There are deep historic and cultural reasons for this approach. Homes and businesses are generally not secure because the doors are locked, they are secure because the people around them don't try and break in or even check if the door is locked. In city's where that changes you see what looks like more security, but that has surprisingly little impact as it mostly convinces people to break in somewhere else.

What changed in computing is the internet is the worlds largest 'city' by a huge margin and people can mostly automate checking to see not just if the door is locked but if the lock is of poor quality. Clearly in that situation laws are going to have limited value, but because they have been so successful in the past it's really hard to get out of that mindset.

PS: Sure, there is crime, but compared to say 20,000 years ago the odds some kills you and takes your stuff next year is tiny.

Good comparison with locks, because when you read lockpicking topics it looks the same. That pin tumbler locks are bad and whole industry for locks is bad because they should provide better options and throw away pin tumblers. Most of people are not getting robbed only having basic locks. Second is that actually thiefs are not picking locks but smashing doors or opening them with crowbar.

I think it is a good idea to make hacking be viewed as heavy offense instead of fun and games. Of course you can do it on your own servers for fun but do not touch what is not yours.

That is effectively the law right now (at least in the US). But between a media circus of demonization (which frequently arises in cases like these), the government's demonstrated aggressiveness and zeal in pursuit of hacking charges (see Aaron Swartz), and public ignorance and fear, it is difficult to receive a truly fair trial.

> Second is that actually thiefs are not picking locks but smashing doors or opening them with crowbar.

I think people have an implicit threat-model that their home/business would be robbed by a cat burglar, rather than a robber. Because, if they, as a regular person, wanted to steal stuff, cat burglary is what they'd do, because it makes it a lot easier to get away with.

People don't realize, of course, that thieves are usually people rather desperately in need of money—people who need a short-term solution to an urgent problem—and so not only don't care as much about the long-term risk of their actions, but really don't have time to "case the joint" or come up with a stealthy solution.

> people can mostly automate checking to see not just if the door is locked but if the lock is of poor quality

From across the world. Lack of proximity overturns the effectiveness of millennia of social norms.

I completely agree. It's strange to me that people are so scared of 'all of the hackers'. It's not like everyone with a black belt in karate runs around beating up everyone they see. Personally, everyone I know who has a deeper understanding of computer security, is so caught up in their curiosity, and getting 'that next trick' (more like skateboarders) that they don't even have a trace of the inclination, the time, or the threshold for the risk of prison time as it would interfere with their research, to plot and execute the type of stuff that people are so worried about.

You might like this talk on historical computer viruses and the shift from hobby to business in the 2000's. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yswPIwDFYDY

It's true that there are lots of white-hat hackers, but there are also lots of black-hat ones, many of them, I gather, associated with criminal organizations -- and as Retric points out, the Internet allows attacks to come from anywhere on the planet. I don't think it's responsible to suggest that people are unnecessarily worried about the problem.

(Full disclosure: I work in the computer security industry.)