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

well until he experienced tunnel vision while watching the judge read his penalty. He perused the room but saw neither Phoenix nor Nom.

When Judge Anthony Smith summarised the charges, he seemed to have a special interest in count number 13—the Zardoz charge. A few minutes into reading the sentence, the judge said, `In my view, a custodial sentence is appropriate for each of the offences constituted by the 12th, 13th and 14th counts’. They were the `knowingly concerned’ charges, with Phoenix, involving NASA, LLNL and CSIRO. Electron looked around the courtroom. People turned back to stare at him. Their eyes said, `You are going to prison’.

`I formed the view that a custodial sentence is appropriate in respect of each of these offences because of the seriousness of them,’ Judge Smith noted, `and having regard to the need to demonstrate that the community will not tolerate this type of offence.

`Our society today is … increasingly … dependent upon the use of computer technology. Conduct of the kind in which you engaged poses a threat to the usefulness of that technology … It is incumbent upon the courts … to see to it that the sentences they impose reflect the gravity of this kind of criminality.

`On each of Counts 12, 13 and 14, you are convicted and you are sentenced to a term of imprisonment of six months … each … to be concurrent.’

The judge paused, then continued, `And … I direct, by order, that you be released forthwith upon your giving security by recognisance … in the sum of $500 … You will not be required to serve the terms of imprisonment imposed, provided you are of good behaviour for the ensuing six months.’ He then ordered Electron to complete 300 hours of community service, and to submit to psychiatric assessment and treatment.

Electron breathed a sigh of relief.

When outlining the mitigating circumstances which led to suspension of the jail sentence, Judge Smith described Electron as being addicted to using his computer `in much the same way as an alcoholic becomes addicted to the bottle’. Boris Kayser had used the analogy in the sentencing hearing, perhaps for the benefit of the media, but the judge had obviously been swayed by his view.

When court adjourned, Electron left the dock and shook hands with his lawyers. After three years, he was almost free of his court problems. There was only one possible reason he might need to return to court.

If Phoenix fought out his case in a full criminal trial, the DPP would put Electron on the stand to testify against him. It would be an ugly scene.

The inmates of HM Prison Kirkham, on the north-west coast of England, near Preston, had heard all about Pad and Gandalf by the time they arrived. They greeted the hackers by name. They’d seen the reports on telly, especially about how Gandalf had hacked NASA—complete with footage of the space shuttle taking off. Some TV reporter’s idea of subtle irony—`Two hackers were sent down today’ as the space shuttle went up.

Kirkham was far better than Brixton, where the hackers had spent the first days of their sentence while awaiting transfer. Brixton was what Pad always envisioned prison would look like, with floors of barred cells facing onto an open centre and prisoners only allowed out of their cells for scheduled events such as time in the yard. It was a place where hard-core criminals lived. Fortunately, Pad and Gandalf had been placed in the same cell while they waited to be assigned to their final destination.

After ten days inside Brixton Pad and Gandalf were led from their cell, handcuffed and put in a coach heading toward the windy west coast.

During the drive, Pad kept looking down at his hand, locked in shiny steel to Gandalf’s hand, then he looked back up again at his fellow hacker. Clearing his throat and turning away from Gandalf’s difficult grin—his friend now on the edge of laughing himself—Pad struggled. He tried to hold down the muscles of his face, to pull them back from laughter.

A minimum security prison holding up to 632 prisoners, Kirkham looked vaguely like a World War II RAF base with a large collection of free-standing buildings around the grounds. There were no real walls, just a small wire fence which Pad soon learned prisoners routinely jumped when the place started to get to them.

For a prison, Kirkham was pretty good. There was a duck pond, a bowling green, a sort of mini-cinema which showed films in the early evenings, eight pay phones, a football field, a cricket pavilion and, best of all, lots of fields. Prisoners could have visits on weekday afternoons between 1.10 and 3.40, or on the weekend.

Luck smiled on the two hackers. They were assigned to the same billet and, since none of the other prisoners objected, they became room-mates. Since they were sentenced in May, they would serve their time during summer. If they were `of good behaviour’ and didn’t get into trouble with other prisoners, they would be out in three months.

Like any prison, Kirkham had its share of prisoners who didn’t get along with each other. Mostly, prisoners wanted to know what you were in for and, more particularly, if you had been convicted of a sex crime. They didn’t like sex crime offenders and Pad heard about a pack of Kirkham prisoners who dragged one of their own, screaming, to a tree, where they tried to hang him for being a suspected rapist. In fact, the prisoner hadn’t been convicted of anything like rape. He had simply refused to pay his poll tax.

Fortunately for Pad and Gandalf, everyone else in Kirkham knew why they were there. At the end of their first week they returned to their room one afternoon to find a sign painted above their door. It said, `NASA HQ’.

The other minimum security prisoners understood hacking—and they had all sorts of ideas about how you could make money from it. Most of the prisoners in Kirkham were in for petty theft, credit card fraud, and other small-time crimes. There was also a phreaker, who arrived the same day as Pad and Gandalf. He landed eight months in prison—two more than the 8lgm hackers—and Pad wondered what kind of message that sent the underground.

Despite their best efforts, the 8lgm twosome didn’t fit quite the prison mould. In the evenings, other prisoners spent their free time shooting pool or taking drugs. In the bedroom down the hall, Gandalf lounged on his bed studying a book on VMS internals. Pad read a computer magazine and listened to some indie music—often his `Babes in Toyland’ tape. In a parody of prison movies, the two hackers marked off their days inside the prison with cross-hatched lines on their bedroom wall—four marks, then a diagonal line through them. They wrote other things on the walls too.

The long, light-filled days of summer flowed one into the other, as Pad and Gandalf fell into the rhythm of the prison. The morning check-in at 8.30 to make sure none of the prisoners had gone walkabout. The dash across the bowling green for a breakfast of beans, bacon, eggs, toast and sausage. The walk to the greenhouses where the two hackers had been assigned for work detail.

The work wasn’t hard. A little digging in the pots. Weeding around the baby lettuce heads, watering the green peppers and transplanting tomato seedlings. When the greenhouses became too warm by late morning, Pad and Gandalf wandered outside for a bit of air. They often talked about girls, cracking crude, boyish jokes about women and occasionally discussing their girlfriends more seriously. As the heat settled in, they sat down, lounging against the side of the greenhouse.

After lunch, followed by more time in the greenhouse, Pad and Gandalf sometimes went off for walks in the fields surrounding the prison. First the football field, then the paddocks dotted with cows beyond it.

Pad was a likeable fellow, largely because of his easygoing style and relaxed sense of humour. But liking him wasn’t the same as knowing him, and the humour often deflected deeper probing into his personality. But Gandalf knew him, understood him. Everything was so easy with Gandalf. During the long, sunny walks, the conversation flowed as easily as the light breeze through the grass.

As they wandered in the fields, Pad often wore his denim jacket. Most of the clothes on offer from the prison clothing office were drab blue, but Pad had lucked onto this wonderful, cool denim jacket which he took to wearing all the time.

Walking for hours on end along the perimeters of the prison grounds, Pad saw how easy it would be to escape, but in the end there didn’t seem to be much point. They way he saw it, the police would just catch you and put you back in again. Then you’d have to serve extra time.

Once a week, Pad’s parents came to visit him, but the few precious hours of visiting time were more for his parents’ benefit than his own. He reassured them that he was OK, and when they looked him in the face and saw it was true, they stopped worrying quite so much. They brought him news from home, including the fact that his computer equipment had been returned by one of the police who had been in the original raid.

The officer asked Pad’s mother how the hacker was doing in prison. `Very well indeed,’ she told him. `Prison’s not nearly so bad as he thought.’ The officer’s face crumpled into a disappointed frown. He seemed to be looking for news that Pad was suffering nothing but misery.

At the end of almost three months, with faces well tanned from walking in the meadows, Pad and Gandalf walked free.

To the casual witness sitting nearby in the courtroom, the tension between Phoenix’s mother and father was almost palpable. They were not sitting near each other but that didn’t mitigate the silent hostility which rose through the air like steam. Phoenix’s divorced parents provided a stark contrast to Nom’s adopted parents, an older, suburban couple who were very much married.

On Wednesday, 25 August 1993 Phoenix and Nom pleaded guilty to fifteen and two charges respectively. The combined weight of the prosecution’s evidence, the risk and cost of running a full trial and the need to get on with their lives had pushed them over the edge. Electron didn’t need to come to court to give evidence.

At the plea hearing, which ran over to the next day, Phoenix’s lawyer, Dyson Hore-Lacy, spent considerable time sketching the messy divorce of his client’s parents for the benefit of the judge. Suggesting Phoenix retreated into his computer during the bitter separation and divorce was the best chance of getting him off a prison term. Most of all, the defence presented Phoenix as a young man who had strayed off the correct path in life but was now back on track—holding down a job and having a life.

The DPP had gone in hard against Phoenix. They seemed to want a jail term badly and they doggedly presented Phoenix as an arrogant braggart. The court heard a tape-recording of Phoenix ringing up security guru Edward DeHart of the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University to brag about a security exploit. Phoenix told DeHart to get onto his computer and then proceeded to walk him step by step through the `passwd f’ security bug. Ironically, it was Electron who had discovered that security hole and taught it to Phoenix-a fact Phoenix didn’t seem to want to mention to DeHart.

The head of the AFP’s Southern Region Computer Crimes Unit, Detective Sergeant Ken Day was in court that day. There was no way he was going to miss this. The same witness noting the tension between Phoenix’s parents