The kind where squabbles between two private parties are civil matters until and unless someone commits (or conspires to commit) an actual crime?

Particularly when the "harm" here is harm of reputation due the target's public actions? If I assemble a bunch of potentially-reputation-harming data on a public figure and post it on the internet with the clear intent of convincing people that public figure is incompetent, should that be an act that can get me landed in jail? Or is that speech?

Is the automated collection of that data really a thing that should be criminalized? Should it be criminal because or only when it includes identifying information of innocent bystanders?

This is publicly-available information.

Hypothetical scenario as an existence proof (not related to the situation currently at trial):

Suppose you're an investigative reporter. You regularly investigate a person or company that you feel gets away with too much, whose public actions always skate right on the line, and figure they must be doing something wrong. You feel vindictive about it because you haven't managed to find anything about them in the past. You fully intend to find something to report on that will cause their business harm; it's less about the story at this point, and more about you versus them. You find your story, you report on it (truthfully), and the result is serious enough that their business takes a major hit.

You had malicious intent to cause harm, and managed to cause the intended harm, and yet you've still done absolutely nothing wrong. (Remember that truth is an absolute defense against slander/libel accusations.)

Malicious intent to cause harm is frequently a necessary condition for a crime (leaving aside things like negligence), but never a sufficient one. You still have to do something inherently wrong.

In legal terms, see "mens rea" versus "actus reus".

Breaking into a computer system without permission by exploiting a security hole: generally a crime.

Accessing data made accessible to the general public: not wrong in the slightest, regardless of intent.

Changing your user-agent isn't exploiting a security hole (modulo changing it to ');drop table students;-- ), nor is automated access to a website (modulo DoSing). And embarrassing a company by showing that they made private user data publicly accessible definitely shouldn't be criminal.

>modulo changing it to ');drop table students;-- )

As an aside, about a year ago I made a simple web crawler that got (among other things) HTTP headers from all the servers it found. After an hour of crawling, I took the headers to start working on a parser for them, and found 7 attempts at an sql injection. Do I get to prosecute whoever set up those servers?

> What kind of reality do you live in where malicious intent to cause harm to someone or some group should not be a crime?

It depends somewhat on what you class as malice. Starting a business is usually a deliberate attempt to cause harm to competitors, and success at it may well cause thousands of people to lose their jobs, etc.

The world is simply becoming too complicated, all these "trajedy of the commons" type economics are blowing up in ways that are so harmful all over. I feel it is wrong for Weev to be in jail, the same way I feel it was wrong for max hardcore (paul little) to have went to jail, and so many others. I have been writing weev, he says he wishes more people will write him, it is very lonely in solitary confinement, in this complicated world, writing a letter to another human being seems the least I can do. I hope more people here do so too, even though I hated looking at all those goatse buttholes over the years and condemned the person who was doing that to me - LOL! I don't wish a human being to be locked up for years for what Weev has done.

Similarly, should the programmer(s) who implemented the feature (plus the staff who devised and approved it) be accused of reckless endangerment of the data?