> I don't think it makes any sense at all to treat each page as a separate household on private property.
It's certainly true that some pages on a site might be private to someone else and others not. The page/site distinction is orthogonal to the authorized/unauthorized distinction. It's not clear to me why, in your story, it was OK to ask for ID 334, but it if it were, that doesn't automatically make it OK to grab 335.
The library is itself an analogy and it's a bit broken here, because of course at a library the ISBNs and the books they correspond to aren't meant to be private, unlike the ATT/Weev case. So let's imagine that your iPad automatically looked up your email address using its ICC ID because that was why they built it (I don't actually know if that's the case or not). It doesn't follow that you have permission to look up everyone else's. That's where I was going with the doors analogy. I hope that clears that up.
> There is explicit permission to contact the web server.
I deleted my counter to this because I think it's an irrelevant semantics issue. Let's let that one go.
> In the former case, I may be doing something unexpected, but I am not exceeding the authority given to me.
We keep stumbling on this concept of authority, and this thing about design. The design part I don't get. Didn't the library software's author design the system so that it took query parameters and directly formed SQL strings out of them? So isn't it working exactly as designed? Of course not, because the designer never intended it to be used that way [1]. So their intention is exactly what matters, and the same applies to trying incremental ICC IDs--clearly not the intent of the service. That's why this design/expectation dichotomy isn't there, or at least isn't relevant (it's also why I was distinguishing the "purpose of the software" from the "design of the code" earlier).
As for authority, you continue to see it as something the webserver can provide by virtue of its technical characteristics, and I--and the law--simply don't. Authorization in the technical sense is a technological codification of an authorization policy, which may be implicit. If that policy is obvious (which I think it is here), then it's that policy that matters, not its technical enforcement. I fear we're retreading ground here, though, and this may just boil down to having different axioms.
[1] You could say that there are layers to design and that the flaw in the designs here ("don't do any access control" vs "don't sanitize strings") are at grossly different granularities. That's true, but I'm not sure how you plan to formalize the appropriate level of generality that makes such a design flaw equivalent to permission to entry as opposed to simply not working as designed. I don't think you can without resorting to the designer's intent.
