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   Q. OUTSTANDING WARRANTS 

If you have an outstanding warrant or charges pending in another jurisdiction you would be wise to deal with them as soon as possible -after- you are sentenced. If you follow the correct procedure chances are good the warrants will be dropped (quashed). In the worst case scenario, you will be transported to the appropriate jurisdiction, plead guilty and have your "time run concurrent." Typically in non-violent crimes you can serve several sentences all at the same time. Many Federal inmates have their state time run with their Federal time. In a nutshell: concurrent is good, consecutive bad. 

This procedure is referred to as the Interstate Agreement On Detainers Act (IADA). You may also file a "demand for speedy trial", with the appropriate court. This starts the meter running. If they don't extradite you within a certain period of time , the charges will have to be dropped. The "Inmates' Self-Help Litigation Manual" that I mentioned earlier covers this topic quite well.

  R. ENCRYPTION 

There are probably a few of you out there saying, "I triple DES encrypt my hard drive and 128 character RSA public key it for safety." Well, that's just great, but... the Feds can have a grand jury subpoena your passwords and if you don't give them up you may be charged with obstruction of justice. Of course who's to say otherwise if you forgot your password in all the excitement of getting arrested. I think I heard this once or twice before in a Senate Sub-committee hearing. "Senator, I have no recollection of the aforementioned events at this time." But seriously, strong encryption is great. However, it would be foolish to rely on it. If the Feds have your computer and access to your encryption software itself, it is likely they could break it gi ven the motivation. If you understand the true art of code breaking you should understand this. People often overlook the fact that your password, the one you use to access your encryption program, is typically less than 8 characters long. By attacking the access to your encryption program with a keyboard emulation sequencer your triple DES/128 bit RSA crypto is worthless. Just remember, encryption may not protect you.

S. LEGAL SUMMARY 

Before I move on to the Life in Prison subpart, let me tell you what this all means. You're going to get busted, lose everything you own, not get out on bail, snitch on your enemies, get even more time than you expected and have to put up with a bunch of idiots in prison. Sound fun? Keep hacking. And, if possible, work on those sensitive .gov sites. That way they can hang an espionage rap on you. That will carry about 12 to 18 years for a first time offender. 

I know this may all sound a bit bleak, but the stakes for hackers have gone up and you need to know what they are. Let's take a look at some recent sentences: 

• Agent Steal (me) 41 months
• Kevin Poulsen 51 months
• Minor Threat 70 months
• Kevin Mitnick estimated 7-9 years 

As you can see, the Feds are giving out some time now. If you are young, a first-time offender, unsophisticated (like MOD), and were just looking around in some little company's database, you might get probation. But chances are that if that is all you were doing, you would have been passed over for prosecution. As a rule, the Feds won't take the case unless $10,000 in damages are involved. The problem is who is to say what the loss is? The company can say whatever figure it likes and it would be t ough to prove otherwise. They may decide to, for insurance purposes, blame some huge downtime expense on you. I can hear it now, "When we detected the intruder, we promptly took our system off-line. It took us two weeks to bring it up again for a loss in wasted manpower of $2 million." In some  cases you might be better off just using the company's payroll system to cut you a couple of $10,000 checks. That way the government has a firm loss figure. This would result in a much shorter sentence. I'm not advocating blatant criminal actions. I just think the sentencing guidelines definitely need some work. 

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