Underground by Suelette Dreyfus (top rated books of all time txt) 📕

When his wife left him, she didn’t just take their toddler child. She took a number of things which had sentimental value to Mendax. When she insisted on taking the CD player she had given him for his twentieth birthday just a few months before, he asked her to leave a lock of her hair behind for him in its place. He still couldn’t believe his wife of three years had packed up and left him.

The last week of October had been a bad one for Mendax. Heartbroken, he had sunk into a deep depression. He hadn’t eaten properly for days, he drifted in and out of a tortured sleep, and he had even lost the desire to use his computer. His prized hacking disks, filled with highly incriminating stolen computer access codes, were normally stored in a secure hiding place. But on the evening of 29 October 1991, thirteen disks were strewn around his $700 Amiga 500. A fourteenth disk was in the computer’s disk drive.

Mendax sat on a couch reading Soledad Brother, the prison letters from George Jackson’s nine-year stint in one of the toughest prisons in the US. Convicted for a petty crime, Jackson was supposed to be released after a short sentence but was kept in the prison at the governor’s pleasure. The criminal justice system kept him on a merry-go-round of hope and despair as the authorities dragged their feet. Later, prison guards shot and killed Jackson. The book was one of Mendax’s favourites, but it offered little distraction from his unhappiness.

The droning sound of a telephone fault signal—like a busy signal—filled the house. Mendax had hooked up his stereo speakers to his modem and computer, effectively creating a speaker phone so he could listen to tones he piped from his computer into the telephone line and the ones which came back from the exchange in reply. It was perfect for using Trax’s MFC phreaking methods.

Mendax also used the system for scanning. Most of the time, he picked telephone prefixes in the Melbourne CBD. When his modem hit another, Mendax would rush to his computer and note the telephone number for future hacking exploration.

By adjusting the device, he could also make it simulate a phreaker’s black box. The box would confuse the telephone exchange into thinking he had not answered his phone, thus allowing Mendax’s friends to call him for free for 90 seconds.

On this night, however, the only signal Mendax was sending out was that he wanted to be left alone. He hadn’t been calling any computer systems. The abandoned phone, with no connection to a remote modem, had timed out and was beeping off the hook.

It was strange behaviour for someone who had spent most of his teenage years trying to connect to the outside world through telephone lines and computers, but Mendax had listened all day to the hypnotic sound of a phone off the hook resonating through each room. BEEEP. Pause. BEEEP. Pause. Endlessly.

A loud knock at the door punctured the stereo thrum of the phone.

Mendax looked up from his book to see a shadowy figure through the frosted glass panes of the front door. The figure was quite short. It looked remarkably like Ratface, an old school friend of Mendax’s wife and a character known for his practical jokes.

Mendax called out, `Who is it?’ without moving from the sofa.

`Police. Open up.’

Yeah, sure. At 11.30 p.m.? Mendax rolled his eyes toward the door. Everyone knew that the police only raid your house in the early morning, when they know you are asleep and vulnerable.

Mendax dreamed of police raids all the time. He dreamed of footsteps crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 a.m. He dreamed of waking from a deep sleep to find several police officers standing over his bed. The dreams were very disturbing. They accentuated his growing paranoia that the police were watching him, following him.

The dreams had become so real that Mendax often became agitated in the dead hour before dawn. At the close of an all-night hacking session, he would begin to feel very tense, very strung out. It was not until the computer disks, filled with stolen computer files from his hacking adventures, were stored safely in their hiding place that he would begin to calm down.

`Go away, Ratface, I’m not in the mood,’ Mendax said, returning to his book.

The voice became louder, more insistent, `Police. Open the door. NOW’. Other figures were moving around behind the glass, shoving police badges and guns against the window pane. Hell. It really was the police!

Mendax’s heart started racing. He asked the police to show him their search warrant. They obliged immediately, pressing it against the glass as well. Mendax opened the door to find nearly a dozen plain-clothes police waiting for him.

`I don’t believe this,’ he said in a bewildered voice `My wife just left me. Can’t you come back later?’

At the front of the police entourage was Detective Sergeant Ken Day, head of the AFP’s Computer Crimes Unit in the southern region. The two knew all about each other, but had never met in person. Day spoke first.

`I’m Ken Day. I believe you’ve been expecting me.’

Mendax and his fellow IS hackers had been expecting the AFP. For weeks they had been intercepting electronic mail suggesting that the police were closing the net. So when Day turned up saying, `I believe you’ve been expecting me,’ he was completing the information circle. The circle of the police watching the hackers watching the police watch them.

It’s just that Mendax didn’t expect the police at that particular moment. His mind was a tangle and he looked in disbelief at the band of officers on his front step. Dazed, he looked at Day and then spoke out loud, as if talking to himself, `But you’re too short to be a cop.’

Day looked surprised. `Is that meant to be an insult?’ he said.

It wasn’t. Mendax was in denial and it wasn’t until the police had slipped past him into the house that the reality of the situation slowly began to sink in. Mendax’s mind started to work again.

The disks. The damn disks. The beehive.

An avid apiarist, Mendax kept his own hive. Bees fascinated him. He liked to watch them interact, to see their sophisticated social structure. So it was with particular pleasure that he enlisted their help in hiding his hacking activities. For months he had meticulously secreted the disks in the hive. It was the ideal location—unlikely, and well guarded by 60000 flying things with stings. Though he hadn’t bought the hive specifically for hiding stolen computer account passwords for the likes of the US Air Force 7th Command Group in the Pentagon, it appeared to be a secure hiding place.

He had replaced the cover of the super box, which housed the honeycomb, with a sheet of coloured glass so he could watch the bees at work. In summer, he put a weather protector over the glass. The white plastic cover had raised edges and could be fastened securely to the glass sheet with metal clasps. As Mendax considered his improvements to the bee box, he realised that this hive could provide more than honey. He carefully laid out the disks between the glass and the weather protector. They fitted perfectly in the small gap.

Mendax had even trained the bees not to attack him as he removed and replaced the disks every day. He collected sweat from his armpits on tissues and then soaked the tissues in a sugar water solution. He fed this sweaty nectar to the bees. Mendax wanted the bees to associate him with flowers instead of a bear, the bees’ natural enemy.

But on the evening of the AFP raid Mendax’s incriminating disks were in full view on the computer table and the officers headed straight for them. Ken Day couldn’t have hoped for better evidence. The disks were full of stolen userlists, encrypted passwords, cracked passwords, modem telephone numbers, documents revealing security flaws in various computer systems, and details of the AFP’s own investigation—all from computer systems Mendax had penetrated illegally.

Mendax’s problems weren’t confined to the beehive disks. The last thing he had done on the computer the day before was still on screen. It was a list of some 1500 accounts, their passwords, the dates that Mendax had obtained them and a few small notes beside each one.

The hacker stood to the side as the police and two Telecom Protective Services officers swarmed through the house. They photographed his computer equipment and gathered up disks, then ripped up the carpet so they could videotape the telephone cord running to his modem. They scooped up every book, no small task since Mendax was an avid reader, and held each one upside down looking for hidden computer passwords on loose pieces of paper. They grabbed every bit of paper with handwriting on it and poured through his love letters, notebooks and private diaries. `We don’t care how long it takes to do this job,’ one cop quipped. `We’re getting paid overtime. And danger money.’

The feds even riffled through Mendax’s collection of old Scientific American and New Scientist magazines. Maybe they thought he had underlined a word somewhere and turned it into a passphrase for an encryption program.

Of course, there was only one magazine the feds really wanted: International Subversive. They scooped up every print-out of the electronic journal they could find.

As Mendax watched the federal police sift through his possessions and disassemble his computer room, an officer who had some expertise with Amigas arrived. He told Mendax to get the hell out of the computer room.

Mendax didn’t want to leave the room. He wasn’t under arrest and wanted to make sure the police didn’t plant anything. So he looked at the cop and said, `This is my house and I want to stay in this room. Am I under arrest or not?’

The cop snarled back at him, `Do you want to be under arrest?’

Mendax acquiesced and Day, who was far more subtle in his approach, walked the hacker into another room for questioning. He turned to Mendax and asked, with a slight grin, `So, what’s it like being busted? Is it like Nom told you?’

Mendax froze.

There were only two ways that Day could have known Nom had told Mendax about his bust. Nom might have told him, but this was highly unlikely. Nom’s hacking case had not yet gone to court and Nom wasn’t exactly on chummy terms with the police. The other alternative was that the AFP had been tapping telephones in Mendax’s circle of hackers, which the IS trio had strongly suspected. Talking in a three-way phone conversation with Mendax and Trax, Nom had relayed the story of his bust. Mendax later relayed Nom’s story to Prime Suspect—also on the phone. Harbouring suspicions is one thing. Having them confirmed by a senior AFP officer is quite another.

Day pulled out a tape recorder, put it on the table, turned it on and began asking questions. When Mendax told Day he wouldn’t answer him, Day turned the recorder off. `We can talk off the record if you want,’ he told the hacker.

Mendax nearly laughed out loud. Police were not journalists. There was no such thing as an off-the-record conversation between a suspect and a police officer.

Mendax asked to speak to a lawyer. He said he wanted to call Alphaline, a free after-hours legal advice telephone service. Day agreed, but when he picked up the telephone to inspect it before handing it over to Mendax, something seemed amiss. The phone had an unusual, middle-pitched tone which Day didn’t seem to recognise.