This isn't looking good for MIT--in fact, it looks outright schizophrenic. How can you give a professorship to the architect of the Morris worm but not even sign off on a plea bargain with someone who just downloaded a bunch of JSTOR papers? Maybe some of the powers that be at MIT are in too deep with the academic publishing industry, if not apparently JSTOR in particular.
He got community service, probation and a $10k fine. There would have been no general outrage, and no suicide, if the prosecutor sought a similar penalty in this case.
He also fought his case to the end, and even appealed. He did not take a plea deal. His sentence was relatively light because a judge said that the punishment did not fit the crime.
Honestly, Morris got extremely lucky. I'd be curious how he funded his defense, because that case seems to have gone on longer than this one.
You won't get rich, but at the higher levels, you can make a pretty good amount of money.
GS-15 starts around 120k for base pay, if you are a "research scientist" there's an identifier that can add 80-100k. The cost of living increase near the NSA hq is about 21 percent of base pay. I hear there's levels above GS-15, but I've never seen the pay chart for them.
There's no level above GS-15 per se, but there is a higher tier of civil servant called SES (Senior Executive Service), which is approximately equivalent to Admiral/General-level rank in the military.
I believe the pay for SES and above (e.g. appointed officials) is defined by what's called the Executive Schedule.
SES is what I was thinking of. As you noticed, I'm not that familiar with how it works, I was just aware that there is something that pays more than the standard GS payscale.
Right, it's definitely respectable, but the costs were projected to be in the millions. Generally people making 150k/year or so cannot afford this.
FYI there is a hard cap on the payscale (according to wikipedia) of 155k. After base+adjustments+modifiers, it cannot exceed level IV of the Executive Schedule or something to that effect.
His sentence was probably a lot lighter in in 1988 because back then the only stuff on the Internet was internal to universities/government/research and non-commercial by definition. I am pretty confident the judge, prosecutor, etc. had no idea what the Internets were and had no personal interest in it. There was probably no AUSA trying to make a name for himself as the world's authority on cybercrime. Etc.
More importantly, he was a super sympathetic defendant, not someone who had previously done virtually the same thing to the DOJ and gotten off scott-free.
OTOH, if you want to see a really politically unconnected, very "unsympathetic" defendant get utterly fucked, the Escher Aurenheimer ("weev") case is a perfect example.
Hah! It took me a moment to realize you must be talking about Robert Tappan Morris. I recall his full name because that's how you refer to convicted felons, which is exactly what he was when I read Cyberpunk as a kid. I certainly wouldn't have guessed tenure at MIT was what the future held for him. Funny world we live in :)
