Anyone who's done networking knows that ethernet and wifi are not equivalent. I'll grant you he was escalating his bandwidth; what is this "privilege" you describe which was neither physical nor technical?
No, I think you're misunderstanding a key part of this: MIT has a layer of defense between their public-access networks (like campus wifi) and their core network. Among other things, that's the layer their antiscraping defenses live in.
The closet router was deeper than that -- inside that layer of defense. Aaron didn't just plug in for bandwidth or permanence -- he did it because it was a trusted subnet that would evade the protections and restrictions MIT places on their public access points.
Ah, noted. Evading rate limiting to a resource you have lawful access to still reads to me as bandwidth, not privilege, but point taken.
But still— unlocked closet, unsecured network, all, we are given to understand, because of a very lenient open network policy. If he was not "authorized" access, what is the authority, and when would the authorization have taken place? It seems a terribly tough row to hoe.
Indeed, I'm finding myself in a strange place in this debate, because I do think that computer crime laws are very vague and extremely harsh, including the ones Aaron was being prosecuted under. But I think Aaron's defenders go too far when they claim he was completely innocent.
Respect; you're a fine devil's advocate. I'll definitely agree what Aaron was doing was cheeky, and anyone could have seen how it could easily get him in trouble with MIT or JSTOR or maybe even the cops. It's just hard to point out what actual part of the law as written was broken, since it looks like he didn't actually circumvent anything that would normally be called security except in the sense of "We didn't think anyone would do that."
