Computer crime - column

SOMEONE TOLD me about this jaunty computer bilk long ago. Data processor Smith, working in Payroll at Gog and Magog Corp., noted that each time employees were paid, oh, $243.013 the IBM or Xerox would round off to $243.01; 0.003 didn't print out anywhere--it had no existence. So Smith instructed the computer to deposit every frangment of take-home in his personal bank account--0.003 X 10,000 workers X 52 is a decent annual incentive bonus. That was 1972 or so: since, computer crime has become as prevalent and sophisticated as fresh, resistant gonorrhea viruses.

I have a free-market definition. No new industry or form of commerce can be considered profitable until some criminal claque has been drawn to it. What ain't worth stealing, ain't. A Smithsonian magazine article has it that between $300 million and $5 billion is gouged annually by electronic rustling. And this does not count the "hacker" subculture--teen children who access (and often damage) systems by telephone instead of doing something creative, like autoerotic strangulation. (Access is now a verb. Think I'll access my wife tonight.) The 414 crew in Milwaukee nicked a major network at Los Alamos. Little Fred, age 14, could give his high-school principal 432 parking tickets, or insert himself in The Dictionary of American Biography. Computers, after all, were invented to disperse information--security is counter their essence. The Department of Defense has sicced in-house tiger teams on its own hardware. Not one system was impregnable. Imagine what Rosenberg could do today with an access code or two. We've come some long way from half Jello boxes.

And yet computer law is about as up-to-date as the Burying in Wool Act. Just twently or so states have passed modern legislation: there is no federal computer-crime code whatsoever. At a New York Bar Association seminar, U.S. Attorney Rudolph Guiliani though aloud that four times as much is stolen from the bank system through computer hold-ups as through good old panty-hose-over-your-face confrontation. "A whole group of people who would be deterred by violent activity or the need to corrupt a bank officer feel safe committing computer crime. It's impersonal, distant. Deterrent barriers are down." Yet Guiliani is forced to prosecute using awkward larceny or wire-fraud legislation. Might as well play billiards with a sashweight.

What, moreover, is property? A California court ruled that electrical impulses moving between computer and computer couldn't be called tangible. (Well, nu?, they aren't.) Another court said that stolen computer time wasn't service theft. When a crook pipes your tax record or hospital chart, he hasn't, in the common-law sense, committed larceny: there is no "taking and carrying away." Wire-fraud legislation can enable a prosecutor--but the crime must be interstate. And penalties are often disproportionate: any teenage hacker or "logic bomber" indicted for vandalism under wire fraud would be subject to a five-year sentence. Furthermore, no one has even decided how you should properly define "computer." In some states now, misuse of a word processor or simple home calculator would qualify as computer crime. Think, you could send your steno-pool temp upriver if she tapped out her Pritikin diet plan on the office display reader.

IBM counsel Donato Evangelista said with some naivete: "A certain mystique has grown up around computers. Actually, the computer is a relatively simple tool, roughly analogous to a corporate file room." So, but not so: the computer is both grand modern utensil and premonition. Hal, in 2001, was no file clerk. Those sterile squared-off numerals--each 9 looking like some stiff golf flag--suggest establishment, multinational, bureaucratic, adversary, unsociable, big. another arrogant, separate--maybe inimical--lobe for the human brain. You are meant, watching War Games, to sympathize and celebrate because a young hacker has almost kicked off World War, Part III. Nuclear defense computers are "inhuman." They supervise "inhuman" nuclear armament. The corollary assumption is dangerous and over-facile: that our war chest has become too complex for safety. Children can superzap it. (They could, no doubt, glitch quite a lot.) But the conclusion that we should disarm unilaterally--since it is somehow better to die by intention than by mistake--represents liberal garbage in, liberal garbage out. and I smell left-side manipulation. After all, that new, chic-progressive class of technocrats, managers, social theorists understood best what a computer could do. They programmed it and us: income redistribution, indeed, all of statism as we recognize the phenomenon, could never have been without data processing. Now these radical mandrins tell us they're scared: and they should know. Me, I always though compassion cam out of a terminal somewhere.

Meanwhile Congress has had computer-crime legislation in committee since 1977. And we still prosecute electronic theft as if it were shoplifting. Giuliani has this insight: "Congress, particularly the House, is virtually useless, as a body, to deal comprehensively with a serious criminal problem. Or really with any kind of comprehensive problem. One group or another--either civil libertarian or far right--will block legislation. In fact Congress has been unable to legislate at all in the criminal-law area for the last ten or 12 years. There is little hope that it will get up a consensus or take itself seriously enough to pass legislation like this." I might advance some incisive, ironic comment here: but, on second though, I'm too disgusted.