I'm sorry, but you clearly don't know what the culture at MIT is like. People at MIT break into places like network closets all the time, including picking the locks (a popular hobby). It's not officially encouraged, but it's endemic, and the administration generally doesn't mind that much. Accessing places you're not supposed to be in and doing neat hacks is a big part of the culture. Lots of people "get kicked off the network" and warned about their behavior. Any administration that actively tried to tamp down on the culture would be shooting themselves in the foot in a big way, as that's a big part of what attracts a lot of people to the place. The incongruity with that normal attitude and spirit is a big part of what shocks people about this.
You're right in that I don't have first-hand experience with the culture at MIT, but I'm highly skeptical of the claim that it's normal that outsiders break into the closets there used for the networking equipment while wearing bicycle helmets so as to not be recognized. Likewise, I'm skeptical of the claim that it's considered 'normal' for people to be repeatedly and explicitly told not do something on the network and not face repercussions eventually. E.g., how many torrent sites are hosted on MIT machines? Or on machines hidden in closets and connected to their network? Maybe there are, I don't know - but the extent of your claim (not the fundamentals of it - what I mean is, the extent of the Wild West-ness on the MIT network you claim) doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Having gone there for undergrad, I do have first hand experience with the culture. I doubt Aaron was as much of an outsider as you seem to think he was. It's a very open and accepting place. Given that his dad worked for them in some capacity, and given that Harvard and MIT students cross register regularly, and where his interests lay, there's a good chance that he was at least socially involved with people there, and that's generally enough to take part.
The social norms there don't resemble those of the country at large or even those of other schools, so I would be very careful about extrapolating what's acceptable elsewhere to what's acceptable at MIT. Nothing about what he did struck me as something that would be very far offbase there, I think it would be seen as a really cool hack. I'm sure the admins would feel a bit different if it caused problems for them, but generally this kind of thing was more than socially acceptable.
To answer your question about torrents, file sharing was very common on the network, but people had much better solutions than torrents (cert. authenticated file servers, internet2, etc).
Edit: Also, c'mon - he wasn't wearing his bike helmet to avoid the cams, he didn't think he was doing anything very wrong. He probably just rode is bike to the building and left it on.
One of the interesting details in this article that I had not previously seen was that JSTOR had blocked MIT's access owing to repeated bulk downloads, which led to an investigation by MIT police. So this presumably went a bit beyond routine high jinks, and it presumably at least inconvenienced other users.
The fact is that — much as we may sympathize with him — Aaron killed himself.
Yeah, when it creates more work for the admins is probably when the admins would start being pissed, not with the trespassing or w/e that people seem stuck on.
And he killed himself in the face of what must have seemed like a hopeless situation, much of that hopelessness created by the massively overzealous prosecution. I think the prosecutors deserve a good amount of that blame.
But Aaron was at Harvard. He was not an MIT student or part of their faculty. At what point does MIT get to take charge of their own network against third parties?
Harvard and MIT have a lot of crosstalk. If he knew people at MIT and was around, which I assume he did and was, it's generally socially acceptable to take part in "hacks" (breaking into locked places is one type).
But he wasn't "taking part in" a hack, he was the hack. Ringleader, sole proprietor, everything.
Crosstalk or not he should have started it at Harvard if it were so obviously on the up and up.
And in any event once he was kicked off the network to such an extent as to require entering a network closet (note it was never locked, so there was no 'hack' to be had here physically) to regain the subnet he should have taken that as notice that his 'hack' was unwelcome. Well, he should have taken the hint earlier too...
Sure, pulling off a hack, if that makes you feel better.
Where does it say he needed to go to the network closet to regain net access? It sounds like the admins didn't have him on their radar until after he had planted his download box. It just seems like a convenient place to leave a computer downloading things for a long time.
> Where does it say he needed to go to the network closet to regain net access? It sounds like the admins didn't have him on their radar until after he had planted his download box. It just seems like a convenient place to leave a computer downloading things for a long time.
You should go study the whole thing again.
Basically he started off leeching off of Wifi only.
At some point JSTOR noticed and complained to MIT so they blocked (get this), his IP address.
So Aaron picked a different IP.
Then they blocked his MAC (this is all on Wifi, still).
So Aaron changed his MAC.
Eventually MIT and JSTOR figured out how to block him off of their wireless completely (or at least, to rate-limit the JSTOR access over Wifi).
It was only at this point that Aaron changed strategies into trying to hookup with a wired connection directly to the MIT switches, by finding and utilizing the network closet.
