Sunday, April 12, 2015

Ridiculousness: 8th grader charged with cyber crimes for changing teacher's wallpaper

Man, it's been an interesting week for law enforcement as a whole in the United States. This Charleston, SC cop thought he wouldn't get caught shooting an unarmed black man in the back, but it turns out that someone did catch it on camera, and now the cop is charged for murder. This post isn't about that though, but something else that might as well be just as retarded.

According to the post from Slate, the 8th grade teenager was charged with felony cyber crimes for accessing a computer system with an administrator password, and proceeded to change the wallpaper of the desktop to something mischievous.

There's something fatally wrong with this arrest though. If you haven't read carefully yet, I'll point it out to you.
Sheriff Chris Nocco said, "Even though some might say this is just a teenage prank, who knows what this teenager might have done." Crazy teens.
So, the arrest was done based on what the teen could have done vs what he actually did? Oh, and here's some additional details on the actual password used to gain access to the computer.
The code is easy to remember because it's just a last name. Green discovered it by watching a teacher type it in. Green was originally suspended from school for three days and other students were punished, too, but he was later arrested because the school deemed his infraction more serious. It is now overhauling its password system.
This doesn't make much sense to me. This teenager didn't really do any serious crime at all, if you ask me. Taking such a harsh stance for a crime that doesn't match it is simply stupid, and it could even have an opposite effect on the convict.

Here's some Reddit comments that I wanted to display as well. Who would have know that Reddit's embed comment feature would become so useful?