Imagine someone picked the lock on your back door and walked inside.

This person went through your mail, took your data and stole invasive and private images. It was all traded away to others, without your consent or your control.

And then it happened to about 300 other people.

The litany of crimes would stagger. It would start with breaking and entering, and move on to burglary. The act of forcing entry would be joined by the theft, by the exploitive images and by the distribution. It would be multiplied by the number of instances and again by the number of victims.

The sentence could make even a drug kingpin blanch.

Michael Yackovich, 30, of West Newton will not feel that stern consequence. Despite admitting to breaking into hundreds of Snapchat accounts, accessing private images and sensitive videos and treating it all like his own toy box, the federal charges he faced were not quite that severe.

He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. His plea will see him serve four years in federal prison. He will spend another three years on supervised release and make $38,000 restitution to four victims.

The victims felt the difference in the sentence because it reflected the way the crime was measured.

“I see Michael Yackovich as a sexual predator,” one woman wrote. “No different than a creep hiding in a locker room.”

This is the problem with law that evolves more slowly than crime.

People will always find daring and sometimes dastardly ways to use technology as soon as it is developed. The law always lags. Whether with regulation or with criminal code, it takes time to catch up to what needs to be monitored, restricted or penalized.

Yackovich’s plea focused on the technology and ignored the reality that this was more than hacking. The goal was not simply financial gain but sexual exploitation. If someone shoplifted but lingered to commit arson, a charge of retail theft would not be good enough to reflect the damage done. This feels similar.

Other crimes have been updated over time but were not discounted before. Strangulation, for example, was added as a specific charge in Pennsylvania but was still pressed as assault before 2016. Sexual extortion was spelled out in 2019 with a defined range of behavior and penalties. That doesn’t mean it was not prosecuted in other ways in 2018.

Plea deals boil down to the lowest common denominator — what the prosecutor offers versus what the defense will accept. Victims are not always part of that calculus.

But Yackovich admitted to what he did to the victims.

“I didn’t recognize the impact this would have on you,” he said in court Monday. “I didn’t think it through.”

It sounds like the law didn’t either, ending in a plea that reduced the victims to commodities in an online game.

— Pittsburgh Tribune-Review