Chapter 11
The Bad Stuff Goes Both Ways . . .Protecting Others and Yourself From Your Kids
and Their Friends
Fortune Magazine reports that financial losses from computer crimes run about $10 billion per year. What's even scarier is that more than 95 percent of them, according to FBI estimates, go undetected. Last year a new law was passed making it easier to prosecute hackers for commercial computer crimes.
But the biggest part of the problem is that hackers are the heroes of their Internet generation. According to Fortune, a manager at Panasonic said that hacking is how computer experts learn. "You break into programs, commit piracy, all kinds of wild and crazy things." ("Who's reading your e-mail?" Fortune, February 3, 1997.)
The fact that adults who are computer experts can classify these things as "wild and crazy things" is the essential problem. Kids don't understand that hacking is a crime, and a serious one. When I was running the Court TV Law Center Legal Helpline, one day we logged on to find all of our legal discussions replaced with pornographic pictures. While we all laughed, it meant that everything had to be reconstructed at a huge cost, and the people who had asked us legal questions had to repost their questions.
In order to make kids understand how bad hacking is, they'll need to identify with the victim, since to them hacking is a victimless and faceless crime. If you try to "bring it home," showing your kids how horrible it would be if a hacker got into your computer at work and destroyed all the work you've done, or got into your home computer and destroyed their files or destroyed their favorite websites, they may be able to appreciate the seriousness of the crime.
Keeping an eye on their computing makes it a little harder for them to commit computer crimes. Look over their shoulder from time to time, and don't put the computer in their bedroom. Keeping it in a central family location is one of the best tips I can share with you.
As much as we have focused on protecting your children from others in cyberspace, dangers exist to you and others as well. And these dangers may be caused by our children and their friends, inadvertently or intentionally.
It's not a matter of whether or not you trust them or how well they listen to you. Simply by filling out a survey or a form online they may divulge personal and private information about us and our families. They may be giving out our telephone numbers or our addresses online, without understanding the risks associated with sharing this private information.
Remember, that even if you trust your own kids not to break the rules, you need to be able to trust their friends, too. Their friends may be using your account when they visit—friends who may not know your rules, or if they do, may not follow them. I wish I had thought of this before learning the hard way myself.
Since I host several boards in an AOL legal forum, I'm expected to be online regularly, monitoring activity while policing my boards. One night, when I tried to log on, I learned that my account had been closed. I was told that someone had violated AOL's terms of service. Not able to reach anyone in AOL administration in the evening, I had to open a new account just to get online. The new account didn't have my board tools, so I couldn't police the boards. I was angry, and my forum suffered. It took days to get things sorted out, and all my e-mails were returned to their senders during that time.
Apparently, friends of my daughter had been over and had used my AOL account to get online. These kids had gotten into a flaming match in a teen chat room (remember . . . "flaming" is when you insult or act in a discourteous manner in an online discussion), and when their bad behavior was reported to AOL, my account was closed for violating the terms of service.
In addition, children armed with powerful computers have proven themselves very good at manipulating others' computer systems and cyberspace. They are breaking into other computer systems, sending e-mails and pretending that someone else sent them (remailers) and ordering goods and services with our and others' credit cards. Because they do this from their home, they think they are anonymous. They also often don't understand how serious these activities may be.
A close friend of mine, one of the first cyberspace lawyers in the United States and very tech-smart, called me recently complaining about his children. Apparently they had found his credit card information stored in a computer file for easy access. They called their friends, and together ordered a big screen TV and surround sound system from a vendor on AOL.
Luckily AOL staff—noticing that the delivery and the billing addresses were different (the kids were smart enough to have it delivered down the street to their friend's house), called to confirm. My friend was able to cancel the order before too much damage was done. Knowing a lot about computers doesn't always prepare you for what your kids, or their friends, will dream up next. Remember that.
Hey! . . . That's My Intellectual Property!
Many people forget that the laws that apply on the ground apply equally in cyberspace. U.S. and international intellectual property laws and treaties protect copyrighted material. And copyrighted material doesn't have to have been filed with the Copyright Office to be protected by the copyright laws. It doesn't have to be labeled as "copyrighted" and doesn't need the © mark. Under intellectual property laws, if you write it and publish it . . . it's protected against infringement.
Given the ease with which anyone can block, cut and paste anything from any website, or download and save it as a document or graphic on your computer, people forget that anything more than "fair use" is an infringement. Our children need to learn to attribute the material (by correct bibliographies), and not use more than a simple quotation or two.
Recent changes in the U.S. copyright laws, to bring them in line with the world community, make copyright infringement a crime, even if the infringement was not for the purposes of making a profit. Many kids swap software, trading a copy they have of something for a copy someone else has of whatever they want. The new law changes make this a crime. Although it's unlikely that the U.S. Attorney's Office or Department of Justice will start arresting our children in droves, it's an additional risk which didn't exist before.
Teach them to respect others' property, even if it looks like it's available for everyone to use freely. The Internet works because people are willing to publish proprietary information for public enjoyment and learning. It's important that the rights of those people are protected or the flow of information might slow, to everyone's detriment.
Protecting Your Boss . . . Don't Use Your Business Account for Family Computing
It is estimated that half of the people on the Internet access it in connection with their work. Problems for employers from misuse of their Internet access by employees, or others using an employee's account, include defamation, copyright infringement, trade secret protection and confidentiality, harassment (including hostile work environment issues), and criminal accountability (such as for hate crimes and hacking).
As easy as it might be to use your business Internet account at home to get online with your children, don't. Just to save $19.95 per month (the cost of an Internet service provider account), you might jeopardize your job, or risk your business. Get another account.
With more and more employers being held liable for actions of their employees online (Cybertots), many employers are setting up Internet use policies to regulate their employees' Internet access. Most of those policies prohibit the use of the account by non-employees, and substantially restrict the online activities of employees.
In addition, Big Brother may be watching you. All but a small minority of states permit an employer to monitor electronic communications of their employees, if the employer supplied the equipment and access or the employee consented to the monitoring. (E-mail policies contained in your employee handbook may be deemed consent.) That means that they are permitted to intercept and monitor your e-mail and where you go online. (Or your kids, for that matter.)
If employers discover a misuse of their Internet accounts, they may be able to discipline or fire you. So be careful.
Protecting Your Computer in Cyberspace . . . Viruses
A virus is a special computer code, contained within a computer program, that is designed to infect a file and when executed, do something bad to your computer and spread. Your computer may crash, it may not be able to turn on (boot up), files may become corrupted, the entire hard drive may be wiped out . . . there are a lot of ways a virus can wreak havoc. If your computer suddenly does something weird, or doesn't do what it's supposed to do, look for a virus before you waste your time doing anything else.
The odds of catching a virus on the Internet are very small. But they can do lots of damage if you do catch one. Most viruses have been especially designed to damage computer systems, and are very successful at what they have been designed to do. They also replicate themselves, infecting file after file once they've imbedded themselves into a program.
Remember Mikey? The kid who wouldn't eat anything? Well, you may also remember the rumor about twenty years ago that he died while eating Pop Rocks (the effervescent candy) when he drank a can of soda and his stomach exploded. Rumors, especially those that sound believable, have abounded for centuries. It isn't any different in cyberspace. Computer virus rumors are just the latest fad of cyber-rumors.
E-mail hoax messages warning me about some new virus hazard arrive in my mail box daily. One night my son Michael sent me a list of supposedly infected files that someone had sent to him at college. The list included the upgrade for AOL, among many other unlikely virus-carrier candidates. This is the typical virus hoax which attempts to frighten people who have already installed popular programs, like AOL. (I reminded him to reread this section before he forwarded the hoax e-mail to anyone else.)
One of the biggest Internet rumors in the last few years was the Good Times virus, which was reputed to infect PCs through e-mail. Experienced Internet and computer users dismissed it as a hoax, because they knew a virus couldn't be passed by reading an e-mail message. A lot of other people were fooled, though.
The far greater danger lies not in Internet-passed viruses, but through sharing infected floppy disks (something kids do all the time) and by running infected programs. When my law firm's website was first being built we were drafting a lot of articles, from home and from our office. We kept the articles on one disk and took it back and forth, sharing it from computer to computer. One morning, none of those computers would boot up. The virus was on the disk, and had infected each and every computer it touched.
To avoid viruses . . . practice safe computing!
Luckily, there are good virus protection programs available that scan your hard drive for viruses and get rid of them. The two most popular for PCs, Norton Anti-Virus and McAfee Anti-Virus, will both rid your system of any existing viruses and scan it regularly for new ones that you may have contracted unwittingly.
I use Norton Anti-Virus. It's easy to install and you can buy it wherever computer software is sold. (It also saved our computer system during that boot-virus event I just told you about.) They also have a good tech support team at Norton to handle any questions. McAfee, though, is the favorite of the teen members of our research team, basically because you can download a trial version, without charge, from the Internet. McAfee's site is at www.mcafee.com/ and the program can be downloaded at www.mcafee.com/down/index.html. I found it very hard to install, though.
Both products update the software frequently to stay on top of the latest viruses. You can update both products from the Web, with free downloads.
Smart and safe computing means being careful. Preventive medicine is the best medicine. You'll be fine if you remember to:
• Use a good anti-virus program on each boot up.
• Run each Internet downloaded document/program through an anti-virus program.
• Check each floppy disk for a virus before loading anything onto your computer.
In order to make sure your computer stays well and virus free, practice, and make sure your children practice, safe computing.