Wednesday, May 10, 2000

Losers keep finding how to disrupt lives
(ARN Editorial)

Once upon a time, even before the electronic age became the cyber age, there was a threatening social nuisance called the anonymous phone call, a primitive form of technological stalking.

The caller would mutter obscenities, threats or sexual propositions to the victim. It was a sadistic form of harassment and a difficult crime to solve because tracing phone calls was so laborious.

Occasionally, though, the anonymous callers were identified and typically were geeky, unsocialized pranksters or a lonesome loser in a basement apartment. Both, being bullies of a type, tended to collapse in abject terror when the cops came through the door.

Typically, too, the callers were almost too pathetic to punish, and rarely did they have assets making it worthwhile for the victim to sue for damages. The perpetrators suffered additional indignity: The police would haul them in whenever there was another outbreak of anonymous calls.

Such advances as caller ID, callback and instant tracing have all but ended the anonymous call. The successor crime appears to be computer viruses, and the tracing of the ILOVEYOU virus that crippled computer systems and destroyed files worldwide seems to follow a familiar pattern.

Philippine authorities have traced the Love Bug to three 20-somethings — a bank clerk; his girlfriend, also a bank clerk; and the girlfriend’s unemployed sister — who were sharing a messy apartment and a junk-filled patio in a rundown section of Manila.

Neighbors described the trio as reclusive and uncommunicative.

If these three are, indeed, the Love Bug culprits, there is no hope of recouping the millions of dollars in damage they inflicted, and even their prosecution is in some doubt because Filipino law has lagged behind the cyber age. The pending charges are not for the virus but for a version of credit card fraud.

Because of speed and ease of access, personal computers have become indispensable, much as the telephone did; and because computers’ use depends on openness and universality, they are subject to abuses, much as the telephone was.

Eventually, technology will overtake the hackers as it did anonymous callers, and then just as surely the losers of the world will find some other form of threatening social nuisance.