MIT Didn’t Target Swartz; Missed ‘Wider Background’

Aaron Swartz, an advocate for open access to academic journals, committed suicide in January after being charged with hacking into MIT computers and illegally downloading nearly 5 million academic journal articles from JSTOR, one of the largest digital archives of scholarly journals in the world. At the time of Swartz’s death, the 26-year-old faced 13 federal felony computer fraud charges — and the near certainty of jail time.

In this NPR blog All Tech Considered, MIT denied “targeting” the programmer and claimed no wrongdoing. But the report raises concerns about existing university policies and whether MIT should have been actively involved in supporting Swartz.