UNDERGROUND

'Yeah. I got one. He's lining up a barrister too.'

'They any good?' Mendax asked.

'Dunno. I guess so. The solicitor works at Legal Aid, an in-house guy. I've only met them a few times.'

'Oh,' Mendax paused. 'What are their names?'

'John McLoughlin and Boris Kayser. They did Electron's case.'

Trax and Prime Suspect decided to plead guilty. Once they saw the overwhelming evidence -- data taps, telephone voice taps, data seized during the raids, nearly a dozen state- ments by witnesses from the organisations they had hacked, the 300-page Telecom report -- they figured they would be better off pleading. The legal brief ran to more than 7000 pages. At least they would get some kudos with the judge for cooperating in the police interviews and pleading early in the process, thus saving the court time and money.

Mendax, however, wanted to fight the charges. He knew about Pad and Gandalf's case and the message from that seemed to be pretty clear: Plead and you go to prison, fight and you might get off free.

The DPP shuffled the charges around so much between mid-1994 and 1995 that all the original charges against Trax, issued on 20 July 1994, were dropped in favour of six new charges filed on Valentines Day, 1995. At that time, new charges -- largely for hacking a Telecom computer -- were also laid against Mendax and Prime Suspect.

By May 1995, the three hackers faced 63 charges in all: 31 for Mendax, 26 for Prime Suspect and six for Trax. In addition, NorTel claimed the damages attributed to the hacker incident totalled about $160 000 -- and the company was seeking com- pensation from the responsible parties. The Australian National University claimed another $4200 in damages.

Most of the charges related to obtaining illegal access to commercial or other information, and inserting and deleting data in numerous computers. The deleting of data was not malicious -- it generally related to cleaning up evidence of