What might @ProjectLincoln have done legally (as opposed to morally) wrong, if -- as it appears -- it accessed the Twitter account of its former partner @NHJennifer to publish her DMs with a journalist writing about them?

Ugh, fine, let's discuss.
/1 https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1360085473784332293?s=20

/2 The most obvious potential crime lies within the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a train wreck of a statute that illustrates what happens frequently when Congress legislates about things it doesn't understand.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

/3 I'm not a CFAA expert -- thats @OrinKerr, for instance, and @mmasnick is very knowledgeable -- but I know a little. CFAA criminalizes, to the best of Congress' limited ability and understanding, certain unauthorized access to computer systems.

/4 The bottom line is that under some interpretations of the statute it's a federal crime to access a web site -- like, say, Twitter -- in a way that violates that site's Terms of Use, or in a way that is "without authorization" or "exceeds authorized access."

/5 How serious a crime it might be depends on what you do once you're there. If there's an argument you caused quantifiable damage or obtained certain types of information, it can be a felony. It can also be a misdemeanor.

/6 What happens when you give the feds an extremely flexible statute open to many interpretations governing a complex and constantly changing set of systems like the internet?

Bad things, mostly.

Here's a good piece by @mmasnick about some of the bad ways this broad discretion is used. It's more or less "we're mad, there must be some way to prosecute this person, ah, here it is." https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200709/17302644876/eff-orin-kerr-ask-supreme-court-to-prevent-turning-cfaa-into-convenient-way-to-punish-site-users-security-researchers.shtml

/8 And here is @OrinKerr's testimony before Congress on how bad the law is and how much troublesome unprincipled discretion it gives prosecutors.

https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/11/Testimony-of-Orin-S-Kerr.pdf

/9 So: if someone at @ProjectLincoln entered that Twitter account without authorization, a federal prosecutor could -- without breaking a sweat -- make a federal misdemeanor out of it. Will they? Very highly unlikely, and not really because of political partisanship.