Didn't he get caught before he fully downloaded everything? My understanding was that's what he was doing with that laptop stuffed in a supply closet on the MIT campus.

probably nobody knows

but certainly he was capable of ensuring that everything he downloaded would be released if that was what he wanted

You should add your Matrix to your contact page.

He could have been trying to evaluate how many public domain papers it wasn't sharing access to at the time, which would have required a collection of the database. Would also have explained why he wasn't trying to hide his behavior.

He would have succeeded if he was just wanting to deaddrop all the data in a bin, probably without getting caught.