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ted Police and the Ontario Provincial Police. Security agents from MCI, Sprint, AT&T as well as nine Bell phone companies provided technical assistance.

On 24 May 1989 the Secret Service asked local authorities in six cities for assistance to mount raids on Doucette’s Chicago apartment and the addresses of five other major hackers in the ring. Prior to the raids the authorities compiled a list of equipment that was to be seized: telephones and speed dialling devices; computers and peripherals; diskettes; cassette tapes; video tapes; records and documents; computer or data processing literature; bills, letters, invoices or any other material relating to occupancy; information pertaining to access device codes; and ‘degaussing’ equipment.⁵

The raid on Doucette’s Chicago apartment produced a lode of access codes. Moore found a book listing the numbers for 171 AT&T, ITT and other telephone cards, as well as authorization codes for 39 PBXs. In addition, the agents found numbers for 118 Visa cards, 150 MasterCards and two American Express cards.

Doucette admitted that she was Kyrie. Later, in the Secret Service offices, she confessed to operating code lines, trafficking stolen numbers and receiving unauthorized Western Union money orders. She was held in custody without bond and indicted on seventeen counts of violating federal computer, access device and telecom fraud laws between January 1988 and May 1989.

Estimates of the costs of Doucette’s activities varied. On the day of her arrest, she was accused of causing ‘$200,000 in losses . . . by corporations and telephone service providers’. Later it was announced that ‘substantially more than $1.6 million in losses were suffered’ by credit card companies and telephone carriers.

Doucette’s was a high profile arrest, the first federal prosecution for hacking VM systems and trafficking in access devices. The prosecution was determined that Doucette would be made an example of; her case, the authorities said, would reflect ‘a new reality for hackers’ in the 1990s – the certainty of ‘meaningful punishment’. If convicted of all charges, Doucette could have faced eighty-nine years’ imprisonment, a $69,000 fine and $1.6 million in restitution charges.

The case was plea-bargained. Doucette admitted to one count; the other charges were dismissed. On 17 August 1990 Doucette, then

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