> You are not allowed unauthorized access regardless of how the key works.

You and I seem to both speak/write English, but there is a language barrier. For me, "authorization" means that they have given me credentials, and any content locked down under those credentials is off-limits.

For you, "authorization" is a magical term that has no real meaning. It means that they want me to have the content. But I am no telepath, and I do not know what they want me to have or do not want me to have. The only way, from my point of view, to know what they want me to have or not is to try to retrieve the content without credentials, and if it succeeds, it's legal.

Of course, there are a few corner cases. What if I discover some software defect that very clearly shows they intended to require credentials, and a test without credentials shows that it is indeed off-limits, but exploiting the defect produces that content? I wouldn't do that, that'd be illegal.

But your way of (non-)thinking is alien to me, and no reasonable judge or legislator could possibly mean what you claim that law states. Or at least what you seem to claim.

>No you're not. Denial of service is a federal crime.

Only with intent. If I send reasonable content that shouldn't be DoS, how was I to know? I intend no crime.

>Yes you do, and this is just beyond silly.

You're the one being silly. You can't even decide what you mean by "authorized".

>The nuance of how you obtained it will be decided in a court.

I'm never going to trial, I'm not even going to be noticed.

>Use of a vulnerability to cause

Use of a clear defect. The biggest and most dangerous vulnerabilities are the apathy and stupidity of their employees, their lack of a sane business model and attainable vision, and so on. Using those is just common sense. There is a popular magazine that is subscription only. But they have the pdf download links hidden with display: none CSS. These links require no authorization. Just knowledge. I retrieve those quite punctually.

You're both veering out of CFAA jurisprudence in different ways. But you know you're in trouble when you start saying things like "I am no telepath", because in fact a big part of an ambiguous CFAA case will be determining what a reasonable person (ie: the jury) would think confronted with the computer system under discussion. There will in fact be mind reading involved; your intent would in fact be tried.

There's nothing at all CFAA-specific about this; this is really basic US criminal law and it comes up in all sorts of different criminal justice contexts. The terms you're both dancing around are mens rea and actus reus.