Well, not quite; it is like charging a child with breaking & entering because snuck into his teacher's house through a window to play a prank.
Can you pause to examine why you think it's necessary to substitute "friend" for "teacher" in your analogy to make it work for you?
Presumably, "friend's house" is a place where you've been before (possibly even overnight), where all the household members know where you are and where you are generally welcome.
Not at all like breaking into a house, breaking into a house is a violation of physical safety and comfort. One's home is one's sanctuary, and an invasion is quite frightening.
This is analogous to the student noticing the teacher left their keys at their desk, taking the keys to unlock a private desk drawer, and putting some naughty picture in the drawer. At most, such a prank would merit a week of detention. Calling it a criminal offense of felony hacking is insane.
> breaking into a house is a violation of physical safety and comfort
There is an interpretation of your above words that the occupants are unsafe because of what the intruder could do even it doesn't happen.
That is analogous to the argument that the privacy and integrity of the data stored in that computer were unsafe, because of "who knows what this teenager might have done".
> One's home is one's sanctuary, and an invasion is quite frightening.
Whereas, say, an invasion of your e-mail, social networking, bank account, credit card, or medical or government file or whatever else just something you can brush off and move on with your life.
Hmm, on further thought, my intuition is that the severity of the crime actually depends on being caught in the act, versus caught after the prank.
Situation one: Imagine the students break into the teachers house to pull some prank while the teacher is sleeping. The teacher gets terrified, calls the cop, and the students get caught.
Situation two: the students wait until they know nobody is home, then break into the teachers house and pull some prank, like leaving a naught blow-up doll on the couch. Later someone tattles and they find out which students did it.
Situation one, you are more likely to have to treat the crime like felony burglary, since they caused trauma, and for all you know the claim of it being a prank is just an after the fact excuse. If you let them use that excuse, then any burglar could use that excuse.
Situation two, you treat them leniently, since obviously if they intended to do real harm, they would not have left a call sign, and they would have actually stolen something. So you know there was no malicious intent, so you do not need to treat them like felons.
It's the same with the computer. If the teacher walked in on the students using the computer, you would have to treat it a lot more seriously, because you would have to assume maliciousness. But once the prank is pulled, then you treat it more leniently, since if they were truly malicious they would have stole the information without leaving any footprints.
I don't know if we want to legally separate the physical and digital worlds like that. Isn't that the whole complaint with the NSA? Someone entering your home to do something might sound scarier than them doing something remotely. However, what is the difference if both results are the same, especially considering the ease of the latter compared to the former?
I chose "friend's house" because the analogy doesn't really account for the ease with which it is to "break and enter" into a computer system if you just watched someone type their password. Maybe you could say that he "broke into" a teacher's house through an open window?
I make this distinction because destruction of property could be an issue with a physical break-in (via the act of breaking in).
The teacher has had students over before, and unlocks his/her home by grabbing the key out of the fake rock sitting on the doorstep. The student uses that key and wrote something obscene with the fridge magnets.
It's not quite breaking and entering, but it's more than trespassing.
i like that version, and the "lasting" consequences are the same. move the letters back to spell "i love teaching", aka change your background back to whatever cat picture was there before.
If you must use an analogy it's a good idea to keep it close to the original act. In this case that could be "accessing the teachers office via keypad". House suggests another level of privacy.
> By your reasoning, picking a lock or guessing a combination couldn't be breaking in because you didn't literally break anything.
What reasoning? I said that "breaking and entering" can happen through an open window. My point was to modify the analogy so that the act of breaking & entering was "easy" and non-destructive bringing it closer to the level of severity in the situation that we are discussing.
Gaining access to someone's password has a much lower bar than something like picking a lock which requires a certain set of skills, and may imply a certain level of intent. The student didn't hookup a laptop to the school network and run metasploit.
Again, semantics, but I'd say it's more akin to a kid breaking into school, not the teacher's home.
Or, more likely, the teacher's briefcase.
Yes, using a computer feels a lot like going to an actual physical place. But we forget, it's a portable piece of property. It contains sensitive documents, but it's not breaking and entering.
In this particular case, the password was widely known. The teacher must have known that it is known, yet didn't bother changing it, thereby tacitly authorizing those who know the password to use that computer. In effect, the computer was public to the same extent like school property, such as a blackboard. I'm sure the defense will wield some version of this argument.
> but it's not breaking and entering
Well, nobody said it is, including the prosecutors, who are charging the kid with some information-technology-specific crime (informally, "hacking"), and not "burglary".
It's called an analogy. "Breaking & Entering" is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of a situation where the act of someone gaining access to something is itself a crime. In this case, the student is being charged with "hacking" which according to the Federal law is gaining "unauthorized access" to a computer system.
What would be the crime committed in breaking into the teacher's briefcase? Theft during the duration of time that the student gain 'possession' of the briefcase to open it?
and look where that has led... the lack of notable consequences for ones actions tend to lead you down the path of "I'll do whatever I please because the only real consequences are a slap on the wrist," or rather "I know my rights and with a competent lawyer, I'll get off anyway, I don't really care how that affects you or anyone else." There appears to be little empathy for how one's actions affect everyone around you, with everyone looking out for themselves and feeling like the country somehow owes them something.
Fair enough this was a prank, and sure, we all used to do a lot more... and these days you can't let your kids run free without the police picking them up on their way to or at the park and attempting to charge the parents with criminal neglect. There is little that makes sense about any of this.
When talking about social changes, "look where that has led..." is definitely a good argument... in a bar, not in a serious conversation.
This kind of event is simply caused by the excessive increase of policing, and the political profit of such events; it's not a really special or complex phenomenon.
The major consequence is a context which supports excessive penalties for people, in which unreasonable laws, vampire prosecutors and self-obsessed politicians prosper.
Proceedings like this are a product of all the above - in the era of cyberwar, the government turned even minor incidents are into major crimes, in order to make an example, and to get the political monopoly on cyberoffense; such cases are quite common.
Wherever the excessive increase of policing comes... well, that definitely is a complex and special phenomenon, but I guess it's off topic.
I'd like to see a reliable source on that. The cultural differences with most countries in western-Europe certainly don't seem to support your assertions.
LOL we used to run free even in the 80's and 90's. Back then society was no safer, it's just we didn't have the media pumping fear into us every day. It's ridiculous how cooped up kids are becoming with parents expected to supervise (or even have someone else to supervise) their kids every minute of every day. That's not helping. Kids need time to themselves to find themselves and learn to stand alone.
It's a poor analogy in general, but given the context of the school, it's a bit more like a kid walking into the open front door that everyone else used, and then hanging up a poster. Computer security doesn't really exist in highschools/gradeschools it seems.
Arguing analogies is hopeless: arguing about specifics, changing minor details to make a point is arguing a synthetic case that has no bearing on the actual case under discussion.
Whether you illegally entered someone's house, garden shed, school office, car, briefcase, lunch box, coat pocket, smartphone or computer are things that are different in important ways.
Whether you had to force your way in, schemed and lied to perform your act or could perform it without any trouble matters.
What someone subsequently did is also relevant. Planting a note 'your ... was open' differs from planting a turd or an explosive.
We are dealing with someone that changed the background of a desktop on a computer obviously left easily accessible. That is what should be discussed.
Except it's more like he opened the (locked) screen door to put a poster in it and didn't open the (locked with the same key) door that led to the rest of the house. If anything, it's criminal mischief..
It said that students using teacher's passwords was rampant. I can imagine that some non-technical teachers weren't actually keeping their password a secret, out of convenience.
Can you pause to examine why you think it's necessary to substitute "friend" for "teacher" in your analogy to make it work for you?
Presumably, "friend's house" is a place where you've been before (possibly even overnight), where all the household members know where you are and where you are generally welcome.