Crimes with Computers essays

Crimes with Computers essays Technology experienced a break-through with the invention of computers. With this break-through came a new quest for knowledge and power. Society relies more and more on computers each day and people have found that a quest for knowledge or power on a computer could give them more than they bargained for. In the media, the term hacker is often defined as a criminal, armed with a computer, set out to commit malicious acts. The US Department of Defense estimated that their computer systems were attacked 250,000 by hackers in 1995 alone. Thats an attack every thirty seconds (Knittel and Soto 6). This would lead most people to believe that hackers were in fact malicious criminals. However, a hacker is simply a talented computer user with a vast knowledge of how computers work. Not all hackers commit malicious acts. But what acts committed by hackers are considered malicious? The legal definition of a computer crime is pending. Lawmakers and computer experts have characterized it variously as using a computer to steal money, services, or property, or to commit an invasion of privacy or an act of extortion or terrorism (Caplan 218). Early hacking was simple and not necessarily harmful. In the early 1970s, John Draper, a hacker later known as Captain Crunch, discovers that he can make free long distance phone calls by blowing an exact tone into the telephone with a toy whistle from a box of cereal. Draper was arrested several times during the 1970s for computer and phone related crimes. In the late 70s, two hackers from the Homebrew Computer Club develop devices called blue boxes which tap into the phone system. These two hackers, named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, later went on to found Apple Computers (Triguax[Online]). But it would be in the following decades that hackers would discover just how far they could push the envelope. ...