IANAL, but legally speaking unauthorized access is a crime regardless of how easy it was to gain access.
1. This would allow all of those 'You agree that you are not a law enforcement official' B.S. 'terms of use' on warez servers to actually have teeth.
2. "If you are a {black,hispanic,gay,etc} person, you are not allowed to access my website."
Do any of these sound reasonable? I should hope not.
* How about that 'MySpace Hacking' case? From Wikipedia:
Judge Wu summed up his opinion by stating that allowing a violation of a
website's Terms of Service to constitute an intentional access of a computer
without authorization or exceeding authorization would "result in
transforming section 1030(a)(2)(C) into an overwhelmingly overbroad enactment
that would convert a multitude of otherwise innocent Internet users into
misdemeanant criminals." For these reasons, Judge Wu granted Drew's motion
for acquittal. Government eventually decided not to appeal [16].
Somebody runs a program to guess passwords until they find one that works. "Ah ha," they say, "I have a password, so my usage is now authorized." I don't think a judge or jury will buy that. Even if the password was easy to guess.
I believe that was SpikeGronim's point. Assuming the definition of unauthorized is legit, there's no such "it was too easy" defense. Or "I could do it, therefore I must have been allowed to do it."
How long until posting a negative comment to a blog is "unautorized access" to that blog? Gaining access was easy: all you had to do was type a comment and hit submit. But some Powers That Be decided they didn't really want you to post that, so now it's a federal computer crime.
Land of the free.
This case is currently winding its way through the courts, and will hopefully be overturned: http://volokh.com/2011/06/14/petition-for-rehearing-filed-in...
With only a few exceptions, persons accused of crimes are not presumed to have mens rea. Statutory rape, for instance, has "strict liability"; even if you don't know you're committing a crime, you're liable. Most criminal offenses are not like this. The state is required to establish mens rea.
A prosecutor could say that a ToS-infringing blog comment is a criminal violation, but unless that prosecutor can establish that the comment was made in purposeful, knowing, or reckless violation of the ToS, they'd be wasting their time.
As a side note, I think we all should be more careful with "omg, we're losing our freedoms!" comments. They're usually not as clever as they feel at the time, and have the dangerous property of inuring us to such claims.