UNDERGROUND

risk. He ran a hidden cable from his sister’s telephone line, which was on the old exchange. His inability to stop made him feel weak and guilty, and even more anxious about the risks. Perhaps the death threat threw him over the edge. He couldn’t really understand why he had turned himself in to the police. It had just sort of happened.

The Victoria Police notified the AFP. The AFP detectives must have been slapping their heads in frustration. Here was Australia’s next big hacker case after The Realm, and they had expected to make a clean bust. They had names, addresses, phone numbers. They had jumped through legal hoops to get a telephone tap. The tap was up and running, catching every target computer, every plot, every word the hackers said to each other. Then one of their targets goes and turns himself in to the police. And not even to the right police – he goes to the Victoria Police. In one fell swoop, the hacker was going to take down the entire twelve-monthOperation Weather

The AFP had to move quickly. If Trax tipped off the other two IS hackers that he had called the police, they might destroy their notes, computer files — all the evidence the AFP had hoped to seize in raids.

When the AFP swooped in on the three hackers, Mendax and Prime Suspect had refused to be interviewed on the night. Trax, however, had spent several hours talking to the police at his house.

He told the other IS hackers that the police had threatened to take him down to AFP headquarters — despite the fact that they knew leaving his house caused him anxiety. Faced with that prospect, made so terrifying by his psychiatric illness, he had talked.

Prime Suspect and Mendax didn’t know how much Trax had told the police, but they didn’t believe he would dob them in completely. Apart from anything else, he hadn’t been privy to much of his colleagues’ hacking. They hadn’t tried to exclude Trax, but he was not as sophisticated a hacker and therefore didn’t share in many of their exploits.