Wire fraud.

If you shoplift from a store wearing a fake mustache, and saying your name is "Mickey Mouse", you aren't committing fraud, just shoplifting. If you download documents with an anonymous name ("Gary Host", not the name of a MIT student / staff member) and an anonymous MAC address (once again - not passing yourself off as anything other than a guest) you are guilty of copyright infringement, not wire fraud. Using a script to rapidly change your name / MAC address might be a different matter, as you are pretending to be a crowd of people (and it's hard to respond to). But there's nothing he did to circumvent the security that was intended to make a material misrepresentation, he simply did the equivalent of using his hotmail account to create a new account once his gmail was banned.

For things like fraud, there's no hard and fast laws. The courts use a thing called "common sense" (or precedent, which is using a previous judge's common sense). The bar for fraud is pretty high - he had to have misled the victim, and that misrepresentation must have made them behave differently (among other requirements). Had he used his own name, and used a new laptop instead of spoofing his MAC address, he would still have been able to download the documents.

But that's just my opinion, and IANAL.

Can you enlist some of those things you think he was guilty of? Leaving aside the fact that he was actually trying to forcefully give people (you and I) back what they already owned.

The frivolous charges of wire fraud, damaging computer systems with wrecklessness, etc.

he wasn't guilty of the crimes he was accused of. an innocent man shouldn't accept a plea. that is a coerced confession and one of the worst forms of tyranny.

Was he? He was never tried, and neither a court nor a jury made a finding either way. The evidence that is publicly available doesn't back up some of the charges against him and at best is ambiguous as to whether his actions would result in even a 3 months prison sentence, if anything, if he had had the chance to have his case heard in court. Especially given that with his earlier work with PACER it's quite likely that his goal with JSTOR was to gain access to and release documents which, legally, should have been in the public domain.

Besides which, whether or not he violated the law is only partially relevant as the morality of the law is also at issue. How would you feel if your only option was to plead guilty to a law you felt was unjust?

Never having been through a similar situation, I cannot say what I would do if I were in his shoes. I believe that he didn't believe that what he did warranted decades of jail time. I believe that the prosecutor believed that his crimes did justify jail time.

But your statement reflects two facts: that he did end up committing suicide (not known a priori) and that he chose not to accept guilt when he didn't believe he was guilty (and I fully suspect you've never been in that type of situation at the severity of the Swartz case, so it's hard to definitively state that you would just take the jail time)

As others have said, he would also be branded a felon, which in the US is enough to ruin most people's professional careers - not to mention a host of other very strict restrictions.