Damage Multiplier
It does annoy me immensely that Govts and companies can lose much more sensitive data on a weekly basis, and nobody gets even remotely threatened with "being fried" or banged up for 20 years.
During our current "Times of War" (tm Bush Cheney Corp), surely leaving in the pub an unencrypted hard disk with the personal details of every serving and retired British serviceman is an act of gross misconduct which should be construed as giving aid to the enemy? You don't need much of an imagination to know what kidnapping/assassinating a gaggle of former generals & their families would do for the enemy's cause...
If during WWII or Cold War, a War Ministry official had "accidentally" left a file with highly sensitive names and addresses on it; there would a good chance he'd either be swinging from the gallows - or at least doing life. Yet now, data losses on a massive scale hardly even merit 2 column inches buried near the TV section of the newspapers.
Oh, and lets not bother mentioning the billions of physical dollars (as well as tons of military hardware) that have fallen into the hands of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan due to sheer negligence and staggering incompetence of "Allied" personnel or their lackey contractors. Nobody is "being fried" or doing 20 in the pokey for that. Now, surely one would imagine that handing "terrrists" the monetary or physical means to substantially enhance their offensive capabilities would be considered more serious than a UFO geek taking a virtual wander around unsecured servers?? Do we see those responsible being locked up by the truckload??
So, to those obviously braindead and brainwashed "he's guilty - send him to jail" brigade; who more rightly deserves extradition/long jail sentences?? The hacker who didn't remove a byte of sensitive data and only did as much "damage" as Patch Tuesday causes? Or the civil/military personnel who lose gigabytes on a regular basis?
If that's too close to call for you, don't you think those who've given billions of hard currency and tons of hardware to known insurgents should be in line to go to jail *before* the guy who didn't remove a byte of sensitive data?? Or, taking the argument wider - how about raising extradition warrants on the members of a certain arab royal family who have been caught numerous times funding terrorist organisations and are known to visit the UK/Europe on shopping trips??
"You can take a man to the pool of knowledge, but you can't make him think".
It's cases like this that make me realise the planet really is controlled by idiots and for idiots.