can someone please explain what the deal is here for us uninitiated? sounds like they are throwing the book at him for stealing books? seriously? why is the prosecution being so aggressive? did he profit from it or something? this sounds so petty
The cynic in me suspects that he has annoyed someone in power with his many other political activities (Demand Progress etc). When I first had contact with Aaron he was just this guy who wrote rss2email, it's been very inspiring to see him move on to hacking politics.
He violated Terms of Service for a large database of journals at an egregious rate. If he had stolen say...10,000 articles this may be a non-issue. The fact that they can tie 4,000,000 articles to him is what makes this so bad.
The other part that is extremely bad is his measure to continually evade MIT MAC banning through spoofing. That measure of evasion proves, to some extent, his intent to steal and is a form of computer fraud.
I wouldn't be too surprised if him causing a month (months?) long interruption of JSTOR for an entire campus deeply involved in government contracts was also part of the ire.
