
MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case - bguthrie
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/mit-releases-swartz-report-0730.html
======
bguthrie
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-w...](http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-whitewash-
my-statement-in-response)

~~~
larrys
"Those of us who believe MIT deserves some blame for subsequent events"

To be clear do you mean that MIT deserves blame for the suicide?

~~~
chaostheory
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.

~~~
res0nat0r
> 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?

~~~
burntsushi
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.)

~~~
danielweber
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?

~~~
burntsushi
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.

~~~
res0nat0r
The question above: Is a 6 month sentence and no jail time plea bargain
considered disproportionate?

~~~
chaostheory
That was only mentioned AFTER he died. Let's take a look at their press
release:
[http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR....](http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.html)

"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?

~~~
res0nat0r
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.

~~~
chaostheory
"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."

~~~
res0nat0r
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.

~~~
chaostheory
In this case, you're talking about the enforcement of keeping publicly funded
research out of the public's hands. Was any of this necessary?

------
denzil_correa
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
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
> 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.

~~~
jpmattia
> _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.

~~~
MichaelSalib
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.

~~~
betterunix
Calling in a computer forensics team is already over the top, far beyond what
was needed in this case.

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

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.

------
rdl
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.

~~~
larrys
"University police essentially exist to cover up rapes on campus."

Oh come on what kind of statement is that to make?

~~~
rdl
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.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bennett-l-gershman/campus-
cult...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bennett-l-gershman/campus-culture-
complacency_b_1095510.html) is one article.

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).)

~~~
larrys
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.

Has that been the case? (Serious question).

~~~
rdl
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.

~~~
saraid216
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.

------
sadfaceunread
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
Update: Still on Part III. I am amazed that people are posting like they have
gotten through it all.

~~~
sadfaceunread
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. "

------
twotwotwo
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...](http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/56881327662/mit-report-is-a-whitewash-
my-statement-in-response)

~~~
twotwotwo
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
Andrew Grosso.

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

~~~
iblaine
This is more coincidence than conspiracy. People look for patterns where they
do not exist.

~~~
chaostheory
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".

------
mikexstudios
Direct link to report: [http://swartz-report.mit.edu/](http://swartz-
report.mit.edu/)

------
john_b
> _" 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"_

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

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

------
Mustafabei
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.

------
strathmeyer
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.

------
Zigurd
That's a lot of hand-washing.

------
swalkergibson
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.

------
sendos
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)

~~~
betterunix
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
Maybe he should have asked. Or gone about it in a legal way.

Breaking the law, is breaking the law. However noble your intent.

------
lsiebert
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
> “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.

