Omar Khan Has Been Failed
News YC is abuzz this morning over the following story:
“Between Jan. 23, 2008, and May 20, 2008, Omar Kahn is accused of unlawfully breaking and entering into locked rooms at Tesoro High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, where he was a senior, on several occasions late at night and on weekends to access school computers to change his grades. He is accused of altering current test scores from Advanced Placement (AP) classes and school records from previous semesters, often changing grades of “C,” “D,” or “F” to “A.” He is accused of stealing personal log-in information from teachers to gain access to their computers and grades. He is accused of primarily changing his own grades, and altering the permanent transcript grades of 12 other students. “
#Epic Fail
This is obviously a pupil showing a prodigal level of proficiency in a specific, useful body of knowledge. Just like any other binary-blooded hacker, this kid wants to beat the system. He wants to be successful on his own terms. He has found his own way to assess his performance, and that assessment is his ability to control the artificial grades that don’t accurately reflect his talents.
Almost something poetic about it. And yet instead of an epic win, it’s an epic fail.
This is an important story, because unlike many other supposedly controversial matters, people are likely to have a wide variety of opinions about it. Most Americans would agree that this student is a danger to society, and should be serve jail time. If he had simply broken into his teacher’s office, that would be one thing, but the word “hacker” elicits a burst of associations, almost all negative.
Hackers themselves, on the other hand, are likely to debug the problem more rationally, and put the blame on the schools. After all, best security practices are readily available, and schools are accountable for their own stupidity and negligence.
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And yet, this story is unlikely to make much of a wave. Judgement has already been cast, and as for Omar’s bright future as a hacker? Heck, even I’d fund that much talent and chutzpah in a hacker his age, but now he probably won’t be able to handle an iPhone, let alone further develop his skills (and put an end to all of that script-kiddie trojan nonsense).
Nevermind that in a similar case involving a Congressional Aide in 2006, no criminal charges were ever brought.
Nevermind that in California, computer trespassing is not specifically a crime.
Nevermind that the FOIA request I mail later today to get public, taxpayer-funded information related to the case will take months for me to get a response, if at all.
It’s ridiculously ironic - while the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the USA Patriot Act make it a felony to obtain government data, government agencies are at the same time in the midst of a slapstick effort to offer governmental data to those same hackers via programming interfaces.
