Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. 
 
 Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. 
 
 Report to the President: 
 
 MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz 
 
 In January 2013, MIT President L. Rafael Reif asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement in the Aaron Swartz matter, from the time that MIT first perceived unusual activity on its network in fall 2010 up to the time of Aaron Swartz's suicide on January 11, 2013. 
 
 On July 26, 2013, Professor Abelson and his team submitted their report to President Reif. Through this site, President Reif is sharing their report with the community. This site offers direct access to their report, a letter from President Reif in response and a variety of documents that MIT has previously committed to releasing publicly. 
 
 You will also find, below, a news story and FAQs prepared by the MIT News Office. ||||| The Massachusetts Institute of Technology just released its internal report on whether or not the school was complicit in "targeting" Aaron Swartz for prosecution before his eventual suicide earlier this year. The report, written by Professor Hal Abelson and finished on July 26, 2013, clears the school of any wrong doing that could have contributed in any way to his death, but raises questions about policies and strategies used in the case. President L. Rafael Reif writes that the report "makes clear that MIT did not “target” Aaron Swartz, we did not seek federal prosecution, punishment or jail time, and we did not oppose a plea bargain," in his letter addressing the findings. We'll have more on this as we make our way through the report. 
 
 But those close to Swartz aren't satisfied with the report's findings. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Swartz's girlfriend, called the report "a whitewash," in a just released statement. This is her version of events: 
 
 Here are the facts: This report claims that MIT was “neutral” — but MIT’s lawyers gave prosecutors total access to witnesses and evidence, while refusing access to Aaron’s lawyers to the exact same witnesses and evidence. That’s not neutral. The fact is that all MIT had to do was say publicly, “We don’t want this prosecution to go forward” – and Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz would have had no case. 
 
 The report goes into great detail to put all of the blame for Swartz's prosecution on the Cambridge District Attorney's office and the U.S. Attorney's office. MIT was not involved in the state prosecution. In fact, MIT "first learned of the prosecution on November 17, 2011, through a Cambridge DA’s Office press release," the report alleges. The school claims it was never contacted prior to the DA's office filing charges against Swartz, and the same thing happened with federal prosecutors, too. "At no time had the U.S. Attorney’s Office sought the permission, opinion, or support of MIT for this prosecution before the indictment was handed up," the report says. The school stress the only position they took against Swartz was "neutral," while the prosecutors took the case and ran with it. To gain some sense of what MIT's "posture of neutrality" entailed, look no further than this passage: 
 
 MIT recognized that Aaron Swartz had harmed the Institute with his downloading. Despite that, with MIT’s stance of neutrality, this concept of “MIT as victim” meant little to MIT: the Institute simply did not view itself as a victim in anything other than the most technical sense. [...] MIT, whether as a “victim” or otherwise, hoped to avoid the expenditure of time and resources that it would incur if a trial took place, and it wanted to protect its employees from having to testify and thus be exposed to cross-examinati ons designed to challenge their credibility for the purpose of advancing the interests of the defense. Thus, it would be advantageous to MIT if the parties achieved a resolution that would avoid trial, although MIT did not express a view on what that resolution should be. 
 
 The school did not want a trial, but declined to express that wish out loud. 
 
 The report goes on to ask whether MIT police should bolster their ability to handle cybercrime in house rather than deferring all cases to local, state or federal officials, and whether the school should review its electronic review policies. President Rief said the school will look at the questions over the summer. 
 
 Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at connorbsimpson at gmail dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire. ||||| A long-awaited report released Tuesday by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the university made mistakes but engaged in no wrongdoing in the case of Aaron Swartz, a renowned programmer and charismatic technology activist who committed suicide in January while facing a federal trial on charges of hacking into the M.I.T. computer network. 
 
 M.I.T. did not urge federal law enforcement officials to prosecute Mr. Swartz, the report found, and remained neutral in the case. But the university “missed an opportunity to demonstrate the leadership that we pride ourselves on,” based on its reputation as an institution known “for promoting open access to online information, and for dealing wisely with the risks of computer abuse.” 
 
 Mr. Swartz was arrested in January 2011 after downloading more than four million scholarly articles from the fee-based online archive JSTOR; to gain access, he evaded multiple efforts to block him, and even entered an unlocked closet in the basement of a campus building to plug directly into the network. 
 
 Mr. Swartz had long argued for public access to many kinds of important documents hidden behind walls of copyright. What he intended to do with the documents has not been established, but he was a co-author of a “guerrilla open-access manifesto” that stated, “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world.” ||||| MIT has finally released a report on its role in the prosecution of hacktivist Aaron Swartz — a legal battle that's been blamed for spurring his suicide in January of 2013. In an open letter, president R. Rafael Reif said that the report would show that MIT "did not seek federal prosecution, punishment or jail time" for Swartz after finding that he had used MIT's network to access and mass-download articles from academic repository JSTOR. The report, compiled by Professor Hal Abelson and others, finds that MIT didn't actively aggravate the case that would consume Swartz's life, saying there was no "silver bullet" that could have prevented the tragedy of his death. However, it also raises questions about the stance that the university should have taken, and the strength of the case against him. 
 
 "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," it reads. "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." Later, it quotes one source as saying "MIT didn't do anything wrong; but we didn't do ourselves proud." 
 
 MIT may never have actually said whether Swartz's network access was 'unauthorized' 
 
 That neutrality, says the report, meant that MIT limited its involvement in the case (hiring outside counsel and responding to subpoenas but not asking for criminal prosecution) and made no public statements regarding Swartz or his case. It says that before Swartz's suicide, this prompted little criticism. "Few students, faculty, or alumni expressed concerns to the administration," it reads. "In preserving MIT's stance of neutrality and limited involvement, MIT decision makers did not inquire into the details of the charges until a year after the indictment, and did not form an opinion about their merits." MIT did "inform the US Attorney's Office that the prosecution should not be under the impression that MIT wanted jail time for Aaron Swartz," though it did not actively oppose jail time for Swartz either. 
 
 MIT's worst actions are described as sins of omission that indict the Justice Department more than the university. "Among the factors not considered were that the defendant was an accomplished and well-known contributor to Internet technology; that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a poorly drafted and questionable criminal law as applied to modern computing, one that affects the Internet community as a whole and is widely criticized; and that the United States government was pursuing an overtly aggressive prosecution," the reviewers write. MIT, they say, categorically did not set out to make an example of Swartz, but it's implied that the FBI may well have done so. 
 
 MIT says it denied Swartz access to documents because it assumed the government would hand them over 
 
 Longtime online law authority Larry Lessig points out what may be a particularly tragic and infuriating point: that the "unauthorized" network access that made Swartz so vulnerable to prosecution under the CFAA may not have been unauthorized at all. "MIT was never asked by either the prosecution or the defense whether Aaron Swartz's access to the MIT network was authorized or unauthorized - nor did MIT ask this of itself." Swartz had hooked up his laptop to an MIT ethernet cable in a network closet, and the investigation points to a cat-and-mouse game as employees tried to stop Swartz from downloading articles, but the report says that Swartz arguably had authorized "guest" access through the entire process. 
 
 Despite its ongoing claims to neutrality, the report cites instances where MIT's actions helped the prosecution more than the defense. It notes that some information was turned over to the government without a subpoena, contrary to early information given to Aaron Swartz's father Robert. It also admits that Swartz's defense attempted to contact MIT multiple times but got only slow replies. However, it calls the explanations for these delays largely mundane. It also touched on a major criticism leveled by Swartz's partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman: that the prosecution was given broader access to witnesses and evidence than the defense. 
 
 MIT assumed, the report says, that the prosecution would ask to call more witnesses than the defense, but the university still attempted to accommodate "reasonable requests" by either party. In several cases, however, it provided documents more readily to the prosecution, either handing them over without a subpoena or denying requests by the defense. The reason, it says, is a legal one, based on a rule that says defendants should be allowed to get documents from their prosecutors in a criminal case. MIT's legal counsel apparently assumed that Swartz could get these documents from the government, though the assertion that it "did not want MIT to engage in duplication of effort" to get the documents seems questionable. 
 
 In a statement to The New York Times, Robert Swartz said that MIT had collected and presented the facts well, but he disputed its central assertion. "MIT claimed it was neutral," he said, "and it was not — and besides, should have advocated on Aaron's behalf."
– MIT has released its own internal report on the suicide of hacker activist Aaron Swartz, and the Verge highlights one anonymous quote it contains that seems to sum things up: "MIT didn't do anything wrong; but we didn't do ourselves proud." The report, by well-regarded computer science professor Hal Abelson, found that the school tried to maintain a neutral stance in the criminal case against Swartz, who had downloaded millions of scholarly articles from MIT's online archive, reports the New York Times. Critics say federal prosecutors went after Swartz too aggressively and were bent on locking him up for decades as an example, with MIT's help. But the school says the report shows it didn't "seek federal prosecution, punishment, or jail time" for Swartz. The report, however, faults "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." Basically, it says this wasn't just a simple case of a hacker caught red-handed; bigger principles were at play, and the school seemed ignorant of them. Swartz's girlfriend calls the report a "whitewash," adds the Atlantic Wire. "This report claims that MIT was 'neutral'—but MIT’s lawyers gave prosecutors total access to witnesses and evidence, while refusing access to Aaron’s lawyers to the exact same witnesses and evidence. That’s not neutral." Swartz's father, Robert, has a similar take: "MIT claimed it was neutral, and it was not—and besides, should have advocated on Aaron's behalf."