Hard to say with any certainty, but there is the case of the founder of a certain Wikileaks-type organization currently playing out that you might want to look at...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev
AT&T put hundreds of thousands of subscriber emails on the web with no password or firewall or meaningful authentication of any kind. (They were server-sent autocompleted values in the username field of a login form that had a sequential integer URL argument.) He and a conspirator downloaded them all and sent them to the media to run stories about AT&T’s negligence (instead of, say, selling or publishing the list, or emailing them malware, et c).
He did a few years in federal, mostly in solitary.
I witnessed the terrible effects it had on his health and psyche. He was never the same person again after he got out. Solitary confinement is torture.
sophocles is right. There are two sets of laws in America, and the bigger one applies to you and not them. If you don’t show sufficient respect for their authority and the more restrictive set of rules they apply to your lower-status group, they will stretch their own rules to the point where you will be railroaded and subsequently tortured.
There are teenagers who were dating someone with a slightly too large age gap who spent far more time in prison than Epstein did.
The guy had been baiting people to clock him in the face for his anti-social behavior on the internet since forever. I don't think it was what he did to AT&T that got him sent up, he'd been on the feds' radar since at least the Sarah Palin email hack.
Perfect example of a guy just a little bit too far outside of the circle to get away with ignoring the inner party’s mandates.
They cooked up some insider trading to throw him in federal, too. He’s out now, I understand.
> It's pretty clear the crime here was unauthorized access to the server, not the sending of the information on to the media.
I think this is a good place as any to reassert that the CFAA is irrepairable and irredeemable at this point and MUST be scrapped with no replacement.
How about we stop justifying hurting people because of their (in this case retroactive) violations of social/political norms and worry more about if our society itself is tolerable and is, in fact, sometimes perfectly deserving of extreme reactions.
