> No one is saying that. If he was hit with trespassing then it would be a different story. He was political target hit with the worst laws they could find that remotely applied to his case.
He was hit with the hacking equivalent of trespassing. The point is that the fact that the network is unprotected or poorly protected doesn't make it any less "hacking" than the fact that property is unprotected or poorly protected makes it less "trespassing." What matters is whether Schwartz had permission to access the network for the kind of activity he engaged in, and he did not have such permission.
> No one is saying that. If he was hit with trespassing then it would be a different story. He was political target hit with the worst laws they could find that remotely applied to his case.
The aspies here are the techies who can't fathom why someone might characterize Schwartz's actions as "hacking into MIT's network to steal millions of scientific documents" and do so in good faith. It's aspies to not see how most people would see the situation that way, and rage at the prosecutor instead of acknowledging the larger task of changing people's views.
> Just the idea that Ortiz and Heymann had no choice but to hit Schwarz with these specific set of charges is absurd.
I didn't say she had no choice, I said her case was within the scope of the law. This is not a case where a prosecutor stretched obscure statute to railroad an innocent victim. This case was based on laws that proscribed exactly the kinds of activities the defendant undertook.
My point is that there are two very different kinds of "injustice" and people are confusing them.
In some cases, prosecutors charge defendants with completely tangentially-related laws in order to railroad them. But in this case the laws were on point. The real injustice is that the laws regarding "hacking" make no distinction between something like what Schartz did, and Russian mafia hacking into Bank of America's network.