📸

time. In 1981 there was no comprehensive computer fraud law so Pat was ‘shoehorned’ – his expression – into the existing criminal statutes.

There are advantages to being a child of privilege. Though Pat’s colleagues were also arrested (there were five arrests in total, including Pat and Doctor Diode) and some turned state’s evidence in exchange for a light sentence, Pat’s father’s money bought him the services of two of Philadelphia’s biggest law firms. After looking at the evidence one of the lawyers turned to Pat and said: ‘No jury will ever understand what you did and no jury will ever convict you for ripping off the phone company.’

The lawyer’s words were not put to the test. The charges against Pat were plea-bargained down to a $1,000 fine and two and a half years’ ‘phone probation’ – meaning that Pat had to report to his probation officer by calling in. Pat still thinks it’s amusing that a convicted phreaker and hacker was required to report in by telephone.

In the wake of the Captain Zap case the American authorities reassessed the threat of computer hacking. By the mid-1980s almost every state had criminalized ‘theft by browsing’ – that is, hacking into computers to see what’s there. The first federal law on computer crime, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, was passed in 1986.

The contrast between the leniency shown Captain Zap for what was, in the end, hacking for profit, and the treatment meted out to Nick Whiteley in England for schoolboyish pranks nine years later is illustrative of the changes in the authorities’ perception of hacking over the decade. In 1981, when Captain Zap was arrested, his lawyer was probably correct in assuming that no jury would have understood the prosecution’s case. By 1990 Nick was almost certainly right in saying the courts were determined to throw the book at him.

The authorities’ awareness of hacking and the existence of a technological underground that was subverting the integrity of computer security had grown through the decade. Hacking – though probably only dimly understood by most of the public – became a fashionable threat, explained in long, analytical articles in newspapers and described in detail by stylish magazines. Computer security experts (and some hackers) were invited on to TV talk shows, to paint the

📸