Why does creating a virus carry lighter penalties than marijuana offences?
Jeffrey Lee Parson pleaded guilty last week to unleashing part of the MSBlast worm attack that wreaked havoc on the Internet a year ago. He got off easy. Federal prosecutors predictably touted Parson’s guilty plea as an example for other would-be vandals. John McKay, the US Attorney for Seattle, proclaimed: “The damage to individual computer users is very real, and the penalties are also very real.” Not really. McKay neglected to mention that Parson’s all-expense-paid visit to Club Fed will be surprisingly brief. Prosecutors say that the deal they cut means that Parson, who is 19 years old, will be sentenced to between 18 and 37 months. That’s mild punishment for someone who admitted to inserting nasty features into the original version of MSBlast to make it more noxious. By releasing his “MSBlast.B” variant that took advantage of a bug in Microsoft Windows, Parson intentionally harmed tens of thousands of people for his own amusement. Compare Parson’s sentence with the far stiffer pen
