According to the upstream article posted in a sibling comment [1], the decision was made by the department head for EAPS, themselves a scientist AFAICT [2].
That doesn't necessarily change anything (and I'm not weighing in here), but given your assertion it seemed worth pointing out.
Edit: and for what it's worth, I think many people here are too easily stirred into a frenzy based on astonishingly little information about this incident.
I'm an MIT student and received the letter as an email. This was the URL linked in the email for the 'online version'.
I had the URL updated to the Office of the President's page linked by a poster below as it is certainly clearer / more immediately credible. Thanks for raising the issue and thanks to that poster for the link.
I am quite certain that this was done by administrators who aren't part of and don't understand MIT culture and are just implementing what was done in the previous place they worked.
I couldn't read the paper (seemed to be missing), but has anyone else noticed that MIT seems to have big problems with open science?
I mean I have formed an association specifically with the MIT brand now, so this type of work coming out of there doesn't surprise me. I couldn't tell you exactly what has lead to this association though.
Apparently JSTOR also supports redaction:
"
JSTOR’s response was similar to MIT’s. “We believe the information we provided to the United States Attorney’s Office in this case should be made open and available to the public. In a letter dated Feb. 25, we agreed to the lifting of the protective order so long as the articles downloaded from JSTOR were not released and the identities of our staff are protected,” said Heidi McGregor, a JSTOR spokeswoman, in an email to The Tech. “We do not agree that individuals’ names need to be included with these materials to serve the public interest.”
"
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“Although the United States and representatives of Mr. Swartz agreed on many proposed modifications to the order, the United States and Mr. Swartz’s representatives did not reach agreement on the scope of the redactions,” Pirozzolo said.
“The United States expects to respond to the motion within the time provided by the district court rules,” he said. “It will also request that individuals potentially affected by the modification of the order be given an opportunity to be heard on the proposed modifications.”
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Given that last part you can certainly expect the MIT documents to come out much much faster than Gov documents.
Besides the linked article, this was also emailed out to the entire MIT community. And here's the prior discussion on HN when the faculty first endorsed this statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34132152
I would love to understand some of the rationale behind MIT not reversing it's stance. Is there any public/anon writing from someone inside MIT at the time?
Was there some pressure being employed by scientific publishers to make an example out of Swartz?
It just seems so strange, but then again as we've seen institutions can be easily hijacked and corrupted when populated with the wrong actors.
Which authorities? That does not seem to be clear. From what I've seen so far, that decision could have been made at a pretty low level. Also, when that decision was made, it seems clear that MIT had no idea what was actually going on; it wasn't until much later that the reason behind the anomalous network traffic was known, after the feds were already involved and it was too late to un-involve them.
That doesn't necessarily change anything (and I'm not weighing in here), but given your assertion it seemed worth pointing out.
[1]: https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa...
[2]: https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/hilst
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