>If I knock on a door, it swings open, and I walk inside and steal something, then imho there should be a lesser maximum charge for possessing burglary tools than if I show up with a lock gun, crowbar, and concrete saw.

Why? (I'm not a lawyer...) - shouldn't intent and harm (i.e. the value of the stolen item) be the only relevant details? Now of course its much easier to demonstrate intent if there's a crowbar involved, but once that's already established, it seems irrelevant.

Because that's the way most method-specific laws work, at least in the US.

There's an underlying result crime (eg causing business harm by destroying a database), then the method by which one chose to do it (eg exceeding authorized access to a computer with the intent to cause harm).

The CFAA was originally passed under the erroneous worry that existing laws wouldn't be enforceable against cybercrime, which turned out to generally be false.

When you cause damage, there's almost always a law by which someone can sue you for those damages.

What there wasn't, and what the CFAA created, were extra penalties for computer crimes and an ability to charge people with computer crimes where there were no damages (eg Aaron Swartz).

And why should those things need to exist? Theft is theft. Destruction is destruction.

It was an underspecified law, ripe for prosecutor overreach. See: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/HTML/R47557...

It fit with 'premeditated intent' intensifiers (where penalties escalate if premeditated intent can be proven)... but that wasn't actually how it was written or how it is used. Instead, it's a method-based checkbox that allows prosecutors to tack on additional charges / penalties. If a computer was used to destroy this thing, add X years the sentence.

If you're saying there should only be theft charges either way, that's fine.

But if there are burglary tool charges, they should depend on whether you used burglary tools to burgle, not how much theft you did.