Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier Part 68

Anthrax's mother was back at his apartment, waiting for news. She had been on night duty and was supposed to be sleeping. That was the ostensible reason she didn't attend. Anthrax thought perhaps that the tension was too much for her. Whatever the reason, she didn't sleep all that day. She tidied the place, washed the dishes, did the laundry, and kept herself as busy as the tiny apartment would allow her.

Anthrax's girlfriend, a pretty, moon-faced Turkish girl, also came to court. She had never been into the hacking scene. A group of school children, mostly girls, chatted in the rows behind her.

Anthrax read through the four-page summary of facts provided by the prosecution. When he reached the final page, his heart stopped. The final paragraph said:

31. Penalty

s85ZF (a)--12 months, $6000 or both

s76E(a)--2 years, $12000 or both

Pointing to the last paragraph, Anthrax asked his lawyer what that was all about. His lawyer told him that he would probably get prison but, well, it wouldn't be that bad and he would just have 'to take it on the chin'. He would, after all, be out in a year or two.

Rapists sometimes got off with less than that. Anthrax couldn't believe the prosecution was asking for prison. After he cooperated, suffering through that miserable interview. He had no prior convictions. But the s...o...b..ll had been set in motion. The magistrate appeared and opened the court.

Anthrax felt he couldn't back out now and he pleaded guilty to 21 counts, including one charge of inserting data and twenty charges of defrauding or attempting to defraud a carrier.

His lawyer put the case for a lenient sentence. He called Anthrax's father up on the stand and asked him questions about his son. His father probably did more harm than good. When asked if he thought his son would offend again, his father replied, 'I don't know'.

Anthrax was livid. It was further unconscionable behaviour. Not long before the trial, Anthrax had discovered that his father had planned to sneak out of the country two days before the court case. He was going overseas, he told his wife, but not until after the court case.

It was only by chance that she discovered his surrept.i.tious plans to leave early. Presumably he would find his son's trial humiliating.

Anthrax's mother insisted he stayed and he begrudgingly delayed the trip.

His father sat down, a bit away from Anthrax and his lawyer. The lawyer provided a colourful alternative to the prosecutor. He perched one leg up on his bench, rested an elbow on the knee and stroked his long, red beard. It was an impressive beard, more than a foot long and thick with reddish brown curls. Somehow it fitted with his two-tone chocolate brown suit and his tie, a breathtakingly wide creation with wild patterns in gold. The suit was one size too small. He launched into the usual courtroom flourish--lots of words saying nothing. Then he got to the punch line.

'Your wors.h.i.+p, this young man has been in all sorts of places. NASA, military sites, you wouldn't believe some of the places he has been.'

'I don't think I want to know where he has been,' the magistrate answered wryly.

The strategy was Anthrax's. He thought he could turn a liability into an a.s.set by showing that he had been in many systems--many sensitive systems--but had done no malicious damage in any of them.

The strategy worked and the magistrate announced there was no way he was sending the young hacker to jail.

The prosecutor looked genuinely disappointed and launched a counter proposal--1500 hours of community service. Anthrax caught his breath.

That was absurd. It would take almost nine months, full time. Painting buildings, cleaning toilets. Forget about his university studies. It was almost as bad as prison.

Anthrax's lawyer protested. 'Your Wors.h.i.+p, that penalty is something out of cybers.p.a.ce.' Anthrax winced at how corny that sounded, but the lawyer looked very pleased with himself.

The magistrate refused to have a bar of the prosecutor's counter proposal. Anthrax's girlfriend was impressed with the magistrate. She didn't know much about the law or the court system, but he seemed a fair man, a just man. He didn't appear to want to give a harsh punishment to Anthrax at all. But he told the court he had to send a message to Anthrax, to the cla.s.s of school children in the public benches and to the general community that hacking was wrong in the eyes of the law. Anthrax glanced back at the students. They looked like they were aged thirteen or fourteen, about the age he got into hacking and phreaking.

The magistrate announced his sentence. Two hundred hours of community service and $6116.90 of rest.i.tution to be paid to two telephone companies--Telecom and Teleglobe in Canada. It wasn't prison, but it was a staggering amount of money for a student to rake up. He had a year to pay it off, and it would definitely take that long. At least he was free.

Anthrax's girlfriend thought how unlucky it was to have landed those giggling school children in the courtroom on that day. They laughed and pointed and half-whispered. Court was a game. They didn't seem to take the magistrate's warning seriously. Perhaps they were gossiping about the next party. Perhaps they were chatting about a new pair of sneakers or a new CD.

And maybe one or two murmured quietly how cool it would be to break into NASA.

Afterword.

It was billed as the 'largest annual gathering of those in, related to, or wis.h.i.+ng to know more about the computer underground', so I thought I had better go.

HoHoCon in Austin, Texas, was without a doubt one of the strangest conferences I have attended. During the weekend leading up to New Year's Day 1995, the Ramada Inn South was overrun by hackers, phreakers, ex-hackers, underground sympathisers, journalists, computer company employees and American law enforcement agents. Some people had come from as far away as Germany and Canada.

The hackers and phreakers slept four or six to a room--if they slept at all. The feds slept two to a room. I could be wrong; maybe they weren't feds at all. But they seemed far too well dressed and well pressed to be anything else. No one else at HoHoCon ironed their T-s.h.i.+rts.

I left the main conference hall and wandered into Room 518--the computer room--sat down on one of the two hotel beds which had been shoved into a corner to make room for all the computer gear, and watched. The conference organisers had moved enough equipment in there to open a store, and then connected it all to the Internet. For nearly three days, the room was almost continuously full. Boys in their late teens or early twenties lounged on the floor talking, playing with their cell phones and scanners or tapping away at one of the six or seven terminals. Empty bags of chips, c.o.ke cans and pizza boxes littered the room. The place felt like one giant college dorm floor party, except that the people didn't talk to each other so much as to their computers.

These weren't the only interesting people at the con. I met up with an older group of nonconformists in the computer industry, a sort of Austin intelligentsia. By older, I mean above the age of 26. They were interested in many of the same issues as the young group of hackers--privacy, encryption, the future of a digital world--and they all had technical backgrounds.

This loose group of blue-jean clad thinkers, people like Doug Barnes, Jeremy Porter and Jim McCoy, like to meet over enchiladas and margueritas at university-style cafes. They always seemed to have three or four projects on the run. Digital cash was the flavour of the month when I met them. They were unconventional, perhaps even a little weird, but they were also bright, very creative and highly innovative.

They were just the sort of people who might marry creative ideas with maturity and business sense, eventually making widespread digital cash a reality.

I began to wonder how many of the young men in Room 518 might follow the same path. And I asked myself: where are these people in Australia?

Largely invisible or perhaps even non-existent, it seems. Except maybe in the computer underground. The underground appears to be one of the few places in Australia where madness, creativity, obsession, addiction and rebellion collide like atoms in a cyclotron.

After the raids, the arrests and the court cases on three continents, what became of the hackers described in this book?

Most of them went on to do interesting and constructive things with their lives. Those who were interviewed for this work say they have given up hacking for good. After what many of them had been through, I would be surprised if any of them continued hacking.

Most of them, however, are not sorry for their hacking activities.

Some are sorry they upset people. They feel badly that they caused system admins stress and unhappiness by hacking their systems. But most do not feel hacking is wrong--and few, if any, feel that 'look-see hacking', as prosecuting barrister Geoff Chettle termed non-malicious hacking, should be a crime.

For the most part, their punishments have only hardened their views on the subject. They know that in many cases the authorities have sought to make examples of them, for the benefit of rest of the computer underground. The state has largely failed in this objective. In the eyes of many in the computer underground, these prosecuted hackers are heroes.

PAR

When I met Par in Tucson, Arizona, he had travelled from a tiny, snow-laden Mid-Western town where he was living with his grandparents.

He was looking for work, but hadn't been able to find anything.

As I drove around the outskirts of Tucson, a little jetlagged and disoriented, I was often distracted from the road by the beauty of the winter sun on the Sonoran desert cacti. Sitting in the front pa.s.senger seat, Par said calmly, 'I always wondered what it would be like to drive on the wrong side of the road'.

I swerved back to the right side of the road.

Par is still like that. Easy-going, rolling with the punches, taking what life hands him. He is also on the road again.

He moved back to the west coast for a while, but will likely pack up and go somewhere else before long. He picks up temporary work where he can, often just basic, dull data-entry stuff. It isn't easy. He can't just explain away a four-year gap in his resume with 'Successfully completed a telecommuting course for fugitives. Trained by the US Secret Service'. He thought he might like to work at a local college computer lab, helping out the students and generally keeping the equipment running. Without any professional qualifications, that seemed an unlikely option these days.

Although he is no longer a fugitive, Par's life hasn't changed that much. He speaks to his mother very occasionally, though they don't have much in common. Escaping his computer crimes charges proved easier than overcoming the effects of being a fugitive for so long on his personality and lifestyle. Now and again, the paranoia sets in again. It seems to come in waves. There aren't many support mechanisms in the US for an unemployed young man who doesn't have health insurance.

PRIME SUSPECT

Prime Suspect has no regrets about his choices. He believed that he and Mendax were headed in different directions in life. The friends.h.i.+p would have ended anyway, so he decided that he was not willing to go to prison for Mendax.

He completed a TAFE course in computer programming and found a job in the burgeoning Internet industry. He likes his job. His employer, who knows about his hacking convictions, recently gave him a pay rise. In mid-1994, he gave up drugs for good. In 1995 he moved into a shared house with some friends, and in August 1996 he stopped smoking cigarettes.

Without hacking, there seems to be time in his life to do new things.