The inside story of MIT and Aaron Swartz

[struggle4progress]

1. So as a Harvard student he had access to any JSTOR articles he needed . But for some reason,

known only to himself, he repeatedly went to the MIT campus and without permission left a personal computer connected to the MIT network in a utility closet to circumvent the JSTOR user agreement by downloading millions of articles -- an activity that could have cost MIT access to JSTOR, or could have cost JSTOR access to journal articles, or both

By sneaking into the MIT closet, instead of operating from Harvard, and by repeatedly creating false MIT user accounts, which MIT repeatedly shut down, instead of an account reflecting his real identity, he engaged in behavior that would convince any reasonable person that he knew what he was doing violated existing a number of rules and that he was attempting to conceal his actions

It's an interesting irony that he was a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics at the time:

... The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics stands at the core of what is now a well-established movement at Harvard that is giving ethics a prominent place in the curriculum and on the agenda of research ...

IIRC prosecutors offered him a deal with a six month jail term -- which corresponds to 2 or 3 seconds of confinement per stolen document. He declined the deal and ultimately committed suicide

This was a sad story, since he was obviously a bright young man, but not a story about MIT railroading a poor waif to suicide: it's a story about the peculiar psychological problems of Aaron Swartz