Summer vacation is underway with older kids spending unsupervised hours at home. If your middle-schooler is making the leap into those tumultuous teen years, it’s time to be especially vigilant about their online activity. That’s the advice of Arnold Laanui, a Hawaii-based special agent for the FBI and an expert on cybercrime.

“Typically, during the summer months each seventh-grade, soon-to-be-eighth-grade class, they all tend to get really good cell phones or tech,” Laanui said. “Many of them start to turn 13. Parents see that they’re a teenager now, (so) they should have that technology. And they spend the whole summer getting involved in online networks or social media networks.”

Laanui, a Damien Memorial School graduate, visits schools regularly to talk about cybersecurity, digital ethics and “digital tattoos” — the personal information that gets posted on the internet and remains there permanently. He said he’s often called upon to visit a school in the late fall or winter, after a student’s summertime misbehavior has percolated through the school community and caused problems.

“I’m kind of like a flu shot, coming in a bit late,” he said.

Laanui, 48, has worked on the FBI’s cybersquad for about 15 years. He found that many cybersecurity issues facing teens aren’t related to increased criminal activity or even to unusual teen behavior. It’s that modern technology has made the ordinary trials and tribulations of the teen years much more public.

“Statistically speaking, one of our greatest vulnerabilities isn’t the fact that there are bad guys out there waiting to steal our stuff; it’s the way we interact with the technology itself,” he said. “Really, what we’re seeing playing out on the internet is classic human behaviors, but there’s new twists that come with the technology.”

The teenage years are often when issues with sexual interest and orientation, ethnic identity and gender identity surface, he said.

While such development is normal and healthy, in the past “those behaviors play out in a smaller setting — your classroom, your home and maybe on your campus,” he said. “But through technological means, that development is now being played out on the internet … on a much larger scale and in a way that’s way more public.”

Laanui’s presentations are direct and dramatic. He shows some of the screen names that seventh- and eighth-grade students use for their online profiles. “Those screen names would tend to be rather profane by adult standards,” he said. Students might think those names are private, but they’re not.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many young teens have yet to learn that their actions have consequences. A student might post a comment about a college admission officer’s visit to campus, he said. “Colleges occasionally screen online for what those comments look like, and that might have very adverse effects on someone’s admission to that college,” he said.

Laanui said students need instruction about publishing standards, because that is what they are doing when they post online. Some local schools have created blogs for students that are monitored, with inappropriate comments giving rise to discussion about ethics and standards.

“What that kind of mentoring does,” Laanui said, “is it lets students know that these spaces, although they live in a digital realm, are not necessarily an ‘other’ realm at all.”