MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case • Hacker News Board

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#51

Post by rdl » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:19 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #43

rdl wrote: post #21

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 depart…

The "oh no, China!" thing is BS; traffic analysis would show that the china logins were (presumably) ssh portscans and not real connections. You have no evidence of that; you just made it up out of thin air. Odds would be that it was a MIT student scraping Every large network, and there's no reason to exclude MIT, gets attacked by non-students on a regular basis. They can't just assume every portscan is innocuous.

We know with pretty high confidence that aaronsw owned this particular laptop and aaronsw was not in China or in any way connected to PLA. It's possible his box was rooted by PLA hackers, but since no one mentioned this any more, and boxes I've had on net-18 get ssh-probed to hell from China, it seems like a pretty logical assumption.

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#52

Post by chaostheory » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:21 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #45

chaostheory wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple. Delay it for a few days. I would imagine MIT's administration reads the news. Even if they publicly announced a deadline, which I don't think they did; it's not like they couldn't offer a good rationale for delaying the release of the findings. My opinion hasn't changed. Given the date of release and their objection to the FOIA requests, the only things MIT really wants is to have this event forgotten and to…

The optimal thing for MIT would have been to release it after PFC Manning gets ~20 years (which is my prediction; not found guilty on aiding the enemy, but everything else). It's weird to do something slightly shifty (morning-of) but not optimally shifty.

I would argue that would make it too obvious. Besides while it may be more optimal to release it after the verdict, releasing it in the morning on the same day has essentially the same effect.

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#53

Post by larrys » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:24 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #40

larrys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"University police essentially exist to cover up rapes on campus." Oh come on what kind of statement is that to make?

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 ad…

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).

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#54

Post by john_b » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:35 PM UTC

> "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"

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#55

Post by bguthrie » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:36 PM UTC

larrys wrote: post #33

bguthrie wrote: post #5

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 chan…

"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?

Depression is a complicated disease with many causes, and no one knows exactly what was going through Aaron's mind. But I believe his depression was in large part situational, and that yes, MIT is at least partly to blame for that situation.

At the bare minimum, whether or not you believe MIT aided the prosecution over the defense (and I believe they did), it seems clear to me that Aaron and his family (his father is an alumnus, and worked for the MIT Media Lab) deserved better than "neutrality" from the MIT administration, if for no other reason than that I can't think of a single conceivable technical reason to call what Aaron did "felony" hacking.

By standing pat, MIT also contributed to the ongoing prosecutorial weaponization of laws like the CFAA, which makes a felony of a wide range of activities that most hackers would not even categorize as misdemeanors, to say nothing of crimes that bar you from voting or holding most jobs. It is a terrible precedent no matter how you look at it.

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#56

Post by res0nat0r » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:37 PM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #48

larrys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

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 so…

> 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?

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#57

Post by danielweber » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:40 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #21

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 depart…

> I don't think a competent IS&T would have gone directly to the Cambridge police if there were no MIT police.

Can you explain this more? INLINE EDIT: I take it you are saying that IS&T would have not gone to the Cambridge Police Department at all if there were no Campus Police. I'm not sure this follows. They wanted to get this person to stop, and they surely could have just confiscated this laptop, but that may have actually been illegal since it wasn't theirs.

Edit: Need some explanation on this, too:

> I love how MIT tries to pin blame on their budgetary cutbacks and staff furloughs, too.

I assume you are referring to page 20, when MIT employees didn't respond until January 3rd to a JSTOR email sent on December 26/27th. How are they "pinning blame" on anything there? It reads as a very straightforward description of the timeline.

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#58

Post by NelsonMinar » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:42 PM UTC

sadfaceunread wrote: post #25

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.

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.

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#59

Post by danielweber » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

sadfaceunread wrote: post #25

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.

A lot of people are just rehashing arguments from six months ago.

Re: MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

#60

Post by chaostheory » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 5:49 PM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #56

chaostheory wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

> 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?

Of course he did, just like Rosa Parks and MLK Jr knowingly broke laws that they felt were unjust, but that's besides the point. The main point is that MIT could have done what JSTOR did and made it right. They didn't. To add insult to injury, now they're doing everything they can to hide information relevant to the case.

I also really hate arguments that blame the victim.