(Wiki)Leak case spotlights an MIT divide

Leak case spotlights an MIT divide
By Tracy Jan
Globe Staff / August 8, 2010

It was once called the Pentagon on the Charles, a campus of imposing limestone structures connected by long corridors where some of the nation’s most significant military advancements were hatched.

Here, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists developed radar used to help track and direct fire at German cruise missiles during World War II. During the Cold War, university researchers designed the nation’s air defense and missile guidance systems. More recently, its professors and graduate students have been working with the Army on nanotechnologies to protect soldiers on the battlefield.

But MIT, which has received billions in military funding over the past six decades, has also been home to some of the Defense Department’s most notorious antagonists. Daniel Ellsberg, the former Marine officer famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers, spent a year there as a research fellow prior to the 1971 publication of the secret history of US involvement in Vietnam. Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist-turned-antiwar activist, landed on President Nixon’s enemies list. In 2000, physics professor Theodore Postol began a decade-long battle with the university, accusing MIT officials of covering up fraud in missile defense testing in order to maintain lucrative military contracts.

And just a week ago, the university’s name became intertwined with another act of Defense Department defiance when several MIT students and graduates were linked to an Army private accused of funneling thousands of pages of classified war records to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

The circumstances surrounding the MIT students’ alleged connection to the leaker, characterized by Ellsberg as the largest unauthorized disclosure since the Pentagon Papers, remain murky, but point to the dual nature of a university that has served as both one of the intellectual drivers of the defense industry and, at times, a particularly sharp thorn in its side.