Yet this would be very familiar to anyone with previous intelligence experience in the US. The person with hands on keyboard will change depending on if the mission is being conducted under Title 10 or Title 50 authority.

Does an instructor who trains someone who goes on to commit murder using the techniques they taught become legally culpable for the murder?

If your company offers some service - consulting to set up their infrastructure, or helping them navigate AWS - necessary to the running of the company, and that company goes on to commit a crime are you at fault? They couldn't have done it with out you, after all.

Legally, it depends. The term you're looking for is "criminal conspiracy". In US law this is, roughly, an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime, and at least one of the people commits an "overt act" in furtherance of the crime. In the case of these officers, and in your two hypotheticals, there is an overt act taking place. An overt act does not need to be illegal, it just has to be an action taken to assist in the planned crime. For instance, buying ski masks is perfectly legal, but if you bought ski masks in preparation for your bank robbery, that counts as an overt act. But is there an agreement to commit a crime? Generally speaking, in the company-offering-services example, if you did not know the other party was going to commit a crime, and a reasonable person in your position wouldn't think the other party was planning to commit a crime, you are not engaged in criminal conspiracy. There's tons of special cases and nuances here, but that's roughly what happens.

That's if they charge conspiracy in the first place.

The more general answer here is that the criminality of exploitation depends a lot on your state of mind (a property of law that something HN always has a hard time with). A professor teaching a class to an anonymous group of students is not at all the same thing, in criminal law, as that same professor standing behind foreign intelligence operatives coaching them on a targeted attack.

The confounder here is that there are statutes you can theoretically violate by providing some specific exploitation tools to foreign nationals.

The MIT professor, in an MIT classroom, is never going to be charged (same almost certainly goes for a consultant teaching an exploit class at Black Hat USA).

Let's say you are a gun instructor. You take your student out to the street, hand them a sniper rifle and point at their victim. You walk them through the process of pulling the trigger and how to make sure they get their target.

The judge isn't going to let that slide. In both cases, you are an accessory.

Technically I think both parties would be guilty of murder, but that's specific to murder charges. For instance, getaway drivers have been charged with murder because the robbers they transport shoot someone.

That is specifically "felony murder", which wouldn't apply here (though conspiracy might?). Felony murder is the idea that you are guilty of murder if someone dies as a result of you committing another felony (sometimes from a specific enumerated list).

If you are a direct participant in the murder you might just get charged with it (perhaps as a conspirator which I think often has roughly the same penalties).

How many School of the America's instructors were prosecuted?

Strictly ethically speaking, yes they would be at fault

Agreed.

It's one thing to teach general skills and another to help do the actual hacking

If they are being guided through the actual hacking then that's saying that only the driver in pair programming is producing code

I don't think the UAE is concerned about this.

You're probably right, but I think it also depends...

Is a professor at MIT teaching cyber security exploit development guilty of the same crime?

What about a consultant teaching how to use a particular tool or how to look for a particular family of exploits? (Potentially legally dodgy, depending on the client, but probably ok in a lot of grey areas)

What about a consultant which performs a passive audit of a target for a 3rd party? (Starting to get pretty dodgy, but probably depends both on the 3rd party and the target and the nature of the audit)

It's... probably not so cut-and-dry. Though I agree that it doesn't sound like a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I'm sure the intent of the MIT professor/consultant passing their knowledge on to others is to get ahead of the actual attackers and help prevent further crime(s against humanity), not to actively participate...

You're just being argumentative. You know the answer.

Oh no, that wasn't my intent at all. I was just saying that things in court can get pretty messy when you try to define things precisely with laws that don't directly address edge cases. That's why you see headlines about rulings that seem so counterintuitive and ridiculous upon first glance.