Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (38 page)

The stories of Wandii’s self-confessed addiction overwhelmed, appalled and eventually engendered pity in the courtroom audience. The media began calling him ‘the hermit hacker’.

Wandii’s defence team couldn’t fight the prosecution’s evidence head-on, so they took the prosecution’s evidence and claimed it as their own. They showed the jury that Wandii hadn’t just hacked the institutions named by the prosecution; he had hacked far, far more than that. He didn’t just hack a lot--he hacked too much. Most of all, Wandii’s defence team gave the jury a reason to acquit the innocent-faced young man sitting before them.

During the trial, the media focused on Wandii, but didn’t completely ignore the other two hackers. Computer Weekly hunted down where Gandalf was working and laid it bare on the front page. A member of

‘the UK’s most notorious hacking gang’, the journal announced, had been working on software which would be used at Barclay’s Bank.7 The implication was clear. Gandalf was a terrible security risk and should never be allowed to do any work for a financial institution. The report irked the hackers, but they tried to concentrate on preparing for their sentencing hearing.

From the beginning of their case, the hackers had problems obtaining certain evidence. Pad and Gandalf believed some of the material seized in the police raids would substantially help their case--such as messages from admins thanking them for pointing out security holes on their systems. This material had not been included in the prosecution’s brief. When the defendants requested access to it, they were refused access on the grounds that there was classified data on the optical disk. They were told to go read the Attorney-General’s guidelines on disclosure of information. The evidence of the hackers’

forays into military and government systems was jumbled in with their intrusions into computers such as benign JANET systems, the defence team was told. It would take too much time to separate the two.

Eventually, after some wrangling, Pad and Gandalf were told they could inspect and copy material--provided it was done under the supervision of the police. The hackers travelled to London, to Holborn police station, to gather supporting evidence for their case. However, it soon became clear that this time-consuming exercise would be impossible to manage on an ongoing basis. Finally, the Crown Prosecution Service relented, agreeing to release the material on disk to Pad’s solicitor, on the proviso that no copies were made, it did not leave the law office, and it was returned at the end of the trial.

As Wandii’s case lurched from revelation to exaggeration, Pad and Gandalf busily continued to prepare for their own sentencing hearing.

Every day, Gandalf travelled from Liverpool to Manchester to meet with his friend. They picked up a handful of newspapers at the local agent, and then headed up to Pad’s lawyer’s office. After a quick scan for articles covering the hacking case, the two hackers began sifting through the reluctantly released prosecution disks. They read through the material on computer, under the watchful eye of the law office’s cashier--the most computer literate person in the firm.

After fifteen days in the Southwark courtroom listening to fantastic stories from both sides about the boy sitting before them, the jury in Wandii’s trial retired to consider the evidence. Before they left, Judge Harris gave them a stern warning: the argument that Wandii was obsessed or dependent was not a defence against the charges.

It took the jurors only 90 minutes to reach a decision, and when the verdict was read out the courtroom erupted with a wave of emotion.

Not guilty. On all counts.

Wandii’s mother burst into a huge smile and turned to her son, who was also smiling. And the defence team couldn’t be happier. Kelman told journalists, ‘The jury felt this was a sledge hammer being used to crack a nut’.8

The prosecution was stunned and the law enforcement agents flabbergasted. Detective Sergeant Barry Donovan found the verdict bizarre. No other case in his 21 years in law enforcement had as much overwhelming evidence as this one, yet the jury had let Wandii walk.

And in a high-pitched frenzy rivalling its earlier hysteria, the British media jumped all over the jury’s decision. ‘Hacker who ravaged systems walks free’, an indignant Guardian announced. ‘Computer Genius is cleared of hacking conspiracy’, said the Evening Standard. ‘Hacking

"addict" acquitted’, sniffed The Times. Overpowering them all was the Daily Telegraph’s page one: ‘Teenage computer addict who hacked White House system is cleared’.

Then came the media king-hit. Someone had leaked another story and it looked bad. The report, in the Mail on Sunday, said that the three hackers had broken into a Cray computer at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting at Bracknell. This computer, likes dozens of others, would normally have been relegated to the long list of unmentioned victims except for one thing. The US military used weather data from the centre for planning its attack on Iraq in the Gulf War. The media report claimed that the attack had slowed down the Cray’s calculations, thus endangering the whole Desert Storm operation. The paper announced the hackers had been ‘inadvertently jeopardising--almost fatally--the international effort against Saddam Hussein’ and had put ‘thousands of servicemen’s lives at risk’.9

Further, the paper alleged that the US State Department was so incensed about British hackers’ repeated break-ins disrupting Pentagon defence planning that it had complained to Prime Minister John Major.

The White House put the matter more bluntly than the State Department: Stop your hackers or we will cut off European access to our satellite which provides trans-Atlantic data and voice telecommunications.

Someone in Britain seemed to be listening, for less than twelve months later, authorities had arrested all three hackers.

Pad thought the allegations were rubbish. He had been inside a VAX

machine at the weather centre for a couple of hours one night, but he had never touched a Cray there. He had certainly never done anything to slow the machine down. No cracking programs, no scanners, nothing which might account for the delay described in the report. Even if he had been responsible, he found it hard to believe the Western allies’

victory in the Gulf War was determined by one computer in Berkshire.

All of which gave him cause to wonder why the media was running this story now, after Wandii’s acquittal but before he and Gandalf were sentenced. Sour grapes, perhaps?

For days, columnists, editorial and letter writers across Britain pontificated on the meaning of the Wandii’s verdict and the validity of an addiction to hacking as a defence. Some urged computer owners to take responsibility for securing their own systems. Others called for tougher hacking laws. A few echoed the view of The Times, which declared in an editorial, ‘a persistent car thief of [the hacker’s]

age would almost certainly have received a custodial sentence. Both crimes suggest disrespect for other people’s property ... the jurors may have failed to appreciate the seriousness of this kind of offence’.10

The debate flew forward, changing and growing, and expanding beyond Britain’s borders. In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post asked,

‘Is [this] case evidence of a new social phenomenon, with immature and susceptible minds being damaged through prolonged exposure to personal computers?’ The paper described public fear that Wandii’s case would result in ‘the green light for an army of computer-literate hooligans to pillage the world’s databases at will, pleading insanity when caught’.11

By April Fool’s Day 1991, more than two weeks after the end of the court case, Wandii had his own syndrome named after him, courtesy of The Guardian.

And while Wandii, his mother and his team of lawyers celebrated their victory quietly, the media reported that the Scotland Yard detectives commiserated over their defeat, which was considerably more serious than simply losing the Wandii case. The Computer Crimes Unit was being

‘reorganised’. Two experienced officers from the five-man unit were being moved out of the group. The official line was that the

‘rotations’ were normal Scotland Yard procedure. The unofficial word was that the Wandii case had been a fiasco, wasting time and money, and the debacle was not to be repeated.

In the north, a dark cloud gathered over Pad and Gandalf as their judgment day approached. The Wandii case verdict might have been cause for celebration among some in the computer underground, but it brought little joy for the other two 8lgm hackers.

For Pad and Gandalf, who had already pleaded guilty, Wandii’s acquittal was a disaster.

[ ]

On 12 May 1993, two months after Wandii’s acquittal, Boris Kayser stood up at the Bar table to put forward Electron’s case at the Australian hacker’s plea and sentencing hearing. As he began to speak, a hush fell over the Victorian County Court.

A tall, burly man with a booming voice, an imperious courtroom demeanour and his traditional black robes flowing behind him in an echo of his often emphatic gesticulations, Kayser was larger than life. A master showman, he knew how to play an audience of courtroom journalists sitting behind him as much as to the judge in front of him.

Electron had already stood in the dock and pleaded guilty to fourteen charges, as agreed with the DPP’s office. In typical style, Kayser had interrupted the long process of the court clerk reading out each charge and asking whether Electron would plead guilty or not guilty.

With an impatient wave of his hand, Kayser asked the judge to dispense with such formalities since his client would plead guilty to all the agreed charges at once. The interjection was more of an announcement than a question.

The formalities of a plea having been summarily dealt with, the question now at hand was sentencing. Electron wondered if he would be sent to prison. Despite lobbying from Electron’s lawyers, the DPP’s office had refused to recommend a non-custodial sentence. The best deal Electron’s lawyers had been able to arrange in exchange for turning Crown witness was for the DPP to remain silent on the issue of prison. The judge would make up his mind without input from the DPP.

Electron fiddled nervously with his father’s wedding ring, which he wore on his right hand. After his father’s death, Electron’s sister had begun taking things from the family home. Electron didn’t care much because there were only two things he really wanted: that ring and some of his father’s paintings.

Kayser called a handful of witnesses to support the case for a light sentence. Electron’s grandmother from Queensland. The family friend who had driven Electron to the hospital the day his father died.

Electron’s psychiatrist, the eminent Lester Walton. Walton in particular highlighted the difference between the two possible paths forward: prison, which would certainly traumatise an already mentally unstable young man, or freedom, which offered Electron a good chance of eventually establishing a normal life.

When Kayser began summarising the case for a non-custodial sentence, Electron could hear the pack of journalists off to his side frantically scribbling notes. He wanted to look at them, but he was afraid the judge would see his ponytail, carefully tucked into his neatly ironed white shirt, if he turned sideways,

‘Your Honour,’ Kayser glanced backward slightly, toward the court reporters, as he warmed up, ‘my client lived in an artificial world of electronic pulses.’

Scratch, scribble. Electron could almost predict, within half a second, when the journalists’ pencils and pens would reach a crescendo of activity. The ebb and flow of Boris’s boom was timed in the style of a TV newsreader.

Kayser said his client was addicted to the computer the way an alcoholic was obsessed with the bottle. More scratching, and lots of it. This client, Kayser thundered, had never sought to damage any system, steal money or make a profit. He was not malicious in the least, he was merely playing a game.

‘I think,’ Electron’s barrister concluded passionately, but slowly enough for every journalist to get it down on paper, ‘that he should have been called Little Jack Horner, who put in his thumb, pulled out a plumb and said, "What a good boy am I!"’

Now came the wait. The judge retired to his chambers to weigh up the pre-sentence report, Electron’s family situation, the fact that he had turned Crown witness, his offences--everything. Electron had given a nine-page written statement against Phoenix to the prosecution. If the Phoenix case went to trial, Electron would be put on the stand to back up that statement.

In the month before Electron returned to court to hear his sentence, he thought about how he could have fought the case. Some of the charges were dubious.

In one case, he had been charged with illegally accessing public information through a public account. He had accessed the anonymous FTP server at the University of Helsinki to copy information about DES. His first point of access had been through a hacked Melbourne University account.

Beat that charge, Electron’s lawyer had told him, and there’s plenty more where that came from. The DPP had good pickings and could make up a new charge for another site. Still, Electron reasoned some of the Crown’s evidence would not have stood up under cross-examination.

When reporters from Australia and overseas called NASA headquarters for comment on the hacker-induced network shutdown, the agency responded that it had no idea what they were talking about. There had been no NASA network shutdown. A spokesman made inquiries and, he assured the media, NASA was puzzled by the report. Sharon Beskenis’s statement didn’t seem so watertight after all. She was not, it turned out, even a NASA employee but a contractor from Lockheed.

During that month-long wait, Electron had trouble living down Kayser’s nursery-rhyme rendition in the courtroom. When he rang friends, they would open the conversation saying, ‘Oh, is that Little Jack Horner?’

They had all seen the nightly news, featuring Kayser and his client.

Kayser had looked grave leaving court, while Electron, wearing John Lennon-style glasses with dark lenses and with his shoulder-length curls pulled tightly back in a ponytail, had tried to smile at the camera crews. But his small, fine features and smattering of freckles disappeared under the harsh camera lights, so much so that the black, round spectacles seemed almost to float on a blank, white surface.