High school suspends Net access after hack

Usually, people are trying to protect kids from the Internet. But in Cloverdale, Calif., officials are trying to protect the Internet from the kids.

	Exclusive: Diary of a hack counter-attack.

In a ban believed to be the first of its kind, Cloverdale High School has cut off computer access to its entire student body while federal officials investigate whether two teens had a role in hacking into a Pentagon computer system last week. Days later, the FBI swooped into the small town, a well-to-do and highly wired community located about 100 miles north of San Francisco, and raided each of the two teens' homes.

Although the restriction is temporary -- Cloverdale High officials said they took the step as a short-term precautionary measure -- those on both sides of the Net censorship debate are calling the ban a "kneejerk reaction" and hoping the school doesn't impose any permanent restrictions.

"You don't close the schoolyard because kids were caught smoking there," said Bruce Taylor, president of the National Law Center for Children and Families, a conservative organization devoted to protecting kids from online smut. "It's natural to say 'Let's shut it down until we figure out how to put some controls out there,' but it would be a shame if they overreacted."

	Teen attorney calls hack attack merely a 'lark'

Instead, Taylor suggested monitoring software that could track a student's visits to sites they might later hack at home. "If they had monitoring systems, it might have been able to prove their innocence -- or that they did it," said Taylor, who's a vocal advocate of filtering and block-ing software.

Meanwhile, staff attorney Ann Brick of the ACLU's Northern California office in San Francisco said the most troubling part of the ban is that the alleged hackings didn't even happen at school, yet the entire student body has been denied any access from the Web. "To deprive the entire student body of Internet access seems to me to be a hysterical reaction," Brick said. "Should the school close the wood shop if two kids used their parents tools from home to break into the local store?"

Stanton McCandlish of the Electronic Freedom Foundation had his own alarming analogy. "It's kind of like making the library off limits because one kid was caught reading a banned book," he said.

But Bill Cox, president of Cloverdale's Board of Education, said the ban was actually the result of carefully considered and methodical reaction to last week's incident. "Cloverdale has taken a very systematic approach to resolving the hacker incident," he said.

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In the wake of the FBI raid, officials revoked the teens' access to the school's local area network, he said. It also froze directories used by the two teens. Nevetheless, by Thursday of this week, using auditing tools, school officials were able to track continuing activity on the school's server.

At that point, given the potential for sabotage or retaliation, they decided to sever the school's Internet connection. Cox said the school also invoked the temporary suspension to learn more about security. "Is it fair deny service to 400 kids access for the actions of two or more students?," asked Cox. " No, but right now, we have no selective solution."

Cloverdale's action was being backed by school officials elsewhere in Northern California. Nick Tipon, a Curriculum Resource Assistant in Technology for the neighboring Santa Rosa City School District, said, "it's probably something that I would have done," too. "I'd also want to assess the whole situation."

Cloverdale's situation isn't the first time the feds have come knocking at a California school. At least three times, the Secret Service has confronted schools whose students sent threatening letters to the President. And some schools have taken their computers off the Internet temporarily while bolstering their firewalls so students couldn't access confidential district documents.

Still, Frank Wallace, an education technology consultant with the state's Department of Education, thinks Cloverdale's computers will be up and running soon. "If they've made the effort and spent the money to give students acess it'll probably be a temporary situation," he said.

Alex Wellen and Luke Reiter of ZDTV's CyberCrime contributed to this story.