Underground, Suelette Dreyfus [ebook reader online .txt] 📗

The week after Electron pleaded guilty in Australia, Pad and Gandalf sat side by side in London’s Southwark dock one last time.

For a day and a half, beginning on 20 May 1993, the two hackers listened to their lawyers argue their defence. Yes, our clients hacked computers, they told the judge, but the offences were nowhere near as serious as the prosecution wants to paint them. The lawyers were fighting hard for one thing: to keep Pad and Gandalf out of prison.

Some of the hearing was tough going for the two hackers, but not just because of any sense of foreboding caused by the judge’s imminent decision. The problem was that Gandalf made Pad laugh, and it didn’t look at all good to laugh in the middle of your sentencing hearing. Sitting next to Gandalf for hours on end, while lawyers from both sides butchered the technical aspects of computer hacking which the 8lgm hackers had spent years learning, did it. Pad had only to give Gandalf a quick sidelong glance and he quickly found himself swallowing and clearing his throat to keep from bursting into laughter. Gandalf’s irrepressible irreverence was written all over his face.

The stern-faced Judge Harris could send them to jail, but he still wouldn’t understand. Like the gaggle of lawyers bickering at the front of the courtroom, the judge was—and would always be—out of the loop. None of them had any idea what was really going on inside the heads of the two hackers. None of them could ever understand what hacking was all about—the thrill of stalking a quarry or of using your wits to outsmart so-called experts; the pleasure of finally penetrating a much-desired machine and knowing that system is yours; the deep anti-establishment streak which served as a well-centred ballast against the most violent storms washing in from the outside world; and the camaraderie of the international hacking community on Altos.

The lawyers could talk about it, could put experts on the stand and psychological reports in the hands of the judge, but none of them would ever really comprehend because they had never experienced it. The rest of the courtroom was out of the loop, and Pad and Gandalf stared out from the dock as if looking through a two-way mirror from a secret, sealed room.

Pad’s big worry had been this third charge—the one which he faced alone. At his plea hearing, he had admitted to causing damage to a system owned by what was, in 1990, called the Polytechnic of Central London. He hadn’t damaged the machine by, say, erasing files, but the other side had claimed that the damages totalled about [sterling]250

000.

The hacker was sure there was zero chance the polytechnic had spent anything near that amount. He had a reasonable idea of how long it would take someone to clean up his intrusions. But if the prosecution could convince a judge to accept that figure, the hacker might be looking at a long prison term.

Pad had already braced himself for the possibility of prison. His lawyer warned him before the sentencing date that there was a reasonable likelihood the two 8lgm hackers would be sent down. After the Wandii case, the public pressure to `correct’ a `wrong’ decision by the Wandii jury was enormous. The police had described Wandii’s acquittal as `a licence to hack’—and The Times, had run the statement.12 It was likely the judge, who had presided over Wandii’s trial, would want to send a loud and clear message to the hacking community.

Pad thought that perhaps, if he and Gandalf had pleaded not guilty alongside Wandii, they would have been acquitted. But there was no way Pad would have subjected himself to the kind of public humiliation Wandii went through during the `addicted to computers’ evidence. The media appeared to want to paint the three hackers as pallid, scrawny, socially inept, geeky geniuses, and to a large degree Wandii’s lawyers had worked off this desire. Pad didn’t mind being viewed as highly intelligent, but he wasn’t a geek. He had a casual girlfriend. He went out dancing with friends or to hear bands in Manchester’s thriving alternative music scene. He worked out his upper body with weights at home. Shy—yes. A geek—no.

Could Pad have made a case for being addicted to hacking? Yes, although he never believed that he had been. Completely enthralled, entirely entranced? Maybe. Suffering from a passing obsession? Perhaps. But addicted? No, he didn’t think so. Besides, who knew for sure if a defence of addiction could have saved him from the prosecution’s claim anyway?

Exactly where the quarter of a million pound claim came from in the first place was a mystery to Pad. The police had just said it to him, as if it was fact, in the police interview. Pad hadn’t seen any proof, but that hadn’t stopped him from spending a great deal of time feeling very stressed about how the judge would view the matter.

The only answer seemed to be some good, independent technical advice. At the request of both Pad and Gandalf’s lawyers, Dr Peter Mills, of Manchester University, and Dr Russell Lloyd, of London Business School, had examined a large amount of technical evidence presented in the prosecution’s papers. In an independent report running to more than 23 pages, the experts stated that the hackers had caused less havoc than the prosecution alleged. In addition, Pad’s solicitor asked Dr Mills to specifically review, in a separate report, the evidence supporting the prosecution’s large damage claim.

Dr Mills stated that one of the police expert witnesses, a British Telecom employee, had said that Digital recommended a full rebuild of the system at the earliest possible opportunity—and at considerable cost. However, the BT expert had not stated that the cost was [sterling]250000 nor even mentioned if the cost quote which had been given had actually been accepted.

In fact, Dr Mills concluded that there was no supporting evidence at all for the quarter of a million pound claim. Not only that, but any test of reason based on the evidence provided by the prosecution showed the claim to be completely ridiculous.

In a separate report, Dr Mills’ stated that:

i) The machine concerned was a Vax 6320, this is quite a powerful `mainframe’ system and could support several hundreds of users.

ii) That a full dump of files takes 6 tapes, however since the type of tape is not specified this gives no real indication of the size of the filesystem. A tape could vary from 0.2 Gigabytes to 2.5 Gigabytes.

iii) The machine was down for three days.

With this brief information it is difficult to give an accurate cost for restoring the machine, however an over estimate would be:

i) Time spent in restoring the system, 10 man days at [sterling]300 per day; [sterling]3000.

ii) Lost time by users, 30 man days at [sterling]300 per day; [sterling]9000.

The total cost in my opinion is unlikely to be higher than [sterling]12000 and this itself is probably a rather high estimate. I certainly cannot see how a figure of [sterling]250000 could be justified.

It looked to Pad that the prosecution’s claim was not for damage at all. It was for properly securing the system—an entirely rebuilt system. It seemed to him that the police were trying to put the cost of securing the polytechnic’s entire computer network onto the shoulders of one hacker—and to call it damages. In fact, Pad discovered, the polytechnic had never actually even spent the [sterling]250000.

Pad was hopeful, but he was also angry. All along, the police had been threatening him with this huge damage bill. He had tossed and turned in his bed at night worrying about it. And, in the end, the figure put forward for so long as fact was nothing but an outrageous claim based on not a single shred of solid evidence.

Using Dr Mills’s report, Pad’s barrister, Mukhtar Hussain, QC, negotiated privately with the prosecution barrister, who finally relented and agreed to reduce the damage estimate to [sterling]15000. It was, in Pad’s view, still far too high, but it was much better than [sterling]250000. He was in no mind to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Judge Harris accepted the revised damage estimate.

The prosecution may have lost ground on the damage bill, but it wasn’t giving up the fight. These two hackers, James Richardson told the court and journalists during the two-day sentencing hearing, had hacked into some 10000 computer systems around the world. They were inside machines or networks in at least fifteen countries. Russia. India. France. Norway. Germany. The US. Canada. Belgium. Sweden. Italy. Taiwan. Singapore. Iceland. Australia. Officers on the case said the list of the hackers’ targets `read like an atlas’, Richardson told the court.

Pad listened to the list. It sounded about right. What didn’t sound right were the allegations that he or Gandalf had crashed Sweden’s telephone network by running an X.25 scanner over its packet network. The crash had forced a Swedish government minister to apologise on television. The police said the minister did not identify the true cause of the problem—the British hackers—in his public apology.

Pad had no idea what they were talking about. He hadn’t done anything like that to the Swedish phone system, and as far as he knew, neither had Gandalf.

Something else didn’t sound right. Richardson told the court that in total, the two hackers had racked up at least [sterling]25000 in phone bills for unsuspecting legitimate customers, and caused `damage’ to systems which was very conservatively estimated at almost [sterling]123000.

Where were these guys getting these numbers from? Pad marvelled at their cheek. He had been through the evidence with a fine-toothed comb, yet he had not seen one single bill showing what a site had actually paid to repair `damage’ caused by the hackers. The figures tossed around by the police and the prosecution weren’t real bills; they weren’t cast in iron.

Finally, on Friday 21 May, after all the evidence had been presented, the judge adjourned the court to consider sentencing. When he returned to the bench fifteen minutes later, Pad knew what was going to happen from the judge’s face. To the hacker, the expression said: I am going to give you everything that Wandii should have got.

Judge Harris echoed The Times’s sentiments when he told the two defendants, `If your passion had been cars rather than computers, we would have called your conduct delinquent, and I don’t shrink from the analogy of describing what you were doing as intellectual joyriding.

`Hacking is not harmless. Computers now form a central role in our lives. Some, providing emergency services, depend on their computers to deliver those services.‘13

Hackers needed to be given a clear signal that computer crime `will not and cannot be tolerated’, the judge said, adding that he had thought long and hard before handing down sentence. He accepted that neither hacker had intended to cause damage, but it was imperative to protect society’s computer systems and he would be failing in his public duty if he didn’t sentence the two hackers to a prison term of six months.

Judge Harris told the hackers that he had chosen a custodial sentence, `both to penalise you for what you have done and for the losses caused, and to deter others who might be similarly tempted’.

This was the show trial, not Wandii’s case, Pad thought as the court officers led him and Gandalf out of the dock, down to the prisoner’s lift behind the courtroom and into a jail cell.

Less than two weeks after Pad and Gandalf were sentenced, Electron was back in the Victorian County Court to discover his own fate.

As he stood in the dock on 3 June 1993 he felt numb, as emotionally removed from the scene as Meursault in Camus’ L’etranger. He believed he was handling the stress pretty