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Abelson Report to MIT on Aaron Swartz Released ~pj Updated

By Pamela Jones et al.

Harold Abelson report [PDF] to MIT about his investigation into the Aaron Swartz affair is now publicly available on MIT's website, along with a letter [PDF] from the President of MIT, L. Rafael Reif. There's a MD5 fingerprint.

It's dated July 26, and the review panel is listed as being made up of  Abelson,   Peter  A.  Diamond,   Andrew  Grosso, and   Douglas  W.  Pfeiffer  (support).

It's not a whitewash. It clearly sets out that MIT could have done more to achieve a different outcome had it cared about Aaron more and acted more harmoniously with traditional MIT culture:

If the Review Panel is forced to highlight just one issue for reflection, we would choose to look to the MIT administration's maintenance of a "neutral" hands-off attitude that regarded the prosecution as a legal dispute to which it was not a party. This attitude was complemented by the MIT community's apparent lack of attention to the ruinous collision of hacker ethics, open-source ideals, questionable laws, and aggressive prosecutions that was playing out in its midst. As a case study, this is a textbook example of the very controversies where the world seeks MIT's insight and leadership.

A friend of Aaron Swartz stressed in one of our interviews that MIT will continue to be at the cutting edge in information technology and, in today's world, challenges like those presented in Aaron Swartz's case will arise again and again. With that realization, "Neutrality on these cases is an incoherent stance. It's not the right choice for a tough leader or a moral leader." In closing, our review can suggest this lesson: MIT is respected for world-class work in information technology, for promoting open access to online information, and for dealing wisely with the risks of computer abuse. The world looks to MIT to be at the forefront of these areas. Looking back on the Aaron Swartz case, the world didn't see leadership. As one person involved in the decisions put it: "MIT didn't do anything wrong; but we didn't do ourselves proud."

It has not been the Panel's charge for this review to make judgments, rather only to learn and help others learn. In doing so, let us all recognize that, by responding as we did, MIT missed an opportunity to demonstrate the leadership that we pride ourselves on. Not meeting, accepting, and embracing the responsibility of leadership can bring disappointment. In the world at large, disappointment can easily progress to disillusionment and even outrage, as the Aaron Swartz tragedy has demonstrated with terrible clarity.

Not everyone reading the report will agree that MIT "didn't do anything wrong" as the report itself is critical of MIT's stance in certain respects. However, it does say that there is no one thing that would have for sure changed the outcome:

In concluding this review, we recognize the desire for a simple take-away, a conclusion that "if MIT had only done this rather than that, things would have turned out OK." We can't offer one. There were too many choices, too many might-have-beens, too great an emotional shock, and a public response that has been supercharged by the power of the Internet, the same power that Aaron Swartz epitomized and that he helped to create. Even today, with the benefit of hindsight, we have not found a silver bullet with which MIT could have simply prevented the tragedy.

Here's one. Do something about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. There's the silver bullet.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 30, 2013 (boomark / email).