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.
