Yes, it was absolutely justified, and technically speaking there was no hacking involved. As the expert witness for Aaron's defense, Alex Stamos, underlines: let's not credulously accept the government's framing of Aaron's behavior.

Paid-access to research articles is a burden for research. We need to make this knowledge available to anyone free of charge.

Consider the following facts:

• The cost to access literature is a 8-figure number for a library of a large university (see annual journal subscription costs paid per university). This could fund many research projects. I have recently received an e-mail from one of the largest universities in France asking for researchers to reduce their use of the IEEE website as they charge the university for each article someone downloads.
• If research articles were free-access, citizens other than "professional researchers" could more easily contribute to research. (e.g. physicians, software engineers, activists, teenagers, hackers, etc.).
  
• Neither the authors nor the reviewers get any money. The only folks who get paid are the one who restrict the access to the article. Worse, most of the time authors have to transfer copyright!
• Some say paid access to research articles isn't an issue since researchers have access to everything from their lab. This is false: even at MIT where I am currently located, I don't have free access to many research articles, which subsequently reduce my productivity. I even dropped one of my personal projects because of that. I am obviously not the only one in this situation and I often got requests from friends asking for articles to which they don't have access from their lab.
  
• Many of the articles Aaron downloaded where in the public domain, but only accessible through paywall.

More details at:

• To what extent does paid access to research articles slow down research?
• What are the biggest things that are slowing down scientific research?
  

A nice explanation of the current academic publishing system taken from another JSTOR mass-downloader: Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on The Pirate Bay:

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd system. The authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete. As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models.

The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia. Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (written by Aaron in 2008)

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Text of Remarks by Carl Malamud at Memorial for Aaron Swartz at the
Internet Archive on January 24, 2013):

## Aaron's Army

Do not think for a moment that Aaron's work on JSTOR was the random
act of a lone hacker, some kind of crazy, spur-of-the-moment bulk
download.

JSTOR had long come in for withering criticism from the net. Larry
Lessig called JSTOR a moral outrage in a talk and I suppose I have to
confess he was quoting me. We weren't the only ones fanning those
flames.

Sequestering knowledge behind pay walls--making scientific journals
only available to a few kids fortunate enough to be at fancy
universities and charging $20 an article for the remaining 99% of
us--was a festering wound. It offended many people.

It embarrassed many who wrote those articles that their work had
become somebody's profit margin, a members-only country club of
knowledge.

Many of us helped fan those flames. Many of us feel guilty today for
fanning those flames.

But JSTOR was just one of many battles. They tried to paint Aaron as
some kind of lone-wolf hacker, a young terrorist who went on a crazy
IP killing spree that caused $92 million in damages.

Aaron wasn't a lone wolf, he was part of an army, and I had the honor
of serving with him for a decade. You have heard many things about his
remarkable life, but I want to focus tonight on just one.

Aaron was part of an army of citizens that believes democracy only
works when the citizenry are informed, when we know about our
rights--and our obligations. An army that believes we must make
justice and knowledge available to all--not just the well born or
those that have grabbed the reigns of power--so that we may govern
ourselves more wisely.

He was part of an army of citizens that rejects kings and generals and
believes in rough consensus and running code.

We worked together on a dozen government databases. When we worked on
something, the decisions weren't rash. Our work often took months,
sometimes years, sometimes a decade, and Aaron Swartz did not get his
proper serving of decades.

We looked at and poked at the U.S. Copyright database for a long time,
a system so old it was still running WAIS. The government had--believe
it or not--asserted copyright on the copyright database. How you
copyright a database that is specifically called out in the
U.S. Constitution is beyond me, but we knew we were playing with fire
by violating their terms of use, so we were careful.

We grabbed that data and it was used to feed the Open Library here at
the Internet Archive and it was used to feed Google Books. And, we got
a letter from the Copyright Office waiving copyright on that copyright
database. But before we did that, we had to talk to many lawyers and
worry about the government hauling us in for malicious premeditated
bulk downloading.

These were not random acts of aggression. We worked on databases to
make them better, to make our democracy work better, to help our
government. We were not criminals.

When we brought in 20 million pages of U.S. District Court documents
from behind their 8 cent-per-page PACER pay wall, we found these
public filings infested with privacy violations: names of minor
children, names of informants, medical records, mental health records,
financial records, tens of thousands of social security numbers.

We were whistle blowers[1] and we sent our results to the Chief Judges
of 31 District Courts and those judges were shocked and dismayed and
they redacted those documents and they yelled at the lawyers that
filed them and the Judicial Conference changed their privacy rules.

But you know what the bureaucrats who ran the Administrative Office of
the United States Courts did? To them, we weren't citizens that made
public data better, we were thieves that took $1.6 million of their
property.

So they called the FBI, they said they were hacked by criminals, an
organized gang that was imperiling their $120 million per year revenue
stream selling public government documents.

The FBI sat outside Aaron's house. They called him up[2] and tried to
sucker him into meeting them without his lawyer. The FBI sat two armed
agents[3] down in an interrogation room with me to get to the bottom
of this alleged conspiracy.

But we weren't criminals, we were only citizens.

We did nothing wrong. They found nothing wrong. We did our duty as
citizens and the government investigation had nothing to show for it
but a waste of a whole lot of time and money.

If you want a chilling effect, sit somebody down with a couple
overreaching federal agents for a while and see how quickly their
blood runs cold.

There are people who face danger every day to protect us--police
officers and firefighters and emergency workers--and I am grateful and
amazed by what they do. But the work that people like Aaron and I did,
slinging DVDs and running shell scripts on public materials, should
not be a dangerous profession.

We weren't criminals, but there were crimes committed, crimes against
the very idea of justice.

When the U.S. Attorney told Aaron he had to plead guilty to 13
felonies for attempting to propagate knowledge before she'd even
consider a deal, that was an abuse of power, a misuse of the criminal
justice system, a crime against justice.

And that U.S. Attorney does not act alone. She is part of a posse
intent on protecting property not people. All over the United States,
those without access to means don't have access to justice and face
these abuses of power every day.

It was a crime against learning when a nonprofit corporation like
JSTOR, charged with advancing knowledge, turned a download that caused
no harm and no damage into a $92 million federal case.

And the JSTOR corporate monopoly on knowledge is not alone. All over
the United States, corporations have staked their fences on the fields
of education: for-profit colleges that steal from our veterans,
nonprofit standards bodies that ration public safety codes while
paying million dollar salaries, and multinational conglomerates that
measure the worth of scientific papers and legal materials by their
gross margins.

In the JSTOR case, was the overly aggressive posture of the Department
of Justice prosecutors and law enforcement officials revenge because
they were embarrassed that--in their view at least--we somehow got
away with something in the PACER incident? Was the merciless JSTOR
prosecution the revenge of embarrassed bureaucrats because they looked
stupid in the New York Times, because the U.S. Senate called them on
the carpet?

We will probably never know the answer to that question, but it sure
looks like they destroyed a young man's life in a petty abuse of
power. This was not a criminal matter, Aaron was not a criminal.

If you think you own something and I think that thing is public, I'm
more than happy to meet you in a court of law and--if you're
right--I'll take my lumps if I've wronged you. But when we turn armed
agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,
we have broken the rule of law, we have desecrated the temple of
justice.

Aaron Swartz was not a criminal, he was a citizen, and he was a brave
soldier in a war which continues today, a war in which corrupt and
venal profiteers try to steal and hoard and starve our public domain
for their own private gain.

When people try to restrict access to the law, or they try to collect
tolls on the road to knowledge, or deny education to those without
means, those people are the ones who should face the stern gaze of an
outraged public prosecutor.

What the Department of Justice put Aaron through for trying to make
our world better is the same thing they can put you through. Our army
isn't one lone wolf, it is thousands of citizens--many of you in this
room--who are fighting for justice and knowledge.

I say we are an army, and I use the word with cause because we face
people who want to imprison us for downloading a database to take a
closer look, we face people who believe they can tell us what we can
read and what we can say.

But when I see our army, I see an army that creates instead of
destroys. I see the army of Mahatma Gandhi walking peacefully to the
sea to make salt for the people. I see the army of Martin Luther King
walking peacefully but with determination to Washington to demand
their rights because change does not roll in on the wheels of
inevitability, it comes through continuous struggle.

When I see our army, I see an army that creates new opportunities for
the poor, an army that makes our society more just and more fair, an
army that makes knowledge universal.

When I see our army, I see the people who have created the Wikipedia
and the Internet Archive, people who coded GNU and Apache and BIND and
LINUX. I see the people who made the EFF and the Creative Commons. I
see the people who created our Internet as a gift to the world.

When I see our army, I see Aaron Swartz and my heart is broken. We
have truly lost one of our better angels.

I wish we could change the past, but we cannot. But, we can change the
future, and we must.

We must do so for Aaron, we must do so for ourselves, we must do so to
make our world a better place, a more humane place, a place where
justice works and access to knowledge is a human right.

## Footnotes

[1]: <https://public.resource.org/uscourts.gov/>
[2]: <https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00693.html>
[3]: <https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00707.html>

Related: Posthumously pardon Aaron Swartz.