No fly zones aren't illegal in the sense that piracy is illegal, where you get a slap on the wrist.

They're illegal in the sense that the minimum ticket is $400 and the maximum that's ever been given is $1.9 million. The usual fines are between $1,100 and $2,200.. Those are for the people with licences. The one case of a person flying without a license got to eat a $5,500 fine.

The short answer to this story is that you shouldn't even attempt this. The long answer is that, unless you're technically competent enough to build your own drone that you can be sure won't trace back to you, and you're willing to ditch the drone at a moments notice, you're just asking to get reamed by the feds. And if you are competent enough to do this, you probably shouldn't anyways as it raises the heat on responsible drone owners.