Playing Games

Data banks become kids' stuff

"It was really easy," said one of the perpetrators. "It didn't take too much intelligence to get into the things."

In the movie WarGames, a bright teen-ager uses his home computer to gain access to the key U.S. military computer. Inspired by the film, a group of youths, including Explorer Scouts from a troop taught and sponsored by IBM in Milwaukee, used their home computers to penetrate a dozen computers in the U.S. and Canada. Included were Security Pacific National Bank in Los Angeles and the nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, N. Mex., both of which insisted that no real harm had been done. As of last week, all that the ten young people, ages 15 to 22, had set off was an FBI investigation.

The youngsters' prank was feasible because most of the penetrated computers had been linked by GTE Telenet Inc., which provides access to computer systems in 325 U.S. cities and 50 nations. Ron Zeitz, Telenet's public affairs director, said that gifted amateurs do occasionally get into unclassified data banks, but that classified military data are virtually impossible to intercept. WarGames, said Zeitz, is "a delightful movie, but it just couldn't happen that way." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.