Those of us who believe MIT deserves some blame for subsequent events do so because they could have asked the prosecution to desist, as JSTOR did, or at least downgrade the charges to a misdemeanor, but chose not to. That amounted to an implicit endorsement of the prosecution, which would have been difficult to pursue without the support of either MIT or JSTOR.
The report appears to find that MIT should not have changed its neutral stance, which is disappointing, and I'm skeptical. Here's a quote (IV.B.3):
Given the lead prosecutor’s comments to MIT’s outside
counsel (see section III.C.3), MIT statements would
seemingly have had little impact, and even risk making
matters worse—although this information was not shared
with Swartz’s advocates.
It does reinforce what we already know: that the public prosecutor was mostly interested in collecting a scalp.
Update: Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron's partner at the time of his death, has released a statement. Full disclosure: Taren's a friend, Aaron was a friend, and I'm not exactly a disinterested party here.
> The report appears to find that MIT should not have changed its neutral stance, which is disappointing, and I'm skeptical.
The report does not have any findings about what MIT "should" have done, as it states many times, such as in the last paragraph of the Introduction section:
> It was not part of our charge in this review to draw conclusions, but rather to determine facts and to consider what can be learned from this tragedy. Part V accordingly poses questions, not answers.
and again in the 4th paragraph of Section V:
> The Review Panel was not asked to make recommendations in our report, but rather to suggest how MIT might learn from this history.
Your comment misrepresents the report's purpose as well as its content. I think the report deserves a more careful reading.
EDIT: Personally, I recommend reading the Conclusion section (p. 100) and searching for the string "neutral" in that section.
I'm skimming quickly for the gist, and certainly didn't intend to misrepresent its contents. That being said, I'm not going to change what I wrote; that quote presents a value judgment, one that I'm skeptical of, and since the broader report doesn't appear to admit to any responsibility for subsequent events, I think it's disappointing.
I have a lot of respect for the authors of the report, and I trust their integrity. But if judgement wasn't in their remit, then it was a poor remit.
Note also that MIT's president seems to believe that the report constitutes a free pass:
From studying this review of MIT's role, I am
confident that MIT's decisions were reasonable,
appropriate and made in good faith.
> The report does not have any findings about what MIT "should" have done
Well then what's the point of the report other than allowing MIT to wash its hands? Great timing on the release as well since it will likely be forgotten and hidden due to another big event today.
Simple. Delay it for a few days. I would imagine MIT's administration reads the news. Even if they publicly announced a deadline, which I don't think they did; it's not like they couldn't offer a good rationale for delaying the release of the findings. My opinion hasn't changed. Given the date of release and their objection to the FOIA requests, the only things MIT really wants is to have this event forgotten and to disavow any wrongdoing on their part.
The optimal thing for MIT would have been to release it after PFC Manning gets ~20 years (which is my prediction; not found guilty on aiding the enemy, but everything else). It's weird to do something slightly shifty (morning-of) but not optimally shifty.
I would argue that would make it too obvious. Besides while it may be more optimal to release it after the verdict, releasing it in the morning on the same day has essentially the same effect.
Depression is a complicated disease with many causes, and no one knows exactly what was going through Aaron's mind. But I believe his depression was in large part situational, and that yes, MIT is at least partly to blame for that situation.
At the bare minimum, whether or not you believe MIT aided the prosecution over the defense (and I believe they did), it seems clear to me that Aaron and his family (his father is an alumnus, and worked for the MIT Media Lab) deserved better than "neutrality" from the MIT administration, if for no other reason than that I can't think of a single conceivable technical reason to call what Aaron did "felony" hacking.
By standing pat, MIT also contributed to the ongoing prosecutorial weaponization of laws like the CFAA, which makes a felony of a wide range of activities that most hackers would not even categorize as misdemeanors, to say nothing of crimes that bar you from voting or holding most jobs. It is a terrible precedent no matter how you look at it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but they deserve blame for initiating the destruction of someone's life (jail time and fines in the millions) and not doing anything to stop it like JSTOR did. Yes not everyone offs themselves when their lives are ruined, but there are a lot of people who do. Now they're essentially trying to be free of any blame by releasing a CYA document during a time when everyone's attention will be on something else.
Even if Aaron was still alive, the things MIT did would be no less wrong.
There exists such a thing known as a disproportionate response. I assumed that was the implication here. (Not that Aaron did nothing wrong, but that the response to his wrong-doing was wildly disproportionate.)
People are discussing when the disproportionate response occurred. Was it calling any police at all? Was it a prosecutor offering a six-month plea bargain to a charge that likely would not have gotten Swartz any jail time at all even if guilty on all charges?
What? That wasn't what I responded to. Look at the progression of the parent comments:
>> Correct me if I'm wrong but they deserve blame for initiating the
>> destruction of someone's life (jail time and fines in the millions)
> So Aaron had nothing to do with getting himself into the situation that
> he did?
There exists such a thing known as a disproportionate response. I assumed
that was the implication here. (Not that Aaron did nothing wrong, but that
the response to his wrong-doing was wildly disproportionate.)
My response is saying that nobody is claiming Aaron doesn't deserve any blame. Only that there was a disproportionate response. Just because X acted wrongly doesn't mean Y had to have acted rightly.
Yes, it is disproportionate. Anything beyond confiscating the laptop from the closet would have been disproportionate. Aaron did not harm any systems, posed to no threat, and deprived nobody of anything.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested near the Harvard campus by two MIT police officers and a U.S. Secret Service agent. He was arraigned in Cambridge District Court on two state charges of breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony.
On July 11, 2011, Swartz was indicted in Federal District Court on four felony counts: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
On November 17, 2011, Swartz was indicted by a Middlesex County Superior Court grand jury on state charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny and unauthorized access to a computer network.
So where exactly does it state that Aaron caused damage to systems, posed a threat, and deprived people of something?
What you posted is a fancy way of saying that Aaron logged into JTSTOR using his own credentials and downloaded publicly funded research papers onto a computer hidden in an MIT supply closet. Who's the victim in his crime?
That sounds more like the PACER incident. MIT pays for a site-license for JSTOR, so everyone on campus can access it for 'free.' This is why Aaron was trying to use MIT's network.
"AARON SWARTZ, 24, was charged in an indictment with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million."
Gee I wonder why someone would contemplate suicide?
Maybe to outsiders, but Aaron and Aaron's lawyers both knew the six-month plea deal was on the table.
The DOJ publicly said "up to 35 years," and they deserve what they get for saying that --
-- but Aaron's lawyers didn't just fall off the turnip truck. They knew federal sentencing guidelines. Even if guilty on all counts, there were good odds that Aaron would face 0 days in jail, being a first-time non-violent offender. There was a 0.00% chance of Aaron going to jail for 35 years.
Unless he had the worlds worst lawyer, he would have known that those terms are theoretical maximums which always get trotted out in the news and in press releases. This keeps getting ignored for some reason in this case.
Also there are thousands of people every year sentenced to possibly long term jail time who don't kill themselves, therefore I put the blame more on Aaron himself than MIT.
"Andy Good, Swartz’s initial lawyer, is alternately sad and furious.
'The thing that galls me is that I told Heymann the kid was a suicide risk,' Good told me. 'His reaction was a standard reaction in that office, not unique to Steve. He said, ‘Fine, we’ll lock him up.’ I’m not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I’m saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless.'"
"Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. He said JSTOR signed off on it, but MIT would not.
'There were subsets of the MIT community who were profoundly in support of Aaron,' Weinberg said. That support did not override institutional interests."
Dropping charges because someone is at risk of hurting themselves is not a good policy law enforcement policy. The charges could proceed as normal, but extended supervision should be the proper response.
Of course he did, just like Rosa Parks and MLK Jr knowingly broke laws that they felt were unjust, but that's besides the point. The main point is that MIT could have done what JSTOR did and made it right. They didn't. To add insult to injury, now they're doing everything they can to hide information relevant to the case.
I also really hate arguments that blame the victim.
larrys, you haven't disputed any of my points other than telling me that I'm wrong, which makes sense since you're unwilling to use your real HN account.
> He broke the law.
Was the law that was broken make sense? Was the response to a victimless crime appropriate?
> Then he committed suicide.
You're acting like people dealing with a serious mental illness for years can easily make the same mundane choices that people without mental illness do everyday. It's more complicated than that.
I'm not larrys. All I'm saying is that he clearly had his own demons, and his own problems. He decided to break the law, knowing what the result would be. Then he decided to end his own life. A sad tale, but the law is the law.
The problem with MIT's neutral stance is highlighted in the report and the one which I find particularly interesting.
However, the report says that MIT’s neutrality stance did not consider
factors including “that the defendant was an accomplished and well-known
contributor to Internet technology”; that the law under which he was charged
“is a poorly drafted and questionable criminal law as applied to modern
computing”; and that “the United States was pursuing an overtly aggressive
prosecution.” While MIT’s position “may have been prudent,” the report says,
“it did not duly take into account the wider background” of policy issues
“in which MIT people have traditionally been passionate leaders.”
IMO, the MIT fraternity (particularly the faculty) should have been a bit more proactive in this regard.
We note that no one from MIT called the Secret Service.
The MIT Police contacted the Cambridge detective by calling him on his individual cell phone.
The special agent became involved because he accompanied the Cambridge detective.
Things just magically fall together. The MITs neutrality apparently extends so far that they don't even bother with what kind of police forces are strolling around on campus.
(Also note that, presumably due to their neutral stance, MIT intervened in court cases asking for the release of documents produced on Swartz and the case)
> The MITs neutrality apparently extends so far that they
> don't even bother with what kind of police forces are
> strolling around on campus.
Inter-agency task forces have become common in American law enforcement since 9/11. Many people have multiple affiliations. For example, I have a friend that is part of the New England Electronic Crimes Task Force. He's a Secret Service agent and does Secret Service details. But, he's a Boston police officer, works out of the Boston police headquarters, and overall is the exact same as any other Boston cop except where the funding line that allows Boston PD to cover his pay check comes from.
It's true that there are all sorts of interagency entanglements, but MIT doesn't have to participate in them if they don't want to. They could take a more cautious approach to which police end up on campus, at least for the parts of the campus that count as private property (excluding public roads going through the campus, for example). Unless in "hot pursuit" of a suspect or with a warrant, the only police that can enter MIT property are those that MIT gives permission to.
> Inter-agency task forces have become common in American law enforcement since 9/11.
Still, you call for a Cambridge detective, the Secret Service also shows up, and that doesn't cause major head scratching? I wish the summary had expanded on that part.
FD: I'm an alum.
Edit: From the report:
For the same reasons, the MIT Police sought
forensic assistance from a detective in the Cambridge Police Department who
had expertise in computer crime and with whom they had worked repeatedly
in the past. The Cambridge detective, who was a member of the New England
Electronic Crimes Task Force, responded to the call, accompanied by an agent
of the U.S. Secret Service. While the inclusion of the Secret Service agent was
not the intention of MIT, it was a recognized possibility. It was not until a
few days later, when Aaron Swartz was arrested, that MIT learned the identity
of the person involved in the JSTOR downloading. Thus, we find that MIT
did not focus on Aaron Swartz at any time during its own investigation of the
events that led to his arrest, and that MIT did not intentionally “call in the
feds” to take over the investigation.
So it wasn't MIT's intention to "hand it over to the feds" but it was indeed a recognized possibility that the feds would get involved when the request was made.
The summary would be improved if that were included.
>Still, you call for a Cambridge detective, the Secret Service also shows up, and that doesn't cause major head scratching?
No. If something similar happened in Boston and you called BPD, you'd probably get a BPD detective that does burglaries for the break in and a BPD detective that does computer crimes for the laptop - someone like my friend (who is a Boston PD detective that has an "extra" Secret Service credential by way of his assignment to the New England Electronic Crimes Task Force).
The New England Electronic Crimes Task Force is funded and run by the Secret Service. My understanding is that is primarily for jurisdictional reasons. But, it is also because way back in the day (300baud dail-up era) the majority of computer crime was related to the anti-counter fitting mandate that Secret Service has (like fake credit cards, fake vital documents, and fake currency). Computer crime was a new thing and most people didn't have PC's yet (or computer skills) so there wasn't an agency that was a great fit. The FBI didn't want it. So, in many places Secret Service got it.
Any computer crime in Mass is will almost always have Secret Service involved. New Hampshire and Maine are a little different. They have their own state level task forces/labs. So, any computer crime there will almost always have the State Police involved. The Secret Service involvement in Mass. is like the State Police involvement in those states. It's not an escalation. It's just a matter of where the resources (people with comp. forensic training and equipment) were developed and are located.
No, it doesn't cause head scratching. You called the police because you need computer forensics expertise while investigating a crime. The local cops show up with extra computer forensics experts who are also law enforcement. Not a big deal.
My very general impression from reading the "key findings" is that the report seems to me to invoke naiveté, an image academic institutions very carefully cultivate. But for the institution as a whole, that's pretense. MIT is a big business, a multi-billion business, and invoking naiveté on its part is wholly disingenuous. And ultimately that's the problem with this report. It's written by a professor, and you can't fault him for invoking that academic naiveté in good faith. Administrative officials assiduously avoid exposing faculty to the dirty realities of the machines that are modern academic institutions. Had the report been issued by the Office of the President itself, the conclusions would have rung hollow and rightly so.
My TLDR on this is that it all basically went haywire when MIT IS&T decided to call MIT Police for a machine downloading content on their network. They screwed up in many ways after that, but once someone unleashed a politically ambitious US Attorney on the case, it was kind of a lost cause.
I don't believe universities should have police departments (or really that any private organizations should have police departments, or even quasi-government organizations like transit agencies). University police essentially exist to cover up rapes on campus. In general they're underresourced and get used in a weird "quasi insider" role.
I don't think a competent IS&T would have gone directly to the Cambridge police if there were no MIT police. The "oh no, China!" thing is BS; traffic analysis would show that the china logins were (presumably) ssh portscans and not real connections. Basic network monitoring would show that this was just a badly written scraper and not anything more malicious. Odds would be that it was a MIT student scraping, and calling the cops on a MIT student for scraping a resource like that would have been bogus, too.
I love how MIT tries to pin blame on their budgetary cutbacks and staff furloughs, too.
I also think aaronsw was a moron in several ways (not rate limiting, not treating the box as a throwaway encrypted box, general behavior, and ultimately killing himself), but I'm more willing to cut a 24 year old slack than a multi-billion dollar endowment university which claims to be at the forefront of science.
Today I'm kind of sad I dropped out of MIT to do a startup, because it means I can't burn my diploma and promise to never donate to MIT. Oh well.
The effectiveness of a police force is due in part to its proximity and daily interactions with its constituents...police departments that place some value on foot patrols, for example, tend to find that voluntary cooperation from citizens increases...as opposed to departments that just swoop in from time to time in paramilitary gear.
Moreover, while all police have, in theory, the ability to enforce the complete city code, most departments have specialized departments: vice, homicide, burglary, etc., because it's simply more efficient to have a police officer who knows their section of enforcement really well (as well as being able to develop sources specific to that beat)
Cutting out a campus police force means that the people who respond to campus infractions would be police force accustomed to dealing with city crime. This isn't such a bad thing when the crime is something like homicide, serious assault, or rape...but assuming that the majority of incidents involve noise/party infractions, curfew violations, and trespassing, I think it's doubtful that the city police would be the ideal officials to take on these calls. If anything, the city police would just end up having another department specialize in campus crime, and these cops would probably be lower tier cops...which, again, is probably not going to make campus life particularly fun.
Non-criminal complaints on campus could be handled by something other than police with guns. If someone is a tenant in a university-owned building, it's pretty reasonable to sign some kind of agreement to not violate rules egregiously; the ultimate sanction of eviction and expulsion should be enough for things short of serious crimes (which would be better addressed by "real" police).
MIT police seem to have become a lot more "police-like", especially with respect to creative forms of trespassing, during the previous administration.
I can't speak for MIT's police, but at my campus, campus police were not armed with guns and had just started debating the use of Tasers...so, I agree with you.
I'd also argue that having campus police is not mutually exclusive of fostering the creative mischief that you mention...in fact, I'd argue that having campus police is the best way to maintain that creative mischief. Again, a police close to its constituents learns (ideally) the give and take and the pulse of the people it serves. A well-managed MIT police force could handle all the calls that are made by well-intentioned people, but come in knowing a likelihood of how much caution to take...whereas if you leave it to the Boston police force, who knows how familiar that officer is with said kind of call in that particular part of campus. An effectively managed campus police force can help keep things de-escalated.
Whether that's happening at MIT is beyond the scope of this argument, but I'm just pointing out that it's not necessarily either-or
Yeah -- we probably agree. I'd like early, lightweight intervention; I just don't think they should be from sworn law enforcement officers, who generally have a duty to report/intervene. The ideal would be to have peers as the first line of intervention, followed by RAs and other sort-of-peers, and then IMO people who are not law enforcement but are somehow trained.
Part of what happened at MIT was Susan Hockfield, who was by far the worst President MIT has ever had (2004-2012) -- pushing a lot of these developments (expansion of bureaucracy/deans, more "conventional" police responses to issues, ...). Vest (1990-2004) was better, and Reif (2012-now) seems pretty good, but I mostly stopped caring.
Every police officer I've ever passed on the highway while breaking the speed limit has apparently not had a duty to report.
In the off-case you do need to arrest someone on campus you need sworn police, and while it's possible to detain someone for a "real" cop to come arrest them, you end up that way with situations where someone who just needs to be separated from the campus population for a bit, instead ends up in city lockup with all that implies.
Cops are allowed to use their best judgment when handling civil and criminal complaints (this is, after all, one of the things Arizona was trying to "fix" with their anti-immigration laws, was to make enforcement of those law mandatory on their cops).
The "oh no, China!" thing is BS; traffic analysis would show that the china logins were (presumably) ssh portscans and not real connections.
You have no evidence of that; you just made it up out of thin air.
Odds would be that it was a MIT student scraping
Every large network, and there's no reason to exclude MIT, gets attacked by non-students on a regular basis. They can't just assume every portscan is innocuous.
> You have no evidence of that; you just made it up out of thin air.
It's actually addressed in the report:
"Ultimately, MIT concluded that the communication from the IP address located in China was a — not unusual — “pinging” attempt by someone or some entity in China to determine what computer systems at MIT were available and accessible, and unrelated to the activity of this laptop."
We know with pretty high confidence that aaronsw owned this particular laptop and aaronsw was not in China or in any way connected to PLA. It's possible his box was rooted by PLA hackers, but since no one mentioned this any more, and boxes I've had on net-18 get ssh-probed to hell from China, it seems like a pretty logical assumption.
A factual one, which has been widely reported over the years.
Universities pay for their own police. The goal of the university is to avoid incidents which would deter parents from sending their children to the school. Rape, particularly date rape/incidents involving alcohol are quite common on campus, if only due to demographics (young, socially connected, etc.)
There are three ways to solve it -- either actually addressing the underlying issues, or full prosecution of every incident, or sweeping it under the rug to the extent possible.
#1 is obviously ideal, but difficult. #2 would end up with both scary stats and large numbers of other students with felony convictions. #3 is the standard university police outcome.
Anyone who is a victim of a serious crime in a place with "internal" police should almost certainly report directly to the territorial police instead, or at least in addition to, since they have much fewer conflicts of interest, and probably more expertise in dealing with serious crimes.
("Real" police departments are also (theoretically) much more accountable to voters and the public, too. This is particularly an issue with weird transit or internal-to-agency police like the BART Police (who are tied with East Palo Alto PD as the worst department in the region).)
Interesting. So you are saying it has to do with essentially restricting or retarding the flow of information that could be harmful to the University.
Then I would expect over time with the Internet that that would not be as effective as it was in years past before the Internet.
Do we have any data on how this has changed now that anyone can broadcast anything and get attention? I would expect that if the primary reason for existence of the police force was to control the information flow as I think you suggest (which it could do quite easily pre internet) that we should see much more of this negative information has come out because it has a path.
Good question. I think it's more about having alternatives to official reporting channels so the stuff never actually gets reported, vs. hiding reports. But, we've seen citizen cameras as a huge force to accountability in cases of police abuse, too (Rodney King for a city PD; BART and Toronto for transit police, various people who came forward at Penn State after the Sandusky stuff blew the issue up there). So it seems plausible.
I'm not saying the only thing the police do is hide rapes, it's that their essential differentiation vs. other LEOs would be to protect their employers from embarrassment which would be detrimental to the organization's mission, which rape would be. So the reason it exists as a distinct force is that, whereas they still spend a large percentage of their effort in duties totally in common with a city police force.
Really, leveling such an accusation at the university police is trying to deal with a symptom. Abolishing university police forces won't cause rape instances to decline appreciably, but it will accelerate the implosion of higher education as a whole. Precisely for the reasons you stated.
Perhaps it would be better to look for a solution where universities are less motivated to compete for student head count, so that their police forces are less motivated to cover up incidents that would reduce it.
Cities pay for their own police. The goal of cities is to avoid the appearance that the city is dangerous, to encourage investment and more taxable income.
University police exist to insulate students from all sorts of crimes, rape just happens to be one of the crimes that happens on college campuses. Others include public intoxication, drug use, etc. There was a huge row a few years ago when Yale students were treated like commoners in a New Haven night club raid: http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2010/10/02/news/new_haven....
Fun fact. In the 1960's the MIT Campus Police were elevated to be State Police officers, because back then the students were protesting, and as State Police officers they had the power to order the Cambridge City Police off of MIT grounds.... the goal was to protect the students (so they might get some kind of internal Committee of Displine sanctions for flinging sh*t at people as part of a protect, instead of getting treated as criminals by the Cambridge cops).
One of the things which was mentioned in the report as a potential policy question to be considered is whether random visitors to the campus should be given some level of consideration as extended members of the MIT community. (If Aaron had been an MIT student or some other member of the MIT community, the situation would have probably been handled quite differently, and it might have gotten escalated to someone higher level inside MIT --- i.e., one of MIT's Deans ---- much more quickly, instead of having the Cambridge police get involved, who then brought in a Secret Service buddy of his, at which point things escalated down a very different path, one which was largely out of MIT's control.)
One important thing to remember is that when people talk about "MIT decided", it's really not MIT as the entire organization, but individuals who happen to be MIT employees making various decisions on the spot. So from the perspective of the institution, if someone makes a decision which is within their scope of their responsibility, and that decision was consistent with the policy in force at that particular point in time, and that person was acting in good faith, MIT the organization has to really protect that person, and not offer that person up as a sacrificial lamb to hordes of ravening Internet denizens screaming for revenge. It might have been the case that if someone like Hal Abelson had been brought in that fateful night, he would have made a different choice at multiple points in the timeline. But until Aaron committed suicide, it seems pretty clear that this whole affair wasn't considered something that required the attention of senior MIT administration officials, or the consideration of senior faculty members such as Prof. Abelson.
In some ways, the way some folks have been complaining about MIT is very similar to how the Republicans have been certain that decisions made by lower level staffers in the IRS must be something where direct blame must be laid at the feet of someone senior in the White House.
> I don't think a competent IS&T would have gone directly to the Cambridge police if there were no MIT police.
Can you explain this more? INLINE EDIT: I take it you are saying that IS&T would have not gone to the Cambridge Police Department at all if there were no Campus Police. I'm not sure this follows. They wanted to get this person to stop, and they surely could have just confiscated this laptop, but that may have actually been illegal since it wasn't theirs.
Edit: Need some explanation on this, too:
> I love how MIT tries to pin blame on their budgetary cutbacks and staff furloughs, too.
I assume you are referring to page 20, when MIT employees didn't respond until January 3rd to a JSTOR email sent on December 26/27th. How are they "pinning blame" on anything there? It reads as a very straightforward description of the timeline.
The number of people in this comment thread who have not read this report in detail is outstandingly large. It is a 100+ page document and I've been reading it for longer than this link has been active and I still haven't finished reviewing finely enough to comment intelligently on the contents.
Finally read all the the text and most appendices (skipped the definition of terms at the end). Overall I think that this report is very long but unfortunately difficult to process. In the end it, in compliance with its charge, does not propose recommendations but merely provides statements of facts, and identifies critical questions.
The overall opinion I'm left with is that the legal system is incredibly complex, and that MIT's decision to take a position of neutrality and active disinterest in the case while a defensible position made it harder for the administration and others to act. In the end MIT did not identify an outcome it wanted for the process, which is _okay_ but far from world leading, or inspiring. I agree with the sentiment of the report in the conclusion that
"
Looking back on the Aaron Swartz case, the world didn’t see leadership. As
one person involved in the decisions put it: “MIT didn’t do anything wrong; but we
didn’t do ourselves proud.
"
I think this is the one weakness of this report; no one is going to read it. I'm hoping someone writes a useful summary to satisfy the tl;dr culture. OTOH that seems disrespectful; if you really care about MIT and Aaron, read the damned report.
This report is necessarily missing important information: MIT is still intervening in a Wired reporter's FOIA request. You don't bother to block an information release unless something important would be released; that doesn't pass the smell test.
I have no reason to believe the authors aren't honest people who worked hard and firmly believe what they wrote, BTW.
But they're also members of the MIT community, and Abelson at least is a professor first and investigator second; that's going to affect the investigation process and conclusion.
That's why when there are big investigations in government, they often go hire an outsider as inspector general or independent counsel; there's no substitute for independence, complete access, and an investigator's skills and mindset.
I'm not alleging conspiracy, just stupidity in handling bad PR on MIT's part -- if they'd dropped it in 4h, ~no one would read it (PFC Manning is 1000x bigger deal than aaronsw, not the least of which because PFC Manning is alive).
> "In a letter to the MIT community announcing the release of the report, Reif wrote, “The review panel’s careful account provides something we have not had until now: an independent description of the actual events at MIT and of MIT’s decisions in the context of what MIT knew as the events unfolded."
How is this an "independent" report when three of the five people named as leaders of the investigative committee work for MIT?
> "Compilation of the report, “MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz,” was led by Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, at the request of MIT President L. Rafael Reif in January. In conducting his review, Abelson was joined by MIT economist and Institute Professor emeritus Peter Diamond; attorney Andrew Grosso, a former assistant U.S. attorney; and MIT assistant provost for administration Douglas Pfeiffer"
I undertsand that universities can take a neutral stance when it comes to politics. But this was not a political issue. I have examined the report and I think it's sincere (dare I say it spoke to me a vibe that says "People please! There was not much we could have done!"), but certainly does not make up for what MIT had not done in my view. This of course, is solely my idea. And it's that MIT should have stated, the moment the case has been filed, "We understand if there are any repercussions stemming from any violation of license agreements between JSTOR and MIT, however, it is unfathomable that a federal prosecution demanding years of incarceration has begun from making available to public a massive piece of random information, which was intended to be 'publicized' in the first place. With utmost respect to legal authorities, we as MIT do not wish that this prosecution move forward."
Wow I didn't expect them to lie so openly. As someone who was completely let down by their "elite" university, it's hard to understand what it feels like to be an MIT student these days.
Absurd. Typical, gutless reaction we have now come to expect from large corporations/institutions. I would be absolutely shocked if MIT had dug their heels in that nothing about this situation would have changed.
I did not follow this case when it broke, so do guys know what Aaron planned on doing with all that JSTOR material he was downloading? (~80% of JSTOR, according to one article I read)
It is not clear. The prosecution claims that his goal was to distribute the articles freely to the world (yes, the terrible crime of using university resources to spread knowledge), but that is just a hypothesis based on statements he made years ago.
We really don't know that. There are reasons to suspect that he did, but as the report points out (section II.A.2), he never explicitly said what his intent was.
He was ostensibly trying to do this to enable analysis of the archives. I think if he explained that to a librarian, they may very well have tried to help him.
The report appears to find that MIT should not have changed its neutral stance, which is disappointing, and I'm skeptical. Here's a quote (IV.B.3):
It does reinforce what we already know: that the public prosecutor was mostly interested in collecting a scalp.Update: Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron's partner at the time of his death, has released a statement. Full disclosure: Taren's a friend, Aaron was a friend, and I'm not exactly a disinterested party here.
http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-w...