Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontierDreyfus, Suelette
Science
Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier
Dreyfus, Suelette
Computer crimes -- Australia; Computer hackers -- Australia -- Biography; Computer security -- Australia
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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