His mother worried. She asked her son to cooperate with the police. Anthrax felt he had to protect his mother and finally agreed to a police interview after his uni exams. The only reason he did so was because of the police threat to charge his mother. He was sure that if they dragged his mother through court, her health would deteriorate and lead to an early death.
Anthrax's father picked him up from uni on a fine November day and drove down to Melbourne. His mother had insisted that he attend the interview, since he knew all about the law and police. Anthrax didn't mind having him along: he figured a witness might prevent any use of police muscle.
During the ride to the city, Anthrax talked about how he would handle the interview. The good news was that the AFP had said they wanted to interview him about his phreaking, not his hacking. He went to the interview understanding they would only be discussing his `recent stuff'—the phreaking. He had two possible approaches to the interview. He could come clean and admit everything, as his first lawyer had advised. Or he could pretend to cooperate and be evasive, which was what his instincts told him to do.
His father jumped all over the second option. `You have to cooperate fully. They will know if you are lying. They are trained to pick out lies. Tell them everything and they will go easier on you.' Law and order all the way.
`Who do they think they are anyway? The pigs.' Anthrax looked away, disgusted at the thought of police harassing people like his mother.
`Don't call them pigs,' his father snapped. `They are police officers. If you are ever in trouble, they are the first people you are ever going to call.'
`Oh yeah. What kind of trouble am I going to be in that the first people I call are the AFP?' Anthrax replied.
Anthrax would put up with his father coming along so long as he kept his mouth shut during the interview. He certainly wasn't there for personal support. They had a distant relationship at best. When his father began working in the town where Anthrax now lived and studied, his mother had tried to patch things between them. She suggested his father take Anthrax out for dinner once a week, to smooth things over. Develop a relationship. They had dinner a handful of times and Anthrax listened to his father's lectures. Admit you were wrong. Cooperate with the police. Get your life together. Own up to it all. Grow up. Be responsible. Stop being so useless. Stop being so stupid.
The lectures were a bit rich, Anthrax thought, considering that his father had benefited from Anthrax's hacking skills. When he discovered Anthrax had got into a huge news clipping database, he asked the boy to pull up every article containing the word `prison'. Then he had him search for articles on discipline. The searches should have cost a fortune, probably thousands of dollars. But his father didn't pay a cent, thanks to Anthrax. And he didn't spend much time lecturing Anthrax on the evils of hacking then.
When they arrived at AFP headquarters, Anthrax made a point of putting his feet up on the leather couch in the reception area and opened a can of Coke he had brought along. His father got upset.
`Get your feet off that seat. You shouldn't have brought that can of
Coke. It doesn't look very professional.'
`Hey, I'm not going for a job interview here,' Anthrax responded.
Constable Andrew Sexton, a redhead sporting two earrings, came up to
Anthrax and his father and took them upstairs for coffee. Detective
Sergeant Ken Day, head of the Computer Crime Unit, was in a meeting,
Sexton said, so the interview would be delayed a little.
Anthrax's father and Sexton found they shared some interests in law enforcement. They discussed the problems associated with rehabilitation and prisoner discipline. Joked with each other. Laughed. Talked about `young Anthrax'. Young Anthrax did this. Young Anthrax did that.
Young Anthrax felt sick. Watching his own father cosying up to the enemy, talking as if he wasn't even there.
When Sexton went to check on whether Day had finished his meeting, Anthrax's father growled, `Wipe that look of contempt off your face, young man. You are going to get nowhere in this world if you show that kind of attitude, they are going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.'
Anthrax didn't know what to say. Why should he treat these people with any respect after the way they threatened his mother?
The interview room was small but very full. A dozen or more boxes, all filled with labelled print-outs.
Sexton began the interview. `Taped record of interview conducted at Australian Federal Police Headquarters, 383 Latrobe Street Melbourne on 29 November 1994.' He reeled off the names of the people present and asked each to introduce himself for voice recognition.
`As I have already stated, Detective Sergeant Day and I are making enquiries into your alleged involvement into the manipulation of private automated branch exchanges [PABXes] via Telecom 008 numbers in order to obtain free phone calls nationally and internationally. Do you clearly understand this allegation?'
`Yes.'
Sexton continued with the necessary, and important, preliminaries. Did Anthrax understand that he was not obliged to answer any questions? That he had the right to communicate with a lawyer? That he had attended the interview of his own free will? That he was free to leave at any time?
Yes, Anthrax said in answer to each question.
Sexton then ploughed through a few more standard procedures before he finally got to the meat of the issue—telephones. He fished around in one of the many boxes and pulled out a mobile phone. Anthrax confirmed that it was his phone.
`Was that the phone that you used to call the 008 numbers and subsequent connections?' Sexton asked.
`Yes.'
`Contained in that phone is a number of pre-set numbers. Do you agree?'
`Yes.'
`I went to the trouble of extracting those records from it.' Sexton looked pleased with himself for hacking Anthrax's speed-dial numbers from the mobile. `Number 22 is of some interest to myself. It comes up as Aaron. Could that be the person you referred to before as Aaron in South Australia?'
`Yes, but he is always moving house. He is a hard person to track down.'
Sexton went through a few more numbers, most of which Anthrax hedged.
He asked Anthrax questions about his manipulation of the phone system,
particularly about the way he made free calls overseas using
Australian companies' 008 numbers.
When Anthrax had patiently explained how it all worked, Sexton went through some more speed-dial numbers.
`Number 43. Do you recognise that one?'
`That's the Swedish Party Line.'
`What about these other numbers? Such as 78? And 30?'
`I'm not sure. I couldn't say what any of these are. It's been so long,' Anthrax paused, sensing the pressure from the other side of the table. `These ones here, they are numbers in my town. But I don't know who. Very often, 'cause I don't have any pen and paper with me, I just plug a number into the phone.'
Sexton looked unhappy. He decided to go in a little harder. `I'm going to be pretty blunt. So far you have admitted to the 008s but I think you are understating your knowledge and your experience when it comes to these sort of offences.' He caught himself. `Not offences. But your involvement in all of this … I think you have got a little bit more … I'm not saying you are lying, don't get me wrong, but you tend to be pulling yourself away from how far you were really into this. And how far everyone looked up to you.'
There was the gauntlet, thrown down on the table. Anthrax picked it up.
`They looked up to me? That was just a perception. To be honest, I don't know that much. I couldn't tell you anything about telephone exchanges or anything like that. In the past, I guess the reason they might look up to me in the sense of a leader is because I was doing this, as you are probably aware, quite a bit in the past, and subsequently built up a reputation. Since then I decided I wouldn't do it again.'
`Since this?' Sexton was quick off the mark.
`No. Before. I just said, "I don't want anything to do with this any more. It's just stupid". When I broke up with my girlfriend … I just got dragged into it again. I'm not trying to say that I am any less responsible for any of this but I will say I didn't originate any of these 008s. They were all scanned by other people. But I made calls and admittedly I did a lot of stupid things.'
But Sexton was like a dog with a bone.
`I just felt that you were tending to … I don't know if it's because your dad's here or … I have read stuff that "Anthrax was a legend when it came to this, and he was a scanner, and he was the man to talk to about X.25, Tymnet, hacking, Unix. The whole kit and kaboodle".'
