[simpleigh]

I've always thought it a nice feature of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (bear with me here...) that the general confession covers "those things which we ought to have done" before mentioning "those things which we ought not to have done".

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

[pdonis]

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

That still doesn't make doing nothing identical to doing something. You may consider them morally equivalent, but that doesn't make them identical.

My point was about how to correctly describe what MIT did. If we start muddying our language because, oh, well, it's all morally equivalent anyway so it doesn't matter how we describe it, we end up not being able to think clearly. And if we can't think clearly, we can't tell good from evil, so we end up doing even more evil.

[Ygg2]

If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction. In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.

[pdonis]

If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction.

Yes. But if you take a man and throw him in the water with chains around his arms and legs so that he drowns, you are guilty of something worse. I'm not saying MIT is blameless; I'm saying that there are degrees of blame, and the prosecutors deserve more than MIT does, because MIT failed to help but the prosecutors actively sought to harm.

In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. What "informal warning" could MIT have issued? They didn't know who had broken into their network until after Swartz was arrested. As for "the nuclear option", see above.

[Ygg2]

The article implies that MIT knew that students were downloading JSTOR files illegally.

[pdonis]

Swartz wasn't a student, so even if MIT had issued some sort of warning to students, he wouldn't have seen it.