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.

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...

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.”

Direct link to the report, good summary starts on page 13: 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.

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 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.

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-w...

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

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

> "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"

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

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.

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.

That's a lot of hand-washing.

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)

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.

> “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.

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