Charges Against High School Hackers Dropped

ZosX writes "According to eSchool News Online, the 13 students from Kutztown, PA originally charged with felonies for hacking have been given a deal, dropping charges in exchange for 15 hours of community service. From the article: 'The probation department realizes this is small potatoes,' said William Bispels, an attorney representing nearly half the accused students. This is great news for the students and their families."

Comments

I hope they don't take the deal

[Rogerborg]

I hope that at least one of them fights it out, and makes the state (in all senses) that started this madness either see it out, or drop the charges altogether.

I was asked to hack

[Boomshanka]

When I was in my senior year in high school back in 86 and Apple IIe's were the flavour of the day (wonder if linux will run on it?) the math department had a password protected program for tracking and scoring all the students of the school for that year and guess what.. they forgot the password. I was asked what could I do so I ran the program through a hex dump and looked for unusual words appearing in the hex and found a word "ferret" tried it and got in. So its not all bad to be a computer enthusiast (nerd) at high school. I got no community service for that. I had the chance to up my grades but I of course I didnt.

Backing down gracefully.....

[xiaomonkey]

So, this appears to be the school's way of backing down gracefully. That is, they get to drop the charges without having to admit that it was wrong to press the charges in the first place.

Overall, not a bad out come. But, it does leave it as an open question whether or not the school district will every try something like this again.

Lucky fucking kids

[rk87]

You know, this is such absolute bullshit.

Several years ago (I think '99) I was in an optional school activity that fixed computers and made sure the school network worked etc.. There was one particular trouble computer where apparently students snuck on and installed a whole bunch of nasty stuff. One of the other guys that did this with me installed Back Orifice on it to monitor it (remember, those were the days when it was popular). One day he asked me to go on the linux box and check on that computer (I watched him do it plenty of times, so i knew how). At this point, the head of the computer group came around and saw bo2k. Oooh boy was he pissed. Since this was the time of people using bo2k as a virus, he instantly thought it was.

I told him that I was just checking it for the other guy but when he asked him he knew nothing about it and wondered why there was a virus on the linux box. Fuck.

I got kicked off the computer group, got a total of abut 25 hours of detention cleaning desks, and my parents got to pay the equivalent of about $200 in "damages". And no, I did NOT make slashdot with this.

Re:Lucky fucking kids

[rk87]

If you had actually read my comment, you would know that I was not the one that installed BO2K, but the other guy that claimed he didn't. These days, I use TightVNC exclusively.

And, what I didn't mention, is that they told me they would press charged if I didn't clean the desks and my parents didn't pay the fines. If they were actually going to do it, i don't know, but what was I supposed to know? It's fucked either way _especially_ since I didn't install it.

My comments, and link to article

[Antony-Kyre]

The below really bothers me. Someone may think that accepting that kind of offer admits no guilt, but in reality, it admits you're guilty. The logic is that if you are truly innocent, you should have no problem in court. But then again, the American judicial system is so messed up, especially towards juveniles/minors, it may be next to impossible to get a fair trial/proceeding.

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-b4_5kutztown-3 aug26,0,1647962,print.story?coll=all-newslocal-hed

Mike Boland, who represents one student, said his client probably will accept the offer. ''It doesn't require my client to acknowledge he is guilty of anything,'' he said.

Re:Good news?

[EternityInterface]

- The Profound -
Men of profound thought
appear to themselves in intercourse with others
like comedians
for in order to be understood
they must always simulate superficiality

[Nietzchse]

sad...

[Anonymous Coward]

i am currently attending junior high.

the sad thing is the school management and even some it departments are very naive about their computer security. i recently ALMOST got suspended from school from using batch files to start word, internet explorer, or excel! (they believe batch files constitute as a hacking tool/device that can compromise network security).

ideally, IT staff should be trained properlly and understand that security is only as good as the person enforcing it. if school network security is bad, then perhaps they should hire better people. this is because i recently got the admin password of the local computer taking about 15 minutes (1) boot usb key 2) copy sam file from hdd to usb 3) use saminside to generate pwdump file of sam hashes 4) pass the pwdump file to l0phtcrack which passes the hash through a rainbow table - the password was 6chars long with 1 number!?) - the IT staff were so naive to have the network and local computer pass the same, and allowing booting to usb key.

in the ideal world, school network security would be standardized and out-sourced to higher-skilled people.

these kids should be commended for proving how in-effective school network security is.

Outrageous

[hooeezit]

The authorities in question had the gall to offer a compromise that included:

15 hours of community service, a letter of apology, a class on personal responsibility, and a few months of probation.

A letter of apology? That I'm sighted, not dumb, and would like to use convenient technology to stay in touch with my friends?

And what is this from one of the defendant attorneys:

Mike Boland, who represents one student, said his client likely will accept the offer. "It doesn't require my client to acknowledge he is guilty of anything," he said.

I'd say a letter of apology counts as acknowledging guilt, at least in my books!
If you keep track of Paul Graham's essays (try http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/nerds.html), you will probably recognize this as a glowing example of the holding pen analogy he uses vis-a-vis present day school system. I'm apalled that the most important thing that these bright kids are impressioned with is 'Obey the Thought Police'!

So...they did not have the right to read?

[RAMMS EIN]

Reading the students' story, it sounds almost like The Right to Read.

Student Story:

At a school board meeting ~ a year ago, opponents of the high school's Computer Initiative predicted that the administration would not be able to control the student's access to inappropriate internet sites...

It would allow the computer department to monitor student activity and it limited access to the network and internet. This configuration was protected by an administrative password and, as our administration discovered, the laptop could be easily reconfigured by curious students when the password was not secured...

At least one student figured it out and passed it along until ~ 80 - 100 of the students had access to it...

the Kutztown Police Department notified the parents of 13 high school students that their children were being charged with the crime of Computer Trespass. This offense is graded by the state as a felony of the 3rd degree.

Right to Read:

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books...

In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing...

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books.

Re:Small potatoes == felony?

[MosesJones]

It's not like they murdered someone

And this is the problem with the way the US legal system is going. Murder by a juvenille becomes a death penalty offence, and hey look another felony should have them tried as an adult and another.... etc etc etc until we have 12 year olds being tried for fraud because they lied to their parents about tidying their room to get their pocket money.

Its a more fundamental question than small potatoes, its about whether its right to EVER try juvenilles as adults.

Mods? Hello?

[Zeebs]

I can speak to the truth of this. When I was in my 4th year of highschool the IT department decided they wanted to lock down all the computers in the school, passwords this that and the other thing. They did this even in the lab that was used exclusivly for the programming courses, needless to say, pain in the arse. A small group of the students got a little annoyed about having to get up and get the teacher to unlock the computer at the start of every class, and anytime we managed to crash one among other things. So we conspired, about 3 of us, to obtain the passwords we needed to work freely, simply quickly mocking up a dummy screen and getting the teacher to unlock the computer. Now this is far worse then what these students did, we actually stole the password, it wasn't written down anywhere we could get to. You know what happened?

The teacher thought it was great, we all had a good laugh, he even wanted to have a look at the source for our little tool. Now, we did admit to the teacher we did this however, because there wasn't an environment of fear about going to jail for basicly a simple prank.

Had that been the case for these students the state might actually have had a case and gone to trial with it.

Where is the line ?

[DirtyFly]

1) You take a coffe , forget the wallet in the counter, someone uses your credit card :
a) You asked for it.
b) Who ever found the wallet should had taken it to the police.

2) A girl is drunk and falls asleep in a public garden, she is rapped:
a) She had it comming, she should fall asleep in a public ungarded place.
b) Who ever foud her should had waken her and help her.

3) The door lock in your house is a 1990 model simple to break, your house is burglered when you are on vacations.
a) Next time get a better Lock.
b) No one should had ever entered your house.

Please tell me where is the line ? between crime and not crime ! 15 hours of cummunity service ? WTF thats been lean on them.

The comparisons above are a bit harsh, but i believe that here there are plenty of people who consider themselves as law makers, and are completely out of sync with reallity.

Maybe im just being naive but if i let my door open whoever enter my house without permission is as criminal as the one who breaks the window to enter.

These kid/kids should have alerted the system admins to the vulnerability of their system and help to improve rather than disrupt. I do believe that this is the result of a stupid culture imposed by TV shows and other tipes of media that make people believe that its beter and cooler to be a cracker rather than helping to construct something better. You can see this trend in many other areas other than IT.

my 5 cents

JORGE

Re:Where is the line ?

[LordLucless]

I'm really struggling to find a parallel between your scenarios and what happened to these kids. I'm really struggling.

How about this scenario:
You give a friend permission to sleep on your couch. However, they are only allowed to do it between the hours of 9 and 5 and they are only allowed to sleep on the couch. You come home at 6 o'clock and find them sitting on the couch, in breach of all your rules. So you charge them with trespass.

These children were given laptops by an education institution that their parents were funding. The school would not let them get an education without these laptops. These laptops reported everything the students did back to the school administration, and they were forced to use them. They disabled the surveillance software.

After that, they did a number of different things. But that's not hugely important, because that's not what they're being charged for. They are being charged for stopping a computer, paid for by their parents, that they were forced to use in order to get an education that was theirs by rights, spying on them.

How exactly is that equivelant to stealing a wallet, breaking and entering or rape?

Re:Hmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Because criminal charges for unauthorized computer access should be reserved for breaking into computers that aren't supposed to be in your possession in the first place, not for going beyond the access allowed by your contract. Breach of contract is a civil matter, not a criminal one, and in my opinion that's all this was.

If someone is talking too loud in a library should they be asked to leave or should they be charged with breaking and entering?

Re:DAMMIT MODS

[RAMMS EIN]

`` I hate to break it to you, but this is a real problem is the USA, and it isn't a problem in most of the rest of the western world.

Then you haven't been paying attention. As an Aussie, I'll give you at least one example:''

Yes, that's Australia. Note that I said "most of the rest of the western world". I was specifically thinking about Australia when I wrote that.

``That said, the OP *is* flamebait, and your post isn't any better.''

I agree that my post isn't any better than the original, but I don't agree that the original was flamebait. It was simply stating that some people thought there is a problem with American authorities. I don't see any flamebait in that.

Now, if you considered _my_ post a flamebait, that would make sense. It uses slanted language and actually insults the intelligence of an entire nation. Strangely, it has been modded Insightful. Maybe the point I was making is a valid one?

Major difference

[Sycraft-fu]

You were asked by the legal owner to do it. These kids were told, repeatedly, to stop doing this and were punished by the school for it.

If I lock my keys in my car and call a locksmith to get them he is perfectly allowed to pick my lock since I (the legal owner) requested it. Indeed, he'll even charge me to do it. If you decide to pick my lock randomly for fun, it's a crime and you'll be charged if caught.

That's the things. Just like with physical property, you aren't allowed to access computers without permission. Also permission of one kind doesn't constitute full permission. Slashdot runs a publicly accessable webserver, since it is setup with the intent to reach the public, it's the same as giving you permission to access it. However that doesn't mean you have permission to try to get root on the box and do whatever you want. Likewise that the school let these kids use the laptops was not permission to do whatever they want.

I can say as a lab admin for a university, if we had to deal with a similar situation, there would be criminal charges as well. If you break in to a computer, we'll yank your account and send you to talk to the dean. If you do it again, we are going to call the cops since you obviously didn't learn your lesson the first time.

True, our labs are much more secure than these laptops, but nothing any person with computer support experience couldn't easily get by. If you have physical access to the computer, it's not hard to just wipe and reinstall the damn thing. However just because you can do it, doesn't make it legal or right to do it. I mean I can break in your house. Unless you are someone with one in a million good security, it would be easy. However that doesn't mean it's legal for me to do so.

What you did, was put your skills to good use to help someone at their request. What these kinds did was put their skills to bad use for personal gain.

Forbidden to turn pages of a book allso ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids are inquisitive. Tell them *not* to look behind a door, and you can be *sure* some of them, probably most, will. The defiant ones more openly than others.

But what do you expect ? They have this wonderfull machine in their hands, which can do *all kinds* of stuff, but they are told to *only* use it to "worship" the school. Mind you : the same school most of those kids only tolerate, but more often simply abhor.

Personally I would like to throw that school into jail, because they are willingly tempting (read *provoking*) quite some of their pupils to break their rules.

But than again : most schools are not known for their innovative idea's, or their wilingness to please their pupils. And I'm afraid that providing a kid with a multi-purpose tool while forbidding them to explore the extend of the usage of that tool (and I don't mean using it to spread viri or spy upon others) is nothing short of *malicious*.

P.s.
I'm 44, about trice the age of those culprits :-)