[shawn-butler]

http://web.mit.edu/mission.html

Now consider that someone using your open network in order to access a corpus of public-funded scientific literature with the intent to analyze and publish findings about any fraud that lexical analysis revealed.

Does that fit the mission statement or not?

I am deeply saddened by the whole affair and the extent it reveals about how much the institute has changed from a place of learning, innovation, and challenging yourself and others into basically a government-funded R&D lab run by administrators and lawyers. Determining whether this is the kind of place the faculty, staff and students of MIT actually wants it to be is what "pointing fingers" accomplishes.

It seems to me after reading the report that it was seen as a potential attack on the government's interest in the IP on MIT's network and that was the cause of the ham-fisted response.