Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier — John Shaqi
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
During Par's time on the run, the international computer underground
was a small and strongly connected place. We had already
co-incidentally interviewed half a dozen hackers he had communicated
with at various times during his zig-zag flight across America. Suelette
also spoke at length to his lead lawyer Richard Rosen, who, after
getting the all-clear from Par, was kind enough to send us a copy of
the legal brief. We had logs of messages Par had written on
underground BBS's. We had data intercepts of other hackers in
conversation with Par. We had obtained various Secret Service documents
and propriety security reports relating to Par's activities. I had
extensively interviewed his Swiss girlfriend Theorem (who had also been
involved with Electron and Pengo), and yes, she did have a melting
French accent.
Altogether we had an enormous amount of material on Par's activities,
all of which was consistent with what Par had said during his
interviews, but none of it, including Rosen's file, contained any
reference to Black Mountain, NC. Rosen, Theorem and others had heard
about a SS raid on the run, yet when the story was traced back, it
always led to one source. To Par.
Was Par having us on? Par had said that he had made a telephone call to
Theorem in Switzerland from a phone booth outside the motel a day or
two before the Secret Service raid. During a storm. Not just any
storm. Hurricane Hugo. But archival news reports on Hugo discussed it
hitting South Carolina, not North Carolina. And not Black
Mountain. Theorem remembered Par calling once during a storm. But not
Hugo. And she didn't remember it in relation to the Black Mountain
raid.
Par had destroyed most of his legal documents, in circumstances that
become clear in the book, but of the hundreds of pages of documentary
material we had obtained from other sources there was wasn't a single
mention of Black Mountain. The Black Mountain Motel didn't seem to
exist. Par said Nibbler had moved and couldn't be located. Dozens of
calls by Suelette to the Secret Service told us what we didn't want to
hear. The agents we thought most likely to have been involved in the
the hypothetical Black Mountain incident had either left the Secret
Service or were otherwise unreachable. The Secret Service had no idea
who would have been involved, because while Par was still listed in the
Secret Service central database, his profile, contained three
significant annotations:
1. Another agency had ``borrowed'' parts Par's file.
2. There were medical ``issues'' surrounding Par.
3. SS documents covering the time of Black Mountain incident had been destroyed for various reasons that become clear the book.
4. The remaining SS documents had been moved into ``deep-storage'' and would take two weeks to retrieve.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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