The Feds' Latest Crusade

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/columns/0,4164,2637321,00.html

October 5, 2000
By Lewis Z. Koch Special To Inter@ctive Week

The U.S. government is now embarking on a new war against teen
hackers. It's likely to be no more successful than our "War on Drugs,"
but geeky keyboard desperados, handicapped by raging hormones and
other afflictions of puberty, are much easier and safer marks than
well-armed cartel terrorists.

Thus it was that earlier this year, the full force of the federal
government, including the highly secretive Defense Criminal
Investigative Service, marshaled 11 weapons-toting enforcement
officers clad in bulletproof vests. Their target was the home of a
16-year-old South Floridian, Jonathan James, whose girlfriends thought
he was real cool for being able to hack into computers at the
Pentagon, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, BellSouth
and, of course - shades of War Games - the Miami-Dade school system.

A Miami Herald reporter, Martin Merzer, quoted James' father as saying
of his boy: "He's just like your son, just like the boy next door, but
a few steps sharper. I've been in computers for 20 years, and I can't
do what he was doing." It appears that, among other hacks, young James
downloaded a bunch of e-mail from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency,
which Merzer said was created to "reduce the threat of nuclear,
biological, chemical - and technological - mayhem." James' father said
his son told him the agency's e-mail put him to sleep.

More, bigger, better

The fact that kids like James are more nuisance than danger - the
cyberspace equivalent of kids who toilet-paper houses - is apparently
of no importance to policy-makers. The Department of Justice is asking
Congress for new powers to punish juveniles who experiment with their
computers.

A proposed DOJ amendment to Section 5032 of Title 18, the Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, would give federal courts and
prosecutors jurisdiction over juveniles for a specific list of
offenses: espionage, theft of information from a federal computer or
unlawful access to a federal computer. Those seem reasonable enough if
the threat is real. But it would also offer a general provision for
"damage" to any computer used in interstate or foreign commerce -
which takes in just about every computer out there and raises the
question of what constitutes damage.

Offenders would be prosecuted as juveniles, not as adults. At present,
just about every state-run juvenile detention facility is horrendously
overcrowded. Perhaps with the precipitous drop in the adult crime
rate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the DOJ have to develop
a whole new set of "enemies" through which they can justify - maybe
even increase - their budgets. Or do they actually believe that the
entire teen-age population of the United States is riddled with
hackers, who pose an imminent danger to society unless convicted and
detained?

Since prison facilities are already bulging from the "War on Drugs,"
maybe the next president and DOJ, in collusion with the 107th
Congress, could allocate funds to build special federal detention
centers for juvenile computer hackers.

Of course, such a center would end up being a perpetual hackers'
summit, a place for all those young amateurs to graduate as seasoned
pros after sentences spent exchanging their own special hacking
techniques, analyzing and carefully scrutinizing where they tripped up
and deliberating on how to avoid repeating their mistakes. Hey, far
cooler than regular school, dude! A 24/7 course in hacking!

Another hacker, another dollar

Maybe they could bring in some other networked kiddy criminals for
peer counseling - like 15-year-old Jonathan Lebed, of Cedar Grove,
N.J. Lebed was the kid who made $273,000 by illegally promoting stocks
on the Internet in what the Securities and Exchange Commission called
a "pump and dump" scheme. It seems that Lebed would go into a chat
room or log on to a bulletin board and announce that a penny stock,
about which he had "secret, inside" information, was going to rise to
$20. Lebed didn't have to go to jail, but he did have to return all
the money plus $12,000 in interest.

Lebed's father said of his son's intrepid behavior: "So they pick on a
kid."

Gretchen Morgenson, author of The New York Times "Market Watch"
column, made the same observation, albeit a little more pointedly: How
different were Lebed's actions, she asked, from those by Wall Street
equity analysts whose firms financially benefit from the price targets
they put on stocks? "And how, precisely, do Jonathan [Lebed]'s
activities differ from the gunning of stocks by big investors at the
end of each day or each quarter, a practice widely known as
window-dressing, to make their performance look better and attract
more investors?" Morgenson wondered. "What about the accounting games
corporate managements play to keep their stocks aloft?"

She capped it all by observing: "The manipulations Jonathan [Lebed]
was accused of involved misleading statements. Many of today's most
popular accounting tricks mislead too: for example, so-called pro
forma numbers that reflect only what companies want investors to see,
rather than the entire picture."

A modest proposal

Everyone knows there are country club federal penitentiaries, places
with tennis courts, libraries and classes, where white-collar
corporate miscreants wind up. Without spending a great deal more, the
feds could set up a juvenile wing of the country club pens. Then it
would be easy to set up a mentoring system. You could put one
computer-genius kid together with one top-notch, cunning white-collar
criminal. They could - how do social workers put it? - oh yes, they
could bond with one another. Won't that be constructive! Kids can
learn a lot from adults.

There are great benefits for the adults as well. Most grown-ups aren't
very computer-literate. Often, the best they can do is read e-mail. In
a sort of reverse apprenticeship, the kids could help the adults to
develop their computer skills to more criminally advantageous levels.
Who knows? Some long-term partnerships might even develop.

Even now I can hear fading ghosts in the Oval Office charting moves
against mostly imagined enemies:

"We haven't used the [Federal] Bureau [of Investigation], and we
haven't used the Justice Department, but things are going to change
now," Richard M. Nixon declared shortly after his re-election in 1972.

"That's an exciting prospect!" gushed White House counsel John Dean.

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