Chris, yeah, the “harmless” label is not one I’d apply to the kids. I’d say they are somewhere between “harmless” and “script kiddies”…and script kiddies are below “virus/malware writers” and their ilk The primary differentiator in my mind is intent and activity to cause harm: the students in this case were not defacing or damaging systems like script kiddies (who are random vandals), and random vandals aren’t trying to thieve/cause irreparable damage like virus writers.

I also think you are on the right track regarding the school getting itself caught in a situation they can’t figure out how to get out of. My question earlier (which Shane cut part out of for his quote) was…

“A good school and good teachers would have done a better job disciplining the kids before invoking the legal recourse- I ask again, why the heck did the kids *still* have laptops once they had broken the rules repeatedly? Why were they *still* in class if they were such dangerous criminals?”

I think the school feels they *can’t* do the reasonable thing (take the laptops away). Why they can’t permanently suspend the kids and force them to go to another school, I don’t know. Calling the cops…well, that was almost certainly an act of desperation by people who had boxed themselves into a political corner.

I also sort of think there is something else going on here possibly regarding the parents. I noticed some news reports on one site from a couple of years ago when the schoolboard in question initially floated the idea of buying iBooks for the students. A number of parents were basically saying it was a dumb idea, the money could be better spent on books or supportive funding for the families to buy their own computers.

I still think that criminal charges are unreasonable. And I firmly believe that the fact that I was provided an environment in highschool computing that encouraged me to experiment and explore was critically important to me. Would I have done the same thing these kids did? Probably not to the same extent. But I can definitely see myself:

• typing in an admin password taped to the back of the computer
• trying to guess/guessing the admin password (which was the school’s address)
• using the remote control software on my machine installed by the administrators to take over someone elses machine…for example, the administrator’s machine (which should have been password protected/locked)
• trying to figure out how to install software that the machine didn’t come with, particularly communications programs like instant messaging software
• writing programs/exploring the computer’s configuration to figure out what it was that the administrators were running and what types of things they were capturing / monitoring
• trying out the programs/tools the administrators had installed and seeing what neat things I could do with them (see “using remote control software” above)

For myself, personally, I likely would have stopped after the first warning. More likely than not, I would have taken the laptop back to the school and said “keep it, I’m buying my own” and gone out and bought my own- I wasn’t rich, I just worked a part time job to earn my own money and, unlike most kids, spent nearly every penny on computers. If they forced me to use it, I’d do the absolute minimum with the thing, and I’d probably make it clear to the teachers and administrators that the locked down computer was a total waste of my time that trivialized its educational value.

Now: would the school board have called the cops on me? I don’t know: my likely behavior would have differed from the “Kutztown 13”, but I think the undertone in my behavior would have been similar. And I think its that “attitude” that the schoolboard resents and which may have been behind their calling the cops, moreso than the actions of the students themselves.