Tackling that out of order, because it seems clearer.

> Analogize with entering vs. breaking and entering.

From Free Dictionary [1]:

breaking and entering v., n. entering a residence or other enclosed property through the slightest amount of force (**even pushing open a door**), without authorization.

Emphasis mine. If pushing a door counts, so does changing the user agent header or auto-incrementing IDs. The key here is "without authorization". As that analogizes with the Weev situation and our librarian, much of the debate I see here on HN seems to hinge on whether that means authorization in some technical sense or in the sense meant by that breaking and entering definition. I submit that it means the latter, in part because that reflects how we see authorization in other contexts (like doors we're not supposed to enter) and in part because I don't think the first view holds up to scrutiny on its own terms.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Consider two situations:

1. A server responds to requests for email addresses without checking whether the user is authorized to receive that information.

2. A server responds to all requests without checking whether they contain injected SQL.

In pure technology terms, these aren't really any different. In either case, the server is simply failing to check that the request has certain properties (came from the right user/does not contain context escapes). But of course case 2 is particularly nefarious, because passing SQL directly to the database is clearly not the intent of that interface, and that it's not the intent is obvious to the SQL injector. So the intent of the software is what matters. But then it's what matters in case 1 too. The lack of technical enforcement of this intent is not the issue.

Which leads me to some clarity about this:

> Not if you make a distinction between using a service and breaking a service.

I believe this use/break distinction exists, but the distinction isn't something that's determined by the code or the vaguer "design of the code"; it's determined by the purpose of the service. The service as it would be described functionally, not technically. The service was not meant to be used by Weev and his scraper any more than our librarian's database was meant to be used by SQL injection, or any more than your unencrypted traffic was meant to be intercepted by my packet sniffer (you did nothing to not authorize me to see it!). To drive that home, the library's hapless database admin who foolishly decides to update the list of books using her own SQL injection bug is not hacking, because she is authorized to fiddle with the database, even though, in your terms, it's bypassing the design of the code.

In other words, authorization is not the same as the technical artifacts involved in authorization. More generally, I don't think being bad at making software justifies people accessing it when they know it's not meant for them.

As the law is actually applied here, I am somewhat sympathetic to Weev, on the grounds that I don't think it was a serious crime (imagine if it were bank account information!), but that's a quantitative issue, not a qualitative one. I can also see that there are many cases where it isn't obvious whether something is meant for you to access or not (like a door that seems to lead into a public place but which turns out to be a private space), and I can imagine there being issues there. But this isn't one of them.

[1] http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/breaking+and+e...