War Games
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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
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ils of the defense system as seen in the film were invented, though they were based on what is known of actual practice. The defense system is shown as being fraught with tensions and strains even without the danger of computer hackers, and the toll is great on the human beings who are asked to take such awesome responsibility to heart. The young man who uses his computer to play a game with the government computer means no harm, but his act has consequences. It is impossible to say whether this precise sequence of events could come to pass, whether playing a war game could lead to the brink of a real war, but it is certain that a computer hacker using a home computer can break into a wide variety of computer systems across the country.
There is nothing new about electronic anarchy, and as far back as the 1960s attacks on the telephone company by sophisticated electronics experts were common. The telephone company was a target as the hackers of that era as they used blue boxes to make telephone calls without paying and to mess up the telephone system by stacking calls on phone lines by manipulating switching equipment over telephone lines. The hackers of today can do even more damage because the computer is more sophisticat
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Some common words found in the essay are:
War Games, Soviet Empire, computer systems, war games, defense system, telephone company, Twentieth-Century Fox, telephone system, computer hackers, telephone lines, , movie war games, strong ethical sense, ethical sense, break codes, government computer, tamper computer systems,
Approximate Word count = 1366
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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