Note on Code Swaraj
The FBI staked out Aaron’s house and tried to get him to come down for interviews, but he refused. The FBI told the courts we had done nothing wrong. Then, after the New York Times wrote the story up, the courts called the FBI again and asked them to take a second look. Again, there was nothing to see there and the FBI told the courts to move along.
. . .
This is when I began to study civil resistance seriously. I knew we weren’t facing the kind of dangers that Gandhi and King faced. There were no law officers and vigilantes threatening me with physical harm. Access to the text of the law is a much more mundane issue than the fight for social justice. It is not like the liberation of an entire people.
But, our work was an attempt to change how the system works, and I knew we had much to learn from those that went before us. I also wanted to know more about how to make change effective. Beating one’s head against a wall or tilting at windmills doesn’t make change. I wanted to know more about how this was done in the past, how we could move from complaining about the present towards creating change in the future.
That study grew even more serious by 2011. I was no longer doing case law and had started to focus intently on technical standards required by law. The private parties who thought they owned these laws had million-dollar salaries at stake and were clearly going to fight hard. I had not been sued, but I knew there was a lot of angst inside some of these nonprofit standards bodies and they were digging in to fight change at any cost.
Something else happened. Aaron got arrested. He had downloaded a large number of scholarly articles from a system called JSTOR. He did this out of MIT where he had guest privileges, and MIT called the police instead of doing what one usually does with precocious students like Aaron, which is call them in for a lecture. I called my friend Jeff Schiller who used to run the MIT network and that’s exactly what he told me. It wasn’t on his watch though, somebody new was running the operation, and once the police got called, there was no going back. What was done was done.
The police handed it to the U.S. Attorney who decided to make an example of this case, and charged Aaron with 13 felonies. The consequences of these charges was huge fines and decades in jail. I think just as terrifying for Aaron was the idea of being convicted of a felony and losing his right to vote. A typical
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