Andy did not commit any illegal acts at all.

Just curious... what was the illegal act and by whom? My understanding is that one person called another a "criminal", which IMHO is defamatory and therefore illegal. The "crime" was to guess somebody else's obvious password for a free bbs called Foxite, and to use that login to browse threads that are freely available to all members. There was no impersonation and the act only came to light because the owner of Foxite was annoyed at one party and used his access to private logs and other information to assist her detractor. With no damage and no victim (except possibly A's pride,) where's the beef?

I'm not trying to minimize it... but we need to keep a sense of proportion. We might also observe that we've all been told over and over not to choose obvious passwords, for this very reason. I suspect that the judge throwing out the case may well mention that if somebody did try to make N a criminal.

I'll tell you what disappoints me: 3 things.

a), the attempts by certain people with grudges against UT to turn this into a UT issue, because N was a UT Administrator at the time. We got FUD about credit card numbers possibly stored in UT, passwords being lifted from UT to be used elsewhere and all sorts of opportunistic abuse.

b), the sudden legalese flying around in a community that used to be far more collegial.

And c), the behavior by some "leaders" who don't hesitate to wade into the "cattle" if they're being a bit uppity.