Nixon Denies Any Knowledge

By Rebecca Winters Sunday, July 28, 2002
    • Violated teens. Mysterious hackers. A President's niece. Shaken ivory towers. No, it's not the pilot of Law & Order: Campus Police. It's a real-life intrigue involving students and administrators in the cutthroat culture of Ivy League college admissions. Yale University complained to the FBI last week that members of the admissions office at rival Princeton University had broken into Yale's new online applicant-notification system at least 14 times at the height of the admissions season last spring and gained access to private information about 11 prospective students, some of whom had also applied to Princeton. Even more titillating: one of the hacked files belonged to President Bush's niece Lauren, according to the Washington Post. The hacking was easy — all it takes to log in to Yale's site is knowing the birth dates, last names and Social Security numbers of prospective students. And of course Princeton had all that information in the files of its own applicants. The university quickly apologized for the spying, suspended an associate dean of admissions and launched an internal investigation. But motive in the case remains a puzzle. The suspended Princeton official, Stephen LeMenager, declined to comment to TIME, but he told the Yale Daily News, which broke the story on its website, that the hacking was "really an innocent way for us to check out the security" at Yale. Ivy Leaguers who might consider using this excuse to snoop during a final exam should probably wait to see how it holds up.