessig of Harvard reading a statement on behalf of Tim Berners-Lee, Joi Ito of the MIT media lab, me, Aaron’s father, and several others. The speeches will be followed by a reception.

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/318892888214473/

MIT Media Lab event page (though redundant with the information here): http://www.media.mit.edu/events/2013/03/12/memory-inspiration-remembrance-aaron-swartz

This event will be a smaller than the ones in NYC, SF, and DC, and more personalized to the MIT Media Lab community, but it is open to the public and Boston-area friends (of Aaron, Aaron’s family and me) are very welcome. Unlike the other events, this one will not be livestreamed, but videos of the speakers will be up on Youtube afterwards.

This is going to be an emotional event, because Cambridge was more of a home to Aaron over the last 7 or 8 years than any other city, and many of his closest friends live there. He left Cambridge to live with me in New York last year, in part because of the social impossibility for him of living in Central Square right on Massachusetts Ave while banned from both Harvard and MIT campus.* We were planning to move back to Cambridge after he was acquitted. This will be my first visit back since he died.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

Updates: I updated the speaker list and edited the description of the event to reflect new information.

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*I still don’t understand why or under what process Harvard banned Aaron from campus. What gives Harvard the moral right to punish someone for an alleged (and unproven) crime committed somewhere else in the world, not on Harvard campus, in a case that has no bearing on Harvard? What if the alleged crime, even if the courts eventually found the action to be against the law, constituted civil disobedience? (I note that Harvard hasn’t banned Bill McKibben.) What if said civil disobedience was in the service of spreading academic knowledge — something Harvard should be thrilled to promote if it has any institutional values whatsoever? Or, for that matter, what if the alleged crime was actually part of a research project into, say, corporate sponsorship of academic research?

And most of all, whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

Thank you

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 22:45:00 -0500

To those who have contacted me with condolences:

To those who are fighting for accountability for MIT and the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office, for Aaron’s Law, for academic knowledge to be freed, for criminal justice reform that reins in prosecutors and, and for all the causes Aaron cared about:

To those who envisioned, evangelized for, and contributed to the Taren Fund:

To those who have organized, spoken at, attended, or watched Aaron’s funeral or memorial services:

To my beautiful staff, advisors, board, and funders who have stepped up to run and support my startup, SumOfUs, while I take time to heal:

To Aaron’s family and friends, many of whom I knew in passing or not at all before Aaron died, who have wholeheartedly welcomed me into their lives under these worst of circumstances:

To those who took time off of work or away from other obligations to cherish and protect me; who have held me in the middle of the night:

To those who have read, watched, and shared my speeches and blog posts about Aaron’s death:

To those who have hugged me and Aaron’s family; who cannot make sense of what has happened; who have cried for Aaron; who have thrown things at the wall in anger at his decision; who have examined your lives wholesale in light of his life and death:

Thank you.

I have not been able to respond to all of you personally, and I may never be able to. But I have read your emails, seen your tears and your anger. I have felt your love. It’s what is keeping me going.

Just a few examples of the generosity that has enveloped me: It was three weeks after Aaron died before I was physically by myself for more than a few minutes. Deepa, Sam, Paul, Ben, Ben, Alec, Peter and many others have taken valuable time from their own projects and organizations — each of them with world-changing missions — to care for me and give me freedom to travel without having to be alone. Dozens helped organize beautiful memorial services that thousands attended. Trevor Fitzgibbon and his team at Fitzgibbon Media donated their time to manage the overwhelming media interest in the hours, days, and weeks after Aaron died. Tate, Kaytee, Keith, Anthony, Marguerite, Rob, Claiborne, Emma, Angus, Richard, and many others have stepped up to keep SumOfUs running like clockwork in my unexpected absence — quite a testament to the community that’s building around an organization only 14 months old. And around the world, people who I will never meet are tenaciously fighting to salvage possible good from the tragedy of Aaron’s death, organizing to try to stop the kind of abuse of the criminal justice system that killed him from happening again, to liberate academic knowledge, and to fight in Aaron’s name to make the world a better place.

And more: With the help of many of you, Judith Freeman has managed to mobilize $30,000 for the “Taren Fund,” allowing me to take unpaid leave from work and sort out the logistical ruins of my life without worrying about money. This one in particular has made me cry almost every time I think about it — I suspect because of the faith it represents in me personally. I will do my best to live up to it.

I’m being very careful not to generalize from this grieving experience. Someday other people close to me will die. It will not be like this. But this once, it can be and is like this, and I am grateful.

Along with all the multitudes of lessons to draw from Aaron’s life and death, I hope one can be an ongoing commitment to unconditional support for each other in times of great personal crisis.

The truth is, Aaron was very bad at asking for support. He didn’t want to be a burden on others. He believed he ought to be able to make it on his own. He demanded independence from those who loved him. He was eager to help anyone else, but to ask for help for himself was terrifying. That made his 2-year ordeal much harder in many ways.

I’ve learned what I believe are the right lessons from this, and I hope you all will as well. The world is often — though not always — naked and cold. Confronting it on our own is sometimes merely difficult, sometimes downright impossible. We have a responsibility to help each other through the hard times, and an equal responsibility to ask for help from each other.

You have all already helped me infinitely* in this very hard time, and you’ve done so with my barely needing to ask. I am immensely grateful for that.

But we’re not done. I will be asking even more from you in the coming months. I will be asking you for more help along my long road to healing. I will also be asking you to do more for the world. I’ll be asking you in Aaron’s name to leave your comfort zone, to examine freely and openly your own motivations and mistakes, to reach higher and farther than you thought possible. Not only that, I’ll be asking you to push each other as well.

In exchange, I pledge to do the same.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

*As a math major, I do not use that word lightly.

Non-existence

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 08:01:39 -0500

I was trying to really wrap my head around the idea that Aaron’s consciousness doesn’t exist anymore and never will ever again. And I realized something: It is easier for me to accept/grasp the notion of my own consciousness ceasing to exist than it is to accept/grasp me still being around and him not.

I think this might be because when my consciousness ceases to exist, I by definition won’t have to comprehend that fact — or anything else, for that matter.

It really annoys me that he has managed to weasel out of the cognitive work of comprehending his own non-existence, while forcing the rest of us to deal with it.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

DOJ admits Aaron's prosecution was political

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 01:06:00 -0500

The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.

I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.

But this HuffPo article, and what I’m hearing from sources on the Hill, suggest that that’s not true. That Ortiz and Heymann knew exactly what they were doing: Shutting up, and hopefully locking up, an extremely effective activist whose political views, including those on copyright, threatened the Powers That Be:

A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.

Keep in mind that Aaron did not in fact distribute the articles he downloaded from JSTOR. Keep in mind that he had the legal right to download each and every one of those articles individually. Keep in mind that the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto that the DOJ cites was written by a group, not by Aaron individually, several years before Aaron’s actions — and take it from me that several years could be an eternity in the evolution of Aaron’s political views. Keep in mind that many independent commentators made an extremely plausible case that Aaron was interested in doing statistical research on the archive of articles, not distributing them.* And keep in mind that the government’s ONLY evidence that Aaron wanted to distribute the articles was this co-authored manifesto.

Does that seem like sufficient cause to destroy someone’s life? Let alone the life of one of the most promising technologists and entrepreneurs in the country?

Yes, it does: If the system’s main purpose is to maintain the status quo at the expense of anyone who tries to disrupt it.

This is making me angrier than almost anything I’ve heard since Aaron died. I finally figured out why: Because I worked my ass off to elect the Obama administration in 2008. I helped these people get in power. And then they drove the man I loved to suicide because they didn’t like something he said once.

And not only that: They are standing by their actions!

The DOJ refuses to admit the possibility that this might have been a mistake:

Reich told congressional staffers that the Justice Department believed federal prosecutors acted in a reasonable manner, according to the sources.

And to make matters even worse, everything I’m hearing from the Hill confirms that the DOJ is actively opposing against any changes to the CFAA, the law Aaron was prosecuted under. (The same law that says that anyone using a fake middle name on Facebook is committing a federal felony.)

If you know someone in the Obama administration, especially in the DOJ, ask them: How do you live with yourself right now?

And if you don’t, ask yourself: Do you feel safer?

UPDATE: I want to clarify something: Even if Aaron’s intention was in fact to distribute the journal articles (to poor people! for zero profit!), that in no way condones his treatment.

But the terrifying fact I’m trying to highlight in this particular blog post is this: According to the DOJ’s testimony, if you express political views that the government doesn’t like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making “an example” out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.

Talk about a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

UPDATE #2: A DOJ official says (in the outlet “Broadcasting & Cable,” an odd choice if you ask me…) that my characterization of the prosecution as “political” is inaccurate. No argument as to why or how, so color me unconvinced.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

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*As I’ve said in other venues, I don’t know what Aaron planned to do with the articles, and neither does anyone else (other than maybe his lawyers). His lawyers instructed him very strictly that he should never talk about motive with anyone before the trial, as it could play a key role in the defense and they didn’t want the prosecution to get any hint of what line of argument might be used. And he was worried that I could be subpeona’d, since we weren’t married and hence I didn’t have marital privilege. Let me tell you, really not fun to go through a few years of a serious relationship and make life-changing decisions together like whether you should take a plea bargain, while having to worry that something you tell the other person could be used against you in a court of law.

Aaron & Ben's radio show is back!

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:22:24 -0500

Aaron & Ben's radio show is back!:

Aaron moved to NYC (and hence made me move to NYC) last year because he wanted to cofound this radio show with Ben Wikler, one of his best friends. The show was on hiatus for a while, but it’s back now! You should subscribe to its tumblr (reblogged below), follow @benwikler and @FSJradio on Twitter, and apply for and share the jobs that Ben is hiring for (Audio Engineer/Board Op, Social Media Producer, and interns).

flamingswordofjustice:

I think activists are rock stars. I think true stories about battles for a better world are more thrilling than action movies. And I think email isn’t the only scalable way to inspire people to action.

So I’m very excited to announce my new gig: The Flaming Sword of Justice, with Ben Wikler,…

What to record?

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 19:22:00 -0500

One of the, many, many bizarre experiences for me since Aaron died is realizing that the year and a half we spent together was one of the most undocumented parts of his life.

He spent the entire 20 months we were together, other than the day he was arraigned (when he had to put out press releases so that the prosecution didn’t control the whole media cycle), actively avoiding press coverage of himself. (Though he at least did media work around the SOPA fight.)

I’m not a photographer like Quinn; there are only a few photos of the two of us. For that matter, there may be fewer photos per hour we spent together than any other significant portion of his life. His parents have photos of him as a kid; by the time he was 13 or 14 he was being regularly captured at conferences and the like.

I didn’t blog while we were together, and he didn’t like me talking about him on social media. I think that was largely part of his general avoiding-attention mindset — in fact, one of the ironies to me of the way the press has covered his death is the oft-expressed view that Aaron lived his life very publicly. The Aaron I knew, chastened, humiliated, and terrified by the case, lived his life extremely privately. He no longer blogged about personal matters like relationships or the case; he rarely even discussed them with friends.

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So, most of the records of our life together are in my own head. And I know, both intellectually and from the experience of trying now to remember the details of past relationships, that those records are fleeting and imperfect. The neurons in my brain that hold those memories will be written over, sometimes completely and sometimes in ways that make the memory wrong or incomplete without any sign to me that I’m missing something important.

This is already happening, I’m sure.

There is no backup copy.

So what do I write down or record and in what format? With whom do I share it — journalists, the readers of this blog, audiences I speak to, Aaron’s closest friends only, my closest friends only, no one but myself… — and under what conditions? I could spend weeks or months cataloguing, describing, narrating, without ever feeling like I had finished. That doesn’t sound very healthy, but I wonder whether I will regret someday that I didn’t. Whether I’ll reach for a story central to my self and be unable to find it.

Instead of on “hard” recordings, I’ve focused more on conversation: Telling stories about Aaron to friends, family and journalists, laughing at his flaws and piecing together different perspectives on episodes I saw from only one side. I’ve focused more on his living legacy: Building relationships with the amazing network of friends and colleagues he built over the years, people who will still be around and learning and growing in a decade or three, people who I can hug and call for advice in real life, not just in my dreams. But their memories are ephemeral and will erode just like mine.

Where is the right balance?

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Aaron did mention me in his blog once, as his unnamed partner:

Growth mindset has become a kind of safe word for my partner and I. Whenever we feel the other person getting defensive or refusing to try something because “I’m not any good at it”, we say “Growth mindset!” and try to approach the problem as a chance to grow, rather than a test of our abilities. It’s no longer scary, it’s just another project to work on.

Just like life itself.

Yes, Aaron. Just like life itself.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

If the house is crooked and crumbling

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:35:00 -0500

Aaron died one month ago this past Monday. This week I was intending to post a big update about all the various campaigns and policy changes we’re fighting for in the aftermath of Aaron’s death. I still will, but I haven’t been able to work up the energy to finish it yet.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about the last thing I ever read out loud to Aaron. He was in a bad mood on Saturday afternooon, 6 days before he died, and I knew that reading out loud to him would cheer him up, despite the decidedly uncheerful content of the book I chose. I was right — I watched him gradually loosen up as I read. When I was done, he complimented my reading voice and got up to help me with the dishes.

The selection I read was from the epilogue of Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, a documentary-style non-fiction narrative I had just finished that follows the lives of residents of a Mumbai slum over several years.

All of the book’s characters — or I should say, the book’s real people — are trapped in their own ways by India’s sociopolitical and economic structures, by financial destitution and the stress that comes with lack of control over one’s own fate. Many of them are forced to make choices they find morally repugnant — like becoming thieves.

Several of them, in the face of routine pain, fear, and impotence, choose to kill themselves.

The author wrote, and I read out loud to Aaron:

The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting, I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset. Children have little power to act on those imaginations, and by the time they grow up, they may have become the adults who keep walking as a bleeding waste-picker slowly dies on the roadside, who turn away when a burned woman writhes, whose first reaction when a vibrant teenager drinks rat poison is to shrug. How—to use Abdul’s formulation—do children intent on being ice become water?

…

In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of a mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be—all those invisible individuals who ever day find themselves faced with dilemmas not unlike the one Abdul confronted, stone slab in hand, one July afternoon when his life exploded. If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

To be clear: I am not making a claim that American government is morally equivalent to Indian government, or that Aaron’s experiences were equivalent to those of Abdul and his neighbors.

But the parallels in this passage to Aaron’s life and death have been haunting me.

Aaron’s ethical imagination was the broadest of anyone I know. It encompassed not just the bleeding waste-picker slowly dying on the street next to him — it encompassed in equal measure all people dying on the streets everywhere in the world. His idealism never grew up, never transformed into the world-weary adult pragmatism of almost everyone else. But the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office, governed by our own particularly American brand of corruption, would not stand for him acting on that imagination, even on behalf of people literally dying for lack of information he could have liberated. They trapped him and were driving him to financial destitution. And after two years of routine pain, fear, and impotence, he finally chose to kill himself.

It is blisteringly hard to be as good as Aaron wanted to be. The astonishment is that he tried. If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

You should follow me on Twitter here.

Steve Heymann should be fired

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:52:18 -0500

Steve Heymann is the prosecutor in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office who so aggressively and unreasonably went after Aaron.

Heymann saw Aaron as a scalp he could take. He thought he could lock Aaron up, get high-profile press coverage, and win high-fives from his fellow prosecutors in the lunchroom. Aaron was a way of reviving Heymann’s fading career. Heymann had no interest in an honest assessment of whether Aaron deserved any of the hell he was being put through.

I believe that Heymann is guilty of prosecutorial misconduct on several levels, but I can’t prove it until we have a proper investigation. Among other things, many of the court documents that Aaron’s lawyers have access to that would help make that case are currently under protective order. Not, to be clear, to protect Aaron — Aaron’s family and I want the documents to be public. It’s the prosecutors whose interest is served by keeping the documents secret.

I also suspect there may be other documents we don’t have that, if subpeonaed, could help us show that Heymann was bending or even breaking the rules in his vicious quest to make an example out of Aaron.

For all these reasons, we need an investigation in order to understand better how personally involved Carmen Ortiz was in Heymann’s actions. Several members of Congress are pushing for answers from the DOJ.

But there is another critical front: this Whitehouse.gov petition. In the aftermath of Aaron’s death, supporters started two petitions on Whitehouse.gov, the official website of the White House. One was for Carmen Ortiz, Heymann’s boss, to be fired. That petition has already surpassed the required 25,000* signature threshold, which means that the White House must respond to it publicly. The other is for Steve Heymann to be fired. It is hovering at around 11,000 signatures as of this writing, and the deadline is Monday.

We need this petition to get to 25,000* signatures by Monday, February 11. Please sign it right now, and share it with everyone you know. Even if Heymann is not fired in direct response to this petition, the White House’s responsibility to respond to it will open up crucial fronts in the investigation as to what went so terribly, terribly wrong with our justice system in Aaron’s case.

Sign now and share:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-attorney-steve-heymann/RJKSY2nb

I was in the courtroom with Aaron and Heymann (pronounced “High-muhn”) multiple times in person. I’ve never seen Aaron react so viscerally to the presence of another human being. He wasn’t dramatic about it; I’m not sure someone who didn’t know him as well as I did would have noticed. But you could see the tension in his body, the effort he had to make to stay mentally focused and calm with Heymann there in the same room.

Aaron’s last court date before he died was in December 2012. At his lawyers’ behest, the judge granted a hearing (which would have taken place on January 25) to review whether some of the evidence that Heymann had introduced was admissible at trial. I and another of Aaron’s friends were sitting in the benches behind the prosecutor and defense tables. We were the only people in the courtroom other than the parties, the judge and his assistants, and an MIT Tech reporter. After the hearing, I went up to Aaron outside the courtroom to give him a hug. Heymann was standing maybe 10 feet away. Aaron pushed me away and hissed, “Not in front of Heymann. I don’t want to show Heymann that.” It still hurts to think about that moment.

Heymann and Ortiz wanted to make an example out of Aaron. Instead, we as a society must make an example out of Heymann and Ortiz. Prosecutors must understand that they have moral responsibilities. They cannot simply hide behind the phrase “prosecutorial discretion” to justify any decision. Their actions have consequences, and they must be held accountable to them.

I believe that as much as any other individual person, Steve Heymann’s decisions drove Aaron to his death. We’re never getting Aaron back, but we can try to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else again.

Sign the petition calling for Steve Heymann to be fired, and share with everyone you know before Monday’s deadline:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-attorney-steve-heymann/RJKSY2nb

You should follow me on Twitter here.

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*A few days after these two petitions went up at WhiteHouse.gov, the White House increased the # of required signatures to 100,000 in order for them to have to respond. However, the change took effect only for new petitions at that point, so my understanding is that the threshold for the Ortiz and Heymann petitions remains at 25,000.

Why Aaron died

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 01:38:00 -0500

Last week, I awoke to find Aaron with me. He was sitting next to my bed, grinning his cheekiest grin, holding my hand.

For a few minutes, I savored a sweet uncertainty: Were the last few weeks all a nightmare, and Aaron was still with me? Or was I awaking inside a dream state, and in the real world Aaron was actually dead?

Then Aaron started trying to read a book to me, but he was having trouble deciphering the sentences. He said he was forgetting how to read for lack of practice. It became clear then that he was dream Aaron — real Aaron would never forget how to read. And that meant that everything I remembered about him killing himself must have been true in real life.

So I asked him why. Why did you do it? What was going through your mind when you killed yourself? I would have done anything for you. Anything at all, if you’d just told me what you needed.

“I’m dream Aaron,” he replied, after a long pause. “It’s not my job to tell you why. You see, as dream Aaron, I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”

As sadness enveloped me, I forced myself awake from the dream nightmare, only to confront the real-life nightmare. I will never have all the answers I crave. But I do have answers that no one else has. And that is why I’m writing this blog post.

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I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.

I say this with the understanding that many other people would not have made the same choice that Aaron made, even under the same pressures he faced.

I say this not in any way to understate the pain he was in — nor, for that matter, the pain that clinically depressed people are in.

I say this despite the fact that early on in our relationship, I had read and discussed with him his infamous blog post about suicide written years before — so I was not unaware that he had struggled with mental health in the past.

I say this because over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office — and I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.

I say this because, since his suicide, as I’ve tried to grapple with what happened, I’ve been learning. I’ve researched clinical depression and associated disorders. I’ve read their symptoms, and at least until the last 24 hours of his life, Aaron didn’t fit them.

And that makes it hard to read, in so many articles, that “Aaron struggled with depression” — as though the prosecution was just one factor among many, as though, perhaps, he might have committed suicide on January 11 without it.

Depression is characterized by low energy and inactivity, withdrawal and isolation, feelings of low self-worth, trouble concentrating and remembering detail, and an inability to take pleasure in everyday life. Not all depressed people feel all of these things all the time, but those are the recipe. And, indeed, Aaron’s blog post about his own depression years before had alluded to many of these things.

But let me tell you about the Aaron I knew—the Aaron Swartz of 2011, 2012, and the first few days of 2013.

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The Aaron I knew was active. He worked out most days until he got the flu two weeks before he died. Just a few weeks before that, when I was out of town for the weekend, he had surprised me by taking himself on a day-long hike outside of New York. He came back glowing that evening, describing how he had scrambled up a steep rocky “shortcut” with some other hikers watching (and in the process lost his Kindle down a crevice).

The Aaron I knew was sociable and excited to spend time with his favorite people, right up to the very end. He had plans and ambitions — huge ones. On January 9, two days before he died, he spent hours deep in conversation with our Australian friend Sam about the new organization Aaron was in the early stages of building. Sam asked him whether he had support, and Aaron replied that everyone who was competent enough to support him was, in fact, supporting him — classic Aaron pessimistic arrogance, but also a reminder that he knew his friends were standing with him. Sam gave Aaron a quick overview of Australian politics; Aaron expressed astonishment at how easy it would be to “take over Australia”, but concluded that a country of only 20 million probably wouldn’t be worth it.

Self-esteem, needless to say, was definitely not Aaron’s problem.

The Aaron I knew had no trouble concentrating or remembering detail. Up through the week before he died, he was devouring all the scientific literature he could find on drug addiction and effective interventions. Not, to be clear, because he had any drug issues himself (he almost never even drank alcohol), but for a consulting project he was working on for Givewell, his favorite charity. He related to me with deep intellectual excitement his conversations with the top experts in the field, the interventions that had shown the most promise at combating alcoholism, his developing theories about what types of policy changes might be most politically feasible. We debated the cultural constructs that allow our society to treat almost indistinguishable chemicals as differently as we treat heroin and morphine.

The Aaron I knew had profound capacity for pleasure in everyday life. He did, of course, have problems with eating — within the range of normal symptoms associated with his ulcerative colitis. But when he found truly great food — or for that matter, truly great anything — he reveled in it. He had a finely honed aesthetic sense. He could get deeper, truer joy out of a perfect corn muffin, a brilliantly constructed narrative arc from Robert Caro’s LBJ biography, a beautiful font, than anyone I’ve ever met.

And maybe most impressively, he sustained all of these qualities for almost two years, in the face of an ongoing ordeal that threatened to ruin his life.

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Aaron was human: He wasn’t happy every moment, and I’d be the first to say he could be a real pain to live with sometimes. Aaron could be moody and introverted. Aaron was often in substantial physical pain from his stomach. Aaron was hard on himself (and equally hard on others). And Aaron obviously, at the end, was suicidal.

But I say it again: Aaron’s death was not caused by depression. This is an important point, because many people are arguing that it was, and that the appropriate response to his death is better treatment for depression, better detection of suicidal tendencies. This country absolutely needs these things — Aaron would have been the first to agree — but we need them because they’re the right thing to do, not because of what happened to Aaron.

I don’t know exactly why Aaron killed himself. I don’t know exactly what was going through his mind. If I had known those things on January 11, if I had even known the right questions to ask, maybe I could have stopped him. Since January 11, I think about it every hour of every day.

But as dream Aaron reminded me, I can only know what I already know. And with the knowledge I have — from watching, listening, asking, next to him on the bed, over meals, talking on the subway, from our adjacent desks at the office where we worked on separate projects — from our lives together, I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.

I believe Aaron’s death was caused by exhaustion, by fear, and by uncertainty. I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a persecution and a prosecution that had already wound on for 2 years (what happened to our right to a speedy trial?) and had already drained all of his financial resources. I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a criminal justice system that prioritizes power over mercy, vengeance over justice; a system that punishes innocent people for trying to prove their innocence instead of accepting plea deals that mark them as criminals in perpetuity; a system where incentives and power structures align for prosecutors to destroy the life of an innovator like Aaron in the pursuit of their own ambitions.

Ask yourself this: If on January 10, Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz at the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office had called Aaron’s lawyer and said they’d realized their mistake and that they were dropping all charges — or even for that matter that they were ready to offer a reasonable plea deal that wouldn’t have marked Aaron as a felon for the rest of his life — would Aaron have killed himself on January 11?

The answer is unquestionably no.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

Aaron and I didn’t have many photos together. We...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:54:02 -0500

Aaron and I didn’t have many photos together. We didn’t prioritize trying to capture our lives in digital form. This is one of the best we do have, thanks to our wonderful friend Ben Wikler.

Who am I?

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:26:00 -0500

My name is Taren Kate Stinebrickner-Kauffman. I grew up as the kind of kid who skipped the prom to go to an international science fair. I majored in math and thought I was going to be an academic. But I wound up working on a Congressional campaign in 2004 and caught the political bug. There’s an addictive quality to discovering that you, personally, can nudge the socio-political-economic structures that govern our lives, whether it’s through elections or lobbying or organizing or something else entirely. I went through a series of political jobs — from GetUp.org.au to the AFL-CIO, from the US to Australia to Germany — most 1 year or less, where the learning curve is greatest.

In 2011, I decided that there was a gap in the campaigning world that I could fill: In response to the growing power of multinational corporations we need an online community and platform where consumers, investors, and more generally what I term “economic citizens” from around the world can come together to hold corporations accountable. So I founded SumOfUs.org. A little over a year in, we have over 850,000 users and have won some amazing campaigns helping everyone from tomato pickers in Florida to factory workers in China.

Along the way, I met and fell in love with programmer, writer, activist, thinker, lover, world-changer Aaron Swartz. We started dating in June 2011, just weeks before he was indicted by the federal government for downloading too many academic journal articles. We moved to New York together in 2012 and were living together in January 2013, at the time of his suicide, while he was facing federal felony charges potentially amounting to over 35 years in prison and $4 million in fines.

This blog is about Aaron’s life, death, and the aftermath thereof, as well as about my life, work, and the many things we both cared about.

You can read more about the purpose of this blog in my post “What is going on here?”

You can follow me on Twitter here.

What is going on here?

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:19:00 -0500

A friend said to me last week, “One should start blogging when one has something to say.” Since Aaron’s death, I have many things to say.

In the short run, most of those things will be related to Aaron’s life and death. I want this blog to serve as a hub for information about all the thousands of flowers that are blooming around his legacy and the issues he cared about, as well as around holding accountable the people and systems who helped cause his death.

But I want this blog to go beyond that as well. One of the millions of things I miss about Aaron is that when I had something to say, anything at all, I would talk about it with him; get his thoughts and his feedback; circle around it and riff on it with him for weeks. We never, not once in our entire relationship, ran out of things to talk about.

The about page of Aaron’s blog is worth quoting here:

In his 1959 classic, The Sociological Imagination, the great sociologist C. Wright Mills told students of the discipline:

As a social scientist, you have to … capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman. But how can you do this? One answer is: you must set up a blog…

In such a blog … there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this blog, you … will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person.

…

Actually, he called it a “file” instead of a blog, but the point remains the same: becoming a scientific thinker requires practice and writing is a powerful aid to reflection.

My conversations with Aaron, in many ways, served as this file for me since we started dating in June 2011. Now, as I begin to rebuild my life, I hope this blog can start to fill part of that purpose as well.

You can read more about who I am and my relationship with Aaron Swartz here.

You can follow me on Twitter here.