Aaron Swartz, The Internets Own Boy

I saw a fascinating movie about a boy named Aaron Swartz. The movie named “The Internet's Own Boy”, is about a boy who grew up to be a web designer. When Aaron Swartz was a young boy, he grew to love computers and books but hated school. Eventually when he was in high school, he dropped out and went on to teach himself instead as he was a very good and observant reader. He got very smart and opinionated which made him grow a little bit of a selfish attitude. His brothers say that he grew that attitude due to being a little smarter than them without having to go to school. This is part of what made Aaron himself though, and the story doesn’t stop there. Since he was a child, he grew to love computers and as he was growing up with them, he learned certain web coding to start web designing.

When he was barely becoming an adult, he was already going to important web meetings to help make the web better. He was often looked down upon from the adults because they didn’t like the idea of having a 16 to 17 year old boy telling them what they should do to make it better. Eventually he and 2 other friends designed the famous website known as reddit.com. Aaron was the one who came up with the idea of it, but his friends and him all worked on the website together. When they finished it and posted it to online, it started out a little slow like what most sites would, but it didn’t take too long before it started getting major hits. Later as the free site was getting more and more hits, a company offered to buy it off of him for over $1,000,000. He and his friends talked about it and decided to accept the deal. Though they could afford a lot of things, Aaron didn’t really feel like living the life of luxury as he had lived in apartments for his whole life, so that is what he was used to. He also didn’t see a need for a big house as he still wanted to web design and he only needed a small room for that.

As he was going on with his life, he noticed that PACER was a problem. He didn’t like the idea that people had to pay a certain amount of money to see free public domain. His mind had been set on helping people and he saw that opportunity. He went into a building that had a computer with most of the info on it to attempt a hack. He went into the closet that the computer system was in, and he hacked it by simply plugging his laptop into it. He connected hard drives that held gigabytes of storage to his laptop and would return every three days to switch it out. Eventually one of the workers found Aarons laptop in the closet that was taking info from the computers, and reported it to the authorities. The FBI ended up getting involved and decided to catch the culprit red handed by placing a camera in the room to see who walked in to change the drive. When they caught him, they pressed lots of charges against him including felony charges. Eventually he was taken in for questioning but Aaron would not say that he was guilty in those charges that was made against him. He and most of his friends and family said that he was wrongly convicted as a felon. after a while, a bail of $100,000 was set and he was bailed. This was supposed to be the end of it until the authorities decided to put 3 more charges against him. They kept on trying to get him to plead guilty and set up a court date. But before that court date could come, Aaron killed himself from all the stress.

My opinion is that Aaron did do wrong to hack, but was falsely charged 5 out of 6 crimes he did for hacking into that computer. He definitely should not have been called a felon. The government was obviously not happy of what he did and arrested him once, got bailed, and then arrested him again because they didn’t get their way. They so badly wanted him to plead guilty that they did more false charges against him on the same case just so they could arrest him again. They were basically bullying him to get him to plead guilty, causing Aaron to commit suicide.

In the end of it all, though there was a casualty, it was a victory. Aarons plan won as he was trying to get the PACER law down and succeeded a few days after he died. The PACER law is no longer in place and people can look at free information for free. It was tragic, but a marvelous victory.