That's because NJ literally doesn't have a case against the students -- there have been no charges filed. This is an unconstitutional fishing expedition that I suspect is intended to intimidate and create an atmosphere of fear, not just among Bitcoiners but all tinkerers and hackers (in the MIT/HN sense of the word).
As someone at Berkeley who's been to many events at MIT, I feel like the definition of Silicon Valley/West Coast "hacker" is very different from the MIT hacker.
SV/West Coast has largely adopted the same term, albeit in a much looser sense.
Hack was then used by MIT's TMRC of which many members became involved with/helped build the AI-lab. The first third of Hackers (http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Anniversar...) gives a good perspective on the evolution.
But all that is pretty immaterial to the question at hand. Both hacker subcultures are probably intended as the target of intimidation.
But it really feels like there is more to the story. Perhaps someone reused the existing code in malware? Or maybe New Jersey is simply confused.
The EU cookie case is indeed an excellent parallel - cookies are so thoroughly entrenched into the business models of the web that all that's been accomplished is the more compliant websites throw up a big annoying banner you must dismiss. If you try to hamstring javascript the same way, the shady websites that actually run the stuff you want to worry about will take no notice. And the nice websites will explode with infinite regress trying to figure out how to obtain consent to run their cookie banner javascript...