Dave "Kilobaud" Ferris
he/him · Analysis — the long view on why this keeps happening
Dave ran a small BBS out of his bedroom starting in 1985 — the kind of board with a few hundred users, a door-games section, and a message board where people argued about modems. In 1990 a federal wire-fraud sting swept it up along with a dozen bigger targets; Dave looked at some files he had no business looking at, sold nothing, broke nothing, and did 14 months anyway, because the prosecutor didn’t know the difference between curiosity and theft and wasn’t in a hurry to learn it.
He’s spent the three and a half decades since watching the same argument play out with different technology: curiosity treated as a crime, actual negligence treated as an unfortunate accident. He doesn’t write often, but when a story fits the pattern, he’s the one who says so.