Wow. That is a flagrant violation of research ethics by everyone involved. UMN needs to halt anything even close to human subjects research until they get their IRB back under control, who knows what else is going on on campus that has not received prior approval. Utter disaster.

Someone made a good case that the IRB may have just been doing their job, according to their guidelines for what is exempt from review & what is "research on human subjects".

Nevertheless it is clear that UMN does not have sufficient controls in place to prevent this kind of unethical behavior. The ban & patch reversions may force the issue.

Individual groups at unis are very independent, little oversight is common.

UMN CS associate department head on this: https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384965111014641667 (TL;DR: they didn't hear about this before because each group does its thing, leadership doesn't get involved in IRB process, in his opinion IRB failed - situation analogous to cases known to be problematic in other subfields https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384955467051454466 )