Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology officials have admitted they could have done more to help the legal defense of Aaron Swartz, the Internet freedom activist who hanged himself in January while facing 13 felony charges for allegedly downloading and disseminating academic articles using MIT servers. In a report issued Monday, MIT said it had acted "neutrally" in the case, but could have assisted Swartz by disclosing that as a visitor to MIT, he enjoyed a legal right to use the JSTOR database where he accessed the articles.
Swartz sought to make the articles available to the general public as part of his commitment to Open Access, a movement designed to make research – particularly publicly funded research – available to everyone.
Swartz’s friends say that the information about the 26-year-old's access clearance could have changed the course of what MIT described in the report as an "aggressive prosecution."
MIT acknowledged that it had responded to more information requests from the prosecution than it did Swartz's defense.
"Responding similarly to subpoenas from each side is not the same as giving both sides equal access to information," the university said in the report.
The report -- which MIT president L. Rafael Reif requested after Swartz's death -- states that federal prosecutors failed to ask the university whether Swartz had authorized access to JSTOR via the MIT network on which he reportedly downloaded some 4.8 million articles, or 80 percent of JSTOR’s journals. At the time of the investigation, any visitor on the MIT campus was allowed to access the university network and JSTOR subscription. Though federal prosecutors didn't ask about the school's policy, MIT also did not voluntarily share that information.
"By MIT's policies, Aaron was an authorized user," Swartz's close friend Ben Wikler, executive vice president at the social justice advocacy site Change.org, told Al Jazeera America. "They didn't mention that to the prosecution."
"If they wanted genuinely to be equal, they should have provided support to both sides," Wikler said.
And while JSTOR publicly bowed out of pending legal action against Swartz and advised the government to drop charges, MIT never came out publicly to do the same. MIT notes in the report that it did not seek the federal prosecution against Swartz.
"In keeping with its stance of neutrality," the report reads, "MIT never issued a public statement about Swartz’s prosecution or advocated publicly on his behalf, even though doing this was urged by Aaron Swartz's family and legal team and by two members of the faculty."
Swartz was supposed to have dinner with his friend Ben Wikler and his family the night Swartz is thought to have killed himself. Swartz's partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman found his body at their New York City apartment on Jan. 11. Swartz's friends and relatives have blamed what they call aggressive prosecutorial overreach for his suicide.
Swartz's mentor Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, also said MIT had a responsibility to make information about authorized access known publically.
"If indeed MIT recognized this, and didn’t explicitly say either privately or publicly that Aaron was likely not guilty of the crime charged, then that failure to speak can’t be defended by the concept of 'neutrality,'" Lessig wrote on his Tumblr page.
MIT caused a stir earlier this month when university officials filed a motion to intervene in a WIRED magazine reporter’s Freedom of Information Act Request demanding Secret Service documents obtained during the university’s investigation of Swartz’s activity.
The motion "raises questions about whether MIT is really trying to [stop] the flow of info about the case," Wikler said.
MIT has not responded to requests for public statement on the issue in the more than one-and-a-half years of prosecution. MIT officials were not available for comment at time of publication.
As a teen, Swartz helped develop RSS, an early form of blogging, and later helped develop the social media platform Reddit. An avid proponent of Open Access, he helped organize a movement against the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which analysts say would have drastically restricted U.S. Internet freedoms.
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