> - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The case escalated and was eventually dropped, included POTUS attention.

A legitimate example of free speech. Zimmerman published his code in the appendix of scholarly book, in addition to posting online in source & binary form.

> - Aaron Swartz passed away via suicide in 2013 under threat of 35 years in prison and a lot else for downloading from JSTOR programmatically

A terrible example, and not comparable to your first example. Swartz gained physical access to a network room he was not supposed to be, inside a building he was not supposed to be, connected a laptop to a LAN he was not granted access.... When you say programmatically, you must mean the parts where he proceeded to download JSTOR using his laptop? Has was criminally trespassing, accessing a network he knew he wasn't allowed to access. The tragic outcome was due to... hate to say it, he had well known mental issues that amplified the stress he felt when being indicted for a crime he knew he was guilty.

So I get what you're saying, but you might want to limit your examples to abjectly reasonable ones that withstand scrutiny. Otherwise it might look like a bandwagon, generalization, or even false dichotomy.