MIT did not target Aaron Swartz before federal prosecution, review finds

MIT president L Rafael Reif said: 'I am confident that MIT's decisions were reasonable, appropriate and made in good faith.' Photograph: Chris Stewart/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has released a long-awaited review of its involvement in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, who was facing charges for hacking into the university's computers when he killed himself in January.

The 182-page report finds that school officials did not request federal prosecution of Swartz, and that MIT was not consulted about the charges or punishment, but it also questions the school's decision not to intervene in court proceedings.

Swartz had been federally indicted on 13 felony charges at the time of his death and was facing up to $1m in fines and 35 years in jail for downloading several million academic articles from the JSTOR database through the MIT computer network. The aggressive prosecution was roundly criticized following his death.

"I am confident that MIT's decisions were reasonable, appropriate and made in good faith," said MIT president L Rafael Reif in a statement (pdf). He said the report also makes clear that the school did not "target" Swartz.

According to the report, MIT administrators did not know Swartz was the person who had hacked into their networks until his arrest on 6 January 2011. The school also did not intend to "call in the feds" to take over the investigation, saying the presence of a secret service agent at his arrest was not their intention, "but a recognized possibility," when they alerted authorities that its network was compromised.

The school said it did not request a criminal prosecution be brought against Swartz and adopted a neutral position early in the prosecution. Though they issued no public statements, "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."

"MIT took the position that US v Swartz was simply a lawsuit to which it was not a party, although it did inform the US attorney's office that the prosecution should not be under the impression that MIT wanted jail time for Aaron Swartz. MIT did not say it was actually opposed to jail time," the report said.

According to the report, prior to his death, "the MIT community paid scant attention" to Swartz's prosecution and few people expressed concerns to the administration about the case. However, Swartz's father, a consultant to the MIT lab and former student there, asked MIT to aid efforts to have the charges dropped or to get a plea deal that would not have jail time. Two faculty members advocated a similar appeal.

In choosing the position of neutrality, the report says the school did not consider Swartz's contributions to internet technology and was not critical enough of the US government's "overtly aggressive prosecution." MIT also did not account for Swartz's prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which the report called " a poorly drafted and questionable criminal law." That law has been widely criticised since Swartz's death.

"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," it concludes.

Reif asked computer science professor Hal Abelson to lead a review the school's involvement in his prosecution in January with assistance from other members of the MIT staff. The group consulted 10,000 documents and conducted interviews with 50 people to assess the school's involvement in the case.

"Only Swartz knows why he committed suicide," the report said. "However, for the final 24 months of his life, he was the subject of a vigorous investigation and prosecution by the US Department of Justice, with an indictment and then a superseding indictment that could have resulted in years in prison."

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Clegg and Gove in spending review battle over free nursery education

Education secretary Michael Gove lost out in the clash with the deputy prime minister and has been told to find savings elsewhere. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Archive/Press Association Ima

An attempt to save ￡380m by cancelling a plan to further extend access to free nursery education has been at the centre of one of the most bitter battles in the comprehensive spending review due to be announced Wednesday.

Whitehall sources said Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, and Michael Gove, the education secretary, clashed over the plan, with the issue taken to the most senior ministers by Clegg last Wednesday.

Gove had proposed that the plan to provide 15 hours a week of free nursery education to a further 20% of low income families from next year be shelved. Clegg, Whitehall sources said, objected and took the issue to the so-called Quad, the coalition's most senior ministers. The first tranche of free 15 hours a week nursery education for two-year-olds is due to be made available to the lowest 20% income group from this autumn in England.

Gove, the Whitehall sources said, has instead been told to find efficiency savings in the way in which new academies and free schools are commissioned.

It has also been agreed that the budget for the second wave of free nursery care will not assume 100 % take-up, but if there is higher than expected take-up, the cash will be found from the general contingency reserve.

The row is another indication of the ill feeling now emerging between Gove and the Lib Dems. Gove has still not forgiven Clegg for what he regards as backtracking on plans to relax the ratios of nursery assistants to children in registered nurseries. The education secretary is furious at what he regards as Clegg's politically driven U-turn in an effort to win the support of parenting groups, such as MumsNet.

Currently, more than 800,000 3- and 4-year-olds nationally access up to 15 hours of free early education every week. The government had pledged in the Spring to extend that to around 150,000 of the least advantaged 2-year-olds from September 2013, rising to around 260,000 in September 2014. Gove had put the extension to the second group under threat.

Clegg has made the extension of free nursery care to young children one of his key personal issues.

In another issue that has caused tension across government during the spending review, the Treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, announced an extra ￡200m to help fund an extension of the troubled families programme to a wider group of 400,000 families from 2015-16.

The current ￡110m a year programme is aimed at 120,000 families deemed to be at very serious risk of offending or failing to secure an education for their children. Each family is deemed to cost the taxpayer ￡75,000 a year. The announcement, at a time when most programmes are facing cuts, is a victory for Louise Casey, the civil servant in charge of the programme.

Although the extra ￡200m covers 2015-16 the first year of the next government, there has been a cross party consensus over the effectiveness of the troubled families programme and it is likely that the new wider programme designed to reach families liable to classified soon as in severe difficulty will continue after 2015-16. That implies a larger and long term financial commitment.

Casey's capture of the cash will see money transferred from departments of health, education and ministry of justice.

Delivered in partnership with local areas, central government will cover 40% of the cost of working with each family. Local government provides the remaining 60%.

A one-off average investment of ￡4,500 in work with each family is expected to reduce the annual ￡15,000 cost of dealing with their problems, by supporting families to access work, reducing anti-social behaviour, poor school attendance and criminality.

The Local Government Association said: "We will be seeking clarification that this ￡200 million is actually additional money and not money redirected from existing local authority budgets. We await the Spending Round announcement on Wednesday for more detail on this."

The spending review is due to announce ￡11.5bn in cuts for 2015-16. Much of it will be found through greater efficiency.

There is also growing concern in aid circles that the budget of the department of international development has been raided to help the budget of the Ministry of Defence. In a sign that the coalition ministers are determined to continue to try to pin the blame for the cuts on the last Labour government, David Laws, currently schools secretary and previously Treasury chief secretary, showed ITV the private letter he received in 2010 from the outgoing Treasury chief secretary, Liam Byrne saying "there is no money".

There is a convention that ministers leave letters to their successors, and at the time Byrne would have been expecting the shadow chief secretary Phillip Hammond to take up the post, and not Laws, a Liberal Democrat.

Laws claimed in an ITN interview he had broken no constitutional convention by disclosing the letter and claimed to have been surprised it led to such a media reaction in 2010. At the time he claimed the letter said "There is no money left", but the text filmed yesterday said more simply "there is no money", a form of words that does not imply the Labour government had blown all the money.

Laws told ITN: "I did not set out to embarrass Liam Byrne", and conceded the letter had been intended as a joke. But he claimed the letter was totemic of a profligate government, and said he now expected the letter to be used in future election campaigns.

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Nursery school leads to better results of the review - but "for poorer students" only

The study of 15,500 people born in 1990 shows that maternal education had "no statistically significant effect" on education later backgrounds children disadvantaged, so that disadvantaged children did benefit, get best results into their national curriculum tests 11 and their GCSES.

At GCSE level, their results were found in 7% better than their peers who were not followed by nursery. Their chances of getting an A * grade C pass in maths and English, improved by 4 or 5 percent.

However, improving tails at the time of the A-levels - even though the chances of a teenager from a home course disadvantaged University improves if they attended the nursery.

Nursery education is likely to have a more significant impact on girls 'education than boys', according to the study, led by Professor Ian Walker at Lancaster University Management School. "Girls who went to the preschool significantly better in all tests of score at different ages and in all subjects", the researchers write. "Pre-school attendance seems to be beneficial for girls, while the effect on the results of tests of boys are generally not significantly different from zero."

The study also found that children who attended the nursery were likely to feel happier during their school days. They have been found to put more efforts in their schoolwork and seemed to have more friends than those who did not.

They were also less likely to be out of education or employment at the time that they reached their twenties and less likely to smoke, try cannabis, or become teenage mothers. "They are also less likely to have been suspended from school or be responsible for acts of vandalism, shoplifting problem behaviours and similar,"the research concluded.

The positive results were "largely confined" to those from disadvantaged groups, leading researchers to assert: "the fact that they are strong for those from disadvantaged backgrounds suggests that subsidies are subordinate instead of the universal."

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Double recognition of credit and review courses in schools secondary U.S. Public: 2010-11

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Headteacher found hanged at primary school 'feared Ofsted review'

Helen Marr, aged 43, was found dead at Sytchampton Endowed First School for four to nine-year-olds in Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire, last November.

Dr Stephanie Gait, who chaired the school’s governing body, told the inquest:? “She was very concerned that - if an Ofsted inspection was imminent - the school would lose its ‘outstanding’ rating.

“That had been mentioned in at least one governor’s meeting and we all said we understood that would be the case but not through any fault of her.”

The inquest heard local authority officials had carried out their own assessment of the school and said? it was unlikely to maintain its top ranking.? Mrs Mann had been head of the school for just six months when she died following a five term period when it had been without a permanent headteacher.

The inquest also heard Mrs Mann, a married mother with two children, was worried about having to make a part-time teacher, Angela Mercer, redundant, ”There was an employment issue which was not of her making,” said Dr Gait.? “There was a hearing that Helen was at and I know she found that very difficult.? ...? I was told by the governors that were there that she was visibly distressed following that meeting.”

On the day she was found hanged in the school - a training day when there were no pupils around, she had just returned from a month’s sick leave following collapsing at a meeting.

Dr Gait said that - following the summer holidays - Mrs Mann appeared “weighed down by what she wanted to achieve” and had noticeably lost weight.

“I was concerned ... she was not the bright-eyed bushy-tailed young woman who had joined us and was being weighed down by what she saw as problems,” she added.

Jacqueline Stanley, a teaching assistant at the school, said Mrs Mann had looked ”dreadful” when she had come into the school during her sick leave but added that - as a head - she had been “very hands on, very interactive”.? “She was lovely with the children,” she said.

The inquest, which is expected to last four days, was adjourned until tomorrow.

*If any of the content of this story affects you, the Samaritans are available to talk 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

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