That is simply not what happen. He was never warned off MIT campus. The case was never one of trespassing with MIT - otherwise he'd have been slapped on the wrist with a local case.
Rather he was arrested by a federal secret service agent for CFAA violations that were based on extremely tenuous arguments that at the least most legal commentators concede was an egregious case of over-prosecution.
I'd love to hear your list of deserving award winners who are somehow notable dissidents without breaking something as lowly as a trespass law.
I'm not talking about violating trespass laws or any other legal principle---I'm talking about guestright. Aaron Swartz abused MIT's institutional journal subscriptions, which he had access to as a guest of the institution. He was warned to stop by MIT IS&T to an e-mail address he wasn't monitoring. When his IP was blocked, he got a new IP and kept downloading. He knew, or should have known, that his behavior was out of line, and yet he continued.
Do I think he should have been rung up on federal charges? No. But he wasn't a student, or a teacher, or a visiting researcher, or an alum. He had no official affiliation to MIT, and he showed no understanding of or respect for our culture. The flip side of an open culture is respect for and maintenance of the commons, and instead he exploited ours. It was really hard to defend him at the time for abusing the openness of the MIT community.
(And now, in fact, MIT affiliates like Aaron and me no longer have access to MIT's institutional subscriptions, in what I can only assume is partly a response to his actions.)
MIT's history has no shortage of people who were part of the institution and part of the culture, who the administration failed to support when that support was more justified and more needed than it ever was in Aaron's case. I'm sorry for the outcome, and I don't think he deserved it, but I don't think he deserves either some kind of posthumous award, nor does MIT deserve the scorn heaped on it by those who would canonize him.
Rather he was arrested by a federal secret service agent for CFAA violations that were based on extremely tenuous arguments that at the least most legal commentators concede was an egregious case of over-prosecution.
I'd love to hear your list of deserving award winners who are somehow notable dissidents without breaking something as lowly as a trespass law.