Those rose colored glasses seem to have forgotten Kevin Mitnick, and the accounting practices used to inflate the impression of the amount of damage he did. He was confined to solitary for eight months (out of five years served) due to fears that he could "start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone".

The 90's in the school's computer lab may have felt differently if you escaped any sort of punishment for exploration, but the CFAA was first enacted in 1986 and the punishment for computer crimes have been disproportional since before then, owing to societal lack of understanding of how computers actually work.