FILM REVIEW: THE INTERNET'S OWN BOY THE STORY OF AARON SWARTZ

A scene from The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. Photo by Quinn Norton.

A real transformer 

By Ed Rampell

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is required viewing for anyone who values free speech and justice. Brian Knappenberger’s riveting documentary is also a case study in Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s selective prosecution. As liberal commentator/columnist/radio talk show host David Sirota points out in an onscreen interview, the Obama administration has not prosecuted the financial sector for basically wrecking much of the world economy.

While Big Brother and the Holder Company gave the Wall Street banksters (and Bush mass murderers a pass), at the same time, as Matt Taibbi points out in The Divide, American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, “Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization.” But who does the Department of Justice (DOJ) decide to throw the book at? Internet whiz kid Aaron Swartz, who in 2000, at the age of 14, helped develop RSS, which has been called “Really Simple Syndication,” as it enables automatic summarization of online information, among other things. The Chicago-born child prodigy went on to cofound the social networking and news website Reddit, a platform for Net communities.

Swartz attended (but did not graduate from) Stanford and became a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics. The passionate advocate of Internet freedom and free access to information became an off- and online activist, harnessing the power of the Web to monitor the powers that be. In 2008 he founded Watchdog.net to aggregate data about politicians and helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. In 2010, Swartz founded the nonprofit Demand Progress, which spearheaded Net roots resistance that helped defeat Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Like a sort of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden of academia, from September 2010 to January 2011 Swartz is believed to have mass downloaded documents from MIT’s JSTOR database, a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. Although it’s not certain what Swartz’s motivation was for allegedly doing so, it appears that the hacktivist was attempting to thwart efforts to profiteer off of human knowledge by making this information available free of charge to the general public, which is a recurring theme of The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.

In early 2011 the Secret Service and Cambridge Police Department starting investigating and the US Attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation into the hacking of MIT’s network. By the end of January Swartz’s office and home were raided and grand jury and subpoena actions commenced. As the documentary meticulously reveals, although JSTOR declined to press charges and MIT proclaimed its “neutrality” in the legal matter (while Jamie Dimon and Dick Cheney skated) federal prosecutor Stephen P. Heymann, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, who had a background in prosecuting computer hacking, pursued the case with Inspector Javert-like intensity, and on July 14, 2011 Swartz was charged with four felony counts, including theft of computer information. The 24-year-old was arrested days later.

It was the bulldog versus the watchdog, and during the zigzagging trajectory of Swartz’s case, the number of felony counts against him rose to 13, and Aaron pled not guilty. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange may have been beyond Washington’s long arm of the law and members of the underground collective Anonymous (Knappenberger previously directed the 2012 doc We Are Legion: The Story of the Hactivists) too cagey to be caught, but Swartz was within the U.S. judicial system’s grasp, and it appears that the DOJ was determined to make an example of him. Faced with economic ruin and imprisonment for years by a vengeful administration -- the Obama regime has been extraordinarily vindictive towards whistleblowers, charging more people with the Espionage Act than all previous U.S. administrations combined -- the free spirited Swartz appears to have been pushed over the edge on Jan. 11, 2013.

The 26-year-old’s death prompted protest, including from Congress -- within days California’s U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren announced she’d introduce “Aaron’s Law” to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But on March 6, 2013 an unrepentant Attorney General Holder defended Swartz’s prosecution before a Senate committee.

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is a compelling, powerful, well put together work, combining archival footage and original interviews with notables such as academic/activist Lawrence Lessig, Sen. Ron Wyden, Rep. Lofgren, as well as with Aaron’s relatives, friends, lovers, etc., who provide an intimate look into the personal side of the film’s subject.  This gripping, must-see documentary -- especially relevant as the struggle for Net neutrality continues and the Snowden case unfolds -- is being released theatrically and on Amazon and Hulu.

R.I.P. Aaron Swartz -- aloha oe (farewell to thee): Your bulb burned briefly, but brightly.