It's called wrongful termination and the civil lawsuit consequences

And if his employment was 'at-will'? If so then he has just as big of a leg to stand on as if he were fired because wore a green shirt to work on a Tuesday... none.

So long as you are not dismissed in violation of an employment agreement (which are usually worded in favor of the employer), in violation of law, or you can make a compelling case that you are a member of a protected class & that was actually the reason... you aren't going to win such a battle.

Does the place you work have two or more completely separate networks with no access between the inside & outside ones, requiring you two have two PCs on your desk, one for searching Google for how an API works or posting to /., and another you do your sensitive work work on? Probably not.

After 9/11 there was talk about setting up federal systems this way... clearly that still hasn't happened as once you breach a single PC inside of the corporate network, even if that PC doesn't have access to your target data, it and it's users permissions can be used to climb the ladder to find someone who does have data and use them.

The % of the background check that is the self-volunteered information isn't important, but the fact it exists and can be very compelling in the wrong hands.

Sony must not have been either when oodles of data got pulled out of them... or those detection measures were not enough.

Even if you are looking for mass uploads or downloads, there is no reason the bad guy wouldn't be willing to have the ex-filtration take a bit longer by spreading it between multiple offsite servers with smaller packages of data and over a longer bit of time.

The summary is poorly worded.

It's not that clearing your browsing history, throwing out old logs/emails or flushing your toilet are inherently illegal, it's when you use them and why.

If the cops are knocking at your door and you decide to flush the drugs, that's obstruction, if you just hacked someone's system and then wiped all of the local logs on your machine to hide the evidence, that's obstruction. If however you have as a routine process... not to retain any email older than say... 30 days and purge pretty regularly (either manually or automatically), that's not obstruction, that's just good cleanliness, and if some incriminating evidence happens to be wiped out on day 30, it's a lot harder to prove that you were doing so to hide your wrongdoing rather than simply not wanting to have to keep around old Amazon offers which clutter your inbox.

You realize the last "Media Center Edition" was XP... right? Media Center was built into the higher SKUs of Vista & 7 and available as a quick and relatively cheap add in ($15?) for 8... free keys for which they gave away for quite a while. ... or are you saying that XP was crap? ... which would be an unusual view on /. these days.

you cannot vote directly for your senators

The Seventeenth Amend disagrees... unfortunately.

Or the statute of limitations for the crime the allegations point to has expired.

Betting the dude who wrote PuTTY is not in a good mood right about now...

Oh? How much do you think he was making through donations for PuTTY?

Hell, I even played with scripting text to speech alerting just to see if I could, and it was really easy!

I know a guy who did that with a telephony system which calls him when something goes wrong then accepts voice input for what to do next... including executing a limited # of PS commands.

I've not seen the code, but like you said, I'm told it's pretty easy.

PowerShell primary commands are formatted Verb-Noun. This is awfully convenient, as a PowerShell user can guess hundreds of commands just by learning a few verbs and a few nouns.

Not to mention built in tab completion for arguments where you can read the man page after finding the cmdlet to know which arguments you will have to use, or just quickly tab through to what you know is going to be there.

From the WSJ:

After a three-week trial in New York City, Mr. Ulbricht was found guilty in February of seven criminal charges, including conspiracies to sell drugs, launder money and hack computers.

So a gun, knife or rope manufacturer should be label anytime someone misuses their products?

You forgot "9/11 was an inside job"

Except for that you are speaking of what really amount to common carriers which transport bits without much worry about what they are.

Now if Comcast was in the business of advertising they have the best internet pipe for looking for slaves, chemical weapons or terrorists for hire... you might have a point.

There is a big difference between something legitimate being used for illegitimate purposes and something being built explicitly for illegitimate purposes... this is why guns tend to be legal while building a bomb is not.