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Does Hacking Grades Warrant 20 Years in Jail?
While there have been many students who decided they would rather change their grades than come by them the usual way, the punishments for the most part have been pretty reasonable. However, the latest chapter in this type of behavior finds two culprits facing a $250,000 fine and 20 years in jail based on the number of charges leveled against them. "The guys have been charged with "unauthorized computer access, identity theft, conspiracy, and wire fraud." Obviously, these guys did a bad thing, but it's hard to see how the possible sentence matches with the crime. Of course, it seems unlikely that any judge would give them the maximum sentence, but even hearing that it's possible just for changing your grades seems ridiculous."
TFA and the post author confuse the issue by saying that these guys are getting punished for the end result (changing their grades), rather than the method (hacking an admin account, using that access to hack other accounts, stealing privileged information, AND taking cash to change someone's grades).
Imagine some jerkwad walked into a 7-11, got a Slurpee, tried to walk out without paying for it, then shot the clerk when the clerk confronted him. Then imagine the Slashdot article saying "this guy could get the death penalty just for stealing a Slurpee."
That's an extreme example, but it gets my message across. They're being prosecuted not only for what they did, but how they did it.
Also, if you read the original press release from the DOJ, it states: "The charged counts carry a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine. However, the actual sentence will be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables, and any applicable statutory sentencing factors."
So even the Feds, while stating the maximum possible sentence (probably for the deterrence value), are admitting that the actual sentence depends on a lot of factors and probably won't be the maximum. Although giving these guys double-dimes in the pen would send a message.
Start a happiness pandemic
Here's the article at InforWorld.
Where I once worked we had a couple of student workers change their own grades, one caught after she had been accepted at University of Michigan, for which she was undoubtably given a right boot in the arse from them after we notified them she had changed her grade. She may well have displaced the next student in line, who was now elsewhere or changed majors as a result of not being accepted. Certain schools only take so many into a programme each year.
The consequences of changing grades can be dire. How about someone receiveing an engineering degree who doesn't really have the solid math background required, but had a friend who worked in the college records office.
We also sacked a student who changed her grades so she could continue to receive financial aid. Hurts nobody, right? Wrong. How about the student who deserved it but all the money in the scholarship fund was given to others, including the one who falsified records.
I, too, doubt the judge would make an example of them. It will probably be a fine and some community service, along with the stain on their records for being convicted of a crime, which would doubtfully make a positive impression upon prospective employers, unless Enron and Arthur Anderson were still in business.
As to this article, Seems a bit of a "slow news day" post. Why not something about how Martial Law in Pakistan has resulted in severed internet connections and how people might be coping.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Remember when hacking into the school's computer system to change grades was considered to be a prank that resulted in maybe at most a suspension. Now, it's literally a Federal Crime. What, in a few years, you'll get the death penalty for hacking grades?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Does it really warrant a lengthy argument?
Insane.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
You are sentenced to school until such time as you earn the grade you created by hacking.
No.
As you were.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Just askin.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The old laws simply need updated to reflect todays technology. Unfortunately the govt is too busy worrying about how many ounces of breast milk you can carry on plane to investigate this matter. At this point the accused party might as well have beat up some cops and then raped their wives to get 20 years.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Sentencing guidelines are a mistake, and that's the whole problem. What sentencing guidelines do is move the judiciary power into the federal power, and as a result, you have a race to ever more ridiculous sentences for political reasons. What we really need is to have judges doing the sentencing based on the facts of the case and the real severity of the crime, not a congress in a race to imprison people to seem tough on crime.
Sure, one can say that there was identity theft involved, but, what -really- happened? If the students used a password cracker to try and break in, then technically, yes, there was an identity theft because they logged in as someone else. However, this sort of an attack doesn't really constitute an identity theft in the sense we would reasonably define it - which is, using someone's personal information to destroy their life. Like, they weren't breaking into accounts to steal visa numbers and go on a spending spree. Yet, they are going to be charged with the crime, and the government is using a technicality to smear them in the public.
Such actions by the government will only undermine people's faith in it. As Princess Leia once said, "the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
This is my sig.
If you think that 20 years is a harsh sentence for illegally changing grades, just think of the kid who had sex with his girlfriend and got 10 years.
In the mean time, some asshole who shoots a kid to death because the kid knocked on the wrong door walks around free, and is even considered an unsung hero by some.
Complaining about the maximum sentence shows lack of experience with matters of law. There are many, many laws in various countries that carry a substantial maximum penalty for a crime because the crime _can_ be severe but it can also be ridiculously petty.
For example, most countries carry the crime "theft" on the books and if that country only has one statute for any sort of theft, the maximum penalty will look harsh if it would be applied to someone stealing a candy bar. However, one has to consider that the same statute also covers stealing millions from a bank in which case a sentence closer to the maximum could be justified.
That's why we have HUMAN judges, with all their faults, instead of just a computer that checks if all the conditions for the crime is met and just prints a "default" sentence, because not every case is the same even if they are punishable under the same law.
Don't break the law.
I didn't place a lot of importance on my grades throughout school, but it's been proven that a person's grades affects many aspects of life. Other than employment grades affect financial assistance, insurances rates, and even leniency in the legal system. While grades aren't really legally binding in a court of law for anything many judges and juries will take good grades into consideration because statistics show that they tend to be law-abiding citizens. In a round-about way if you're falsifying grades then you're stealing financial assistance, cheating insurance companies, etc.
Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
In Argentina, you don't get 20 years even if you kill someone. (in theory you could get up to 25 years for commit a homicide, but it is very unlikely to get such a sentence).
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
It's the standard MO of DA's these days. Pile on charge after charge until someone is looking down the barrel of 50 years for jay-walking, until they're very willing to take the plea-bargan slap on the wrist. Essentially torturing someone until they admit guilt. This way the DA doesn't have to actually work to convict someone while padding their resume with lots of convictions. Who wants to risk going before a capricious and tough on crime public, or worse, a tough on crime judge, to plead their innocence when they're looking at that much time? After all, if you were innocent you wouldn't have been arrested, right?
It seems that the punishment for computer crimes has become more harsh, almost as though hiring competent admins and securing the network is more work than changing a law...a law being passed by people that refer to the Inet as "tubes" that get clogged, and haven't the slightest idea of what the internet is all about.
Troubling.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
They're 29 and 28 years old and STILL in college!
Link to the full story
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
But you left out that they could cause a Global Thermonuclear War.
...it was the pre 9/11 days when Matthew Broderick was showing off to Ally Sheedy otherwise Ferris Bueller would have been in the big house for changing their grades, well, not to mention for that little game of thermo-nuclear warfare.
1. You forge checks to buy $100,000 of stuff.
2. You forge documents to indicate you completed $100,000 of schooling.
Those differ how exactly?
Hack the planet, while they're at it.
Is it just me that wonders why these two are punished, yet the teacher who's classroom computer was rootkited is charged?
In one case we have a clear case of people hacking a school computer system with fraudulent intent. In the other, the victim was penalized.
Is the US criminal justice system geared only to blame humans? If the culprit is a piece of software controlled by someone not in the jurisdiction of the court, are we always going to blame the victim?
In this case, the bad guys got caught, but like people caught for possession of minor amounts of marijuana, the punishment is more harsh than violent crimes.
Yet one more sign that the criminal justice system in the US is totally unbalanced, and needs to be reviewed and reconstructed in view of how the information age has changed the faces of business and commerce. Perhaps we will, in a majority, make the right choices in a year's time.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
One minute they're hacking grades...
And you know what happens after that?
Defcon 1... unscrambled launch codes... and brightly lit games of Tic-Tac-Toe that flash mysteriously across your face is it plays!
Hmm. That certainly does smell fishy.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So hacking into a computer to change a grade is some how less of a crime than hacking to a computer to say steal user data or "just because"? It's a frigging crime! They broke the law. Do you not get that? Let's play "whatif"...
1. Guy robs store to get money to pay the rent.
B. Guy robs store to get money to buy drugs.
What's the difference between the two?
Nothing! Nada! The store was still robbed in either situation. Doesn't matter why it was robbed. The law was broken either way.
This is one of those "if you have to ask you'll never understand" scenarios. Return to sender.
It's bad enough to take a peek, but many are curious so that's not unusual, but whenever data is modified without permission it's a really bad crime. Even as tempting it may be some things are best untouched. If information is incorrect there are better ways than to modify it yourself.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The legislative branch makes the law, which includes the punishment for breaking that law.
But I guess if your knowledge of government is define by Star Wars, then no wonder you are confused.
20 years ago, the paper would have described them as geniuses and chalked it up to something like "Geeks will be geeks" and a slap on the wrist. Later, they'd have started a successful PC company, and it would become an interesting anecdote in their memoirs.
First their using the password 'pencil' to change their biology degree from an F to an A, then next thing you know we are at DEFCON 1 and W.O.P.R. has the launch codes. Have we learned nothing people?
I thought the penal system was supposed to help rehabilitate people too? If you take someone that's 28 years old and throw them in prison for 20 years. You're going to have a 48 year old person that has absolutely no chance of earning a decent wage.
Look at Frank Abagnale Jr, for all the crimes he commited he spent less than 5 years in prison. He was then offered a deal to work with the government for free and then started his own firm based around catching fraud. He's worth more now than what he originally stole.
I'm not saying slap them on the wrists, but give them a reasonable sentence and help rehabilitate them. You may end up with the next Frank working on your IT department security audit. Instead I, as a tax payer, get to pay for 20 years of these guys in prison for changing a few grades. No body died, no one was physically harmed while we have rapists and murderers receiving similar sentences. Where is the logic in that?
Why is it that some dude kidnaps a kid and gets virtually nothing, and these two punks (yes, they are punks) could get 20 years? I emphasize could, but still. We have such a skewed sense of justice in this country, it's really insane.
Pax Vobiscum
it does warrant an A+ in CS.
Playing Devil's advocate for a moment, though, the crime here is that they are stealing good grades instead of earning them, and the benefits of good grades are fairly far-reaching considering your college transcript follows you the rest of your life. Assuming that they got away with it, would it be fair to say that their criminal act could have potentially gotten them 20 years of success and $250,000 of salary over the long term?
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
1) When the jackass that couldn't secure the system gets fired, the kid is given the first chance to take that job
... it would make me a better admin, and it would make them learn skills that can be used later on.
... they could be supporting the terrorists in the future.
and/or
2) The kid should be given a scholarship to the school of his/her choice as long as they are going for a C.S. ( or related ) degree
what happens to the future sys admins, programmers, and IT security people when everything becomes punishable by fines and jail time?
if i was responsible for a schools network i would throw a challenge down to the students to attempt to hack it when ever they get a chance
next step: we arrest anyone that likes shop class or chemistry
No, these punks didn't just change their grades. Anyone can see that their new grades were identical to the grades of other students who created their own grades legitimately by their own work. These punks copied those other students' grades. So, like copying those students' CDs, these punks stole their grades, from other students. Those stolen grades are worth a great deal in the marketplace, entire careers of incomes from the victims.
20 years is too good for these thieves. They should have to spend their sentences listening to each week's Top 50 pop songs, endlessly repeated on commercial radio stations.
--
make install -not war
Quite frankly, it is enough to punish the most severe charge and not adding the others. Or to let people serve the penalties in paralell. 20 years for this is not reasonable at all. There is no relation to the damage done. For some reason the US system still does this "damned forever" punishmenst, and increasingly for for non-violent crimes dtat did not cause a lot of damage. From Europe is looks a bit like the prison industry is behind this, as they need as many long-term convicts as they can get. All in all my impression is that the US is the "free' country with the longest prison terms and the least effect of the penalties on the crime rate. Don't you people want to rehabilitate your criminals and change them into non-criminals? Does not look that way to me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
hey genius, the judiciary makes up part of the federal government. what the hell are you talking about? sure, there are also judiciary branches on the lower forms of government but what it clear to me is that you have little or no respectable concept about the structures of the system laws or our courts. you're a mere 2/3s of the way to having no understanding of the government at all.
expelling them? I mean come on. the solution to this particular crime is very simple.
Expel them and revoke all the credits they earned at the school in question.
Their inability to get admitted to another school or get a job will be punishment enough.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
...would be to sentence them go thru Army boot camp and serve four years as a buck private with no promotion.
In some states, judges or juries get very broad latitude in sentencing but most of the time they are reasonable.
They reserve the lenient and extra-hard sentences for extenuating circumstances or the guy who is clearly an Very Bad Person.
Take 3 people who all embezzle $5000 from their employer. Let's say the sentence range is "probation to 10 years in jail" with a sentencing recommendation of 18 months.
One is a poor widow with a very sick child but didn't want to beg for a handout. When she's caught she's truly remoseful. She'll get probation and probably a lot of donations from her coworkers and friends.
The other is your average embezzler whose momma never taught him right from wrong. He'll get 18 months to learn his lesson.
The last one is known to be a Mafia enforcer on the weekends with a few bodies to his name but the cops haven't been able to get anything to stick. They'll try to get 10 and the prosecutors will show up at every parole hearing to make sure he does it all.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is really an old topic and an old story. the 1986 computer privacy act was the start of it all.
Every since then computer crimes generally carry larger penalties than murder.
Look at any of the famous "hacker" cases of the late 80's/early 90's
An American student, Ferris Bueller, is now facing life without parole for a number of heinous crimes,including computer misuse, fraud and identity theft.
Ferris, stated the District Attorney, tapped into school computers, altering grades, and impersonated others through use of physical disguises and impersonating them in telephone calls. As a result, the DA stated, the state felt that it had no alternative but to ask for the maximum sentence permissable.
Ferris' co-students and friends are organising a petition to the governor and have organised public displays of their devotion to Ferris in his time of need.
Ferris was unavailable for comment.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
By that logic, Shatner should get life imprisonment for the Kobayashi Maru incident.
study any subject matter well enough to pass a test.
Just consider it detention....
"Does Hacking Grades Warrant 20 Years in Jail?"
Were they studying to be doctors or some other profession where people's lives could be in danger? Would you want to go to a doctor that didn't really pass, but bought his degree instead?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Did he shoot someone, as the thief in your 7-11 story did? Did anyone die? Did anyone go to the hospital? No, the charges were all nonviolent; the very worst thing he did was take money to change someone else's grade.
OTOH a couple of decades ago here in Springfield I had a friend named Danny, who drove a cab. He was taking a fare to the housing project and a gang banger walked up, put a gun to his chest, and demanded money. Danny had just started his shift and only had fifty cents on him (cabbies don't make much money here).
The gun went off and the robber ran on foot. Danny was dead. They caught the robber, who claimed the gun went off accidentally. He spent two years in jail, I lost a friened.
So unless this guy caused someone's death, no, twenty years is far, far too much.
-mcgrew
PS: My present roommate is also a cab driver. If someone shoots her, I may be the one to go to prison, for vigilantism. Two years was not enough to pay for Danny's life, although I imagine as soon as his murderer got out of jail he likely went right back in for shooting someone else. Life sucks sometimes. If anyone shot Amy I'd lose a friend AND the money she pays me for rent!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
No, they are not. It has been ruled repeatedly that a judge may depart from sentencing guidelines, generally in favor of less severe punishment if the case warrants. They are not mandatory.
http://www.ussc.gov/departrpt03/departrpt03.pdf (warning PDF!)
Who wants to bet that means they tried such clever combinations as: admin:admin admin:1234 etc. Or the combination that the person left on the sticky note by their monitor. If they're like most other big institutions this is far more likely than the guys being 1337 haXXorz. Not that it makes it any better morally, but I'm just curious if the supervisor will be punished if that's the case.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
As others have pointed out, grade-changing can have financial aid implications ranging into the thousands of dollars. The students know damn well what they are doing when they change the grades and have no concern at all about who it hurts (class rankings, etc.). Changing grades is one thing. Illictly accessing a computer system is quite another. These are not just high-school students. These were full-grown adults. As McGarrett would say: "Get 'em outta here."
What do you call the person who graduated at the bottom of his class in medical school?
Doctor!!!
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
If you can't see the difference you are a robot.
Even among homicides, there are various charges ranging from criminally negligent homicide which usually gets only a few years or even probation to premeditated murder which can get you executed. But either way your victim is just as dead.
Even among intentional murder there are several "degrees" with varying sentences depending on circumstances.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some drunk driver who kills a person gets 3 years, and they get 20 for hacking. I find this retarded.
That's what you get when you let people write the laws whose understanding of math ends at adding and substracting.
Obviously, a much better formula would be more appropriate, something as simple as a geometric series, but the lawyers wouldn't understand it (and, let's face it, neither would the general public).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The US justice and social system needs some serious work. If you have 1 in 142 US residents in jail you have a problem. This equates to just under 2 million inmates and this is only based on 2002 figures, so I'd hate to see the current status.
This inmate population is enough to populate any of the 13 least populated states in the USA.
I am not saying what these people did isn't wrong, but the crime sounds more like revenge that punishment. This kids will be in debt and slaves to the system by the time the get out. Any time they would have had to think about what they did will be marred by the excessiveness of the punishment. Maybe the American society is just looking to continue slavery, but using other means to do it?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It's certainly possible that obtaining the access that permits them to change grades would also permit them to access other records regarding other students, especially other records which are required to be maintained privately. So, one way to view this is that the hackers are committing a gross breach of other students' privacy.
like a japanese cowboy, or a brother on skates.
OK, so what would you do with the orphan-turned-fake-diploma-doctor in Cider House Rules?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is the American Judicial System we're talking about so anything can happen. I mean this is the system that arrested an elerly woman, hand cuffed her and tossed her down to the street cutting her face for the heinous crime of not watering her lawn but, that let a repeat sex offender out on the streets the same day.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Pulling numbers from my anatomical /dev/null
Risk: 20 years in jail x odds of getting caught x 0.66 (out in 2/3rds with good behavior) x 0.25 (realistic likely percentage of full sentence given for a first time offence) x 0.5 (overcrowded jails, halving sentences for white collar crime).
Reward: 40 years of career earning 20% more assuming you get a better post university position and then grow proportionally.
In pure cost vs. reward terms, a maybe 10% chance of getting caught and then facing what's really 2-3 years after the 20 year scare number is thrown around, works out to a pretty minimal statistical cost vs. about a million dollars in increased earning over a typical IT career.
Would you consider three months (statistical average cost) against one million dollars (statistical average reward)?
Kind of makes me feel stupid for not having done it in my day... or did I? *grins*
Yes, 20 years sounds like a disproportionately high punishment to our initial gut response. But, when you consider how inept we are at catching people, how inept we are at sentencing them, how inept we are at giving even close to that full sentence and how inept we are are them making them serve even close to it... You suddenly realize that a 20 year, $250,000 fine, sentence isn't near enough to make a sensible statistician pick the other option.
Your grades in college can make a huge difference in the rest of your career - failing out of school versus, say, getting into a good graduate program. This can amount to a payoff of potentially millions of dollars over the perpetrator's life.
Naturally this is just one of many possible scenarios, but it's certainly one that's very possible. For people in that situation, if the punishment is not sever then the risk-benefit is clear - risk a slap on the wrist? Sure, why not? Why not pay someone to do it for you, or if instead you have the skills take that level of money if the risk is not that great?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
The value of a Phd is only worth something as long as everyone thinks it worth something. If it becomes easy for people to get degrees via changing grades, purchasing them online, whatever... then the perceived value decreases. I'm not saying that the Phd is not worth anything to person who comes by it honestly (knowledge is power... you can only get knowledge by doing it, unless we're in a Matrix, but then thats for another post.)
The bigger question in my mind is, does a single instance of hacking a network warrant getting 20 years in jail? I don't think that they got all of this jail time racked up for changing their grades. It's the breaking-in part that did them in. I suppose it could be compared to breaking into the teacher's house to change your grades in his grade-book. Changing the grades may or may not be a crime... hell, I don't know. But breaking into his house is definitely a crime. Anyway, I don't think that 20 years is an appropriate sentence for a single instance of hacking. But it's hard for me to form a good opinion when the article is only a paragraph long...
That way they could have gotten off with only 5 years, two for good behavior.
Hobbes says:
-Ignorance of promulgated, just law is no excuse.
-Ignorance of the law-making body is no excuse.
-Ignorance of the penalty is no excuse.
Fuck em. I go to a state school (PSU) because I didn't worry about my grades. They shouldn't get a life they don't deserve, I say life their asses.
"Of course, it seems unlikely that any judge would give them the maximum sentence, but even hearing that it's possible just for changing your grades seems ridiculous."
Why is that ridiculous? We routinely give people longer sentences than that for simply possessing drugs. We give 3 times the sentence for possessing crack that we do cocaine. So why would you be surprised that breaking and entering a school's computer gets you a longer potential sentence than breaking and entering a school?
This is what happens when you try to make your criminal justice system a deterrent to crime, rather than just punishing crimes. The current crime strawman is going to get disproportionally long sentences. This has nothing to do with justice. It has to do with appeasing voters.
It's always been a federal crime, it was just seldom enforced due to technology changing faster than the legal system. Keep in mind, though, that these same miscreants--if left to their own devices--would likely grow up having zero ethical problems with literally rewriting history to suit their own agendas. Our history as a society is being converted at an alarming rate to digital medium that is subject to essentially untraceable manipulation. Do you truly want to encourage (or even fail to non-trivially discourage) this sort of behavior?
This kind of crime strikes me as being comparable in severity to grand larceny without a firearm or weapon, which is punishable by up to 16 months in prison in California.
So, 20 years seems excessive to me.
I though that was pretty sweet at the time, but I have since done my fair share of SQL database work, including a couple that I designed and built from scratch, and I have since learned that implementing this kind of compartmentalized permission system is pretty trivial... almost automatic since every db system I have ever used requires you to actively assign permissions to new users.
So, uh, where did you work? I think I might shoot a resume their way.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
In a side note: both students were offered jobs in H.Clinton's voter registration drive. Diebold is offering voting machine programing internships...
P226
Now ask yourself if getting paid $5 to steal Mrs. Smith's gradebook and change a grade is worth 20 years in jail.
Nothing is worth 20 years in jail. The US Constitution guarantees my right to a speedy trial, and 20 years waiting trial is a bit excessive.
OK, I'm being pedantic -- the linked article (but not the original) got this wrong, and everybody here is repeating it.
Jail is not prison. Jail is where you wait for trial. You don't go to jail for more than a year. If they want to lock you up for 20 years, they send you to prison. (Didn't you guys ever take a government class in high school?)
Absolutely. In the the example, when you break into Mrs. Smith's office to change the grade book, you could have killed him, raped his secretary, did a pedo movie, hid hard drugs, committed a terrorist act, high treason, and single-handedly caused global warming.
Having a hundred degrees of "Broke into office with intent to..." laws would just cause confusion, possible loopholes, and would likely still leave just as much judicial/prosecutorial discretion as far as which specific charge to select.
There might be something to be said later, if the judge slaps down the max, but that's an issue to take up once facts are in. At the moment, the article is really nothing but FUD and fumes.
And it's no problem if Homeland security gets to send you to Guantanamo (you are, after all a potential terrorist), put you in the sex registry (you are, after all a potential pedophile and rapist), force you into drug therapy (you are, after all a potential hard drug user), freeze your bank account (you are, after all a potential terrorist and drug pusher) or disclose your location to Greenpeace (he's the cause of Global warming, have your way with him). This is all part of a standard evidential phase of a trial.
And even if they *don't* do any of this, but threaten to (it's called plea bargaining) there's a good chance that a fair number of people would blink and accept the plea bargain. But that's okay, right?
Actually, this is so good an approach, why don't we get rid of all laws and replace them with a single law:
1) Don't be evil.
That should really streamline the court system.
How about another alternative? If they have proof of the other charges, then present the evidence at the hearing and add them to the charges. If not, then don't give authorities the right to go on a fishing expedition or a powerful force to intimidate people into submission.
Could just as likely be the state legislature enacting the guidelines and mandatory minimums.
regardless of wether or not this case deserves 20 years, there is a rising trend in prosecution to add as many charges as possible, to encourage either a conviction or a confession. also, by having four charges, they might be found not guilty of several of them, but guilty on one. add a convition to the prosecutor's tally. a criminal is convicted, and everyone is happy since all the right statistics go up.
allways follow the incentives.
I'm sorry if I don't feel sorry for these a$$hats. We all know that they knew what they were doing, and that what they were doing was unlawful. If they're going to learn anything (obviously they weren't since they were changing their grades) its that decisions have consequences, and that life doesn't give you "do-overs".
Would they have acted differently if they knew they were looking down the barrel at 20 years?
Yep.
Now everyone else knows it to, which will hopefully deter them from trying something like this in the future. Letting them off too lightly will really screw up the message that this situation is trying to send out.
Beny
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
You're really undercounting the costs. For starters:
- No time off for good behavior or overcrowding in the federal system.
- Felony conviction on the record is a BIG career-limiter. Kiss the corporate officer slots and pretty much the rest of the white-collar world goodbye. No guns for you, either.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It is a PUBLIC USE COMPUTER... the entire faculty and staff has access to it via one format or another. This leaves lots of avenues of access so ALL DATA ON SUCH A SYSTEM IS SUSPECT!
Especially in an educational facility, I've been on both ends of this argument the hacker and the hacked, so trust me on this or don't, but data on government and facility wide access machines, is NOT secure and is ALWAYS suspect.
Of course, as far as I'm concerned, this is yet another reason NOT to worry about school, IMHO.
I did most of my learning as an "extra curricular" activity. It paid off dividends, while schoolwork and college work have yet to pay me a penny. In fact, most of my non "vocational" education has cost me dozens of thousands of dollars and haven't paid me back even a fraction of the cost involved. So IMHO, hacking grades is pointless, because neither straight A's nor straight F's will get you a job, or get you well paid, or anything. At best, you can slave away for straight A's so you can end up a boring, lifeless, possibly low paid, and certainly easy to fire cubicle monkey for the jock who learned how to run a business, or the geek who never showed up for class on time and barely passed gym or shop when he was in school.
Look around, history's brightest people, inventors, discoverers, all were either failures in school or not particularly shining examples of "classwork drones". Why? Simple, their attention was diverted to this thing called "life". And while you were trying to get ready to live your life one week of vacation per year of work at a time, they were living theirs... (and if they didn't get stupid with their investments, they probably continued to do so well past the time where you had a kid or three, a mortgage and car payment, none of which you couldn't afford... which in the end is the reason so many of us "geek" types end up broke... poor investments, of both time and money.)
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
(because the media labels anyone as who is right of center as an extremist)
I say, "No."
One year and $250K fine would work for me. Two years tops. But 25 years? A quarter of a century? What would be the maximum penalty if they broke in and altered a paper record? Or if they had attempted to bribe the principal? The legal system needs a reality check.
So they may no longer be in college.
No, it does not. It gives a range which the Judge is urged (not required) to consider as the appropriate guidelines for punishment. The Judge is free to depart from these guidelines. If a departure is given, it may require justification.
In short, the "problem" as you state it does not exist.
It is entirely possible, even likely these kids will get off with a very light sentence, or none at all (unlikely, but if they go to trial and win...).
Regardless, the law does not "give a 20 year sentence regardless of the harm done", it places that as the maximum suggested penalty available.
I think many people here have the same misconception as you do regarding the sentencing guidelines.
"Nothing he did deserves hard time."
This is the mind set of a privileged elite: arrogant, careless, self-indulgent. There is no disguising it from a judge or jury. It is guaranteed to sink the Geek's case it when it goes to trial.
Link to viewer-friendly version of the actual article
By "viewer friendly" I mean the link provided for printing the article, by which I mean the one without ads on it. Couldn't the Slashdot editors have done this for us? Seriously, instead Slashdot links to a lame blog with lame commentary about the actual story? If you want to link to that, the right way is to say "Here's the (link) STORY and here's some (link) COMMENTARY". Ferkrissake.
There was a time on Slashdot when, when the link went somewhere other than the article, we could count on one of the very first posts being a link to the actual article. Sometimes those posters got modded as karma whores, but they were doing a valuable service, the service which I'm providing now. I will forgo the karma and post anon, but I sure wish we could regain that Slashdot norm.
-Myopic
Don't forget the biggest funding source of the IRA was America.
When you read the actual indictment - the reasons for the high (potential) penalty become clear, because the alleged perpetrator(s) did much more than simply 'hack into the database' as implied by the summary. They stole multiple passwords, and entered the system multiple times under various identities. One of the accused abused his position of trust within the IT department in order to facilitate the above actions. Further, they did so across state lines - which, on top of everything else, makes their actions a federal crime.
Give me your email and I will see you get some pointers on how to deal with your eh.. weakness. Don't worry it happens to all men, or so I hear. Not me offcourse.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They could have been trading Britney Spears files online or some other hard core criminal activity. Best to make an example of them now before they progress to this level of criminal activity.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
every time that I see such news or about patents I come to the conclusion that US legal system is "from morons - for morons" and it is pity that after gaining independence US sticked to british casual law rather than roman system.
No.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
I was thinking of doing this... so... good to know.
Only a terrorist would... ah.. nevermind.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Corporate politics says; "If it looks good, fuck'em", and we should all know by now that US politicians get high on any idea about servicing the citizens of the USA. Also, this will tell all those good (ain't gonna get caught noway) crackers laundering and making money for terrorist, vacations, and/or retirement, or whom belong to a foreign military or government that if they were US Citizens ....
... it is all about US-Plutocrats betrayal and treason of US-Citizens. US-Plutocrats wave the flag, fan the bible, blame US Citizens, and falsely swear to protect and defend The USA Constitution.
Well if they ain't gonna get caught, so what's that fycking-point? Like the socioeconomic drug-wars, national religion-schism, public funded corporate welfare, patriotic-fundamentalism, elective-nepotism
Anyway, If they ain't smart enough to not get caught or join a foreign military or government, then why should we take corporate-welfare tax-dollars and spend on criminals in jail. I say, let's just lynch'em if the get more than a five year sentence. I recommend that a constitutional amendment be past to allow substitution of hangings when the sentence is five or more years. We can call it The USA Constitution "Darwin Award" Amendment.
THINK about it before you bust a gut/vain or troll DnMod/flame me. (%~$)
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
unless it also involves tic-tac-toe on government computers.
is that the lawmakers are not smart enough to word a law specific enough to incriminate most of the guilty while making it impossible to incriminate the innocent. The usual rule is "we'll make a law broad enough to catch most of 'em, and rely on the interpretation of the judge/jury to make sure no innocents get tossed in jail". That NEVER works. The same thing applies here for sentencing - they set an upper limit so high that it no longer serves as anything of a guideline, leaving the sentencing almost entirely up to the court.
An old saying, "what we need today are not MORE laws, but BETTER laws."
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The lead server admin at the college I went to had a great approach to how he viewed a student hacking into the system and giving themself grades. If it was a Computer Science student, he felt being able to bypass their security was a sign that the student deserved whatever grades they gave themself. He only required that the student be required to write a paper on the subject, and the research he did, and depending on the quality, they would give a diploma. This of course wouldn't apply if someone edited someone else's grades.
I don't think the administration of the school agreed with him though.
You can be an insane coder too, read: Insane Coding
If these people are liberal arts, fine... the sentence is harsh because the degree barely matters anyway. However, if they are fraudulently claiming to have a real skill they don't possess through changing their grades, then ask how big a deal it is when they:
-- Attempt to write the code that flies an airplane from point A to point B
-- Design the bridge that gets you and your kids between to cliffs
-- do your taxes.... (man, the fines for cheating on those tests are huge, and your responsibility)
-- work the night shift as an ER nurse when you get in a wreck
-- become your manager, and use those same ethics in a way that endangers the financial stability of your family.
A college degree ain't like a high school degree. You're claiming to have real skills here, and can ruin other's lives. They aren't kids anymore.
Gee, and here I thought it was some fuckwad in a Slashdot post.
This sounds identical to the list of crimes you made, only committed with a pencil rather than a computer. The problem here is that old lawmakers are more afraid of computers (because they don't know how they work), and thus are making equivalent crimes more severe if they involve a computer instead of a pencil.
Whaddya know, "doing X via a computer" inflates both patents and jail sentences.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe they should see if they can get bill Gates to help them out with some fancy lawyers. After all, he hacked into a university computer system to change his grades and only got expelled, and is now insanely rich.
Do they deserve it? YES. They committed a crime, and a fairly serious one. Maybe their aim was not to do harm (besides falsifying their grades) but they violated a number of laws in doing so, and they should be punished. Say the school didn't have a computerized system, and they broke into the administration offices to do the same thing? Would they be punished based on all the crimes they committed? YES. This is no different. By trying them and making them serve time this will be on their permanent records. Any company hiring will want to know that they are perfectly willing to commit crimes against the company to falsify records. Why don't we teach computing ethics in school? We need to. The computer isn't just a toy. Breaking into systems isn't just a "fun thing to do." It is a serious offense, and those who do it need to be prosecuted whenever they are caught.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
How bout we play a nice game of chess?
I, for one, welcome or new computer criminal statue overlords!
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
...or a slap on the wrist, if you can change it to that by hacking into our system.
Oooooh, somebody found the truth a little bit painful!
Personnally, I feel that all college classes in which grades were changed should result in a failure. All funds that may have been given to them in financial aid or grants or loans should be repaid in Full 2 times over.
They should be denied the ability to ever take another class in that field again thus preventing the individual from becomming accredited in that field, that they set as their major.
Some jail time should be put into place, say 6 months to a year.
All colleges throughout the country should receive their names so the individual can't just go to another college and try to get their degree at another college.
It's simply a matter of fairness to those who bust their ass to go to school and get good grades and support themselves trying to improve their way of life. Those who choose the cheaters path should help pay the way for an honest person's education.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
And turnips usually don't explode either!
The fewer smart people you have circulating throughout society, the easier it is make society as a whole believe whatever you want them to.
(I say this jokingly, but not totally)
Hacking isn't cracking, but there is a vast gray area in between. If a student hacks their own grades without using any automated script, all by using their own ingenuity, then they should pass an ethics course and that's all. Society should focus on making smart people understand that being lawful is better. Putting smart people in prison is a loss for society.
As is always the case, the actual details of the allegations will differ from what was released on the indictment and what is reported by the media. The phrase "routine grade audit", mentioned by other media outlets, seems a little suspect to me. Luckily the university had plenty of time to perfect their version of this story (a few years). The timing of this, simultaneous to the Stacy-Johnson Klein fiasco, is interesting as well.