Almost one year after hacker and Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide, Wired has obtained the video that led the Massachusetts Institute of Technology police and the Secret Service to arrest him for downloading millions of academic articles.
The video was published as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Wired's investigations editor Kevin Poulsen against the Secret Service, which investigated the case. The U.S. government released the first of Swartz's Secret Service files in August.
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In late 2010, MIT discovered that someone was downloading millions of academic articles from an online database using the school's public network. MIT then started investigating the issue and finally found a laptop connected to the campus' servers in a closet of Building 16.
MIT personnel installed a camera in the closet to catch the mysterious serial downloader. Below, you can watch the video captured by that camera in January 2011, showing Swartz entering the closet and pulling out a hard drive, presumably to connect it to the laptop.
Swartz was arrested two days after the video was filmed and faced state charges for breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. Then, in July 2011, he was indicted by a federal grand jury on various charges. Swartz committed suicide on Jan. 11, 2013, just a few weeks prior to the beginning of the trial.

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