UNDERGROUND

he was unable to stop using them, and his infatuation made it impossible for him to choose freely. 'He repeated 12 times in police interviews, "I'm just addicted. I wish I wasn't",' Griffith Edwards told the court. Wandii was highly intelligent, but was unable to escape from the urge to beat computers' security systems at their own game. The hacker was obsessed by the intellectual challenge. 'This is the core . . . of what attracts the compulsive gambler,' the professor explained to the entranced jury of three women and nine men.

But Wandii, this obsessive, addicted, gifted young man, had never had a girlfriend, Griffith Edwards continued. In fact, he shyly admitted to the professor that he wouldn't even know how to ask a girl out. 'He [Wandii] became profoundly embar- rassed when asked to talk about his own feelings. He simply couldn't cope when asked what sort of person he was.'5

People in the jury edged forward in their seats, concentrating intently on the distinguished professor. And why wouldn't they? This was amazing stuff. This erudite man had delved inside the mind of the young man of bizarre contrasts. A man so sophisti- cated that he could pry open computers belonging to some of Britain's and Europe's most prestigious institutions, and yet at the same time so simple that he had no idea how to ask a girl on a date. A man who was addicted not to booze, smack or speed, which the average person associates with addiction, but to a computer - a machine most people associated with kids' games and word processing programs.

The defence proceeded to present vivid examples of Wandii's addiction. Wandii's mother, a single parent and lecturer in English, had terrible trouble trying to get her son away from his computer and modem. She tried hiding his modem. He found it. She tried again, hiding it at his grandmother's house. He burgled granny's home and retrieved it. His mother tried to get at his computer. He pushed her out of his attic room and down the stairs.

Then he ran up a £700 phone bill as a result of his hacking. His mother switched off the electricity at the mains. Her son