The question is whether the usage was authorized not whether it was successful.
This was ultimately to prevent stuff like burglars falling through skylights, then suing the owner of the house they were burgling in civil court while facing criminal prosecution.
I'd be staggered if it was possible to make a relatively weak "authorization" claim stick, seeing as how the police do have the right to investigate things left "in plain view" which you could argue a web server page which you accidentally sent compromising fuzz data too could fall under.
A court would also have little trouble allowing such a thing, since it's a narrow interpretation that doesn't legalize it for the ordinary citizen (though IMO I think it probably should be).
That doesn't make sense to me. You haven't "committed a crime" until you've been convicted.
You seem to be saying that you lose the rights merely by being suspected of a crime.
If that is the case, those rights don't actually exist in the first place.
In the US, they have successfully prosecuted people for "fiddling" just like the FBI did here.
The point here is somewhat similar: trying to sue the FBI for unauthorized access to a server would hinge on the relative standing of that law compared to much more serious offences (i.e. conspiracy to murder being the big one) - since the case would have to come from DPR against the FBI, and would thus be subject I suspect to similar tests of standing.
Other people have made the wider point more thoroughly as well - you'd really struggle to prove wrongdoing when all that was acquired was an IP address.
To answer my own question, I guess you could say weev, but I think his troubles really began when he made the pivot from fiddling to mass scraping. I think it's harder to argue the FBI's access was unauthorized when what they were looking at was the "access is denied" page.