Yeah, this was really annoying to see. Don't use him as a pillar to your malicious action.
You're new so I won't hold it against you. Aaron Swartz would have 100% approved of this.
I'm not new, and no he wouldn't have.
Aaron was known for circumventing systems.
Was he also known for harming innocent bystanders just to hit big companies?
Actually, yeah, because when he setup his PACER scraping script he used credentials belonging to a library that didn't belong to him. A similar thing happened when he hid the computer on campus in a closest that did the JSTOR scraping.
Boo hoo, he "stole" what, $2 worth of computing resources/electricity by doing this?
No human has been harmed here. No property has been substantially harmed either. Anything he "stole" should've been made public for free in the first place.