BOSTON — You have to give Rita Parson credit. She’s undoubtedly the first mother who has ever gone on network television to protest that her son "is not brilliant, he’s not a genius."
"My Son the Un-Genius" is Jeffrey Lee Parson, the 18-year-old Minnesota high-school student who sent forth a version of the Blaster worm from his own little PC. After infecting an estimated 7,000 computers, the worm turned. On him.
On Wednesday the T-shirted and blue-jeaned Jeffrey was in a Seattle courtroom being arraigned for one count of intentionally causing damage to a protected computer — a charge that could bring him 10 years behind bars.
Jeffrey’s cyberfeat brought a whole range of responses. The kids in his Hopkins high school uttered a collective "wow." One even gushed, "he definitely put Hopkins on the map." Meanwhile the head of a computer support company in Seattle muttered, "We’re all hoping he just gets pounded."
Parson is not the only one who got a surprise visit from the cybercops. Lawsuits were just filed against some 261 file-sharers, people who downloaded songs into a folder that allowed millions of strangers to share what wasn’t theirs. Without, of course, paying the artists or record companies.
This too caught the public’s attention. Some 60 million Americans have downloaded music, more than voted in the last presidential primary. Many downloaders are not of voting age, of course, and have parents who know less about Kazaa software than about Beyonce. It’s 3 p.m. and do you know where your children are or whom they’re downloading?
Blaster Worms and the File-sharers? It sounds like the name of a rock group. In fact they are different tales from the annals of the Internet. But Jeffrey Lee Parson pleaded innocent even though he acknowledged his worm paternity. Most of the file-sharers seem equally shocked at the idea they did anything wrong. More to the point, both seem to be caught at a computer cultural turning point.
There’s a crackdown at the O.K. Internet Corral. It’s like those times the sheriff arrives at the frontier town and the good citizens have to decide on the crimes and punishments.
The Internet does have its Wild West past. The original ethic was for open sharing, especially among academics. MIT’s Sherry Turkle describes a free-wheeling culture that believed, "information wants to be free. A closet was there to be opened, a lock was there to be picked."
Then the Internet took off as both a way of communicating and a marketplace. Today, we are more interdependent and more dependent on computer technology. But lately, the free flow of information has felt more like an obstacle course. We have spam and pop-ups littering the marketplace, viruses and worms in the communication grid.
The folks who run the marketplace want more control and the folks who are paralyzed when the computer goes down no longer regard the neighborhood hacker as a merry prankster. The fact that these two cases are thrown up on the news screen together forces us to start thinking about cybercrimes and fitting punishment.
Then there’s Parson, who may not be brilliant … or a terrorist or a Mafioso. He didn’t do the damage of the original Blaster boy, who, by the way, is still at large.
"I just want to tell people they are mad at the wrong guy," says Jeffrey. But we are all vulnerable to the kid in the garage who can bring down the system. There’s no tolerance left for the neighborhood hacker or worm creator. So there has to be something between 10 years in jail and getting sent to your room.
"There are many overlapping cultures on the Internet, new versus old, commercial versus noncommercial, political versus apolitical, centralized versus decentralized," muses Turkle. "Crimes are based on changing social mores and a changing sense of what is damaged." Now those culture clashes and changing mores are going to court.
My Son the Un-Genius? I guess that anyone who’s put up firewalls and patches and anti-virus programs may want to throw the book at him. First, though, we have to write it.
Ellen Goodman can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or send e-mail to EllenGoodman@Globe.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
