Keep in mind that his alleged actions go way behind scraping. He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content.

I sympathize with his goals, but I have to wonder what he was thinking. If the goal was liberating the information and I was in his shoes, I would have found a much more paranoid way to go about it. MIT is a very open environment, and I'm sure he could have recruited sympathizers with legitimate access.

Which makes me wonder if he really cared about getting caught. Civil disobedience can be an effective tactic, but in this case it's simply too easy to paint him as an "evil hacker".