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unnamed contributor to 2600, the hacker journal. The US Attorney’s office in Chicago, then in the midst of its own hacker case, responded by saying it intended to prosecute ‘aggressively’.

The Chicago case, though less publicized than the Mitnick affair, was the first test of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 1987 local law enforcement agencies began watching a sixteen-year-old hacker and high school drop-out named Herbert Zinn, Jr, who used the handle Shadow Hawk. The law enforcement officials spent two months investigating Zinn, auditing its calls and monitoring his activities on computers.

He was subsequently accused of using a PC and a modem to hack into a Bell Laboratories’ computer, an AT&T computer in North Carolina, another AT&T computer at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia, an IBM facility in New York and other computers belonging to the Illinois Bell Telephone Company and the Rochester Telephone Company. He was also accused of copying documents from the computers, including what were called ‘highly sensitive’ programs relating to the US Missile Command.

Shadow Hawk was arrested in a raid involving the FBI, AT&T security representatives and Chicago police. In 1989 he was sentenced to nine months in prison and fined $10,000.

The Mitnick and Shadow Hawk cases fuelled the growing concern among US law enforcement agencies about hacking. By the end of the decade, the Secret Service – which was now charged with investigating computer crime, a responsibility partly, and not entirely amicably, shared with the FBI – had set up a unit simply to monitor electronic pirate bulletin boards. A number of states and local police forces organized their own computer crime sections, while separate investigations of the underground were mounted by US Attorneys’ offices and local prosecutors. As the 1980s turned into the 1990s it could not be said that the American law enforcement agencies were ignoring computer crime.

Across the Atlantic, away from the prying eyes of the American authorities, the biggest international gathering of hackers ever organized took place in Amsterdam in early August 1989.

The assembly was held in the seedy confines of the Paradiso, a

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