As the weeks went by, Peters grew more optimistic about the prospect of suppressing evidence taken from the laptop and USB drive that police had seized when Swartz had been arrested. On December 14, Peters and Heymann met with Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton to review the status of the suppression motions filed by Swartz’s defense team. Judge Gorton granted Peters’s request for an evidence-suppression hearing and scheduled it for January 25, 2013. “If we had won that motion and suppressed the fruits of their search, they wouldn’t have had a lot of the evidence they had planned to use at trial,” Peters remembered.26 Afterward, still in the courthouse, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman moved to embrace Swartz, but was rebuffed. “Not in front of Steve Heymann,” Swartz told her. “I don’t want to show Steve Heymann that.”27
Perhaps feeding off Peters’s energy, Swartz took steps to expand his circle of supporters and get more people invested in his case. Jeffrey Mayersohn got another e-mail from Swartz that December, asking if he’d be willing to meet with Charlie Furman, whom Swartz had hired to help coordinate fund-raising efforts for his legal expenses. “And when that happened, I was really encouraged because I thought, ‘Okay, this is Aaron getting engaged in his defense,’ ” Mayersohn said.28
But leaning into the pain didn’t make it stop hurting. Swartz hated having to ask people for money because doing so meant having to discuss the details of his case. “The more that people talked to him about the case instead of talking to him about their exciting technology ideas, or their ideas about how to change the world, the harder that was for him in a lot of ways, I think,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman suggested.29
The case cut into the time he could spend on his many projects as well. Though his productivity had been sapped, he still tried to keep as busy as possible. As 2012 drew to a close, he was preparing to revive watchdog.net. He was conducting substantial research on how to reform drug policy. At ThoughtWorks, he was leading a team that was developing new digital tools for political activism and had embraced the challenges of personnel management. At a company retreat in Chicago, he gave a presentation about the Toyota lean-production system. When he returned to Brooklyn, he was so excited about the experience that he gave an encore performance for Stinebrickner-Kauffman.
Swartz may have been reluctant to show emotion in front of Heymann, but he was growing more and more comfortable with showing it at home. November and December 2012 marked the zenith of their relationship, Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled. “Being with you just keeps getting better,” Swartz told her at one point.30
Swartz and Stinebrickner-Kauffman rang in 2013 with a New Year’s vacation in Burlington, Vermont, accompanied by Quinn Norton’s young daughter, Ada. It was the first time in a while that Swartz had taken a break from his case. Unfortunately, he contracted the flu, which kept him indoors for most of the trip, and the virus persisted when he returned to New York. “He asked me a couple of times that week, in a voice that could have been rhetorical or flippant, and I thought was rhetorical or flippant at the time, ‘Am I always going to feel like this?’ ” Stinebrickner-Kauffman remembered. “And I thought he was talking about the flu.”31
He recovered sufficiently to travel with Stinebrickner-Kauffman to Holmes, New York, on Wednesday, January 9, for a meeting of multi-issue political activists from around the world. Swartz’s friend Sam McLean, a political organizer from Australia, also attended the conference, and the two men separated from the larger group and secluded themselves in conversation, discussing ways to build intelligent systems that would empower ordinary citizens to challenge entrenched corporate and partisan interests. “His argument was that we’ll have to fight more SOPA-style campaigns. So we need an algorithm or computer program that would encourage lots of people to identify the fights and to start the campaigns,” McLean told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014. “We’d put the tools that we have at our disposal in their hands.”32
Swartz had actually been building tools like these for several months with his colleagues at ThoughtWorks. Victory Kit, as the project was called, was an open-source version of the expensive community-organizing software used by groups such as MoveOn. Victory Kit incorporated Bayesian statistics—an analytical method that gets smarter as it goes along by consistently incorporating new information into its estimates—to improve activists’ ability to reach and organize their bases. “In the end, a lot of what the software was about was doing quite sophisticated A/B testing of messages for advocacy,” remembered Swartz’s friend Nathan Woodhull.33
Swartz was scheduled to present Victory Kit to the group at the Holmes retreat. At the last minute, though, he declined to do so. “I’ve thought at that gathering that he acted a little oddly, in retrospect, but at the time I thought it was just Aaron being Aaron,” Woodhull said. Swartz’s talk apparently depended on finding a partner to join him in making the code open-source, and when Swartz couldn’t secure a commitment in time, he decided not to deliver his presentation.
On the drive back to the city, Swartz held forth on the inefficacy of most nonprofit organizations; they were designed to deploy their tactics without bothering to evaluate whether those tactics actually worked, he grumbled. Woodhull later noted that Swartz was fascinated by “this whole idea that there are all these organizations that think they are doing good, but actually, in objective terms, either aren’t or could be doing a lot better.” Too many nonprofits took the Batman and Harvey Dent routes, so to speak: they deployed methods that were emotionally satisfying but empirically ineffective. What the nonprofits needed to do was emulate the Joker. If you removed emotion and presumption from your strategies and approached your problems rationally and analytically—if you learned from your mistakes and refined your tactics accordingly—then you had a much better chance of devising the optimal solution to any given problem, no matter how crazy that solution might seem.
That same afternoon, Peters called Heymann to discuss the upcoming evidence-suppression hearing. “Toward the end of it,” Peters recalled, “I said, ‘Can’t we find some way to make this case go away?’ I remember saying to them, ‘It’s just not right for this case to ruin Aaron’s life.’ ”34 Heymann responded with a familiar refrain: the government would never agree to a deal that didn’t include jail time, and if Swartz was convicted at trial, the prosecution would seek a guidelines sentence of at least seven years in prison. You want to have a trial? Fine, let’s have a trial.
Though Swartz returned to New York on Wednesday, Stinebrickner-Kauffman remained at the retreat overnight. She returned to Brooklyn on Thursday evening and was surprised to find Swartz at home, on the couch, in an unexpectedly social mood. “Surprise!” he exclaimed, and despite Stinebrickner-Kauffman’s fatigue, he insisted they go out and meet some friends in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood, at a bar called Spitzer’s Corner. They were hungry, so upon arrival they ordered two of Swartz’s favorite dishes, grilled cheese and macaroni and cheese. They agreed the grilled cheese was one of the best they had ever had.
When Swartz woke up the next morning, he was sluggish and gloomy. “I couldn’t get him out of bed. He was just in a really terrible mood. Just despondent about the case and everything,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled. As she got ready for work, she tried various tactics to lift his spirits—opening windows, playing music, tickling him. Eventually, he rose and got dressed, donning a black T-shirt and corduroy pants. “I got ready to go, I was running late for a meeting, and he said he wasn’t going to come with me. And he was going to stay home and rest,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman remembered. “And I asked him why he had gotten dressed. And he didn’t answer.”35
When she got to work, she found Ben Wikler online and told him that she was worried about Aaron. Wikler initially suggested that Swartz work from Wikler’s apartment that afternoon. He and his wife had recently had a baby, a boy, and Wikler thought that working in proximity to the newborn might lift Swartz’s spirits. Instead, they settled on sharing dinner together that night. They tried to call Swartz, but hi
s phone was off—“which was not super-unusual for him,” Wikler said.36 The day went by, amid hopes that all would be right by evening.
That afternoon, in his office in California, Elliot Peters reviewed some of the evidence that the prosecution had handed over in late December.37 As he read, he got more and more excited about Swartz’s chances at the upcoming suppression hearing. “I ran down the hall, saying, ‘Look at this! Look at all this!’ ” he remembered.38
Peters put the new evidence in his briefcase, left his office, and hopped into his car. As he drove, his phone rang. It was Robert Swartz. Aaron had killed himself.
* * *
STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN found Swartz around 7:00 p.m. on Friday, January 11, hanging from a window in their apartment, his body cold, his belt looped around his neck, still wearing the clothes he had donned that morning. She screamed so loud that emergency response operators could not initially understand what she was saying. Stinebrickner-Kauffman called Wikler almost immediately with the sudden, terrible news. He received her call at 7:05. “That’s when everything shattered,” said Wikler.39 Over the next few days, Swartz’s friends and relatives were left to reassemble the various pieces.
Swartz’s death became a national story faster than anyone could have expected, especially considering the relatively meager coverage his ongoing case had received while he was alive. The mourning soon spread worldwide. On a memorial website titled Remember Aaron Swartz, which had been hastily put together by some of his friends, mourners from around the globe posted messages of remembrance and sympathy. “I met Aaron twice and, each time, I was struck by the searing lucidity of his mind, by his uncanny ability to see further than most of us,” wrote Jean-Claude Guédon, a Canadian academic who had attended the EIFL conference in Cupramontana with Swartz in 2008.40 Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation reflected that he knew many people who were willing to stand up for their core beliefs, but “most of them have been very strong, more outgoing personalities, who could react to attacks without flinching. It is perhaps more brave to take on the world when you are shy and it can hurt you so badly.”41 The condolences from strangers outnumbered those from his friends and associates. “I never met him. I am sad,” wrote Reynaldo Guimaraes of Brazil. “God bless him and his family.”42
On the clear, mild morning of January 15, 2013, hundreds of mourners filed past Aaron Swartz’s coffin in the parking lot of the Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois. Television news vans waited on the street outside. Friends, family members, and admirers filled the synagogue to capacity. Some had to stand after all the seats filled up. They had come, representatives from all stages of Swartz’s life, to grieve and console and draw strength from one another’s presence, as if, as a group, they could make sense of this bad thing.
Inside, some of the people who had known Swartz best addressed the crowd: Lawrence Lessig, Ben Wikler, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. Their remarks shared an angry, confused sorrow over the unnecessarily abrupt end to Swartz’s short life. Swartz had always loved explaining things to people, so it was odd that he left no note, no explanation, nothing to clarify why he’d killed himself. Some observers later seized on Swartz’s mood swings and suggested that his suicide was the product of undiagnosed mental illness. In his eulogy at his son’s funeral, an unshaven, haggard Robert Swartz stifled tears as he offered an alternative theory. “Aaron did not commit suicide,” he said, his voice hardening. “He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.”
In the weeks and months following Swartz’s suicide, this claim became the dominant narrative: the government hounded Swartz to his grave, and MIT sat complacently and watched it happen. On January 13, 2013, hackers attacked the website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in retaliation for the school’s perceived role in Swartz’s death. For weeks, school officials received many angry, accusatory e-mails from Swartz’s admirers. “It does not matter how good your reputation is when you find yourself with the blood of a genius on your hands,” one correspondent declared. “Not all great Neptune’s ocean will suffice to wash it off.”43
The US Attorney’s Office in Boston received its share of public acrimony, too. “As Massachusetts natives, we’ll work to end the political careers of the prosecutors here who targeted Aaron,” Holmes Wilson promised in a blog post.44 A person or persons allegedly affiliated with the computer hacking collective Anonymous posted Stephen Heymann’s home address and telephone number online, alongside the names of some of his family and friends. “How does it feel to become an enemy of the state?” an unnamed e-mailer asked Heymann soon after this data was released. “FYI, you might want to move out of the country and change your name. . . .”45 At his home address, Heymann received an ominous postcard featuring a picture of his head inside a guillotine. Elliot Peters told the Boston Globe that the day after Swartz killed himself, Stephen Heymann had called and left a message expressing his sympathy. “I can’t call him back,” Peters told the Globe’s Kevin Cullen. “Either I’ll say something I shouldn’t say, or I’m going to act like I accept his condolences, which I don’t. So the only thing I can do is not call him back.”46
At a memorial service in New York City the weekend after Swartz’s funeral, the graphic designer Edward Tufte took the stage and recounted how, as a college student in the 1960s, he had gotten caught hacking the telephone system. Tufte and a friend had built a “blue box”—a device that allowed them to make long-distance phone calls for free—and had used it to make what they believed was the longest-distance phone call ever made: a call from Palo Alto to New York, routed through Hawaii. Six months later A. J. Dodge, a security agent from AT&T, called Tufte and informed him that the company had been onto them the entire time. While the blue-box stunt had technically qualified as a crime, both Dodge and the company’s executives realized that Tufte wasn’t a criminal, and that nothing was to be gained from treating him as such.
Tufte and AT&T reached an informal resolution, in which Tufte and his friend agreed “that we wouldn’t try to sell this . . . we wouldn’t do any more of it, and that we would turn our equipment over to AT and T. And so they got a complete vacuum tube oscillator kit for making long-distance phone calls,” Tufte said. “But I was grateful for A. J. Dodge and, I must say, even AT and T, that they decided not to wreck my life.”47
AT&T decided not to do it. To pursue a case is always a decision, not an ineluctable gravitational reaction. The government could have given Swartz a break. MIT could have made a statement on his behalf. Swartz could have gone on to greater successes in the future. “He could have done so much more,” Robert Swartz said in his eulogy, his voice heavy with regret. “But now he is dead.”
Aaron Swartz is dead. And no one has been held accountable. In a March 2013 session of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Texas Republican John Cornyn questioned Attorney General Eric Holder about the prosecutors’ conduct and the wisdom of the charges against Swartz, suggesting that it was inappropriate “to try to bully someone into pleading guilty to something that strikes me as rather minor.” Holder expressed support for Stephen Heymann, Carmen Ortiz, and the US Attorney’s Office in Boston. As of this writing, none of the prosecutors in the Swartz case have been officially censured for their actions. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. US Attorney’s Offices exist to win convictions, to prosecute alleged lawbreakers without regard to the logic or the justice of the laws that have been broken. Despite Stephen Heymann’s resentment of some of Swartz’s tactics, the case, in the end, wasn’t personal. He was just doing his job, following the rules and customs of the system that employed him.
MIT appointed an independent committee to examine its actions in the Swartz affair soon after his death, amid mounting public anger over the school’s inertia. Midway through 2013, the committee released a largely exculpatory report, concluding that MIT had not been unduly negligent or callous in its handling of the Swartz case. It noted that the school was responsible for “r
especting its contractual obligations with licensors” and “maintaining the integrity of its network.” The report also observed that MIT seemed wholly unprepared for the forcefulness of the public reaction to Swartz’s death, especially given the relatively sparse attention the case had received while Swartz had still been alive: “Aaron Swartz’s suicide has embroiled MIT in an Internet uproar that the Institute did not anticipate and with which it is not well prepared to grapple as a legal, policy, or social phenomenon.”48
Swartz’s downfall is not so much a tale of personal vendettas and conspiracies as it is a story of flawed organizations. Imperfect institutions cannot help but generate imperfect outcomes. Mistakes compound because systems are designed to produce them. Swartz’s seventh and final post in the Raw Nerve series had returned to this theme and asserted that, often, what looked like human error was really systemic failure. The story concerned the Toyota lean-production method that Swartz so admired. In 1982, General Motors closed a plant in Fremont, California, that had been notorious for underproduction and labor grievances. One year later, Toyota came to town, reopened the factory, and rehired the same workers—and, Swartz writes, “so began the most fascinating experiment in management history.”
The new Toyota employees were flown to Japan, where they toured Toyota facilities and were introduced to the company’s unfamiliar management philosophy. “Three months after they got back to the US and reopened the plant, everything had changed,” Swartz wrote. “The Fremont factory, once one of the worst in the US, had skyrocketed to become the best. The cars they made got near-perfect quality ratings. And the cost to make them had plummeted. It wasn’t the workers who were the problem; it was the system.”49
A better system was the solution. “When there’s a problem, you shouldn’t get angry with the gears—you should fix the machine,” Swartz reflected. Unfortunately, some machines resist fixing.
The Idealists Page 27