The first recorded computer abuse, according to Donn B. Parker, a frequent writer on computer crime, occurred in 1958. The first federally prose-cuted crime identified specifically as a computer crime involved an alteration of bank records by computer in Minneapolis in 1966. Computers were not so widespread then as they are now, and the stakes weren't quite so high. It's one thing to have money controlled and kept track of via computer; it's quite another to have power controlled in this way. In 1970, many criminology researchers were stating that the problem of computer crime was merely a result of a new technology and not a topic worth a great deal of thought. Even in the mid-1970s, as crimes by computer were becoming more frequent and more costly, the feeling was that the machines themselves were just a part of the environment, and so they naturally would become a component of crime in some instances. It doesn't matter if a burglar carries his loot in a pillow case or a plastic bag - why should the props of the crime determine the way in which criminologists think about the case?
This was an unfortunate mode of thought for those charged with preventing computer crimes, because while research stagnated, the criminals, crackers and hackers were actively racking their brains to come up with more ingenious methods of doing things with computers they were not sup-posed to be able to do. The
criminologists could not have realized then that the computer really was an integral part of the crime, and that the existence of these machines - and the systems built around them - led to whole new areas of crime and think-ing about crime that had never before been explored.
Lawmakers and enforcers, however, finally did sit up and take notice. In 1976 two important de-velopments occurred. The FBI established a 4-week training course for its agents in the investigation of computer crime (and followed it up with a second course for other agencies in 1978). Also in 1976, Senator Abraham Ribicoff and his U.S. Senate Gov-ernment Affairs Committee realized that something big was going on, and it was important for the gov-ernment to get in on it. The committee produced two research reports and Ribicoff introduced the first Federal Systems Protection Act Bill in June, 1977. These reports eventually became the
Com-puter Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. Florida, Michi-gan, Colorado, Rhode Island, and Arizona were some of the first states to have computer crime legislation, based on the Ribicoff bills that had devel-oped into the 1986 Act.
A year before, a major breakthrough was an-nounced at the Securicom Conference in Cannes by a group of Swedish scientists who had invented a method of silently eavesdropping on a computer screen from a far-off distance. But let's save this story for later. Much later.
