When the Going Gets Tough, It's Not My Problem

In The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll, the protagonist Cliff tries several times to go to various governmental agencies for help in tracking down a hacker who is using his university's system to access government computers. While these agencies are more than willing to ask him questions and get information, they're very unwilling to tell him anything in return. Furthermore, they're unwilling to actually do anything. They don't want to help monitor the hacker, and they don't want to take responsibility for trying to track him down. As a reader, I felt some of Cliff's frustrating while reading about how unhelpful the people in authority were being. It's a situation I could totally sympathize with. How many problems, discovered by seemingly unimportant people, could potentially have enormous impact on society? How do you properly inform the correct people? How do you make sure the problem is treated as a priority? This is a general human problem, but it can apply to the field of computer science in unique ways. What if you discover a bug in some software? Should you exploit it? Quietly report it to authorities? Fix it yourself and submit a patch? Spread the word about it all over the internet? What do we do if people report a problem to us? How do we know if a problem is important enough to be worth our resources? These and many other questions are big considerations in software, and especially in open source software where developers like us have more opportunity to make a positive difference.