File: NEWSWEEK - TEACHING HACKERS ETHICS Read 6 times ============================================================================== = Teaching Hackers Ethics = Newsweek/January 14, 1985 by Dennis A. Williams = = with Richard Sandza = [Word Processed by BIOC Agent 003] = ============================================================================== The parents of "Echo Man," 16, "Thr ee Rocks," 15, and "Uncle Sam," 17, probably thought they were in their rooms doing homework. Instead, the Burlingame, Calif., teen-agers were programming their Apples to scan the Sprint telephone-service computers for valid access numbers, which they used to make free calls. The hackers then posted the numbers on an electronic bulletin board, so others could share in the spoils. That was their undoing. Local police, who had been monitoring the bulletin board, raided each of the hackers' homes last month and found enough evidence to charge them with felony theft and wire fraud. But the police chose not to prosecute if the youngsters agreed to pay Sprint for the calls and write 10-page papers -- on typewriters, no less -- on the evils of computer hacking. Several years after the introducti on of computers into the nation's classrooms, teachers are realizing they have a twofold lesson to teach: computer use and computer abuse. But few schools have initiated the second part of the program. "Many schools are trying to focus on the issue of ethnics," says Jeff Levinsky of the Stanford Institute on Microcomputers in Education. "Still, there's nowhere near enough of that." One reason is that most schools are still trying to catch up with the changing technology, which leaves little time for thinking about its moral implications. But some teachers try to emphasize high-tech ethics in their computer classes. David Daniels, a seventh-grade teacher in Houston, devoted a week to discussing the movie "WarGames," which illustrates both the allure and the dangers of computer trespassing. Others point out the potential consequences of computer mischief, such as expulsion from school, incurring lawsuits or causing personal harm, say, by tampering with a hospital's computer. Many hackers are already proficient users by the time they get computer courses in school, and some teachers may feel it's too late to keep them from tampering. "We have lots of kids who are way ahead of the teachers," says Larry Hawkinson, a retired Silicon Valley teacher. Some schools, in fact, seek to exploit that expertise by challenging students to break into the school's computer; the process helps the school design better safeguards for its own system but leaves students more capable of breaking into others. Teachers themselves are often guilty of software piracy, and frequently convey only the most pragmatic notions of computer propriety. "Computer instructors don't teach lofty things like the difference between right and wrong," charges Jeanne Dietsch of Talmist, Inc., a Chicago computer-consulting firm. "They just teach technical things like how to program in codes to protect your own privacy." Power: One soulution may be to give hackers the responsibility for monitoring electronic snooping. At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts, five student "superusers" control the school's computer system. "The group has been very strict about policing its own actions," says adviser Paul Goldenberg. "They are almost nauseatingly moral." Senior superuser Toby Mintz admits that members used to peruse the records "just to see what our grades were." But he says they never changed anything. "We k