UNDERGROUND

It looked to Pad that the prosecution’s claim was not for damage at all. It was for properly securing the system – an entirely rebuilt system. It seemed to him that the police were trying to put the cost of securing the polytechnic’s entire computer network onto the shoulders of one hacker – and to call it damages. In fact, Pad discovered, the polytechnic had never actually even spent the £250 000.

Pad was hopeful, but he was also angry. All along, the police had been threatening him with this huge damage bill. He had tossed and turned in his bed at night worrying about it. And, in the end, the figure put forward for so long as fact was nothing but an outrageous claim based on not a single shred of solid evidence.

Using Dr Mills’s report, Pad’s barrister, Mukhtar Hussain, QC, negotiated privately with the prosecution barrister, who finally relented and agreed to reduce the damage estimate to £15 000. It was, in Pad’s view, still far too high, but it was much better than £250 000. He was in no mind to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Judge Harris accepted the revised damage estimate.

The prosecution may have lost ground on the damage bill, but it wasn’t giving up the fight. These two hackers, James Richardson told the court and journalists during the two-day sen- tencing hearing, had hacked into some 10 000 computer systems around the world. They were inside machines or networks in at least fifteen countries. Russia. India. France. Norway. Germany. The US. Canada. Belgium. Sweden. Italy. Taiwan. Singapore. Iceland. Australia. Officers on the case said the list of the hackers’ targets ‘read like an atlas’, Richardson told the court.

Pad listened to the list. It sounded about right. What didn’t sound right were the allegations that he or Gandalf had crashed Sweden’s telephone network by running an X.25 scanner over its packet network. The crash had forced a Swedish government minister to apologise on television. The police said the minister did not identify the true cause of the problem – the British hackers – in his public apology.