Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier Part 12

The Real Article tended to rise above the petty games that whining adolescent boys with bruised egos could play, but this was too much.

She called in Telecom Protective Services, who put a last party release on her phone line to trace the early-morning hara.s.sing calls.

She suspected Blue Thunder was involved, but nothing was ever proved.

Finally, the calls stopped. She voiced her suspicions to others in the computer underground. Whatever shred of reputation Blue Chunder, as he then became known for a time, had was soon decimated.

Since his own technical contributions were seen by his fellow BBS users as limited, Blue Thunder would likely have faded into obscurity, condemned to spend the rest of his time in the underground jumping around the ankles of the aristocratic hackers. But the birth of carding arrived at a fortuitous moment for him and he got into carding in a big way, so big in fact that he soon got busted.

People in the underground recognised him as a liability, both because of what many hackers saw as his loose morals and because he was boastful of his activities. One key hacker said, 'He seemed to relish the idea of getting caught. He told people he worked for a credit union and that he stole lots of credit card numbers. He sold information, such as accounts on systems, for financial gain.' In partnership with a carder, he also allegedly sent a bouquet of flowers to the police fraud squad--and paid for it with a stolen credit card number.

On 31 August 1988, Blue Thunder faced 22 charges in the Melbourne Magistrates Court, where he managed to get most of the charges dropped or amalgamated. He only ended up pleading guilty to five counts, including deception and theft. The Real Article sat in the back of the courtroom watching the proceedings. Blue Thunder must have been pretty worried about what kind of sentence the magistrate would hand down because she said he approached her during the lunch break and asked if she would appear as a character witness for the defence. She looked him straight in the eye and said, 'I think you would prefer it if I didn't'. He landed 200 hours of community service and an order to pay $706 in costs.

Craig Bowen didn't like where the part of the underground typified by Blue Thunder was headed. In his view, Chunder and Trotsky stood out as bad apples in an otherwise healthy group, and they signalled an unpleasant shift towards selling information. This was perhaps the greatest taboo. It was dirty. It was seedy. It was the realm of criminals, not explorers. The Australian computer underground had started to lose some of its fresh-faced innocence.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, a new player entered the Melbourne underground. His name was Stuart Gill, from a company called Hackwatch.

Bowen met Stuart through Kevin Fitzgerald, a well-known local hacker commentator who founded the Chisholm Inst.i.tute of Technology's Computer Abuse Research Bureau, which later became the Australian Computer Abuse Research Bureau. After seeing a newspaper article quoting Fitzgerald, Craig decided to ring up the man many members of the underground considered to be a hacker-catcher. Why not? There were no federal laws in Australia against hacking, so Bowen didn't feel that nervous about it. Besides, he wanted to meet the enemy. No-one from the Australian underground had ever done it before, and Bowen decided it was high time. He wanted to set the record straight with Fitzgerald, to let him know what hackers were really on about. They began to talk periodically on the phone.

Along the way, Bowen met Stuart Gill who said that he was working with Fitzgerald.4 Before long, Gill began visiting PI. Eventually, Bowen visited Gill in person at the Mount Martha home he shared with his elderly aunt and uncle. Stuart had all sorts of computer equipment hooked up there, and a great number of boxes of papers in the garage.

'Oh, h.e.l.lo there, Paul,' Gill's ancient-looking uncle said when he saw the twosome. As soon as the old man had tottered off, Gill pulled Bowen aside confidentially.

'Don't worry about old Eric,' he said. 'He lost it in the war. Today he thinks I'm Paul, tomorrow it will be someone else.'

Bowen nodded, understanding.

There were many strange things about Stuart Gill, all of which seemed to have a rational explanation, yet that explanation somehow never quite answered the question in full.

Aged in his late thirties, he was much older and far more worldly than Craig Bowen. He had very, very pale skin--so pasty it looked as though he had never sat in the sun in his life.

Gill drew Bowen into the complex web of his life. Soon he told the young hacker that he wasn't just running Hackwatch, he was also involved in intelligence work. For the Australian Federal Police. For ASIO. For the National Crime Authority. For the Victoria Police's Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI). He showed Bowen some secret computer files and doc.u.ments, but he made him sign a special form first--a legal-looking doc.u.ment demanding non-disclosure based on some sort of official secrets act.

Bowen was impressed. Why wouldn't he be? Gill's cloak-and-dagger world looked like the perfect boy's own adventure. Even bigger and better than hacking. He was a little strange, but that was part of the allure.

Like the time they took a trip to Sale together around Christmas 1988.

Gill told Bowen he had to get out of town for a few days--certain undesirable people were after him. He didn't drive, so could Craig help him out? Sure, no problem. They had shared an inexpensive motel room in Sale, paid for by Gill.

Being so close to Christmas, Stuart told Craig he had brought him two presents. Craig opened the first--a John Travolta fitness book. When Craig opened the second gift, he was a little stunned. It was a red G-string for men. Craig didn't have a girlfriend at the time--perhaps Stuart was trying to help him get one.

'Oh, ah, thanks,' Craig said, a bit confused.

'Glad you like it,' Stuart said. 'Go on. Try it on.'

'Try it on?' Craig was now very confused.

'Yeah, mate, you know, to see if it fits. That's all.'

'Oh, um, right.'

Craig hesitated. He didn't want to seem rude. It was a weird request, but never having been given a G-string before, he didn't know the normal protocol. After all, when someone gives you a jumper, it's normal for them to ask you to try it on, then and there, to see if it fits.

Craig tried it on. Quickly.

'Yes, seems to fit,' Stuart said matter of factly, then turned away.

Craig felt relieved. He changed back into his clothing.

That night, and on many others during their trips or during Craig's overnight visits to Stuart's uncle's house, Craig lay in bed wondering about his secretive new friend.

Stuart was definitely a little weird, but he seemed to like women so Craig figured he couldn't be interested in Craig that way. Stuart bragged that he had a very close relationship with a female newspaper reporter, and he always seemed to be chatting up the girl at the video store.

Craig tried not to read too much into Stuart's odd behaviour, for the young man was willing to forgive his friend's eccentricities just to be part of the action. Soon Stuart asked Craig for access to PI--unrestricted access.

The idea made Craig uncomfortable, but Stuart was so persuasive. How would he be able to continue his vital intelligence work without access to Victoria's most important hacking board? Besides, Stuart Gill of Hackwatch wasn't after innocent-faced hackers like Craig Bowen. In fact, he would protect Bowen when the police came down on everyone. What Stuart really wanted was the carders--the fraudsters.

Craig didn't want to protect people like that, did he?

Craig found it a little odd, as usual, that Stuart seemed to be after the carders, yet he had chummed up with Ivan Trotsky. Still, there were no doubt secrets Stuart couldn't reveal--things he wasn't allowed to explain because of his intelligence work.

Craig agreed.

What Craig couldn't have known as he pondered Stuart Gill from the safety of his boyish bedroom was exactly how much innocence the underground was still to lose. If he had foreseen the next few years--the police raids, the Ombudsman's investigation, the stream of newspaper articles and the court cases--Craig Bowen would, at that very moment, probably have reached over and turned off his beloved PI and Zen forever.

Chapter 3 -- The American Connection.

US forces give the nod; It's a setback for your country.

-- from 'US Forces', 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Force had a secret. The Parmaster wanted it.

Like most hackers, The Parmaster didn't just want the secret, he needed it. He was in that peculiar state attained by real hackers where they will do just about anything to obtain a certain piece of information. He was obsessed.

Of course, it wasn't the first time The Parmaster craved a juicy piece of information. Both he and Force knew all about infatuation. That's how it worked with real hackers. They didn't just fancy a t.i.tbit here and there. Once they knew information about a particular system was available, that there was a hidden entrance, they chased it down relentlessly. So that was exactly what Par was doing. Chasing Force endlessly, until he got what he wanted.

It began innocently enough as idle conversation between two giants in the computer underground in the first half of 1988. Force, the well-known Australian hacker who ran the exclusive Realm BBS in Melbourne, sat chatting with Par, the American master of X.25 networks, in Germany. Neither of them was physically in Germany, but Altos was.

Altos Computer Systems in Hamburg ran a conference feature called Altos Chat on one of its machines. You could call up from anywhere on the X.25 data communications network, and the company's computer would let you connect. Once connected, with a few brief keystrokes, the German machine would drop you into a real-time, on-screen talk session with anyone else who happened to be on-line. While the rest of the company's computer system grunted and toiled with everyday labours, this corner of the machine was reserved for live on-line chatting. For free. It was like an early form of the Internet Relay Chat. The company probably hadn't meant to become the world's most prestigious hacker hang-out, but it soon ended up doing so.

Altos was the first significant international live chat channel, and for most hackers it was an amazing thing. The good hackers had cruised through lots of computer networks around the world. Sometimes they b.u.mped into one another on-line and exchanged the latest gossip.

Occasionally, they logged into overseas BBSes, where they posted messages. But Altos was different. While underground BBSes had a tendency to simply disappear one day, gone forever, Altos was always there. It was live. Instantaneous communications with a dozen other hackers from all sorts of exotic places. Italy. Canada. France.

England. Israel. The US. And all these people not only shared an interest in computer networks but also a flagrant contempt for authority of any type. Instant, real-time penpals--with att.i.tude.

However, Altos was more exclusive than the average underground BBS.

Wanna-be hackers had trouble getting into it because of the way X.25 networks were billed. Some systems on the network took reverse-charge connections--like a 1-800 number--and some, including Altos, didn't.

To get to Altos you needed a company's NUI (Network User Identifier), which was like a calling card number for the X.25 network, used to bill your time on-line. Or you had to have access to a system like Minerva which automatically accepted billing for all the connections made.

X.25 networks are different in various ways from the Internet, which developed later. X.25 networks use different communication protocols and, unlike the Internet at the user-level, they only use addresses containing numbers not letters. Each packet of information travelling over a data network needs to be encased in a particular type of envelope. A 'letter' sent across the X.25 network needs an X.25 'stamped' envelope, not an Internet 'stamped' envelope.

The X.25 networks were controlled by a few very large players, companies such as Telenet and Tymnet, while the modern Internet is, by contrast, a fragmented collection of many small and medium-sized sites.