You can't go to Windows Update and get a patch for stupidity.

I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.

Computer hacking really results in financial losses and hassles. The objectives of terrorist groups are more serious. That is not to say that cyber groups can't access a telephone switch in Manhattan on a day like 9/11, shut it down, and therefore cause more casualties.

So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock.

A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies, but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company, and that person complies, and if the attacker gets in, then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted.

I was pretty much the government's poster boy for what I had done.

My argument is not that I shouldn't have been punished, but that the punishment didn't fit the crime.