Aaron Swartz and MIT The inside story. CAMBRIDGE The mysterious visitor called himself Gary Host at first, then Grace Host, which he shortened for his made up e mail address to ghost, a joke apparently, perhaps signaling mischievousness or menace. The intruder was lurking somewhere on the MIT campus, downloading academic journal articles by the hundreds of thousands. The interloper was eventually traced to a laptop under a box in a basement wiring closet. He was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant young programmer and political activist. The cascade of events that followed would culminate in tragedy a Secret Service investigation, a federal prosecution, and ultimately Swartzs suicide. Advertisement. But in the fall of 2. Swartz was still a stranger in the shadows, and the university faced a hard question How big a threat was the ghost downloader And a harder one What should be done about him Answering those questions would prove a particularly knotty puzzle for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a place long supportive of the free flow of information and so famously friendly to pranks, known in MIT lingo as hacks, that a book published by the MIT Museum in the 1. Get Fast Forward in your inbox. Forget yesterdays news. Inside Out Downloading ' title='Inside Out Downloading ' />Get what you need today in this early morning email. And yet, MIT is a cradle of world class scientific research with unpublished data and unpatented inventions on its network, and its leaders felt vulnerable to the rising tide of high tech espionage. There is some speculation that this might have been an MIT student experimenting with a robot, one MIT employee noted in an e mail after a second breach by Swartz was discovered. But another pointed out that sinister foreigners may have stolen credentials or compromised a computer. MITs efforts to track down Swartz, while under intense pressure from JSTOR, the not for profit that ran the journal database, eventually would lead to felony computer crimes charges that might have brought years in jail. Swartz, 2. 6, was under indictment when he committed suicide in January 2. Advertisement. Critics, both on campus and around the world, have accused MIT of abandoning its values celebrating inventive risk taking by helping to doom a young man whose project likely an act of civil disobedience to make information freely available didnt in the end cause serious harm. Looking to download apps for your Android phone or tablet This is everything you need to know about the official app store for Android Google Play. Get over 500 WordforWord Questions, Phrases, and Conversations to Open and Close More Sales in Mikes new, bestselling book on inside sales. An examination of some of the technological milestones of recorded music and reaction from the music industry from Thomas Edisons first indentions on tin foil. MIT has insisted it maintained an appropriate, even compassionate, neutrality toward a determined hacker who stole 4. But MITs brand of neutrality proved one with notable limits, according to a Globe review of more than 7,0. Swartzs court case. In the wake of his death, both MIT and JSTOR posted online documents that they had turned over to authorities, a trove that drew little if any notice at the time. The Globe also obtained a number of e mails related to the case not available publicly. Only with a patient review of the complete record does the full picture of the dilemma MIT faced become clear. The aftershocks of the choices the institution made in the wake of the ghost continue to reverberate, on campus and off, more than a year after Swartzs death. Most vividly, the e mails underscore the dissonant instincts the university grappled with. There was the eagerness of some MIT employees to help investigators and prosecutors with the case, and then there was, by contrast, the glacial pace of the institutions early reaction to the intruders provocation. MIT, for example, knew for 2 months which campus building the downloader had operated out of before anyone searched it for him or his laptop even as the university told JSTOR they had no way to identify the interloper. Download Dvd Movie Mia. And once Swartz was unmasked, the ambivalence continued. MIT never encouraged Swartzs prosecution, and once told his prosecutor they had no interest in time. However, e mails illustrate how MIT energetically assisted authorities in capturing him and gathering evidence even prodding JSTOR to get answers for prosecutors more quickly before a subpoena had been issued. In a handful of e mails, individual MIT employees involved in the case aired sentiments that were far from neutral. One, for example, gushed to prosecutor Stephen P. Heymann about the quality of the indictment of Swartz. Nicely done Steve and kudos All points. Ive ever seen, wrote the information technology employee. I only say that because every time Ive ever given an interview, details are always slightly to horribly munged not that I ever expected any less, its just a true relief and very refreshing to see your accuracy and precision. Yet if MIT eventually adopted a relatively hard line on Swartz, the university had also helped to make his misdeeds possible, the Globe review found. Numerous e mails make it clear that the unusually easy access to the campus computer network, which Swartz took advantage of, had long been a concern to some of the universitys information technology staff. Some at MIT believed that officials had failed to pay serious attention to what one person called poor, limited, or outdated security protections on resources like the JSTOR database. The documents also put JSTORs role in the case in a new light. In contrast to MIT, the journal archive organization has been widely hailed for publicly distancing itself from Swartzs prosecution, declaring that once Swartz returned the documents, it had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter. But a number of JSTORs internal e mails show a much angrier face in the months that Swartz eluded capture, with employees sharing frustration about MITs rather tepid level of concern. JSTOR officials repeatedly raised the prospect, among themselves, of going to the police, e mails show. Whats wrong with us. JSTOR official, whose name like most was redacted in the released documents. In the end, JSTOR neither called the police nor asked MIT to do so, according to its president. Eric Grimson, who recently stepped down as chancellor of MIT, defended the universitys handling of the case as a judicious effort to protect the community without seeking retribution. MITs first steps, he said, were simply to deny the downloader access to the network. They didnt search for the laptop for many weeks because they thought he had been thwarted. When Swartz proved undeterred, he said, MIT had to do more. We were confronted with a situation of an unknown user accessing our network, he said in an interview, using it to download massive amounts of material. MIT was harmed in the process, Grimson said, with 1. JSTOR sought to cut off the mass downloading. Helping investigators pursue the campus intruder was the only reasonable course, he said. I think we should as a matter of principle cooperate with law enforcement in an investigation of an alleged crime being committed on our campus, he said. Thats protecting our community. MIT Video footage of allegedly shows Aaron Swartz in a wiring closet at MIT on Jan. After Swartzs arrest, Grimson said, the university went out of its way to be fair to the defense, voluntarily making staff members available to answer questions from Swartzs attorneys. I would like to suggest we took a path to try to balance being empathetic to Aarons situation while acknowledging that there was a legal process involved, he said. Allure of openness. Swartz was an Internet prodigy. By age 1. 9, he had helped to build RSS, a service that allowed users to create personalized news feeds to develop the social news website Reddit and to establish Creative Commons, an alternative to traditional copyright more friendly to sharing. In his 2. 0s, the restless Stanford dropout turned his energies to political activism. He helped launch several progressive political groups and was a major force behind a national wave of protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act, which targeted unauthorized sharing of videos and music, but which Swartz and others saw as an attack on free speech.