Computerworld - The flurry of recent, highly publicized incidents involving young systems hackers accessing government and commercial data bases has refocused attention on a variety of proposed and recently enacted computer crime laws, both state and federal.
Some 20 states have passed computer crime laws, and the federal statute, languishing on Capitol Hill since the late 1970s, is receiving new interest among legislators who previously considered computer crime an esoteric subject of the future.
The slow development of state laws until now has been little more than an academic undertaking, as forward-looking legislators sought to persuade their colleagues it was necessary to prepare for a growing criminal problem in the information society. Now, criminal justice authorities in several states are scrambling to bring those laws to bear or identify existing laws that will aid the prosecution of the growing number of apprehended hackers.
The most notorious group of hackers of recent note are the so-called "414s," named after their Milwaukee area code, who have been at the center of the "computer crime wave" of recent months. Numbering only a handful, this group has been charged with unauthorized access of computer systems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and several Milwaukee-area schools.
New Mexico and Wisconsin have computer crime laws that can be used by prosecutors, who so far are taking a get-tough approach to this mini crime wave. New York does not, but there are other laws that can be used, according to Susan Nycum, a Palo Alto, Calif., attorney specializing in computer law, who has looked into the case.
Nycum, of the law firm Gaston Snow & Ely Bartlett, said wire fraud statutes apply in this case, but the prosecutors will have to show that "a scheme or artifice to defraud" was involved. She noted the hackers probably did not intend to steal any information in the systems they attacked, but she said theft of the computer time involved would qualify.
Also, in the Los Alamos incident, she said "there is a whole body of law directed at federal enclaves. It's my understanding [prosecutors] will try to rely on that" in their attempts to gain convictions of the "414" group.
Nycum said she talked to one of the defense attorneys in the case and was told the hackers "didn't have any malicious intent," that would probably be a major line of defense in any court proceeding arising from the incidents. "I'm frankly very concerned about [that line of reasoning] " she said. "Some of [the hackers] don't understand what they've done."
This IT pilot fish at a government agency gets a call from the administrative officer, who's on the verge of hysterics: Her computer is dead, she's having a total meltdown, and it's all his fault.
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