that. We came to understand that system. Now part of that computer system is ours. We have taken it back for general ownership.’
None of us ever harmed anybody or caused any damage in our night-time forays, but we were never naive enough to think that the authorities would see it that way. By about 1988, the Australian authorities were trying to establish some test cases to justify a new Computer Crimes Bill, and it was clear I had to be careful. I used to hide my floppy disks inside the beehive. I was sure the guys from the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence wouldn’t risk getting stung for real as they went about their sting.
There were some totally inspired hackers who were friends of mine: Phoenix, Trax and Prime Suspect. The latter two bonded together with me into a group we called the International Subversives. We were doing nightly raids on the Canadian telecom company, Nortel, on NASA and on the Pentagon. One time, I got the passwords I needed to access the Overseas Telecoms Commission by phoning their office in Perth pretending to be a colleague. As I spoke, I played around me a tape I had made of fake office noise – photocopiers whirring, keyboards clicking, a hum of conversation – just to create the right ambience for my fraud. They came up with the password in seconds. It sounds playful, and in a way it was, I suppose. But when the new legislation came in we went from feeling like climbers breaking into a nature reserve to explore, to criminals facing ten years in jail. Some of my friends had already been busted, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I got raided.
In the event, my brother let them in. He was only eleven. By sheer good fortune I wasn’t there. Anyway, the police had no evidence and the whole raid was a fishing expedition. There was a lot of fiction doing the rounds about hackers stealing from Citibank. Bullshit, actually. We were worried about stealing electricity to run our computers, and stealing phone calls and postage, but money, no. Far from looking for commercial gain, we were careful not to destroy anything in our path. If we hacked a system then we repaired our way back out of it, leaving, oftentimes, a back door to let ourselves back in again.
They started tapping some of our phones on a 24-hour basis. It was weird, and the weirdness crept into the characters of some of those kids. True to say, some of us were weird anyway, coming from what are now called dysfunctional families, where addictions had played a part, where disguises were already part of the picture. That was true enough of me, and I was probably one of the less obsessive kids. My friend Trax, for instance, had always been eccentric and seemed to suffer some kind of anxiety disorder. He hated to travel, rarely came to the city and once made reference to seeing a psychiatrist. But I have often found that the most interesting people are a little unusual, and Trax was both.
Hacking was a way for us to connect with other kids who didn’t feel like hostages to normality. We wanted to go our own way and we had an instinct for questioning authority. In my case, I was born into that instinct. We were born into a permissive society, but our generation was perhaps more questioning of what permission meant. We weren’t into ’60s psychobabble about freedom – neither were my parents, who always felt the hippies were appallingly apolitical – and what we wanted to do was not protest abusive power but unseat it. If we were at all subversive, it was the kind of subversion that worked from the inside. We had the same mindset as the boys who were running the computer systems. We knew the language and had cracked their codes. The question would increasingly become one of following the inevitable, following the logic of what we had discovered and seeing how it held society to account. Around the time of the Australian bicentenary, 1988, there was a new confidence, a new abundance of home computers, a new vibrancy in popular culture, and a sense among my kind that the military–industrial complex of bombing people and buying stuff should be subverted. We grew up fast and made ready for trouble. We were already being targeted by the Bureau.
It is probably right to say I was more political than many of my friends. I had always believed, and still believe, that oppressive forces draw much of their strength from their ability to wield their power in secret. It wasn’t long before I realised, from my experience inside the systems, that the ‘clandestine’ zone might be the right place to confront them. Hacking gave us a start. We knew from the hysteria our fun had created, and from the new government legislation, that we had hit upon something fundamental about how secrets were hidden. Governments were scared: much more scared, it turns out, than they were of people demonstrating in the street or throwing petrol bombs over barricades. The Internet would offer a model of insurrection that baffled corrupt authority with plain science. It said, ‘You no longer control how I think of you.’
One Australian headline, of 1990, read: ‘When sharing your disc can be as dangerous as sharing a needle.’ This manages to get information-sharing to sound like Aids-spreading, which is pretty much the level of attack we’ve been dealing with ever since. We were Ned Kelly; we were Robin Hood; we were the Mongol hordes: but, in fact, we were young men in our late teens, discovering what made the world tick and then asking why certain clocks were rigged. We had a finger on the pulse of our new technology and, when the opportunity arose, we wished to use our knowledge for justice and decency. But many people didn’t want that. Many authorities hated us. It has been the major element in the story of my life – lock him up, keep him quiet.
Only now, twenty years later, can I see how I was running on nervous energy. I thought high pressure was just how it rolled in a young life, never having known an extended period of calm since I was about ten. The sheer size of our trespassing was beginning to make me shudder. We were kids, and finally we were dealing with forces so sinister, and so powerful, it began to dawn on each of us that we would not only be raided but also that we would likely be marked for life. The world was full of Goliaths and we were vulnerable. Time teaches you – or my time has taught me, anyhow – the ways of smearing and avenging that characterise the powerful when they are forced into a corner. You learn to hold your position, correct errors where you can, keep your chin up and never forget that people who fight grand public liars have always been vilified. The wiles of vilification would become almost comic in my case, but, back then, as a teenager not quite ready for handcuffs, it was hard to keep my bottle. After the raid on my mother’s house I felt the shadowy forces getting nearer and nearer. I wiped all my disks and burned all my printouts and ran away from the suburbs with my girlfriend to live in a squat in the city. Life on the run had begun again in earnest, and it would never stop.
5
The International Subversives were different from other hackers. Some hackers were noisy, leaving footprints everywhere. But we were silent and contemplative. We operated like ghosts, haunting the halls of power, passing like ectoplasm through keyholes and under doors. I always felt hacking was like looking at a painting. You see the canvas, you see the achievement, the movement of the paint and the drawing-out of themes. But what you were really looking for, if you were like us, was the flaw. And once you found it, the flaw in the picture, you worked on it until it became larger and took over. At one point, we wanted to take over the world of communications. Can you imagine that, not as a science-fiction trope or a crazy comic-book imagining, but as a real possibility in the mind of a bunch of teenagers? It sounds ridiculous, but we found our own keyholes into the inner workings of vast corporations, and we installed others, until we found we would be able to control their whole system. Turn off 20,000 phone lines in Buenos Aires? No problem. Give New Yorkers free telephone calls for an afternoon with no good reason? Do it.
But the stakes were high. There were many trials for the hackers before my own. The legislation was new and was finding its feet, and we watched those steps with our breath held and our self-esteem high, knowing it would be our turn next. We saw ourselves as a group of young freedom fighters under fire from forces that just didn’t get what it was all about. That’s how we saw those trials, though to others, to Australians in thrall to American corporations or to secret servicemen crazy at being outwitted, we were the dangerous harbingers of a new kind of white-collar crime. We sniggered at that – through the vanity and confidence of
