This all hinges on what he was going to do with the documents. If he was looking to perform some large-scale analysis (such as he has done before) and publish t

This all hinges on what he was going to do with the documents. If he was looking to perform some large-scale analysis (such as he has done before) and publish the results academically, then this would fall under the academic mission of MIT, and therefore be legit. But if this were the case, why go through the hassle of hacking the system? Why not just ask JSTOR for cooperation? Or maybe he did, and they rejected it? There has got to me more to this story, because I just can't for the life of me believe that he would download the documents to "free" them on internet (as is alleged).