Read over these scenarios. Ask yourself the questions shown below. This should help you decide what important rights you want to protect and what code or message you want to get across to your peers. You should be able to come up with a code of at least 6 important points for your code after reading these situations and discussing them. Also, there are some wonderful useful links below that can help you.
Think about these five questions for each of the situations below:
1. Is it ethical or unethical?
2. Is it against the law? Yes, No, Need more information.
3. Have any rights been violated? If so, explain.
4. Should there be punishment?
5. Would the case ever be okay?
Case 1: A young girl hears about a terrific new adventure game for her computer, but she can not afford to buy it. A friend of hers already has the program. He says he will make a copy of it and sell it to her for half-price. She takes him up on the offer.
Case 2: Just for fun, 13-year-old Alice tells the other people on her electronic mailing list that she is 20 years old and a nursing student. Others on the list have begun e-mailing her health-related questions.
Case 3: A college student in New York uses a computer to "call up" the college's mainframe computer. He finds his record and gives himself excellent grades. That semester, he makes the honor roll.
Case 4: Albert finds a site on the Internet that has lots of old term papers. He downloads one on ancient Greece, changes the title, and submits it as his own.
Case 5: Fahad is upset with his friend George. He finds the data disk on which George has been storing his essays and erases it.
Case 6: Chang sends an e-mail message to his sister who attends a school across town. In this e-mail he uses profanities and racial slurs.
Case 7: Mike's older friend Hank, a high school student, has discovered the password to the school's student information system. Because Hank feels a teacher has unfairly given him a poor grade, he plans to create a "bomb" which will erase all the information on the office computer.
Case 8: Jack's class has been using the digital camera to take pictures for the school year book. Jack has discovered that he can use a computer program to change the photographs. He has used the program to make himself look like the tallest boy in the class, to blacken out the front tooth of a girl he doesn't like, and to give his teacher slightly crossed eyes.
Case 9: The computers in the library always seem to be busy. Otis tells the librarian he is working on a research project, but actually uses the computer to access the latest soccer scores posted on the Internet.
Case 10: Several junior high school students "break into" the computer system of a large company. (That means they electronically gain access to the information stored in the computer.) They don't steal any money or information. They do destroy certain records and documents and they read information that is private.
Case 11: Cindy finds some good information about plant growth nutrients for her science fair project on a CD-ROM reference title. She uses the copy function of the computer to take an entire paragraph from the CD-ROM article and paste it directly into her report. When she writes her report, she does not cite the source in her bibliography.
Case 12: Just for fun, Nellie sets the print command on her computer to print 50 copies of an electronic encyclopedia article she's been reading, and then walks away.
Case 13: Betty downloads a solitaire card game from the Internet that is "shareware." It can be legally used for 30 days and then Betty must either delete it from her computer or send its author a fee. What should Betty do?
Case 14: With her teacher's permission, Lucy uses the classroom computer to download a program from the Internet that has instructions on how to make paper airplanes. After using the program, the classroom computer does not seem to work very well, crashing often and randomly destroying files. Lucy thinks she might have downloaded a virus along with the paper airplane program.
Case 15: Penelope has found a Web site that has "gross jokes" on it. She prints out the pages and shares them with her friends.
Case 16: Danny asked Julie to go out on a date. Julie refused. Danny, using an anonymous high school e-mail account, sought revenge by posting the following message posing as Julie on a chat group: "Hi, my name is Julie Tolooting. Call me at home for a hot date. My phone number is 219-429-9337" (he posted her actual home phone number.)
1. What kind of message does this send to Julie about who uses the Internet and for what? If you were Julie, how would you feel about what Danny has done?
2. How should Danny, who is a minor, be disciplined?
Case 17: "I got a copy of a really funny computer "joke" from one of my friends. It asks you if you want Internet Access for FREE? When you say 'yes,'it changes some files on your computer so that each time you log on, your computer says 'Way to go, DODO'. I think I will send it through the Internet to my friends as a joke ."
Case 18: A computer operator at a large bank fixes the computer so it switches part of other people's deposits into his account. In less than two weeks, his account grows to more than ten million dollars.
Case 19: "At school, I saw this girl that I don't like enter her password for Internet access, and now I can log in and read all her e-mail. Now I can send e-mail from her account, too, so that people will think the message is from her."
Casd 20: Jerry borrows Ben's game disks for Monster Truck Rally II and installs them on his home computer. He says he will erase the game if he does not like it, or will buy the game for himself if he likes it.
Case 21: My friend Joey and I wanted to buy this really cool computer game, but it cost a lot of money. Then Joey found a web site where you could get this game FOR FREE just by trading a copy of any other game that you had.
Case 22: "My friend Quentin brags that he can break into any computer there is! He figures out how to get into a computer network, and then he can read anybody's e-mail or even send fake e-mail from someone else's account. He says this is really fun, and he wants me to help him get into the computer at school."
Case 23: Hacker cracks Islamist mailing list, 09/18/01
A hacker has cracked a German Islamist Web site, publishing on the Web hundreds of e-mail addresses of subscribers to its mailing list, including one of a suspect ...
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0918islamhack.html
Case 24: "I have a history paper due tomorrow, and I just started to research it. I found a web site that has a lot of term papers ALREADY WRITTEN. They are grouped by subject matter and grade level. There's a paper there on my topic. All I have to do to get a copy is trade a copy of any other paper that I did for school. That would be a lot easier than researching and writing this entire paper in one night."
Case 25: A teenager in Boston and some of his friends found a way to hack into a computer that belongs to the phone company and that directs telephone traffic in the Boston area. After he got into the system, the hacker decided to reboot the computer, which basically made it crash. The first time he did this, the hacker completely shut off phone service for six hours to a regional airport so that the air traffic control tower had an extrememly hard time communicating. The second time he crashed the computer, he cut off phone service to about 600 homes.
The phone company reported this to the United States Secret Service, which investigated the case and indentified all the kids involved. He received very serious punishment: he lost his computer, must pay $5000 to the telephone company, and must work in the community for free for 250 hours. He will also be on probation for the next two years, and during that time he is not allowed to use any computer with a modem. That means, of course, that he is off the Internet and all other networks. How would you feel if you were one of the 600 houses that lost phone service? What if you needed to call 911? How would you feel if you had been flying into the airport that lost telephone service?
Case 26: Mr. Skala figured out how to get into the CyberPatrol program to see how it worked. At no point did Skala think he was doing anything wrong or malicious. Just figuring out how a computer program works by carefully examining it, is not illegal, at least not to Skala. He ignored Cyber Patrol’s licensing agreement that, like every other piece of software, forbids reverse engineering of the computer code. If you buy a car or a TV, you are perfectly entitled to take it apart to discover how it works, so why not a computer program? “I didn’t steal anything,” says Skala. “Theft is defined as depriving an owner of the use of a thing—stealing a chair, stealing software. But we didn’t take anything.” No, they gave. They gave the world information that was hidden from them by corporate interests. He felt Cyberpatrol was blocking sites that shouldn't be blocked and they wouldn't tell anyone how they were blocking sites.
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