I'm not sure how you define hacking. Web-scraping is not gaining unauthorized access to an otherwise inaccessible system. Anything you can see with your eyes in a browser is out in the open. And you can adjust a scraper's schedule to be mostly indistinguishable from human browsing habits.

That is, if a web-scraper can be reasonably indistinguishable from a human, then certainly we can't say web-scraping is illegal across the board.

I guess that was a poorly phrased question. Auernheimer was convicted of "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization" so more specifically, is web scraping the same thing as "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization"?

Web scrapers look just like real humans, and its publicly available data, so when a website doesnt authorize web scrapers, how do you draw a legal differentiations?

Depends on what the meaning of the word hacking is.

If your name is AT&T, then the answer is yes.