Aaron Swartz’s father blasts MIT’s claim of neutrality, citing school’s own report

(RT) The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was anything but neutral, Aaron Swartz’s father, Robert Swartz, said in response to a report released by the institute regarding its role in the legal wrangling that led to his son committing suicide.

In an interview with TIME magazine, Robert Swartz said that while the account of the events surrounding the school’s entanglement into a police investigation is welcome, the report itself indicates that the academic institution did play more than a passing role.

The 180-page document released on Tuesday, which was compiled by MIT’s Hal Abelson – a professor of electrical engineering and computer science – sought to shed light on events that call into question whether MIT enabled judicial overreach on the part of prosecutors.

“The report is a contradiction because it says that MIT was neutral, and yet it makes very clear that MIT was actually not neutral,” Robert Swartz told TIME.

“MIT called in the police and then violated the law by providing the government with information and material from Aaron’s computer without a court order. Then they lied to me about those facts,” he added.

Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old computer programmer and internet activist, was facing trial for the downloading of millions of academic articles from JSTOR in 2010 using the school’s networks, which he then planned to make public.

JSTOR itself decided not to pursue a civil case against Swartz and urged the US Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts to drop its criminal case. Swartz nonetheless found himself facing 13 felony charges under Assistant US Attorneys Scott Garland and Stephen Heymann, working under US Attorney Carmen Ortiz.

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