There were other active hacking communities outside Australia--in the north of England, in Texas, in New York. But the Melbourne hackers weren't just noisy--they were noisy inside American computers. It wasn't just a case of American hackers breaking into American systems. This was about foreign nationals penetrating American computers. And there was something else which made the Australian hackers a target. The US Secret Service knew an Australian named Phoenix had been inside Citibank, one of the biggest financial institutions in the US. Gavin didn't have many details to give Force. All he knew was that an American law enforcement agency--probably the Secret Service--had been putting enormous pressure on the Australian government to bust these people. What Gavin didn't know was that the Secret Service wasn't the only source of pressure coming from the other side of the Pacific. The FBI had also approached the Australian Federal Police about the mysterious but noisy Australian hackers who kept breaking into American systems,5 and the AFP had acted on the information. In late 1989, Detective Superintendent Ken Hunt of the AFP headed an investigation into the Melbourne hackers. It was believed to be the first major investigation of computer crime since the introduction of Australia's first federal anti-hacking laws. Like most law enforcement agencies around the world, the AFP were new players in the field of computer crime. Few officers had expertise in computers, let alone computer crime, so this case would prove to be an important proving ground.6 When Gavin broke the news, Force acted immediately. He called Phoenix on the phone, insisting on meeting him in person as soon as possible. As their friendship had progressed, they had moved from talking on-line to telephone conversations and finally to spending time together in person. Force sat Phoenix down alone and gave him a stern warning. He didn't tell him how he got his information, but he made it clear the source was reliable. The word was that the police felt they had to bust someone. It had come to the point where an American law enforcement officer had reportedly told his Australian counterpart, `If you don't do something about it soon, we'll do something about it ourselves'. The American hadn't bothered to elaborate on just how they might do something about it, but it didn't matter. Phoenix looked suddenly pale. He had certainly been very noisy, and was breaking into systems virtually all the time now. Many of those systems were in the US. He certainly didn't want to end up like the West German hacker Hagbard, whose petrol-doused, charred remains had been discovered in a German forest in June 1989. An associate of Pengo's, Hagbard had been involved in a ring of German hackers who sold the information they found in American computers to a KGB agent in East Germany from 1986 to 1988.