Part 5 : Underground ... Page 1 The New York Times ...Judgment Day

Underground

By Suelette Dreyfus with 

 Research by Julian Assange

Chapter 6  

Page 1 The New York Times  

Read about it Just another incredible scene There’s no doubt about it 

 -- from ‘Read About It’, on 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 by Midnight Oil 

Pad had an important warning for the Australian hackers: the computer security community was closing in on them. It was the end of February 1990, not long after Phoenix and Electron had captured Zardoz and just missed out on Deszip. Pad didn’t scream or shout the warning, that wasn’t his style. But Electron took in the import of the warning loud and clear.

‘Feen, they know you did over Spaf’s machine,’ Pad told Phoenix. ‘They know it’s been you in other systems also. They’ve got your handle.’

Eugene Spafford was the kind of computer security expert who loses a lot of face when a hacker gets into his machine, and a wounded bull is a dangerous enemy.

The security people had been able to connect and link up a series of break-ins with the hacker who called himself Phoenix because his style was so distinctive. For example, whenever he was creating a root shell--root access--for himself, he would always save it in the same filename and in the same location on the computer. In some instances, he even created accounts called ‘Phoenix’ for himself. It was this consistency of style which had made things so much easier for admins to trace his movements.

In his typical understated fashion, Pad suggested a change of style. And maybe, he added, it wasn’t such a bad idea for the Australians to tone down their activities a bit. The undercurrent of the message was serious.

‘They said that some security people had contacted Australian law enforcement, who were supposed to be "dealing with it",’ Pad said.

‘Do they know my real name?’ Phoenix asked, worried. Electron was also watching this conversation with some concern.

‘Don’t know. Got it from Shatter. He’s not always reliable, but ...’

Pad was trying to soften the news by playing down Shatter’s importance as a source. He didn’t trust his fellow British hacker but Shatter had some good, if mysterious, connections. An enigmatic figure who seemed to keep one foot in the computer underworld and the other in the upright computer security industry, Shatter leaked information to Pad and Gandalf, and occasionally to the Australians.

While the two British hackers sometimes discounted Shatter’s advice, they also took the time to talk to him. Once, Electron had intercepted email showing Pengo had turned to Shatter for advice about his situation after the raid in Germany. With some spare time prior to his trial, Pengo asked Shatter whether it was safe to travel to the US on a summer holiday in 1989. Shatter asked for Pengo’s birthdate and other details. Then he returned with an unequivocal answer: Under no circumstances was Pengo to travel to the US.

Subsequently, it was reported that officials in the US Justice Department had been examining ways to secretly coax Pengo onto American soil, where they could seize him. They would then force him to face trial in their own courts.

Had Shatter known this? Or had he just told Pengo not to go to the US because it was good commonsense? No-one was quite sure, but people took note of what Shatter told them.

‘Shatter definitely got the info right about Spaf’s machine. 100% right,’ Pad continued. ‘He knew exactly how you hacked it. I couldn’t believe it. Be careful if you’re still hacking m8, especially on the Inet.’ The ‘Inet’ was shorthand for the Internet.

The Altos hackers went quiet.

‘It’s not just you,’ Pad tried to reassure the Australians. ‘Two security people from the US are coming to the UK to try and find out something about someone named Gandalf. Oh, and Gand’s mate, who might be called Patrick.’

Pad had indeed based his handle on the name Patrick, or Paddy, but that wasn’t his real name. No intelligent hacker would use his real name for his handle. Paddy was the name of one of his favourite university lecturers, an Irishman who laughed a good deal. Like Par’s name, Pad’s handle had coincidentally echoed a second meaning when the British hacker moved into exploring X.25 networks. An X.25 PAD is a packet assembler disassembler, the interface between the X.25 network and a modem or terminal server. Similarly, Gandalf, while being first and foremost the wizard from The Lord of The Rings, also happened to be a terminal server brand name.

Despite the gravity of the news that the security community was closing the net around them, none of the hackers lost their wicked sense of humour.

‘You know,’ Pad went on, ‘Spaf was out of the country when his machine got hacked.’

‘Was he? Where?’ asked Gandalf, who had just joined the conversation.

‘In Europe.’

Electron couldn’t resist. ‘Where was Spaf, Gandalf asks as he hears a knock on his door ...’

‘Haha,’ Gandalf laughed. 

‘<knock> <knock> ’ Electron went on, hamming it up. 

‘Oh! Hello there, Mr Spafford,’ Gandalf typed, playing along.

‘Hello, I’m Gene and I’m mean!’

Alone in their separate homes on different corners of the globe, the four hackers chuckled to themselves.

‘Hello, and is this the man called Patrick?’ Pad jumped in.

‘Well, Mr Spafford, it seems you’re a right fucking idiot for not patching your FTP!’ Gandalf proclaimed.

‘Not to mention the CHFN bug--saved by a Sequent! Or you’d be very fucking embarrassed,’ Phoenix added.

Phoenix was laughing too, but he was a little nervous about Pad’s warning and he turned the conversation back to a serious note.

‘So, Pad, what else did Shatter tell you?’ Phoenix asked anxiously.

‘Not much. Except that some of the security investigations might be partly because of UCB.’

UCB was the University of California at Berkeley. Phoenix had been visiting machines at both Berkeley and LLNL so much recently that the admins seemed to have not only noticed him, but they had pinpointed his handle. One day he had telnetted into dewey.soe.berkeley.edu--the Dewey machine as it was known--and had been startled to find the following message of the day staring him in the face:

Phoenix,

Get out of Dewey NOW!

Also, do not use any of the ‘soe’ machines.

Thank you,

Daniel Berger

Phoenix did a double take when he saw this public warning. Having been in and out of the system so many times, he just zoomed past the words on the login screen. Then, in a delayed reaction, he realised the login message was addressed to him.

Ignoring the warning, he proceeded to get root on the Berkeley machine and look through Berger’s files. Then he sat back, thinking about the best way to deal with the problem. Finally, he decided to send the admin a note saying he was leaving the system for good.

Within days, Phoenix was back in the Dewey machine, weaving in and out of it as if nothing had happened. After all, he had broken into the system, and managed to get root through his own wit. He had earned the right to be in the computer. He might send the admin a note to put him at ease, but Phoenix wasn’t going to give up accessing Berkeley’s computers just because it upset Daniel Berger. 

‘See,’ Pad continued, ‘I think the UCB people kept stuff on their systems that wasn’t supposed to be there. Secret things.’

Classified military material wasn’t supposed to be stored on non-classified network computers. However, Pad guessed that sometimes researchers broke rules and took short cuts because they were busy thinking about their research and not the security implications.

‘Some of the stuff might have been illegal,’ Pad told his captive audience. ‘And then they find out some of you guys have been in there ...’

‘Shit,’ Phoenix said.

‘So, well, if it APPEARED like someone was inside trying to get at those secrets ...’ Pad paused. ‘Then you can guess what happened. It seems they really want to get whoever was inside their machines.’

There was momentary silence while the other hackers digested all that Pad had told them. As a personality on Altos, Pad remained ever so slightly withdrawn from the other hackers, even the Australians whom he considered mates. This reserved quality gave his warning a certain sobriety, which seeped into the very fabric of Altos that day.

Eventually, Electron responded to Pad’s warning by typing a comment directed at Phoenix: ‘I told you talking to security guys is nothing but trouble.’

It irritated Electron more and more that Phoenix felt compelled to talk to white hats in the security industry. In Electron’s view, drawing attention to yourself was just a bad idea all around and he was increasingly annoyed at watching Phoenix feed his ego. He had made veiled references to Phoenix’s bragging on Altos many times, saying things like ‘I wish people wouldn’t talk to security guys’.

Phoenix responded to Electron on-line somewhat piously. ‘Well, I will never talk to security guys seriously again.’

Electron had heard it all before. It was like listening to an alcoholic swear he would never touch another drink. Bidding the others goodbye, Electron logged off. He didn’t care to listen to Phoenix any more.

Others did, however. Hundreds of kilometres away, in a special room secreted away inside a bland building in Canberra, Sergeant Michael Costello and Constable William Apro had been methodically capturing each and every electronic boast as it poured from Phoenix’s phone. The two officers recorded the data transmissions passing in and out of his computer. They then played this recording into their own modem and computer and created a text file they could save and use as evidence in court.

Both police officers had travelled north from Melbourne, where they worked with the AFP’s Computer Crime Unit. Settling into their temporary desks with their PC and laptop, the officers began their secret eavesdropping work on 1 February 1990.

It was the first time the AFP had done a datatap. They were happy to bide their time, to methodically record Phoenix hacking into Berkeley, into Texas, into NASA, into a dozen computers around the world. The phone tap warrant was good for 60 days, which was more than enough time to secrete away a mountain of damning evidence against the egotistical Realm hacker. Time was on their side.

The officers worked the Operation Dabble job in shifts. Constable Apro arrived at the Telecommunications Intelligence Branch of the AFP at 8 p.m. Precisely ten hours later, at 6 the next morning, Sergeant Costello relieved Apro, who knocked off for a good sleep. Apro returned again at 8 p.m. to begin the night shift.

They were there all the time. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Waiting and listening.

It was too funny. Erik Bloodaxe in Austin, Texas, couldn’t stop laughing. In Melbourne, Phoenix’s side hurt from laughing so much.

Phoenix loved to talk on the phone. He often called Erik, sometimes every day, and they spoke for ages. Phoenix didn’t worry about cost; he wasn’t paying for it. The call would appear on some poor sod’s bill and he could sort it out with the phone company.

Sometimes Erik worried a little about whether Phoenix wasn’t going to get himself in a jam making all these international calls. Not that he didn’t like talking to the Australian; it was a hoot. Still, the concern sat there, unsettled, in the back of his mind. A few times he asked Phoenix about it.

‘No prob. Hey, AT&T isn’t an Australian company,’ Phoenix would say. ‘They can’t do anything to me.’ And Erik had let it rest at that.

For his part, Erik didn’t dare call Phoenix, especially not since his little visit from the US Secret Service. On 1 March 1990, they burst into his home, with guns drawn, in a dawn raid. The agents searched everywhere, tearing the student house apart, but they didn’t find anything incriminating. They did take Erik’s $59 keyboard terminal with its chintzy little 300 baud modem, but they didn’t get his main computer, because Erik knew they were coming.

The Secret Service had subpoenaed his academic records, and Erik had heard about it before the raid. So when the Secret Service arrived, Erik’s stuff just wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there for a few weeks, but for Erik, they had been hard weeks. The hacker found himself suffering withdrawal symptoms, so he bought the cheapest home computer and modem he could find to tide him over.

That equipment was the only computer gear the Secret Service discovered, and they were not happy special agents. But without evidence, their hands were tied. No charges were laid.

Still, Erik thought he was probably being watched. The last thing he wanted was for Phoenix’s number to appear on his home phone bill. So he let Phoenix call him, which the Australian did all the time. They often talked for hours when Erik was working nights. It was a slack job, just changing the back-up tapes on various computers and making sure they didn’t jam. Perfect for a student. It left Erik hours of free time.

Erik frequently reminded Phoenix that his phone was probably tapped, but Phoenix just laughed. ‘Yeah, well don’t worry about it, mate. What are they going to do? Come and get me?’

After Erik put a hold on his own hacking activities, he lived vicariously, listening to Phoenix’s exploits. The Australian called him with a technical problem or an interesting system, and then they discussed various strategies for getting into the machine. However, unlike Electron’s talks with Phoenix, conversations with Erik weren’t only about hacking. They chatted about life, about what Australia was like, about girls, about what was in the newspaper that day. It was easy to talk to Erik. He had a big ego, like most hackers, but it was inoffensive, largely couched in his self-effacing humour.

Phoenix often made Erik laugh. Like the time he got Clifford Stoll, an astronomer, who wrote The Cuckoo’s Egg. The book described his pursuit of a German hacker who had broken into the computer system Stoll managed at Lawrence Berkeley Labs near San Francisco. The hacker had been part of the same hacking ring as Pengo. Stoll took a hard line on hacking, a position which did not win him popularity in the underground. Both Phoenix and Erik had read Stoll’s book, and one day they were sitting around chatting about it.

‘You know, it’s really stupid that Cliffy put his email address in his book,’ Phoenix said. ‘Hmm, why don’t I go check?’

Sure enough, Phoenix called Erik back about a day later. ‘Well, I got root on Cliffy’s machine,’ he began slowly, then he burst out laughing. ‘And I changed the message of the day. Now it reads, "It looks like the Cuckoo’s got egg on his face"!’

It was uproariously funny. Stoll, the most famous hacker-catcher in the world, had been japed! It was the funniest thing Erik had heard in weeks.

But it was not nearly so amusing as what Erik told Phoenix later about the New York Times. The paper had published an article on 19 March suggesting a hacker had written some sort of virus or worm which was breaking into dozens of computers.

‘Listen to this,’ Erik had said, reading Phoenix the lead paragraph, ‘"A computer intruder has written a program that has entered dozens of computers in a nationwide network in recent weeks, automatically stealing electronic documents containing users’ passwords and erasing files to help conceal itself."’

Phoenix was falling off his chair he was laughing so hard. A program? Which was automatically doing this? No. It wasn’t an automated program, it was the Australians! It was the Realm hackers! God, this was funny.

‘Wait--there’s more! It says, "Another rogue program shows a widespread vulnerability". I laughed my ass off,’ Erik said, struggling to get the words out.

‘A rogue program! Who wrote the article?’

‘A John Markoff,’ Erik answered, wiping his eyes. ‘I called him up.’

‘You did? What did you say?’ Phoenix tried to gather himself together.

‘"John," I said, "You know that article you wrote on page 12 of the Times? It’s wrong! There’s no rogue program attacking the Internet." He goes, "What is it then?" "It’s not a virus or a worm," I said. "It’s PEOPLE."’

Erik started laughing uncontrollably again.

‘Then Markoff sounds really stunned, and he goes, "People?" And I said, "Yeah, people." Then he said, "How do you know?" And I said, "Because, John, I KNOW."’ 

Phoenix erupted in laughter again. The Times reporter obviously had worms on his mind, since the author of the famous Internet worm, Robert T. Morris Jr, had just been tried and convicted in the US. He was due to be sentenced in May.

US investigators had tracked the hacker’s connections, looping through site after site in a burrowing manner which they assumed belonged to a worm. The idea of penetrating so many sites all in such a short time clearly baffled the investigators, who concluded it must be a program rather than human beings launching the attacks.

‘Yeah,’ Erik continued, ‘And then Markoff said, "Can you get me to talk to them?" And I said I’d see what I could do.’ 

‘Yeah,’ Phoenix said. ‘Go tell him, yes. Yeah, I gotta talk to this idiot. I’ll set him straight.’

Page one, the New York Times, 21 March 1990: ‘Caller Says he Broke Computers’ Barriers to Taunt the Experts’, by John Markoff.

True, the article was below the crease--on the bottom half of the page--but at least it was in column 1, the place a reader turns to first.

Phoenix was chuffed. He’d made the front page of the New York Times.

‘The man identified himself only as an Australian named Dave,’ the article said. Phoenix chuckled softly. Dave Lissek was the pseudonym he’d used. Of course, he wasn’t the only one using the name Dave. When Erik first met the Australians on Altos, he marvelled at how they all called themselves Dave. I’m Dave, he’s Dave, we’re all Dave, they told him. It was just easier that way, they said.

The article revealed that ‘Dave’ had attacked Spaf’s and Stoll’s machines, and that the Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory at Harvard University--where Stoll now worked--had pulled its computers off the Internet as a result of the break in. Markoff had even included the ‘egg on his face’ story Phoenix had described to him.

Phoenix laughed at how well he had thumbed his nose at Cliff Stoll. This article would show him up all right. It felt so good, seeing himself in print that way. He did that. That was him there in black in white, for all the world to see. He had outsmarted the world’s best known hacker-catcher, and he had smeared the insult across the front page of the most prestigious newspaper in America.

And Markoff reported that he had been in Spaf’s system too! Phoenix glowed happily. Better still, Markoff had quoted ‘Dave’ on the subject: ‘The caller said ... "It used to be the security guys chasing the hackers. Now it’s the hackers chasing the security people."’

The article went on: ‘Among the institutions believed to have been penetrated by the intruder are the Los Alamos National Laboratories, Harvard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Boston University and the University of Texas.’ Yes, that list sounded about right. Well, for the Australians as a group anyway. Even if Phoenix hadn’t masterminded or even penetrated some of those himself, he was happy to take the credit in the Times.

This was a red-letter day for Phoenix.

Electron, however, was furious. How could Phoenix be so stupid? He knew that Phoenix had an ego, that he talked too much, and that his tendency to brag had grown worse over time, fed by the skyrocketing success of the Australian hackers. Electron knew all of that, but he still couldn’t quite believe that Phoenix had gone so far as to strut and preen like a show pony for the New York Times.

To think that he had associated with Phoenix. Electron was disgusted. He had never trusted Phoenix--a caution now proved wise. But he had spent hours with him on the phone, with most of the information flowing in one direction. But not only did Phoenix show no discretion at all in dealing with the paper, he bragged about doing things that Electron had done! If Phoenix had to talk--and clearly he should have kept his mouth shut--he should have at least been honest about the systems for which he could claim credit.

Electron had tried with Phoenix. Electron had suggested that he stop talking to the security guys. He had continually urged caution and discretion. He had even subtly withdrawn each time Phoenix suggested one of his hair-brained schemes to show off to a security bigwig. Electron had done this in the hope that Phoenix might get the hint. Maybe, if Phoenix couldn’t hear someone shouting advice at him, he might at least listen to someone whispering it. But no. Phoenix was far too thick for that.

The Internet--indeed, all hacking--was out of bounds for weeks, if not months. There was no chance the Australian authorities would let a front-page story in the Times go by un-heeded. The Americans would be all over them. In one selfish act of hubris, Phoenix had ruined the party for everyone else.

Electron unplugged his modem and took it to his father. During exams, he had often asked his father to hide it. He didn’t have the self-discipline needed to stay away on his own and there was no other way Electron could keep himself from jacking in--plugging his modem into the wall. His father had become an expert at hiding the device, but Electron usually still managed to find it after a few days, tearing the house apart until he emerged, triumphant, with the modem held high above his head. Even when his father began hiding the modem outside the family home it would only postpone the inevitable.

This time, however, Electron vowed he would stop hacking until the fallout had cleared--he had to. So he handed the modem to his father, with strict instructions, and then tried to distract himself by cleaning up his hard drive and disks. His hacking files had to go too. So much damning evidence of his activities. He deleted some files and took others on disks to store at a friend’s house. Deleting files caused Electron considerable pain, but there was no other way. Phoenix had backed him into a corner.

Brimming with excitement, Phoenix rang Electron on a sunny March afternoon.

‘Guess what?’ Phoenix was jumping around like an eager puppy at the other end of the line. ‘We made the nightly news right across the US!’

‘Uhuh,’ Electron responded, unimpressed.

‘This is not a joke!’ We were on cable news all day too. I called Erik and he told me.’

‘Mmm,’ Electron said.

‘You know, we did a lot of things right. Like Harvard. We got into every system at Harvard. It was a good move. Harvard gave us the fame we needed.’

Electron couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He didn’t need any fame--and he certainly didn’t need to be busted. The conversation--like Phoenix himself--was really beginning to annoy him.

‘Hey, and they know your name,’ Phoenix said coyly.

That got a reaction. Electron gulped his anger.

‘Haha! Just joshing!’ Phoenix practically shouted. ‘Don’t worry! They didn’t really mention anyone’s name.’

‘Good,’ Electron answered curtly. His irritation stewed quietly.

‘So, do you reckon we’ll make the cover of Time or Newsweek?’

Good grief! Didn’t Phoenix ever give up? As if it wasn’t enough to appear on the 6 o’clock national news in a country crawling with over-zealous law enforcement agencies. Or to make the New York Times. He had to have the weeklies too.

Phoenix was revelling in his own publicity. He felt like he was on top of the world, and he wanted to shout about it. Electron had felt the same wave of excitement from hacking many high-profile targets and matching wits with the best, but he was happy to stand on the peak by himself, or with people like Pad and Gandalf, and enjoy the view quietly. He was happy to know he had been the best on the frontier of a computer underground which was fresh, experimental and, most of all, international. He didn’t need to call up newspaper reporters or gloat about it in Clifford Stoll’s face. 

‘Well, what do you reckon?’ Phoenix asked impatiently.

‘No,’ Electron answered. 

‘No? You don’t think we will?’ Phoenix sounded disappointed.

‘No.’

‘Well, I’ll demand it!’ Phoenix said laughing, ‘Fuck it, we want the cover of Newsweek, nothing less.’ Then, more seriously, ‘I’m trying to work out what really big target would clinch it for us.’

‘Yeah, OK, whatever,’ Electron replied, distancing himself again.

But Electron was thinking, Phoenix, you are a fool. Didn’t he see the warning signs? Pad’s warning, all the busts in the US, reports that the Americans were hunting down the Brits. As a result of these news reports of which Phoenix was so proud, bosses across the world would be calling their computer managers into their offices and breathing down their necks about their own computer security.

The brazen hackers had deeply offended the computer security industry, spurring it into action. In the process, some in the industry had also seen an opportunity to raise its own public profile. The security experts had talked to the law enforcement agencies, who were now clearly sharing information across national borders and closing in fast. The conspirators in the global electronic village were at the point of maximum overreach.

‘We could hack Spaf again,’ Phoenix volunteered.

‘The general public couldn’t give a fuck about Eugene Spafford,’ Electron said, trying to dampen Phoenix’s bizarre enthusiasm. He was all for thumbing one’s nose at authority, but this was not the way to do it.

‘It’d be so funny in court, though. The lawyer would call Spaf and say, "So, Mr Spafford, is it true that you are a world-renowned computer security expert?" When he said, "Yes" I’d jump up and go, "I object, your honour, this guy doesn’t know jackshit, ’cause I hacked his machine and it was a breeze!"’

‘Mmm.’

‘Hey, if we don’t get busted in the next two weeks, it will be a miracle,’ Phoenix continued happily.

‘I hope not.’

‘This is a lot of fun!’ Phoenix shouted sarcastically. ‘We’re gonna get busted! We’re gonna get busted!’

Electron’s jaw fell to the ground. Phoenix was mad. Only a lunatic would behave this way. Mumbling something about how tired he was, Electron said goodbye and hung up.

At 5.50 a.m. on 2 April 1990, Electron dragged himself out of bed and made his way to the bathroom. Part way through his visit, the light suddenly went out.

How strange. Electron opened his eyes wide in the early morning dimness. He returned to his bedroom and began putting on some jeans before going to investigate the problem.

Suddenly, two men in street clothes yanked his window open and jumped through into the room shouting, ‘GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR!’

Who were these people? Half-naked, Electron stood in the middle of his room, stunned and immobile. He had suspected the police might pay him a visit, but didn’t they normally wear uniforms? Didn’t they announce themselves?

The two men grabbed Electron, threw him face down onto the floor and pulled his arms behind his back. They jammed handcuffs on his wrists--hard--cutting his skin. Then someone kicked him in the stomach.

‘Are there any firearms in the house?’ one of the men asked.

Electron couldn’t answer because he couldn’t breathe. The kick had winded him. He felt someone pull him up from the floor and prop him in a chair. Lights went on everywhere and he could see six or seven people moving around in the hallway. They must have come into the house another way. The ones in the hallway were all wearing bibs with three large letters emblazoned across the front: AFP.

As Electron slowly gathered his wits, he realised why the cops had asked about firearms. He had once joked to Phoenix on the phone about how he was practising with his dad’s .22 for when the feds came around. Obviously the feds had been tapping his phone.

While his father talked with one of the officers in the other room and read the warrant, Electron saw the police pack up his computer gear--worth some $3000--and carry it out of the house. The only thing they didn’t discover was the modem. His father had become so expert at hiding it that not even the Australian Federal Police could find it.

Several other officers began searching Electron’s bedroom, which was no small feat, given the state it was in. The floor was covered in a thick layer of junk. Half crumpled music band posters, lots of scribbled notes with passwords and NUAs, pens, T-shirts both clean and dirty, jeans, sneakers, accounting books, cassettes, magazines, the occasional dirty cup. By the time the police had sifted through it all the room was tidier than when they started.

As they moved into another room at the end of the raid, Electron bent down to pick up one of his posters which had fallen onto the floor. It was a Police Drug Identification Chart--a gift from a friend’s father--and there, smack dab in the middle, was a genuine AFP footprint. Now it was a collector’s item. Electron smiled to himself and carefully tucked the poster away.

When he went out to the living room, he saw a policemen holding a couple of shovels and he wanted to laugh again. Electron had also once told Phoenix that all his sensitive hacking disks were buried in the backyard. Now the police were going to dig it up in search of something which had been destroyed a few days before. It was too funny.

The police found little evidence of Electron’s hacking at his house, but that didn’t really matter. They already had almost everything they needed.

Later that morning, the police put the 20-year-old Electron into an unmarked car and drove him to the AFP’s imposing-looking headquarters at 383 Latrobe Street for questioning. 

In the afternoon, when Electron had a break from the endless questions, he walked out to the hallway. The boyish-faced Phoenix, aged eighteen, and fellow Realm member Nom, 21, were walking with police at the other end of the hall. They were too far apart to talk, but Electron smiled. Nom looked worried. Phoenix looked annoyed.

Electron was too intimidated to insist on having a lawyer. What was the point in asking for one anyway? It was clear the police had information they could only have obtained from tapping his phone. They also showed him logs taken from Melbourne University, which had been traced back to his phone. Electron figured the game was up, so he might as well tell them the whole story--or at least as much of it as he had told Phoenix on the phone.

Two officers conducted the interview. The lead interviewer was Detective Constable Glenn Proebstl, which seemed to be pronounced ‘probe stool’--an unfortunate name, Electron thought. Proebstl was accompanied by Constable Natasha Elliott, who occasionally added a few questions at the end of various interview topics but otherwise kept to herself. Although he had decided to answer their questions truthfully, Electron thought that neither of them knew much about computers and found himself struggling to understand what they were trying to ask.

Electron had to begin with the basics. He explained what the FINGER command was--how you could type ‘finger’ followed by a username, and then the computer would provide basic information about the user’s name and other details.

‘So, what is the methodology behind it ... finger ... then, it’s normally ... what is the normal command after that to try and get the password out?’ Constable Elliott finally completed her convoluted attempt at a question.

The only problem was that Electron had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Well, um, I mean there is none. I mean you don’t use finger like that ...’

‘Right. OK,’ Constable Elliott got down to business. ‘Well, have you ever used that system before?’

‘Uhm, which system?’ Electron had been explaining commands for so long he had forgotten if they were still talking about how he hacked the Lawrence Livermore computer or some other site.

‘The finger ... The finger system?’

Huh? Electron wasn’t quite sure how to answer that question. There was no such thing. Finger was a command, not a computer.

‘Uh, yes,’ he said.

The interview went the same way, jolting awkwardly through computer technology which he understood far better than either officer. Finally, at the end of a long day, Detective Constable Proebstl asked Electron:

‘In your own words, tell me what fascination you find with accessing computers overseas?’

‘Well, basically, it’s not for any kind of personal gain or anything,’ Electron said slowly. It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Not because he didn’t know the answer, but because it was a difficult answer to describe to someone who had never hacked a computer. ‘It’s just the kick of getting in to a system. I mean, once you are in, you very often get bored and even though you can still access the system, you may never call back.

‘Because once you’ve gotten in, it’s a challenge over and you don’t really care much about it,’ Electron continued, struggling. ‘It’s a hot challenge thing, trying to do things that other people are also trying to do but can’t.

‘So, I mean, I guess it is a sort of ego thing. It’s knowing that you can do stuff that other people cannot, and well, it is the challenge and the ego boost you get from doing something well ... where other people try and fail.’

A few more questions and the day-long interview finally finished. The police then took Electron to the Fitzroy police station. He guessed it was the nearest location with a JP they could find willing to process a bail application at that hour.

In front of the ugly brick building, Electron noticed a small group of people gathered on the footpath in the dusky light. As the police car pulled up, the group swung into a frenzy of activity, fidgeting in over-the-shoulder briefcases, pulling out notebooks and pens, scooping up big microphones with fuzzy shag covers, turning on TV camera lights.

Oh NO! Electron wasn’t prepared for this at all.

Flanked by police, Electron stepped out of the police car and blinked in the glare of photographers’ camera flashes and TV camera searchlights. The hacker tried to ignore them, walking as briskly as his captors would allow. Sound recordists and reporters tagged beside him, keeping pace, while the TV cameramen and photographers weaved in front of him. Finally he escaped into the safety of the watchhouse.

First there was paperwork, followed by the visit to the JP. While shuffling through his papers, the JP gave Electron a big speech about how defendants often claimed to have been beaten by the police. Sitting in the dingy meeting room, Electron felt somewhat confused by the purpose of this tangential commentary. However, the JP’s next question cleared things up: ‘Have you had any problems with your treatment by the police which you would like to record at this time?’

Electron thought about the brutal kick he had suffered while lying on his bedroom floor, then he looked up and found Detective Constable Proebstl staring him in the eye. A slight smile passed across the detective’s face.

‘No,’ Electron answered.

The JP proceeded to launch into another speech which Electron found even stranger. There was another defendant in the lock-up at the moment, a dangerous criminal who had a disease the JP knew about, and the JP could decide to lock Electron up with that criminal instead of granting him bail.

Was this meant to be helpful warning, or just the gratification of some kind of sadistic tendency? Electron was baffled but he didn’t have to consider the situation for long. The JP granted bail. Electron’s father came to the watchhouse, collected his son and signed the papers for a $1000 surety--to be paid if Electron skipped town. That night Electron watched as his name appeared on the late night news.

At home over the next few weeks, Electron struggled to come to terms with the fact that he would have to give up hacking forever. He still had his modem, but no computer. Even if he had a machine, he realised it was far too dangerous to even contemplate hacking again.

So he took up drugs instead.

###

Electron’s father waited until the very last days of his illness, in March 1991, before he went into hospital. He knew that once he went in, he would not be coming out again.

There was so much to do before that trip, so many things to organise. The house, the life insurance paperwork, the will, the funeral, the instructions for the family friend who promised to watch over both children when he was gone. And, of course, the children themselves.

He looked at his two children and worried. Despite their ages of 21 and 19, they were in many ways still very sheltered. He realised that Electron’s anti-establishment attitude and his sister’s emotional remoteness would remain unresolved difficulties at the time of his death. As the cancer progressed, Electron’s father tried to tell both children how much he cared for them. He might have been somewhat emotionally remote himself in the past, but with so little time left, he wanted to set the record straight.

On the issue of Electron’s problems with the police, however, Electron’s father maintained a hands-off approach. Electron had only talked to his father about his hacking exploits occasionally, usually when he had achieved what he considered to be a very noteworthy hack. His father’s view was always the same. Hacking is illegal, he told his son, and the police will probably eventually catch you. Then you will have to deal with the problem yourself. He didn’t lecture his son, or forbid Electron from hacking. On this issue he considered his son old enough to make his own choices and live with the consequences.

True to his word, Electron’s father had shown little sympathy for his son’s legal predicament after the police raid. He remained neutral on the subject, saying only, ‘I told you something like this would happen and now it is your responsibility’.

Electron’s hacking case progressed slowly over the year, as did his university accounting studies. In March 1991, he faced committal proceedings and had to decide whether to fight his committal.

He faced fifteen charges, most of which were for obtaining unauthorised access to computers in the US and Australia. A few were aggravated offences, for obtaining access to data of a commercial nature. On one count each, the DPP (the Office of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions) said he altered and erased data. Those two counts were the result of his inserting backdoors for himself, not because he did damage to any files. The evidence was reasonably strong: telephone intercepts and data taps on Phoenix’s phone which showed him talking to Electron about hacking; logs of Electron’s own sessions in Melbourne University’s systems which were traced back to his home phone; and Electron’s own confession to the police.

This was the first major computer hacking case in Australia under the new legislation. It was a test case--the test case for computer hacking in Australia--and the DPP was going in hard. The case had generated seventeen volumes of evidence, totalling some 25000 pages, and Crown prosecutor Lisa West planned to call up to twenty expert witnesses from Australia, Europe and the US.

Those witnesses had some tales to tell about the Australian hackers, who had caused havoc in systems around the world. Phoenix had accidentally deleted a Texas-based company’s inventory of assets--the only copy in existence according to Execucom Systems Corporation. The hackers had also baffled security personnel at the US Naval Research Labs. They had bragged to the New York Times. And they forced NASA to cut off its computer network for 24 hours.

AFP Detective Sergeant Ken Day had flown halfway around the world to obtain a witness statement from none other than NASA Langley computer manager Sharon Beskenis--the admin Phoenix had accidentally kicked off her own system when he was trying to get Deszip. Beskenis had been more than happy to oblige and on 24 July 1990 she signed a statement in Virginia, witnessed by Day. Her statement said that, as a result of the hackers’ intrusion, ‘the entire NASA computer system was disconnected from any external communications with the rest of the world’ for about 24 hours on 22 February 1990.

In short, Electron thought, there didn’t seem to be much chance of winning at the committal hearing. Nom seemed to feel the same way. He faced two counts, both ‘knowingly concerned’ with Phoenix obtaining unauthorised access. One was for NASA Langley, the other for CSIRO--the Zardoz file. Nom didn’t fight his committal either, although Legal Aid’s refusal to fund a lawyer for the procedure no doubt weighed in his decision.

On 6 March 1991, Magistrate Robert Langton committed Electron and Nom to stand trial in the Victorian County Court.

Phoenix, however, didn’t agree with his fellow hackers’ point of view. With financial help from his family, he had decided to fight his committal. He wasn’t going to hand this case to the prosecution on a silver platter, and they would have to fight him every step of the way, dragging him forward from proceeding to proceeding. His barrister, Felicity Hampel, argued the court should throw out 47 of the 48 charges against her client on jurisdictional grounds. All but one charge--breaking into the CSIRO machine in order to steal Zardoz--related to hacking activities outside Australia. How could an Australian court claim jurisdiction over a hacked computer in Texas?

Privately, Phoenix worried more about being extradited to the US than dealing with the Australian courts, but publicly he was going into the committal with all guns blazing. It was a test case in many ways; not only the first major hacking case in Australia but also the first time a hacker had fought Australian committal proceedings for computer crimes.

The prosecution agreed to drop one of the 48 counts, noting it was a duplicate charge, but the backdown was a pyrrhic victory for Phoenix. After a two-day committal hearing, Magistrate John Wilkinson decided Hampel’s jurisdictional argument didn’t hold water and on 14 August 1991 he committed Phoenix to stand trial in the County Court.

By the day of Electron’s committal, in March, Electron’s father had begun his final decline. The bowel cancer created a roller-coaster of good and bad days, but soon there were only bad days, and they were getting worse. On the last day of March, the doctors told him that it was finally time to make the trip to hospital. He stubbornly refused to go, fighting their advice, questioning their authority. They quietly urged him again. He protested. Finally, they insisted. 

Electron and his sister stayed with their father for hours that day, and the following one. Their father had other visitors to keep his spirits up, including his brother who fervently beseech him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal saviour before he died. That way, he wouldn’t burn in hell. Electron looked at his uncle, disbelieving. He couldn’t believe his father was having to put up with such crap on his deathbed. Still, Electron chose to be discreet. Apart from an occasional rolling of the eyes, he kept his peace at his father’s bedside. 

Perhaps, however, the fervent words did some good, for as Electron’s father spoke about the funeral arrangements, he made a strange slip of the tongue. He said ‘wedding’ instead of funeral, then paused, realising his mistake. Glancing slowly down at the intricate braided silver wedding band still on his finger, he smiled frailly and said, ‘I suppose, in a way, it will be like a wedding’.

Electron and his sister went to hospital every day for four days, to sit by their father’s bed.

At 6 a.m. on the fifth day, the telephone rang. It was the family friend their father had asked to watch over them. Their father’s life signs were very, very weak, fluttering on the edge of death.

When Electron and his sister arrived at the hospital, the nurse’s face said everything. They were too late. Their father had died ten minutes before they arrived. Electron broke down and wept. He hugged his sister, who, for a brief moment, seemed almost reachable. Driving them back to the house, the family friend stopped and bought them an answering machine.

‘You’ll need this when everyone starts calling in,’ she told them. ‘You might not want to talk to anyone for a while.’

In the months after his bust in 1990 Electron began smoking marijuana regularly. At first, as with many other university students, it was a social thing. Some friends dropped by, they happened to have a few joints, and so everybody went out for a night on the town. When he was in serious hacking mode, he never smoked. A clear head was much too important. Besides, the high he got from hacking was a hundred times better than anything dope could ever do for him.

When Phoenix appeared on the front page of the New York Times, Electron gave up hacking. And even if he had been tempted to return to it, he didn’t have anything to hack with after the police took his only computer. Electron found himself casting around for something to distract him from his father’s deteriorating condition and the void left by giving up hacking. His accounting studies didn’t quite fit the bill. They had always seemed empty, but never more so than now.

Smoking pot filled the void. So did tripping. Filled it very nicely. Besides, he told himself, it’s harder to get caught smoking dope in your friends’ houses than hacking in your own. The habit grew gradually. Soon, he was smoking dope at home. New friends began coming around, and they seemed to have drugs with them all the time--not just occasionally, and not just for fun.

Electron and his sister had been left the family home and enough money to give them a modest income. Electron began spending this money on his new-found hobby. A couple of Electron’s new friends moved into the house for a few months. His sister didn’t like them dealing drugs out of the place, but Electron didn’t care what was happening around him. He just sat in his room, listening to his stereo, smoking dope, dropping acid and watching the walls.

The headphones blocked out everyone in the house, and, more importantly, what was going on inside Electron’s own head. Billy Bragg. Faith No More. Cosmic Psychos. Celibate Rifles. Jane’s Addiction. The Sex Pistols. The Ramones. Music gave Electron a pinpoint, a figurative dot of light on his forehead where he could focus his mind. Blot out the increasingly strange thoughts creeping through his consciousness.

His father was alive. He was sure of it. He knew it, like he knew the sun would rise tomorrow. Yet he had seen his father lying, dead, in the hospital bed. It didn’t make sense. 

So he took another hit from the bong, floated in slow motion to his bed, lay down, carefully slid the earphones over his head, closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on what the Red Hot Chilli Peppers were saying instead. When that wasn’t enough, he ventured down the hallway, down to his new friends--the friends with the acid tabs. Then, eight more hours without having to worry about the strange thoughts.

Soon people began acting strangely too. They would tell Electron things, but he had trouble understanding them. Pulling a milk carton from the fridge and sniffing it, Electron’s sister might say, ‘Milk’s gone off’. But Electron wasn’t sure what she meant. He would look at her warily. Maybe she was trying to tell him something else, about spiders. Milking spiders for venom.

When thoughts like these wafted through Electron’s mind, they disturbed him, lingering like a sour smell. So he floated back to the safety of his room and listened to songs by Henry Rollins. 

After several months in this cloudy state of limbo, Electron awoke one day to find the Crisis Assessment Team--a mobile psychiatric team--in his bedroom. They asked him questions, then they tried to feed him little blue tablets. Electron didn’t want to take the tablets. Were little blue pills placebos? He was sure they were. Or maybe they were something more sinister.

Finally, the CAT workers convinced Electron to take the Stelazine tablet. But when they left, terrifying things began to happen. Electron’s eyes rolled uncontrollably to the back of his head. His head twisted to the left. His mouth dropped open, very wide. Try as he might, he couldn’t shut it, any more than he could turn his head straight. Electron saw himself in the mirror and he panicked. He looked like a character out of a horror picture.

His new house-mates reacted to this strange new behaviour by trying to psychoanalyse Electron, which was less than helpful. They discussed him as if he wasn’t even present. He felt like a ghost and, agitated and confused, he began telling his friends that he was going to kill himself. Someone called the CAT team again. This time they refused to leave unless he would guarantee not to attempt suicide. 

Electron refused. So they had him committed.

Inside the locked psychiatric ward of Plenty Hospital (now known as NEMPS), Electron believed that, although he had gone crazy, he wasn’t really in a hospital psychiatric ward. The place was just supposed to look like one. His father had set it all up.

Electron refused to believe anything that anyone told him. It was all lies. They said one thing, but always meant another. 

He had proof. Electron read a list of patients’ names on the wall and found one called Tanas. That name had a special meaning. It was an anagram for the word ‘Santa’. But Santa Claus was a myth, so the name Tanas appearing on the hospital list proved to him that he shouldn’t listen to anything anyone told him.

Electron ate his meals mostly in silence, trying to ignore the voluntary and involuntary patients who shared the dining hall. One lunchtime, a stranger sat down at Electron’s table and started talking to him. Electron found it excruciatingly painful talking to other people, and he kept wishing the stranger would go away.

The stranger talked about how good the drugs were in hospital.

‘Mm,’ Electron said. ‘I used to do a lot of drugs.’

‘How much is a lot?’

‘I spent $28000 on dope alone in about four months.’

‘Wow,’ the stranger said, impressed. ‘Of course, you don’t have to pay for drugs. You can always get them for free. I do.’

‘You do?’ Electron asked, somewhat perplexed.

‘Sure! All the time,’ the stranger said grandly. ‘No problem. Just watch.’

The stranger calmly put his fork down on the tray, carefully stood up and then began yelling at the top of his lungs. He waved his arms around frantically and shouted abuse at the other patients.

Two nurses came running from the observation room. One of them tried to calm the stranger down while the other quickly measured out various pills and grabbed a cup of water. The stranger swallowed the pills, chased them with a swig of water and sat down quietly. The nurses retreated, glancing back over their shoulders.

‘See?’ The stranger said. ‘Well, I’d better be on my way, before the pills kick in. See ya.’

Electron watched, amazed, as the stranger picked up his bag, walked through the dining-hall door, and straight out the front door of the psychiatric ward.

After a month, the psychiatrists reluctantly allowed Electron to leave the hospital in order to stay with his maternal grandmother in Queensland. He was required to see a psychiatrist regularly. He spent his first few days in Queensland believing he was Jesus Christ. But he didn’t hold onto that one for long. After two weeks of patiently waiting and checking for signs of the imminent apocalypse, consistent with the second coming, he decided he was really the reincarnation of Buddha.

In late February 1992, after three months of psychiatric care up north, Electron returned to Melbourne and his university studies, with a bag full of medication. Prozac, major tranquilisers, Lithium. The daily routine went smoothly for a while. Six Prozac--two in the morning, two at midday and two at night. Another anti-depressant to be taken at night. Also at night, the anti-side effect tablets to combat the involuntary eye-rolling, jaw-dropping and neck-twisting associated with the anti-depressants.

All of it was designed to help him deal with what had by now become a long list of diagnoses. Cannabis psychosis. Schizophrenia. Manic depression. Unipolar effective disorder. Schizophreniform. Amphetamine psychosis. Major effective disorder. Atypical psychosis. And his own personal favourite--factitious disorder, or faking it to get into hospital. But the medication wasn’t helping much. Electron still felt wretched, and returning to a host of problems in Melbourne made things worse.

Because of his illness, Electron had been largely out of the loop of legal proceedings. Sunny Queensland provided a welcome escape. Now he was back in Victoria facing a tedious university course in accounting, an ongoing battle with mental illness, federal charges which could see him locked up for ten years, and publicity surrounding the first major hacking case in Australia. It was going to be a hard winter.

To make matters worse, Electron’s medication interfered with his ability to study properly. The anti-side effect pills relaxed the muscles in his eyes, preventing them from focusing. The writing on the blackboard at the front of the lecture hall was nothing but a hazy blur. Taking notes was also a problem. The medication made his hands tremble, so he couldn’t write properly. By the end of a lecture, Electron’s notes were as unreadable as the blackboard. Frustrated, Electron stopped taking his medicine, started smoking dope again and soon felt a little better. When the dope wasn’t enough, he turned to magic mushrooms and hallucinogenic cactus.

The hacking case was dragging on and on. On 6 December 1991, just after he left psych hospital but before he flew to Queensland, the office of the DPP had formally filed an indictment containing fifteen charges against Electron, and three against Nom, in the Victorian County Court.

Electron didn’t talk to Phoenix much any more, but the DPP lawyers hadn’t forgotten about him--far from it. They had much bigger plans for Phoenix, perhaps because he was fighting every step of the way. Phoenix was uncooperative with police in the interview on the day of the raid, frequently refusing to answer their questions. When they asked to fingerprint him, he refused and argued with them about it. This behaviour did not endear him to either the police or the DPP.

On 5 May 1992, the DPP filed a final indictment with 40 charges against Phoenix in the County Court. The charges, in conjunction with those against Electron and Nom, formed part of a joint indictment totalling 58 counts.

Electron worried about being sent to prison. Around the world, hackers were under siege--Par, Pengo, LOD and Erik Bloodaxe, MOD, The Realm hackers, Pad and Gandalf and, most recently, the International Subversives. Somebody seemed to be trying to make a point. Furthermore, Electron’s charges had changed considerably--for the worse--from the original ones documented in April 1990.

The DPP’s final indictment bore little resemblance to the original charge sheet handed to the young hacker when he left the police station the day he was raided. The final indictment read like a veritable Who’s Who of prestigious institutions around the world. Lawrence Livermore Labs, California. Two different computers at the US Naval Research Laboratories, Washington DC. Rutgers University, New Jersey. Tampere University of Technology, Finland. The University of Illinois. Three different computers at the University of Melbourne. Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. The University of New York. NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia. CSIRO, Carlton, Victoria.

The charges which worried Electron most related to the US Naval Research Labs, CSIRO, Lawrence Livermore Labs and NASA. The last three weren’t full hacking charges. The DPP alleged Electron had been ‘knowingly concerned’ with Phoenix’s access of these sites.

Electron looked at the thirteen-page joint indictment and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He had been a lot more than ‘knowingly concerned’ with accessing those sites. In many cases, he had given Phoenix access to those computers in the first place. But Electron tried to tread quietly, carefully, through most systems, while Phoenix had noisily stomped around with all the grace of a buffalo--and left just as many footprints. Electron hardly wanted to face full charges for those or any other sites. He had broken into thousands of sites on the X.25 network, but he hadn’t been charged with any of them. He couldn’t help feeling a little like the gangster Al Capone being done for tax evasion.

The proceedings were attracting considerable media attention. Electron suspected the AFP or the DPP were alerting the media to upcoming court appearances, perhaps in part to prove to the Americans that ‘something was being done’.

This case had American pressure written all over it. Electron’s barrister, Boris Kayser, said he suspected that ‘the Americans’--American institutions, companies or government agencies--were indirectly funding some of the prosecution’s case by offering to pay for US witnesses to attend the trial. The Americans wanted to see the Australian hackers go down, and they were throwing all their best resources at the case to make sure it happened.

There was one other thing--in some ways the most disturbing matter of all. In the course of the legal to-ing and fro-ing, Electron was told that it was the US Secret Service back in 1988 which had triggered the AFP investigation into The Realm hackers--an investigation which had led to Electron’s bust and current legal problems. The Secret Service was after the hackers who broke into Citibank.

As it happened, Electron had never touched Citibank. Credit cards couldn’t interest him less. He found banks boring and, the way he looked at it, their computers were full of mundane numbers belonging to the world of accounting. He had already suffered through enough of those tedious types of numbers in his university course. Unless he wanted to steal from banks--something he would not do--there was no point in breaking into their computers.

But the US Secret Service was very interested in banks--and in Phoenix. For they didn’t just believe that Phoenix had been inside Citibank’s computers. They believed he had masterminded the Citibank attack.

And why did the US Secret Service think that? Because, Electron was told, Phoenix had gone around bragging about it in the underground. He hadn’t just told people he had hacked into Citibank computers, he reportedly boasted that he had stolen some $50000 from the bank.

Going through his legal brief, Electron had discovered something which seemed to confirm what he was being told. The warrant for the telephone tap on both of Phoenix’s home phones mentioned a potential ‘serious loss to Citibank’ as a justification for the warrant. Strangely, the typed words had been crossed out in the handwritten scrawl of the judge who approved the warrant. But they were still legible. No wonder the US Secret Service began chasing the case, Electron thought. Banks get upset when they think people have found a way to rip them off anonymously.

Electron knew that Phoenix hadn’t stolen any money from Citibank. Rather, he had been circulating fantastic stories about himself to puff up his image in the underground, and in the process had managed to get them all busted.

In September 1992, Phoenix rang Electron suggesting they get together to discuss the case. Electron wondered why. Maybe he suspected something, sensing that the links binding them were weak, and becoming weaker by the month. That Electron’s mental illness had changed his perception of the world. That his increasingly remote attitude to Phoenix suggested an underlying anger about the continual bragging. Whatever the reason, Phoenix’s gnawing worry must have been confirmed when Electron put off meeting with him.

Electron didn’t want to meet with Phoenix because he didn’t like him, and because he thought Phoenix was largely responsible for getting the Australian hackers into their current predicament. 

With these thoughts fermenting in his mind, Electron listened with interest a few months later when his solicitor, John McLoughlin, proposed an idea. In legal circles, it was nothing new. But it was new to Electron. He resolved to take up McLoughlin’s advice.

Electron decided to testify as a Crown witness against Phoenix.

Chapter 7

Judgment Day 

Your dream world is just about to end 

 -- from ‘Dreamworld’, on Diesel and Dust by Midnight Oil

In another corner of the globe, the British hackers Pad and Gandalf learned with horror that the Australian authorities had busted the three Realm hackers. Electron had simply disappeared one day. A short time later, Phoenix was gone too. Then the reports started rolling in from newspapers and from other Australian hackers on a German board similar to Altos, called Lutzifer.

Something else worried Pad. In one of his hacking forays, he had discovered a file, apparently written by Eugene Spafford, which said he was concerned that some British hackers--read Pad and Gandalf--would create a new worm, based on the RTM worm, and release it into the Internet. The unnamed British hackers would then be able to cause maximum havoc on thousands of Internet sites.

It was true that Gandalf and Pad had captured copies of various worm source codes. They fished around inside SPAN until they surfaced with a copy of the Father Christmas worm. And, after finally successfully hacking Russell Brand’s machine at LLNL, they deftly lifted a complete copy of the WANK worm. In Brand’s machine, they also found a description of how someone had broken into SPAN looking for the WANK worm code, but hadn’t found it. ‘That was me breaking into SPAN to look around,’ Gandalf laughed, relaying the tale to Pad.

Despite their growing library of worm code, Pad had no intention of writing any such worm. They simply wanted the code to study what penetration methods the worms had used and perhaps to learn something new. The British hackers prided themselves on never having done anything destructive to systems they hacked. In places where they knew their activities had been discovered--such as at the Universities of Bath, Edinburgh, Oxford and Strathclyde--they wrote notes to the admins signed 8lgm. It wasn’t only an ego thing--it was also a way of telling the admins that they weren’t going to do anything nasty to the system.

At one university, the admins thought 8lgm was some kind of weird variation on a Belgian word and that the hackers who visited their systems night after night were from Belgium. At another uni, the admins made a different guess at the meaning. In the morning, when they came into work and saw that the hackers had been playing in their system all night, they would sigh to each other, ‘Our eight little green men are at it again’.

At the University of Lancaster, the hackers wrote a message to the admins which said: ‘Don’t do anything naughty. We have a good image around the world, so please don’t tarnish it or start making up stories about us messing up systems. Don’t hold your breath for us to hack you, but keep us in mind.’ Wherever they went, their message was the same.

Nonetheless Pad visualised a scenario where Spaf whipped up the computer security and law enforcement people into a frenzied panic and tried to pin all sorts of things on the British hackers, none of which they had done. The underground saw Spaf as being rabid in his attack on hackers, based largely on his response to the RTM worm. And Gandalf had hacked Spaf’s machine.

The crackdown on the Australians, combined with the discovery of the Spaf file, had a profound effect on Pad. Always cautious anyway, he decided to give up hacking. It was a difficult decision, and weaning himself from exploring systems night after night was no easy task. However, in the face of what had happened to Electron and Phoenix, continuing to hack didn’t seem worth the risk.

When Pad gave up hacking, he bought his own NUI so he could access places like Altos legitimately. The NUI was expensive--about [sterling]10 an hour--but he was never on for long. Leisurely chats of the type he once enjoyed in Altos were out of the question, but at least he could mail letters to his friends like Theorem and Gandalf. There would have been easier ways to maintain his friendship with Gandalf, who lived in Liverpool, only an hour’s drive away. But it wouldn’t be the same. Pad and Gandalf had never met, or even talked on the phone. They talked on-line, and via email. That was the way they related.

Pad also had other reasons for giving up hacking. It was an expensive habit in Britain because British Telecom time-charged for local phone calls. In Australia, a hacker could stay on-line for hours, jumping from one computer to another through the data network, all for the cost of one local call. Like the Australians, Pad could launch his hacking sessions from a local uni or X.25 dial-up. However, an all-night hacking session based on a single phone call might still cost him [sterling]5 or more in timed-call charges--a considerable amount of money for an unemployed young man. As it was, Pad had already been forced to stop hacking for brief periods when he ran out of his dole money. 

Although Pad didn’t think he could be prosecuted for hacking under British law in early 1990, he knew that Britain was about to enact its own computer crime legislation--the Computer Misuse Act 1990--in August. The 22-year-old hacker decided that it was better to quit while he was ahead.

And he did, for a while at least. Until July 1990, when Gandalf, two years his junior, tempted him with one final hack before the new Act came into force. Just one last fling, Gandalf told him. After that last fling in July, Pad stopped hacking again.

The Computer Misuse Act passed into law in August 1990, following two law commission reviews on the subject. The Scottish Law Commission issued a 1987 report proposing to make unauthorised data access illegal, but only if the hacker tried to ‘secure advantage, or cause damage to another person’--including reckless damage.2 Simple look-see hacking would not be a crime under the report’s recommendations. However, in 1989 The Law Commission of England and Wales issued its own report proposing that simple unauthorised access should be a crime regardless of intent--a recommendation which was eventually included in the law.

Late in 1989, Conservative MP Michael Colvin introduced a private member’s bill into the British parliament. Lending her support to the bill, outspoken hacker-critic Emma Nicholson, another Conservative MP, fired public debate on the subject and ensured the bill passed through parliament successfully.

In November 1990, Pad was talking on-line with Gandalf, and his friend suggested they have one more hack, just one more, for old time’s sake. Well, thought Pad, one more--just a one-off thing--wouldn’t hurt.

Before long, Pad was hacking regularly again, and when Gandalf tried to give it up, Pad was there luring him to return to his favourite pastime. They were like two boys at school, getting each other into trouble--the kind of trouble which always comes in pairs. If Pad and Gandalf hadn’t known each other, they probably would both have walked away from hacking forever in 1990.

As they both got back into the swing of things, they tried to make light of the risk of getting caught. ‘Hey, you know,’ Gandalf joked on-line more than once, ‘the first time we actually meet each other in person will probably be in a police station.’

Completely irreverent and always upbeat, Gandalf proved to be a true friend. Pad had rarely met such a fellow traveller in the real world, let alone on-line. What others--particularly some American hackers--viewed as prickliness, Pad saw as the perfect sense of humour. To Pad, Gandalf was the best m8 a fellow could ever have.

During the time Pad avoided hacking, Gandalf had befriended another, younger hacker named Wandii, also from the north of England. Wandii never played much of a part in the international computer underground, but he did spend a lot of time hacking European computers. Wandii and Pad got along pleasantly but they were never close. They were acquaintances, bound by ties to Gandalf in the underground.

By the middle of June 1991, Pad, Gandalf and Wandii were peaking. At least one of them--and often more--had already broken into systems belonging to the European Community in Luxembourg, The Financial Times (owners of the FTSE 100 share index), the British Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, NASA, the investment bank SG Warburg in London, the American computer database software manufacturer Oracle, and more machines on the JANET network than they could remember. Pad had also penetrated a classified military network containing a NATO system. They moved through British Telecom’s Packet Switched Stream Network (PSS), which was similar to the Tymnet X.25 network, with absolute ease.3

Gandalf’s motto was, ‘If it moves, hack it’.

On 27 June 1991, Pad was sitting in the front room of his parent’s comfortable home in greater Manchester watching the last remnants of daylight disappear on one of the longest days of the year. He loved summer, loved waking up to streaks of sunlight sneaking through the cracks in his bedroom curtain. He often thought to himself, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Around 11 p.m. he flicked on his modem and his Atari 520 ST computer in the front sitting room. There were two Atari computers in the house--indicative of his deep enthusiasm for computers since neither his siblings nor his parents had any interest in programming. Most of the time, however, Pad left the older Atari alone. His elder brother, an aspiring chemist, used it for writing his PhD thesis.

Before dialling out, Pad checked that no-one was on the house’s single phone line. Finding it free, he went to check his email on Lutzifer. A few minutes after watching his machine connect to the German board, he heard a soft thud, followed by a creaking. Pad stopped typing, looked up from his machine and listened. He wondered if his brother, reading in their bedroom upstairs, or his parents, watching telly in the back lounge room, could hear the creaking.

The sound became more pronounced and Pad swung around and looked toward the hallway. In a matter of seconds, the front door frame had been cracked open, prising the door away from its lock. The wood had been torn apart by some sort of car jack, pumped up until the door gave way.

Suddenly, a group of men burst through from the front doorstep, dashed down the long hallway and shot up the carpeted stairs to Pad’s bedroom.

Still sitting at his computer downstairs, Pad swiftly flicked his modem, and then his computer, off--instantly killing his connection and everything on his screen. He turned back toward the door leading to the sitting room and strained to hear what was happening upstairs. If he wasn’t so utterly surprised, he would almost have laughed. He realised that when the police had dashed up to his bedroom, they had been chasing every stereotype about hackers they had probably ever read. The boy. In his bedroom. Hunched over his computer. Late at night.

They did find a young man in the bedroom, with a computer. But it was the wrong one, and for all intents and purposes the wrong computer. It took the police almost ten minutes of quizzing Pad’s brother to work out their mistake.

Hearing a commotion, Pad’s parents had rushed into the hallway while Pad peered from the doorway of the front sitting room. A uniformed police officer ushered everyone back into the room, and began asking Pad questions.

‘Do you use computers? Do you use the name Pad on computers?’ they asked.

Pad concluded the game was up. He answered their questions truthfully. Hacking was not such a serious crime after all, he thought. It wasn’t as if he had stolen money or anything. This would be a drama, but he was easy-going. He would roll with the punches, cop a slap on the wrist and soon the whole thing would be over and done with.

The police took Pad to his bedroom and asked him questions as they searched the room. The bedroom had a comfortably lived-in look, with a few small piles of clothes in the corner, some shoes scattered across the floor, the curtains hanging crooked, and a collection of music posters--Jimi Hendrix and The Smiths--taped to the wall.

A group of police hovered around his computer. One of them began to search through Pad’s books on the shelves above the PC, checking each one as he pulled it down. A few well-loved Spike Milligan works. Some old chess books from when he was captain of the local chess team. Chemistry books, purchased by Pad long before he took any classes in the subject, just to satisfy his curiosity. Physics books. An oceanography textbook. A geology book bought after a visit to a cave excited his interest in the formation of rocks. Pad’s mother, a nursing sister, and his father, an electronics engineer who tested gyros on aircraft, had always encouraged their children’s interest in the sciences.

The policeman returned those books to the shelves, only picking out the computer books, textbooks from programming and maths classes Pad had taken at a Manchester university. The officer carefully slid them inside plastic bags to be taken away as evidence.

Then the police picked through Pad’s music tapes--The Stone Roses, Pixies, New Order, The Smiths and lots of indie music from the flourishing Manchester music scene. No evidence of anything but an eclectic taste in music there.

Another policeman opened Pad’s wardrobe and peered inside. ‘Anything in here of interest?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Pad answered. ‘It’s all over here.’ He pointed to the box of computer disks.

Pad didn’t think there was much point in the police tearing the place to pieces, when they would ultimately find everything they wanted anyway. Nothing was hidden. Unlike the Australian hackers, Pad hadn’t been expecting the police at all. Although part of the data on his hard drive was encrypted, there was plenty of incriminating evidence in the un-encrypted files.

Pad couldn’t hear exactly what his parents were talking about with the police in the other room, but he could tell they were calm. Why shouldn’t they be? It wasn’t as if their son had done anything terrible. He hadn’t beaten someone up in a fist fight at a pub, or robbed anyone. He hadn’t hit someone while drunk driving. No, they thought, he had just been fiddling around with computers. Maybe poking around where he shouldn’t have been, but that was hardly a serious crime. They needn’t worry. It wasn’t as if he was going to prison or anything. The police would sort it all out. Maybe some sort of citation, and the matter would be over and done. Pad’s mother even offered to make cups of tea for the police.

One of the police struck up a conversation with Pad off to the side as he paused to drink his tea. He seemed to know that Pad was on the dole, and with a completely straight face, he said, ‘If you wanted a job, why didn’t you just join the police?’

Pad paused for a reality check. Here he was being raided by nearly a dozen law enforcement officers--including representatives from BT and Scotland Yard’s computer crimes unit--for hacking hundreds of computers and this fellow wanted to know why he hadn’t just become a copper?

He tried not to laugh. Even if he hadn’t been busted, there is no way he would ever have contemplated joining the police. Never in a million years. His family and friends, while showing a pleasant veneer of middle-class orderliness, were fundamentally anti-establishment. Many knew that Pad had been hacking, and which sites he had penetrated. Their attitude was: Hacking Big Brother? Good on you.

His parents were torn, wanting to encourage Pad’s interest in computers but also worrying their son spent an inordinate amount of time glued to the screen. Their mixed feelings mirrored Pad’s own occasional concern.

While deep in the throes of endless hacking nights, he would suddenly sit upright and ask himself, What am I doing here, fucking around on a computer all day and night? Where is this heading? What about the rest of life? Then he would disentangle himself from hacking for a few days or weeks. He would go down to the university pub to drink with his mostly male group of friends from his course.

Tall, with short brown hair, a slender physique and a handsomely boyish face, the soft-spoken Pad would have been considered attractive by many intelligent girls. The problem was finding those sort of girls. He hadn’t met many when he was studying at university--there were few women in his maths and computer classes. So he and his friends used to head down to the Manchester nightclubs for the social scene and the good music.

Pad went downstairs with one of the officers and watched as the police unplugged his 1200 baud modem, then tucked it into a plastic bag. He had bought that modem when he was eighteen. The police unplugged cables, bundled them up and slipped them into labelled plastic bags. They gathered up his 20 megabyte hard drive and monitor. More plastic bags and labels.

One of the officers called Pad over to the front door. The jack was still wedged across the mutilated door frame. The police had broken down the door instead of knocking because they wanted to catch the hacker in the act--on-line. The officer motioned for Pad to follow him.

‘Come on,’ he said, leading the hacker into the night. ‘We’re taking you to the station.’

Pad spent the night in a cell at the Salford Crescent police station, alone. No rough crims, and no other hackers either.

He settled into one of the metal cots lined against the perimeter of the cell, but sleep evaded him. Pad wondered if Gandalf had been raided as well. There was no sign of him, but then again, the police would hardly be stupid enough to lock up the two hackers together. He tossed and turned, trying to push thoughts from his head.

Pad had fallen into hacking almost by accident. Compared to others in the underground, he had taken it up at a late age--around nineteen.

Altos had been the catalyst. Visiting BBSes, he read a file describing not only what Altos was, but how to get there--complete with NUI. Unlike the Australian underground, the embryonic British underground had no shortage of NUIs. Someone had discovered a stack of BT NUIs and posted them on BBSes across England.

Pad followed the directions in the BBS file and soon found himself in the German chat channel. Like Theorem, he marvelled at the brave new live world of Altos. It was wonderful, a big international party. After all, it wasn’t every day he got to talk with Australians, Swiss, Germans, Italians and Americans. Before long, he had taken up hacking like so many other Altos regulars.

Hacking as a concept had always intrigued him. As a teenager, the film War Games had dazzled him. The idea that computers could communicate with each over telephone lines enthralled the sixteen-year-old, filling his mind with new ideas. Sometime after that he saw a television report on a group of hackers who claimed that they had used their skills to move satellites around in space--the same story which had first caught Electron’s imagination.

Pad had grown up in Greater Manchester. More than a century before, the region had been a textile boom-town. But the thriving economy did not translate into great wealth for the masses. In the early 1840s, Friedrich Engels had worked in his father’s cotton-milling factory in the area, and the suffering he saw in the region influenced his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. 

Manchester wore the personality of a working-class town, a place where people often disliked the establishment and distrusted authority figures. The 1970s and 1980s had not been kind to most of Greater Manchester, with unemployment and urban decay disfiguring the once-proud textile hub. But this decay only appeared to strengthen an underlying resolve among many from the working classes to challenge the symbols of power.

Pad didn’t live in a public housing high-rise. He lived in a suburban middle-class area, in an old, working-class town removed from the dismal inner-city. But like many people from the north, he disliked pretensions. Indeed, he harboured a healthy degree of good-natured scepticism, perhaps stemming from a culture of mates whose favourite pastime was pulling each other’s leg down at the pub.

This scepticism was in full-gear as he watched the story of how hackers supposedly moved satellites around in space, but somehow the idea slipped through the checkpoints and captured his imagination, just as it had done with Electron. He felt a desire to find out for himself if it was true and he began pursuing hacking in enthusiastic bursts. At first it was any moderately interesting system. Then he moved to the big-name systems--computers belonging to large institutions. Eventually, working with the Australians, he learned to target computer security experts. That was, after all, where the treasure was stored.

In the morning at the police station, a guard gave Pad something to eat which might have passed for food. Then he was escorted into an interview room with two plain-clothed officers and a BT representative.

Did he want a lawyer? No. He had nothing to hide. Besides, the police had already seized evidence from his house, including unencrypted data logs of his hacking sessions. How could he argue against that? So he faced his stern inquisitors and answered their questions willingly.

Suddenly things began to take a different turn when they began asking about the ‘damage’ he had done inside the Greater London Polytechnic’s computers. Damage? What damage? Pad certainly hadn’t damaged anything.

Yes, the police told him. The damage totalling almost a quarter of a million pounds.

Pad gasped in horror. A quarter of a million pounds? He thought back to his many forays into the system. He had been a little mischievous, changing the welcome message to ‘Hi’ and signing it 8lgm. He had made a few accounts for himself so he could log in at a later date. That seemed to be nothing special, however, since he and Gandalf had a habit of making accounts called 8lgm for themselves in JANET systems. He had also erased logs of his activities to cover his tracks, but again, this was not unusual, and he had certainly never deleted any computer users’ files. The whole thing had just been a bit of fun, a bit of cat and mouse gaming with the system admins. There was nothing he could recall which would account for that kind of damage. Surely they had the wrong hacker?

No, he was the right one all right. Eighty investigators from BT, Scotland Yard and other places had been chasing the 8lgm hackers for two years. They had phone traces, logs seized from his computer and logs from the hacked sites. They knew it was him.

For the first time, the true gravity of the situation hit Pad. These people believed in some way that he had committed serious criminal damage, that he had even been malicious.

After about two hours of questioning, they put Pad back in his cell. More questions tomorrow, they told him.

Later that afternoon, an officer came in to tell Pad his mother and father were outside. He could meet with them in the visiting area. Talking through a glass barrier, Pad tried to reassure his worried parents. After five minutes, an officer told the family the visit was over. Amid hurried goodbyes under the impatient stare of the guard, Pad’s parents told him they had brought something for him to read in his cell. It was the oceanography textbook.

Back in his cell, he tried to read, but he couldn’t concentrate. He kept replaying his visits to the London Polytechnic over and over in his mind, searching for how he might have inadvertently done [sterling]250000 worth of damage. Pad was a very good hacker; it wasn’t as if he was some fourteen-year-old kid barging through systems like a bull in china shop. He knew how to get in and out of a system without hurting it.

Shortly after 8 p.m., as Pad sat on his cot stewing over the police damage claims, sombre music seemed to fill his cell. Slowly at first, an almost imperceptible moaning, which subtly transformed into solemn but recognisable notes. It sounded like Welsh choir music, and it was coming from above him.

Pad looked up at the ceiling. The music--all male voices-- stopped abruptly, then started again, repeating the same heavy, laboured notes. The hacker smiled. The local police choir was practising right above his cell.

After another fitful night, Pad faced one more round of interviews. The police did most of the questioning, but they didn’t seem to know much about computers--well, not nearly so much as any good hacker on Altos. Whenever either of the police asked a technical question, they looked over to the BT guy at the other end of the table as if to say, ‘Does this make any sense?’ The BT guy would give a slight nod, then the police looked back at Pad for an answer. Most of the time, he was able to decipher what they thought they were trying to ask, and he answered accordingly.

Then it was back to his cell while they processed his charge sheets. Alone again, Pad wondered once more if they had raided Gandalf. Like an answer from above, Pad heard telephone tones through the walls. The police seemed to be playing them over and over. That was when he knew they had Gandalf too.

Gandalf had rigged up a tone dialler in his computer. It sounded as if the police were playing with it, trying to figure it out.

So, Pad would finally meet Gandalf in person after two years. What would he look like? Would they have the same chemistry in person as on-line? Pad felt like he knew Gandalf, knew his essence, but meeting in person could be a bit tricky.

Explaining that the paperwork, including the charge sheets, had finally been organised, a police officer unlocked Pad’s cell door and led him to a foyer, telling him he would be meeting both Gandalf and Wandii. A large collection of police had formed a semi-circle around two other young men. In addition to Scotland Yard’s Computer Crimes Unit and BT, at least seven other police forces were involved in the three raids, including those from Greater Manchester, Merseyside and West Yorkshire. The officers were curious about the hackers.

For most of the two years of their investigation, the police didn’t even know the hackers’ real identities. After such a long, hard chase, the police had been forced to wait a little longer, since they wanted to nab each hacker while he was on-line. That meant hiding outside each hacker’s home until he logged in somewhere. Any system would do and they didn’t have to be talking to each other on-line--as long as the login was illegal. The police had sat patiently, and finally raided the hackers within hours of each other, so they didn’t have time to warn one another.

So, at the end of the long chase and a well-timed operation, the police wanted to have a look at the hackers up close.

After the officer walked Pad up to the group, he introduced Gandalf. Tall, lean with brown hair and pale skin, he looked a little bit like Pad. The two hackers smiled shyly at each other, before one of the police pointed out Wandii, the seventeen-year-old schoolboy. Pad didn’t get a good look at Wandii, because the police quickly lined the hackers up in a row, with Gandalf in the middle, to explain details to them. They were being charged under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990. Court dates would be set and they would be notified.

When they were finally allowed to leave, Wandii seemed to disappear. Pad and Gandalf walked outside, found a couple of benches and lay down, basking in the sun and chatting while they waited for their rides home.

Gandalf proved to be as easy to talk to in person as he was on-line. They exchanged phone numbers and shared notes on the police raids. Gandalf had insisted on meeting a lawyer before his interviews, but when the lawyer arrived he didn’t have the slightest understanding of computer crime. He advised Gandalf to tell the police whatever they wanted to know, so the hacker did.

The trial was being held in London. Pad wondered why, if all three hackers were from the north, the case was being tried in the south. After all, there was a court in Manchester which was high enough to deal with their crimes.

Maybe it was because Scotland Yard was in London. Maybe they had started the paperwork down there. Maybe it was because they were being accused of hacking computers located within the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court--that court being the Old Bailey in London. But Pad’s cynical side hazarded a different guess--a guess which seemed justified after a few procedural appearances in 1992 before the trial, which was set for 1993. For when Pad arrived at the Bow Street Magistrates Court for his committal in April 1992, he saw it packed out with the media, just as he had anticipated.

A few hackers also fronted up to fly the flag of the underground. One of them--a stranger--came up to Pad after court, patted him on the back and exclaimed enthusiastically, ‘Well done, Paddy!’ Startled, Pad just looked at him and then smiled. He had no idea how to respond to the stranger.

Like the three Australian hackers, Pad, Gandalf and the little-known Wandii were serving as the test case for new hacking laws in their country. British law enforcement agencies had spent a fortune on the case--more than [sterling]500000 according to the newspapers--by the time the 8lgm case went to trial. This was going to be a show case, and the government agencies wanted taxpayers to know they were getting their money’s worth.

The hackers weren’t being charged with breaking into computers. They were being charged with conspiracy, a more serious offence. While admitting the threesome did not hack for personal gain, the prosecution alleged the hackers had conspired to break into and modify computer systems. It was a strange approach to say the least, considering that none of the three hackers had ever met or even talked to the others before they were arrested.

It was not so strange, however, when looking at the potential penalties. If the hackers had been charged with simply breaking into a machine, without intending any harm, the maximum penalty was six months jail and a fine of up to [sterling]5000. However, conspiracy, which was covered under a different section of the Act, could bring up to five years in jail and an unlimited amount in fines.

The prosecution was taking a big gamble. It would be harder to prove conspiracy charges, which required demonstration of greater criminal intent than lesser charges. The potential pay-off was of course also much greater. If convicted, the defendants in Britain’s most important hacking case to date would be going to prison. 

As with The Realm case, two hackers--Pad and Gandalf--planned to plead guilty while the third--in this case Wandii--planned to fight the charges every step of the way. Legal Aid was footing the bill for their lawyers, because the hackers were either not working or were working in such lowly paid, short-term jobs they qualified for free legal support.

Wandii’s lawyers told the media that this showcase was tantamount to a state trial. It was the first major hacking case under the new legislation which didn’t involve disgruntled employees. While having no different legal status from a normal trial, the term state trial suggested a greater degree of official wrath--the kind usually reserved for cases of treason.

On 22 February 1993, within two months of Electron’s decision to turn Crown witness against Phoenix and Nom, the three 8lgm hackers stood in the dock at Southwark Crown Court in South London to enter pleas in their own case.

In the dim winter light, Southwark couldn’t look less appealing, but that didn’t deter the crowds. The courtroom was going to be packed, just as Bow Street had been. Scotland Yard detectives were turning out in force. The crowd shuffled toward Room 12.

The prosecution told the media they had about 800 computer disks full of evidence and court materials. If all the data had been printed out on A4 paper, the stack would tower more than 40 metres in the air, they said. Considering the massive amount of evidence being heaved, rolled and tugged through the building by teams of legal eagles, the choice of location--on the fifth floor--proved to be a challenge.

Standing in the dock next to Wandii, Pad and Gandalf pleaded guilty to two computer conspiracy charges: conspiring to dishonestly obtain telecommunications services, and conspiring to cause unauthorised modification to computer material. Pad also pleaded guilty to a third charge: causing damage to a computer. This last charge related to the almost a quarter of a million pounds worth of ‘damage’ to the Central London Polytechnic. Unlike the Australians’ case, none of the British hackers faced charges about specific sites such as NASA.

Pad and Gandalf pleaded guilty because they didn’t think they had much choice. Their lawyers told them that, in light of the evidence, denying their guilt was simply not a realistic option. Better to throw yourself on the mercy of the court, they advised. As if to underline the point, Gandalf’s lawyer had told him after a meeting at the end of 1992, ‘I’d like to wish you a happy Christmas, but I don’t think it’s going to be one’.

Wandii’s lawyers disagreed. Standing beside his fellow hackers, Wandii pleaded not guilty to three conspiracy charges: plotting to gain unauthorised access to computers, conspiring to make unauthorised modifications to computer material, and conspiring to obtain telecommunications services dishonestly. His defence team was going to argue that he was addicted to computer hacking and that, as a result of this addiction, he was not able to form the criminal intent necessary to be convicted.

Pad thought Wandii’s case was on shaky ground. Addiction didn’t seem a plausible defence to him, and he noticed Wandii looked very nervous in court just after his plea.

Pad and Gandalf left London after their court appearance, returning to the north to prepare for their sentencing hearings, and to watch the progress of Wandii’s case through the eyes of the media.

They weren’t disappointed. It was a star-studded show. The media revved itself up for a feeding frenzy and the prosecution team, headed by James Richardson, knew how to feed the pack. He zeroed in on Wandii, telling the court how the schoolboy ‘was tapping into offices at the EC in Luxembourg and even the experts were worried. He caused havoc at universities all around the world’.4 To do this, Wandii had used a simple BBC Micro computer, a Christmas present costing [sterling]200.

The hacking didn’t stop at European Community’s computer, Richardson told the eager crowd of journalists. Wandii had hacked Lloyd’s, The Financial Times and Leeds University. At The Financial Times machine, Wandii’s adventures had upset the smooth operations of the FTSE 100 share index, known in the City as ‘footsie’. The hacker installed a scanning program in the FT’s network, resulting in one outgoing call made every second. The upshot of Wandii’s intrusion: a [sterling]704 bill, the deletion of an important file and a management decision to shut down a key system. With the precision of a banker, FT computer boss Tony Johnson told the court that the whole incident had cost his organisation [sterling]24871.

But the FT hack paled next to the prosecution’s real trump card: The European Organisation for the Research and Treatment of Cancer in Brussels. They had been left with a [sterling]10000 phone bill as a result of a scanner Wandii left on its machine,5 the court was told. The scanner had left a trail of 50000 calls, all documented on a 980-page phone bill.

The scanner resulted in the system going down for a day, EORTC information systems project manager Vincent Piedboeuf, told the jury. He went on to explain that the centre needed its system to run 24 hours a day, so surgeons could register patients. The centre’s database was the focal point for pharmaceutical companies, doctors and research centres--all coordinating their efforts in fighting the disease.

For the media, the case was headline heaven. ‘Teenage computer hacker "caused worldwide chaos"’ the Daily Telegraph screamed across page one. On page three, the Daily Mail jumped in with ‘Teenage hacker "caused chaos for kicks"’. Even The Times waded into the fray. Smaller, regional newspapers pulled the story across the countryside to the far reaches of the British Isles. The Herald in Glasgow told its readers ‘Teenage hacker "ran up [sterling]10000 telephone bill"’. Across the Irish Sea, the Irish Times caused a splash with its headline, ‘Teenage hacker broke EC computer security’.

Also in the first week of the case, The Guardian announced Wandii had taken down the cancer centre database. By the time The Independent got hold of the story, Wandii hadn’t just shut down the database, he had been reading the patients’ most intimate medical details: ‘Teenager "hacked into cancer patient files"’. Not to be outdone, on day four of the trial, the Daily Mail had christened Wandii as a ‘computer genius’. By day five it labelled him as a ‘computer invader’ who ‘cost FT [sterling]25000’.

The list went on. Wandii, the press announced, had hacked the Tokyo Zoo and the White House. It was difficult to tell which was the more serious offence.

Wandii’s defence team had a few tricks of its own. Ian MacDonald, QC, junior counsel Alistair Kelman and solicitor Deborah Tripley put London University Professor James Griffith-Edwards, an authoritative spokesman on addictive and compulsive behaviours, on the stand as an expert witness. The chairman of the National Addiction Centre, the professor had been part of a team which wrote the World Health Organisation’s definition of addiction. No-one was going to question his qualifications.

The professor had examined Wandii and he announced his conclusion to the court: Wandii was obsessed by computers, he was unable to stop using them, and his infatuation made it impossible for him to choose freely. ‘He repeated 12 times in police interviews, "I’m just addicted. I wish I wasn’t",’ Griffith-Edwards told the court. Wandii was highly intelligent, but was unable to escape from the urge to beat computers’ security systems at their own game. The hacker was obsessed by the intellectual challenge. ‘This is the core ... of what attracts the compulsive gambler,’ the professor explained to the entranced jury of three women and nine men.

But Wandii, this obsessive, addicted, gifted young man, had never had a girlfriend, Griffith-Edwards continued. In fact, he shyly admitted to the professor that he wouldn’t even know how to ask a girl out. ‘He [Wandii] became profoundly embarrassed when asked to talk about his own feelings. He simply couldn’t cope when asked what sort of person he was.’6

People in the jury edged forward in their seats, concentrating intently on the distinguished professor. And why wouldn’t they? This was amazing stuff. This erudite man had delved inside the mind of the young man of bizarre contrasts. A man so sophisticated that he could pry open computers belonging to some of Britain’s and Europe’s most prestigious institutions, and yet at the same time so simple that he had no idea how to ask a girl on a date. A man who was addicted not to booze, smack or speed, which the average person associates with addiction, but to a computer--a machine most people associated with kids’ games and word processing programs.

The defence proceeded to present vivid examples of Wandii’s addiction. Wandii’s mother, a single parent and lecturer in English, had terrible trouble trying to get her son away from his computer and modem. She tried hiding his modem. He found it. She tried again, hiding it at his grandmother’s house. He burgled granny’s home and retrieved it. His mother tried to get at his computer. He pushed her out of his attic room and down the stairs.

Then he ran up a [sterling]700 phone bill as a result of his hacking. His mother switched off the electricity at the mains. Her son reconnected it. She installed a security calling-code on the phone to stop him calling out. He broke it. She worried he wouldn’t go out and do normal teenage things. He continued to stay up all night--and sometimes all day--hacking. She returned from work to find him unconscious--sprawled across the living room floor and looking as though he was dead. But it wasn’t death, only sheer exhaustion. He hacked until he passed out, then he woke up and hacked some more.

The stories of Wandii’s self-confessed addiction overwhelmed, appalled and eventually engendered pity in the courtroom audience. The media began calling him ‘the hermit hacker’.

Wandii’s defence team couldn’t fight the prosecution’s evidence head-on, so they took the prosecution’s evidence and claimed it as their own. They showed the jury that Wandii hadn’t just hacked the institutions named by the prosecution; he had hacked far, far more than that. He didn’t just hack a lot--he hacked too much. Most of all, Wandii’s defence team gave the jury a reason to acquit the innocent-faced young man sitting before them.

During the trial, the media focused on Wandii, but didn’t completely ignore the other two hackers. Computer Weekly hunted down where Gandalf was working and laid it bare on the front page. A member of ‘the UK’s most notorious hacking gang’, the journal announced, had been working on software which would be used at Barclay’s Bank.7 The implication was clear. Gandalf was a terrible security risk and should never be allowed to do any work for a financial institution. The report irked the hackers, but they tried to concentrate on preparing for their sentencing hearing.

From the beginning of their case, the hackers had problems obtaining certain evidence. Pad and Gandalf believed some of the material seized in the police raids would substantially help their case--such as messages from admins thanking them for pointing out security holes on their systems. This material had not been included in the prosecution’s brief. When the defendants requested access to it, they were refused access on the grounds that there was classified data on the optical disk. They were told to go read the Attorney-General’s guidelines on disclosure of information. The evidence of the hackers’ forays into military and government systems was jumbled in with their intrusions into computers such as benign JANET systems, the defence team was told. It would take too much time to separate the two.

Eventually, after some wrangling, Pad and Gandalf were told they could inspect and copy material--provided it was done under the supervision of the police. The hackers travelled to London, to Holborn police station, to gather supporting evidence for their case. However, it soon became clear that this time-consuming exercise would be impossible to manage on an ongoing basis. Finally, the Crown Prosecution Service relented, agreeing to release the material on disk to Pad’s solicitor, on the proviso that no copies were made, it did not leave the law office, and it was returned at the end of the trial.

As Wandii’s case lurched from revelation to exaggeration, Pad and Gandalf busily continued to prepare for their own sentencing hearing. Every day, Gandalf travelled from Liverpool to Manchester to meet with his friend. They picked up a handful of newspapers at the local agent, and then headed up to Pad’s lawyer’s office. After a quick scan for articles covering the hacking case, the two hackers began sifting through the reluctantly released prosecution disks. They read through the material on computer, under the watchful eye of the law office’s cashier--the most computer literate person in the firm.

After fifteen days in the Southwark courtroom listening to fantastic stories from both sides about the boy sitting before them, the jury in Wandii’s trial retired to consider the evidence. Before they left, Judge Harris gave them a stern warning: the argument that Wandii was obsessed or dependent was not a defence against the charges.

It took the jurors only 90 minutes to reach a decision, and when the verdict was read out the courtroom erupted with a wave of emotion.

Not guilty. On all counts.

Wandii’s mother burst into a huge smile and turned to her son, who was also smiling. And the defence team couldn’t be happier. Kelman told journalists, ‘The jury felt this was a sledge hammer being used to crack a nut’.8

The prosecution was stunned and the law enforcement agents flabbergasted. Detective Sergeant Barry Donovan found the verdict bizarre. No other case in his 21 years in law enforcement had as much overwhelming evidence as this one, yet the jury had let Wandii walk.

And in a high-pitched frenzy rivalling its earlier hysteria, the British media jumped all over the jury’s decision. ‘Hacker who ravaged systems walks free’, an indignant Guardian announced. ‘Computer Genius is cleared of hacking conspiracy’, said the Evening Standard. ‘Hacking "addict" acquitted’, sniffed The Times. Overpowering them all was the Daily Telegraph’s page one: ‘Teenage computer addict who hacked White House system is cleared’.

Then came the media king-hit. Someone had leaked another story and it looked bad. The report, in the Mail on Sunday, said that the three hackers had broken into a Cray computer at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting at Bracknell. This computer, likes dozens of others, would normally have been relegated to the long list of unmentioned victims except for one thing. The US military used weather data from the centre for planning its attack on Iraq in the Gulf War. The media report claimed that the attack had slowed down the Cray’s calculations, thus endangering the whole Desert Storm operation. The paper announced the hackers had been ‘inadvertently jeopardising--almost fatally--the international effort against Saddam Hussein’ and had put ‘thousands of servicemen’s lives at risk’.9 [what a load of horseshit, typical msm lying propaganda, if this 'hack' was so important and the assholes at the Pentagon were involved supposedly why was this not among his charges to begin with? dc ]

Further, the paper alleged that the US State Department was so incensed about British hackers’ repeated break-ins disrupting Pentagon defence planning that it had complained to Prime Minister John Major. The White House put the matter more bluntly than the State Department: Stop your hackers or we will cut off European access to our satellite which provides trans-Atlantic data and voice telecommunications. Someone in Britain seemed to be listening, for less than twelve months later, authorities had arrested all three hackers. [yeah arrested, but not charged, why? because it was bs and the MI6 shill writing(leaking) the story knew it!, mockingbird was and is global! dc ]

Pad thought the allegations were rubbish. He had been inside a VAX machine at the weather centre for a couple of hours one night, but he had never touched a Cray there. He had certainly never done anything to slow the machine down. No cracking programs, no scanners, nothing which might account for the delay described in the report. Even if he had been responsible, he found it hard to believe the Western allies’ victory in the Gulf War was determined by one computer in Berkshire.

All of which gave him cause to wonder why the media was running this story now, after Wandii’s acquittal but before he and Gandalf were sentenced. Sour grapes, perhaps?

For days, columnists, editorial and letter writers across Britain pontificated on the meaning of the Wandii’s verdict and the validity of an addiction to hacking as a defence. Some urged computer owners to take responsibility for securing their own systems. Others called for tougher hacking laws. A few echoed the view of The Times, which declared in an editorial, ‘a persistent car thief of [the hacker’s] age would almost certainly have received a custodial sentence. Both crimes suggest disrespect for other people’s property ... the jurors may have failed to appreciate the seriousness of this kind of offence’.10 

The debate flew forward, changing and growing, and expanding beyond Britain’s borders. In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post asked, ‘Is [this] case evidence of a new social phenomenon, with immature and susceptible minds being damaged through prolonged exposure to personal computers?’ The paper described public fear that Wandii’s case would result in ‘the green light for an army of computer-literate hooligans to pillage the world’s databases at will, pleading insanity when caught’.11 

By April Fool’s Day 1991, more than two weeks after the end of the court case, Wandii had his own syndrome named after him, courtesy of The Guardian.

And while Wandii, his mother and his team of lawyers celebrated their victory quietly, the media reported that the Scotland Yard detectives commiserated over their defeat, which was considerably more serious than simply losing the Wandii case. The Computer Crimes Unit was being ‘reorganised’. Two experienced officers from the five-man unit were being moved out of the group. The official line was that the ‘rotations’ were normal Scotland Yard procedure. The unofficial word was that the Wandii case had been a fiasco, wasting time and money, and the debacle was not to be repeated.

In the north, a dark cloud gathered over Pad and Gandalf as their judgment day approached. The Wandii case verdict might have been cause for celebration among some in the computer underground, but it brought little joy for the other two 8lgm hackers.

For Pad and Gandalf, who had already pleaded guilty, Wandii’s acquittal was a disaster. 

###

On 12 May 1993, two months after Wandii’s acquittal, Boris Kayser stood up at the Bar table to put forward Electron’s case at the Australian hacker’s plea and sentencing hearing. As he began to speak, a hush fell over the Victorian County Court.

A tall, burly man with a booming voice, an imperious courtroom demeanour and his traditional black robes flowing behind him in an echo of his often emphatic gesticulations, Kayser was larger than life. A master showman, he knew how to play an audience of courtroom journalists sitting behind him as much as to the judge in front of him. 

Electron had already stood in the dock and pleaded guilty to fourteen charges, as agreed with the DPP’s office. In typical style, Kayser had interrupted the long process of the court clerk reading out each charge and asking whether Electron would plead guilty or not guilty.

With an impatient wave of his hand, Kayser asked the judge to dispense with such formalities since his client would plead guilty to all the agreed charges at once. The interjection was more of an announcement than a question. 

The formalities of a plea having been summarily dealt with, the question now at hand was sentencing. Electron wondered if he would be sent to prison. Despite lobbying from Electron’s lawyers, the DPP’s office had refused to recommend a non-custodial sentence. The best deal Electron’s lawyers had been able to arrange in exchange for turning Crown witness was for the DPP to remain silent on the issue of prison. The judge would make up his mind without input from the DPP.

Electron fiddled nervously with his father’s wedding ring, which he wore on his right hand. After his father’s death, Electron’s sister had begun taking things from the family home. Electron didn’t care much because there were only two things he really wanted: that ring and some of his father’s paintings.

Kayser called a handful of witnesses to support the case for a light sentence. Electron’s grandmother from Queensland. The family friend who had driven Electron to the hospital the day his father died. Electron’s psychiatrist, the eminent Lester Walton. Walton in particular highlighted the difference between the two possible paths forward: prison, which would certainly traumatise an already mentally unstable young man, or freedom, which offered Electron a good chance of eventually establishing a normal life.

When Kayser began summarising the case for a non-custodial sentence, Electron could hear the pack of journalists off to his side frantically scribbling notes. He wanted to look at them, but he was afraid the judge would see his ponytail, carefully tucked into his neatly ironed white shirt, if he turned sideways,

‘Your Honour,’ Kayser glanced backward slightly, toward the court reporters, as he warmed up, ‘my client lived in an artificial world of electronic pulses.’

Scratch, scribble. Electron could almost predict, within half a second, when the journalists’ pencils and pens would reach a crescendo of activity. The ebb and flow of Boris’s boom was timed in the style of a TV newsreader.

Kayser said his client was addicted to the computer the way an alcoholic was obsessed with the bottle. More scratching, and lots of it. This client, Kayser thundered, had never sought to damage any system, steal money or make a profit. He was not malicious in the least, he was merely playing a game.

‘I think,’ Electron’s barrister concluded passionately, but slowly enough for every journalist to get it down on paper, ‘that he should have been called Little Jack Horner, who put in his thumb, pulled out a plumb and said, "What a good boy am I!"’

Now came the wait. The judge retired to his chambers to weigh up the pre-sentence report, Electron’s family situation, the fact that he had turned Crown witness, his offences--everything. Electron had given a nine-page written statement against Phoenix to the prosecution. If the Phoenix case went to trial, Electron would be put on the stand to back up that statement.

In the month before Electron returned to court to hear his sentence, he thought about how he could have fought the case. Some of the charges were dubious.

In one case, he had been charged with illegally accessing public information through a public account. He had accessed the anonymous FTP server at the University of Helsinki to copy information about DES. His first point of access had been through a hacked Melbourne University account.

Beat that charge, Electron’s lawyer had told him, and there’s plenty more where that came from. The DPP had good pickings and could make up a new charge for another site. Still, Electron reasoned some of the Crown’s evidence would not have stood up under cross-examination.

When reporters from Australia and overseas called NASA headquarters for comment on the hacker-induced network shutdown, the agency responded that it had no idea what they were talking about. There had been no NASA network shutdown. A spokesman made inquiries and, he assured the media, NASA was puzzled by the report. Sharon Beskenis’s statement didn’t seem so watertight after all. She was not, it turned out, even a NASA employee but a contractor from Lockheed.

During that month-long wait, Electron had trouble living down Kayser’s nursery-rhyme rendition in the courtroom. When he rang friends, they would open the conversation saying, ‘Oh, is that Little Jack Horner?’

They had all seen the nightly news, featuring Kayser and his client. Kayser had looked grave leaving court, while Electron, wearing John Lennon-style glasses with dark lenses and with his shoulder-length curls pulled tightly back in a ponytail, had tried to smile at the camera crews. But his small, fine features and smattering of freckles disappeared under the harsh camera lights, so much so that the black, round spectacles seemed almost to float on a blank, white surface.

The week after Electron pleaded guilty in Australia, Pad and Gandalf sat side by side in London’s Southwark dock one last time.

For a day and a half, beginning on 20 May 1993, the two hackers listened to their lawyers argue their defence. Yes, our clients hacked computers, they told the judge, but the offences were nowhere near as serious as the prosecution wants to paint them. The lawyers were fighting hard for one thing: to keep Pad and Gandalf out of prison.

Some of the hearing was tough going for the two hackers, but not just because of any sense of foreboding caused by the judge’s imminent decision. The problem was that Gandalf made Pad laugh, and it didn’t look at all good to laugh in the middle of your sentencing hearing. Sitting next to Gandalf for hours on end, while lawyers from both sides butchered the technical aspects of computer hacking which the 8lgm hackers had spent years learning, did it. Pad had only to give Gandalf a quick sidelong glance and he quickly found himself swallowing and clearing his throat to keep from bursting into laughter. Gandalf’s irrepressible irreverence was written all over his face.

The stern-faced Judge Harris could send them to jail, but he still wouldn’t understand. Like the gaggle of lawyers bickering at the front of the courtroom, the judge was--and would always be--out of the loop.

None of them had any idea what was really going on inside the heads of the two hackers. None of them could ever understand what hacking was all about--the thrill of stalking a quarry or of using your wits to outsmart so-called experts; the pleasure of finally penetrating a much-desired machine and knowing that system is yours; the deep anti-establishment streak which served as a well-centred ballast against the most violent storms washing in from the outside world; and the camaraderie of the international hacking community on Altos.

The lawyers could talk about it, could put experts on the stand and psychological reports in the hands of the judge, but none of them would ever really comprehend because they had never experienced it. The rest of the courtroom was out of the loop, and Pad and Gandalf stared out from the dock as if looking through a two-way mirror from a secret, sealed room.

Pad’s big worry had been this third charge--the one which he faced alone. At his plea hearing, he had admitted to causing damage to a system owned by what was, in 1990, called the Polytechnic of Central London. He hadn’t damaged the machine by, say, erasing files, but the other side had claimed that the damages totalled about [sterling]250 000.

The hacker was sure there was zero chance the polytechnic had spent anything near that amount. He had a reasonable idea of how long it would take someone to clean up his intrusions. But if the prosecution could convince a judge to accept that figure, the hacker might be looking at a long prison term.

Pad had already braced himself for the possibility of prison. His lawyer warned him before the sentencing date that there was a reasonable likelihood the two 8lgm hackers would be sent down. After the Wandii case, the public pressure to ‘correct’ a ‘wrong’ decision by the Wandii jury was enormous. The police had described Wandii’s acquittal as ‘a licence to hack’--and The Times, had run the statement.12 It was likely the judge, who had presided over Wandii’s trial, would want to send a loud and clear message to the hacking community.

Pad thought that perhaps, if he and Gandalf had pleaded not guilty alongside Wandii, they would have been acquitted. But there was no way Pad would have subjected himself to the kind of public humiliation Wandii went through during the ‘addicted to computers’ evidence. The media appeared to want to paint the three hackers as pallid, scrawny, socially inept, geeky geniuses, and to a large degree Wandii’s lawyers had worked off this desire. Pad didn’t mind being viewed as highly intelligent, but he wasn’t a geek. He had a casual girlfriend. He went out dancing with friends or to hear bands in Manchester’s thriving alternative music scene. He worked out his upper body with weights at home. Shy--yes. A geek--no.

Could Pad have made a case for being addicted to hacking? Yes, although he never believed that he had been. Completely enthralled, entirely entranced? Maybe. Suffering from a passing obsession? Perhaps. But addicted? No, he didn’t think so. Besides, who knew for sure if a defence of addiction could have saved him from the prosecution’s claim anyway?

Exactly where the quarter of a million pound claim came from in the first place was a mystery to Pad. The police had just said it to him, as if it was fact, in the police interview. Pad hadn’t seen any proof, but that hadn’t stopped him from spending a great deal of time feeling very stressed about how the judge would view the matter.

The only answer seemed to be some good, independent technical advice. At the request of both Pad and Gandalf’s lawyers, Dr Peter Mills, of Manchester University, and Dr Russell Lloyd, of London Business School, had examined a large amount of technical evidence presented in the prosecution’s papers. In an independent report running to more than 23 pages, the experts stated that the hackers had caused less havoc than the prosecution alleged. In addition, Pad’s solicitor asked Dr Mills to specifically review, in a separate report, the evidence supporting the prosecution’s large damage claim.

Dr Mills stated that one of the police expert witnesses, a British Telecom employee, had said that Digital recommended a full rebuild of the system at the earliest possible opportunity--and at considerable cost. However, the BT expert had not stated that the cost was [sterling]250000 nor even mentioned if the cost quote which had been given had actually been accepted.

In fact, Dr Mills concluded that there was no supporting evidence at all for the quarter of a million pound claim. Not only that, but any test of reason based on the evidence provided by the prosecution showed the claim to be completely ridiculous.

In a separate report, Dr Mills’ stated that:

i) The machine concerned was a Vax 6320, this is quite a powerful ‘mainframe’ system and could support several hundreds of users.

ii) That a full dump of files takes 6 tapes, however since the type of tape is not specified this gives no real indication of the size of the filesystem. A tape could vary from 0.2 Gigabytes to 2.5 Gigabytes.

iii) The machine was down for three days.

With this brief information it is difficult to give an accurate cost for restoring the machine, however an over estimate would be:

i) Time spent in restoring the system, 10 man days at [sterling]300 per day; [sterling]3000.

ii) Lost time by users, 30 man days at [sterling]300 per day; [sterling]9000.

The total cost in my opinion is unlikely to be higher than [sterling]12000 and this itself is probably a rather high estimate. I certainly cannot see how a figure of [sterling]250000 could be justified.

It looked to Pad that the prosecution’s claim was not for damage at all. It was for properly securing the system--an entirely rebuilt system. It seemed to him that the police were trying to put the cost of securing the polytechnic’s entire computer network onto the shoulders of one hacker--and to call it damages. In fact, Pad discovered, the polytechnic had never actually even spent the [sterling]250000.

Pad was hopeful, but he was also angry. All along, the police had been threatening him with this huge damage bill. He had tossed and turned in his bed at night worrying about it. And, in the end, the figure put forward for so long as fact was nothing but an outrageous claim based on not a single shred of solid evidence.

Using Dr Mills’s report, Pad’s barrister, Mukhtar Hussain, QC, negotiated privately with the prosecution barrister, who finally relented and agreed to reduce the damage estimate to [sterling]15000. It was, in Pad’s view, still far too high, but it was much better than [sterling]250000. He was in no mind to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Judge Harris accepted the revised damage estimate.

The prosecution may have lost ground on the damage bill, but it wasn’t giving up the fight. These two hackers, James Richardson told the court and journalists during the two-day sentencing hearing, had hacked into some 10000 computer systems around the world. They were inside machines or networks in at least fifteen countries. Russia. India. France. Norway. Germany. The US. Canada. Belgium. Sweden. Italy. Taiwan. Singapore. Iceland. Australia. Officers on the case said the list of the hackers’ targets ‘read like an atlas’, Richardson told the court.

Pad listened to the list. It sounded about right. What didn’t sound right were the allegations that he or Gandalf had crashed Sweden’s telephone network by running an X.25 scanner over its packet network. The crash had forced a Swedish government minister to apologise on television. The police said the minister did not identify the true cause of the problem--the British hackers--in his public apology. 

Pad had no idea what they were talking about. He hadn’t done anything like that to the Swedish phone system, and as far as he knew, neither had Gandalf.

Something else didn’t sound right. Richardson told the court that in total, the two hackers had racked up at least [sterling]25000 in phone bills for unsuspecting legitimate customers, and caused ‘damage’ to systems which was very conservatively estimated at almost [sterling]123000.

Where were these guys getting these numbers from? Pad marvelled at their cheek. He had been through the evidence with a fine-toothed comb, yet he had not seen one single bill showing what a site had actually paid to repair ‘damage’ caused by the hackers. The figures tossed around by the police and the prosecution weren’t real bills; they weren’t cast in iron.

Finally, on Friday 21 May, after all the evidence had been presented, the judge adjourned the court to consider sentencing. When he returned to the bench fifteen minutes later, Pad knew what was going to happen from the judge’s face. To the hacker, the expression said: I am going to give you everything that Wandii should have got.

Judge Harris echoed The Times’s sentiments when he told the two defendants, ‘If your passion had been cars rather than computers, we would have called your conduct delinquent, and I don’t shrink from the analogy of describing what you were doing as intellectual joyriding. 

‘Hacking is not harmless. Computers now form a central role in our lives. Some, providing emergency services, depend on their computers to deliver those services.’13

Hackers needed to be given a clear signal that computer crime ‘will not and cannot be tolerated’, the judge said, adding that he had thought long and hard before handing down sentence. He accepted that neither hacker had intended to cause damage, but it was imperative to protect society’s computer systems and he would be failing in his public duty if he didn’t sentence the two hackers to a prison term of six months.

Judge Harris told the hackers that he had chosen a custodial sentence, ‘both to penalise you for what you have done and for the losses caused, and to deter others who might be similarly tempted’.

This was the show trial, not Wandii’s case, Pad thought as the court officers led him and Gandalf out of the dock, down to the prisoner’s lift behind the courtroom and into a jail cell.

Less than two weeks after Pad and Gandalf were sentenced, Electron was back in the Victorian County Court to discover his own fate.

As he stood in the dock on 3 June 1993 he felt numb, as emotionally removed from the scene as Meursault in Camus’ L’etranger. He believed he was handling the stress pretty well until he experienced tunnel vision while watching the judge read his penalty. He perused the room but saw neither Phoenix nor Nom.

When Judge Anthony Smith summarised the charges, he seemed to have a special interest in count number 13--the Zardoz charge. A few minutes into reading the sentence, the judge said, ‘In my view, a custodial sentence is appropriate for each of the offences constituted by the 12th, 13th and 14th counts’. They were the ‘knowingly concerned’ charges, with Phoenix, involving NASA, LLNL and CSIRO. Electron looked around the courtroom. People turned back to stare at him. Their eyes said, ‘You are going to prison’.

‘I formed the view that a custodial sentence is appropriate in respect of each of these offences because of the seriousness of them,’ Judge Smith noted, ‘and having regard to the need to demonstrate that the community will not tolerate this type of offence.

‘Our society today is ... increasingly ... dependent upon the use of computer technology. Conduct of the kind in which you engaged poses a threat to the usefulness of that technology ... It is incumbent upon the courts ... to see to it that the sentences they impose reflect the gravity of this kind of criminality.

‘On each of Counts 12, 13 and 14, you are convicted and you are sentenced to a term of imprisonment of six months ... each ... to be concurrent.’

The judge paused, then continued, ‘And ... I direct, by order, that you be released forthwith upon your giving security by recognisance ... in the sum of $500 ... You will not be required to serve the terms of imprisonment imposed, provided you are of good behaviour for the ensuing six months.’ He then ordered Electron to complete 300 hours of community service, and to submit to psychiatric assessment and treatment.

Electron breathed a sigh of relief.

When outlining the mitigating circumstances which led to suspension of the jail sentence, Judge Smith described Electron as being addicted to using his computer ‘in much the same way as an alcoholic becomes addicted to the bottle’. Boris Kayser had used the analogy in the sentencing hearing, perhaps for the benefit of the media, but the judge had obviously been swayed by his view.

When court adjourned, Electron left the dock and shook hands with his lawyers. After three years, he was almost free of his court problems. There was only one possible reason he might need to return to court.

If Phoenix fought out his case in a full criminal trial, the DPP would put Electron on the stand to testify against him. It would be an ugly scene.

The inmates of HM Prison Kirkham, on the north-west coast of England, near Preston, had heard all about Pad and Gandalf by the time they arrived. They greeted the hackers by name. They’d seen the reports on telly, especially about how Gandalf had hacked NASA--complete with footage of the space shuttle taking off. Some TV reporter’s idea of subtle irony--‘Two hackers were sent down today’ as the space shuttle went up.

Kirkham was far better than Brixton, where the hackers had spent the first days of their sentence while awaiting transfer. Brixton was what Pad always envisioned prison would look like, with floors of barred cells facing onto an open centre and prisoners only allowed out of their cells for scheduled events such as time in the yard. It was a place where hard-core criminals lived. Fortunately, Pad and Gandalf had been placed in the same cell while they waited to be assigned to their final destination.

After ten days inside Brixton Pad and Gandalf were led from their cell, handcuffed and put in a coach heading toward the windy west coast.

During the drive, Pad kept looking down at his hand, locked in shiny steel to Gandalf’s hand, then he looked back up again at his fellow hacker. Clearing his throat and turning away from Gandalf’s difficult grin--his friend now on the edge of laughing himself--Pad struggled. He tried to hold down the muscles of his face, to pull them back from laughter.

A minimum security prison holding up to 632 prisoners, Kirkham looked vaguely like a World War II RAF base with a large collection of free-standing buildings around the grounds. There were no real walls, just a small wire fence which Pad soon learned prisoners routinely jumped when the place started to get to them.

For a prison, Kirkham was pretty good. There was a duck pond, a bowling green, a sort of mini-cinema which showed films in the early evenings, eight pay phones, a football field, a cricket pavilion and, best of all, lots of fields. Prisoners could have visits on weekday afternoons between 1.10 and 3.40, or on the weekend.

Luck smiled on the two hackers. They were assigned to the same billet and, since none of the other prisoners objected, they became room-mates. Since they were sentenced in May, they would serve their time during summer. If they were ‘of good behaviour’ and didn’t get into trouble with other prisoners, they would be out in three months.

Like any prison, Kirkham had its share of prisoners who didn’t get along with each other. Mostly, prisoners wanted to know what you were in for and, more particularly, if you had been convicted of a sex crime. They didn’t like sex crime offenders and Pad heard about a pack of Kirkham prisoners who dragged one of their own, screaming, to a tree, where they tried to hang him for being a suspected rapist. In fact, the prisoner hadn’t been convicted of anything like rape. He had simply refused to pay his poll tax.

Fortunately for Pad and Gandalf, everyone else in Kirkham knew why they were there. At the end of their first week they returned to their room one afternoon to find a sign painted above their door. It said, ‘NASA HQ’.

The other minimum security prisoners understood hacking--and they had all sorts of ideas about how you could make money from it. Most of the prisoners in Kirkham were in for petty theft, credit card fraud, and other small-time crimes. There was also a phreaker, who arrived the same day as Pad and Gandalf. He landed eight months in prison--two more than the 8lgm hackers--and Pad wondered what kind of message that sent the underground.

Despite their best efforts, the 8lgm twosome didn’t fit quite the prison mould. In the evenings, other prisoners spent their free time shooting pool or taking drugs. In the bedroom down the hall, Gandalf lounged on his bed studying a book on VMS internals. Pad read a computer magazine and listened to some indie music--often his ‘Babes in Toyland’ tape. In a parody of prison movies, the two hackers marked off their days inside the prison with cross-hatched lines on their bedroom wall--four marks, then a diagonal line through them. They wrote other things on the walls too.

The long, light-filled days of summer flowed one into the other, as Pad and Gandalf fell into the rhythm of the prison. The morning check-in at 8.30 to make sure none of the prisoners had gone walkabout. The dash across the bowling green for a breakfast of beans, bacon, eggs, toast and sausage. The walk to the greenhouses where the two hackers had been assigned for work detail.

The work wasn’t hard. A little digging in the pots. Weeding around the baby lettuce heads, watering the green peppers and transplanting tomato seedlings. When the greenhouses became too warm by late morning, Pad and Gandalf wandered outside for a bit of air. They often talked about girls, cracking crude, boyish jokes about women and occasionally discussing their girlfriends more seriously. As the heat settled in, they sat down, lounging against the side of the greenhouse.

After lunch, followed by more time in the greenhouse, Pad and Gandalf sometimes went off for walks in the fields surrounding the prison. First the football field, then the paddocks dotted with cows beyond it.

Pad was a likeable fellow, largely because of his easygoing style and relaxed sense of humour. But liking him wasn’t the same as knowing him, and the humour often deflected deeper probing into his personality. But Gandalf knew him, understood him. Everything was so easy with Gandalf. During the long, sunny walks, the conversation flowed as easily as the light breeze through the grass.

As they wandered in the fields, Pad often wore his denim jacket. Most of the clothes on offer from the prison clothing office were drab blue, but Pad had lucked onto this wonderful, cool denim jacket which he took to wearing all the time.

Walking for hours on end along the perimeters of the prison grounds, Pad saw how easy it would be to escape, but in the end there didn’t seem to be much point. They way he saw it, the police would just catch you and put you back in again. Then you’d have to serve extra time.

Once a week, Pad’s parents came to visit him, but the few precious hours of visiting time were more for his parents’ benefit than his own. He reassured them that he was OK, and when they looked him in the face and saw it was true, they stopped worrying quite so much. They brought him news from home, including the fact that his computer equipment had been returned by one of the police who had been in the original raid.

The officer asked Pad’s mother how the hacker was doing in prison. ‘Very well indeed,’ she told him. ‘Prison’s not nearly so bad as he thought.’ The officer’s face crumpled into a disappointed frown. He seemed to be looking for news that Pad was suffering nothing but misery.

At the end of almost three months, with faces well tanned from walking in the meadows, Pad and Gandalf walked free. 

### 

To the casual witness sitting nearby in the courtroom, the tension between Phoenix’s mother and father was almost palpable. They were not sitting near each other but that didn’t mitigate the silent hostility which rose through the air like steam. Phoenix’s divorced parents provided a stark contrast to Nom’s adopted parents, an older, suburban couple who were very much married.

On Wednesday, 25 August 1993 Phoenix and Nom pleaded guilty to fifteen and two charges respectively. The combined weight of the prosecution’s evidence, the risk and cost of running a full trial and the need to get on with their lives had pushed them over the edge. Electron didn’t need to come to court to give evidence.

At the plea hearing, which ran over to the next day, Phoenix’s lawyer, Dyson Hore-Lacy, spent considerable time sketching the messy divorce of his client’s parents for the benefit of the judge. Suggesting Phoenix retreated into his computer during the bitter separation and divorce was the best chance of getting him off a prison term. Most of all, the defence presented Phoenix as a young man who had strayed off the correct path in life but was now back on track--holding down a job and having a life.

The DPP had gone in hard against Phoenix. They seemed to want a jail term badly and they doggedly presented Phoenix as an arrogant braggart. The court heard a tape-recording of Phoenix ringing up security guru Edward DeHart of the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University to brag about a security exploit. Phoenix told DeHart to get onto his computer and then proceeded to walk him step by step through the ‘passwd -f’ security bug. Ironically, it was Electron who had discovered that security hole and taught it to Phoenix--a fact Phoenix didn’t seem to want to mention to DeHart.

The head of the AFP’s Southern Region Computer Crimes Unit, Detective Sergeant Ken Day was in court that day. There was no way he was going to miss this. The same witness noting the tension between Phoenix’s parents might also have perceived an undercurrent of hostility between Day and Phoenix--an undercurrent which did not seem to exist between Day and either of the other Realm hackers.

Day, a short, careful man who gave off an air of bottled intensity, seemed to have an acute dislike for Phoenix. By all observations the feeling was mutual. A cool-headed professional, Day would never say anything in public to express the dislike--that was not his style. His dislike was only indicated by a slight tightness in the muscles of an otherwise unreadable face.

On 6 October 1993, Phoenix and Nom stood side by side in the dock for sentencing. Wearing a stern expression, Judge Smith began by detailing both the hackers’ charges and the origin of The Realm. But after the summary, the judge saved his harshest rebuke for Phoenix.

‘There is nothing ... to admire about your conduct and every reason why it should be roundly condemned. You pointed out [weaknesses] to some of the system administrators ... [but] this was more a display of arrogance and a demonstration of what you thought was your superiority rather than an act of altruism on your part.

‘You ... bragged about what you had done or were going to do ... Your conduct revealed ... arrogance on your part, open defiance, and an intention to the beat the system. [You] did cause havoc for a time within the various targeted systems.’

Although the judge appeared firm in his views while passing sentence, behind the scenes he had agonised greatly over his decision. He had attempted to balance what he saw as the need for deterrence, the creation of a precedence for sentencing hacking cases in Australia, and the individual aspects of this case. Finally, after sifting through the arguments again and again, he had reached a decision.

‘I have no doubt that some sections of our community would regard anything than a custodial sentence as less than appropriate. I share that view. But after much reflection ... I have concluded that an immediate term of imprisonment is unnecessary.’

Relief rolled across the faces of the hackers’ friends and relatives as the judge ordered Phoenix to complete 500 hours of community service work over two years and assigned him a $1000 twelve-month good behaviour bond. He gave Nom 200 hours, and a $500, six-month bond for good behaviour.

As Phoenix was leaving the courtroom, a tall, skinny young man, loped down the aisle towards him.

‘Congratulations,’ the stranger said, his long hair dangling in delicate curls around his shoulders.

‘Thanks,’ Phoenix answered, combing his memory for the boyish face which couldn’t be any older than his own. ‘Do I know you?’ 

‘Sort of,’ the stranger answered. ‘I’m Mendax. I’m about to go through what you did, but worse.’ 

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The International Subversives