The prof overseeing the paper clarified that they initially did not seek IRB approval, and then received an IRB exemption [0]. I'd want to ask the IRB why they approved that, for starters. Maybe because they'd already done the research and hoped it would blow over, vs. the controversy of rejecting it when they'd already done the work?
Honestly I’m guessing this kind of situation didn’t match any existing policy for the review board and a few people made a bad call.
We need to make sure to be supportive of people making mistakes and learning from them instead of raising pitchforks for every misstep. Failure is never completely avoidable and responding properly to failure is way more important than never failing.
From my reading of the threads in the kernel mailing lists, it seems the IRB thought "is it bioscience with experimentation on live animals? No? Then it's all fine".
Yeah, especially considering that the IRB said the research was out of scope (specifically that it was not "human subject research") rather than indicating that it was ethical. Kind of like the distinction between a court not having jurisdiction and a court declaring you didn't break any laws.
I think they misrepresented the project so that it would be classified as “not human research”. It’s unclear whether the misrepresentation was intentional (to obtain the exemption) or unintentional (they were genuinely unaware of the human impact).
0: https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/papers/clarifications-hc....