Despite the many hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Aaron Swartz since his suicide last month, there remain a number of unanswered questions about the life of the computer-prodigy-turned-political-activist. Many have wondered about the seriousness of the crime alleged in his massive download of JSTOR, the online archive of academic articles, for which federal prosecutors obtained a 13-count indictment and could have sent him to prison for decades. Others have speculated about Swartz's mental health (he had written about his own struggle with depression), and the role it may have played in his death. But perhaps the most mystifying question is why Swartz was so preoccupied with JSTOR in the first place.

Swartz had nurtured a soft spot for so-called "open access" issues—that is, removing barriers to the free flow of information—since he was a teenager. But by the time he began downloading JSTOR in September 2010, he was almost 24 and seemingly far more interested in overtly political activism. He had helped found a group called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which funded and publicized more conventional liberal causes. He had worked on a Democratic congressional campaign in Rhode Island that ended only a few days before he trained his sights on JSTOR. Around the same time, a friend called to enlist Swartz's help in stopping a U.S. Senate bill that would censor the Internet by way of draconian penalties for copyright violations, among other things. "What’s the big deal?" Swartz responded, according to his own recollection. "I'm not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Health care, financial reform, those are the issues that I work on. Not something obscure like copyright law."

The whole story of what led Swartz down the path that cost him his life is long and full of tragic twists and turns. But given the obvious significance of the JSTOR episode, it's worth answering the narrower question of what got Swartz so interested in freeing up journals at the very moment he'd supposedly disowned the cause.

The U.S. Attorney's office prosecuting Swartz certainly seemed stumped by this question. Although the federal indictment states matter-of-factly that "Swartz intended to distribute a significant portion of JSTOR's archive," the only real evidence of a motive or plan that prosecutors disclosed was a document he wrote in July 2008 called the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto." Swartz began that widely reported post by arguing that, "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." He continued:

Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. … We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. … We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

This is attention-getting stuff. But it only tells a small sliver of the story. For one thing, the document didn't just appear out of thin air. It was a direct response to one of the more exhilarating and radicalizing experiences of Swartz's life.