"Such things are no longer jokes. They screw up entire lives."
But should they screw up lives? Why should we put up with authorities that can't take a joke. This is the foundation of the culture of defiance that hacking was all about expressing.
They key concept here is 'trickery', and how 'tricked' someone is on a spectrum. Society trusts our authorities to give their best efforts to keep our daily actions within the realm of 'the law'.
There is a spectrum of what one considers a 'joke'. If you tell an authority a dad joke, when they ask you a serious question, that is a fine place on the spectrum to joke with authorities. If you are giving them fake IDs to _trick_ them (and thus, trick society at large, who have delegated power to the authorities by vote etc...), that is not a good thing, to trick others you are living with, at the far end of the 'joke/trickery' spectrum.
Probably because the number of instances of people with real bombs has gone up. It’s not a joke any more because the real bomb isn’t the exception.