Pat was indicted on September 21 in both Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., for a number of offenses, including theft of equipment--the $500,000 worth of computers and supplies--and theft of telephone services. He was twenty-four years old at the time. In 1981 there was no comprehensive computerfraud law, so Pat was "shoehorned"--his expression--into the existing criminal statutes.
There are advantages to being a child of privilege. Though Pat's colleagues were also arrested (there were five arrests in total, including Pat and Doctor Diode) and some turned state's evidence in exchange for a light sentence, Pat's father's money bought him the services of two of Philadelphia's biggest law firms. After looking at the evidence, one of the lawyers turned to Pat and said, "No jury will ever understand what you did and no jury will ever convict you for ripping off the phone company."
The lawyer's words were not put to the test. The charges against Pat were plea-bargained down to a $1,000 fine and two and a half years' "phone probation"--meaning that Pat had to report to his probation officer by calling in. He still finds it ironic that a convicted phreaker and hacker was required to report in by telephone.
In the wake of the Captain Zap case the American authorities quickly woke up to the threat of computer hacking. By the mid 1980S almost every state had criminalized "theft by browsing"--that is, hacking into computers to see what's there. The first federal law on computer crime, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, was passed in 1986.
The contrast between the leniency shown Captain Zap in the U.S. courts for what was, in the end, hacking for profit, and the judgment given to Nick Whiteley in England for schoolboyish pranks nine years later is illustrative of the changes in the authorities' perception of hacking over the decade. In 1981, when Cap- tain Zap was arrested, his lawyer was probably correct in assuming that no jury would have understood the prosecution's case. In 1990, however, Nick was almost certainly right in saying the courts were determined to throw the book at him.
Over the course of a decade, both the authorities' awareness of hacking and the technological underground that committed this crime had grown. Hacking--though probably only dimly understood by most of the public--had become a fashionable threat, explained in long, analytical newspaper articles and described in detail by stylish magazines. Computer security experts (and some hackers) were invited onto TV talk shows to paint the threats to computer security in lurid terms. The sense of impending technological apocalypse was heightened by a number of well-publicized hacking cases during the 1980S, of which the best known was probably the Kevin Mitnick affair.
Mitnick was said to be obsessed with computers. In 1979 he and a friend had successfully hacked into the NORAD (North American Air Defense command) mainframe in Colorado Springs. Mitnick has since said that they didn't tamper with anything, but simply entered the system, looked around, and got out. He first ran afoul of the law in 1981, when he and three friends were arrested for stealing technical manuals from the Pacific Telephone Company: he was convicted and served six months. In 1983 he was caught by the University of Southern California while trying to hack one of their computers. Later, he was accused of breaking into a TRW computer (the TRW Credit Information Corporation holds data on 80 million Americans nationwide). In 1987 he was arrested for stealing software from a southern California company and sentenced to thirty-six months' probation.
Mitnick belonged to a group of Los Angeles-area hackers called the Roscoe Gang.
He and the gang allegedly used PCs to harass their victims, break into Defense Department computers, and sabotage businesses. He was also accused of breaking into a National Security Agency computer and stealing important information. More seriously, he was charged with defrauding the computer company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and the long-distance phone company MCI, and with transporting proprietary software across state lines. The software was alleged to be a copy of DEC's Security Software System, which made it possible for Mitnick to break into DEC's computers and cause $4 million worth of damage.
Mitnick was again arrested in late 1988. He was refused bail by several federal judges, who said there would be no way to protect society if he were freed. He was also denied access to a phone while in jail, for fear that he may have preprogrammed a computer to remotely trigger off damaging programs. In 1989 he was sentenced to two years in prison.
