Of course it was the "signature" of Swartz's actions that raised the federal government's interest.
1) The "target" was MIT;
2) There was physical intrusion into MIT's network;
3) Millions of documents were downloaded;
4) Swartz previously did something similar to PACER.
You can argue about whether walking into an unlocked closest is "physical intrusion" or whether the "actual target" was JSTOR but that's all just a matter of characterization. The Feds are not "shades of gray" people--everything is like the show "24" to them. They will assume the worst.
I'd bet money that the "bullet points" similar to the above landed on someone's desk, and even though I think the prosecution definitely was overzealous, I'm not at all surprised at the way they reacted. I'm really shocked that anyone is surprised.
To the extent I am arguing anything, it is against the convenience of casting events into the form of a morality play...or of a Fox Television apologetic for torture. Cartoon characterizations don't require much of us and simple causal chains don't require us to deal with messy realities.
They just make for easy journalism and lazy citizenship.
I don't know anything about MIT culture other than what I've read, but people have told me it is similar to Caltech's culture. At Caltech, the most important rule is the Caltech honor code:
No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair
advantage of another member of the Caltech community.
If the Swartz incident had happened at Caltech then when it reached the laptop in the closet stage the conclusion would be that the intruder was almost certainly an outsider, not a member of the community. At that point it is appropriate to call in the outside authorities.
The Feds and MIT administrators are smart. And what I describe would be just them doing their jobs - and doing them with professional efficiency.
To put it another way, how likely is it that that particular closet had been used for similar activities before? Is it more plausible that Swartz discovered the closet or that someone told him about it?
Hell, it was unlocked. The camera may have already been there and the Secret Service already involved. Swartz may have blundered into a honey hole and screwed up an ongoing investigation. That's the sort of thing which pisses cops off.
It's not easy to make sense of MIT's actions as naive responses to a one off event - disconnecting the laptop and alarming the closet would be more plausible as responses to a commercial crime. Putting in cameras and letting the crime continue just doesn't make sense in response to the sort of hacking which is traditional on the MIT campus (e.g. lockpicking). MIT went along until JSTOR took radical public action and data collection and observation by the Feds was no longer feasible.
If the proposed plea bargain required Swartz to cooperate with investigations of other hackers, neither side would have an interest in exposing it. The Feds for fear of tipping their hand, Swartz's survivors for remembrance of his legacy. All along I have had the feeling there is more to the tragedy than the press can get from their chairs.