Why Computers Get Snatched

When a computer system is confiscated from a young person because they break into someone's mainframe, because they have a BBS with lots of codes or passwords posted on it, or because they are caught making illegal phone calls, no one complains.

It is often said that the young person obviously committed a crime and deserves to lose their computer.  The kid's parents are not going to complain, because they know enough to think twice about arguing with the FBI, the Secret Service, or whomever.  Plus the parents do not want to make headlines in the local papers.  So what the authorities in effect are doing is convicting people and punishing them by taking away their computer system.  This is, in part, due to the fact that charges are often not pressed against young people who break into computers.

When one asks some big company's public relations department whether or not people break into their computers they are likely to say: "Oh no, of course not, we have the most secure systems."  This is because it looks bad to admit to security breaches in one's system; one's livelihood.

In the case of GTE Telemail, the people there saw something going wrong, told the FBI and then the case was out of their hands.  A full four months or more after the raids in October, 1983 the default password was still the letter "A".  And it was not until weeks after this was publicized that this was corrected (see 2600, April 1984).

Obviously Telemail did not want to admit that they were reluctant to deal with the real problem.  TRW was upset last summer when the press (see 2600, July 1984) had to tell the world about breaches into the company's credit gathering system.

These companies make money because their systems are reliable and secure and not because they will prosecute people who break in.  They know that it is not worth it to try to prosecute kids, and it is better to prosecute those who try to use a computer to embezzle.  In addition kids are often exempt from prosecution or, because of youthful offender laws, will have little or no penalties placed against them.

It is for these reasons that it is more advantageous for companies to have authorities confiscate equipment and punish the hacker that way rather than dragging them through court.  They keep the equipment by calling it evidence in an ongoing investigation, and they often return it if the kid tells them everything they know.

(In addition, the kid's confession about the poor security of whatever system he may have broken into is rarely related to the proper security personnel at the company that owns the system.)

This is also a form of harassment or scare tactics.  Aren't young people citizens and don't they have rights just like the rest of us?  They have the right to due process and have to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Law enforcement types have said that they occasionally have to make hacking headlines 1n order to reduce the amount of late night computer activity.  They have admitted that they need to get a good bust in before the summer starts, because they know that all young people with computers may spend their summer trying to start World War III from their home.  And this is a no-no.