Do you really think the US government is going to just let this fly because hes 17? I dont care if hes 12 they are going after him or them like a full fledged terrorist orginization now. As soon as that plane switched destinations the next 10 years of his life were sealed. Its not even like hes a real hacker who can work out a deal to work for y he government because they found some fatal flaw. It was ddos attack and a twitter threat, I could teach my 90 year old great grandmother how to do that in 20 mins and she wouldnt even miss jeopardy. No this kid or these kids will be sitting in an 8x10 room for a good portion of the rest of their lives.

Believe me, I know they wouldn't just disregard this. I just wasn't sure what kind of trouble he'd get into.

Federal conspiracy charges are big boy time. If they find that its a group of people you can throw RICO on top of that which is something the feds always seem to do these days basically because once youre indicted under RICO theres no way out. Even in a plea you have to plea to a RICO charge and it has to be approved by the DoD. Terrorism is a whole nother level, since these guys claimed ISIS/ISIL they dont have to prove any type of connection other then what they said. Even if AlQueda has no idea who the hell you are, if you claim to be doing something in support of them you have basically given th government all they need. Maybe if they have half a mill to spend on a decent lawyer they could get a plea of 5-10 years and a fine to pay back all the money spent by the government and American Airlines, but if they had the kinda money their gonna need they might have something better to do then troll the internet. The real variable is when they seize their computers, if theyve been trolling chan or the under webz their bound to have something on there that they wont be able to explain away. Add another 10 years for child/torture porn and id say their pretty well done. The reports were that they were hiding in Europe or Russia but when you make terrorist threats even Russia isnt going to grant asylum. If their in the middle east a drone smack down may be the quickest and cleanest way out, but its more likely their somewhere in the U.S. thinking that tor is going to protect their ip, which they will find was an unfortunate miscalculation.

I don't know 100% everything about Tor but I do know quite a bit. I think it should be fine so long as they don't be stupid and run any scripts or have cookies activated. And about the terrorist thing, he only uploaded the ISIS flag to SOE's ftp servers for the lulz which was still stupid and will still result in being charged as a terrorist. It just makes me laugh though thinking about how he just wanted to ruin the president of SOE's day when in doing so the "hacker" ruined his entire life. Skids these days. It would probably be a lot harder to catch him if he had actually hacked and knew what he was doing. But DDoS's are just so easy to trace if you're the FBI.

He was tweeting about ISIL and the calliphate after the threat in a taunt, I suppose he thought they would stop looking if the agencies thought he was out of reach. It shows how juvenile he thinks. Just like the "oj I was just reporting on information I recieved about a bomb" thats something immature children think, that if they say its just a rumor I heard they cant use it against me, along with the "im under 18 I cant goto jail" line of thought, its never the case in a real courtroom or interrogation. Im not fully versed in tor but I do know the basics and even if it did route you through a hundred or thousand different ip's all its going to do is make it harder to track not impossible. For a threat like this the FBI DHS CIA every three letter orginization yoy can think of will lend expertise. It will not be a case of does the end justify the means it will be a case of national security. They will want to parade this case through the media to show others that there will be no where to hide if you commit an act of terrorism. Ive also read articles that tor is a glorified honey pot where most activities are monitored but not actionable. They wait for things like this to happen before making a move, remember silk road, everyone thought that was safe too. The navy helped code tor in its early days and any government agency is guaranteed to leave themselves a way in before releasing something like tor. This kid or kids will be hunted down on principle, the government really hates it if you make it look stupid and out of control.