A Youth's Passion for Computers, Gone Sour

By Michael Wines
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10, 1988 -- No drama is complete without a moment of foreshadowing, something Robert T. Morris, a onetime student of ancient Greek, knows all too well. In the drama that has enveloped him and his son Robert Jr., a Cornell University graduate student who last week caused the biggest computer gridlock on record, the moment came five years ago on Capitol Hill.

The elder Mr. Morris, an expert on computer security who at the time worked for Bell Laboratories, was a witness before a House committee studying a new and ominous phenomenon called the computer virus. His testimony was blunt.

''The notion that we are raising a generation of children so technically sophisticated that they can outwit the best efforts of the security specialists of America's largest corporations and of the military,'' he said, ''is utter nonsense.

''I wish it were true. That would bode well for the technological future of the country.''

A National Sensation

Now an isolated realization of the fears that Mr. Morris addressed has hit home in a very personal way, posing a threat to the future of his extraordinarily bright son.

The younger Mr. Morris - known to some friends as RTM, his computer log-on - has declined on the advice of his lawyer to discuss last week's incident or other matters. But in telephone interviews in recent days, his father and his mother, Anne, as well as friends and associates, talked about him, his family and a passion for computers that has caught the Morrises up in a national sensation.

Robert T. Morris Jr., 23 years old, is the subject of an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States attorneys in Virginia and New York. He has been identified by friends as the creator of an electronic virus, developed for what the friends describe as a nonmalicious experiment, that ran out of control and swamped 6,000 terminals last week along a nationwide Pentagon computer network called Arpanet.

A Father Torn

His father, now chief scientist at the Government's National Computer Security Center, is the man responsible for shielding Arpanet and other, more sensitive networks from such electronic intruders.

He is also the man who introduced his gifted son to the craft of computing, and he is torn by the furor surrounding the Arpanet incident.

On one hand, he condemns the creators of viruses and other computer pranks as irresponsible. Indeed, he compared them in his 1983 Capitol Hill testimony to teen-agers who are ''stealing a car for the purpose of joy riding.''

In an interview this week, Mr. Morris declined to discuss his son's role in the Arpanet affair, but he is aware that it may damage his own future. Mr. Morris is a senior official of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., a Government intelligence bureau whose very existence was a secret for decades, and nightly mention of his son on television news programs, he said, ''is not a career plus.''

Factors of Mitigation

Yet, on the other hand, he has heard what other experts say of the Arpanet virus: that it was a programming triumph fit for publication in a journal, that it caused no lasting damage, that it pointed up far more serious security threats.

And, in the interview, he appeared to find it difficult to suppress some pride in the technical wizardry of its creator.

''I know a few dozen people in the country who could have done it,'' he said. ''I could have done it, but I'm a darned good programmer.''

'One of the Best'

He is better than good, say his associates. In 26 years at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill and Whippany, N.J., Mr. Morris, a pure mathematician by training, helped create the Unix program that is the foundation of modern computer operations. Unix and similar programs are the rule books by which computers process the numbers, words, sounds and images fed into them.

''He's one of the best,'' said his onetime supervisor at Bell Labs, M. Douglas McIlroy.

Both he and his son are regarded by their peers as brilliant computer analysts, blessed with insights into mathematical and logical problems whose complexity might confound lesser experts. That is but one of several experiences and traits they share. Both cut their teeth in computer programming while working in summer jobs at Bell Laboratories; both maintained computer systems while studying at Harvard University; both are deeply involved in the study of computer security and are intellectually entranced by the challenge of finding holes and ''backdoors'' in programs touted as burglar-proof.

Anne Morris, the elder Mr. Morris's wife, said the two men were acutely aware of the similarities.

''Of course they are aware of it,'' she said in an interview this week. ''How could they not be? Their interests and careers will dovetail, so that there will be a continuum of Robert Morrises over the course of computer science.''

Computing in a Farmhouse

The younger Mr. Morris is a product of a family of bright and fiercely independent parents and children.

Anne and Robert Morris met in 1959, while she was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he was pursuing a doctoral degree in mathematics at Harvard. Mr. Morris abandoned his pursuit of the degree shortly after taking a summer job at Bell Laboratories, where he would remain for a quarter-century.

Computing proved his real love, and in the 1960's a Bell Labs remote computer terminal was installed in the 200-year-old farmhouse that the family occupied along the Passaic River near Millington, N.J.

The oldest of their three children, Meredith, now 25, had little interest in computing and currently works at the Library of Congress in Washington. The youngest, Ben, 21, proved an avid outdoorsman and works for a New Jersey tree service company.

A Precocious Child

The middle child, Robert, was different. At the age of 4, Mrs. Morris said, he was constructing intricate models from cardboard and Scotch tape, including a handgun with working parts and an automobile that could be steered. At 9, he was devouring old issues of Scientific American. ''We used to buy them at old-book sales,'' Mrs. Morris said. ''We still have them - steamer trunks full, in the attic.''

With the children of other Bell employees, young Robert also began to play computer games. By the age of 14 or so, his mother said, he had attracted the attention of Bell officials with his ''sleuthing'' on the family computer terminal, and they began allowing him to visit his father's office and play with computer projects.

He wrote technical analyses of computer programs just for fun and, as his parents acknowledge, also became an adept electronic cat burglar, using his superior programming knowledge to sneak into and out of other computer files undetected.

His parents say it was he who was depicted in a Smithsonian magazine article in 1982 as ''a quiet, polite young man with soft brown hair and rosy cheeks'' who ''has broken into password files, read supposedly private computer mail, and has broken into computers that are linked together in networks.''

''I never told myself that there was nothing wrong with what I was doing,'' the youth was quoted as saying at the time, adding that he had continued with it because he enjoyed the challenge of testing computer security.

So did the elder Mr. Morris. By the 1980's, associates say, he was both a master cryptographer and one of the world's leading specialists in the protection of electronic information. As his son was entering Harvard for undergraduate study in 1983, he himself was penning notes for his Harvard classmates' 25th-anniversary report. ''A long time ago,'' he wrote, ''I promised myself that I would learn to read Greek, learn in some detail how the planets move in their orbits, and how to decipher secret codes. I have gone a long way toward keeping all three promises.''

In the Footsteps

His son followed the same track. After two summer jobs at Bell Laboratories, he entered Harvard and was quickly hired by the university's Aiken Computer Center for a job in computer maintenance. ''He already had quite a reputation as a Unix expert,'' said a college roommate. ''People were very impressed with him.''

He also had a reputation as a somewhat gentle prankster. The young Mr. Morris crafted a program that swept some Harvard computer users into an electronic maze whenever they committed a certain misspelling. He devised a second program that caused classmates' portraits to bounce around computer screens during idle moments.

The jokes were ''never destructive -typical pranks,'' said Douglas J. Beck, a college and high school classmate. ''He clearly enjoyed it.'' Because of his maintenance ability, he was given ''super-user'' privileges at the Aiken center, allowing him to wander at will through high-security files. A former roommate says he ignored the opportunity to make more mischief. Why?

''It was no challenge,'' the roommate said. ''You were already inside. Why do anything?''

An Indifferent Scholar

H. Scott Roy, who as a Harvard senior taught young Mr. Morris in a computer science class, said the youth was ''the most knowledgeable Unix person I've ever seen.'' But Robert Jr. was an indifferent scholar, and he left Harvard for a year in 1985 because of poor academics, undertaking instead a complex programming project for the Convex Computer Corporation near Dallas.

He returned, however, and, after completing his Harvard work last year, went to Cornell to pursue a graduate degree in computer science. Classmates there describe him as shy and extremely bright, although only an average student.

His father, meanwhile, had parlayed his cryptographic and security skills into the top computer-security job at the National Security Agency. In his last job for Bell Laboratories, he had designed a Navy computer that hunted enemy submarines by spotting anomalies amid the vast clutter of data collected by ocean sensors. At the time, it was the largest computer ever built.

In his new post, which he assumed in 1986, Mr. Morris was responsible for protecting sensitive computer-based data worldwide, including information that flowed along many Pentagon networks. He declined in an interview to describe his post in any detail, but people familiar with it say it involves troubleshooting security problems and reviewing reports from an army of N.S.A. scientists and mathematicians.

''For a cryptographer like him, it was akin to going to Mecca,'' said Marvin Schaefer, Mr. Morris's predecessor at the agency, who recommended him for the job.

'Extraordinary Integrity'

And what of Mr. Morris's character, particularly as it relates to the Arpanet affair? ''Bob is of enormously high integrity, extraordinary integrity,'' said Mr. McIlroy, his former superior at Bell Laboratories. ''I am convinced he did not know what Robert may have been doing in this particular case.''

The elder Mr. Morris implied in a telephone conversation this week that in fact he had not been aware of his son's continued forays into any other computer files, much less into one of the military networks for which the father is responsible.

''I had a feeling this kind of thing would come to an end the day he found out about girls,'' Mr. Morris said, deadpan. ''Girls are more of a challenge.''

In his home outside Annapolis, Md., on a living room wall, the elder Mr. Morris has hung a quotation from Virgil, in the original Latin: ''Forsan et haec olim meminisse jurabit.''

''One day,'' Mr. Morris translated, ''we will look back on even these things with pleasure.''

There was only a little weariness in his voice.

GRAPHIC: Photos of Robert T. Morris Jr. with his mother Anne (NYT/Marty Katz); Robert T. Morris Sr. (pg. A28) (NYT/Marty Katz)

Copyright 1988 The New York Times Company