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Comment by latj | Hacker News Reader

I do not condone the attacks that may be occurring. However, if you are trying to get someone's attention- it makes more sense to get the attention of the students rather than the administration. Today's MIT students are tomorrow's death-ray designers, robot-maintainers, and policy makers. They are tomorrow's administration- and they may not have made up their minds yet about ethical issues of intellectual property or the nature of doing and sharing science. It doesnt make sense to target the administration of today. They have already made up their minds.

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As a first guess, MIT students are very unlikely to react to someone causing them trouble by become more sympathetic with the people causing them trouble.

Especially if the message of the attackers is "people who break into the network shouldn't have the cops called on them." (Although we should wait for Hal Abelson's report to find out what happened behind the scenes.)

As a first guess, MIT students are very unlikely to react to someone causing them trouble by become more sympathetic with the people causing them trouble.

That was my general reaction to protests on campus when I was a student there. I often saw the same general pattern I see here: protests would be highly visible and inconvenient to the people who couldn't do anything to address the issue, and would have no impact at all on the people who could.

I think "very unlikely" might be an understatement.

How do you know that MIT students aren't the ones leading the charge? I wouldn't be surprised to learn it.

I couldn't disagree more. These are MIT graduates, highly intelligent people, not some slack jaw locals.

They are fully capable to look at the issues and take moral responsibility for the University they are part of.

How can an intelligent person support a organisation by being part in it, then take no responsibility for what it does.

Yes I know the commoners do this all the time for their entire lives, but being better educated (However you do it) is about moving on from this simplistic me me me mentality and looking at the total issue.

How can an intelligent person support a organisation by being part in it, then take no responsibility for what it does.

Being a student at MIT (or an alum) does not automatically imply support for everything MIT does. That said, I expect many MIT students and alumni to be paying very close attention (as I am) to the investigation that Prof. Abelson is conducting, and what follows from it. And I expect that MIT's administration knows that. But I seriously doubt that this DDoS attack will make any students pay attention who weren't paying attention already.

I really hope "better educated" and "looking at the total issue" isn't code for "agrees with me."

No, it's meant as a 'don't drink the coolaid' and think just because you are part of something you are A. Right B. Don't have to accept any responsibility for the organisation you are part of.

If MIT did something wrong and you go to MIT you are responsible for being part of that organisation. No one is forced to go to MIT.

Take responsibility for who you support, be it a university, club or a job.

If you think MIT did nothing wrong, then say they did nothing wrong. Don't say I'm a member of MIT but nothing bad(= short internet issues) should happen to me cause I'm just one of the many in this organisation.

If you're trying to simply "get the attention" of the student body, congratulations you have it.

If you're trying to get the student body on your side, you're doing the exact opposite. If I pay $X/year to attend an institution, and someone wants to fuck with my ability to learn to further their own political goals (no matter how noble) you're not winning me over.

Let me get this straight- "no matter how noble" a political goal is- to you, that message being spread to others is less important than uninterrupted access to download your class syllabus or read your friends' blogs?

If your parents or government have not already paid for your tuition I urge you to think of something else to do with that money.

This is true if by "get the attention of" you mean "shoot yourself in the foot".

People who are sympathetic to political action tend to become significantly less sympathetic when they are personally inconvenienced by said political action. And their ire tends to be directed at whoever they see as being most directly responsible for their inconvenience.

I am someone who broadly agrees with Aaron's goals. I agree with the principle of the protests. And it is for exactly THAT reason that I am squarely against this DDoS attack.

Just because that's true for you doesn't mean it is for everyone. If an institution I'm associated with or deal with regularly is doing/has done something unethical, I have no problem with people inconveniencing me to raise awareness of that. I would rather support justice rather than convenience.

It's not like MIT has apologized for this, either.

If you already support the protest, then you're likely to be more forgiving of being inconvenienced by it. But if you don't, what happens then?

As for MIT's response, see http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/letter-on-death-of-aaron-... for something that suggests that something much more useful than a formal apology is coming. If you're inclined to be cynical about the inquiry that we've been promised, I highly recommend researching Abelson first.

Of course this is too little, too late for Aaron Swartz. But I couldn't have asked for an MIT president who presumably does not have the full picture to have made a more meaningful gesture.

MIT politics is, and has long been, that the students of today hate the administration of today. This might be correlated to the number of folks in the MIT administration who are not MIT alums, incidentally. Fix that, and everything else follows.

I think that's the eternal position. The complaint in my day was "the administration ignores the students," so the administration asked for student input on the next controversial decision, and then did what they were going to do anyway.

Who do you think should fix it if not the MIT students?

Why don't they go and physically remove administration from the MIT and never let it back?

It seems impossibly unlawful when I write this but you know, there were times when students had a political agendas and they used to run over campuses, barricade them and battle the police. And now it's like "we're gonna hate them for life and not do a thing".

I understand I'm telling other people what to do but then again, the OP tells other people what to do[n't].

By what right to they have to "take over" MIT and "never let administration back"?

It's not their property, and no amount of "cause celebre" or "protest du jour" should make it such.

It's not "the administration" property either.

And when you come to think about it, how can an university be someone's property? Surely you can own buildings, but how do you own education and knowledge?

I'd say it's even more counterproductive then. No one at mit hadn't heard of the scandal at this point, but a few people's minds might get changed on hacktivists in general.

Putting up the messages on those department sites won't inconvenience a bunch of people, but this might.

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