Preservation of information asymetry in Academia
If you're at a university, and haven't heard about Gerry Adams's arrest or Boston College's involvement, you should read the story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
I don't know what to make of it. The crime at the root of the story is a tragedy, without question. The people responsible should should suffer consequences for their actions. The oral history project was serving a different goal. The reporters and historians involved should have had the right to choose if and how any information they had was revealed, even if it meant they were held in contempt of court, like Judith Miller in the Valerie Plame affair. This, on top of MIT's handling of the Arron Swartz case.
UPDATE 2014-06-09: This slashdot post is a starting-point reference for the use of technology-based mechanism design to work around part of the problem. But what about the social dilemma?