I'm never speaking as a lawyer on HN, just as someone has some familiarity with the justice system that anyone could acquire by reading the news. I don't think my opinion should carry any more water than that.

The longest sentence for hacking in the U.S. on record, according to Wired, is for a guy who stole two million credit card numbers and sold them for $20 a pop to organized crime: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/max-vision-sentenci.... He was sentenced to 13 years and paying $27.5 million in restitution, but will be serving about 9 years in a minimum security prison.

The maximum sentences exist for guys like that (and I don't think 9 years in prison is unreasonable for hacking that resulted in $86 million in fraudulent charges).

A quick Google-ing shows that people who engage in activity that doesn't actually cause substantial economic damages, even when facing a dozen felony counts, just don't get substantial jail time. Which makes the "35 years in prison" hand-waving just plain misleading.

Now, maybe you think a 6 month suspended sentence and a felony record are too harsh for illegally accessing a network. I tend to agree with you--I think that copyright infringements should be purely civil matters and accessing networks without permission should be misdemeanors, not felonies. But that's a totally separate argument than: "OMG our system is so fucked he was going to get 35 years for not doing anything wrong!"

I guess my point is that things can be wrong without being an indictment of our whole society. Not everything we should change is the result of the fundamental corruption of our society, the fact that our Congress people are bought out, the fact that our government is one step away from fascism, etc. When you throw the misleading "decades in prison" language around, you force the debate in that direction, instead of more sensible and productive ones ("maybe we should make the misdemeanor case of the CFAA more robust and not so easily side-stepped by simply claiming the hacking was in the furtherance of some other crime.")

Thank you.

I think one of the problems here is that the 'decades in prison' thing is actually used at all, especially by the prosecutors.

If there is no chance of 'decades in prison' then it shouldn't be used in the first place. Such bluffing and posturing leads to all kinds of trouble and I can't see anything good coming from it.

The other part - the civil / felonies - bit I think is slightly more nuanced. Big time commercial piracy versus most others kinds, where the felonies should obviously be handed out to big time commercial pirates. This may be hard to put together in a way that holds water legally, but that opens the door to overreach.

What I've gleaned from the Aaron Swartz case so far is that the actual thing Aaron tried to do (the downloading) turned out to be non-punishable because of the JSTOR reversal, so instead, a lot of hay is being made over something that is actually peripheral to the whole case.

It's like someone with driving with their lights off being charged with a whole slew of offenses because they can't be charged for breaking and entering. Going for the absolute maximum penalty that you can attach in every contrived way possible to driving with your lights off.

This comes across as quite surreal and unjust.

You sound like a crazy person, Jacques. Take a deep breath. Rayiner isn't trying to con you. He is who he says he is. You could verify that easily if you wanted to.