A blog entry Swartz wrote in 2009, titled “Honest Theft,”
neatly details his view of the school as a haven for rebelliousness. He
described friends who he said secretly lived for free on campus,
sleeping on couches in common rooms and stealing food from the
cafeterias — and using the money they saved “to promote the public
good.” – Marcella Bombardieri, “The
Inside Story Of Mit And Aaron Swartz”
The role of MIT’s openness in this case is one that interests me,
though I’m uncertain what to conclude aside from sadness for Aaron and
his loved ones and the likely battening down of things at MIT. When I
was a student there I had friends that basically lived on campus. One
alumni split his time between the 24-hour coffee house and the
libraries, which were open to anyone. (When I was a fellow at Berkman in
the 90s, I was shocked at how much more restrictive things were and
could be at Harvard.) Some female friends went months without permanent
housing using a similar strategy and also taking advantage of the Cheney Room at
the Women’s Community Center.
In addition to MIT be an amazingly open place physically, the
computer systems were similarly open. The lore went that since most
student’s could probably break the security on any workstation, MIT
preferred to design its infrastructure such that they assumed any system
could be compromised but to also trust the community. Hence, one could
get root on any workstation via the command tellme
root. Hence, David Lamacchia’s troubles over file sharing had a
similar dynamic back in 1994: he took advantage of this to install a
file sharing app on a workstation that was only flagged because students
noted that the workstation was slow and its disk was thrashing.
In hindsight, both David’s and Aaron’s actions were ill-considered
and took advantage of MIT’s openness. However, in my youth I too did
things that if done now could get one thrown in jail (e.g., “weev” and
AT&T). Hence, I am saddened when people blame MIT for being open.
That said, the idea of being open, which implies that sometimes folks
will cross a line and need to be responded to appropriately, is not
easily reconcilable with a justice system that seeks to make example of
folks by bankrupting or throwing them in jail.
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