It would be more akin to attacking, but not killing, Bob after having publicly declared that "It is a moral imperative that we should kill Bob." You might then be charged with attempted murder. The law[1] recognizes attempt and conspiracy to attempt as crimes, just as it would if you had attempted to or conspired to kill Bob.
This is not "thoughtcrime", either: it still requires you to take a swing at him with your axe.
I have an established and documented history of downloading large datasets as a professional academic researcher in order to do statistical analysis on them.
Consider (again, because I mentioned this in reply to you once before) that Aaron did not make use of his status as an academic researcher when he did what he did. It might have made a good defense had he gone to trial, but it isn't a magic bullet that absolved him of scrutiny for what he was observed doing.
