tedggh parent
You may be right but it’s not up to you to determine if you are in violation of a federal law. If there’s a non-zero chance you can compromise the safety of the flight that’s all a prosecutor would need to charge you. Yes the possibilities of that happening are remote but also non-zero. So all I’m saying is make sure you calculate the risk and decide if saving $30 it’s worth a tiny possibility of a legal mess or even being banned from ever flying in that airline again. I’m risk averse for this kind of stuff so I would pay for internet access.
One surely can be charged with anything. What I'm trying to say is that tampering or compromising safety of the flight are IMHO highly improbable charges that are very unlikely to appear, and even less likely to stick. Hell, I strongly suspect airline is going to defend the hacker in this scenario, because they absolutely wouldn't want anyone (especially FAA) to ever think their firewall bug can affect flight safety.
I think it's well-known that entertainment systems have to be isolated from main systems of the aircraft. I'm not an expert, but I know that it was the case that IFEs weren't safe, plane(s) went down because of that, so we no longer do that.
All this said, I totally agree with you that there is a non-negligible chance that abusing the network policies could lead to some charges, possibly even criminal charges. Or, at the very least, lead to some unpleasantness that surely isn't worth 30 bucks. Just not the charges you're mentioning.
When you say the chance of an indictment is non-zero, does that mean you know of such a case? Do you have a link to a story or a case file?