chapotraphouse

Extremely unlikely.

Aaron didn't hack any private databases or download random information wholesale. He downloaded academic articles from the JSTOR archive as he had a legal right to do so. It's a paywalled but public system, archiving academic papers that have previously been published. There's nothing secret about the research papers, they've just been ringfenced for profit.

The only difference between him and thousands of other students and research fellows (as he was) at MIT was that he wrote a piece of code - that importantly stayed on is laptop - to make the download requests for the PDFs incredibly quickly and efficiently, and to keep starting new sessions in case system admin tried to ban requests over concerns that it was some sort of DDOS attack (which they did). One of the MIT system admins even said in relation to the trial that it was just 'an incredibly efficient bit of code, but not particularly subtle, never mind secretive'.

You can see my longer comment in this thread for why he was a threat to the surveillance state complex trying to control the internet, but it wasn't because of some smoking gun or finding secret information.

His murder by the state (which it was, even if he hung himself after they hounded, threatened, and relentlessly prosecuted him without cause) has more in common with the way the state went after civil rights organisers in the past, than some sort of whistlerblower murder.