Chapter 1The Boy Who Read Everything

Foreword

I spent my working life writing about men who kept secrets for a living. Intelligence officers, oligarchs, the politicians who moved between them: my beat, for the better part of three decades, was the machinery of the state as it operates in the dark — the file that is opened, the leverage that is applied, the career that is quietly ended in a room the public never sees. I wrote about people who understood, better than anyone, that information is power, and that the entire architecture of power consists of deciding who is permitted to know what. So when I told colleagues I was writing a book about a young American programmer, a boy from a Chicago suburb who had never held a security clearance, never run an agent, never so much as worked for a government, more than one of them asked me what I could possibly want with him.

The answer is that Aaron Swartz believed the exact opposite of everything my other subjects built their lives on — and the state treated him as though he were the most dangerous of them all.

That inversion is what brought me to this book. I had spent years documenting men who hoarded information and were rewarded for it: promoted, decorated, enriched, protected. Here was a man who gave information away — academic articles, code, legal records, the plumbing of the internet itself — and who was met with thirteen federal felony counts and the threat of decades in prison. The spies I wrote about broke laws in the service of secrecy and died in their beds. Aaron Swartz broke a terms-of-service agreement in the service of openness and died at twenty-six. A reporter who has covered security services learns to recognize the sound of a system defending not the public but itself. I heard that sound in the Swartz case from the first document I read.

I expected, when I began, to write a story about American law: a strange local statute, an overzealous prosecutor, a tragedy of the kind every country produces and every country explains away. What I found was something larger and more familiar. The record of this case — the indictments, the plea correspondence as it has been described by those who saw it, the congressional inquiries, the university's own review of its conduct — reads like the files I spent my career deciphering. The same institutional logic. The same conversion of discretion into machinery. The same officials who were not monsters, only professionals, doing what their incentives asked of them while a human being came apart under the weight. I have seen that pattern in Moscow and in Jerusalem. I did not expect to find it, so exactly preserved, in Boston.

The research was, in one respect, unlike any book I have written. My previous subjects hid; the record had to be extracted from them. Aaron Swartz published. His blog, his manifestos, his code, his talks, his adolescent arguments with adults who did not know they were arguing with a child — nearly all of it remains publicly accessible, because he built it to be accessible, and because the people who loved him kept it so. I worked from that public record: from the court filings and press archives, from the published recollections of his family and friends and lawyers, from the documentary account assembled after his death, and from twenty years of his own writing, which is the most complete self-portrait any subject has ever handed me. The difficulty was not finding the material. The difficulty was reading a man narrate his own life without knowing how short it would be.

Why does Aaron Swartz deserve a book from a reporter whose beat was espionage and power? Because his life is the clearest case study I have found of the question my entire career circled without ever quite answering: what happens when an individual decides that the state's rules about information are wrong, and acts on that decision openly, without a service behind him, without diplomatic cover, without the protections that my spies and oligarchs took for granted. He was fourteen when he helped write a specification that still carries the internet's content. He was twenty-six when the machinery finished with him. Between those two ages lies an argument about knowledge and power that every society I have written about is still having, and mostly losing.

This book is my attempt to follow that argument through one short life. I came to it an outsider — wrong country, wrong beat, wrong generation. I leave it convinced that the beat was the same all along. The file, the leverage, the room the public never sees: I had simply been covering the other side of the door.

— Yonatan Barzel, Tel Aviv

Chapter 1 · The Boy Who Read Everything

The Swartz house sat on a quiet block in Highland Park, Illinois, twenty-five miles north of Chicago's Loop, in a neighborhood where the lawns were mowed on Saturday mornings and the public schools were good enough that parents mentioned them at dinner parties. It was 1989, and Robert Swartz had just come home from work.

Robert ran a company called Mark Williams, which produced a Unix clone called Coherent: a scrappy alternative operating system for people who wanted something more elegant than MS-DOS but couldn't afford the licensing fees for the real thing. The company had been founded in 1977 and had shipped Coherent since 1980 — at first to equipment makers, then, from 1983, directly to individual PC users — as one of the first commercial Unix-compatible systems available at a price below a thousand dollars. Robert was not a celebrity technologist. He was an engineer's engineer, the kind of man who worked in a field because the problems fascinated him, who built things because building was its own reward. His wife, Susan, was a woman of similar inclinations, analytically minded and comfortable with the technical world her husband inhabited. Their first son, Aaron Hillel Swartz, had been born on November 8, 1986, and by the time the boy was three, something was clearly different about him.

Not different in the way parents say when they want their children to seem special. Different in a way that his parents could not miss. Aaron taught himself to read before he was four. Not a few words on cereal boxes or street signs. He read books, whole books, sustained decoding that most children don't achieve until first or second grade. He consumed them with a ferocity that seemed almost physical, as though the words were food and he was starving.

By kindergarten, the gap between Aaron and his classmates was not a gap. It was a chasm. While other five-year-olds were learning their letters, Aaron was reading chapter books and asking questions that made his teachers pause. Not the precocious questions that adults find charming (What makes the sky blue?), but structural questions, questions about how systems worked. Why did the library organize books the way it did? Who decided what went in an encyclopedia and what didn't? These were not the questions of a bright child. They were the questions of a mind that had already intuited that the world was organized by rules, and that the rules could be examined.

Robert Swartz recognized what was happening because he lived inside systems himself. Software was systems. A Unix operating system was a cathedral of nested rules: processes calling other processes, permissions governing access, hierarchies of control that determined who could read what and who could change what. Robert watched his eldest son approach the physical world the way a programmer approaches code: by looking for the architecture underneath.

The household reflected Robert's professional philosophy in its physical arrangement. The family's home computer was not a toy or a status symbol but a working tool, treated with the same matter-of-fact seriousness that a carpenter treats a table saw. Robert ran Coherent on his machines, a practical daily affirmation of the belief that software should be open to modification, accessible to users rather than locked inside proprietary black boxes. Technical manuals and documentation sat on the shelves alongside encyclopedias and science books, and Aaron read whatever he could reach, working through material written for professional programmers while his classmates were still sounding out picture books.

The Swartz household was not a typical suburban home. There were computers everywhere — not the gleaming consumer machines that were beginning to appear in American living rooms, but equipment that working programmers accumulated: monitors with green phosphor screens, keyboards with satisfying mechanical switches, stacks of manuals and technical documentation that Aaron began reading as soon as he could reach them. Robert did not hide his work from his children. He did not simplify it. When Aaron asked what his father was doing, Robert explained. Really explained, with the technical vocabulary intact, because the boy seemed to understand.

This was the first forming pressure. Aaron Swartz grew up in a home where knowledge was not gated. There were no subjects too advanced, no questions too complicated, no topics reserved for adults. The assumption (Robert's assumption, rooted in his own hacker ethics) was that information should flow freely, that a curious mind should be fed rather than rationed. It was an assumption about a household. Aaron would spend his life trying to apply it to the world.

Highland Park in the early 1990s was an affluent suburb, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Jewish, a place where achievement was expected and academic success was the local currency. The town sat along the shore of Lake Michigan, its streets lined with mature elms and oaks, its downtown a walkable grid of shops and restaurants that served a population of roughly thirty thousand. It was comfortable in the way that upper-middle-class American suburbs are comfortable: safe, well-resourced, and insulated from the friction and disorder of the city to the south.

For a child like Aaron, Highland Park was both nurturing and confining. The schools were good, well-funded, staffed with teachers who cared, but they were designed for the middle of the bell curve, and Aaron was not in the middle of anything. He moved through the elementary curriculum the way a sports car moves through a school zone: technically compliant, obviously constrained, vibrating with unused capacity.

His younger brothers, Ben and Noah, were bright children in their own right, but neither exhibited the same relentless, consuming hunger for information that defined Aaron from his earliest years. Both would find their own paths through the same terrain of technology and public-interest work, shaped by the same household values, channeling them differently. Aaron was the outlier, the one who seemed to have arrived pre-loaded with an operating system that ran faster than anyone else's.

By second grade, he had discovered the family's computers. Not as toys, not as gaming devices, but as tools. Robert's machines ran Unix-based systems, and Aaron began exploring them with the same systematic curiosity he brought to everything else. He didn't just play with the computers. He investigated them. He opened directories. He read configuration files. He tried commands and observed what happened. He was seven years old.

The internet arrived in the Swartz household early, as it did in many tech-connected homes in the early 1990s. For most Americans, the internet in 1993 and 1994 was still a rumor, something mentioned in magazines, associated vaguely with universities and the military. For the Swartz family, it was already infrastructure. Robert had been connected to networks since before the World Wide Web existed, through bulletin board systems and the early academic networks that preceded the commercial internet. When the web arrived, Aaron was waiting.

What the seven-year-old encountered was not the internet of 2026. Not the walled gardens of social media, not the algorithmic feeds, not the surveillance capitalism that would later define the online experience. The internet of 1993 was a frontier. It was disorganized, incomplete, ugly, and astonishingly free. Anyone could build a website. Anyone could publish. There were no gatekeepers, no content moderation, no terms of service that ran to thirty pages. The early web operated on a set of assumptions that were, in retrospect, breathtakingly idealistic: that information wanted to be shared, that people could be trusted to build things of value, that the network itself was a commons belonging to everyone who connected to it.

Aaron absorbed these assumptions the way he absorbed everything: completely, structurally, at the level of principle rather than practice. He did not experience the early internet as a novelty. He experienced it as a confirmation of something he already believed: that knowledge should be free, that access should be universal, that the barriers between a curious mind and the information it sought were artificial and wrong.

This was not a philosophy he arrived at through reading or instruction. It was the water he swam in. Robert Swartz's work was built on the premise that operating systems should be accessible to everyone, not locked behind corporate licensing agreements. The hacker culture that Robert inhabited (the culture of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, of the Homebrew Computer Club, of the early Free Software Foundation) held as its founding article of faith that information should be free. Aaron didn't learn this principle. He inherited it, the way other children inherited their parents' religion.

By third grade, his teachers had run out of curriculum for him. The problem was not behavioral. Aaron was quiet, often shy, more comfortable with books than with the rough social negotiations of the playground. The problem was cognitive. He had already mastered material that the school didn't plan to teach for another three or four years, and the gap was widening. His parents began exploring options: gifted programs, advanced classes, the various accommodations that American schools offer for children who don't fit the standard timeline.

But the accommodations were designed for children who were a year or two ahead, not for children who were operating on a fundamentally different plane. Aaron was not an accelerated version of a normal student. He was something qualitatively different: a child whose mind worked in patterns and abstractions that most adults didn't reach, processing information at a speed that made conventional instruction feel like watching paint dry.

The loneliness of this experience is difficult to overstate and easy to romanticize. In popular culture, the child prodigy is a figure of wonder: the tiny violinist, the boy who speaks six languages, the girl who solves equations on a chalkboard. What the popular imagination omits is the social cost. A child who thinks differently from everyone around him is, in the most literal sense, alone in a crowd. Aaron's classmates were not unintelligent. They were normal, which meant they were interested in normal things: sports, games, the social hierarchies of the lunchroom. Aaron was interested in how the World Wide Web's hypertext transfer protocol worked.

The result was isolation. Not cruelty, not bullying in the dramatic sense, but the quiet estrangement of a child who cannot find anyone who shares his concerns. Aaron had friends. He was not a hermit. But the deepest part of his intellectual life was, from the very beginning, conducted alone. He read alone. He coded alone. He thought alone. And he began to write.

Writing came to Aaron as naturally as reading had, not as a school assignment but as a compulsion, a need to organize his thoughts by externalizing them. Before he was ten, he was producing essays and observations that showed a startling clarity of thought. Not the laboriously correct prose of a gifted student, but the direct, argumentative, sometimes combative writing of someone who had something to say and no patience for rhetorical decoration. His sentences were short. His arguments were linear. He made his point and moved on.

This writing voice, spare, confident, impatient with pretension, would become one of the defining features of his public life. His blog, Raw Thought, which he would begin in his teenage years and maintain almost until his death, would become one of the most widely read personal websites in the technology world. But the voice was there from the beginning, formed in a bedroom in Highland Park by a boy who was trying to make sense of a world that seemed simultaneously fascinating and frustratingly slow.

The other forming pressure, the one that would prove decisive, was the ArsDigita Prize. In 1999, when Aaron was twelve, the technology company ArsDigita announced an award for young people who created useful, interesting, or original websites. ArsDigita had been founded by Philip Greenspun, a computer scientist and photographer who believed that good software should be given away freely and that communities of practice, not corporate hierarchies, were the proper engines of technological progress. The prize Greenspun established was designed to find the next generation of builders: people who made things for reasons other than profit.

Aaron built a site called The Info Network, a user-constructed encyclopedia where anyone could contribute entries on any topic, free to access. It was, in conception if not in execution, a prototype of Wikipedia, which Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger would not launch until January 2001.

Aaron won the prize in 2000, at thirteen.

The significance of the ArsDigita Prize was not the recognition itself, though the recognition mattered enormously to a boy that age. The significance was what it revealed about the architecture of Aaron's mind. He had not built a game. He had not built a personal homepage or a fan site or any of the other things that twelve-year-olds typically built on the early web. He had built a system: a platform for organizing and sharing knowledge, designed from the ground up to be open, collaborative, and free. At twelve, Aaron Swartz had already identified the problem that would define his life: that human knowledge was fragmented, poorly organized, and artificially restricted, and that the internet could fix this if someone built the right tools.

The ArsDigita Prize also brought Aaron into contact with the adult world of technology and internet culture for the first time. He began attending events, exchanging emails with programmers and developers decades his senior, participating in online communities where his age was invisible and his ideas were evaluated on their merits. The internet's great leveling quality, its indifference to the identity of the person typing, was, for Aaron, not a theoretical principle but a lived experience. Online, he was not a boy from Highland Park. He was a mind, communicating with other minds, and the communication was what mattered.

This was freedom in a form that Highland Park's well-manicured streets could not provide. The physical world sorted people by age, by grade, by social status, by the arbitrary hierarchies of adolescence. The internet sorted people by what they knew and what they could do. For a boy who had spent his entire life feeling out of place among his chronological peers, this was not just liberating. It was existential. The internet was the first place Aaron Swartz felt he belonged.

Robert and Susan watched their son's deepening immersion in the online world with the complicated feelings that any parent would bring to the situation. They were not technophobes. Robert's entire career was built on the same foundations that Aaron was now exploring. But there was a difference between building software for a living and watching your twelve-year-old son enter a world of adults, exchanging ideas about technology policy and information architecture with people who had no idea they were corresponding with a child.

The Swartzes navigated this the way they navigated everything: with openness and a fundamental respect for their son's intelligence. They did not restrict his access. They did not insist that he focus on age-appropriate activities. They trusted him, perhaps because they understood, better than most parents could, what the internet actually was and what Aaron was actually doing on it.

By the end of 1999, Aaron was thirteen years old. He was in the eighth grade at a school where the curriculum bored him. He was building websites that would win national prizes. He was corresponding with adult programmers and technologists who treated him as an equal. He had already articulated, in his writing and in his projects, the central conviction that would drive everything that followed: that information should be free, that access should be universal, that the tools of knowledge-sharing should be open to everyone.

He had also begun to exhibit the pattern that those who loved him would eventually recognize as a warning: long periods of intense, almost manic productivity followed by stretches of withdrawal and darkness. The depression that would shadow his entire life was not yet diagnosed, not yet named, but it was already present: a counter-rhythm to the brilliance, a weight that pulled against the velocity of his mind.

In Highland Park, in the last year of the twentieth century, a thirteen-year-old boy sat in his bedroom, connected to the world through a cable that ran from his computer to a router to a telephone line to a network that was, in those early days, still building itself. He was writing code. He was writing prose. He was reading everything he could find about how the internet worked and how it could be made to work better. He was alone in his room and connected to everything.

He did not know, could not have known, that within a year he would be helping to write the technical specification for one of the internet's foundational protocols. He did not know that within six years he would help build one of the most visited websites in the world. He did not know that in a little more than thirteen years he would be dead.

What he knew was this: the internet was the most important thing that had ever happened, and it was being built right now, and he could help build it, and the building mattered more than anything else he could imagine doing with his life.

He was thirteen years old, and he was right about all of it.

The Highland Park that Aaron left at thirteen had given him more than it is easy to credit. The ordered suburb, the good schools, the parents who treated his questions as worthy of real answers, the computers running Coherent, the early internet access, the household where knowledge flowed freely and the hacker ethic was the ambient culture: all of it had formed a mind that was exceptional not just in its capacity but in its character. Aaron's earliest conviction, that information should be free, that barriers to knowledge were moral failures to be corrected, was not an abstract philosophical position he had reasoned his way into. It was something he had absorbed from the water and the air of the Highland Park house, from a father who built open operating systems because the alternatives were wrong, from a household where no question was too technical and no subject was off-limits.

The genius of Highland Park's formation of Aaron was that it gave him his convictions before it gave him the world to apply them to. By the time Aaron encountered the paywall systems, the corporate publishing empires, and the federal prosecutors who would eventually threaten to imprison him, he already knew what he thought about them. He had known since he was three years old and his father explained, really explained, how Coherent's file permissions worked. The convictions were that deep. The system that tried to change them would find that they could not be changed, only crushed.