The controversy over Swartz's prosecution echoes some of the public response to the very first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986: Robert Tappan Morris, who now teaches at MIT.

In November 1988, the then-23-year-old Cornell graduate student wrote a program that led to unprecedented interruption of computers around the country.

That worm, now known as the Morris worm, infected as many as 6,000 computers, according to a Legal Affairs article on the case.

Morris says he released the worm to figure out how big the Internet was, but it seems he believed he might have been doing something wrong.