Sentencing Cyber Crimes

The legal system does not know how to sentence cyber crimes, and it never has.  We can write all the sentencing guidelines we want, but it still comes down to a court applying normal rules of sentencing for certain types of crimes.  This is just one example taken from two recent cases that will illustrate the point.

Chris Correa was a baseball scout for the St Louis Cardinals.  He had come from the Houston Astros baseball club and, from my understanding, had passwords from the system that gave him access to the Astro's player databases.  Baseball being a statistics driven game, you can see the importance of that kind of data.  He was prosecuted for having unauthorized access to the Astro's system, though I would say that was not unauthorized access if he had it before and they failed to delete his accounts.  He was treated as if he were still an employee.  His lawyers may have overlooked that issue at trial, but maybe it never got that far.  He was sentenced to 46 months in prison.

The case of Su Bin, a Chinese National indicted for helping the PLA steal documents from defense contractors has finally been put to rest with a plea agreement that sends him to jail for 46 months.  Su was helping the PLA steal sensitive documents from Lockheed and Boeing on our most advanced aircraft.  He did this over a number of years and was helping translate some of the stuff into Chinese. He knew what he was doing.

Two crimes with the same sentence, but one is by a national of another country stealing secrets from our businesses, and the other is a baseball scout getting access to player data he probably had before.  Somehow, there does not seem to be justice in sentencing here.  This is something Congress and the Justice Department need to examine more closely.  Two disparate crimes, one with national security implications, and one with no implications what so ever, get the same sentence.  They are not equivalent.  They are not even the same crime, if you asked me.  On the other hand, how anyone can say Su Bin got a fair sentence for what he did, is beyond me.  He should have gotten life.  There is something wrong with the sentencing guidelines, which have been adjusted over and over in the 30 years these have been crimes.  Time for a new adjustment.