Six months after MIT vowed to conduct a "thorough analysis" of any role it might have played in the prosecution that preceded Aaron Swartz's suicide, the college has released a report absolving itself of any wrongdoing.

Although MIT called in a Cambridge police detective to help investigate the massive downloading of academic journal articles from the JSTOR database to a laptop on MIT's network, the school never "call[ed] in the feds" or requested criminal prosecution of Swartz, the report said.

Swartz's role in downloading the documents became known in January 2011 after he was arrested by MIT police on breaking and entering charges. Later that year, US prosecutors charged him with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. They said he faced "up to 35 years in prison." Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013, before the case could go to trial. Swartz had been offered a plea bargain that would have put him in prison for six months.

"Until the arrest in January 2011, MIT was unaware that the person who engaged in the downloading of JSTOR’s data beginning in September 2010 was Aaron Swartz," the MIT report said. "Until the arrest, MIT’s concern was to stop the use of its network, by an unknown person, to download massive numbers of articles from the JSTOR database, which was in violation of MIT’s licensing agreement with JSTOR and whose scale threatened the operation of the JSTOR network to the extent that JSTOR blocked MIT’s access to JSTOR for three days."

After this, MIT "adopted a position of remaining neutral, with limited involvement," the report said. "In keeping with its stance of neutrality, MIT never issued a public statement about Swartz’s prosecution or advocated publicly on his behalf, even though doing this was urged by Aaron Swartz’s family and legal team and by two members of the faculty. One of the reasons for MIT’s silence was the good-faith belief, based on private conversations with the lead prosecutor, that the Institute’s opinion would have no effect on the prosecution and that public statements might make circumstances worse for Aaron Swartz. MIT did inform the prosecution that it was not seeking punishment for Swartz, and it did inform the defense that it was not seeking any civil remedy from him."

The report is not entirely forgiving of MIT's position of neutrality. MIT did not consider "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. MIT’s position may have been prudent, but it did not duly take into account the wider background of information policy against which the prosecution played out and in which MIT people have traditionally been passionate leaders."

Swartz's partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, blasted the report in a statement. She wrote:

MIT’s behavior throughout the case was reprehensible, and this report is quite frankly a whitewash. 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. We have an institution to contrast MIT with—JSTOR, who came out immediately and publicly against the prosecution. Aaron would be alive today if MIT had acted as JSTOR did. MIT had a moral imperative to do so. And even now, MIT is still stonewalling. Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen FOIA’d the Secret Service’s files on Aaron’s case, and judge ordered them to be released. The only reason they haven’t been is because MIT has filed an objection. If MIT is at all serious about implementing any reforms to stop this kind of tragedy from happening again, it must stop objecting to the release of information about the case.

Swartz's father, Robert, also released a response to the report, saying that "The report makes clear that MIT was not in fact neutral." He continued:

The school helped the prosecutor in many ways that it did not help Aaron: They provided the government information without subpoenas and warrants, a courtesy that was never afforded Aaron’s legal team.

MIT gave the prosecutor access to witnesses that they refused to give to us.

The University provided the prosecutor with information that they didn’t give to us.

Lawrence Lessig, law professor and founder of Creative Commons, wrote on this blog that MIT should have tried to intervene on Swartz's behalf given that, "under MIT’s open access policies, Aaron’s access was likely not 'unauthorized.'"

The MIT review was conducted by Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT; Peter Diamon, professor emeritus at MIT; and Andrew Grosso; an attorney and expert on computer law who has no affiliation with MIT. Support was provided to the review panel by Douglas Pfeiffer, assistant provost for administration at MIT. MIT also released copies of its correspondence with the US Attorney's office and Swartz's defense.

JSTOR today also released all of the evidence it provided to the US Attorney's office in relation to the Swartz case.

Going forward, MIT's report said the college should discuss the following questions:

Should MIT develop additional on-campus expertise for handling Potential computer crime incidents, thus giving the Institute more flexibility in formulating its responses?

Should MIT policies on the collection, provision, and retention of electronic records be reviewed?

Should an MIT education address the personal ethics and legal obligations of technology empowerment?

Should MIT increase its efforts to bring its considerable technical expertise and leadership to bear on the study of legal, policy, and societal impact of information and communications technology?

What are MIT’s institutional interests in the debate over reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

Should MIT strengthen its activities in support of open access to scholarly publications?

What are MIT’s obligations to members of our extended community?

How can MIT draw lessons for its hacker culture from this experience?

In response to the report, MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote that MIT should explore all these questions, particularly ones about open access, intellectual property, responsibility and ethics in the digital domain.

"Knowing the tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s death, I read the report with a tremendous sense of sorrow," Reif wrote. "His family and friends suffered a terrible personal loss, and the Internet community lost an exceptional leader. Even those of us who never knew him mourn the loss of someone so young and so brilliant."

After Swartz's death, MIT's website was defaced by Anonymous, which put a memorial for Swartz on the site.

The prosecutor of Swartz denied doing anything wrong shortly after his death, saying he was offered a deal to serve only six months in prison. Last month, members of Congress introduced "Aaron's Law," an attempt to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prevent overzealous prosecutions.