It can get pretty messy. For example, they could wait until they're 21 to try them as an adult, even if it was committed at 17 or younger [0 p. 128]:

> a person who committed the offense before his eighteenth birthday, but is over twenty-one on the date formal charges are filed, may be prosecuted as an adult.... This is true even where the government could have charged the juvenile prior to his twenty-first birthday, but did not.

However, the statute of limitations for CFAA violations is 2 years [1 p. 2] so this might not apply. If somehow they can still go after him at 21, this post could play a part in evidence for performing the hack (I truly hope not).

0: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-ccips/l...

1: https://www.goodwinlaw.com/-/media/files/publications/10_01-...

The newest policy is to charge minors as adults unless there's a compelling and beneficial reason not to. I think that was a DOJ change around 2009. Not sure how many states followed suit. But in general, its increasingly likely that minors are being charged as adults.

I was suspended for a week for creating a network share in my typing class and dividing the work among my friends and we copied and pasted into a single document on the share. This was on Windows NT though so a LONG time ago. It's also I guess "cheating". But they got us on "computer hacking"

Also in my typing class circa 2004 the teacher was about to kick me out because he thought I was on a chat room during his class. I was actually viewing page source on an HTML document

I used CACLS with an Office hack in NT / 9X to copy homework. Never got caught for that.

They got me on propagating computer games through the network using shared drives the teachers were supposed to use for homework.

We had BNC network cables in those days and the entire building shared a single T1 line for several hundred computers.

The world has changed.

Same thing here. Teacher came into class with his multiple month investigation comparing all students work highlighting common errors. Found three different groups that were sharing work load. In school suspension for all of us, only like three kids left in class for the week.

25 years ago wasn’t any better… I recall several in my circle getting suspended for harmless things. The lesson: don’t explore, don’t be curious, and don’t try to fix anything related to the school and computers. Sigh.

Consent is paramount when doing that type of exploration. Without explicit permission, how would an IT administrator distinguish the difference between a curious student and a malicious attacker?

You're not wrong, but I think it might be helpful to think of this in different terms. Teenagers, with burgeoning agency, are being denied the ability to meaningfully impact their environment yet are bound to it for most of their lives.

I agree with you that explicit permission is important, but it is also something that young people are frequently and explicitly denied. I don't think the solution is condoning that sort of 'extracurricular', but I think we should recognize the problem is probably starting with the adults in the situation.

You would think so, only this is a bit opaque when dealing with a local school and a district bureaucracy with various computer labs, internet and phone systems. As a student, you may think that the right person to ask is the local teacher who has control of the asset. Especially if that teacher has been assigned IT duties.

But to many school administrators consent of teachers is meaningless. Those assets aren't owned by the teachers but by the district, even if they are the apparent authority figures and stewards in the eyes of the students.

Well, I imagine that would require using a brain, which may an onerous requirement.

People on HN always act like what they were doing was almost noble. You weren't. If you had been picking locks or even rummaging around unlocked desk drawers you'd get the same treatment and deserve it.

Yea , kids would get expelled in the old days for putting a screensaver password