You Get Off a Lot Easier with Rape than with Hacking!

What I'm going to write next is about to astonish you, I sure know it made my jaw drop when I first got a hold of the news. Perhaps you've already read the material about the boy who shut down Internet access in Marshfield. If you didn't or you don't remember it too well, allow me to say it briefly. The culprit is an 18 year old (initially I wanted to call him "man", but he's just a boy) from Berlin. What he did was attack a server from the United States and take down Internet access for about 18 hours.

Now, he could get a maximum sentence of 14 ½ years and this is just outrageous! Why? Well, because you can get off a lot easier with rape! In some states you get 13 years or less for raping a person. Sure, you can be sentenced to death in some countries for this, but in some, the sentence is milder. So how can you compare hacking a computer with raping some one? Seriously! You get life for killing someone and close to 15 years for hacking. Just think about it, when this guy gets out of jail, his life will be pretty much ruined, not to say anything about his reputation. Now, that makes hacking not worth a dime in my opinion.

Sure, I agree that hackers should be convicted for their crimes and that harsh punishments are in order, but all this guy did was deny Internet access to a town for a day. I guess that they just want to make an example out of this 18 year old. Oh, and I almost forgot, he did a total damage of around $4.000. So, let's see - you hack a couple of Solarus computers, you shut down Internet access to a town, you do some minor damage and you can get 14 ½ years for it, while rape sentences have been milder.

So, if this guy gets the maximum sentence, I hope this will at least have some effect on the hacker world. If he suffers so much for his actions, I hope that this will discourage others from following in his steps. I seriously think that computer hackers should be stopped, but are such sentences really correct?