`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.
