Last spring Kelly K. Johnson-Arbor '96 was stunned when she read an electronic mail message from her friend Grace S. Lin '96.

"Kelly, I know this is crazy, but I'm actually bisexual. I haven't told any-one, But I think cunnilingus sounds great.--Grace."

The return address showed Lin's account as the message's point of origin. But the e-mail, it turns out, wasn't sent by Grace Lin, who is straight. Eric E. Blom '96, an acquaintance of the women, later admitted to sending the fradulent message as a practical joke.

"I was really shocked that something like this could happen," Lin says," I thought that this was private."

The two women never told College officials about the message. Blom was already in trouble with the Freshman Dean's Office at the time for sending other fake e-mail messages, And after the prank, he sent the women a message--this time, in his own name--begging them to keep quiet lest he be expelled, according to a transcript of the message obtained by The Crimson.

"I know it was a very, very poor joke. I had a poor sense of humor at the time. I was a different person then," Blom says in retrospect. "I really had never paid any attention to register messages [warning against fake e-mail]. When I had the ability to send anonymous mail. I never really thought it was a big deal."

Sending e-mail in the name of another person is just one of the abuses that often occurs over Harvard's link to the Internet, a global data communication network. A two-month Crimson investigation, including interviews with about 100 faculty and staff and nearly 150 students, found that the security of electronic communications is frequently com-promised.

Some Harvard undergraduates secretly monitor each other's movements on the network and read their-e-mail message. Students have even broken into and destroyed personal files that their fellow under graduates keep in personal network accounts.

"The system is too easy to beat," says Whitney D. Pidot '96, a frequent network user and president of the Salient, a conservative magazine. "And the ultimate enforcers, the College administrators, don't know what's going on [or] how to divy out the penalties."

The process of ensuring security is complicated by four factors: the inherent flaws in the network operating system used by Harvard, the presence of students aware of these flaws, the lack of a clear understanding by students of what constitutes proper behavior on the network and Harvard's own vague rules on network etiquette.

University administrators, some users charge have not been able to keep up with the changes caused by the recent increase in undergraduate's use of the network.

Administrators respond that they are doing the best they can to develop rules for an evolving technology. For example, a five-year-old University committee on information security is currently revising its manual to cover problems involving the Internet, according to the manual's editor.

Increased security is an option, administrators say, but the network should not be overregulated.

"You can't have security and convenience," saysWilliam J. Ouchark, network manager for theHarvard Arts and Sciences Computer Service(HASCS). "You just can't have both. Havingservices available outweighs security issues...It's a big problem."

Part of the problem is that students often canbe hurt by abuses such as fake e-mail.

"I totally felt that it was a violation of mye-mail privacy," Johnson-Arbor says. "I wasdefinitely shocked. Grace and I were very closefriends and I knew that if Grace was going to tellme something like that she wouldn't to it in sucha tactless way."