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Why on earth does the hacker get punished?

Grumpy07 21st Jan 2009

It seems to me that during this discussion the focus is on the wrong guy. This "do the crime, do the time" mantra is really beyond comprehension for me.

If someone breaks into my network and erases data, my customer/boss will put me, as a sysadmin, on fire. Why the hell did I allow it to happen in the first place?

I think the real culprits may be:
- the OS/webserver/whatever producer
- the sysadmins who did a poor job at defending the network
- the managers who did a poor job at running the organization

Punishing this easy-to-catch guy is pointless. NASA should actually send him a thank-you note saying: Thank you for deleting that sensitive data so that the really bad guys cannot read it any more.

Do you think "justice" is going to be applied to Chinese spies that could all to well view this data from their well-protected military compounds?

Applying justice only to the people who are not yourself and whom you can easily catch is morally unsound. And here, the real culprit is really within NASA.