It's very frustrating reading the analogies that you are attempting to use to describe the charges in this case.

Is what weev did the same as walking to your ex-wife's house with a chainsaw while you shout that you're going to murder her (God forbid)? No, of course not. Given the actual harm or potential harm incurred here, weev's crime was more like walking to your ex-wife's house with an oversized down pillow while you talk about giving her a spanking on the bottom with it.

Is what weev did the same thing as walking into a stranger's house through his unlocked front door and then rifling through his personal papers? I don't think so. It would be better to say it is the same thing as walking past a house after the owner has plastered it with old credit card statements and then remarking to a fellow passer-by that you might make some expensive purchases using that now-public information.

The problem with the charges filed against weev and the charges filed against aaronsw is that they were based on a law that so lacks specificity and grounding in actual computer practice that even computer professionals need to use analogies to justify the illegality of the acts. If the law were legitimate such analogies would not be required.

Is it fair to convict a person based on an analogy, when another analogy might be more correct? If an appropriate analogy is required to determine guilt, then does the analogy itself take on the weight of law, and if so, who is to determine the correct analogy to apply in such a case (when the choice of appropriate analogy is what determines guilt or innocence), the judge, or the jury? No, if an action is going to be criminal, it must be possible to describe that action itself in its own literal terms and thereby determine its criminality.

You write that "crime = intent + action", and then you talk about nothing but his intent. The fact is that the action he undertook can only be described as criminal insofar as accessing a public URL that is not otherwise publicized qualifies as "exceeding access", which is what the CFAA makes a crime.

This is the problem with your argument, with the cases against both weev and aaronsw, and with the CFAA itself. Whatever ill will may have existed in weev's mind (I'm sure there is plenty there to go around), for his action iteself to be criminal, weev had to know what was in the mind of AT&T. And how could he? Because "authorization" is not a concept in the http protocol (or maybe there is, if you count http authentication, which wasn't used here) there are no methods besides clairvoyancy or pure gussing to determine whether a public URL is intended for open access or not. We have to assume that a public URL automatically grants authorization.

This is why the case against weev is so distressing. Although his intent may have been questionable, the actual action that is being prosecuted in this case is nothing more than fiddling with a url in a web browser. Who hasn't done this when looking through an image site like imgur.com or similar, just to see what's there randomly? We do this because it is universally accepted that unless a password restriction has been placed on a url, any publicly-accessible URL is intended to be viewed by the general public. Assuming anything else would break the Internet.