[00:00.000 --> 00:04.580]  Only two things scare me, and one is nuclear war.
[00:05.360 --> 00:06.300]  What's the other?
[00:06.520 --> 00:06.940]  Excuse me?
[00:07.200 --> 00:08.780]  What's the other thing that scares you?
[00:08.980 --> 00:10.020]  Hi, this is Jamie.
[00:10.320 --> 00:16.260]  Hi, this is Sarah from Brand Van 3000, and you're listening to WBAI.
[00:16.500 --> 00:18.240]  99.5 FM.
[00:18.700 --> 00:18.940]  New York?
[00:19.260 --> 00:19.900]  New York.
[00:26.280 --> 00:28.120]  See how relaxed you're getting?
[00:28.660 --> 00:29.100]  Indeed.
[00:35.370 --> 00:45.710]  Greetings, this is Savion Glover, and you're listening to WBAI, listener-supported, non-commercial radio in New York.
[00:46.710 --> 00:47.250]  Enjoy.
[00:48.170 --> 00:53.990]  And it's 59 minutes after 6 o'clock, and yes, you are listening to WBAI New York.
[00:54.530 --> 01:00.850]  At 7 o'clock is when we begin off the hook, except when we run out of announcements and we start 30 seconds early.
[01:02.270 --> 01:05.650]  Unless the button doesn't work, and then we can kill the time by not doing anything.
[01:05.850 --> 01:06.790]  Let's reach over here.
[01:11.910 --> 01:13.890]  The telephone keeps ringing.
[01:14.170 --> 01:16.430]  So I ripped it off the wall.
[01:17.350 --> 01:19.410]  I cut myself while shaving.
[01:19.950 --> 01:21.930]  Now I can't make a call.
[01:22.590 --> 01:24.790]  We couldn't get much worse.
[01:27.490 --> 01:30.190]  Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
[01:30.750 --> 01:32.710]  I hope that's understood.
[01:32.910 --> 01:33.690]  Bum-diddly-bum!
[02:46.100 --> 02:48.540]  And a very good evening to hear about the program is off the hook.
[02:48.640 --> 02:51.360]  Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Mike.
[02:51.600 --> 02:52.040]  Good evening.
[02:52.480 --> 02:53.120]  Rob T.
[02:53.360 --> 02:53.800]  Firefly.
[02:54.040 --> 02:54.420]  Good evening.
[02:54.700 --> 02:55.300]  Bernie S.
[02:56.040 --> 02:57.140]  Greetings from Philadelphia.
[02:57.740 --> 02:59.840]  And a special guest tonight, Jason Scott.
[03:00.040 --> 03:00.800]  Hello, everyone.
[03:01.000 --> 03:01.700]  Welcome to the studio.
[03:02.000 --> 03:02.300]  Thank you.
[03:03.300 --> 03:10.760]  Well, we're all still reeling over the loss to the hacker community of Aaron Schwartz a couple of weeks ago.
[03:12.080 --> 03:25.260]  And this week, on Saturday, there was a memorial right here in Manhattan at Cooper Union, which was very, very well attended, a packed house.
[03:25.360 --> 03:25.820]  Jason, you were there.
[03:25.860 --> 03:27.360]  How many people do you think were in that room?
[03:27.580 --> 03:31.520]  You know, part of me wants to say a thousand, but I'm probably really bad at adjusting crowds.
[03:31.720 --> 03:32.360]  It felt like a thousand.
[03:32.500 --> 03:37.380]  Yeah, but it was probably, you know, we always think that, but it's at least hundreds of people.
[03:37.480 --> 03:38.000]  Yeah, yeah.
[03:38.000 --> 03:40.580]  And enough that it filled all of Cooper Union.
[03:40.740 --> 03:41.920]  There wasn't really any open seats.
[03:42.320 --> 03:55.680]  It was very emotional, very angry at times, and something that I think needed to happen because so many people wanted to be able to express themselves and just come together and talk with other people.
[03:57.060 --> 03:59.740]  And it was quite an event.
[03:59.740 --> 04:08.300]  And we have put together some sound from that, about 10, 15 minutes of audio from Saturday's memorial service for Aaron Schwartz.
[04:08.320 --> 04:08.980]  We're going to play that.
[04:09.100 --> 04:15.080]  We'll come back and talk about that a little bit, talk about some other issues in the hacker world here on Off the Hook.
[04:15.080 --> 04:18.080]  When we're young, we think our cause is a sprint.
[04:19.120 --> 04:20.960]  And then when we're middle-aged, we think it's a marathon.
[04:21.680 --> 04:24.500]  And when we're old, we think it's a relay race.
[04:25.460 --> 04:28.500]  And Aaron was the guy you wanted to hand us off to.
[04:29.680 --> 04:37.380]  One of the amazing things about maturing, about getting older, is that you realize your job is to leave.
[04:37.700 --> 04:40.480]  Your job is to leave the world better than you found it.
[04:40.540 --> 04:48.740]  And you want to leave it in the hands of people who are really good at taking care of the stuff that really matters, and standing up for the stuff that really matters.
[04:49.220 --> 04:50.380]  And Aaron did that.
[04:51.220 --> 04:59.940]  And when he showed up at this thing, it was interesting, because I think Larry had introduced him to me earlier, but I was amazed.
[04:59.940 --> 05:01.000]  He was really small.
[05:01.160 --> 05:02.160]  He was this little guy.
[05:02.440 --> 05:08.140]  There's that picture among the ones that were rotating earlier of Larry Lessig talking to Aaron.
[05:08.280 --> 05:09.520]  That was about when he was that age.
[05:10.400 --> 05:14.500]  And yet, as soon as we started talking, it was like I'm talking to this adult.
[05:15.440 --> 05:19.160]  And I asked him about school and stuff like that.
[05:19.160 --> 05:20.100]  You ask a teenager.
[05:20.280 --> 05:21.380]  He was done with school.
[05:22.100 --> 05:23.000]  He was done.
[05:23.700 --> 05:24.920]  He moved on.
[05:25.420 --> 05:26.600]  Were you going to high school?
[05:26.680 --> 05:26.840]  No.
[05:27.040 --> 05:27.700]  I'm not doing that.
[05:27.880 --> 05:28.500]  You're going to university.
[05:28.720 --> 05:29.760]  Eh, I'm working.
[05:30.020 --> 05:30.660]  On what?
[05:30.940 --> 05:31.860]  Well, there's RSS.
[05:32.040 --> 05:32.760]  There's Creative Commons.
[05:32.960 --> 05:36.160]  There's a whole roster of things that he was active in.
[05:37.820 --> 05:41.600]  Oh, and also, his computer was this broken Mac laptop that had a...
[05:41.600 --> 05:44.460]  You couldn't read it, because the light had gone out behind it.
[05:44.560 --> 05:45.460]  Only he could read it.
[05:45.460 --> 05:46.040]  He explained it.
[05:46.380 --> 05:49.280]  This is okay, because it was still a security precaution.
[05:52.060 --> 05:53.060]  16 years old.
[05:53.640 --> 05:58.960]  Anyway, so I was thinking about what Aaron stood for.
[05:59.020 --> 06:00.320]  You'll hear a lot of that today.
[06:00.320 --> 06:07.840]  And my note here says, geeks and legal dash justice.
[06:08.300 --> 06:11.880]  And geeks tend to avoid the legal stuff.
[06:12.900 --> 06:14.660]  They tend not to want to screw with it.
[06:14.780 --> 06:17.040]  They tend to not want to deal with the politics.
[06:17.300 --> 06:17.900]  We're just...
[06:17.900 --> 06:21.620]  Linus Torvalds, I'm an editor for Linus Journal, would say, I only do kernel space.
[06:21.620 --> 06:22.820]  I don't do user space.
[06:23.800 --> 06:25.140]  Politics is in user space.
[06:25.280 --> 06:26.520]  Justice is in user space.
[06:27.280 --> 06:28.600]  Aaron was in both.
[06:30.360 --> 06:38.740]  And there are so few geeks that stand out and go that extra space, that extra step to defend the rest of us.
[06:38.820 --> 06:39.500]  To stand...
[06:39.500 --> 06:44.260]  To look out in the future and see what needs to be, and work on that.
[06:44.440 --> 06:46.140]  And making that happen.
[06:47.760 --> 06:49.320]  And we need justice here.
[06:49.580 --> 06:50.820]  That's what this hall is about.
[06:51.200 --> 06:52.900]  That's the sacred space we heard about earlier.
[06:54.280 --> 06:55.740]  Justice needs to happen here.
[06:55.840 --> 06:57.260]  That's what Pete Seeger stood for.
[06:57.520 --> 06:58.520]  Still stands for.
[06:58.700 --> 07:00.040]  That's what we all need to stand for.
[07:00.380 --> 07:01.480]  Whatever that means.
[07:01.580 --> 07:03.220]  And in our hearts, we know it's there.
[07:04.540 --> 07:09.720]  And the presence that is Aaron in the world persists, and it's in all of our hearts.
[07:10.080 --> 07:12.900]  But we need to do the work that he started.
[07:13.360 --> 07:14.020]  Thank you.
[07:19.790 --> 07:20.850]  His sense of humor.
[07:21.350 --> 07:31.070]  Another thing that I found in these notes that I pointed to from Aaron's blog was his license haiku, which some of you may have seen.
[07:31.270 --> 07:33.130]  So this is Aaron speaking on his blog.
[07:33.330 --> 07:35.290]  Again, around the same time, 2002.
[07:35.710 --> 07:40.150]  I think that people really use software licenses to express intentions and don't really read the details of the licenses.
[07:40.490 --> 07:45.130]  So I think that licenses should be made as simple as possible so they don't disagree with the intentions.
[07:45.370 --> 07:46.730]  Thus, haiku licensing.
[07:47.710 --> 07:50.390]  And I have a feeling most of the people in the room are going to know what this means.
[07:50.550 --> 07:52.530]  But apologies to those of you who don't know what these acronyms are.
[07:52.570 --> 07:53.890]  You will shortly if you don't.
[07:54.250 --> 07:54.930]  Public domain.
[07:55.210 --> 07:57.310]  Do what you feel like since the work is abandoned.
[07:57.570 --> 07:58.610]  The law doesn't care.
[08:04.090 --> 08:04.890]  MIT license.
[08:05.150 --> 08:09.070]  Take my code with you and do whatever you want, but please don't blame me.
[08:12.640 --> 08:13.040]  LGPL.
[08:13.040 --> 08:17.060]  You can copy this, but make modified versions free in source code form.
[08:18.080 --> 08:18.520]  MPL.
[08:18.540 --> 08:21.780]  Like LGPL, except Netscape is allowed to change the license.
[08:23.600 --> 08:24.120]  GPL.
[08:24.120 --> 08:27.760]  If you use this code, you and your children's children must make your source free.
[08:29.040 --> 08:30.800]  And he finishes with RIAA.
[08:31.360 --> 08:34.600]  If you touch this file, my lawyers will come kill you.
[08:36.280 --> 08:37.620]  So kindly refrain.
[08:40.400 --> 08:45.380]  And I want to just read one thing that is also on his blog that struck me many years ago that I kept.
[08:47.220 --> 08:52.020]  And I just want to say again here that I think is relevant in a couple different ways.
[08:53.120 --> 08:55.100]  This is about Aaron's month offline.
[08:55.100 --> 08:57.540]  He posted a blog post about spending 30 days offline.
[08:57.820 --> 09:00.900]  He's a guy who's very difficult to be offline for, like for many of us.
[09:01.380 --> 09:03.220]  So this is a very significant moment for him.
[09:04.300 --> 09:07.120]  Most of all, I felt not just happy, but firmly happy.
[09:07.580 --> 09:09.080]  Solid is the best way I can put it.
[09:09.500 --> 09:12.180]  I felt like I was in control of my life instead of the other way around.
[09:12.440 --> 09:15.880]  Like its challenges just bounced off me as I kept doing what I wanted.
[09:16.340 --> 09:20.720]  Normally I feel buffeted by events, a thousand tiny distractions nagging at the back of my head at all times.
[09:21.520 --> 09:23.400]  Offline, I felt control of my own destiny.
[09:23.660 --> 09:25.420]  I felt, yes, serene.
[09:25.420 --> 09:37.860]  And Aaron came to Connecticut and he told me about the four and a half million downloads of scholarly articles.
[09:38.220 --> 09:43.360]  And my first question was, why isn't MIT celebrating this?
[09:55.440 --> 10:01.360]  We talked a little bit about the legal case, or maybe it was right before he was indicted.
[10:02.020 --> 10:04.200]  And he asked me if I knew Bill Bowen.
[10:05.560 --> 10:08.040]  I think he knew the answer to that question.
[10:09.080 --> 10:21.980]  Bill Bowen was president of Princeton when I started out and was enormously helpful in my career there.
[10:21.980 --> 10:37.700]  He then became president of the Mellon Foundation, and he had retired from the Mellon Foundation, but he was asked by the Foundation to handle the problem of JSTOR and of Aaron.
[10:39.400 --> 10:51.880]  So I wrote Bill Bowen, an email about it, and I said first that Aaron is a treasurer.
[10:53.480 --> 11:03.600]  And then I told a personal story about how I had done some illegal hacking as a student and been caught at it and what happened.
[11:03.600 --> 11:26.000]  In 1962, my housemate and I invented the first blue box, that's a device that allows for free, undetectable, unbillable, long distance telephone calls.
[11:29.060 --> 11:53.960]  And we got this up and played around with it, and the end of our research came when we completed what we thought was the longest long distance telephone call ever made, which was from Palo Alto to New York time of day via Hawaii.
[11:56.580 --> 12:04.560]  Well, during our experimentation of AT&T on the second day, it turned out, had tapped our phone.
[12:06.680 --> 12:14.700]  But it wasn't until about six months later, when I got a call from a gentleman, A.J.
[12:14.860 --> 12:22.000]  Dodge, senior security person at AT&T, and I said, I know what you're calling about.
[12:23.520 --> 12:30.840]  And so we met, and he said, you know what we're doing is a crime, network and all that.
[12:32.400 --> 12:45.460]  And, but I knew it wasn't serious, because he actually cared about the kind of engineering stuff, and complained that the tone signals we were generating were not up to standard.
[12:47.220 --> 13:00.100]  Because they recorded them and played them back into the network to see what numbers they were, we were trying to reach, and they couldn't, they couldn't break through some of the noise of our signal.
[13:02.140 --> 13:10.860]  And so the deal was that, as I explained in my email to Bill Bowen, the deal was that we wouldn't try to sell this.
[13:10.860 --> 13:22.480]  We were told that, I was told that crime sign tickets wouldn't pay a great deal for this.
[13:22.920 --> 13:27.760]  We wouldn't do any more of it.
[13:27.960 --> 13:32.820]  And that we would turn our equipment over to AT&T.
[13:32.820 --> 13:42.440]  And so they got a complete vacuum-to-oscillator kit for making long-distance phone calls.
[13:46.080 --> 13:51.960]  But I was grateful for A.J.
[13:52.080 --> 13:57.780]  Dodge, and I must say even AT&T, that they decided not to wreck my life.
[14:04.830 --> 14:16.370]  And so I told Bill Bowen that he had a great opportunity here to not wreck somebody's life.
[14:19.610 --> 14:24.610]  And, of course, he thankfully did the right thing.
[14:28.180 --> 14:36.520]  Aaron's unique quality was that he was marvelously and vigorously different.
[14:38.040 --> 14:40.040]  There is a scarcity of that.
[14:41.960 --> 14:45.900]  Perhaps we can be all a little more different, too.
[14:47.080 --> 14:48.080]  Thank you very much.
[14:58.280 --> 15:00.820]  For a long time we didn't talk about the case very much.
[15:01.100 --> 15:02.520]  He wanted to protect me.
[15:03.100 --> 15:05.460]  And he wanted to cordon it off from the rest of his life.
[15:06.340 --> 15:12.440]  He was worried that I would be subpoenaed, or that his other friends would be subpoenaed, and so he kept it all to himself.
[15:12.640 --> 15:18.560]  He kept all of the stress and the anger and the fear to himself.
[15:22.660 --> 15:30.440]  We started talking more and more about it over the last few months, as it became clear that the government was not going to recognize that this was just one big mistake.
[15:31.760 --> 15:48.760]  that Steve Hyman, the prosecutor who was hell-bent on destroying Aaron's life, was not going to come to terms with the notion that Aaron was not a threat, that Aaron should not spend years behind bars, that Aaron should not be labeled a felon for the rest of his life.
[15:52.140 --> 15:55.580]  In December, there was a hearing that I went to with him.
[15:55.960 --> 16:04.900]  In the case, the trial was delayed, because another hearing, at this event, at this hearing, the decision was made to delay the trial until April.
[16:06.460 --> 16:11.460]  And afterwards, I, we came out of the courtroom, and I tried to give him a hug, and he pushed me away.
[16:11.940 --> 16:13.820]  And he said, not in front of Steve Hyman.
[16:14.980 --> 16:16.880]  I don't want to show Steve Hyman that.
[16:22.030 --> 16:24.070]  Aaron would have loved to have been here.
[16:25.350 --> 16:28.230]  I'm not sure he would have liked me speaking about him this way.
[16:28.610 --> 16:32.690]  Despite his public profile, he was an intensely private person in many ways.
[16:34.190 --> 16:36.190]  But memorial services are for the living.
[16:36.510 --> 16:39.330]  And last Friday, he forfeited his right to decide that.
[16:40.810 --> 16:47.670]  I think that you, his friends, his family, his admirers in the wider world, have a right to know what he faced.
[16:49.630 --> 17:05.370]  He faced an unfair prosecution by this man, Steve Hyman, who had no sense of proportion or justice, and just wanted to not rack Aaron up as a notch on his belt so he could go into the cafeteria with the other prosecutors and high-five them.
[17:06.350 --> 17:08.530]  He faced Carmen Ortiz, a U.S.
[17:08.610 --> 17:10.610]  attorney who did nothing to rein Hyman in.
[17:11.550 --> 17:22.450]  He faced indifference from MIT, an institution that could have protected him with a single public statement, and refused to do so in defiance of all of its own most cherished principles.
[17:23.750 --> 17:30.990]  And he faced a deeply dysfunctional criminal justice system, one that he is far from the only victim of.
[17:31.550 --> 17:40.930]  There are millions of Americans who face the kinds of ordeals that he did, most of them with many fewer resources and much less support than he did.
[17:43.630 --> 17:58.490]  And last Friday, he faced the prospect of yet another three months of uncertainty and ups and downs and being forced by the government to spend every fiber of his being on this damnable, senseless trial, with no guarantee that he could exonerate himself at the end of it.
[18:01.830 --> 18:07.950]  He was so scared and so frustrated and so desperate, and more than anything else, just so weary.
[18:08.730 --> 18:11.250]  I think he just couldn't take it another day.
[18:13.410 --> 18:21.130]  Excerpts from the memorial service for Aaron Schwartz held Saturday at Cooper Union here in New York City.
[18:21.490 --> 18:33.710]  We just heard from Taryn Steinbrick-Nakaufman, who was Aaron's partner, fellow activist, and we also heard Edward Tufte, Glenn Otis Brown, Doc Searles.
[18:36.030 --> 18:39.850]  Jason, you were there, saw the whole thing.
[18:40.310 --> 18:46.650]  Any thoughts as to how much better you got to know Aaron from hearing those words?
[18:46.910 --> 18:52.970]  You know, it's something, because I found out about Aaron being gone on Saturday morning.
[18:52.970 --> 18:57.790]  One of my followers emailed me at five in the morning.
[18:57.790 --> 19:04.470]  I had gotten up too early, and I was like, absolutely sure it was a hoax.
[19:04.790 --> 19:07.870]  Always a good sign that you're just like, no, of course not.
[19:07.870 --> 19:09.850]  That can't possibly be the case.
[19:09.970 --> 19:11.790]  We would not lose this person.
[19:12.130 --> 19:22.070]  And then as it got worse and worse, I ended up buying tickets to a show I wasn't particularly able to afford just to go to something nice that day and have a nice day.
[19:23.030 --> 19:36.250]  And I was worried, having been around as long as I have been, that there was going to be this narrative that popped up and that it was going to be kid hacker kills self in spite for a case.
[19:37.330 --> 19:40.030]  Prosecutors, you know, got too close to the truth or something.
[19:40.350 --> 19:41.370]  And it wasn't.
[19:41.470 --> 19:54.330]  You know, I knew as soon as Tim Berners-Lee tweets a sad poem, you know, when the creator of the World Wide Web is mourning in a poem the day that he finds out, that tells you this isn't going to go that way.
[19:54.630 --> 20:03.910]  And so I was happy that that part of the story wasn't going to be lost, about how special he was and what he was doing and that so many lives were connected to him.
[20:04.250 --> 20:07.650]  And then the memorial service, I knew I had to go to.
[20:08.170 --> 20:15.010]  And it fulfilled exactly what I had hoped it would fulfill, which was a feeling of knowing how many different people were involved.
[20:15.010 --> 20:31.110]  I mean, you had firebrand political groups next to legends of science and technology next to charities of worldwide reach all mourning this one person being gone.
[20:31.310 --> 20:40.310]  It's not some, you know, not I barely knew this person and now we're going to talk about ourselves, but here's everything he was doing for us, followed by here's everything he was doing for us.
[20:40.310 --> 20:44.590]  And the sense of he was everywhere, everything.
[20:44.970 --> 20:47.230]  And it's just shocking he was 26.
[20:47.770 --> 20:54.470]  This bright white light that he was for 14 years just affecting everything around him.
[20:54.670 --> 21:01.370]  So that memorial being recorded and the fact that you can go online and hear everything that was said there I think is really important.
[21:01.370 --> 21:07.230]  Um, I should mention that, uh, tomorrow the Internet Archive is having a memorial for him.
[21:07.590 --> 21:14.670]  Uh, they've got representatives of the EFF and, uh, Brewster Kale of, uh, the archive.org is speaking too.
[21:14.830 --> 21:17.210]  And it's open to all and it's in San Francisco.
[21:17.670 --> 21:19.930]  So, uh, you can see it at archive.org.
[21:19.930 --> 21:32.150]  So, they took the page from this memorial service and said, let's find even more people whose lives he touched that we think of as critical to the freedoms and charities and knowledge.
[21:32.370 --> 21:42.410]  So, I'm so happy that instead of a two-dimensional character, we're getting a person and we're getting his life.
[21:42.830 --> 21:51.950]  And, uh, what you did mention was, um, you know, the service went for a period of time and then it stopped and they asked people to talk to each other.
[21:52.530 --> 21:54.390]  And they had to kick us out.
[21:54.470 --> 21:55.830]  I think I got out of there at eight.
[21:56.110 --> 21:57.550]  I was there for like four hours.
[21:57.750 --> 21:58.090]  Mm-hmm.
[21:58.150 --> 22:06.390]  And, uh, because I was meeting people and here were, here were lawyers and here were activists and here were people who just wanted to get a voice out somewhere.
[22:06.710 --> 22:11.110]  And all of us were just kind of passing notes and saying, oh, we're going to do something.
[22:11.390 --> 22:21.430]  You know, we're going to, even if it's not our particular to a person action related to Aaron, Aaron, we're going to take the inspiration of Aaron and do something.
[22:21.910 --> 22:28.610]  And I think that week I worked harder this past week that I've worked in a very long time to saying, I'm going to do right by this kid.
[22:28.710 --> 22:29.990]  I'm going to do something good.
[22:30.210 --> 22:41.450]  And so many other people I've been talking to are like, oh yeah, oh yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to step out and I'm going to offer my skills somewhere they're needed like he did to try to fill something.
[22:41.630 --> 22:43.690]  Well, uh, what you say is certainly true.
[22:43.690 --> 22:52.230]  I recall at the memorial just running into people, someone I haven't seen for decades, people from all different parts of life.
[22:52.230 --> 22:54.090]  So I'm not involved in the hacker community at all.
[22:54.130 --> 22:57.310]  So I'm not involved in computers at all, but he touched so many people.
[22:57.310 --> 22:58.270]  He was the best of us.
[22:58.350 --> 22:58.890]  He really was.
[22:59.170 --> 23:14.170]  And just to, uh, to lose that is, uh, I can't think of anything that has, has shaken our community as much as, as this, uh, because it was just so sudden and, um, I, I guess unexpected, but I'd also like to, um, address one point.
[23:14.350 --> 23:23.530]  Um, there was a lot of, uh, of history, a lot of, uh, anecdotes and stories, and we had some laughs and you heard some of the anger.
[23:23.610 --> 23:25.890]  There was a lot of anger and it's, it's well-focused.
[23:26.210 --> 23:28.430]  It's well-focused Steve Hyman and Carmen Ortiz.
[23:28.430 --> 23:34.650]  They, they do need to answer for this because certainly, certainly it was a factor.
[23:34.650 --> 23:42.030]  We can't say for sure how much of a factor, uh, but, uh, it's, it's not a, uh, it's, it's a good bet.
[23:42.150 --> 23:44.150]  It was, uh, a deciding factor in my opinion.
[23:44.470 --> 23:57.470]  Uh, but the thing that I was a little bit disappointed at was that throughout the entire Memorial, which was well over two hours, there wasn't anything said about the very real issue of depression in our community.
[23:57.470 --> 24:00.730]  And this is something that, uh, we talked about last week.
[24:00.850 --> 24:05.270]  It's something that, uh, we felt important enough to devote a panel to at, at, at, uh, help number nine.
[24:05.790 --> 24:18.130]  Um, and I think it's something that, uh, we need to focus on as well, because Aaron was somebody who battled depression and there are many people who battle depression, uh, whether it's clinical depression or other types of depression.
[24:18.330 --> 24:24.150]  The thing is our community needs to be open and communicating on these issues.
[24:24.250 --> 24:25.690]  So people don't feel like they're isolated.
[24:25.690 --> 24:28.170]  People don't feel like they're the only ones going through something.
[24:28.330 --> 24:33.390]  And so that we all know that there is a place we can go and there are things to look forward to.
[24:33.990 --> 24:39.570]  Um, and I get the anger, the anger is very important, but I, I just don't want to give short shrift to that.
[24:39.570 --> 24:43.010]  I think it's really important that, uh, we address that head on.
[24:43.330 --> 24:43.530]  Right.
[24:43.810 --> 24:48.030]  Without putting his name on the record, um, although anyone who knows me knows who exactly who I'm talking about.
[24:48.270 --> 24:52.810]  Um, I have been helping somebody who had a Kickstarter campaign go terribly wrong.
[24:53.190 --> 24:55.910]  Uh, devastating success.
[24:56.250 --> 24:57.970]  He got, he asked for $6,000.
[24:57.970 --> 24:59.410]  He got $87,000.
[24:59.670 --> 25:00.710]  Wait, why is that going wrong?
[25:00.710 --> 25:06.570]  Because he quit his job and was not prepared to really handle the new responsibilities.
[25:06.570 --> 25:08.450]  He thought he was going to make X amount.
[25:08.450 --> 25:10.550]  He was making X times 20.
[25:10.730 --> 25:11.910]  He was completely ill prepared.
[25:11.910 --> 25:26.510]  And he let himself spiral into that, not being able to answer mail and people getting angrier and then being scared until eventually he was literally catatonic in his room for weeks and not sure where to go yet.
[25:26.750 --> 25:26.990]  Wow.
[25:27.190 --> 25:27.890]  And, uh, yeah.
[25:28.110 --> 25:30.310]  And nobody was really stepping out.
[25:30.450 --> 25:31.450]  A few people were trying to.
[25:31.550 --> 25:33.870]  And I said, basically, look, I'm going to take this thing over for you.
[25:34.330 --> 25:36.370]  You gotta, you gotta go back to yourself.
[25:36.370 --> 25:37.850]  So he's moved in with his parents.
[25:38.530 --> 25:43.810]  And, um, we've been go ahead and trying to fix and close out his Kickstarter for some time now.
[25:44.030 --> 25:47.750]  And when this happened, I was really worried that it was going to have an effect on him.
[25:48.150 --> 25:54.650]  And when I talked to him, he was like, yeah, I've been kind of running around and walking a lot.
[25:54.830 --> 25:57.430]  And I don't know, you know, and I said, are you fine?
[25:58.010 --> 25:59.690]  Because he's in Vermont and I'm not.
[25:59.830 --> 26:01.550]  And he said, I'm fine.
[26:02.450 --> 26:06.370]  And then I called his dad and went, is he actually fine?
[26:06.370 --> 26:08.990]  And his father said, yes, I believe he's fine.
[26:09.690 --> 26:17.150]  And that's when I let him know that among the people who had donated money to fix the problem, Aaron had donated among them.
[26:17.450 --> 26:26.910]  So even though Aaron was under all this indictment late last year, he had actually donated some money to help this other person who he saw as trouble.
[26:27.090 --> 26:34.910]  And that guy wrote a beautiful blog entry about his parallels with being under a lot of stress and depression.
[26:35.210 --> 26:38.650]  And his one thing he said was, go to the ER.
[26:39.350 --> 26:41.830]  You know, treat it like you've come down with something.
[26:42.030 --> 26:44.570]  Treat it like you've come down with a flu or you've broken an arm.
[26:44.690 --> 26:48.550]  Don't treat it like it's some mysterious magic inside your head that nobody understands.
[26:48.870 --> 26:56.490]  Go to the ER like it's a problem that you have to have at least looked at instead of sitting out thinking, I can handle it myself.
[26:56.490 --> 27:14.110]  And the reason that people do that is because of the stigma that says that depression is just a feeling, like some sort of floating emotion and not a possibly devastating aspect of your life that could cripple you for untold amounts of time.
[27:14.130 --> 27:17.390]  And maybe it's worth just having a doctor look at you.
[27:17.410 --> 27:18.330]  Just overnight.
[27:18.590 --> 27:19.550]  Just a little thing.
[27:19.730 --> 27:20.410]  Just having a look.
[27:21.350 --> 27:23.830]  And that's how he's boiled it down.
[27:23.950 --> 27:27.210]  But everyone's got their own ideas about talking about coping and everything else.
[27:27.350 --> 27:31.410]  Well, I mean, that is certainly one important thing to consider.
[27:31.710 --> 27:35.570]  And I do know a lot of people that have faced this.
[27:35.970 --> 27:42.350]  Their rebuttal to that is, well, I don't have insurance or it's going to cost me a fortune.
[27:42.350 --> 27:49.710]  And I think when your own health is concerned, no matter what the situation, you do what's right for you.
[27:50.730 --> 27:54.950]  And forget all that because that's all nonsense compared to your well-being.
[27:54.950 --> 27:57.630]  So that should never be the deciding factor.
[27:57.950 --> 27:58.690]  Yeah, that shouldn't be.
[27:58.770 --> 27:59.250]  That's crazy.
[27:59.470 --> 28:05.870]  I mean, that's when you start making the terrible mistakes of saying, well, I'm trying to save money.
[28:06.130 --> 28:06.610]  Yeah.
[28:06.770 --> 28:09.090]  And you actually just set yourself up for a lot worse.
[28:09.090 --> 28:14.470]  It's better to have creditors calling you every single day than to not take care of yourself.
[28:14.690 --> 28:14.870]  Yeah.
[28:15.270 --> 28:15.710]  Yeah, no.
[28:16.750 --> 28:17.950]  That doesn't matter.
[28:18.050 --> 28:19.150]  That doesn't mean a damn thing.
[28:19.270 --> 28:19.450]  Right.
[28:19.710 --> 28:21.090]  That's exactly my belief.
[28:21.250 --> 28:21.670]  You're right.
[28:21.850 --> 28:26.770]  I mean, but it's that kind of debate that one person can have by themselves alone.
[28:26.770 --> 28:31.270]  That's when they start getting the premises wrong and thinking, well, nobody will be bothered.
[28:31.270 --> 28:38.610]  Everyone will be very happy that I killed myself and saved everybody all this money.
[28:39.410 --> 28:45.730]  And you start to talk yourself into these insane things that I guarantee if your family heard you would just punch your lights out.
[28:45.970 --> 28:49.910]  They'd be like, I think we've mortgaged a house to keep you around for another 50 years.
[28:49.910 --> 28:52.910]  Don't be thinking you're doing anybody a favor.
[28:52.930 --> 29:00.170]  And it's just helpful to walk to a medical area and say, look, I need a time out here.
[29:00.390 --> 29:05.030]  Just look at me and just take a little time out.
[29:05.170 --> 29:07.170]  I just can't stress that enough.
[29:07.270 --> 29:11.810]  That sense of going it alone, which is so inherent in the technical world.
[29:11.970 --> 29:12.230]  Yes.
[29:12.830 --> 29:13.950]  Don't look up the docs.
[29:14.290 --> 29:15.490]  Don't read the manual.
[29:15.490 --> 29:17.110]  Don't look inside.
[29:17.510 --> 29:18.130]  Don't look inside.
[29:18.130 --> 29:19.610]  You've gotten through worse than this.
[29:19.950 --> 29:21.010]  Go it alone.
[29:21.230 --> 29:23.650]  And in many cases, we're talking about young people, too.
[29:23.850 --> 29:28.030]  People who are teenagers going through that already tumultuous time in life.
[29:28.570 --> 29:28.690]  Right.
[29:29.250 --> 29:42.370]  All kinds of questions, all kinds of self-doubt, all kinds of peer pressure to have this particular world as well, the technological world with its pressures and challenges.
[29:44.050 --> 29:46.090]  It can be so much to bear.
[29:46.230 --> 29:48.630]  People do feel like they have to carry the weight themselves.
[29:48.990 --> 29:57.070]  And I just wonder, are we doing enough as a community to be there for people, to have a place they can reach out to, people to talk to?
[29:57.210 --> 29:59.010]  Do we take care of each other enough?
[29:59.010 --> 30:08.250]  I know there's a lot going on on various online communities, chat boards and IRC channels and things like that, where people really give other people a hard time.
[30:08.250 --> 30:11.730]  It's part of, I guess, the growing up or something.
[30:13.190 --> 30:23.150]  Maybe people take it too seriously sometimes, but it's good to know that there's something beyond that, where if people really are troubled, somebody will listen.
[30:23.150 --> 30:28.470]  I like to think that there are at least beginnings of that in the hacker community.
[30:28.610 --> 30:32.850]  And if not there, then places that we can recommend people go to.
[30:32.950 --> 30:33.070]  Rob?
[30:33.070 --> 30:33.490]  Yeah.
[30:33.710 --> 30:39.630]  Because I think it's worth addressing that in the hacker community, there isn't only the...
[30:39.630 --> 30:47.150]  I mean, in addition to the sort of mainstream preconceptions that there are about things like depression, you should be able to deal with this.
[30:47.250 --> 30:47.970]  You're just being weak.
[30:48.070 --> 30:48.890]  You're just being sad.
[30:49.010 --> 30:50.510]  You're just wasting everyone's time.
[30:50.810 --> 30:51.630]  You're just being abnormal.
[30:51.790 --> 30:52.610]  You're just being strange.
[30:53.370 --> 31:03.590]  And then you get the sort of people who end up in the hacker community who I think there's a higher-than-average percentage of people who maybe don't have the best in the way of social skills to begin with.
[31:04.170 --> 31:11.450]  Or people who, since they know about their various subjects, they know about their hacker stuff, they think, well, I should be smart.
[31:11.590 --> 31:13.810]  Why am I not succeeding at this?
[31:14.230 --> 31:15.590]  Why can't I just fix this?
[31:15.730 --> 31:17.130]  I'm this lousy.
[31:17.230 --> 31:17.970]  I'm failing at this.
[31:18.170 --> 31:27.450]  And I think there's just all these different factors that I think put some of us at a far greater risk than, I think, an average person.
[31:28.030 --> 31:35.030]  I have a very close friend who has designed video games that millions upon millions of people have played.
[31:35.710 --> 31:37.310]  Arcade games, console games.
[31:38.250 --> 31:40.150]  And he lost the love of his life.
[31:40.750 --> 31:41.650]  It's broken him.
[31:41.750 --> 31:45.390]  It's to the point he won't come to this part of the country anymore because this is where he met her.
[31:45.650 --> 31:47.570]  She doesn't even live in this part of the country anymore.
[31:47.650 --> 31:48.350]  He won't come here.
[31:48.590 --> 31:52.090]  And he won't go on Facebook and link to anyone because it will eventually link him to her.
[31:52.470 --> 31:55.970]  And this was a guy who is so unbelievably talented.
[31:55.970 --> 32:02.390]  But what happened is whenever he was on a game, he was animated and romantic and wonderful.
[32:02.730 --> 32:09.190]  And then between games, even when he was still employed but they were looking for the next project, he would just flatten out.
[32:09.250 --> 32:10.290]  He would lose himself.
[32:10.290 --> 32:11.470]  He would sit and stare.
[32:11.710 --> 32:12.890]  He wouldn't connect.
[32:12.890 --> 32:14.570]  And she left him over that.
[32:14.890 --> 32:18.210]  And I've watched him do this cycle now for 10 years.
[32:18.650 --> 32:25.090]  And I always worry that, you know, one of these days he's going to hit that cycle and he's not going to come out of it.
[32:25.250 --> 32:28.710]  And he's just... he gives himself completely to his technical projects.
[32:28.850 --> 32:30.190]  He's incredible on them.
[32:30.370 --> 32:34.070]  And then he can't see anything else when he's not on them.
[32:34.450 --> 32:37.430]  And you'll see that with people who get wrapped up in technical things.
[32:37.630 --> 32:42.690]  They over-obsess on that being the full spectrum of everything.
[32:43.030 --> 32:47.030]  I had a boss who made us all walk outside every once in a while.
[32:47.070 --> 32:48.710]  And at the time I was like, what are you doing?
[32:48.870 --> 32:49.650]  What are you doing, Pat?
[32:49.910 --> 32:52.290]  And I look back and I'm like, wow, that was really nice of him.
[32:52.410 --> 32:56.850]  That we had some relation together other than in front of a screen.
[32:56.850 --> 33:04.850]  There was that bit, I think it was Glen Otis Brown that mentioned it, where Aaron was offline for a month.
[33:04.990 --> 33:07.410]  And how that was the happiest period of his life.
[33:07.550 --> 33:09.790]  And I think there's a lot to be said for that.
[33:09.850 --> 33:17.270]  Because when you do step away from that which you're always involved in and just try something else, you find something out about yourself.
[33:17.510 --> 33:25.650]  And this also holds true if you get away from the screen and go outside and exercise or just walk around, do something by yourself.
[33:26.470 --> 33:29.550]  You, I think, become more familiar with who you are.
[33:29.670 --> 33:30.350]  You think more.
[33:30.710 --> 33:32.230]  You see other things.
[33:32.390 --> 33:33.490]  You're breathing better.
[33:33.910 --> 33:37.210]  And that just makes you healthier and happier.
[33:37.210 --> 33:44.070]  And we all need to step away from this life that we have occasionally and try something else on.
[33:44.330 --> 33:46.250]  And many times we're surprised.
[33:47.010 --> 33:47.610]  Yeah.
[33:48.030 --> 33:49.490]  Bernie, any thoughts from you?
[33:50.670 --> 33:53.570]  Yeah, I like how this conversation is going.
[33:53.570 --> 34:10.170]  Because I think our community is much more likely to have success in supporting each other, especially people who suffer from clinical depression.
[34:10.170 --> 34:17.270]  I've dealt with it myself, especially during my bouts with the Department of Justice back in the mid-90s.
[34:17.270 --> 34:32.030]  And we're much more likely to be able to successfully support each other, who we know might be going through tough times, than we are able to change the entire criminal justice system and how it operates in this country.
[34:32.030 --> 34:41.590]  So, you know, we're all angry at how Aaron was treated by our judicial system.
[34:41.810 --> 34:59.990]  But I think we're focusing in the right direction on supporting people who are suffering like he was and helping them out and making them feel like they're not completely alone and abandoned, even though he didn't necessarily feel that way.
[35:00.930 --> 35:03.370]  Perhaps if more people...
[35:03.370 --> 35:05.410]  You know, nobody can second-guess this, really.
[35:05.590 --> 35:12.470]  But the bottom line is we have to do a better job educating people, and we've been working on that, but we can always work harder on that.
[35:12.470 --> 35:18.290]  We can try to change the judicial system, but that's a much bigger mountain.
[35:18.830 --> 35:26.390]  But we're a community that's fairly close-knit, and we have excellent communications in our community.
[35:26.390 --> 35:29.810]  Obviously, we build communications tools that we communicate with.
[35:30.510 --> 35:32.530]  That doesn't mean we know how to communicate, though.
[35:32.530 --> 35:33.550]  So that's the problem.
[35:34.190 --> 35:37.550]  Tools are in place, but we're not taking the best advantage.
[35:37.670 --> 35:46.090]  And Aaron wrote very eloquently over the years about clinical depression, some of the most moving stuff I've read about what it's like.
[35:46.610 --> 35:50.190]  He wrote, this was not a secret to the Department of Justice.
[35:50.490 --> 35:54.570]  They do a lot of research on their targets.
[35:57.070 --> 35:57.630]  So...
[35:57.630 --> 36:00.530]  But it also wasn't a secret to the community.
[36:00.970 --> 36:09.250]  People tried to support him, but just because people have a good affect, like they seem like they're handling it okay, it doesn't mean they really are.
[36:10.870 --> 36:19.910]  So we need to really reach out a little bit more and just try to help people who we know are probably going through a tough time.
[36:20.710 --> 36:24.090]  As on top of things they may seem, it could just be a front.
[36:24.330 --> 36:28.610]  People who suffer from clinical depression are very good at putting up a good front.
[36:29.190 --> 36:30.890]  It's just a way they cope.
[36:31.830 --> 36:32.750]  I've done it myself.
[36:32.970 --> 36:35.150]  So don't let that fool you.
[36:35.350 --> 36:47.550]  You really need to dig down, as Jason has said, and really find out what's going on in somebody's head and try to help them wherever possible.
[36:47.550 --> 36:57.810]  Yeah, and that's one of the really twisted things about clinical depression, as many have dealt with as I've dealt with, where one of the first things it does to you is it makes you...
[36:57.810 --> 36:59.630]  It basically...
[36:59.630 --> 37:06.850]  You basically come out of it thinking that if there's one thing you have to do, it's to not let on how depressed you are, because you're failing at that.
[37:06.950 --> 37:08.130]  You're going to bring everyone else down.
[37:09.470 --> 37:14.430]  So, yeah, as Bernie said, depressed people get very good at hiding it.
[37:15.010 --> 37:22.150]  And then when something like this happens, I mean, there's really no telling.
[37:22.310 --> 37:24.470]  But, you know, was this expected by anyone?
[37:24.470 --> 37:25.230]  I don't know.
[37:25.230 --> 37:31.790]  But there are warning signs, and there are signs that I think...
[37:33.450 --> 37:36.090]  What I'm trying to say is that it's difficult.
[37:36.570 --> 37:42.970]  There are no clear and present checklists to look at somebody and say, are they depressed?
[37:43.030 --> 37:43.530]  Are they not?
[37:43.630 --> 37:46.190]  Are they dealing with something on this sort of huge level?
[37:46.350 --> 37:46.670]  Are they not?
[37:46.770 --> 37:55.230]  And so the only way you can really get things like that out into the open is by talking about them, whether you're suffering or whether someone close to you is.
[37:56.150 --> 37:58.990]  And that's one of the things we need to do as a community.
[37:58.990 --> 38:00.990]  We have to make it okay to talk about things like this.
[38:01.170 --> 38:05.810]  Yeah, and with everybody that does talk, that does share their experiences, we learn more.
[38:06.050 --> 38:08.350]  We learn more about how they're dealing with it.
[38:08.390 --> 38:10.010]  We learn more about the experiences themselves.
[38:10.390 --> 38:12.310]  And we grow stronger as a community.
[38:13.970 --> 38:21.310]  Because I'd like to focus more on the anger at this point, because people are reacting with quite a bit of well-placed anger.
[38:22.310 --> 38:44.190]  After the death of Aaron Schwartz, because of the relentlessness of the prosecution, the federal prosecution against him, particularly Steve Hyman and Carmen Ortiz, and how they basically acted like machines in some kind of a science fiction story that didn't know anything about compassion or taking things into account,
[38:44.690 --> 38:48.910]  realizing degrees of what is an offense and what's not.
[38:48.910 --> 38:55.850]  Technically, something is an offense, so that means you go after it with every bit of strength, as if they were some kind of master criminal.
[38:57.090 --> 38:59.150]  That's not how life works.
[38:59.270 --> 39:00.090]  It's not how life should work.
[39:00.210 --> 39:05.470]  But try explaining that to people in federal prosecution land.
[39:05.590 --> 39:06.650]  It's really hard.
[39:06.750 --> 39:06.870]  Mike?
[39:06.870 --> 39:21.010]  I mean, that is exactly not how life ought not to work, but it is exactly how the Department of Justice and the state prosecutors and all these people do work, is they throw people in jail, which is why the United States has millions of people in jail,
[39:21.170 --> 39:31.930]  more people in jail, both on an absolute basis and per capita than any other country, including regimes that are much larger and generally thought of as much more oppressive than ours.
[39:32.330 --> 39:44.450]  So that's what they do, is they make up excuses to throw people in jail and they get promoted if they can throw people in jail for longer, regardless of the presence or absence of any victims.
[39:44.450 --> 40:01.450]  Bernie, I think it was you who was telling me that basically probation officers get raises or get promotions if they're able to throw somebody back into prison, someone who supposedly has reformed themselves and is out in the free world.
[40:01.510 --> 40:05.090]  If they can find one little thing to get them thrown back into prison, that's considered a good thing.
[40:05.150 --> 40:05.710]  Is that correct?
[40:06.450 --> 40:08.610]  Well, no, I don't think I actually told you that.
[40:08.610 --> 40:25.410]  But they are kind of graded on their success in keeping people out of the system, unlike prosecutors who are graded on the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences they can affect.
[40:26.570 --> 40:28.810]  Probation and parole officers are a little bit different.
[40:29.190 --> 40:41.110]  But they are looked at positively if they catch people doing something that they shouldn't, that is, like, against the conditions of parole or conditions of supervised release.
[40:41.350 --> 40:58.810]  But on that topic, something that really jumped out at me last week, I actually heard about it at NPR, but I had to do some more investigation about it, is that it's extremely likely that what one of the things Aaron faced, if he was convicted, even on one of the 13 counts he was charged with,
[40:58.810 --> 41:12.210]  one of the 13 felony counts, if he was found guilty at trial or even if he just pled guilty, which, you know, the feds have a 97% conviction rate, so your chances at trial are almost nil.
[41:12.490 --> 41:23.770]  But after you serve your federal prison sentence, you automatically serve at least a three- to five-year period of what's called supervised release, which is like parole-like conditions.
[41:25.490 --> 41:35.090]  And the feds did away with parole back in the 80s, but they kept all the parole officers in jobs and told them that, well, you just supervise these people several years after they served their complete sentence.
[41:35.850 --> 42:01.930]  So, for people charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you know, Title 18, Section 1030, which is one of the things that Aaron was charged under, in common, almost considered de rigueur, for one condition of supervised release to be that the defendant not be allowed to use the internet or computer during the period of their supervised release.
[42:03.490 --> 42:04.650]  It happened to Kevin Mitnick.
[42:04.650 --> 42:05.850]  It happened to a lot of other people we know.
[42:05.930 --> 42:07.570]  I wasn't charged under that particular case.
[42:07.710 --> 42:09.430]  I was charged under Title 1029.
[42:09.430 --> 42:11.530]  So, somehow he escaped that, fortunately.
[42:11.530 --> 42:14.890]  So, I was able to get a job at the phone company right after he got out of prison.
[42:15.090 --> 42:28.330]  But the bottom line is, Aaron was looking at a very likely fate of being banned from the internet for several years, not just during prison, but several years after he was released.
[42:28.930 --> 42:33.450]  And that was a big part of his world, the online community.
[42:34.430 --> 42:40.910]  And to him, it may have seemed kind of like a death sentence as part of his life.
[42:41.490 --> 42:59.870]  And I hate to think that that might have been something that pushed him to do something rash, like he did, to just sort of handle that on his own terms, as opposed to having the Department of Justice separate him from his community.
[43:01.130 --> 43:06.010]  Well, all it takes is a moment of piling it all on and saying, wow, this is what I'm facing.
[43:06.190 --> 43:10.790]  This is having to be a felon, a felon for the rest of my life.
[43:10.790 --> 43:16.370]  And the feds have been going around saying that, well, he would have only gotten six months.
[43:16.550 --> 43:19.830]  But again, there was no guarantee of anything like that.
[43:20.170 --> 43:25.230]  And there's a lot more, a lot more that goes with that, that they weren't talking about.
[43:25.430 --> 43:26.110]  Yeah, no, I hear that.
[43:26.230 --> 43:28.790]  And that's always, I mean, I'm lucky.
[43:28.810 --> 43:33.250]  My interaction with law enforcement has not led to my incarceration.
[43:33.350 --> 43:35.550]  It has led to unpleasant conversations.
[43:36.970 --> 43:42.150]  But, in fact, I'm happy to say I finally got my first FBI visit last year because of Facebook.
[43:42.570 --> 43:43.690]  So thanks, Facebook.
[43:43.850 --> 43:47.490]  It only took 13 years of textfiles.com to have the FBI visit me.
[43:47.670 --> 43:49.510]  Well, I want to talk about that in just a second.
[43:50.330 --> 43:57.970]  But the story that Edward Tufte told, a professor from Yale, about his early days with blue boxes.
[43:58.230 --> 43:58.410]  Yes.
[43:58.590 --> 44:00.510]  I thought that was an incredible story to tell.
[44:00.570 --> 44:02.730]  And I understand that was the first time that story has been told in public.
[44:02.730 --> 44:08.030]  Yes, he had been previously, according to Eric Hellman's blog, he had been...
[44:08.870 --> 44:12.610]  It was kind of like a little story he told at parties, just a little quiet story.
[44:12.770 --> 44:17.050]  But he had no writing or public speaking in which he ever owed up to that.
[44:17.150 --> 44:20.090]  That was meant to be a youthful indiscretion, long forgotten.
[44:20.310 --> 44:21.170]  But think about that.
[44:21.370 --> 44:26.090]  He basically defrauded the phone company, was caught, confessed, showed what he did.
[44:26.090 --> 44:29.270]  And as he said, his life was not ruined.
[44:29.630 --> 44:30.870]  Imagine if it was.
[44:31.050 --> 44:42.990]  Imagine where this guy would be right now, a respected professor and an expert in so many fields, if this guy from AT&T had decided he was going to throw him in prison for what it was he did.
[44:43.490 --> 44:48.590]  These are where these decisions are made and how lives are completely changed.
[44:48.590 --> 44:51.790]  And for people who don't know Tufte's work, he's really...
[44:51.790 --> 45:03.370]  To call him a leader in his field is sort of misleading because he basically is his field of sort of sane information design and how to present information in ways that make sense to people.
[45:03.510 --> 45:04.870]  And he's written several books.
[45:05.010 --> 45:06.390]  He's written many articles.
[45:06.790 --> 45:10.570]  When Jason says it's not something he's written about, it's not because the guy never writes.
[45:11.670 --> 45:16.210]  He's very prolific and a lot of people read his work.
[45:16.650 --> 45:19.570]  And I didn't know any of this about him.
[45:20.210 --> 45:21.050]  I had no idea.
[45:21.250 --> 45:28.990]  I had previously paid several hundred dollars to attend a lecture and book package that he provides.
[45:28.990 --> 45:36.570]  He goes on tour every year for a few cities and will do classes in information presentation and design.
[45:36.570 --> 45:39.030]  And you buy his book and meet him and everything else.
[45:39.030 --> 45:46.570]  I had paid some good money because I wanted to meet this man finally, this legend that I'd known about for over 10 years.
[45:46.750 --> 45:52.510]  And here he was saying, oh, this kid, what a great kid this was, you know, coming right down to talk about it.
[45:52.590 --> 45:58.670]  And to find out that while I'm all proud of the fact and bragging to my friends, I got to go see Edward Tufte.
[45:58.870 --> 46:03.870]  And meanwhile, Aaron's hanging with him for support because the guy believes in him so much.
[46:03.870 --> 46:05.510]  That's amazing to me.
[46:06.150 --> 46:07.890]  You know, it's just so...
[46:07.890 --> 46:08.410]  So yeah, yeah.
[46:08.590 --> 46:15.230]  Tough day giving out this tidbit was quite a confession to illustrate the point.
[46:15.670 --> 46:15.970]  Absolutely.
[46:16.330 --> 46:20.850]  I'd like to give out our phone number for listeners who like to call in with their thoughts and feelings.
[46:20.850 --> 46:23.410]  917-580-6020.
[46:23.710 --> 46:28.430]  While we're waiting for calls, Jason, we could spend hours talking about the various projects that you're involved in.
[46:28.490 --> 46:34.970]  But you're one of those people that is so vital and necessary for this community.
[46:35.670 --> 46:37.150]  You're basically the historian.
[46:37.370 --> 46:48.550]  You're the archivist who preserves it all and spends endless hours collecting information from the past and making sure that it's preserved for the ages.
[46:49.490 --> 46:53.690]  So very briefly, all too briefly, what have you been working on lately?
[46:54.190 --> 47:00.390]  What's been absorbing my time is a documentary on the DEFCON Hacker Conference because they just had their 20th year.
[47:01.390 --> 47:03.230]  And they wanted to get it down.
[47:03.370 --> 47:07.710]  So for the first time, they let us come in with cameras, me and a crew of seven.
[47:08.230 --> 47:12.010]  And we shot 278 hours of footage.
[47:12.270 --> 47:18.210]  And I've been producing a documentary that they are going to release for free from their website later this year.
[47:18.410 --> 47:20.450]  So the rough cut is due at the end of the month.
[47:20.450 --> 47:23.570]  So that was that was a lot of footage to go through since last July.
[47:23.850 --> 47:26.110]  And so I've been doing a lot with that.
[47:26.950 --> 47:41.670]  I work for the Internet Archive at archive.org, where I have been both uploading a huge amounts of data and adding a bunch of things to read and things to view and things to play with.
[47:42.730 --> 47:50.550]  Last year, some people might remember the Internet Underground Music Archive, which was one of the first musical archives.
[47:50.550 --> 48:01.230]  This was this archive goes back so far that the original files were in real audio, MP2 and MP3 because they weren't sure which one was going to win.
[48:01.230 --> 48:03.570]  Like it also was in sun audio files.
[48:03.830 --> 48:07.030]  You could like get sun audio files.au for the music.
[48:07.310 --> 48:12.730]  Well, it survived well into the 2000s and then was deleted unceremoniously.
[48:13.130 --> 48:21.390]  And none other than John Gilmore of the Electronic Frontier Foundation had downloaded it onto tapes.
[48:21.690 --> 48:28.170]  So we restored it from the tapes and put it up on the Internet Archive like 50,000 bands of music.
[48:28.170 --> 48:33.850]  So that was my big pride of the last year was we resuscitated this thing, put it up for free.
[48:35.030 --> 48:36.810]  Everyone's been pretty happy about it.
[48:36.970 --> 48:44.410]  The co-founders of the Internet Underground Music Archive came to the archive to thank us.
[48:44.470 --> 48:46.490]  So that was a really big accomplishment.
[48:46.790 --> 49:01.970]  And then the rest of it's all just, you know, traveling, working on other documentaries, speaking wherever I can, and mostly just spreading the word about Archive Team, the activist archivist group I work with as well, about saving user data, user content,
[49:02.090 --> 49:05.770]  and just being the old guy, having a good time at it.
[49:05.910 --> 49:09.430]  And every waking moment I'm working on something I care about and it's a good life.
[49:09.430 --> 49:10.490]  That's awesome.
[49:10.630 --> 49:12.510]  And so vital to everybody.
[49:13.490 --> 49:16.250]  917-580-6020 is our phone number.
[49:16.350 --> 49:19.130]  We've got Jason Scott in the studio and the phone lines are wide open.
[49:19.730 --> 49:26.990]  Jason, are you ever surprised by how quickly things that are digitized just don't exist anymore?
[49:26.990 --> 49:27.910]  They're not accessible.
[49:28.150 --> 49:30.550]  They become unplayable in new formats.
[49:30.550 --> 49:39.090]  And I find that in some ways when we digitize and don't keep things in analog format, they disappear all the quicker.
[49:39.290 --> 49:53.190]  I think that there's a talk I gave called The Short Happy Life or The Miserable Infinity of Data, which is either it's around forever or it just disappears like it was never there in the first place.
[49:53.310 --> 49:58.470]  That's the interesting binary problem of if somebody cares, yeah, it'll stick around forever.
[49:58.470 --> 49:59.830]  It's in digital format.
[49:59.970 --> 50:01.130]  You can transfer that easily.
[50:01.150 --> 50:05.190]  But if somebody takes their eye off the ball, it can disappear.
[50:05.190 --> 50:10.130]  One good grinding hard drive, one unexpected lightning strike, and you've lost it.
[50:10.370 --> 50:15.790]  And we've been so enamored with technology as an accomplishment.
[50:16.370 --> 50:22.990]  And we are just not encouraged to look back at it as what happens if something goes wrong?
[50:22.990 --> 50:24.910]  You know, like, what do we do if we lose our data?
[50:25.170 --> 50:26.350]  How dependent are we?
[50:26.470 --> 50:28.570]  How sad would we be if this went away?
[50:28.710 --> 50:30.090]  What if this website went away?
[50:31.010 --> 50:35.150]  I had a documentary film crew in my house this morning talking about losing data.
[50:35.410 --> 50:43.650]  And to demonstrate to them, I showed them a British telecom internet website that they had run since 1998.
[50:44.510 --> 50:47.830]  And they shut it off after 30 days notice, 13 years later.
[50:48.970 --> 50:53.770]  And they, if you go to the site, you can do, you can still see the searches on Google.
[50:53.930 --> 50:58.550]  You look for family genealogy and you see all these family genealogy pages somebody worked away on.
[50:58.690 --> 50:59.650]  And they're all disappeared.
[50:59.810 --> 51:00.350]  They're all deleted.
[51:00.610 --> 51:04.310]  I found a thousand links to one page that was a canonical site.
[51:04.810 --> 51:08.090]  And luckily, archive team had gone through and downloaded a copy.
[51:08.170 --> 51:09.270]  So we saved it.
[51:09.390 --> 51:13.910]  But it was purely a case of we should do this, not because it naturally happened.
[51:14.430 --> 51:19.830]  And we are so lucky that we have this beautiful network and this beautiful capacity.
[51:20.250 --> 51:24.870]  But along with it has not come any of the education that come with those tools or that responsibility.
[51:25.330 --> 51:39.070]  And I'm a little scared that with the overtaking of the concept of the cloud, that we're being told it's a virtue to be as little informed about where your data is and what it does and what your future is than ever before.
[51:39.770 --> 51:42.090]  So I often tell people, just call it the clown.
[51:42.570 --> 51:44.430]  So I'm storing my files in the clown.
[51:44.430 --> 51:45.890]  We have a clown based business.
[51:46.110 --> 51:47.910]  We're going to put some stuff in the clown.
[51:48.290 --> 51:53.270]  You know, so, so then you feel, then you maybe you get a little more perspective with what you got.
[51:53.270 --> 51:57.750]  Yeah, I don't want to drag things down here, but we haven't gotten a single phone call.
[51:57.910 --> 52:02.710]  I don't know if we're boring people to death, or I thought it was a very interesting conversation, very topical, very vital, in fact.
[52:02.830 --> 52:07.710]  Maybe people are just so moved by it all that they can't lift up their hands to dial the phone.
[52:07.790 --> 52:10.290]  But again, for the last few minutes, 917-580-6020.
[52:11.250 --> 52:13.850]  Our phone line's wide open, and that's the last time I'm going to say it.
[52:14.650 --> 52:18.930]  My natural assumption is everybody outside of the studio has frozen to death in this cold snap.
[52:19.090 --> 52:19.590]  That's all.
[52:19.690 --> 52:20.370]  Transmitter could be broken.
[52:20.430 --> 52:21.370]  I've tested the phone line myself.
[52:21.550 --> 52:21.830]  Just completely snapped.
[52:22.130 --> 52:22.410]  Crack.
[52:23.270 --> 52:23.470]  It's cold outside.
[52:23.750 --> 52:24.790]  Birds are falling out of the sky.
[52:24.990 --> 52:25.890]  It's very cold outside.
[52:25.990 --> 52:27.230]  It is unbelievably cold.
[52:27.550 --> 52:29.010]  But you can listen to the radio inside.
[52:29.310 --> 52:29.910]  You'd think so.
[52:30.230 --> 52:31.310]  But I think this is it.
[52:31.370 --> 52:33.290]  I think frozen Hoth planet and it's us.
[52:33.390 --> 52:34.510]  We'll find out soon enough.
[52:34.610 --> 52:34.770]  Yeah.
[52:34.870 --> 52:35.550]  That phone line doesn't ring.
[52:35.670 --> 52:39.950]  I think either the transmitter is broken or people are completely stunned by what we've been saying.
[52:39.950 --> 52:52.470]  But one thing on the subject of preserving information over the ages, if Plato's Republic was written on a Kindle or available on a Kindle, I don't think it would be around today.
[52:52.630 --> 53:00.370]  I mean, nothing against Kindles, but I just think that something would happen, new versions would come out, and it just wouldn't be copied over at some vital point.
[53:00.370 --> 53:07.130]  Whereas if you preserve something in actual writing, physically, it survives the ages.
[53:07.290 --> 53:08.430]  That's just what I've noticed.
[53:08.710 --> 53:18.310]  I mean, lots of ephemera from that period is lost, but people value the Republic, and if they value what's written today, the things that people value most will be the most likely to stick around.
[53:18.310 --> 53:24.450]  But what's really unique that we have the ability to do now with digital technology is save everything.
[53:24.990 --> 53:28.330]  And if we remember to save everything, then I think we have a lot of opportunity.
[53:28.550 --> 53:37.910]  The challenge I like to issue to people who disagree with me on this is show me the first digital picture that you took on your computer, however many computers ago that was.
[53:38.230 --> 53:40.290]  And I find nobody can do that.
[53:40.390 --> 53:41.590]  Nobody can figure out how to open it.
[53:41.590 --> 53:41.850]  I can do it.
[53:41.990 --> 53:42.590]  Okay, well...
[53:42.590 --> 53:43.330]  I can do it, but I'm weird.
[53:43.330 --> 53:44.390]  Bring it next week, all right?
[53:44.450 --> 53:45.070]  I expect to see it.
[53:45.070 --> 53:46.870]  I mean, but digital pictures don't go back that far.
[53:47.090 --> 53:48.090]  They're all JPEGs.
[53:48.350 --> 53:48.470]  Right.
[53:48.850 --> 53:51.570]  There's not that much obscure formats going on there, but...
[53:51.570 --> 54:00.210]  I have a 1995 digital picture of myself because I was working at a computer software company where they were testing this brand new webcam that had just come out.
[54:00.550 --> 54:05.510]  And they gave me it on the floppy because it was so amazing that I had a picture of myself.
[54:05.990 --> 54:06.250]  Floppies, yeah.
[54:06.250 --> 54:07.030]  So that was my...
[54:07.030 --> 54:10.930]  Now, granted, this picture is, what is it, 180 by 60 or something?
[54:11.170 --> 54:12.150]  And it's a picture of me.
[54:12.150 --> 54:12.850]  And that's another thing.
[54:12.850 --> 54:17.730]  I've got an attic full of floppies, five and a quarter inch and 3.5, and I can't read them on any machine.
[54:17.730 --> 54:18.850]  So I have no idea what's on there.
[54:19.170 --> 54:20.330]  Look at all the phone calls we're getting now.
[54:20.430 --> 54:23.330]  So let's give our listeners a chance to chime in here.
[54:23.470 --> 54:24.090]  And good evening.
[54:24.230 --> 54:25.030]  You are on Off The Hook.
[54:25.570 --> 54:26.210]  Yeah, good.
[54:26.890 --> 54:28.310]  I didn't know if you were going to pick up or not.
[54:28.710 --> 54:29.310]  Well, we did.
[54:30.030 --> 54:30.350]  Yes.
[54:31.310 --> 54:33.070]  Now that we did, what's on your mind?
[54:33.470 --> 54:34.910]  You know, I was...
[54:34.910 --> 54:41.530]  You know, I know these are young guys, but you know, we're trying to preserve some files going back into the 60s.
[54:41.530 --> 54:45.370]  And I wonder if you want to talk to that, because a lot of them are analog, a lot of them on cassettes.
[54:45.930 --> 54:52.330]  Maybe give us some ideas and perhaps contact points for people to advise us.
[54:52.330 --> 54:59.410]  Because this is a lot of African Americana from the East Coast, a lot of civil rights stuff, a lot of black rights movement stuff.
[54:59.890 --> 55:00.890]  You understand what I'm saying?
[55:01.070 --> 55:01.290]  Right.
[55:01.650 --> 55:03.010]  So if you have...
[55:03.010 --> 55:14.190]  Okay, so in the general sense, if you have old stuff, that is to say, stuff that is old, and you're like, we want to make sure that this stuff persists, there's multiple avenues.
[55:14.190 --> 55:19.470]  But one of the questions you have to ask, you always have to ask yourself these days, is whose is it?
[55:19.470 --> 55:29.910]  So that kind of modifies things because sometimes people will find out that you're like, this is getting old, but then you find out the people who are in charge of the tape say, no, unless we have A, B, and C, we won't do it.
[55:29.990 --> 55:35.950]  But let's move forward and say that you just have the right to be able to do what you want with these tape reels.
[55:36.230 --> 55:49.210]  There are a variety of contemporary music archives that are trying to, and by contemporary I mean existing these days, where they want to digitize old reel-to-reel tapes.
[55:50.990 --> 55:52.850]  I don't mind giving out my email address.
[55:53.050 --> 55:56.170]  It's jscott, J-S-C-O-T-T, at archive.org.
[55:56.170 --> 56:01.770]  If you want to write me, and I'll certainly try to connect you with appropriate places that could help you.
[56:02.310 --> 56:04.430]  Certainly in a world where...
[56:04.430 --> 56:06.950]  I'm assuming that these are reel-to-reel tapes, probably.
[56:07.270 --> 56:08.550]  Reel-to-reel is cassettes.
[56:08.870 --> 56:09.590]  Cassettes, yep.
[56:09.590 --> 56:11.570]  Yeah, and VHS videos.
[56:11.850 --> 56:12.150]  Mm-hmm.
[56:12.670 --> 56:14.130]  You know, that kind of old stuff.
[56:14.330 --> 56:20.530]  There are a whole variety of technologies, thankfully, to transfer them.
[56:20.650 --> 56:34.250]  And if they've been stored with relative luck in a way that doesn't affect the magnetic structure, it's usually a pretty simple case to get it onto a high-quality digital format.
[56:34.250 --> 56:41.630]  I've had great luck with old cassettes from the 1970s that still sound just fine, whereas reel-to-reel deteriorated very, very quickly.
[56:41.690 --> 56:43.310]  The exact opposite of what I was told.
[56:43.790 --> 56:45.410]  Depends on what you bought.
[56:45.630 --> 56:45.790]  Yeah.
[56:46.090 --> 56:53.430]  You know, you buy something and you find out, or it was, you know, if you say you have a group that did a lot of recording to reel-to-reel, you don't know.
[56:53.550 --> 56:56.870]  You're going to turn around and you're going to find out that, oh, we used really cheap tape.
[56:57.190 --> 56:57.890]  Right, right.
[56:58.070 --> 56:59.850]  But you know, I'm always in favor of preserving it.
[56:59.850 --> 57:04.050]  Even if you don't own the actual data or material yourself, preserve it.
[57:04.210 --> 57:04.290]  Right.
[57:04.290 --> 57:06.790]  And find that out later, but always preserve what you have.
[57:07.010 --> 57:07.170]  Right.
[57:07.250 --> 57:18.910]  When I say that, by the way, what I meant to say was not so much like, do you have the rights, but more that you will find that, oh, there's this huge pile of tapes and somebody comes along and says, oh, oh no, you're not allowed to touch that.
[57:18.990 --> 57:19.850]  You're in the wrong department.
[57:19.850 --> 57:21.030]  You're not the right guy.
[57:21.030 --> 57:22.490]  You don't work for the right person.
[57:22.790 --> 57:23.010]  Yeah.
[57:23.150 --> 57:23.970]  Very short-sighted.
[57:24.130 --> 57:25.130]  So that's what I'm talking about.
[57:25.130 --> 57:28.390]  Jason, thanks so much for being around, for doing what you do.
[57:28.570 --> 57:28.730]  Thanks.
[57:28.730 --> 57:30.070]  And I want to hear more stories.
[57:30.170 --> 57:33.470]  I want to hear more about your projects because it's always interesting and fascinating.
[57:34.170 --> 57:35.350]  And how can people contact you?
[57:36.950 --> 57:41.210]  Just contact me, jscott, J-S-C-O-T-T, at archive.org.
[57:41.210 --> 57:45.850]  I'll happily talk to you about any projects or ideas you have or anything else you want to tell me.
[57:46.230 --> 57:46.790]  All right.
[57:47.070 --> 57:53.910]  And the website, to remember Aaron Schwartz, www.rememberarinsw.com.
[57:53.950 --> 57:55.610]  A lot of very moving tributes on there.
[57:55.950 --> 57:58.990]  Write to us, O-T-H, at 2600.com.
[57:59.090 --> 58:00.050]  It's a manual for Off the Hook.
[58:00.170 --> 58:01.350]  Stay tuned for The Personal Computer Show.
[58:01.510 --> 58:01.990]  Have a good night.
[58:12.320 --> 58:14.860]  I'm running out of height tonight.
[58:15.240 --> 58:15.680]  Ah!
[58:19.330 --> 58:21.110]  Just this tonight.
[01:00:05.740 --> 01:00:06.800]  A lot of people.
[01:00:07.420 --> 01:00:07.980]  A
[01:00:23.410 --> 01:00:24.990]  lot of people sitting down.
[01:00:26.110 --> 01:00:27.330]  By the night!