Read the following case study. Then, as a class, discuss the questions that follow.

One night, 21-year-olds Brian Salcedo and Adam Botbyl were driving around in Adam’s car with a couple of antennas hanging out the window and a laptop. Salcedo and Botbyl were looking for open wireless networks they could access. As they drove past a Lowe’s home improvement store, they found it had an open network. Lowe’s had set it up to be open so the company’s employees could use scanners and other handheld devices to connect wirelessly to it.

Six months later, Salcedo and Botbyl used the Lowe’s network to upload a modified program onto Lowe’s computer system. The program was designed to transmit customers’ credit card numbers to the men. Fortunately, the FBI investigated the incident and arrested Salcedo and Botbyl before they ever saw a single credit card number. They pleaded guilty and worked with Lowe’s to boost its security. Nonetheless, Salcedo was sentenced to nine years in prison, one of the longest sentences in U.S. history for computer hacking. Botbyl was sentenced to 26 months.