People are way too hasty to label Aaron Swartz action as hacking, thieving or any word with illegal connotations. It is well known that Aaron by way of his associations with MIT had the right to download JSTOR articles there. All he did was to create a simple program that exploited his access with a program that went through the motions of downloading automatically instead of having to manually click on each articles. This is not hacking. It is a very common type of script used by software developers all the time. He already had legal access. He only accelerated the downloading of articles.

People have been attributing the fact that Aaron tried to hide his actions on the MIT campus as a sign that he knew what he was doing was illegal. I believe it is actually a sign of the opposite. All parties thought that the downloading he was doing was probably legal (or at least a gray area). However, it broke some Terms of Service agreement (you know the long documents you have to press 'accept' to when you want to install software). Everyone involved knew that, since they didn't have a good legal defense, the only thing the university could do to stop him using their network in a way that they didn't like was to physically stop him and kick him off campus as a trespasser. Therefore he had to hide from them to avoid this. It wasn't right for him to trespass and ignore Terms and Conditions but it certainly shouldn't have been a felony.

Why do I believe that Aaron thought what he was doing was legal? Aaron was not a naive person when it came to laws. Exhibit A: The amount of books Aaron read and reviewed, often more than 100 per year! If you look at the list there are lots of them on politics, economy,philosophy and law ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2010 ).

Take a glance at Aaron's last blog post which is a review of a Batman movie. It is all about the strategic uses of game theory to affect the balance of powers in the legal and political system (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk). He seemed to have a very keen eye that saw all the weird ways laws and powers can flow in political systems.

It seems that Aaron was not trying to hack computer code but instead hack legal code. That is find legal means (or at least gray areas) that he could then exploit politically. Once he had the articles, he probably intended to release them publicly and confront the courts where he thought he could set favorable precedents for information freedom (like he had done in the past). He probably wanted to get caught for the act of releasing the articles but that required him not to get caught trespassing for a while.

Aaron's misjudgment was that he would face a legal challenge in broken but still somewhat reasonable copyright laws and maybe some kind of trespassing violation (and the civil disobedience would be on the level of trespassing) when instead he was confronted with completely disproportionate and unreasonable Anti-Hacking laws meant to deter terrorists from penetrating vital systems. These laws were way too broad by stating that anything that violates Terms and Condition (something that most people do) can be considered a felony. That is what is supposed to change with Aaron's law (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/aarons-law-amending...)

I think Aaron's misjudgment was a perfectly understandable. My opinion is that even MIT, in favoring prosecution, thought that he would face reasonable laws and would get a slap on the wrist. That is why they didn't tell the DOJ to drop the charges and are now internally investigating what happened.