And how would you prove intent? It might be easy to prove if it's an usb drive with only a zip bomb. But what if it's on a 8TB external hard drive, with a bunch of random stuff (research papers, movies, podcasts, etc), placed inside a folder called "DoS examples" with a bunch of other malformed files as well?

>And how would you prove intent?

They don't have to prove it, in the sense that you prove a mathematical proof.

They just need to agree you had that intent.

Isn't the American legal system the one where that kind of argument actually has weight? Why so many cases are thrown out on technicalities and litigation costs are so high.