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from a vice grip’, according to Barlow.⁸ Baxter was in Wyoming to talk about high-tech crime, but hackers were not his usual beat. He readily told Barlow that ‘my eight year old knows more about computers than I do’.

Baxter was investigating the theft of the operating system source code for the Macintosh computer. According to Baxter, it had been stolen by the ‘New Prosthesis League’, who were threatening to destroy the American company by releasing the code to East Asian manufacturers of Apple clones.

Briefed at length by his San Francisco office, Agent Baxter confided to Barlow that the FBI would like to interview John Draper – otherwise known as Captain Crunch, the legendary phreaker. Draper, the FBI believed, was a known member of the Hackers’ Conference, an underground association with likely connections to the New Prosthesis League, and he was thought to have Soviet contacts. The FBI believed also that Draper was the chief executive of Autodesk, a software company with many top-secret government Star Wars contracts.

Jurisdiction for this particular investigation had fallen to the FBI, not the Secret Service. It was one of the oddities of US law enforcement that while the responsibilities of the two agencies overlapped, their intelligence and resources were almost never pooled. And in this case the FBI agent’s information, Barlow knew, was almost completely wrong. It was so off-the-wall that Barlow felt even he might be a suspect.

Barlow knew that Draper wasn’t the chief executive of Autodesk, though he had worked there as a programmer for a time. And Autodesk was not a major Star Wars contractor. Also, the Hackers’ Conference wasn’t an underground association, but an annual gathering of the nation’s brightest and most respected computer experts, by invitation only. As for the New Prosthesis League, Barlow presumed that the agent was referring to the self-styled nuPrometheus League, which had been circulating filched copies of the Macintosh code to annoy Apple. Opinion in the computer underground was that the code was probably picked up by kids who’d been dumpster diving. The ethos at Apple had changed since 1979. Then it was a small

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