So aside from the fact that it's completely different, you're right, it's exactly the same.
Source?
2. He changed his MAC address because they blocked his old one.
I don't think that this alone should be enough for a conviction though. For instance, he wasn't privy to the reason that his network connection wasn't working anymore (so far as the MAC address was concerned). The prosecutors wanted to argue that changing the MAC address was a purposeful attempt to thwart restrictions, but from the outside he couldn't have known why the old MAC was no longer working.
3. Instead of using Harvard's network and signing up with his own name, he used MIT's network (which is open to the public) and signed up for access with a fake name. The prosecutors would have argued that this was his way of hiding his identity because he knew what he was doing was wrong.
4. The US Department of Justice has had a hard-on to expand the hacking statutes to cover "any crime with a computer." See the case about the MySpace/Facebook mother that drove her daughter's classmate to suicide. They tried to go after her for 'hacking' into the website because she signed up with a fake name which is against the Terms of Service (i.e. "unauthorized access" to the website).
You're conflating two networks. He had every right to access the public wifi network at MIT, which has numerous security and bandwidth-control mechanisms in effect.
He did not have every right to connect directly to MIT's core network infrastructure, which bypasses most of the above.
If an MIT professor left his laptop plugged into one of the public ports downloading a linux tarball unattended over night, is he liable under CFAA? What the professor left it in the unlocked closet instead, to minimize the risk of getting his laptop stolen?
He could have covered his face after his experience with PACER where he was legally in the right, but still got hounded by the FBI.
To indict someone, you don't have to prove your interpretation of the facts. You have to present evidence that supports your interpretation of the facts. The fact that he hid is face is perfectly reasonable evidence to suggest he knew he was accessing MIT resources he should not have, sufficient to support an indictment.
Now, maybe he could have argued that he nonetheless didn't know it wasn't meant for public access. I doubt the prosecutor would have believed that claim, or a jury. I don't believe it, and I honestly don't think you believe it either. So why drag us both down this ridiculous hypothetical?
The miscarriage of justice here is that they dropped the trespassing charge because the CFAA charge was so much more lucrative. There is no reason a minor network intrusion should carry a firmer penalty than an equivalent physical trespass. I wholeheartedly agree on that point. But to make the stronger argument that Aaron did nothing wrong, you have to put aside common sense to the point where you're arguing that a grown man didn't know he wasn't supposed to be doing something when even a child could have parsed the situation correctly.
The general public does not have a right to access MIT's network. MIT generously ALLOWS the general public some access to their network.