You answered your own question. Seems you're having trouble taking responsibility for the fact that you acted unprofessionally by lashing out with presumptive a

You answered your own question. Seems you're having trouble taking responsibility for the fact that you acted unprofessionally by lashing out with presumptive attacks on my beliefs, which are incorrect. The culture of that workplace is a mitigating factor for the lower ranked staff, conversely it is a compounding factor for the senior staff that failed to put an end to it and discipline those involved. Should you have been fired? Depends on how much you abused your privilege and what you did with that information. Your comparison to 1 strike laws and greater crime is pretty rich given the information you improperly accessed could be used to blackmail others, or whatever. It's important to treat such information with the utmost respect. Your cavalier attitude and inability to accept responsibility in this regard may be very common within the tech industry, but such attitudes are also why there is a growing movement to; take data out of the hands of companies, and to harshly punish companies who fail to protect the data on one hand while vacuuming up as much as possible with the other.