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War Games

The movie War Games raises a number of issues of growing importance in our computer-oriented society. We live in an era when certain international tensions seem to have subsided with the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, and as a result many are calling into questions our military expenditures, including those that are directed toward intelligence capabilities and technological means of analysis and protection. It has been charged by some that we are leaving ourselves open to attack, especially attack by the new danger from terrorists, and computers make this danger all the more intense. Computer experts might be capable of breaking through our defenses and entering our computer systems to wreak havoc, including the sort of havoc seen in this film where missiles are launched by accident. Many people would not accept the idea that a lone hacker, and especially a high-school student, could break through the many codes and fail-safe mechanisms involved in protecting our national defense network. This is what happens in the movie, but in real life the danger would come from a terrorist or computer expert. People taking this view ignore the fact that the sort of intrusion on which War Games is based has indeed happened and that the perpetrators in many cases are young people who understand computers sometimes better than the experts.

Of course, no one has yet triggered a missile launch, but hackers have endangered the defense system at various times as they enter secret computer systems and look around, often with relative impunity. We have developed our computer capabilities rapidly in the last two decades, so rapidly that we have not been able to maintain the security of the pre-computer age. In 1990

law enforcement officers arrested dozens of computer hackers involved in a computer underground that made use of modems and telephone lines to tamper with computer systems and especially with the telephone company itself. T...

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War Games. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 17:27, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681466.html