The lawmakers who passed the CFAA generally assumed that computers were industrial equipment, and that computer networks were like the railroad network. It was still assumed that home computer access would be in the form of online services and thin clients, and that PCs were just a hobby (if they had even heard of PCs). To them, unauthorized use of a computer was the equivalent of stealing a freight train.

None of the consequences of the law were unintended. The lawmakers never gave any thought to the idea of hackers being something other than criminals. The idea of PCs being the dominant mode of computing remains foreign to most of our lawmakers, who think that their laptops, desktops, and tablets are just terminals used to connect to industrial systems. Killing the hacker spirit is not unintended; the law envisioned a world without hackers at all.

It is still assumed by those in power that programming is something you do for pay (and for the maximum pay you can find), that source code is a valuable industrial secret, and that the Internet is divided into "clients" and "servers" (i.e. it is just a shadow of the world, which is "producers" and "consumers"). Sure, there are "hobbyists" out there who play with computers, but the serious work and the dissemination of technology is done by industry. It is the same worldview that says that research can only be done by those with an affiliation and that legal documents can only be read by lawyers (hence the prosecution of Aaron Swartz).