Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (13 page)

Somewhere in this transition, the Phreakers Five sprung to life. A group of five hackers-turned-phreakers gathered in an exclusive group on PI. Tales of their late-night podding adventures leaked into the other areas of the BBS and made would-be phreakers green with jealousy.

First, the phreakers would scout out a telephone pod--the grey steel, rounded box perched nondescriptly on most streets. Ideally, the chosen pod would be by a park or some other public area likely to be deserted at night. Pods directly in front of suburban houses were a bit risky--the house might contain a nosy little old lady with a penchant for calling the local police if anything looked suspicious. And what she would see, if she peered out from behind her lace curtains, was a small tornado of action.

One of the five would leap from the van and open the pod with a key begged, borrowed or stolen from a Telecom technician. The keys seemed easy enough to obtain. The BBSes message boards were rife with gleeful tales of valuable Telecom equipment, such as 500 metres of cable or a pod key, procured off a visiting Telecom repairman either through legitimate means or in exchange for a six-pack of beer.

The designated phreaker would poke inside the pod until he found someone else’s phone line. He’d strip back the cable, whack on a pair of alligator clips and, if he wanted to make a voice call, run it to a linesman’s handset also borrowed, bought or stolen from Telecom. If he wanted to call another computer instead of talking voice, he would need to extend the phone line back to the phreakers’ car. This is where the 500 metres of Telecom cable came in handy. A long cable meant the car, containing five anxious, whispering young men and a veritable junkyard of equipment, would not have to sit next to the pod for hours on end. That sort of scene might look a little suspicious to a local resident out walking his or her dog late one night.

The phreaker ran the cable down the street and, if possible, around the corner. He pulled it into the car and attached it to the waiting computer modem. At least one of the five was proficient enough with electronics hardware to have rigged up the computer and modem to the car battery. The Phreaker’s Five could now call any computer without being traced or billed. The phone call charges would appear at the end of a local resident’s phone bill. Telecom did not itemise residential telephone bills at the time. True, it was a major drama to zoom around suburban streets in the middle of the night with computers, alligator clips and battery adaptors in tow, but that didn’t matter so much. In fact, the thrill of such a cloak-and-dagger operation was as good as the actual hacking itself. It was illicit. In the phreakers’ own eyes, it was clever. And therefore it was fun.

Craig Bowen didn’t think much of the Phreakers Five’s style of phreaking. In fact, the whole growth of phreaking as a pastime depressed him a bit. He believed it just didn’t require the technical skills of proper hacking. Hacking was, in his view, about the exploration of a brave new world of computers. Phreaking was, well, a bit beneath a good hacker. Somehow it demeaned the task at hand.

Still, he could see how in some cases it was necessary in order to continue hacking. Most people in the underground developed some basic skills in phreaking, though people like Bowen always viewed it more as a means to an end--just a way of getting from computer A to computer B, nothing more. Nonetheless, he allowed phreaking discussion areas in the private sections of PI.

What he refused to allow was discussion areas around credit card fraud. Carding was anathema to Bowen and he watched with alarm as some members of the underground began to shift from phreaking into carding.

Like the transition into phreaking, the move into carding was a logical progression. It occurred over a period of perhaps six months in 1988 and was as obvious as a group of giggling schoolgirls.

Many phreakers saw it simply as another type of phreaking. In fact it was a lot less hassle than manipulating some company’s PABX. Instead, you just call up an operator, give him some stranger’s credit card number to pay for the call, and you were on your way. Of course, the credit cards had a broader range of uses than the PABXes. The advent of carding meant you could telephone your friends in the US or UK and have a long voice conference call with all of them simultaneously--something which could be a lot tougher to arrange on a PABX. There were other benefits. You could actually charge things with that credit card. As in goods. Mail order goods.

One member of the underground who used the handle Ivan Trotsky, allegedly ordered $50000 worth of goods, including a jet ski, from the US on a stolen card, only to leave it sitting on the Australian docks.

The Customs guys don’t tend to take stolen credit cards for duty payments. In another instance, Trotsky was allegedly more successful.

A try-hard hacker who kept pictures of Karl Marx and Lenin taped to the side of his computer terminal, Trotsky regularly spewed communist doctrine across the underground. A self-contained paradox, he spent his time attending Communist Party of Australia meetings and duck shoots. According to one hacker, Trotsky’s particular contribution to the overthrow of the capitalist order was the arrangement of a shipment of expensive modems from the US using stolen credit cards. He was rumoured to have made a tidy profit by selling the modems in the computer community for about $200 each. Apparently, being part of the communist revolution gave him all sorts of ready-made rationalisations. Membership has its advantages.

To Bowen, carding was little more than theft. Hacking may have been a moral issue, but in early 1988 in Australia it was not yet much of a legal one. Carding was by contrast both a moral and a legal issue.

Bowen recognised that some people viewed hacking as a type of theft--stealing someone else’s computer resources--but the argument was ambiguous. What if no-one needed those resources at 2 a.m. on a given night? It might be seen more as ‘borrowing’ an under-used asset, since the hacker had not permanently appropriated any property. Not so for carding.

What made carding even less noble was that it required the technical skill of a wind-up toy. Not only was it beneath most good hackers, it attracted the wrong sort of people into the hacking scene. People who had little or no respect for the early Australian underground’s golden rules of hacking: don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information. For most early Australian hackers, visiting someone else’s system was a bit like visiting a national park. Leave it as you find it.

While the cream seemed to rise to the top of the hacking hierarchy, it was the scum that floated at the top of the carding community. Few people in the underground typified this more completely than Blue Thunder, who had been hanging around the outskirts of the Melbourne underground since at least 1986. The senior hackers treated Blue Blunder, as they sometimes called him, with great derision.

His entrance into the underground was as ignominious as that of a debutante who, delicately descending the grand steps of the ballroom, trips and tumbles head-first onto the dance floor. He picked a fight with the grande doyenne of the Melbourne underground.

The Real Article occupied a special place in the underground. For starters, The Real Article was a woman--perhaps the only female to play a major role in the early Melbourne underground scene. Although she didn’t hack computers, she knew a lot about them. She ran The Real Connection, a BBS frequented by many of the hackers who hung out on PI. She wasn’t somebody’s sister wafting in and out of the picture in search of a boyfriend. She was older. She was as good as married. She had kids. She was a force to be reckoned with in the hacking community.

Forthright and formidable, The Real Article commanded considerable respect among the underground. A good indicator of this respect was the fact that the members of H.A.C.K. had inducted her as an honorary member of their exclusive club. Perhaps it was because she ran a popular board. More likely it was because, for all their bluff and bluster, most hackers were young men with the problems of young men. Being older and wiser, The Real Article knew how to lend a sympathetic ear to those problems. As a woman and a non-hacker, she was removed from the jumble of male ego hierarchical problems associated with confiding in a peer. She served as a sort of mother to the embryonic hacking community, but she was young enough to avoid the judgmental pitfalls most parents fall into with children.

The Real Article and Blue Thunder went into partnership running a BBS

in early 1986. Blue Thunder, then a high-school student, was desperate to run a board, so she let him co-sysop the system. At first the partnership worked. Blue Thunder used to bring his high-school essays over for her to proofread and correct. But a short time into the partnership, it went sour. The Real Article didn’t like Blue Thunder’s approach to running a BBS, which appeared to her to be get information from other hackers and then dump them. The specific strategy seemed to be: get hackers to logon and store their valuable information on the BBS, steal that information and then lock them out of their own account. By locking them out, he was able to steal all the glory; he could then claim the hacking secrets were his own. It was, in her opinion, not only unsustainable, but quite immoral. She parted ways with Blue Thunder and excommunicated him from her BBS.

Not long after, The Real Article started getting harassing phone calls at 4 in the morning. The calls were relentless. Four a.m. on the dot, every night. The voice at the other end of the line was computer synthesised. This was followed by a picture of a machine-gun, printed out on a cheap dot matrix printer in Commodore ASCII, delivered in her letterbox. There was a threatening message attached which read something like, ‘If you want the kids to stay alive, get them out of the house’.

After that came the brick through the window. It landed in the back of her TV. Then she woke up one morning to find her phone line dead.

Someone had opened the Telecom well in the nature strip across the road and cut out a metre of cable. It meant the phone lines for the entire street were down.

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 harassing 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 Institute 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, hello 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.