They sell it, and they make money off the personal information that I have given them. And what we are recognizing now on the Internet is that personal information is commodity.

This guy didn't participate in the misappropriation, and probably didn't conspire with anybody to misappropriate it. Once it's posted online, it's just not secret anymore. At some point it becomes public information.

What I would as a parent argue is that I can consent to my kid's monitoring. Hey, it's my kid. I can read their mail, but the federal law doesn't make any distinction. If I'm reading anybody's communications without their consent or without a consent of one party, I'm violating federal law.

Reverse engineering is not clearly illegal.

The bad guy will have gone through many, many steps to conceal his identity, through pirated or hacked accounts.

There are more and more of these breaches, because information is money. The more computerized we are the more true that is. It?s not that hard to turn a piece of information into cash, by opening a fake cell phone account or a fake credit card account.