Juvenile Crime Newsroom

It's Not Just Fun and War Games Juveniles and Computer Crime

In the 1983 movie "War Games," Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy play high school students who inadvertently access the NORAD computer network, thinking that they are merely playing a "war game" with the computers. As a consequence, Broderick and Sheedy come Hollywood-close to initiating a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish this hack, Broderick configures his PC's modem to automatically dial random telephone numbers in the city where the computers he hopes to break into are located. When Sheedy asks Broderick how he pays for all the telephone calls, Broderick coyly tells her that "there are ways around" paying for the phone service. Sheedy asks: "Isn't that a crime"? Broderick's reply: "Not if you are under eighteen."

This article demonstrates why Broderick was wrong, for, while the movie may have seemed to be pure science fiction, the increased reliance on computers at all levels of society, coupled with the explosive growth in the use of personal computers and the Internet by teens, has made the scenario portrayed by the film seem to be not so fictional. Consider the following cases:

* A juvenile in Massachusetts pleads guilty to charges he disabled a key telephone company computer servicing the Worcester airport control tower, thereby disabling both the main radio transmitter, as well as a circuit which enabled aircraft on approach to send signals activating the runway lights.

* A 16-year-old from Florida pleads guilty and is sentenced to six months in a detention facility for intercepting electronic communications on military computer networks and for illegally obtaining information from a NASA computer network.

* A 16-year-old in Virginia pleads guilty to computer trespassing after hacking into a Massachusetts Internet service provider's (ISPs) computer system, causing $20,000 in damages.

* A 13-year-old California boy pleads guilty to making threats directed against a 13-year-old girl over the Internet. The boy had created a website which included a game featuring the girl's picture over a caption which read: "Hurry! Click on the trigger to kill her." The website included a petition calling for the girl's death.

See www.cybercrime.gov/juvenilepld.htm (Worcester airport); cybercrime.gov/comrade.htm (NASA case) Arthur L. Bowker, Juveniles and Computers: Should We Be Concerned, Federal Probation, December 1999, at 40 (Virginia and California cases).

This article seeks to explain: (1) why and how the rise of the computer culture and Internet generation presents opportunities for juveniles to commit crimes distinctly different from those traditionally committed by minors; (2) the statutory framework governing prosecution of computer delinquents in federal court; and (3) special considerations which pertain to the prosecution of computer crimes by juveniles. At a time when a Newsweek survey estimates that almost eighty percent of children regularly go online, the incidence of computer crime committed by juveniles will, increasingly, come to a prosecutor's attention.