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Legally, it depends. The term you're looking for is "criminal conspiracy". In US law this is, roughly, an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime

Legally, it depends. The term you're looking for is "criminal conspiracy". In US law this is, roughly, an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime, and at least one of the people commits an "overt act" in furtherance of the crime. In the case of these officers, and in your two hypotheticals, there is an overt act taking place. An overt act does not need to be illegal, it just has to be an action taken to assist in the planned crime. For instance, buying ski masks is perfectly legal, but if you bought ski masks in preparation for your bank robbery, that counts as an overt act. But is there an agreement to commit a crime? Generally speaking, in the company-offering-services example, if you did not know the other party was going to commit a crime, and a reasonable person in your position wouldn't think the other party was planning to commit a crime, you are not engaged in criminal conspiracy. There's tons of special cases and nuances here, but that's roughly what happens.

tptacek 5y ago
That's if they charge conspiracy in the first place. The more general answer here is that the criminality of exploitation depends a lot on your state of mind (a property of law that something HN always has a hard time with). A professor teaching a class to an anonymous group of students is not at all the same thing, in criminal law, as that same professor standing behind foreign intelligence operatives coaching them on a targeted attack. The confounder here is that there are statutes you can theoretically violate by providing some specific exploitation tools to foreign nationals. The MIT professor, in an MIT classroom, is never going to be charged (same almost certainly goes for a consultant teaching an exploit class at Black Hat USA).