He downloaded a large amount of articles from JSTOR. This involved setting up a laptop in a storage room in MIT, where he was not a student. MIT had to investigate it because the laptop was making a large amount of requests to JSTOR&#x27;s servers and JSTOR had to block access to MIT. The rest of the story involves an overzealous federal prosecutor wanting to charge him under the CFAA to make an example of him because of Aaron&#x27;s &quot;Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto&quot;. JSTOR also claimed that Aaron cost them an overinflated sum of damages, but was not interested in prosecution after Aaron agreed to delete the acquired documents. MIT adopted a policy of neutrality in the matter, contrary to its spirit of hacking, and did not speak up for Aaron&#x27;s case. Hope that helps. If you want a more objective look at the case, see Wikipedia [0][1] and MIT&#x27;s Report to the President [2] (which is long, but very comprehensive).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aaron_Swartz#JSTOR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aaron_Swartz#JSTOR</a>
[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Swartz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Swartz</a>
[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;swartz-report.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;swartz-report.mit.edu</a>