> This ruling is really confusing for me. So I feel pretty strongly that what Van Buren did is a massive abuse of authority and it warrants punishment. I would

> This ruling is really confusing for me. So I feel pretty strongly that what Van Buren did is a massive abuse of authority and it warrants punishment. I wouldn't disagree with your judgement here, but you wouldn't charge him with murder right? Neither should you charge him with hacking. > If I start selling off information about user to third parties (say journalists), how can that be legal? Well, by default it would be legal, except I imagine any employment contract would have a provision around privacy, disclosure, and trade secrets, etc. You'd be in violation of the contract, and since you made money from it, some form of fraud or similar would apply. The question is, would you consider that the same crime as someone without access to the production database breaking in and grabbing the data, and perhaps just giving it away for free (so they'd avoid committing a bunch of other criminal acts).