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California High Schooler Changes Grades After Phishing Teachers, Gets 14 Felonies for His Efforts (gizmodo.com)
Police in Concord, California arrested a teenager earlier this week and charged him 14 felony counts after discovering the high schooler launched a phishing campaign directed at teachers in order to steal their passwords and change grades. From a report: The 16-year-old student, whose name was not released because he's a minor, was arrested Wednesday following an investigation launched by local law enforcement, with assistance from a Contra Costa County task force and the US Secret Service, KTVU reported. Reports of the hack first started to trickle into police two weeks ago, when teachers in the Mount Diablo Unified School District started receiving suspicious emails in their inbox. As it turns out, they were part of a phishing attempt launched by the student. The email messages contained a link that sent the recipients to a fake website constructed by the student to look like the school's portal. If a teacher clicked on the link, they were directed to the site that would prompt them to enter their username and password. The site would record any information entered, allowing the student to hijack the teacher's account.
That's almost 5 days' worth of felonies. Too bad 'zero tolerance' replaced 'let the punishment fit the crime.'
If he's lucky, the FBI will hire him and get him a shorter/commuted sentence.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
A felony is a massive life-altering consequence that is not necessarily the most useful way to address or punish a problem. The kid's sixteen. Would you charge a kid with sixteen felonies for opening a teacher's grade book and turning an F into an A with an old-fashioned pen? The fact that he used computers to do it shouldn't increase the punishment.
If he just raised random people's grades (so as not to point only to himself), it might have slipped by un-noticed. But students who got lower-than-expected grades would likely complain, causing an investigation. Hoist by his own petard, so to speak.
Should we ruin his life with 14 felonies over it? Nope. He needs a slap in the hand and some direction, not serious jail time and a record. Unpaid community service conducting teacher training on cybersecurity and Internet hygiene would be about right.
But 'murkah and harsh "justice."
The fools that charge the kid with felonies risk putting a talented hacker onto a road to a life of crime by introducing him to real felony criminals in prison, if it went that far. While his hacks were easily reversible, they should show some respect for his skill at exposing the ignorance of this teachers, and put him on a good path and not possibly in prison, by forcing him to teach teachers how to avoid the folly that they fell for. This is the epitome of a victimless crime.
But if anyone who's likely to be called to jury duty on the case is reading this, some advice:
nullify.
Nullify.
NULLIFY.
Not that it's likely to get that far in a juvie case, but still ... remember that it's always your right to judge the law as well as the case.
Prosecutors always go for the maximum they can charge so ... it will probably be settled in a plea bargain and never go to a jury trial.
You don't think maybe there is a problem with the legal system when this is a thing? That prosecutors have a tool they can use to avoid having to prove their cases? That they not only have the will to do this, it is basically standard operating procedure at this point?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Nobody is arguing that he should not be punished it is the severity of the punishment that is in question. A badly behaved schoolkid changing a few internal school grades is not the sort of thing a court is designed to deal with. You cannot achieve justice in schools through the court system: either kids will get off without any punishment or they end up with extremely serious consequences. What is needed is serious, but not life-changing consequences so they have a chance to learn from their mistakes.
I bet that the teacher is not going to be at least reprimanded for being stupid enough to be phished by a kid.
This is why security doesn't work. Being stupid is not being punished.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No kidding. 14 felonies for this? As a teenager, I too phished my teacher (and much of my class) successfully for their passwords by making a mock DOS prompt that mimicked basic commands and the login program. To be fair, I didn't do anything "evil" with it - as part of my final project, I actually encoded the teacher's username and password into stereogram with a generator that I wrote ;) She found it amusing. I'm sure she wouldn't have found it so amusing if I had been in there changing grades or whatnot. But 14 felones for a teenager acting up is just insane.
I'll consider these charges fair when they start charging high school bullies who beat up other students with 14 counts of assault.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
99% of teens age 16 are assholes sometimes. Punishing them for life would almost guarantee them to become assholes most of the time.