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MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

227 points by bguthrie 13y ago

mikexstudios 13y ago
Direct link to report: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/ http://swartz-report.mit.edu/
denzil_correa 13y ago
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.
- revelation 13y ago
  Well, that kind of stuff is all over the report. 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)
  - vabmit 13y ago
    > 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.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      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.
    - jpmattia 13y ago
      > 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.
rdl 13y ago
Interesting dropping this 2h before the PFC Manning verdict, and during the week of hacker conferences.
- iblaine 13y ago
  This is more coincidence than conspiracy. People look for patterns where they do not exist.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    It may be coincidence, but it would be naive to think that there is no sophistication or planning in the public relations of a large organization.
  - rdl 13y ago
    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).
  - chaostheory 13y ago
    It's relatively easy to delay the release of MIT's findings, even when they became aware late in the cycle. Let's also remember that MIT has filed an objection to the Freedom of Information Act requests. There's just too many coincidences to belittle it as "conspiracy theory".
bguthrie 13y ago
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. http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-whitewash-my-statement-in-response http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-w...
- mitmatt 13y ago
  > 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.
  - bguthrie 13y ago
    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.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Zigurd 13y ago
That's a lot of hand-washing.
twotwotwo 13y ago
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. Here's a statement from Swartz's partner: http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-whitewash-my-statement-in-response http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-w...
- twotwotwo 13y ago
  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.
  - sadfaceunread 13y ago
    Andrew Grosso.
mtgx 13y ago
So why are they trying to stop the FOIA request if they did nothing wrong, as they claim?
- tzs 13y ago
  They aren't trying to stop the FOIA request. They are intervenening to review it.
sendos 13y ago
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)
- jmcgough 13y ago
  His intent was to make it all freely available.
  - MichaelSalib 13y 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.
- betterunix 13y ago
  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.
  - grauniad 13y ago
    Maybe he should have asked. Or gone about it in a legal way. Breaking the law, is breaking the law. However noble your intent.
rdl 13y ago
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.
- danso 13y ago
  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.
swalkergibson 13y ago
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.
sadfaceunread 13y ago
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.
- sadfaceunread 13y ago
  Update: Still on Part III. I am amazed that people are posting like they have gotten through it all.
  - sadfaceunread 13y ago
    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. "
- NelsonMinar 13y ago
  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.
- danielweber 13y ago
  A lot of people are just rehashing arguments from six months ago.
rayiner 13y ago
Direct link to the report, good summary starts on page 13: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pd.... 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.
strathmeyer 13y ago
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.
john_b 13y ago
> "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"
lsiebert 13y ago
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. Librarians want to help people.
freewizard 13y ago
> “MIT didn’t do anything wrong; but we didn’t do ourselves proud.” It'll be a great shame if MIT is ok with this "not proud", and stops doing more on this case.
Mustafabei 13y ago
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." I feel relieved.

227 points by bguthrie 13y ago

Direct link to report: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/ http://swartz-report.mit.edu/

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.

revelation 13y ago
Well, that kind of stuff is all over the report. 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)
- vabmit 13y ago
  > 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.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    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.
  - jpmattia 13y ago
    > 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.

rdl 13y ago

Interesting dropping this 2h before the PFC Manning verdict, and during the week of hacker conferences.

iblaine 13y ago
This is more coincidence than conspiracy. People look for patterns where they do not exist.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  It may be coincidence, but it would be naive to think that there is no sophistication or planning in the public relations of a large organization.
- rdl 13y ago
  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).
- chaostheory 13y ago
  It's relatively easy to delay the release of MIT's findings, even when they became aware late in the cycle. Let's also remember that MIT has filed an objection to the Freedom of Information Act requests. There's just too many coincidences to belittle it as "conspiracy theory".

bguthrie 13y ago

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. http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-whitewash-my-statement-in-response http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-w...

mitmatt 13y ago
> 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.
- bguthrie 13y ago
  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.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Zigurd 13y ago

That's a lot of hand-washing.

twotwotwo 13y ago

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. Here's a statement from Swartz's partner: http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-whitewash-my-statement-in-response http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-w...

twotwotwo 13y ago
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.
- sadfaceunread 13y ago
  Andrew Grosso.

mtgx 13y ago

So why are they trying to stop the FOIA request if they did nothing wrong, as they claim?

tzs 13y ago
They aren't trying to stop the FOIA request. They are intervenening to review it.

sendos 13y ago

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)

jmcgough 13y ago
His intent was to make it all freely available.
- MichaelSalib 13y 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.
betterunix 13y ago
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.
- grauniad 13y ago
  Maybe he should have asked. Or gone about it in a legal way. Breaking the law, is breaking the law. However noble your intent.

rdl 13y ago

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.

danso 13y ago
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.

swalkergibson 13y ago

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.

sadfaceunread 13y ago

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.

sadfaceunread 13y ago
Update: Still on Part III. I am amazed that people are posting like they have gotten through it all.
- sadfaceunread 13y ago
  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. "
NelsonMinar 13y ago
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.
danielweber 13y ago
A lot of people are just rehashing arguments from six months ago.

rayiner 13y ago

Direct link to the report, good summary starts on page 13: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pd.... 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.

strathmeyer 13y ago

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.

john_b 13y ago

> "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"

lsiebert 13y ago

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. Librarians want to help people.

freewizard 13y ago

> “MIT didn’t do anything wrong; but we didn’t do ourselves proud.” It'll be a great shame if MIT is ok with this "not proud", and stops doing more on this case.

Mustafabei 13y ago

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." I feel relieved.