On Monday a court in Jerusalem charged a teenager with dual citizenship in the US and Israel, with making 100 bomb threats against Jewish institutions in in the country, part of an estimated 2000 bomb threats worldwide the youth made for hire against organizations.
The unnamed teenager is also charged with attempted blackmail against Delaware Republican state Senator Ernesto Lopez, after the latter condemned the bomb threats. The teenager arranged to have illegal drugs delivered to the senator’s house in an attempt to run him afoul of the law.
The Israeli Justice Ministry claimed that the teen intended to sow widespread discord and panic by continuously causing emergency teams to respond to the false threats, as well as by causing evacuations, searches and other disruptions, according to the Jerusalem Post. As a result many flights were canceled or subjected to emergency landings.
The teenager is also accused of using the internet to sell access to proprietary or sensitive data, and offered his services to place threats against locations (including police stations, schools, and airports) chosen by anonymous buyers, who paid him in cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.
The teen hacker did not limit his for-hire activities to simple threat-making, however, as he also dealt in illegal drugs and sold software cracks to create counterfeit documentation — including visas — as well as the means to easily hack social media accounts. Recipes for poison manufacture, explosives and even content containing child pornography were found on hardware attributed to the teen.
His airline bomb threat targets included a flight carrying the Boston Celtics basketball team, and a European flight that saw jet fighters from the French Air Force scrambled as escort.
An extradition request by the United States has been turned down by Israel.
The teenager has been seen as almost singlehandedly overturning an increasingly accepted narrative that anti-Semitism was on the rise across the world, and in the US particularly. The teen, in making thousands of anti-Semitic threats, including of bombings and other hate crimes, created an impression that multiple sources were increasing their anti-Jewish threat-making activity when, in fact, much of the hysteria was brought about by one person.
The lawyer for the defense argued that, while the teen hacker was shown to have a high IQ, he concurrently had the emotional intelligence of a five-year-old.
Reports indicate that prosecution will ask for unusually harsh sentencing for the crimes.
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