How many people on HN have been caught using a computer system in an "unauthorized" way, and then decided to do it again less than a few months later?
Remember, this kid is a repeat offender. He got caught, officially, at least once by the Police. We don't know how many times his teachers caught him before putting something onto his permanent record either.
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EDIT: "Green was released on Wednesday from Land O'Lakes Detention Center into the custody of his mother. He'll likely be granted pretrial intervention by a judge, sheriff's detective Anthony Bossone said."
The Sheriff Detective doesn't even expect this kid to have any serious harm on his record. They're trying to scare the kid without really putting anything on his record.
Unfortunately, the freaking newspapers are releasing this guy's name. What the flying *!@#! guys? Does not Florida have laws against releasing the names of 14-year old minors?
Now that I look back on it, I've done this numerous times. If I was born 5-10 years later, I would probably be in jail.
When I was in elementary school, I inputted an expletive into the school's hangman game - I thought it was amusing. The school staff did not.
In middle school, I wrote a simple basic program that would run in the background and speak() interesting phrases throughout the day.
In middle/high school I received detention for goofing off when I was supposed to be researching in the library. I was using Google.com - which the staff had never heard of.
When we first had internet at home, I sent a fake email to my parents from billclinton@whitehouse.gov.
On an internship, I remotely changed the wallpaper of a coworkers PC (we played pranks on each other all the time). But I accidentally targeted a machine in our conference room which was being used by a high ranking military officer...
In college, I attempted to add the school president as a friend on thefacebook.com, since many users at the time had fake accounts as friends like George Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc. But I needed a valid college email to signup. So I created a forwarding email alias: hisname@myschool.edu but for some reason I could not receive email using that alias so I went to sleep. I spent the following couple of days being interrogated by the police and various school officials. I didn't find out until some point later, but apparently this was the school president's actual forwarding email address and due to some bug in the school mail system, I registered a dup account which made all his incoming emails bounce. But I was treated as a hacker, threatened with being expelled and charged with a two-page list of crimes such as identity theft, unauthorized access, etc. I got off with being put on school probation, community service, and writing some papers.
> [redacted] said that on the morning in question, he accessed the computer that stored the FCAT files and, realizing that computer didn't have a camera, found another.
> "So I logged out of that computer and logged into a different one and I logged into a teacher's computer who I didn't like and tried putting inappropriate pictures onto his computer to annoy him," [redacted] said.
Erm... the kid was looking for cameras so that he'd spy on his classmates using administrative privileges.
BTW: The real problem here... is that the press is extremely dumb how they're handling this. I shouldn't be able to find this information... the press should have editorial discretion to protect this kid from this sort of analysis I'm doing. It's not right to take apart an 8th-grader's argument like this... but I think I have to to prove a point to yall.
I'm gonna redact his name at least, unlike the press.
Criminal charges should be a very serious undertaking. If they are planned to be dropped, it's a failure of the justice system to make them in the first place.
Criminal charges, like everything else in this world, is a tool. A tool that police have.
The tool can either be used correctly or incorrectly. I think as long as those officers weren't going to go through with the charges (which it seems to be the case), their use was correct.
Remember, this kid is a repeat offender. He got caught, officially, at least once by the Police. We don't know how many times his teachers caught him before putting something onto his permanent record either.
----------------
EDIT: "Green was released on Wednesday from Land O'Lakes Detention Center into the custody of his mother. He'll likely be granted pretrial intervention by a judge, sheriff's detective Anthony Bossone said."
The Sheriff Detective doesn't even expect this kid to have any serious harm on his record. They're trying to scare the kid without really putting anything on his record.
Unfortunately, the freaking newspapers are releasing this guy's name. What the flying *!@#! guys? Does not Florida have laws against releasing the names of 14-year old minors?