Steve Wozniak spent night in jail for building a fake bomb in high school (2011) (opens in new tab)

>He thought it was because he had won, yet again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police.

This kind of belies the idea that this is a new phenomenon.

Building something to deliberately look like a bomb, and then placing it in a location to again make it look as much like a bomb as possible is completely different from:

* Making a clock * Telling everyone it is a clock

Woz got told off, Ahmed got interrogated with no parents present, then arrested, walked past his schoolmates in hand cuffs, placed in juvenile detention, suspended (still suspended), finger printed, ...

Peter Thiel in Zero to One: "Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school"

He trolls a little smarter these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ1TIYxm1vM (TLDW: He makes perforated tearable "notepads" of real $2 bills and spends them conspicuously to prank people. "You can get arrested for them, but not convicted, because you're in the right." He explains how it works in a deliberately misleading but technically honest way, and may have tricked the host on the show. He's probably buying uncut sheets of bills and perforating and gluing them. Includes short mentions of other hijinks. I'm not sure I believe all of them.)

I suppose Ahmed has a bright future.