What confuses me right now is your ongoing very obvious leftist activist stance on HN vs refusing to entertain the thought that he got away with it because of his NSA dad.

Edit: I am not American. Please realize that I meant exactly what I wrote and not what some of you now imagine that I wrote. I have high trust in you!

To clarify: not a Trump fan.

Please expand?

He was and is very smart. This is not disputed. He was 23 at the time. Not exactly a child.

The worm was surprisingly elaborate containing three separate remote exploits.

It probably took a few weeks to build and test.

So sabotaging thousands of at the time very expensive network connected computers was a very deliberate action.

I posit that he likely did it to become famous and perhaps even successful, feeling safe with his dad’s position. And it worked. He did not end up in prison. He ended up cofounding Viaweb and YCombinator.

Unironically a great role model for YC. :/

> I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time.

”Computer crime” definitely was though.