Comment Re:18 months light "by comparison?" (Score 5, Insightful) 83
From TFA:
"Anderson will be up for parole after half his sentence has been served and faces punishment other than a £5,000 ($8,000) fine. By comparison, the US youth who hacked the email account of Sarah Palin in 2008 recently received a year in an open prison for much less serious hacking of a small amount of private data from one person."
They're not simply comparing the time, but the punishment based on severity of said crime.
One figures out Sarah Palins email using simple methods and gets a full year.
The other orchestrates a malicious botnet attack and only gets a little longer at a year and a half.
In that sense, he is being punished quite lightly.