The TAB report on the UMN affair

I agree that academic research is held to a higher standard and I don't doubt the researchers might be in trouble with their ethics committee (or the committee will be in trouble for having issued a waiver). What I find odd is people who have no connection to the university or academia sticking their noses in and denouncing the researchers for perceived violations of some ethics code. Surely that's a sideshow. After all the intentionally broken commits could equally have come from a private individual or even someone working undercover for an intelligence agency.

Thanks for the clarification that it is indeed considered research on a human subject. I think it is a mistake to group this kind of tail-tweaking with real nonconsensual experiments forbidden by the Nuremberg Code (which very clearly is talking about medical experimentation). But then, I'm not part of the ethics committee either, so I'm not really qualified to comment.