In order to understand why this incident was even more shocking than usual, one just needs to read this snippet<p><pre><code> The arrest shocked friends of Mr. Swartz, as well as
M.I.T. alumni. Brewster Kahle, an M.I.T. graduate and
founder of the digital library Internet Archive, where
Mr. Swartz gave programming assistance, wrote: “When I
was at M.I.T., if someone went to hack the system, say
by downloading databases to play with them, might be
called a hero, get a degree, and start a company. But
they called the cops on him. Cops.”
</code></pre>
I find the change of perspective - from hero to criminal - from MIT quite astonishing. I wonder if this incident makes current students wary about the change in <i>MIT ethos</i>.
"At 9:44 a.m. the M.I.T. police were called in; by 10:30 a.m., the Cambridge police were en route, and by 11 a.m., Michael Pickett, a Secret Service agent and expert on computer crime, was on the scene. "<p>Less than 1.5 hours from campus cops to Secret Service <i>on scene</i>.
<i>"'M.I.T. had to identify the hacker and assist with his apprehension in order to prevent further abuse,' the government argued in court."</i><p>Or they could have just tried talking to him and giving him a verbal warning.
I wonder what "activity from China" was.<p>Also, looks like this went all the way up to the Chancellor, so it's not as if it was just the libraries or someone pushing for this.
Why did MIT call in the secret service right away?<p>The answer must lie with certain Charles M. Vest who, in 1990, became president of MIT and served in that position until December 2004. He is now MIT professor and president emeritus.<p>He also happens to be a key member of the board of trustees of Ithaka, the owners of JSTOR.<p>I would not hold out my breath for MIT investigation criticising its own President Emeritus.
So, is there anything in this story that we didn't know from the indictment? Or any bits of the indictment that have been confirmed by NYT reporters talking to sources who were there? If the NYT is just summarizing the indictment, this doesn't seem very helpful at all.
I think one of the keys of this incident resides in the article posted by thaumaturgy (<a href="http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N66/hacking.html" rel="nofollow">http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N66/hacking.html</a>):<p>"At the meeting, Chancellor Phillip L. Clay PhD ’75 told the faculty that administrators were working with the district attorney’s office to move the felony trials out of the Cambridge court system to an internal Committee on Discipline process.
The charges against the students were dropped on Feb. 28, when the prosecution filed nolle prosequi orders for the three students, indicating that they would not move forward on the charges."<p>My personal opinion is that following identification by MIT and clarification of his intent, this should have been dealt with internally. While it was totally within the power of the prosecution to persist and press charges, the article shows an example where top MIT management did the right thing and insisted upon dealing with this internally (again: my opinion).<p>As an MIT student, it worries me that a measured response was not achieved by MIT management in this case. Whether that means MIT should not have called the police and allow uncontrollable escalation or should have done a better job in convincing the prosecution to not press on, I cannot be sure.
It is of course also possible that what happened is just a reflection of the prosecution's resolve to treat this with the full force of the law and whatever MIT management may have said fell into deaf ears.<p>I am unsure what weight each of those has in this sad case and I deeply appreciate President Reif's initiative to carry an internal investigation into MIT's response.<p>However, two other things bother me with regard to this case. First, it strikes me that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is inadequately broad and allows for dangerous interpretations. Second, it is very scary to think that individuals in the prosecution are insentivized to press for the maximum amount of charges, with little to no regard for proportionality. I can only hope for a system in which sentences are not used as a metric for a prosecutor's competence.<p>It seems to me that the concept of proportionality -as it is applied in armed conflict- is an essential one when talking about this whole issue. I fear that it is the root failing in this affair both in MIT's inability to treat this internally and later, in the prosecution's attitude towards the case.