Rather, he improperly downloaded a large number of academic papers from JSTOR via MIT's network - papers that were publicly funded and were legally accessible to people on MIT's network, but which Aaron believed should be widely accessible to everyone.
The prosecutor tried to bully Aaron into pleading guilty to an array of felony charges for the supposed crime of violating a TOS contract.
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.
He also had "legal" access through his fellowship at Harvard, he could have downloaded his articles while at work.
I really feel like this really cuts to the core of the problem with "cybercrime". The fact is, most people have absolutely no understanding of the technical details of the "crimes" most hackers carry out. Most distressingly, this seems to include public prosecutors and judges.
I am not sure if this is a result of misapplied analogies, or "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", or something else, or some combination of the above. In any case, our biggest priority should not just be reforming the law to match a more careful and technically nuanced version of computer crime.
Indeed, our greatest goal should be to expand public awareness and appreciation of what hackers are, what they do, and how they go about doing it. I intentionally use the ambiguous term, "hacker" here. Until people understand what is really going on, they will forever remain ignorant of the proper course of justice.
Let's say I work a full day with the understanding that I will get paid for my efforts. The employer then refuses to pay me. It would not be uncommon for someone to say that the employer 'stole' from you, or call them a 'thief'.
I could also see how many people would equate that to downloading a copy of something that required effort to produce and was being offered under specific terms.
I could see how arguing about the verbage, to most people, is just an exercise in pedantry and (as far as they are concerned) misses the point.
However, that is not the case at all with digital copying, where the original owner of the data is not deprived of anything. That is the real point - the idea of property is inextricably related to scarcity, which doesn't exist in the digital realm.
Until dev/random spits out complete programs that are worth using, it needs to be taken into account that all software requires effort to produce, and giving the author(s) the ability to dictate the terms of the software use is often the only reason certain software gets made.
So let's say somebody steps into your office, opens your network closet and leaves a laptop there overnight. You don't know who it is and you see it sucking down some data from some service you incidentally pay for.
Can you honestly tell me that when you discover the laptop doesn't belong to anybody in your office, you'll just step out the closet and let it continue doing it's thing while you wait for the owner to return?
It's clear nobody cares about JSTOR, what Byrne is bringing up vis-a-vis historical precedents of civil disobedience and closes with is that when you find the laptop, your real worry isn't about JSTOR's feelings, it's the subterfuge.
Why it's 'complicated' and 'sloppy' is because you now have to divorce your feelings about your network's violation from your ambivalence to casual TOS violation, which is hard.
He was only using the closet, because MIT was trying to singlehandedly change the terms of access to to the database to prevent the hoovering up of the info.
It's like getting arrested at a lunch buffet for eating too fast, or too much.
more to the point, it's like getting arrested by a usda strike force at a buffet for eating in the kitchen after being told by the manager to that you're moving through the line too quickly. I agree that this is a disproportionate punishment, but... why are you in the kitchen again?
I would prefer that we only argue about TOS violations and the ethics of open-access journals, but instead we have to preface everything with "but look, he was only criminally trespassing because MIT changed their network access policy for community members" and that caveat by its very nature weakens the discourse around open-access journals, silly terms of service and so on.
You're right that the behavior on some level is 'technically correct' but it doesn't change Byrne's point that civil disobedience is most effective when the execution (and 'crime' committed) is unambiguous and focused.