The estate of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who was charged with hacking by the federal government and later committed suicide, filed a ­motion in federal court in ­Boston Friday to allow release of documents in the case that has generated national controversy and raised questions over the US attorney’s aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence.

Swartz, who took his life on Jan. 11, was arrested in Boston in 2011 and charged with hacking into MIT’s network and downloading millions of articles from JSTOR, a large subscription-­based scholarly journal archive.