Read the News Office FAQ on the report In preparing its report, this group talked with about 50 people, including MIT faculty, students, alumni and staff; lawyers, police officers and prosecutors; and friends and family of Swartz. It also reviewed about 10, pages of documents. The report also sets the record straight by dispelling widely circulated myths.
The downloading was carried out surreptitiously using a laptop computer that was left in a basement wiring closet in an MIT building, physically connected to the MIT computer network. Two MIT faculty members also urged the administration to make such an appeal to the prosecution. Others feel differently, and the review panel identifies alternate paths we could have followed, including becoming more actively involved in the case as it evolved.
I am sure there will be further discussion and reflection now that we have the report in hand. MIT did not learn that the person responsible for the downloading was Aaron Swartz until after his arrest, on an initial charge of breaking and entering. MIT called in a Cambridge Police detective to help with its investigation. MIT did not request that federal charges be brought against Aaron Swartz. It was not consulted about its opinion about appropriate charges or punishment, and it did not offer any.
MIT was not involved in any plea negotiations, and was never asked — by either the prosecution or the defense — to approve or disapprove of any plea agreement. From early on in the prosecution, MIT adopted a position of neutrality. That was the key evidence identifying Swartz, who would face 13 felony charges for computer and wire fraud.
Wired explains :. Because Swartz, the open-source activist and one of the early developers of both RSS and Reddit, committed suicide before trial, his case has been surrounded by both mystery and outrage. Family members and supporters blame the overly aggressive federal prosecutors for driving Swartz to his death. This video, and the accompanying documents, provide more background, but ultimately do little to settle the arguments about his case..
While the documents are in the public record and free to share, PACER normally charges eight cents a page. The courts reported him to the FBI, which investigated whether the public records were "exfiltrated. The same anti-hacking statute was used to prosecute Lori Drew, who was charged criminally for participating in a MySpace cyberbullying scheme against a year-old Missouri girl who later committed suicide.
The case against Drew hinged on the government's novel argument that violating MySpace's terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking and a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
A federal judge who presided over the prosecution tossed the guilty verdicts in July , and the government declined to appeal. Swartz's title and role re: Reddit is an object of much controversy. Swartz joined Reddit in November , months after the site launched. At that point, the initial features were well-established and initial funding had been raised.
Swartz's company Infogami, like Reddit, was part of the first class of Y-Combinator. Swartz was given an equal chunk of ownership as Alexis and Steve, and Ohanian says he considers Swartz both an early employee and a co-owner, but not a co-founder. Swartz maintains he was a co-founder, and Y-Combinator's Paul Graham has referred to him as a founder.
Reddit was bought by Conde Nast, Wired's parent company, in October This has changed in more recent years, and even in it ran a special program allowing free access in Africa. Despite his own work on open-access issues in the United States, Swartz hadn't quite grasped the way students and scholars abroad could be so deprived of information.
Swartz became animated as he heard from the people in the vanguard of this struggle. But what about the researcher in Accra? Dar es Salaam? It genuinely opened his eyes. For their part, the EIFL officials and their fellow librarians and activists were exceedingly circumspect when it came to obeying the law. When you're young, you're an idealist. You're more ready to be radical then when you get to be my age.
Swartz tended to juggle half-a-dozen projects at any one time, and so his interest in the journal cause waxed and waned over the next few years. But when it waxed Swartz never found it hard to summon the passion he'd worked up in Italy.
He corresponded frequently with friends he had made at the retreat and was familiar with many of the founding documents of the international open access movement. There was, for example, the Budapest Open Access Initiative , whose declaration argued that: "Removing access barriers to [scholarly journals] will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor … and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
In June , a Swedish-born scholar and activist named Lisbet Rausing published a widely-circulated essay in the journal openDemocracy arguing for open access to scholarly articles. She specifically mentioned JSTOR: "It is equally problematic that JSTOR, the splendid database of most twentieth-century scholarly articles in the social sciences and humanities, is off-limits for the public," Rausing wrote.
She elaborated:.
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