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MIT Investigating School's Role In Swartz Suicide
The untimely death of Aaron Swartz has raised a lot of questions over the weekend. Now MIT is launching an internal investigation to determine what role the school played in his suicide. From the article: "In a statement, MIT President L. Rafael Reif offered his condolences, saying that the school's community was 'extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT,' Reif said. 'I have asked professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.'"
However it's sad that it took a suicide for them to examine their role here. For a college that pioneered OpenCourseWare, I never understood why they stood idly by.
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What I have found the most unusual about this situation is the outright-condemnation of techniques such as changing a MAC address, writing scripts, etc.
As anyone with a vague notion of computing can attest to, these are simply 'problem-solving techniques' - and are incredibly far removed from the judge's analogy of "a digital crowbar".
The closest 'real' analogy that I can come up with is someone sneaking into the library to photocopy journals - and when known to the doorman, putting on a hat or a fake moustache.
One can't help but question why the government had such a hardon for the case, considering JSTOR dropped all charges, and MIT didn't really care.
Let's see if the final report:
Clears MIT of any real responsibility.
Talks about the need to listen more to issues that affect its community.
Talks about he need for MIT as an institution to take an active role in trying to educate authorities on technical issues.
Advocates for handling more issues internally but always cooperating with the authorities.
I'd hope the report won't look like the bound edition of this 15-second CYA.
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A crowbar is also a problem solving technique. All sort of times two items are attached too firmly and you need to apply more leverage. A lot of the time this is perfectly legal - stuck doors, opening wooden crates and so on. This is a pretty good analogy for a script.
it's not how MIT acted, but the copyright law, that's what they should investigate. like how come someone can be threatened with 35 years in prison and a $1m fine for making state-funded research papers accessible to people at large?
for killing a person, you only get 4 years.
yeah, for killing Micheal Jackson, you get less than for distributing one song of his 'illegaly'
this has to stop.
And when it is not legal and you use a crowbar you get up to 30 days of prison in the worst case scenario for trespassing, but when you do it electronically it magically becomes 35 years.
Based on what I've read and heard so far about this matter, I fail to see how MIT should be responsible for something that Swartz did to himself, in his own apartment.
In fact, it sounds like MIT is very much a victim of this whole ordeal, too, and were dragged into it solely by the actions of Swartz that happened on their property.
I would rather see internal investigation in prosecutor's office. Or if they are unwilling, external one.
So, he followed along in the tradition of TMRC / the original MIT computer hackers?
I like this Swartz guy more and more!
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What you have to understand is that majority of people posting on this site are anti-copyright zealots, because to them digital stuff should all be free as in beer. Music, movies, games, code, lecture videos, journal articles, whatever. (Ironically, all the stuff which the USA happens to be good at vis-a-vis China and other countries, but that is no matter). So they're going to blame Swartz's death on those who enforced copyright.
Perhaps, but the problem here seems to be the plea bargaining system rather than the actual law.
In the case of a crowbar it wouldn't take too imaginative a prosecutor to come up with an argument for attempted burglary and to consider the crowbar as a weapon.
First off, I am deeply saddened and distraught that such a prolific person that had already helped the world so much took his own life. I hope his family and friends take solace in the amount of achievements this young man had made before his decision to take his own life.
3% of Americans are under the correctional supervision of their justice system. There are seven times more people in prison in the US as a percentage of the population as there are in Europe.
There is no evidence that this policy is any more effective than things like removing Lead in Gas for reducing overall crime. The rest of the world looks on in horror at prison camp America which locks up slightly more people than the Russians. Ever tried looking in the mirror?
The US Justice System is there to enforce the law. I don't know what relevance this has or what you hoped to achieve with your parroted statistics but I don't find it very helpful here. He was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud among other things and when someone alerts the authorities that this may have taken place, they investigate it. If I bypassed your home's security and installed a laptop in your home that connected to your network and took all your files, would you want there to be laws against that? That's what they were investigating -- is there any evidence of undue or unjust actions in this investigation? I think that's what MIT wants to find out here.
I'm not surprised this guy looked at the options and chose the one he did, it was probably the most rational sane thing to do.
You know, that almost sounds like an endorsement for suicide which is probably one of the most disgusting and vehement posts I've read here so far. There is nothing rational nor sane about taking one's own life. When I was 16 one of my friends committed suicide and more recently a roommate's girlfriend came over while my roommate was gone and committed suicide. As someone who has witnessed the aftermath both to someone who meant so much to me and someone I barely knew, I will tell you right now that it is a terrible act that impacts everyone -- and most often in a profoundly negative way. To call it 'rational' or 'sane' in any case reveals that you do not know anything about suicide.
I didn't know Aaron Swartz although I've been following this case with interest. What I suspect happened was that Swartz wanted to make a statement about opening up journals to the public and he wagered that it would be hard to pin any fallout on himself if he did all of this covertly. And he tried. But at the end of the day they figured out who was taking these articles of information. Did you know he was a Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Ethics? What do you think this meant for his career to be indicted on such charges? How would you, as a student, listen to a lecture on ethics from someone who had broken laws and evaded police? I think that Swartz saw this as a sort of "civil disobedience" but when his peers did not agree, he took the coward's route instead of letting society decide his fate for his actions -- and I think the case was still open!
Let's assume Swartz was completely in the right on all of his actions. What, precisely, would you have MIT and the US Government do differently to prevent this suicide? What actions of theirs do you find culpable for forcing Aaron Swartz into no other choice than to take his own life?
My work here is dung.
I really don't think it is so clear cut. If you bully someone into a corner, with 30 years of imprisonment, which is effectively a life sentence (the guy wouldn't be out until 56), then from a certain perspective committing suicide doesn't seem such like a bad alternative.
I would love to see the prosecutors to be disbard for inappropriate behavior that turned what was otherwise a minor of offence into something that was treated as was worse than murder. I would love to have the prosecutors and judge interviewed to understand why they had such a large axe to grind.
Justice should be about fair and appropriate punishment and not something used to make prosecutors feel like rock stars.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
MIT had no role, nor did any other party. Instead of facing the consequences of his actions, like a mature human being would do, he chose to kill himself. The motivation, as well as the blame, was his alone.
A frustrated child may scream: "I'm going to hold my breathe until I turn blue!" The wise parent, however, will not succumb to the ploy.
Why have we decided to accept suicide as a tool for extortion? Swartz in no way can be construed as a helpless victim; rather he is the sole perpetrator of his own destruction.
Suicide is an act of cowardice and weakness, and the responsibility for it belongs solely to the one who carried out the act.
You seem to think that just because something is breaking the law, it should be punished to the fullest extent. Protips:
1. Most people break the law many times each day. The accumulated penalties for those crimes, in most any western country, even if you took the minimum sentences prescribed by law, would immediately put many a country's population behind bars for millenia or make them owe millions of dollars in fines. Mostly both. Just like that.
2. There's this thing called prosecutorial discretion. As in the prosecutor has full control over what cases they want to prosecute. Just like that.
3. Copyright violations, while a matter of criminal law in the U.S. and thus prosecutable ex officio, require participation of the injured parties. If no party claims that a copyright law violation took place, then there's nothing to prosecute. This is where copyright violations differ, from, say, murders. In an attempted murder, it doesn't matter all that much that the victim forgave the attacker and doesn't want them punished. The prosecutor is free to ignore that. In a copyright violation, the victim has pretty much full say in keeping the legal action going, and it's up to them whether it keeps going or stops. Same goes with regard to criminal trespass -- if the injured party says that there was no trespass, the prosecutor has no leg to stand on. Anything else is vigilante justice and amounts to harassment of the defendant. Just like that.
So there.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
What you have to understand is that majority of people posting on this site are anti-copyright zealots, because to them digital stuff should all be free as in beer. Music, movies, games, code, lecture videos, journal articles, whatever. (Ironically, all the stuff which the USA happens to be good at vis-a-vis China and other countries, but that is no matter). So they're going to blame Swartz's death on those who enforced copyright.
The articles were from publicly funded research. We the people already paid for the research once, why should the results not be free to us? If the public is going to fund the research the results should be made freely available to them.
Take your penultimate question and look at it a bit broader
(not that others haven't done that already -- therefore my surprise).
Look at proportionality. Keep your suspicions out of the picture.
Good luck.
No, they're just double checking whether there were any mistakes. MIT did *nothing wrong*. This idiot *insisted* on trying to steal millions of dollars of material, involving the free republication of millions of man-hours of research that get only limited funding and rely on these sorts of copyrighted publications for some of that limited funding.
He was screwing with thesis writing and core research, abusing the credentials of Harvard to sneak onto the MIT campus, and he *kept insisting on doing it!!!*. MIT kept doing as little blocking as feasible to protect their access to critical research material, and he kept insisting on abusing that resource. If there's any failure, it's on *Harvard* for giving this idiot credentials. MIT was tolerant and patient in the extreme: the police only caught him when he was *breaking into the wiring closet* to re-establish his illegal access to that resource with his illegally connected laptop.
I'm sorry for his family that he chickened out and committed suicide, but MIT has no guilt here. This was too big to whitewash: they did everything they could to give him chances to stop his abuses. They didn't help stop him because he was stealing, they helped stop him because he was *sucking up all the bandwidth* and overwhelming the resource. This isn't like stealing some dry ice, this is like staling *all* the dry ice and making experiments fail because they can't preserve tissue samples.
The man deserves no sympathy. His family and friends may deserve some, but only because he was too cowardly to face the charges for his actions.
I'm not surprised this guy looked at the options and chose the one he did, it was probably the most rational sane thing to do.
You know, that almost sounds like an endorsement for suicide which is probably one of the most disgusting and vehement posts I've read here so far.
Just as a reminder, Swartz was subject to bouts of extreme depression. Although it's a human tendency to want to find external causes and somebody to blame, it is most likely that depression has more to do with his suicide than any other factor.
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There are a lot of ethical action which are unlawful and vice versa, a lot of unethical action which are perfectly lawful. I would certainly hear the lecture of somebody which know the difference between ethical and lawful and the ramification.
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Nothing is rational or sane about suicide. It is the ultimate selfish act for cowards.
The first sentence is true, the second only half true; I see you've never had the misfortune of knowing anyone with clinical depression. You can no more blame a suicide's death on the suicide victim than you can blame the victim of a heart attack for his. It's a disease; clinically depressed people can't just shrug it off any more than you can shrug off cancer. It needs professional treatment, and like cancer treatments, sometimes they fail.
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Seems to me that before his suicide would have been better timing.
Nothing is rational or sane about suicide. It is the ultimate selfish act for cowards.
The first sentence is true, the second only half true; I see you've never had the misfortune of knowing anyone with clinical depression. You can no more blame a suicide's death on the suicide victim than you can blame the victim of a heart attack for his. It's a disease;
Having personally known people who committed suicide after suffering intense attacks of depression, I will agree. But then you shouldn't blame a suicide's death on MIT or the Justice Department, either. They didn't cause the disease. (Swartz had written about depression years before; no, being charged with a computer break-in did not cause his depression.).
clinically depressed people can't just shrug it off any more than you can shrug off cancer. It needs professional treatment, and like cancer treatments, sometimes they fail.
I'll agree here-- suicide is not a heroic act of defiance against the system; it is, for the most part, the result of a disease that is difficult to cure and far too often fatal. Clinical depression is not to be taken lightly.