'Sabotage' Contest to Dramatize Computer Fallibility and Misuse

Anyone with technically feasible ideas on how best to "embarrass, harass, or 'sabotage' a large computer system which has done you wrong" could win cash prizes in a contest now being organized by two third-year GSAS students.

Jerry W. Popek and Mark S. Tuttle are organizing the contest in preparation for an upcoming National Educational Television (NET) special on "Privacy and Technology," which will be shown later this fall.

NET tentatively plans to use the winning entries as short vignettes during the 90-minute special.

By gaining national publicity for ways to foil computers, Popek said he hopes to break the myth of infallibility which surrounds computer systems and at the same time to raise questions about the dangers of computer information misuse, particularly by the government.

Tuttle said that under many computer systems, particularly in credit-checking businesses, "you can't get a person to handle your case, and you can't get the computer to admit mistakes." He added that the systems of today are not designed to be responsive to actual mistakes, 'because it's cheaper that way."

A $50 cash prize will go to the contestant who best suggests how one can "obtain redress or 'satisfaction' from the computer systems of credit card companies, government agencies, banks, the F. B. I., ad nauseum."

In clarifying the official contest wording, Tuttle said that "satisfaction" was to be taken "in the Rolling Stones sense of the word."

However, Tuttle and Popek are not simply out to make war on computers. "We don't want to ruin the computer." Popek said, "We're just trying to put things back into perspective."

Both use computers extensively in their GSAS work, and Popek is currently writing a thesis exploring computer science and its applications in medical information systems. He said that computer mistakes in vaccine classification, for example, are just as numerous as credit systems mistakes, but the results are often fatal.

The two realize that dissemination of ways to foil computers could result in misuse of the information, but according to Tuttle, "It's a risk we have to take" in getting people to recognize the problems of computer fallibility and computer misuse.

"We all know someone whose credit has been revoked because they were billed for goods which they never purchased," the contest literature explains. "The F. B. I. may wish to 'tag' your library card. There is a computerized list of 'potential troublemakers' at the Justice Department."

Details of the contest will be announced Thursday in an advertisement Tuttle and Popek plan to place in the CRIMSON.