Juveniles appear to have an ethical "deficit" when it comes to computer crimes. In one study, 34 percent of university undergraduates admitted to illegally pirating copyrighted software, and 16 percent admitted to gaining illegal access to a computer system to browse or exchange information. See Bowker, Juveniles and Computers, at 41 (citing surveys).
Moreover, a recent poll of 47,235 elementary and middle school students conducted by Scholastic, Inc. revealed that 48% of juveniles do not consider hacking to be a crime.
This ethical deficit increases the likelihood that even "good kids" who are ordinarily unlikely to commit crimes such as robbery, burglary, or assault, may not be as disinclined to commit online crimes.
Software Theft Results in 130,000 Lost U.S. Jobs, $5.3 Billion in Lost Wages, and Nearly $1 Billion in Lost Tax Revenues. Corporate America and Home Users are Major Part of the Problem; 1 in 4 Programs are Pirated
Consider these examples:
* A 16-year-old from Florida pleads guilty and is sentenced to six months in a detention facility for intercepting electronic communications on military computer networks and for illegally obtaining information from a NASA computer network.
* A 16-year-old in Virginia pleads guilty to computer trespassing after hacking into a Massachusetts Internet service provider's (ISPs) computer system, causing $20,000 in damages.
* A 13-year-old California boy pleads guilty to making threats directed against a 13-year-old girl over the Internet. The boy had created a website which included a game featuring the girl's picture over a caption which read: "Hurry! Click on the trigger to kill her." The website included a petition calling for the girl's death.
What do you think about this saying?
"Character is what you do when no one is watching."
"Most kids would not walk into somebody's house and rummage around and then turn around and walk out, and say, 'I didn't do anything wrong because I didn't steal anything.' But they're more than willing to go into somebody's computer and do that, and think because they didn't intentionally do anything wrong, they haven't done anything hurtful." — Pete Smith, director
Cybercitizen Partnership
The FBI's Vatis tells students, ''Do you think it would be OK to go spray-paint your neighbor's house or the grocery store down the street? On a Web site, it's the same sort of thing. It's somebody's storefront or an extension of themselves.''
''They do sometimes realize that when they're copying someone's product, it's not just that 5 cent disk, but someone's work that they're copying,'' she said. ''I think they do come to appreciate the fact that it's somebody's salary they're stealing.''
He tries to drive home the consequences of hacking — including the resources it drains from his center, as law enforcement scrambles to find who is responsible at the outset of an attack.
Authorities ''don't know if it's a terrorist or a foreign military,'' Vatis said. ''It diverts very scarce resources of people who are trying to focus on crime, warfare and terrorism.''
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001/09/12/internet-fbi-attacks.htm
FBI following digital trail of terrorists
By Mike Snider, USA TODAY
Internet service providers such as America Online and EarthLink have begun cooperating with the investigation into Tuesday's terrorist attacks, and now privacy advocates are bracing for what they see as an assault on civil liberties. They're expressing concern that, for the sake of security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other authorities will push for increased electronic surveillance of communication networks, including stepped-up use of Carnivore.
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