The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was anything but neutral, Aaron Swartz’s father, Robert Swartz, said in response to a report released by the institute regarding its role in the legal wrangling that led to his son committing suicide.
In an interview with TIME magazine, Robert Swartz said that while
the account of the events surrounding the school’s entanglement
into a police investigation is welcome, the report itself
indicates that the academic institution did play more than a
passing role.
The 180-page document released on Tuesday, which was compiled by
MIT’s Hal Abelson — a professor of electrical engineering and
computer science — sought to shed light on events that call into
question whether MIT enabled judicial overreach on the part of
prosecutors.
“The report is a contradiction because it says that MIT was
neutral, and yet it makes very clear that MIT was actually not
neutral,” Robert Swartz told TIME.
“MIT called in the police and then violated the law by
providing the government with information and material from
Aaron’s computer without a court order. Then they lied to me
about those facts,” he added.
Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old computer programmer and internet
activist, was facing trial for the downloading of millions of
academic articles from JSTOR in 2010 using the school’s networks,
which he then planned to make public.
JSTOR itself decided not to pursue a civil case against Swartz
and urged the US Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts to drop its
criminal case. Swartz nonetheless found himself facing 13 felony
charges under Assistant US Attorneys Scott Garland and Stephen
Heymann, working under US Attorney Carmen Ortiz.
Ortiz and her office were later the subject of criticism in the
wake of Swartz’s suicide, with prosecutorial overreach being
cited as a leading cause. Likewise, MIT began to face mounting
criticism of its own involvement in the investigation, and
produced a report this week in an attempt to set the record
straight.
Though MIT’s report generally absolves itself of blame, it does
in relatively vague speak acknowledge “missed” opportunities.
“We have not found a silver bullet with which MIT could have
simply prevented the tragedy.” Nevertheless, “MIT missed an
opportunity to demonstrate the leadership that we pride ourselves
on,” because MIT has traditionally taken pride in “promoting open
access to online information, and for dealing wisely with the
risks of computer abuse,” wrote Abelson in the report.
Aaron’s father, for one, has not been swayed by the report’s
findings.
“MIT wasn’t neutral. They cooperated with the government and
worked very closely with the prosecutor in the case,” said
Robert Swartz.
According to a May interview with TIME, Swartz’s father believed
that prosecutors were simply intent on making an example of his
son. The slew of charges levied against him were based on the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was enacted in 1986 and is
currently being reviewed by Congress.
MIT’s report incidentally, seems to acknowledge precisely
that point.
MIT did not consider “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,” wrote Abelson in his report.
Republished from: RT