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 datataps 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 beseeched 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 tranquillisers, 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. Schizophrenaform. Amphetamine psychosis. Major effective disorder. Atypical psychosis. And his own personal favourite—facticious 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 Illinios. 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 inPhoenix. For they didn't just believe that Phoenix had been insideCitibank's computers. They believed he had masterminded the Citibankattack.
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.
Your dream world is just about to end.
— from `Dreamworld', Diesel and Dust.
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 whilePad peered from the doorway of the front sitting room. A uniformedpolice officer ushered everyone back into the room, and began askingPad 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
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.
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