To avoid these requests, Bowen had tried to hide his address, real name and phone number from most of the people who used his BBSes. But he wasn't completely successful. He had been surprised by the sudden appearance one day of Masked Avenger on his doorstep. How Masked Avenger actually found his address was a mystery. The two had chatted in a friendly fashion on-line, but Bowen didn't give out his details. Nothing could have prepared him for the little kid in the big crash helmet standing by his bike in front of Bowen's house. `Hi!' he squeaked. `I'm the Masked Avenger!' Masked Avenger--a boy perhaps fifteen years old--was quite resourceful to have found out Bowen's details. Bowen invited him in and showed him the system. They became friends. But after that incident, Bowen decided to tighten security around his personal details even more. He began, in his own words, `moving toward full anonymity'. He invented the name Craig Bowen, and everyone in the underground came to know him by that name or his handle, Thunderbird1. He even opened a false bank account in the name of Bowen for the periodic voluntary donations users sent into PI. It was never a lot of money, mostly $5 or $10, because students don't tend to have much money. He ploughed it all back into PI. People had lots of reasons for wanting to get into the Inner Sanctum. Some wanted free copies of the latest software, usually pirated games from the US. Others wanted to share information and ideas about ways to break into computers, often those owned by local universities. Still others wanted to learn about how to manipulate the telephone system. The private areas functioned like a royal court, populated by aristocrats and courtiers with varying seniority, loyalties and rivalries. The areas involved an intricate social order and respect was the name of the game. If you wanted admission, you had to walk a delicate line between showing your superiors that you possessed enough valuable hacking information to be elite and not showing them so much they would brand you a blabbermouth. A perfect bargaining chip was an old password for Melbourne University's dial-out. The university's dial-out was a valuable thing. A hacker could ring up the university's computer, login as `modem' and the machine would drop him into a modem which let him dial out again. He could then dial anywhere in the world, and the university would foot the phone bill. In the late 1980s, before the days of cheap, accessible Internet connections, the university dial-out meant a hacker could access anything from an underground BBS in Germany to a US military system in Panama. The password put the world at his fingertips.