It seems to me that there is a fine difference between admitting you did the act, and admitting you did the act and conceding the act indeed violated the laws the prosecutors assert.

For example, presumably Aaron's lawyers would argue that while Aaron did in fact use a fake name on a captive portal, but that doing so was not wire fraud.

Why should you abstain from arguing if your actions violated the law just because they have hard proof that you did in fact perform those actions?

This is the definition of wire fraud: (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1343)

Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

JSTOR was in a different state. Swartz caused signals to be transmitted by wire for the purpose of an artifice to defraud. The indictment is specific and cites to statutory definitions of what constitutes criminal behavior.

As I've said over and over again in relation to copyright issues, maybe things like copyright infringement should not be considered crimes at all, but right now, they are. If the elements of a crime are defined as X, Y, and Z, and there's proof that someone engaged in X, Y, and Z, then that person has committed the crime n question. Now if you want to argue that the law in question is unconstitutional for some reason, that's fine, but that's something you do at appeal. the purpose of a trial Court is simply to establish whether a certain set of facts is true or not.

Further evidence that we all commit numerous felonies a day I suppose.

You would be remiss to not even attempt a defence of such a 'crime'.

What "everybody doesn't contest" is different from the 13 felony charges, including wire fraud (!), the government indicted him on.

For instance, the trespassing charges, supported by the surveillance video of him opening an unlocked closet used by the homeless to store their personal effects, were dropped. [1]

[1] http://boingboing.net/2013/01/13/expert-witness-describes-aa...

That article strikes me as absurdly biased. To take just one example, the argument is made that Swartz did nothing to cover his tracks, but if this is the case why buy a new laptop for this purpose instead of using his everyday one? What is so wrong about the comparison between spoofing one's MAC address and changing the VIN on a car, when the purpose of both is to identify a specific piece of hardware? Why cover one's face with a cycling helmet if one does not care about being identified? Why place one's computer in a wiring closet if one could have just downloaded freely from anywhere on campus?

Look, I don't want to bash the poor guy for his idea that such material should be free. But plugging into other peoples' networks without permission and so on are criminal offences, and Swartz was educated enough to know this. If you look through the indictment (http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/09/swartz...) it's very clear about which statutes were being broken. Boingboing is presenting it as if Swartz was some wide-eyed ingenue that didn't realize that anyone would consider his downloading a problem.