I'm pretty sure that he believed strongly that he was doing something right and that he must have been very upset at being persecuted in the way that he was for doing what was right.

If he didn't think he was doing anything wrong, why didn't he just ask permission?

There is this bit: "It is better to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission". This especially holds true if you're up against what we'll loosely label the establishment here, especially if said establishment is capable of marshalling serious force against you. Once it's done it's done, but during the execution phase just getting the job over with is often the smartest course of action.

See the PACER incident for how that can play out when it works. And I guess the JSTOR one for when it doesn't.

I'm not sure that this forgiveness vs. permission rule works well with civil or criminal law...

It has worked well for me so far. Of course it always does until it no longer works so this is just another instance of survivor bias. Unfortunately for poor Aaron it did not work out well for him.

It's possible to believe you're doing something right and still be acting against the rules.

Let's just imagine -- completely hypothetically, of course -- that I recently wrote a crawler specifically designed to rescue client websites from a terrible DIY website service (which might or might not be Jimdo). Let's imagine it was tuned to load Jimdo-related assets (or the assets of a similar service), fix broken code, etc.; I'm pretty sure this would have been against Jimdo's rules (or the rules of a related service, if I had done such a thing, which, surely, I did not), but let's say I did it anyway because I think it's reprehensible that they don't provide a way for their customers to export their websites.

It's possible that I could have found myself on the pointy end of an expensive lawsuit over something like this. It's possible that I would have broken some laws that I am unaware of, had I done that -- and, had I done that, it would only weaken my case further to claim foreknowledge of the laws being broken. It's likely that there are laws which could be loosely enough interpreted to make me guilty of some form of "hacking". (And it would be most certainly utterly stupid to even consider leaving a comment like this under my regular username -- if, of course, I had done such a thing. Fortunately, as HN occasionally reminds me, I'm not competent enough to have done something like this.)

But there's no way I'd ever say that I did something "wrong", and there's no way I would have asked for Jimdo's permission to do something like that. I simply knew what the rules were, and I believed it was the rules, not I, that were wrong.

More to the point, why did he keep taking specific action to evade the feeble roadblocks the admins managed to put up in front of him before he finally just hooked his laptop to a switch? Why did he ignore the Terms of Use statements when he started off on the Wifi MIT network?

Guys, aaronsw was wicked smart, he was undoubtedly at least vaguely aware of there being a Federal law covering "computer crime". It's far easier to believe that he felt he was doing the right thing despite the law than to believe he was completely unaware.

Is it wrong to jaywalk? Assuming you'd say yes then, if one jaywalks across the street to pick up the cure for cancer and subsequently disseminates said cure, would you persecute him for jaywalking? Because jaywalking seems like a pretty good analogy to Swartz's causing a short disruption of the Jstor service, and it wouldn't surprise me if the open publication of all scientific knowledge had the direct result of curing cancer, or the equivalent, many times over.

And just like hacking, in many places, Cambridge included, "jay" walking (I refuse to acknowledge this preposterous concept with its own word) may be purportedly illegal, but is actually accepted and encouraged. But you still must beware the rare meddling fed; they don't like people undermining the need for painting all those hazardous crosswalks.

You're basically saying that the ends justify the means. You may believe that (we probably all do, for some ratio of ends:means) but please keep in mind that the legal system does not believe that in general, as that logic has often been perverted in our history.

He may've believed that the people who he would have to ask permission from are doing something wrong.

Maybe you have heard of The Underground Railroad? Or "Separate but equal" policies and the movements which nonviolently opposed them? Or the United States of America, which was born of disagreement with the rules of the time?

Laws and rules are written by humans. Sometimes other humans don't agree with the rules as they are currently and try to make the world a better place. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they fail.