After ten months, my two-man pro bono legal team came to me with the plea agreement offered by Federal prosecutor Schindler. I could hardly believe what I was hearing: eight years in prison... and that wasn’t even the worst of it. This was what was called a "nonbinding plea agreement," meaning that the judge wouldn’t be bound by the prosecutor’s recommendation, but would instead be free to set a much stiffer sentence. Even worse, I would be agreeing to pay millions of dollars in restitution, a sum that might well be more than I would earn in the rest of my life. And I would have to assign any profits from telling my story to my hacking "victims"—Sun, Novell, Motorola, and so on.