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He listens to the background noises during telephone conversations. 'What's that?' he asks abruptly, in mid-conversation. 'Did you hear a hum?'

'It's OK, John. I'm sitting beside my computer.'
'It's not a computer hum. It's a monitoring hum.'

Now aged forty-eight, Captain Crunch is still being watched by the authorities. He is afraid to phreak and out of work. In January 1992 the spiritual leader of the computer underworld was staring at a financial abyss: he had cut down on watching television and had traded down the wattage in his lightbulbs, just to save electricity.

He was mostly worried about finding the money to pay his phone bill. He was afraid that it might be disconnected. It would be unthinkable for Captain Crunch to be without a phone.

When one door shuts another opens.

The computer underworld is still a growing force, despite the raid, despite the crackdown and the Secret Service. The heirs to Captain Crunch are continuing the tradition.

If one hacker board gets raided, another springs up. If one gang gets busted, another forms.

There is no organized structure in the computer underworld, no mysterious chairman of the board to run things. The underground is anarchic, a confederation of phreakers/hackers and virus writers from all over the world whose common interests transcend culture or language. Most hackers have two or three handles and operate on a number of boards. They change IDs, aliases, sites, their methods, targets and gang membership as rapidly as the authorities track them. Stamping out hacking is like trying to pin down mercury.

Captain Crunch once described hackers as the Silicon Brotherhood. Membership of the Brotherhood is fluid, informal and subjective - you're a member when you know you are. At a guess there are about 2,000 members of the Brotherhood now, world-wide; that means 2,000 of the best - the really dedicated, experienced, probably obsessive, computer freaks. That's not many, but there are probably another 10,000 wannabees.

Most of the Brotherhood keep in touch across Cyberspace. Most probably know one another only through their common passion. The

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