Man who hacked Scarlett Johansson's e-mail sentenced to 10 years

This sentence is everything wrong with the American justice system. I do NOT want my tax payer dollars to be spent keeping a hacker in jail along with with murderers and rapists.<p>Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton drive around coked up and drunk and get either probation or a 1 month/1 year sentence but someone hacking a phone (who doesn't endanger anyone's life) gets 10 years???

The lesson here is clear: if you have money, there is no such thing as crime. If you don't have money, like this guy, then even if you plead guilty you get <i>years</i> in prison.<p>HSBC can aid terrorists and launder money from drug cartels and pay a fine. Goldman Sachs knowingly sells junk to their clients, minimizing their own exposure to the financial crisis, and gets a bailout.<p>Fuck this shit.

Poor bastard. He did something that is unquestionably highly unethical and illegal, but he was also an awkward, messed-up nerdy guy who arguably just needed some real friends and a chance.<p><a href="http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201205/chris-chaney-hacker-nude-photos-scarlett-johansson?printable=true" rel="nofollow">http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201205/chris-chan...</a>

Now when we discuss the legality of NSA having wide open access to citizen emails and other personal data, we'll have a good reference point on what happens when regular people do it.

Here's a thought experiment:<p>Many people here seem to be okay with the idea of this being a punishable offense, but take issue with the length of the sentence (which I'll admit, seems excessive on first blush).<p>But what would an acceptable sentence be for hacking someone's email and then distributing their personal information? Maybe a year? That doesn't sound outrageous.<p>So if he did that, and was sentenced to a year in prison, and then got out and did it again, presumably another year in prison isn't unreasonable (you could argue for a harsher sentence because it was a repeat crime, but we'll ignore that).<p>So he did this to 50 different accounts. That's 50 separate crimes. He took a plea (which resulted in being found guilty of a lesser number of charges), and that got him 10 years.<p>I still think 10 years seems like a lot of time to spend in jail for a nonviolent crime, but shouldn't the number of crimes be used somehow in calculating a sentence?

10 years is far too long.<p>I agree the punishment for hacking emails should be harsh, because your email is your <i>life</i>. But not 10 years... because reading or leaking someone's email is not akin to killing them.

People seem to be focusing on this 10 year number and being really upset, but I'm wondering if anyone actually read the article. The article claims he had access to 50 email accounts and plead guilty to 9 counts of various charges. A linked document mentioned something about a "28-count superseding indictment", which I won't claim to understand. However, the point is, most people here appear, to me at least, that they think it's 1 person's email that he got access to. It's a little bit more than that.

So now that the court agrees that the sentence for hacking email is 10 years, when do we start convicting the entire NSA, AT&#38;T, on up to the Executive head (the President) for doing this to the entire USA? If there is no conviction for these people, then he is clearly not being treated equally under the law, and deserves to be set free.

He may have been better off murdering someone.

More extreme sentencing. Long live the prison state.

The US spends about $52 Billion on people in prison. There are about 2.3 million people in US prisons, with nearly 5 million people on parole.<p>The reason isn't because the US puts more people per year into prison; the reason is that the US keeps people in prison for so long.<p>The incredibly high prison rate has other weird effects. People are expected to die in prison but prison guards are not trained to deal with people at end of life. Dementia in particular is difficult for anyone to deal with.<p>I found this article moving:<p>Life, With Dementia (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html?hp=&#38;pagewanted=all&#38;_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...</a>)<p>And here's another article about prison hospice:<p>(<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1121-prison-hospice-html,0,280840.htmlstory" rel="nofollow">http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1121-prison-hospice-...</a>)<p>We know that prison doesn't work for most prisoners. So why do we spend so much money keeping people there? (There are some people who deserve to be in jail, and who cannot live in wider society.)

I don't know much about this story and certainly don't condone the behaviour, but from the article it seems all he was doing was abusing the password reset system offered by the service providers, which as anyone reading hacker news will know is a very flawed security model (I use random data for answers when they force security q/a). Not exactly high level hacking (it's no firesheep session hijack for example) so seems a bit harsh considering. Surely this is really an issue of a very bad security hole being abused, more responsibility should be directed to the email providers to get better with their security. Again not saying such behaviour should go unpunished, he deserves jail time certainly, but this should also be a clear signal that service providers need to get more serious about security and take more responsibility.<p>edited for clarity.

Wow. He might have received less time for attempted murder [1]<p><a href="http://themercury.com/articles/man-gets-5-years-for-murder-attempt" rel="nofollow">http://themercury.com/articles/man-gets-5-years-for-murder-a...</a>

10 years seems a bit steep.<p>Wonder what Scarlett thinks of this; someone read her email, and is now in jail for 10 years.