Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (56 page)

‘Your poor sick mum. How could you do this to your poor sick mum?

We’re going to have to take her to Melbourne for questioning, maybe even to charge her, arrest her, take her to jail. You make me sick. I feel sorry for a mother having a son like you who is going to cause her all this trouble.’

From that moment on, the tall officer took every opportunity to talk about Anthrax’s ‘poor sick mum’. He wouldn’t let up. Not that he probably knew the first thing about scleroderma, the creeping fatal disease which affected her. Anthrax often thought about the pain his mother was in as the disease worked its way from her extremities to her internal organs. Scleroderma toughened the skin on the fingers and feet, but made them overly sensitive, particularly to changes in weather. It typically affected women native to hot climates who moved to colder environments.

Anthrax’s mobile rang. His mother. It had to be. The police wouldn’t let him answer it.

The tall officer picked up the call, then turned to the stocky cop and said in a mocking Indian accent, ‘It is some woman with an Indian accent’. Anthrax felt like jumping out of his chair and grabbing the phone. He felt like doing some other things too, things that would have undoubtedly landed him in prison then and there.

The stocky cop nodded to the tall one, who handed the mobile to Anthrax.

At first, he couldn’t make sense of what his mother was saying. She was a terrified mess. Anthrax tried to calm her down. Then she tried to comfort him.

‘Don’t worry. It will be all right,’ she said it, over and over. No matter what Anthrax said, she repeated that phrase, like a chant. In trying to console him, she was actually calming herself. Anthrax listened to her trying to impose order on the chaos around her. He could hear noises in the background and he guessed it was the police rummaging through her home. Suddenly, she said she had to go and hung up.

Anthrax handed the phone back to the police and sat with his head in his hands. What a wretched situation. He couldn’t believe this was happening to him. How could the police seriously consider taking his mother to Melbourne for questioning? True, he phreaked from her home office phone, but she had no idea how to hack or phreak. As for charging his mother, that would just about kill her. In her mental and physical condition, she would simply collapse, maybe never to get up again.

He didn’t have many options. One of the cops was sealing up his mobile phone in a clear plastic bag and labelling it. It was physically impossible for him to call a lawyer, since the police wouldn’t let him use the mobile or go to a pay phone. They harangued him about coming to Melbourne for a police interview.

‘It is your best interest to cooperate,’ one of the cops told him. ‘It would be in your best interest to come with us now.’

Anthrax pondered that line for a moment, considered how ludicrous it sounded coming from a cop. Such a bald-faced lie told so matter-of-factly. It would have been humorous if the situation with his mother hadn’t been so awful. He agreed to an interview with the police, but it would have to be done on another day.

The cops wanted to search his car. Anthrax didn’t like it, but there was nothing incriminating in the car anyway. As he walked outside in the winter morning, one of the cops looked down at Anthrax’s feet, which were bare in accordance with the Muslim custom of removing shoes in the house. The cop asked if he was cold.

The other cop answered for Anthrax. ‘No. The fungus keeps them warm.’

Anthrax swallowed his anger. He was used to racism, and plenty of it, especially from cops. But this was over the top.

In the town where he attended uni, everyone thought he was Aboriginal.

There were only two races in that country town--white and Aboriginal.

Indian, Pakistani, Malay, Burmese, Sri Lankan--it didn’t matter. They were all Aboriginal, and were treated accordingly.

Once when he was talking on the pay phone across from his house, the police pulled up and asked him what he was doing there. Talking on the phone, he told them. It was pretty obvious. They asked for identification, made him empty his pockets, which contained his small mobile phone. They told him his mobile must be stolen, took it from him and ran a check on the serial number. Fifteen minutes and many more accusations later, they finally let him go with the flimsiest of apologies. ‘Well, you understand,’ one cop said. ‘We don’t see many of your type around here.’

Yeah. Anthrax understood. It looked pretty suspicious, a dark-skinned boy using a public telephone. Very suss indeed.

In fact, Anthrax had the last laugh. He had been on a phreaked call to Canada at the time and he hadn’t bothered to hang up when the cops arrived. Just told the other phreakers to hang on. After the police left, he picked up the conversation where he left off.

Incidents like that taught him that sometimes the better path was to toy with the cops. Let them play their little games. Pretend to be manipulated by them. Laugh at them silently and give them nothing. So he appeared to ignore the fungus comment and led the cops to his car.

They found nothing.

When the police finally packed up to leave, one of them handed Anthrax a business card with the AFP’s phone number.

‘Call us to arrange an interview time,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ Anthrax replied as he shut the door.

[ ]

Anthrax keep putting the police off. Every time they called hassling him for an interview, he said he was busy. But when they began ringing up his mum, he found himself in a quandary. They were threatening and yet reassuring to his mother all at the same time and spoke politely to her, even apologetically.

‘As bad as it sounds,’ one of them said, ‘we’re going to have to charge you with things Anthrax has done, hacking, phreaking, etc. if he doesn’t cooperate with us. We know it sounds funny, but we’re within our rights to do that. In fact that is what the law dictates because the phone is in your name.’

He followed this with the well-worn ‘it’s in your son’s best interest to cooperate’ line, delivered with cooing persuasion.

Anthrax wondered why there was no mention of charging his father, whose name appeared on the house’s main telephone number. That line also carried some illegal calls.

His mother worried. She asked her son to cooperate with the police.

Anthrax felt he had to protect his mother and finally agreed to a police interview after his uni exams. The only reason he did so was because of the police threat to charge his mother. He was sure that if they dragged his mother through court, her health would deteriorate and lead to an early death.

Anthrax’s father picked him up from uni on a fine November day and drove down to Melbourne. His mother had insisted that he attend the interview, since he knew all about the law and police. Anthrax didn’t mind having him along: he figured a witness might prevent any use of police muscle.

During the ride to the city, Anthrax talked about how he would handle the interview. The good news was that the AFP had said they wanted to interview him about his phreaking, not his hacking. He went to the interview understanding they would only be discussing his ‘recent stuff’--the phreaking. He had two possible approaches to the interview. He could come clean and admit everything, as his first lawyer had advised. Or he could pretend to cooperate and be evasive, which was what his instincts told him to do.

His father jumped all over the second option. ‘You have to cooperate fully. They will know if you are lying. They are trained to pick out lies. Tell them everything and they will go easier on you.’ Law and order all the way.

‘Who do they think they are anyway? The pigs.’ Anthrax looked away, disgusted at the thought of police harassing people like his mother.

‘Don’t call them pigs,’ his father snapped. ‘They are police officers.

If you are ever in trouble, they are the first people you are ever going to call.’

‘Oh yeah. What kind of trouble am I going to be in that the first people I call are the AFP?’ Anthrax replied.

Anthrax would put up with his father coming along so long as he kept his mouth shut during the interview. He certainly wasn’t there for personal support. They had a distant relationship at best. When his father began working in the town where Anthrax now lived and studied, his mother had tried to patch things between them. She suggested his father take Anthrax out for dinner once a week, to smooth things over.

Develop a relationship. They had dinner a handful of times and Anthrax listened to his father’s lectures. Admit you were wrong. Cooperate with the police. Get your life together. Own up to it all. Grow up. Be responsible. Stop being so useless. Stop being so stupid.

The lectures were a bit rich, Anthrax thought, considering that his father had benefited from Anthrax’s hacking skills. When he discovered Anthrax had got into a huge news clipping database, he asked the boy to pull up every article containing the word ‘prison’. Then he had him search for articles on discipline. The searches should have cost a fortune, probably thousands of dollars. But his father didn’t pay a cent, thanks to Anthrax. And he didn’t spend much time lecturing Anthrax on the evils of hacking then.

When they arrived at AFP headquarters, Anthrax made a point of putting his feet up on the leather couch in the reception area and opened a can of Coke he had brought along. His father got upset.

‘Get your feet off that seat. You shouldn’t have brought that can of Coke. It doesn’t look very professional.’

‘Hey, I’m not going for a job interview here,’ Anthrax responded.

Constable Andrew Sexton, a redhead sporting two earrings, came up to Anthrax and his father and took them upstairs for coffee. Detective Sergeant Ken Day, head of the Computer Crime Unit, was in a meeting, Sexton said, so the interview would be delayed a little.

Anthrax’s father and Sexton found they shared some interests in law enforcement. They discussed the problems associated with rehabilitation and prisoner discipline. Joked with each other.

Laughed. Talked about ‘young Anthrax’. Young Anthrax did this. Young Anthrax did that.

Young Anthrax felt sick. Watching his own father cosying up to the enemy, talking as if he wasn’t even there.

When Sexton went to check on whether Day had finished his meeting, Anthrax’s father growled, ‘Wipe that look of contempt off your face, young man. You are going to get nowhere in this world if you show that kind of attitude, they are going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.’

Anthrax didn’t know what to say. Why should he treat these people with any respect after the way they threatened his mother?

The interview room was small but very full. A dozen or more boxes, all filled with labelled print-outs.

Sexton began the interview. ‘Taped record of interview conducted at Australian Federal Police Headquarters, 383 Latrobe Street Melbourne on 29 November 1994.’ He reeled off the names of the people present and asked each to introduce himself for voice recognition.

‘As I have already stated, Detective Sergeant Day and I are making enquiries into your alleged involvement into the manipulation of private automated branch exchanges [PABXes] via Telecom 008 numbers in order to obtain free phone calls nationally and internationally. Do you clearly understand this allegation?’

‘Yes.’

Sexton continued with the necessary, and important, preliminaries. Did Anthrax understand that he was not obliged to answer any questions?

That he had the right to communicate with a lawyer? That he had attended the interview of his own free will? That he was free to leave at any time?

Yes, Anthrax said in answer to each question.

Sexton then ploughed through a few more standard procedures before he finally got to the meat of the issue--telephones. He fished around in one of the many boxes and pulled out a mobile phone. Anthrax confirmed that it was his phone.

‘Was that the phone that you used to call the 008 numbers and subsequent connections?’ Sexton asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Contained in that phone is a number of pre-set numbers. Do you agree?’

‘Yes.’

‘I went to the trouble of extracting those records from it.’ Sexton looked pleased with himself for hacking Anthrax’s speed-dial numbers from the mobile. ‘Number 22 is of some interest to myself. It comes up as Aaron. Could that be the person you referred to before as Aaron in South Australia?’

‘Yes, but he is always moving house. He is a hard person to track down.’

Sexton went through a few more numbers, most of which Anthrax hedged.

He asked Anthrax questions about his manipulation of the phone system, particularly about the way he made free calls overseas using Australian companies’ 008 numbers.

When Anthrax had patiently explained how it all worked, Sexton went through some more speed-dial numbers.

‘Number 43. Do you recognise that one?’

‘That’s the Swedish Party Line.’

‘What about these other numbers? Such as 78? And 30?’

‘I’m not sure. I couldn’t say what any of these are. It’s been so long,’ Anthrax paused, sensing the pressure from the other side of the table. ‘These ones here, they are numbers in my town. But I don’t know who. Very often, ’cause I don’t have any pen and paper with me, I just plug a number into the phone.’

Sexton looked unhappy. He decided to go in a little harder. ‘I’m going to be pretty blunt. So far you have admitted to the 008s but I think you are understating your knowledge and your experience when it comes to these sort of offences.’ He caught himself. ‘Not offences. But your involvement in all of this ... I think you have got a little bit more

... I’m not saying you are lying, don’t get me wrong, but you tend to be pulling yourself away from how far you were really into this. And how far everyone looked up to you.’

There was the gauntlet, thrown down on the table. Anthrax picked it up.

‘They looked up to me? That was just a perception. To be honest, I don’t know that much. I couldn’t tell you anything about telephone exchanges or anything like that. In the past, I guess the reason they might look up to me in the sense of a leader is because I was doing this, as you are probably aware, quite a bit in the past, and subsequently built up a reputation. Since then I decided I wouldn’t do it again.’