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In the trial of self-confessed hacker Paul Bedworth (see This Week),
counsel for the defence observed in his summing-up that his client ‘was
not out stealing cars or bashing babies’. Instead, ‘he was exploring in
the great computer wonderland, on a par with Alice, or Little Red Riding
Hood or Peter Pan’. And, as the defence also observed, ‘he was not interested
in copying files or making money or fraud or modifying and damaging computers’.

All this is true. Bedworth was subsequently acquitted by a jury of three
charges of conspiracy connected with hacking. But was what he did so very
different from joyriding? Consider for a moment what interests the joyrider.
First there is the task of breaking into the car, overcoming the modern
locks and alarms, and hot-wiring the ignition. Then comes the thrill of
taking an expensive high-performance car to its limits, making it do things
others would never normally do on a road – handbrake turns, four-wheel skids.
And for what? For the fun of it. For the average driver, it is a daft way
to treat an investment which is meant to ferry you around.

Finding a way into the system (generally through a phone line), circumventing
the password, becoming a ‘superuser’, making the computer do something that
your own is incapable of – all have obvious parallels with joyriding. True,
the ‘property’ in a computer is intellectual, held in the form of magnetic
media. But hacking is intellectual joyriding.

As far as we know, unlike joyriding, no one has been killed by hacking.
Given the range of systems people like Bedworth have broken into – including
a cancer research institute, where he crashed a central system – that may
be just luck. With more of our lives controlled by computer, the chances
are increasing daily. Which is why it would be very unwise to propagate
the distinction between ‘intellectual’ crime and more obviously violent
crime. It is doubly important when we remember that a new generation of
people in their early teens are growing up with computer skills (including
the capacity to ram through security systems) which exceed anything even
their elder brothers and sisters can imagine.

Would-be hackers should take Bedworth’s own advice at the end of his
trial: ‘concentrate on programming’. It’s a far better way to earn respect
and money.