Student hacker prompts on-line search

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, June 1, 1999 | 11:02 a.m.

Authorities are looking for a student who used a school computer to spew hate mail, racial slurs and Ku Klux Klan symbols.

Clark County School Police, computer technicians and teachers at the Advanced Technologies Academy have launched an on-line search for a student who has used classroom computers to hurl electronic obscenities and threats at ATA student Mike Weiss.

The FBI has been notified, but the agency is not yet part of the investigation, academy principal Michael Kinnaird said.

"We're trying to teach students to use the computers in an ethical and responsible manner," Kinnaird said. "We have one student who is misusing the equipment who needs to be identified and disciplined."

The Advanced Technologies Academy is a competitive magnet school that attracts some of the county's brightest teens, many of whom study computer science. Two years ago, the academy was one of just two schools to earn the state's "high-achieving" label.

"This is one incident," Kinnaird said. "It's not a frequent thing. Ninety-nine percent of our kids are exceptional."

Weiss' father, Robert Weiss, said he first discovered that obscene and malicious messages had been posted on his son's webpage on May 17. He immediately notified Kinnaird.

The messages include sexually explicit obscenities, KKK symbols and racial epithets sent between May 17 and May 26, when this message was posted:

"I am the one who messed with your web page. I know where you live, and what you do. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid."

"I was horrified," said Robert Weiss, a Las Vegas physician. "This is very threatening. This was vicious."

Weiss and his son took their case to the School Board last week, pleading for help to find the "hacker."

"This is the down side of computers," Robert Weiss told the Board.

Weiss said he was concerned that the culprit would never be caught because Wednesday is the last official day of school before summer vacation.

"I'm afraid that they are going to say it's over," Weiss said. "Well, no, it's not. It's over for now. And it's over for them."

Superintendent Brian Cram at the School Board meeting assured the two that "We're trying to identify who is doing this. We don't take this lightly."

Mike Weiss said he didn't know of any students at school who wanted to hurt him.

"It's probably just someone who wants to mess with my head," the computer-savvy 16-year-old said. "He's very aggressive and gets angry very easily, apparently."

Weiss, a junior, said he has kept the guestbook on his website open so investigators could use it to track the message sender.

School officials said they were trying to track the source of the messages through computer records. Kinnaird said the messages have been sent from both IBM and Macintosh computers in at least four classrooms at the academy.

"These kids are smart, computer-wise," Kinnaird said.

Kinnaird said computer specialists and teachers, as well as a school police officer, have been investigating. He said they had interviewed students who may have been on the computers used to send the messages at the time the messages were sent.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," Kinnaird said.

School Police may enlist the help of the FBI, said police spokesman Sgt. Ken Young. Young said that whoever was sending the messages could be charged for making threats and harassment.

"Anything like this is a cause for concern," Young said. Young added that 17 arrests of students had been made for similar threats in recent weeks. School Police have been especially sensitive to threats made by students since a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., left 15 dead.

"We're always optimistic that we're going to catch the guy," Young said.

School officials say that school computers are rarely used by students to send obscene or threatening messages, despite the thousands of computers in the district's 227 schools.

Still, officials say students are becoming more adept at using computers inappropriately without getting caught.

"The only thing akin to it would be students writing something about someone else on the bathroom wall," said Steve McCoy, east area superintendent, who oversees the technologies academy. "But when you do that there's the chance you might get caught. It's harder to see kids doing this on the computer."