| That analogy doesn't fit here at all. In your case they intend to cause harm to someone at the start by literally shooting someone. You are presupposing intent and harm of a person and certainly there were neither in the hacker's case. A better analogy, that maybe is more fitting, is you blow through a stoplight and kill someone. That's definitely negligence but there was no intent to hurt someone, the intent was to speed to a destination. The intent here was to use computing resources to launch an attack on another hacker group, nothing that would have intently harmed a person at the clinic. They could have accidentally hurt someone though. And if they did it would be recklessness, certainly negligent , but their intent was not to kill someone. And this is why we in the US have different laws for different situations that take into account negligence, intent, premeditation etc. None of them are alright but the state of mind the person committing the crime was in makes it varying degrees of bad. Someone who accidentally kills someone and someone who plots a cold blooded murder have both taken a life but, the one who killed on accident isn't as heinous or maybe as morally reprehensible. Life is mostly varying shades of grey and not strictly good or bad and that's why society has complex laws to dole out different punishments depending on situation. And finally, the hacker never harmed anyone in this case arguing on what they might have done is an abuse of the system imo. I might get up right now and burn my neighborhood to the ground, but you cant condemn me of it before I actually do it. (I won't) |
No one mindlessly hacks a utility control system.