MIT releases report on its actions in the Aaron Swartz case

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.

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.

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.