Neal said that he and his friends, who named themselves the "414s" after the Milwaukee area code, did not intend to do any damage and did not realize they were doing anything unethical or illegal. In fact, when asked [at a Congressional subcommittee hearing] at what point he questioned the ethics of his actions, he answered, "Once the FBI knocked on the door."
             It's no secret that a mature sense of ethics is something a person develops over time. Parents are supposed to exercise authority over their children because the children are not expected to know how to make certain decisions for them. We have a juvenile court system separate from the adult criminal court system because we believe that a young person is not capable of criminal intent in the same sense that an adult is capable of it.
             Compare a bunch of adolescents breaking into a computer system with another bunch of kids hot-wiring a car for a joyride. The latter would probably argue, with complete sincerity, that they were doing no harm, because the owner of the car recovered his property afterward. They didn't keep or sell it. It's a "naughty" prank to borrow someone's property in that way, but not really serious.
             These hypothetical car thieves would be wrong, of course, in making that argument. They might lack the sensitivity needed to give weight to the victim's feelings of manipulation, of fear, of anger. They may not understand how the experience of such a random attack can leave a person feeling a profound loss of order and safety in the world--the feeling that leads half our population to hail Bernhard Goetz as a hero to be emulated. Some adolescents don't have the empathy to see beyond the issue of loss of property. Some may show empathy in certain situations but not in others.
             The point is that the computer raises no new issue, ethical or pragmatic. The password hacker who says "we aren't hurting anything by looking arou...