Two men face charges of unlawful computer use, theft of services in a preliminary hearing scheduled for this morning at the Centre County Court of Common Pleas in Bellefonte.

David Geyer, 234 S. Allen St., and Robert W. Clark, 201 Twin Lake Drive, Gettysburg, were arrested Friday in connection with illegal use of the University computer system, according to court records.

Geyer, 36, is charged with theft of service, unlawful computer use and criminal conspiracy. Clark, 20, is charged with multiple counts of unlawful computer use and theft of service.

Both men have been released on their own recognizance.

Clark, who faces the more serious felony charges, allegedly used two computer accounts without authorization from the Center of Academic Computing or the Computer Science Department and, while creating two files, erased a file from the system.

The computers used were located in 113 Electrical Engineering East Building.

When interviewed by University Police Services, Clark stated in the police report that the file deleted contained lists of various groups under the name of "ETZGREEK." Clark said the erasure was accidental, resulting from an override in the file when he tried to copy it over onto a blank file.

According to records, Clark is accused of running up more than $1,000 in his use of the computer account.

Geyer is accused of running up more than $800 of computer time.

Police began to investigate allegations of illegal computer use in November when Joe Lambert, head of the University's computer department, told police a group of people was accessing University computer accounts and then using those accounts to gain access to other computer systems.

Among the systems accessed was Internet, a series of computers hooked to computer systems in industry, education and the military, according to records.

The alleged illegal use of the accounts was originally investigated by a Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie-Mellon University, which assists other worldwide computer systems in investigating improper computer use.

Matt Crawford, technical contact in the University of Chicago computer department, discovered someone had been using a computer account from Penn State to access the University of Chicago computer system.

Penn State officials became aware of the alleged computer misuse when Kenneth R. VanWyk, technical coordinator of the Computer Emergency Response Team, contacted them in November 1989.

The response team, funded by the Department of Defense, was created after a computer virus paralyzed computer systems around the country in November 1988.