I sympathize with his goals, but I have to wonder what he was thinking. If the goal was liberating the information and I was in his shoes, I would have found a much more paranoid way to go about it. MIT is a very open environment, and I'm sure he could have recruited sympathizers with legitimate access.
Which makes me wonder if he really cared about getting caught. Civil disobedience can be an effective tactic, but in this case it's simply too easy to paint him as an "evil hacker".
Maybe you should read the original indictment instead of throwing around conclusions not found in evidence.
"Swartz contrived to ... break into a restricted computer wiring closet at MIT;"
"Swartz connected the Acer computer to MIT's computer network"
"JSTOR blocked the computer's access to its network by refusing communications from the computer's assigned IP address. ... Swartz obtained for his computer a new IP address on the MIT network ... and began again to download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR."
(Sorry for typos, I have a PDF of the indictment that is images)
When that didn't work, MIT put in MAC-level blocking, and he worked to evade that, too. See section 21, among others.
He later brought in another computer. See section 22.
He later brought the laptops when he connected inside the wiring closet and assigned himself IP addresses. See section 26.
I don't see any error on ef4's part, much less one that warrants a "maybe you should read"-level response.
I likely shouldn't discuss this topic any more
"Mere scraping alone" is unlikely to land you a federal charge; the prosecution needs to demonstrate your intent to act unlawfully. A far more typical outcome for a scraping case is a C&D from the site you scraped.
For obvious reasons, JSTOR can't C&D Swartz once their content hits BitTorrent. Similarly, if you scrape a site and post it to file sharing networks, you might have something to be concerned about.
This is an area of law that is evolving rapidly so there may be other cases that supersede that one.