The Electronic Communications Privacy Act And The Comprehensive Crime Control Act

One of the first high-profile cases against hackers happened in 1983, when the FBI arrested six Milwaukee teens collectively known as “414s”, named after the area code of the city. The group was accused of hacking into over 60 different computer systems such as those of Los Alamos National Library and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre. A year after, in 1984, publications about hacking started to surface. For instance, a man named Eric Corley released a subversive magazine with the title “2600: The Hacker Quarterly”, which contained an underground magazine that contained computer and telephone hacking information. This prompted the creation and passing of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which granted the Secret Service jurisdiction over computer and credit card fraud cases. Two other laws addressing hacking were passed in 1986. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act stated that breaking into computer systems was a crime. Unfortunately, these laws did not apply to juveniles. This loophole was highlighted a year after, when 17-year-old Herbert Zinn, aka “Shadow Hawk”, was arrested for breaking into the computer network of AT&T in 1987. During this

Firstly, Russian Vladimir Levin was arrested in Britain after breaking into the computer network of Citibank using his laptop. He then proceeded to transfer money to different accounts across the world. Levin was eventually extradited to U.S.A and sentenced to three years of jail time and a payment of $240,000 to Citibank. While the actual amount of money he stole remains unknown, estimates fall between $3 million to $10 million. Also in 1995, notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick was arrested in Raleigh, North Carolina for a number of security violations. He allegedly copied computer software, hacked into several networks and stole various private data, including 20,000 valid credit card information (Devitt,