[mindslight]

In a perfect world, people starting communities like this would be smarter about it and use better software that conceals their identity and provides no central server to shut down. But unfortunately the Internet gained prime-time popularity with barely-adequate centralized object naming and transport technology (dns/http). So there are masses of people who understand its promise, but don't scrutinize the popular implementation nor take technical precautions to shield themselves - they instead blunder in while concocting legal theories as to why they're safe (as they fail to realize that laws are less like code and more like advertising).

This particular kid may have been dumb (and immature given his flaunting), but to focus on his failings is ignore the greater phenomenon that he's merely fodder to. I certainly don't think he deserves to be put into the meat grinder, but if he had been a bit smarter and avoided it, we'd merely be talking about a different stupid kid.

The really unfortunate thing is that these halfway-there worse-is-better technologies like napster/torrent/bitcoin only serve to immunize the existing power structures by alerting them to the phenomenon of revolutionary communication technologies and giving the state incremental practice at blocking protocols.