14 year-old boy arrested for creating a digital clock

[MilesAhead]

Paranoia 50% off.  All these people are so neurotic over this terrorism stuff.  They should go hang out at the seaport,airport and train terminals of their city and see what hazardous stuff goes through al the time.

Then again maybe they shouldn't.  Homeland Security would be getting calls about legal toxic waste transport every day.  Look!  That garbage truck is transporting garbage!!  Who do we call?

[Deozaan]

I haven't really followed the story closely, but here are a couple of points about the story I feel are often overlooked/ignored during the media's sensationalism/outrage:

• Nobody thought it was really a bomb. He got in trouble for perpetrating a "bomb hoax." (Whether it was an intentional hoax or not is another story.)
• He didn't create the clock. Odds are he didn't even solder any parts together to make a functional clock out of various parts. Evidence suggests he just took the guts out of an old digital clock and stuffed them into a pencil box that looked like a briefcase... which he then, for some inexplicable reason, wrapped in wire so it would be hard to open when the alarm was going off in the middle of class?

I only know this stuff because I used to be into the console homebrew scene (as a "consumer," not a hacker--I'm not that educated) so I follow some hackers on Twitter, and just yesterday I was scrolling through the tweet history of Marcan. Here's his take on the matter, compiled into a single Storify:

https://storify.com/Deozaan/clock

[wraith808]

Nobody thought it was really a bomb. He got in trouble for perpetrating a "bomb hoax." (Whether it was an intentional hoax or not is another story.)

-Deozaan (December 17, 2015, 01:33 PM)

I think that brings up another sticky point.  What is an unintentional hoax?  The 'bomb hoax' angle was a convenient artifice for covering up their reaction.  What you're arrested for at the time (especially as a kid- think about the psychology of a kid in handcuffs), can be very different from what the final charges are.  They kept asking him, "What is this", and he kept answering the same way.  "A clock."