Gutman and her boyfriend, May Kogan, whom she met through Magshimim, will spend this summer working at a camp for Israeli teenagers studying cybersecurity. They have just completed a final project that involved building an application to let teachers remotely control the computers of their students in order to administer an online class in the event that school is canceled due to “a war, or snow” (“what we have and what you have,” Gutman explained to me, referencing the different reasons for canceling school in Israel and the United States).

Many countries, including the United States, have programs designed to teach elementary and high school students coding and computer science skills; many have programs aimed at attracting diverse students to those subjects. But Israel—in large part because of the constant threat of war or cyber attack—is one of the only nations to boast a thriving program for training teenagers from underrepresented groups to focus specifically on cybersecurity.

Beginning in ninth grade, Israeli teenagers from the nation’s “periphery” (that is, outside the well-populated and wealthier cities in Israel) are screened for the afterschool cybersecurity program, which places a particular emphasis on recruiting girls. Magshimim was launched in 2011 by the Rashi Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on supporting underprivileged Israeli youth, and has been co-sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Defense since 2013. More than 530 students have successfully completed the program, and it is in the process of trying to scale up the size of its classes tenfold, from roughly 400 students to 4,800 participants over the course of the next five years.

Magshimim accepts roughly 30 percent of the students who apply, following a series of tests and interviews during which the program screens for determination, dedication, and sociability—but not prior computing experience. That’s how Gutman and students like Revital Baron, 17, were able to make the cut, despite having no background in computing. “I just knew how to use Facebook and play computer games,” Baron said of her familiarity with computers prior to entering Magshimim. Now she, like Gutman, is finishing the program and has built, for her final project, a robot that can create a visual map of the space it occupies using ultrasonic sensors to compute the distance from walls and other obstacles.

The students selected for the program attend three-hour cybersecurity training sessions after school two days per week from 10th through 12th grade. Over the course of three years, they work on programming projects, study computing theory, implement cryptographic protocols, reverse-engineer malware, and study the architecture and design of computer networks. They finish high school with a skillset comparable to that of many college juniors and seniors who study computer science in the United States. (Many of them also finish high school fluent in English—a skill born of many hours poring over the forums on Stack Overflow to help answer technical questions, they told me.)

In the short term, these students are being groomed to enter the Israeli Defense Force’s elite cyber branches during their compulsory military service. In particular, the teenagers in Magshimim hope to join Unit 8200, the intelligence and cybersecurity team featured in Richard Behar’s recent Forbes article as “Israel’s secret startup machine” because so many of its alums enter the private sector and launch successful tech (and often specifically security) companies. If Unit 8200 provides the pipeline for Israel’s start-up economy, then Magshimim provides the pipeline for Unit 8200.

In the United States, we talk a lot about the “pipeline problem” in technology—the lack of women and underrepresented minority students finishing college with degrees in engineering and computer science and the resulting lack of diversity at many major tech firms. Israel is concerned about these same issues, and so Magshimim is not just any pipeline—it’s specifically designed to recruit from underrepresented populations in cybersecurity, including girls, religious students, and children outside the major cities. To attract these populations into cybersecurity, it’s important to recruit students when they’re young, before they form too many ideas about what they can and can’t do or should and shouldn’t be interested in, before they begin to feel that they’ve already fallen behind and can’t compete with their peers. In fact, the program is now working on extending its recruitment even earlier, to include training for eighth and ninth graders.

Perhaps in part because “Magshimim not only looks for smart people, but also social people,” one student told me, and perhaps in part because it includes so many girls, the students in Magshimim are an astonishingly outgoing bunch. When I was visiting Israel recently for their 2016 Cyberweek symposium at Tel Aviv University, which included a Youth Conference for hundreds of Israeli high school students studying cybersecurity, many of them were eager to tell me how important the program has been for them socially, as well as technically.

“I really feel like Magshimim is my second home,” Baron said. “All of my best friends are from Magshimim.” Gutman and Kogan, meanwhile, are quick to credit the program with their relationship. A WhatsApp group keeps all of the seniors in the program across Israel, some 150 students, connected online, and the program also hosts regular overnight “Cyber Nights” and challenge events that seem to combine elements of military or law enforcement exercises with the free-food, stay-up-all-night ethos of the hack-a-thons that are commonplace on American college campuses.

For instance, one Magshimim event, a few years ago, required students to investigate a stolen pizza delivery by accessing a building’s security feeds to retrieve surveillance video footage of the theft. “Then we found the pizza and we ate it,” recalled Omer Greenboim Friman. In another exercise, there was a simulated crisis in which the building’s internet access had been completely shut off and the students had to find a way to re-establish connectivity with the outside world.

Underlying all of Israel’s efforts to ramp up its cybersecurity education and training programs is the sense that such threats (internet blackouts, not pizza theft) are never very far away and that no one is too young to be thinking about and preparing for them. The students in Magshimim make it clear in conversation—sometimes to an extent that feels shocking to an observer from another country—that they understand this is about war.

“We are a little country and we have a lot of enemies so we need to secure our data,” Kogan said. “When we were just kids we didn’t have anything we could do about these threats, but now when we are getting into the army we finally have the power to do something about it.” Similarly, Gutman told me, “I really want to go to the army and contribute. My dream is maybe to stay in the army.”

It’s almost inconceivable to imagine hundreds of tech-savvy teenagers in the United States feeling that way about, say, joining the NSA. Daniel Ninyo, another Magshimim senior, has a life plan that might seem more familiar to U.S. high school students: After serving in the IDF, he hopes to launch a start-up company.

When students in the United States get excited about computer science, their interest often lies in building new tools for social change or games or slick, marketable apps, rather than security. Two uniformed soldiers in a classroom would be unlikely to pique the interest of many U.S. high school freshmen the way that they did Gutman’s. So is it possible to replicate the success of a program like Magshimim in the United States? In some regards, absolutely. The United States is, of course, a much larger country than Israel, with a much more decentralized education system and no compulsory military service. But it could still support competitive, well-regarded cybersecurity afterschool programs that target students from underrepresented communities who have no prior coding experience and offer them not just classes but also a rich social environment, regular mentoring from older alums of the program, and, occasionally, pizza.

And yet—it takes more than pizza to create a program that is held in as high regard as Magshimim, both by its participants and the rest of the country. (“I was in a restaurant with my friends once and the waitress looked at us and she said, ‘Are you guys from Magshimim, that cool cyber program?’” Gutman recalled.) To care deeply, passionately about security, I realize as I speak with the Magshimim students, it helps to feel truly, immediately threatened.

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The CAC was seven blocks from my law office. On the Saturday morning that the exhibit opened to the public, we heard that the Hamilton County prosecutor had empaneled a grand jury to get an indictment by noon, so we sent out scouts to determine when the police were going to arrest the CAC’s director, Dennis Barrie. But Cincinnati is a small town, and our scouts told us that the cops had stopped for lunch along the way.

Eventually Dennis was charged with obscenity for five photos of explicit gay S&M sex and one count of exhibiting two photos of nude children. If convicted, he could have spent two years in jail and paid $2,000 in fines. The CAC would have had to pay $10,000 in fines. The psychic cost for countless artists and museums as they self-censored to avoid obscenity charges also would have been high.

I spent the next six months working on Dennis’s defense; Ultimately a jury judged him not guilty that October. The trial demonstrated that the rights to freedom of expression designated in the Constitution must be fought for—and that they sometimes hinge on narrow legal distinctions.

I had been working on First Amendment cases since the 1970s. That was a decade of changes in attitudes towards art with sexual content. The Kinsey Report’s findings had been accepted by the culture by then, and magazines and filmmaking reflected the sexual revolution. Then, in the 1980s, VHS and Betamax players produced an explosion of pornographic films people could watch in the privacy of their homes instead of theaters. By the late 1980s, sexual content was a bigger part of our culture and our lives.

The controversy over Mapplethorpe’s work is often attributed to his explicit homosexual subject matter. But I wondered if the trouble in Cincinnati wasn’t more about race. There were photographs of black men and white women, after all. And our city is on the edge of the South (Kentucky is just across the river) and 46 percent African American. We had integrated during the ‘70s, but were backsliding into segregated neighborhoods by the ‘90s, with whites moving into small cities and villages in the suburbs.

To me, it was mind-boggling that prosecutors would go after the CAC, a vital and legitimate institution that had been hosting exhibitions since the 1940s. Before trial, we were optimistic that the case would be dismissed, despite the climate of hysteria around Mapplethorpe, because it should have been clear that an organization like the CAC would never do something without a serious artistic purpose. After all, the exhibit was a retrospective of years of work, and it had shown elsewhere in the country. A museum would be a protected institution from these charges, however, the judge said the CAC was not a museum but a gallery because it had no permanent collection. We were boggled by this.

So we had to go to a jury trial. Again, we were optimistic. I was familiar with Miller vs. California, a 1973 case that said that obscenity had to be proven by three so-called prongs. First prong: Would contemporary community standards say that the work as a whole had only prurient interest? Second prong: Did the work show sexual acts in a patently offensive manner? Third prong: Did the work, taken as a whole, lack serious artistic value? I had worked on cases for pornographic movies like The Devil and Mrs. Jones talking about the first and third prong—the movie had a plot and it might be patently offensive but it was not morbidly preoccupied with sex.

A big challenge was to make sure the jury understood the context of the photographs. It was equally important that I would comfortably talk about sexual practices with a more clinical vocabulary, so the jury understood them in a legal context. But we were handicapped because the jury couldn’t see the actual exhibit photos; only the photos and video taken by the police of the exhibit were shown. (The exhibit had gone to Boston by the time of the trial.) So we got all of our expert witnesses to see it at the CAC so they could describe exactly what they saw, and explain the context and the presentation of the photos as art.

In discussing whether the photos had artistic merit, we geared the defense to the idea that art didn’t have to be pretty. It can be challenging. I can see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and leave depressed. But that’s not a problem with the performance—the artistic value doesn’t get determined by what you feel afterwards. For example, the importance for the world of images of the Holocaust is huge. We don’t like those images, but they are vital to telling the story.

That was a winning argument. The jury deliberated for two hours and acquitted Dennis Berrie and the CAC.

The trial created an important history of a jury validating this approach to art. It sent a message that artists and museums can tell us things that we often don’t or can’t talk about easily. The way times and norms change was part of the exhibit. You could see how Mapplethorpe evolved from seeking attention and photographing himself toward the more interior still lives and portraits. Art really reflects the period of time it’s made in. We don’t come to grips with what happened in that time until 20 to 30 years later. It’s good to see that Mapplethorpe’s work today is being recognized as the artistic accomplishment—and advancement—that it really is.

In retrospect we made another smart decision: The prosecutor had offered to drop charges on the five photos if Dennis would plead guilty to two misdemeanors of showing nude children. We said no. Looking back, the repercussions of taking a plea deal for disseminating photos of a minor in a state of nudity could have been a death blow for the CAC—and disastrous for Dennis. Now with all the consciousness over those labeled sexual offenders, such a crime would be a felony and could land him on a sexual offender registry.

For me, winning the case—in a trial that we made about art—was a great moment. The Mapplethorpe exhibit divided the city, and the art world there split against itself. Everybody was afraid. The CAC withdrew from the local arts association so they wouldn’t tarnish the symphony. By winning the case on grounds that this was art, that it was important for humanity, the CAC’s reputation was bolstered. In the years since then it’s raised money for a beautiful new building and a collection.

But that case (and others from that time) has also scared museums and artists who don’t have the resources to fight. There’s a lot of self-censorship by museums, which are especially leery of showing work with children. The repercussions of offering work that could be labeled “dirty” remain serious. Museums’ ability to show what they think is important is still somewhat dependent upon who is running the Justice Department.

Artists who are considered on the edge are still targets. I recently defended a young photographer who was doing a series on birth and death. He got permission to take photos at the morgue, but foolishly sent them out for developing. He was reported to the police and prosecuted for abuse of a corpse. At the end of the trial the prosecutor kicked the box of photographs and told the jury, “Mr. Sirkin’s defense of art is bullshit. Art is only what we’d take home and hang on the wall.”

The artist spent 12 months in prison.

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