They're Not Like Us: Shouldn't We Do Something About That?

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They're Not Like Us: Shouldn't We Do Something About That?

5/27/2004

By Terry Calhoun

I was pretty impressed by Jon's behavior. After all, I do have this fairly negative view of the current state of young people's cyber behavior. Hearing about this made me question my negativity. I thought to myself that maybe I was just getting old. Every generation thinks the newer generation is going to the dogs and that as a result, civilization is falling apart. I used to attribute that to personal bias and bigotry. So, for example, when I - who survived nearly 5 years in the U.S. Navy, including three Vietnam tours of duty, without even once seriously considering getting a tattoo - see young men and women loaded up with "skin art," and feel that slight tug of nausea, I let it go. I don't even let myself think, anymore, "Boy, he/she is really gonna regret that some day." I try to step outside my Baby Boomer status and realize that they see things differently. They are different.

So, I called and talked to both Jonathan Oberheide, and to Linda Green, communications coordinator for Michigan Administrative Information Servicesabout the story. It turns out that Jon is indeed an honorable and well-educated young man. When I talked to him, he didn't seem all that different in terms of cyber responsibility and attitude than a more mature adult, which I found surprising, actually. But then I found out that he is already quite experienced not only in computer science, his major now, but specifically in IT security issues. Jonathan even talks of "the industry" in reference to the subset of the information technology industry that focuses on security issues. As he explained to me, what he did was "industry-specific appropriate" in that he did nothing to widen the potential security breach and appropriately notified the right people. So, his laudable response to identifying a security problem says nothing about young people in general, just speaks to his own early professional experience. Due to both his computer science studies and to employment in the field, Jon felt a strong sense of professional responsibility to do that right thing.

Jonathan stressed to me that university people with whom he spoke seemed very understanding of the need he expressed for students to know more both about online security issues and about the protection of their identities. He seemed to think that U-M might be considering some kind of course for incoming students about that.

I think that such a course would be an excellent idea, and that maybe a lesson we're about to learn is that universities and colleges need to invest in required first-year, intensive and comprehensive, required coursework about the appropriate use and understanding of information technology. Forget about the very good reason to do so which relates to the university's mission of turning out well-educated, responsible young adults. You only have to do a small amount of risk analysis to realize how the programming error that Jonathan found could have cost the university huge amounts of dollars in time and liability exposure had a young person with a more "Lord of the Flies" attitude towards the Internet discovered the breach.