Pranksters, Pirates and Pen Pals

In 1980 four 13-year-olds from Dal ton, a private school in New York City, used the school's computers for a silicon-chip joy ride through the stored riches of several corporations. Over a period of six months, the Dalton Gang eavesdropped on private data banks, juggled accounts and mischievously erased 10 million bits of data from a Canadian cement company's computer. Tracked down and thoroughly chastised, the youths promised to go straight. But since then, electronic pranksterism by other teen-age sorcerers has only grown more sophisticated--and diabolical.

In his pin-neat, Northern California bedroom, a bespectacled 16-year-old who calls himself Marc communicates with several hundred unauthorized "tourists" on a computer magic carpet called ARPANET. This $3.3 million computer network maintained by the Defense Department provides a link between key contractors, but ARPANET has become a pen pal club, dating service and electronic magazine for youngsters and other computer hitchhikers gifted enough to join what is in effect a huge, electronic message service. In fact, TIME Correspondent Michael Moritz, working on a terminal near San Francisco, interviewed a teenage tourist in San Diego, using the ARPANET network. Marc's access to ARPANET is as easy as pi. He dials the number of a local military-base computer, provided by a friend who works there, plugs his receiver into a $125 modem (a telephone computer hookup), and taps out a password on his $685 home terminal. A few seconds later Marc is into an ARPANET computer, 3,000 miles away on the M.I.T. campus. Once in, he can call up such files as "humor," "scifi lovers" and "info micro"--a collection of computer brain teasers. This free play, however, may soon stop. The Government, which has long looked on "visiting" as an annoyance, is now eliminating telephone links and devising more complicated passwords.

A 16-year-old from Needham, Mass., sticks to simpler capers: copying Atari game cartridges (retail value: $12.95 to $49.95) and floppy discs containing programs worth up to $250. He trades them with other copyists. Says he blithely: "This is illegal, but we are basically honest people. I don't know anyone who doesn't pirate software."

To pull it off, duplicators simply hook a couple of devices called disc drives to their microcomputers, then slip the disc containing the program they covet into one drive and a blank disc into the other. Machines can then read the contents of the programmed disc and write them onto the blank. Manufacturers, of course, have tried to prevent this, usually by scrambling the information in such a way that a straightforward reading of the disc will either generate garbage or erase the program. One way around that is a burglary tool called Locksmith. Designed to permit computer owners to make back-up copies of their store-bought discs, the $100 program also can pick open most software written for the Apple. Says the Needham pirate: "If you have Locksmith, you can copy a game in five minutes."

College-age pranksters sometimes get more serious. University of California students at Berkeley figured out an undetectable way to crack a popular time-sharing system called UNIX, which would have allowed them to copy, change or destroy the data of thousands of users. As yet there is no evidence that they have committed any crime. Indeed, the wise guys tipped off authorities, leaving an anonymous warning in the university's electronic mail system that deliberately drew attention to their discovery. "They did the responsible thing," says M. Stuart Lynn, director of computing affairs at Berkeley, "they didn't exploit it."

Right now, about the only thing that victims can do is to hope that morality, like software, may become an item to duplicate and pass along to friends.

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