I'm sorry its a bit hard to have this knee-jerk reaction without at least having some background into the matter. Did Aaron in fact break into any systems? Or did he legitimately access data and then get "flagged" for knowing too much? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Too_Little
I had the same reaction like you (I think). This is a current affair and it seems not clear what exactly happened and why. I would not sign any petition before knowing more.
"circumvented the MIT guest system"? If by circumvented you mean, registered a fake name, clicked accept and got an address via DHCP, then yes.
edit removed the "I bet you're guilty.." and added the below:
Should Aaron have asked for permission from JSTOR first? They seem to have asked the feds not to prosecute, they might have been willing to help originally. Maybe he should have, but JSTOR is unlikely to say "yes."
So Aaron did what most of us would have done. He wrote a script to acquire the information he wanted to--fine. Have you ever mirrored a website? It's likely that you felt guilty doing so, and maybe even went to your local coffeeshop to do it on their network instead. You don't want your IP banned.
Aaron seems to have done basically the same thing, but instead of a coffeeshop, which wouldn't allow him access to JSTOR, since the access is via proxy, he went to a neighboring college campus that likely had a JSTOR subscription.
Now, the thing that's troublesome to me is that MIT didn't stop him while he was doing it in the first place. Surely they'd have noticed 30,000+ requests from the same IP to a protected resource, no?
Mainstream media coverage has also turned in Swartz’s favor.
Not really. The quotes they provide are either neutral at best, from decidedly not "mainstream" media, or are just the news outlets quoting DemandProgress.
I can kind of sympathize with Aaron's goal, but I can't really get behind the methods. If the charges in the indictment are anywhere near true, they're pretty damning.
