Step 1: Write a ToS for your private entity

Step 2: Catch someone violating it

Step 3: Sic the Feds (government) on them for violating it (your private, unvetted agreement).

(no comment from me personally, but I think that's what the GP was saying.)

I'm pretty sure sneaking into a server closet and patching your computer into their network was already against the law before this incident happened.

It was a janitorial closet, not a server room. And connecting to a network is not illegal.

You're asserting that it's legal for you to plug your computer into a piece of networking infrastructure that's clearly not intended for general public use, without the permission of that network's owner?

I'm going to have to slap a [citation needed] on that.

It's the same network that's available elsewhere on campus, so it's not like he was connecting without authorization. Aside from possibly trespassing, what kind of crime would it be?

Are you suggesting that there's a kind of network equipment that you have to trespass to access for which people have a reasonable expectation that they are authorized to use it?

There's no giant sign hanging over the breaker box in my building's elevator room saying "AUTHORIZED USE ONLY", but I'm pretty sure I'd get in trouble if I went in there and started flipping switches.

If I'm a student, and there's a switch in the teachers' lounge that connects to the same network that I am allowed to access in the rest of the school, then I can illicitly enter the teachers' lounge and plug in to that network with the same authorization that I would have outside.

Edit: doesn't have to be wifi.

I don't follow, but then, we're not talking about wifi networks.

I still don't follow.

Look, if your issue here is that there's no apparent bright line that needs to be crossed to violate the CFAA --- that you don't have to break a 128 bit AES key for instance, or inject a ROP payload --- I guess that's a valid complaint, but it speaks to a pretty profound (and very common, especially with nerds) misunderstanding about the way the law works.

The prosecution does not need to produce a cryptographically signed unimpeachable notarized audit log spelling out exactly which parts of the US Code Swartz broke at each timestamped moment of the day.

Instead, they have to convince a jury that a reasonable person should believe that Swartz knew he was violating JSTOR's terms, took constructive steps to violate those terms, and did so purposefully to commit a fraud.

All we have to go on is the story laid out in the indictment; Swartz has a side to tell here too. But if you just go on the indictment, I think there's a pretty decent case to be made against him.

The whole reason he (allegedly) plugged into it was that it wasn't the same network. There were rate limits and / or other access restrictions on the wifi that weren't in effect when you plugged directly into the equipment in the closet.

No, but scraping all the articles off JSTOR using MIT's negotiated access in order to put them onto BitTorrent sure is.

That is not how the law works.