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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> it's at first glance hard to understand why MIT - one of America's leading federally-financed research institues - chose to persecute Aaron Swartz for downloading the jstor archive

It didn't. Read the Abelson report (which has been discussed ad nauseam in past HN threads). MIT did not want Swartz prosecuted, and told the prosecutor that. The prosecutor chose to go after Swartz anyway. MIT's error was that they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor (for example, by making a clearer public statement along the lines of the one JSTOR made, that since the stolen data was returned, no further action was necessary or desired).

> Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz

No, it didn't. It just made an error of judgment (described above). It had nothing against Swartz and was not trying to make an example of him. The Federal prosecutor was the one trying to do that.

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> Read the Abelson report (which has been discussed ad nauseam in past HN threads). MIT did not want Swartz prosecuted, and told the prosecutor that.

from the Abelson report (pg 53, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.p...):

"With regard to substance, MIT would make no statements, whether in support or in opposition, about the government’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz"

Am I missing something? Been a while since I read the report in full.

"While MIT did not conform precisely to this rule, in this sense of similar responses MIT—broadly speaking—did not side with the prosecution, nor did it side with the defense. In consequence of the differences in the powers, timing, and goals of the two parties in the case, neutrality in responses was not consistent with neutrality in outcomes, and MIT was not neutral in outcomes."

I agree that MIT was not trying to make an example out of him. But it wasn't that "they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor", it was that they didn't push back at all. The Ableson report correctly criticizes MIT for this.

> it wasn't that "they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor", it was that they didn't push back at all

It's been a while since I read the report too, thanks for linking to it.

I had thought there was more detail in the report about the private conversations between MIT's Office of General Counsel and the prosecutors, referred to on p. 52, where it says that after a June 21, 2011 discussion, "OGC inferred that further presentations of MIT’s opinions were unlikely to have an effect on the prosecution: the views of both potential victims had already been taken into account". My understanding during previous discussions here (which was quite a while ago) had been that OGC did push back in private conversations with the prosecutor (and the "further presentations" in what I just quoted also can be read that way), but the prosecutor was not receptive, and the June 21 conversation was basically the end of MIT's private attempts to influence the prosecutor. However, since the report does not give any more details about that, I might have gotten that impression from other sources around that time. Clearly, even if MIT did make such attempts, they weren't successful, and could not have been all that emphatic.

And if you look at that particular prosecutor's record, there is a clear pattern of "overkill".

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