A new class of crimes.. and how strong is the Sun Dollar system?

It is getting easier every day to become a criminal without doing anything wrong in the conventional way, i.e. u don't have to hurt someone or steal anything physical to get on the wrong side of the law. Information theft is being viewed as a crime that's just as serious as any others. While hacking might have been a matter of pride ten years ago, it's the surest way to lose even the most basic privileges as the celebrated hacker Kevin Mitnick found out eight years ago when he became a guest of the state for computer fraud. He was released in 2000 but the court forbade him from accessing the Net or even sending e-mail till 2003. As a person who suffers from withdrawal symptoms when away from the Net for even a day, I can only imagine how Mitnick might have spent those three years.

Closer home, ASU has begun to enforce a strict policy against file-sharing. Students can now be expelled or even have their computing privileges suspended if they are found using university resources for downloading or sharing copyrighted content. Earlier this year, a dorm student had her privileges suspended temporarily when another student downloaded a movie from her computer over the ethernet. I tried to read the ASU Electronic policy to ensure that I would not break any law, but found it quite unreadable and gave up after a while.

Earlier this month, a court in Georgia issued a gag order against a couple of students who were planning to present information about security flaws in the Blackboard ID system used by many universities (including ASU for it's Sun Dollars system). The students had promised to reveal information (which Blackboard Inc. claims, they obtained by breaking into a switchbox in a campus laundry.. how cool is that!) which would allow anyone to bypass the ID system. At ASU it would translate into free food, free printouts and free photocopies. I wonder how effective the gag order will be since the very fact that a security flaw exists will be reason enough for smart students to try to bypass the system in the future.