People assume the worst. So when it comes to counting government “requests” for private data, disclosing a number, even a high number, is far better than the fear of infinity. That’s why tech giants are fighting to show they aren’t open books surrendered to the NSA. They want to prove only the suspicious are being spied upon.

“Direct access” were the words that drummed up the fear. The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had attained direct access to the data of nine of the world’s largest tech companies. Many of those companies aggressively denied this, saying they only provide specifically requested data when legally obligated to. Unfortunately they were heavily muzzled regarding the specifics of what they could say. The vagueness combined with their initial inaccurate reports of direct access left the public shaken. Many innocent citizens got the sinking feeling they were being spied on.

Desperate To Disclose

Over the last week, the companies have been fighting for more freedom to disclose exactly how many government requests for data they’ve been receiving from the NSA. The hope was that that would quell the speculation.

Yesterday Facebook and Microsoft both cut deals to disclose numbers. Not hard numbers,  but at least a narrow range of numbers of requests they’ve recieved from the government for private user data on criminal as well as potential terrorist threats over the last six months. For Facebook, that range was nine to ten thousand requests on between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. For Microsoft, it was six to seven thousand requests affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 users.

Previously, all companies were completely gagged when it came to requests from the National Security Agency, legally required to keep the number of requests for data on potential terrorist threats a secret. The deals let them disclose numbers…but only in aggregate with local, state, and federal criminal data requests, and only in bands of one thousand to obscure the specifics.

Numbers, Even Obscured Numbers, Fight Fear

Why Facebook and Microsoft wanted this was that these numbers establish a worst case scenario. Rather than allow conspiracy theorists and panicked journalists (which I was guilty of being) to speculate that hundreds of thousands, millions, or everyone was under the watchful eye of the NSA big brother, it capped the number of people possibly monitored at 19,000 for Facebook and 32,000 for Microsoft. That is a lot more reassuring than people being scared the surveillance extended to all users.

Facebook needed a number to point to more than anyone. It’s business model lives and dies by private data. When users feel comfortable, they volunteer the fuel for Facebook’s content relevance and ad targeting engines. If they feel paranoid, they’re not going to deactivate their accounts, as Facebook has become too crucial a utility for most. But they will be subtly weary of sharing their more personal information and content. That hurts Facebook.

But Google and Twitter immediately criticized the social network. Why? Because they cut a bargain rather than hold out for exact numbers of NSA requests and the volume of people affected. Facebook settled for giving the public something rather than nothing, even if the data on the NSA is obscured by being combined with non-NSA requests for more traditional criminal cases. That could make it harder for other companies to get the NSA to loosen up even further.

Facebook didn’t want to keep the public in the pitch dark, and couldn’t risk not getting to disclose anything. If the government does what’s right, this disclosure will just be a stepping stone to the data Google and Twitter want to provide. True transparency. That’s what the public deserves. But regardless of the criticism, what Facebook and Microsoft won for the public yesterday will go a long way to reassuring us that these companies aren’t knowingly spilling the beans on everyone, and the government might not be as powerful as we suspected.

[Image Credit]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Michael Wellman is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. 

At 1:07 p.m. on April 23, a hijacked AP Twitter account falsely reported an attack on the White House. Seconds later, major US stock indexes started to fall. They were down 1 percent by the time the tweet was publicly identified as bogus three minutes later. And in another three minutes, the markets had recovered to pre-tweet levels.

The quick plunge appears to have been triggered or exacerbated by computer algorithms that automatically trade based on monitoring and analyzing social media streams. Indeed, a growing number of firms and startups claim they can tease emotion, meaning and context out of social media chatter and identify financially relevant information. Augify, SNTMNT, and Lucky Sort (acquired just last month by Twitter) are a few examples. Although we don’t know how any particular product handled the fake AP tweet, the incident illustrates a potential pitfall of automated trading on news feeds in real time.

But perhaps more worrisome are other types of trading algorithms that work even faster. Those meriting the label “high-frequency trading,” for example, can act on data in milliseconds or less. That’s a great deal faster than humans can process even simple bits of information.

The actual focus of high-frequency trading algorithms is on rapid response to detailed events in the internal behavior of financial trading networks rather than on anything that is happening in the economy or world affairs. While some algorithms may be hanging out and listening to social media, a lot more spend their effort gleaning specific information about trade order activity and its transmission throughout the complex network of brokers and exchanges.

The catch is that the public ticker is always just a little bit out of date.

Typical retail investors may be surprised to learn what happens when they enter a trade to buy some stock at their favorite online brokerage. There are dozens of exchanges authorized to execute trades in U.S. equities. It is generally up to the broker to determine how to route a client’s order. Before an exchange can execute a trade against an order on its books, it must check whether a better offer is available at some other exchange, as reflected on the “public ticker.” This public price is compiled from information continually provided by the exchanges, and it is what the investor sees when looking up the current bid-ask prices for a security. Presumably, investors do not care where their orders go, as long as they get the best available prices.

The catch is that the public ticker is always just a little bit out of date. There’s an unavoidable lag, or latency. It takes time for the exchanges to communicate updated price information and continually merge and publish these revisions. The delay may be fairly short—measured in milliseconds. But any disparity in time opens the door for somebody with faster connections and computers to figure it out before it becomes public.

Trading on price disparities across markets is called arbitrage, and if the latency edge of a high-frequency trader is large enough, the trader can in some cases obtain a risk-free profit. Other high-frequency trading strategies exploit latency advantages using statistical predictions rather than strict arbitrage. Whether the gains are sure or not, such profit opportunities have naturally set off a latency arms race. Trading firms routinely invest in high-speed hardware, dedicated computer lines, proximity to exchange servers, and any other measure that could shave mere microseconds from their latency and gain advantage over other traders.

These practices can affect regular investors and market performance overall. This is a large and controversial topic, and the extent of the effects depends on what trading strategies are involved.

In a recent study, University of Michigan doctoral student Elaine Wah and I developed a simple model of latency arbitrage across two exchanges with a delayed public ticker. We found that the presence of high-frequency trading in this model takes profits away from regular investors and, moreover, reduces the overall profit of the system. This doesn’t even count all the direct costs of the latency arms race — all the resources dedicated to trimming microseconds. Our model can’t estimate the extent of the damage, but it does show that it degrades market performance.

Here’s why: High-frequency trading aggressively clears trades across exchanges, whereas the market sometimes performs better by letting orders accumulate for a while to better judge which ones should trade.

It might be in the nation’s best economic interest to eliminate this latency arms race. One way to do this would be to move to a system where all trades happen at discrete points in time — say once per second — rather than continuously. The interval is short enough so that markets can accurately track real-world events, but long enough so that shaving off tiny fractions of a second provides no significant advantage.

Our study showed that this market organization performs better by far than continuous trading. By placing a lower limit on time differences that matter for trading, we could create markets that can effectively keep up with even the fastest-moving world events, but no longer drive us to trade faster than reality itself.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Pirate3D Buccaneer printer hit its Kickstarter goal of $100,000 in just 10 minutes after launch. At time of writing, it’s been roughly 15 hours since the campaign was started, and it’s already hit $282,356.

The 3D printer from the Singapore-based startup is pitched as a beginner’s foray into 3D printing, although it prints at a decent resolution of 100-microns (similar to the Makerbot).The company says it comes fully assembled, and is meant to be set up and printing “within minutes of unboxing”.

It’s an extrusion-based printer, like the Makerbot Replicator 2.0 model.

3D printers have been getting quite a flood of interest from the public, aided by crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter. The Form One printer hit its $100,000 goal in about two-and-a-half hours, eventually hitting a massive $2 million before its deadline.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s no shortage of novel Kickstarter projects that aim to change how we think about the environment, but here’s one that could literally change how we look at it. Infragram, created by the civic science-minded folks at Public Lab, puts low-cost infrared cameras into people’s hands so they can better understand the health of the plants around them.

The goal here is simple enough — by hacking these cameras to peer into the infrared (well, near-infrared) portion of the spectrum, Public Lab hopes to let users see how well plants are converting light into oxygen. The end result is a pair of images that, when processed properly, yield a single false-color image that shows off which plants (or parts of plants) are reflecting the most near-infrared light and are therefore absorbing the most red and blue light.

In a bid to get as many people seeing plants in a different light as possible, the most reward tier will see backers at the $10 level receive a “superblue” filter that attaches onto existing digital cameras (here’s a list of cameras that seem to work well with the filter).

A contribution of $35 nets you the most basic hardware component of the bunch — a cheap webcam that works just as well when lashed to a Raspberry Pi as it does when hooked up to your laptop. $95 on the other hand nets you something really interesting: a bespoke point-and-shoot 2-megapixel camera that already has one of those “superblue” sensors nestled inside it. Once backers start snapping photos of the local greenery, they’ll be able to upload them to a work-in-progress web service to get the those false color images. The team is also working on a spate of analytical tools to cull more information from those images, so the curious nature nut can gain even more insight on the flora around them.

The Public Lab team is no stranger to these sorts of crowdfunded science projects — last year they successfully raised $110,000 for a homebrew spectometry kit that rather smartly relied on a shard of a DVD-R disc. This new project has only been live for five days, but a slew of enthusiastic backers has already brought the team within spitting distance of its $30,000 funding goal. With a month and a half left to go Public Labs is on track to have yet another crowdfunded scientific success on its hands — here’s hoping that some of those backers will put those Infragram camera in youngsters’ hands. After all, we could probably do with a new generation of young people that are sensitive to the plight of those poor plants.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Glenn Solomon  is a partner with GGV Capital. Some of his recent investments include Pandora, Successfactors, Isilon, Domo, Square, Zendesk, Quinstreet, and Nimble Storage. He blogs regularly at www.goinglongblog.com, where the focus is on growth stage entrepreneurs who are thinking big. Follow him on Twitter @glennsolomon.

Stanford-born and Seattle-based Tableau Software (DATA) enjoyed a tremendous debut on the public markets on Friday, closing on its first day of trading at over $50/share, up over 60 percent from its $31/share IPO price. The company raised over $250 million through the sale of approximately 14 percent of the company, and its enterprise value now sits at approximately $2.5 billion.

For the pundits who’ve been arguing that the tech IPO landscape is in crisis, deals like Tableau serve as a powerful reminder that the public market is eager for certain tech companies. In fact, over the past year or so, there have been several other high-profile tech IPO winners, such as Workday, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow.

What lessons can aspiring tech entrepreneurs learn from Tableau and these other Wall Street success stories? Here are few.

Stand Out In The Crowd

Tableau has built a highly attractive business. Growth has been very strong – March quarter revenue growth was over 60 percent, to $40 million. The company is operating in a huge and proven market: The data analytics and visualization space has produced big winners across several software generations and remains interesting, as big data pushes the limits of existing solutions. Finally, Tableau has been able to show profits, albeit modest, as the company has grown rapidly. For all these reasons, public investors flocked to Tableau.

If you’re considering an IPO for your company in the future, recognize that public fund managers have many companies from which to choose. More specifically, small-cap growth managers have between 500-1,000 companies in their universe. Given the enormity of this number, a typical manager will only follow 50-100 companies closely and, depending on strategy, will likely only invest in 25-50 of these in any one year.

Tableau stands out in this sea of stock tickers. Does your company stand out? If not, what investments do you need to make to help you rise above the noise?

Price Your Company Right

Cynics will suggest that Tableau left money on the table. Since the stock popped over 60 percent on the first day of trading, the company clearly could have set its IPO price higher and raised more money. This misses the point.

Tableau recognized that its IPO is a chance to establish a new shareholder base. By pricing the IPO at $31, the company surely had its pick of new investors since most everyone, seeing the obvious good deal, wanted to get in. I’m sure Tableau’s management team spent time evaluating who was most likely to hold their IPO stock and add to their ownership over time. If the company has done its job well, Tableau has stacked its shareholder list with the best, long-term oriented fund managers. This will serve the company well for years to come.

You should spend time getting to know potential VC investors before you take money into your company. Consider prioritizing things like alignment of outlook and ability to help add value ahead of price. Taking the highest price limits dilution in the short-term, but if you add a VC who either can’t help or has a different vision than you for your company, you’ll likely regret the decision down the road.

Patience Is An IPO Virtue

Tableau deferred its IPO for several quarters. In fact, had it used a $100 million in revenue run rate as a threshold for IPO timing, as many others do, the company would have now been public for over a year. Because Tableau waited longer, the company was able to continue to invest in its business. With more time and investment likely came increased visibility and predictability, which is critical to performing as a public company.

Also, Tableau has become more valuable during the past year, as it has grown and solidified its leadership position in the market. With a higher valuation, Tableau’s IPO brought in more money and established a larger public float than would have been possible a year ago. Public fund managers dislike small, or “thin,” float deals; such thin float IPOs often lead to more stock volatility, which is difficult to manage. As you build your company for IPO readiness, consider waiting until you have predictability well under control and your valuation allows you to sell a larger amount of stock without taking more than 15-20 percent of dilution.

Clearly Tableau is a remarkable company. Emulating these three traits will help you succeed, as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How’s this for synchronicity: Google Glass started shipping on the same week that CISPA passed the House, 3DRobotics unveiled their new site, and 4chan and Reddit pored over surveillance photos trying to crowdsource the identity of the Boston bombers.

Cameras on phones. Cameras on drones. Cameras on glasses. Cameras atop stores, in ATMs, on the street, on lapels, up high in the sky. Modern cars log detailed data their manufacturers can access if they so desire. Oh, and “if you carry a phone, your location is being recorded every minute of every day.”

In 1999, Sun CEO Scott McNealy said: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Sadly, that sounds more prophetic every week.

I’ve been arguing for years that “Soon enough, pseudonymity and anonymity will only exist online; in the real world…they’ll be more or less extinct.” The hunt for the Boston bombers is to the coming world of surveillance as a 1980s PC is to a modern server farm. Facial recognition, gait recognition, drones the size of dragonflies — all here already. Just imagine twenty years from now. Every step you take outside will automatically be tracked, indexed, and correlated to all of your previous activity ever.

One can reasonably dispute whether the collective crowdsourced 4chan/Reddit attempt to identify the Boston bomber was a good thing or not, and interesting people are engaged in both sides of just that argument –

Wild how Reddit users crowdsource photo of Boston suspect, zoom, enhance. is.gd/w11k6e Source: is.gd/iIkKEE—
Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) April 19, 2013

Some remarkable interweb Boston Marathon photo-sleuthing – imgur.com/a/sUrnA—
Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) April 17, 2013

If you/someone you know is circulating CCTV pix of random people from Boston Marathon circled b/c they have a backpack, STOP. THAT IS DUMB.—
Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 17, 2013

Seriously: circulating photos you and yer Scooby Doo crimefighter pals have determined to be of the Boston Bomber is criminally stupid—
Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 17, 2013

– but to me, the important thing is the precedent it sets.

As never before in history, as proved in Boston, the observed world is becoming the recorded world. bit.ly/14APAvO—
Gus Silber (@gussilber) April 19, 2013

A lot of people (just read the comments on my last Google Glass post) are seriously squicked by the possibility of individual video surveillance, but are essentially OK with being watched by governments or corporations. I think that is an extremely wrong and dangerous attitude, because I believe one-way transparency will inevitably breed corruption and abuse.

I am not in favor of the death of personal privacy in public spaces. I just think it’s inevitable. Soon enough cameras and surveillance software will be ubiquitous. There are already terrified voices, eg Farhad Manjoo’s, crying for “installing surveillance cameras everywhere” on the eyebrow-raising grounds that “we’re already being watched—just not systematically”.

And that’s why–despite its potentially undesirable social side effects–I’m a cheerleader for Google Glass and its ilk. If transparency will be forced on us, then it needs to be two-way transparency. It’s a given that the strong and rich will be able to watch the weak and poor; we need to ensure that the converse is possible as well. We need to democratize surveillance, and Google Glass is the first of a new kind of tool which can help us do just that.

As the book “Cypherpunks” by my friend @ioerror et al says what we need is to democratize massive crypto tools #cd13—
Renata Avila (@avilarenata) March 18, 2013

For instance, I’d like law enforcement, border patrol, the TSA, and other authorities to wear Glass-like cameras at all time, and for that video to be accessible by the public when the abuse of authority is alleged. Interestingly, there’s now some real data supporting that stance: “Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers.”

In the words of the ACLU:

We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the government should be watching over the population en masse. [but] When it comes to the citizenry watching the government, we like that.

Giving the public some access to police footage isn’t enough, though. We need the people to be able to watch and record their government, just as their government keeps them under constant surveillance. Unfortunately, that inevitably also means that individuals can and will frequently surveil and record each other. Which means bullying, stalking, trolling, and doxing on, well, almost a New York Post scale:

Becoming hard to tell difference between credible news organizations like 4chan and troll sites like New York Post.—
Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) April 19, 2013

I’m not happy about any of this. But drastically increased surveillance in public places is inevitable. Sorry. It’s just going to be too cheap, too easy, too convenient, and too reassuring to too many. Two-way transparency, however, will be a huge battle. The powers that be have every incentive to foster a moral panic about the stalker evils of personal cameras like Google Glass, and crowdsourced surveillance like that of 4chan and Reddit.

Again, I don’t actually think either is necessarily desirable in and of themselves. But I fear that they’re the price we’ll have to pay to have a society relatively free of systematic hierarchical abuse of authority and power — because, more and more, we live in a world where privacy is power.

Image credit: Lingeswaran Marimuthukumar, Flickr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The European Commission has been banging the open data drum for a while now, launching its Open Data Strategy for Europe back in 2011. Today another step along the road to liberating government data across the region so that startups can get their hands on it: an EU committee made up of member states’ representatives has endorsed plans to modernise the 2003 public information directive to make all non-personal public sector info available for reuse.

Opening up public sector data is something the EC believes will help European startups and businesses by providing access to valuable data at “zero or very low cost”:

Once fully implemented into national law, the revision of the 2003 Public Sector Information Directive would make all generally accessible (that is, non-personal) public sector information available for re-use. Developers, programmers, businesses and citizens will be able to get and re-use public sector data at zero or very low cost in most cases. They will also have access to more exciting and inspirational content, for example including materials in national museums, libraries and archives.

Back in 2011 when it proposed to revise the public data directive, the EC projected that its Open Data Strategy will end up injecting €40 billion annually to the EU’s economy, driving growth and jobs.

The revised directive will include a right to reuse public information; expand the remit to include libraries, museums and archives; create a transparent pricing framework for reproduction, provision and dissemination of the information which also aims to keep costs to a marginal minimum; and encourage data to be made available in open machine-readable formats.

Following today’s committee endorsement, the next stage in the process will be for the European Parliament to approve the new rules.

Some individual European Union member states have already started making public sector data available, including the U.K. and France, which have created portals where available datasets can be searched, requests for data can be submitted and apps that are making use of public data can be found.

Europe’s moves towards open data are mirrored in the U.S. by the Obama administration’s Data.gov open government initiative which is aimed at improving access to Federal data.

[Feature image by Tawheed Manzoor via Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Could Fox remove its broadcast signals and become available only as part of a cable subscription? That’s one possibility that News Corp. COO Chase Carey offered up as a business solution if it and other broadcasters lose their ongoing legal battle against streaming video provider Aereo.

In an interview with National Association of Broadcasters president Gordon Smith at the organization’s annual confab in Las Vegas, Carey said that if it couldn’t find a legal or government solution to the Aereo problem, Fox could go subscription-only in order to protect its dual revenue stream.

Aereo is a technology provider that pulls free, over-the-air signals from local broadcasters and makes them available to consumers both live and on-demand, in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. The service allows its customers to access those signals and recorded content on their computers, as well as through a large (and growing) number of mobile and Internet-connected devices.

But broadcasters like Fox believe that what Aereo does amounts to theft, in the sense that it is stealing their signals and rebroadcasting them for a fee, without paying retransmission fees to the content providers.

So far, Aereo has won a few minor legal victories: Last summer a New York district judge denied an injunction that would have effectively shut down the service while the case was in the courts. Last week, that decision was reaffirmed, as the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down an appeal to overturn the decision. In the interview, Carey called that decision disappointing, saying that Aereo was stealing its signal.

“We’re committed to broadcast, but we need to be fairly compensated from people who redistribute our signal… The dual revenue system is essential,” Carey said. “We will pursue our legal rights and we want to be clear that if we can’t defend our rights, we will take our network and make it a subscription service… We’re not going to sit idly by and let someone steal our signal.”

Carey said that ensuring it received retransmission fees as well as advertising dollars was necessary to keep producing the high-quality content, as well as getting the rights to big-ticket sports content through its NFL and MLB deals. “To continue to improve, there needs to be a business model that is viable.

But for Fox to pursue such a business solution would mean alienating its affiliates — the local stations which today distribute the content that Fox creates and licenses, as well as their own local programming. So it’s not a decision that the company is going to make lightly.

It also means not being available to a growing number of viewers who don’t subscribe to cable. Media-monitoring company Nielsen estimates that there are now about 5 million “Zero TV” households in the U.S. today, up from about 2 million in 2007. Zero TV is a bit of a misnomer, as it denotes people who aren’t paying for cable, but are getting their entertainment from other sources, like over-the-air signals or streaming, over-the-top video services.

About 85 percent of U.S. households subscribe to cable, so the vast majority would still have access to Fox. But the percentage of households subscribing is slowly decreasing.

While Fox considers its options, Aereo continues to fight its legal fight and expand into new markets. The company raised $38 million in new funding in January, bringing the total amount it’s raised to more than $60 million.

“Aereo has invented a simple, convenient way for consumers to utilize an antenna to access free-to-air broadcast television, bringing television access into the modern era for millions of consumers,” said Aereo spokesperson Virginia Lam. “It’s disappointing to hear that Fox believes that consumers should not be permitted to use an antenna to access free-to-air broadcast television. Over 50 million Americans today access television via an antenna. When broadcasters asked Congress for a free license to digitally broadcast on the public’s airwaves, they did so with the promise that they would broadcast in the public interest and convenience, and that they would remain free-to-air. Having a television antenna is every American’s right.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

WIKILEAKS #PlusD: “now that's what we call a search engine” wikileaks.org/plusd

—
WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 08, 2013

Buzzword enthusiasts would call this a “pivot”: infamous classified document release outlet, WikiLeaks, has developed a search engine for over 1.7 million historical diplomatic cables. The so-called “Kissinger Cables” span from 1973-1976, partly covering the leadership of controversial Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, containing “significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco’s Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels,” claims WikiLeaks in a Sunday night press release.

“The government can’t be trusted with its own archives,” explains WikiLeaks spokesperson, Kristinn Hrafnsson, justifying the shift from contemporary leaked cables to declassified (but obscure) documents. “One form of secrecy is complexity. That’s the reason why we decided to merge these files with our existing cables and put a lot of effort into making a user-friendly and accessible database.”

WikiLeaks claims that the government has repeatedly attempted to reclassify some of the documents, which were obtained from the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA). WikiLeaks has named the database, the Public Library of United States Diplomacy or “Plus D”, for the sake of a convenient Twitter hashtag.

WikiLeaks hasn’t had any juicy anonymous submissions since 2010 and is clearly trying to remain relevant in the face of financial turmoil and the legal troubles of its leader, Julian Assange, who’s holed up in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.

Perhaps the search engine will prove fruitful. If not, be a mensch and support anarchy with this fashionable line of WikiLeaks merchandise.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is “partially” opposing a request by the estate of Aaron Swartz for the release of documents related to the investigation that led to Swartz’s arrest and prosecution in federal court.

In court papers filed today, MIT counsel states that its opposition stems from two factors: its concerns about people in the MIT community named in the documents and the security of its computer networks.

MIT has previously stated that it would release the documents with redactions of names and other information. MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in email to the MIT community earlier this month:

On Friday, the lawyers for Aaron Swartz’s estate filed a legal request with the Boston federal court where the Swartz case would have gone to trial. They demanded that the court release to the public information related to the case, including many MIT documents. Some of these documents contain information about vulnerabilities in MIT’s network. Some contain the names of individual MIT employees involved. In fact, the lawyers’ request argues that those names cannot be excluded (”redacted”) from the documents and urges that they be released in the public domain and delivered to Congress.

The paper filed today reiterates this position, basing it on threats already made to MIT staff and three separate hacking incidents at the university.

The information includes “email, the names, job titles, departments, telephone numbers, email addresses, business addresses, and other identifying information of many members of the MIT community.”

Swartz has become a symbol in the Internet community since his suicide. His supporters have led the debate about the role MIT played in Swartz’s prosecution and the vigilance of the U.S. Attorney General in the case.

MIT claims it is fully cooperating in the investigation that has come since Swartz’s suicide.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch