Institutional Loyalty
In 2011 Aaron Swartz, was arrested for downloading nearly
five million files from JSTOR, a digital library of mass academic journals, by
infiltrating a network on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus.
Swartz was caught on camera by MIT when he was re-entering the network closet
to replace the storage devices he was using at the time to hold the downloaded
information. Swartz believed that information should not be wholesaled, especially
when the research for the journals were funded by tax dollars. He believed that
the information should have been open source, and available to anyone
interested, for free. Swartz only downloaded these journals and did not release
them, however, MIT filed charges. Due to the lack of institutional loyalty, MIT
concluded that this downloading was theft before any other possibility. The
prosecutors on this case pushed for the firmest penalties, and MIT stood
silently by and watched. These criminal charges led to Swartz taking his own
life in 2013.
The heart of this institutional disloyalty comes from MIT’s contradictory
tradition of encouraging its colleagues to follow their curiosity wherever it
may lead them, even if that’s somewhere they are not authorized. MIT’s main
lobby doors are always unlocked, and the computer networks are set up for easy
guest access. The concept of sharing information, the same one that Swartz
stood for, was born in MIT’s computer labs in the 1950’s and 60’s. Due to this
many say that MIT has Swartz’s blood on its hands. MIT could have asked for the
charges to be dropped just like JSTOR did. Instead, the university chose to
remain neutral, and in doing so contradicted its adopted culture that encourages
openness.
How could a university that boasts about its community of
hackers and hackers abilities turn around and let a member of that community be
prosecuted? Every year MIT holds a self-declared hackathon where students are
asked to show off their hacker abilities, the results are then posted on MIT’s
site and can be read here.
This begs the question of where MIT’s obligation and/or loyalty reside. Is it with
their self-produced hacker community, or with obsolete and unjust laws? I
believe MIT should not contradictorily prosecute hackers for their success and
abilities. Philosopher Josiah Royce argued that as a member of a group, “We
share the standards of that group”. With this in mind, MIT is the leader of a
group, and should set equal standards for all while reaming loyal to that
culture. Royce also argued that loyalty gives security, and offers ready-made
standards. This holds very true to this case. MIT should have remained loyal to
Swartz and his quest to share information paid for by the public, to the public.
Another philosopher, W.E.B. DuBois also argued that values are bound up with
social group identity. DuBois stated, “We are members of a nation first, then
of a culture, and then a subculture, and we may adopt values consistent with
loyalty to those groups”. The group in question here is the hacker community.
With being a “hacker” there is a hacker ethic or philosophy that is adopted.
The vital topics within these ethics are access to information, freedom of
information, and improvement to quality of life via information. This is what
Swartz was striving for, and MIT put a stop to.
I agree with philosopher John Riser and
his stance on obligation to society and loyalty to community. He argued that
obligations are displayed toward rules or requirements of formalized roles
stemming from a membership in society. I believe that MIT should have been
obligated to take a stance in the Swartz case to protect the community that it cultivates.
Instead they remained silent and in the process of doing so, the community tragically
lost a valuable member.
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