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 passenger 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.