UNDERGROUND

That part was definitely true. Everything was self-taught. Well, almost everything. He did take one programming class at uni, but he failed it. He went to the library to do extra research, used in his final project for the course. Most of his classmates wrote simple 200-line programs with few functions; his ran to 500 lines and had lots of special functions. But the lecturer flunked him. She told him, 'The functions in your program were not taught in this course.'

Sexton asked Anthrax if he was into carding, which he denied emphatically. Then Sexton headed back into scanning. How much had Anthrax done? Had he given scanned numbers to other hackers? Anthrax was evasive, and both cops were getting impatient.

'What I am trying to get at is that I believe that, through your scanning, you are helping other people break the law by promoting this sort of thing.' Sexton had shown his hand.

'No more than a telephone directory would be assisting someone, because it's really just a list. I didn't actually break anything. I just looked at it.'

'These voice mailbox systems obviously belong to people. What would you do when you found a VMB?'

'Just play with it. Give it to someone and say, "Have a look at this. It is interesting," or whatever.'

'When you say play with it you would break the code out to the VMB?'

'No. Just have a look around. I'm not very good at breaking VMBs.'

Sexton tried a different tack. 'What are 1-900 numbers? On the back of that document there is a 1-900 number. What are they generally for?'

Easy question. 'In America they like cost $10 a minute. You can ring them up, I think, and get all sorts of information, party lines, etc.'

'It's a conference type of call?'

'Yes.'

'Here is another document, contained in a clear plastic