One member of the underground who used the handle Ivan Trotsky, allegedly ordered $50000 worth of goods, including a jet ski, from the US on a stolen card, only to leave it sitting on the Australian docks. The Customs guys don't tend to take stolen credit cards for duty payments. In another instance, Trotsky was allegedly more successful. A try-hard hacker who kept pictures of Karl Marx and Lenin taped to the side of his computer terminal, Trotsky regularly spewed communist doctrine across the underground. A self-contained paradox, he spent his time attending Communist Party of Australia meetings and duck shoots. According to one hacker, Trotsky's particular contribution to the overthrow of the capitalist order was the arrangement of a shipment of expensive modems from the US using stolen credit cards. He was rumoured to have made a tidy profit by selling the modems in the computer community for about $200 each. Apparently, being part of the communist revolution gave him all sorts of ready-made rationalisations. Membership has its advantages. To Bowen, carding was little more than theft. Hacking may have been a moral issue, but in early 1988 in Australia it was not yet much of a legal one. Carding was by contrast both a moral and a legal issue. Bowen recognised that some people viewed hacking as a type of theft--stealing someone else's computer resources--but the argument was ambiguous. What if no-one needed those resources at 2 a.m. on a given night? It might be seen more as `borrowing' an under-used asset, since the hacker had not permanently appropriated any property. Not so for carding. What made carding even less noble was that it required the technical skill of a wind-up toy. Not only was it beneath most good hackers, it attracted the wrong sort of people into the hacking scene. People who had little or no respect for the early Australian underground's golden rules of hacking: don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information. For most early Australian hackers, visiting someone else's system was a bit like visiting a national park. Leave it as you find it. While the cream seemed to rise to the top of the hacking hierarchy, it was the scum that floated at the top of the carding community. Few people in the underground typified this more completely than Blue Thunder, who had been hanging around the outskirts of the Melbourne underground since at least 1986. The senior hackers treated Blue Blunder, as they sometimes called him, with great derision. His entrance into the underground was as ignominious as that of a debutante who, delicately descending the grand steps of the ballroom, trips and tumbles head-first onto the dance floor. He picked a fight with the grande doyenne of the Melbourne underground.