Mad computer and hacking skills plus pressure to ace High School AP classes without actually studying plus ability to break and enter may result in 38 years jail time for two California High School students. The formula for crime and punishment.
Two seniors at California's Tesoro High School have been caught after a spree of breaking into the school's computer rooms, then hacking the computer system that held their grades, stealing tests and a variety of other crimes. The severity of the possible sentence (38 years in jail) reflects the combined 69 felony counts against the ringleader. Read the story.
Hacking into the school computer isn't entirely new. It's unclear how common it's become because so often the school has such poor security on their systems, they don't even notice the break-in or theft of data. I was recently a speaker at a school in New Jersey and there, the PTA president described their recent student driven hacking event, which shut down the entire email and computer system for the district while outside tech consultants were brought in to redesign the system. Other cases, such as this one in Texas, will occasionally make the news but it's far more likely you hear about school data being hacked in a roundabout way.
What is it about hacking a school system that makes our kids think they'll get away with it? Obviously if you are failing in school, the opportunity to change your grades to something a little better must be sorely tempting, but wouldn't the school or the parents notice? With more of our schools using online homework reporting or requiring parents to sign and return tests and homework, it seems so unlikely that some adult wouldn't sniff out the cheater. I wonder what role we play, putting so much pressure on our children to succeed at all costs. Still, cheating is nothing new and all water rolls downhill, as they say. Which means, if we use poorly constructed systems and keep them in rooms a teenager can break into, we can expect to see this sort of crime occur. So, we start with the data management system. If we can't afford to design it with security, if we don't secure the physical and virtual systems, if we don't watch for and catch any intruders, we're building a playground for cheaters. Unless we catch and punish the cheaters every time, we actually end up cheating the kids who do the work and play the game fairly.