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I think it can be very helpful. MIT had no idea they were dealing with a single individual or if they were dealing with an entity who was only targeting them. P
by MichaelSalib 14y ago
I think it can be very helpful. MIT had no idea they were dealing with a single individual or if they were dealing with an entity who was only targeting them. Pooling information from other potential victims through law enforcement seems like an obvious win.
Moreover, once they discovered the hardware Swartz had left, law enforcement could be extremely helpful by running fingerprints; MIT does not have access to the FBI's fingerprint database.
- rdl 14y agoI agree it could help at that stage, and if this had been a sensitive private network, I'd err on the side of overkill. A university network, especially one as historically open as MIT, is different. Nothing he did was that out of the range of normal user behavior -- changing your dhcp reg, manually assigning an IP in the right range, etc. are all things people do when airport/hotel/etc. networks don't work. Leaving a hidden laptop plugged in is actually something I did a couple times (as a student) to download linux ISOs, mailing list archives, etc. (since we only had a T1 at the house, and the on-campus network was faster). I'll wait until Abelson's report, though.