HN user
For the inconvenience, missed opportunity, and emotional damage, I'd look to tort law.
How would that work in this case? The Catholic church should sue the guy on behalf of their members?
"Would deterrence justify the maximum sentence? Not hardly." You can't just hand-wave things like that by saying "Not hardly." The counterexample is very clear when the author mentions China as a place with a smaller prisoner population. Deterrence is very effective in China...
And, just because the religious altar cost $X to physically replace doesn't mean desecration only caused $X of damage. The reduction of the act of desecration of a symbol people care deeply about to just the replacement cost is absurd.
I don't know much about hashing but is it possible five eyes just has a zettabyte-scale rainbow table covering scary words? They could use that to score encrypted messages and act on the scary ones.
I don't think they could have known for sure it was a joke.