Judgement Day

‘Your Honour,’ Kayser glanced backward slightly, toward the court reporters, as he warmed up, ‘my client lived in an artificial world of electronic pulses.’

Scratch, scribble. Electron could almost predict, within half a second, when the journalists’ pencils and pens would reach a crescendo of activity. The ebb and flow of Boris’s boom was timed in the style of a TV newsreader.

Kayser said his client was addicted to the computer the way an alcoholic was obsessed with the bottle. More scratching, and lots of it. This client, Kayser thundered, had never sought to damage any system, steal money or make a profit. He was not malicious in the least, he was merely playing a game.

‘I think,’ Electron’s barrister concluded passionately, but slowly enough for every journalist to get it down on paper, ‘that he should have been called Little Jack Horner, who put in his thumb, pulled out a plum and said, “What a good boy am I!”’

Now came the wait. The judge retired to his chambers to weigh up the pre-sentence report, Electron’s family situation, the fact that he had turned Crown witness, his offences – every- thing. Electron had given a nine-page written statement against Phoenix to the prosecution. If the Phoenix case went to trial, Electron would be put on the stand to back up that statement.

In the month before Electron returned to court to hear his sentence, he thought about how he could have fought the case. Some of the charges were dubious.

In one case, he had been charged with illegally accessing public information through a public account. He had accessed the anonymous FTP server at the University of Helsinki to copy information about DES. His first point of access had been through a hacked Melbourne University account.

Beat that charge, Electron’s lawyer had told him, and there’s plenty more where that came from. The DPP had good pickings and could make up a new charge for another site. Still, Electron reasoned some of the Crown’s evidence would not have stood up under cross-examination.