Empty words from Carmen Ortiz, and quite Orwellian indeed. Adding 9 felony counts just about proves that the prosecutors were NOT measured in their approach. Whatever MIT's responsibility, it doesn't diminish how wrong the behavior of Ortiz et al was.
Erm, I can see a reasonable case for adding charges, even if you don't intend to ask for the maximum. You can only charge a defendant once for any given crime. You can't bring charges under different theories of guilt if your first attempt fails. So, no matter what sentence you are going for, you want to charge the defendant with all the crimes they could be guilty of. Otherwise, if they evade the largest charge, there is no way to ever punish them at all, even if you could have proven the lesser charges.
There's only one crime, but there are a number of statutes that add all kinds of "add-on crimes", with widely intersecting definitions. Doing just one thing, you can be guilty both in computer fraud, unauthorized access, copyright violation, etc., etc. These are routinely used to a) intimidate the defendants and b) mislead the jury into thinking the defendant is a serious criminal (not one, but 15 charges! he must be guilty of at least something!) and gives strong incentive to "split down the middle" and convict on at least some of the charges. It is a routine trick, which is routinely used by prosecutors, and they know exactly what they are doing. In this case their intimidation has gone further than they intended, but otherwise they are not fooling anyone talking about how they really just wanted a small punishment and always told so to everybody. They bullied Swartz just as they bully everybody.
Analysis on Volokh's blog: http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains... shows the number of the charges probably would not influence the sentence much, but greatly increases chances of conviction and creates serious chance for a long prison term if unsympathetic judge happens to be sentencing.
