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MY FIRST COMPUTER

The computers back then came with nothing; they had no programs of their own. That’s one of the things lost to the new generation of kids coming to their first computer. They are pre-loaded now with all sorts of software and fancy graphics and so on, but when I started you were just one layer above the bare metal. You were typing into this wonderful emptiness, waiting to be populated with minds. The thing was programmed to accept your typing and that was it: as teenagers, we went into that space exactly like explorers, seeking to discover new terrain. Just like in mathematics, where there is the atomic realm, the computer had a space and a set of possible laws that could be discovered gradually. All laws and modes of operation and side-effects were to be freshly discovered. And that is what we did. The excitement was barely containable, in that, within minutes, you could learn to do something on your computer that was infinite. You could train your computer to type the words ‘hello there’ to infinity, a command that would never end, and for a young person to discover that kind of deep power is at very least thrilling, and, at most, revolutionary.

Your thoughts had to be clear, though. The computer was not going to do your thinking for you: it was the difference between saying ‘I want the computer to count’ and saying ‘This is how you count’. As teenage computer nerds, we got into the business of precise instruction. School didn’t teach us that. Our parents didn’t teach us that. We discovered it for ourselves while getting to know the life of the computer. There were guys, of course, who just wanted to play games and that was fine. But a few of us were interested in projecting our thoughts into the computer to make it do something new. We began writing codes and we began cracking them, too.

Wherever we went, I had a desk for my computer and a box for my floppy disks. It was heaven. You would look at the stars and get a certain notion of infinity, then at your computer, and think: infinity resides there, too, but much less remotely. A lot of our initial knowledge came from the people who wrote the computer manuals. The better manuals weren’t always easy to get hold of, but we’d pass the information around, and a teenage underground began to form, loose groups of us who had gained access to certain knowledge and could exchange it. It soon became clear that the subculture we were involved in wasn’t just local, wasn’t just Australian: there was a worldwide subculture of people who would take computer programs invented by software companies and modify them, breaking the encryption codes on them so you could then copy them and give them to your friends. It was mainly for the challenge. The guys who wrote the codes and the guys who broke them were in a kind of competition, except the guys who wrote them were in their twenties and working for companies. We were in our bedrooms laughing at the screen.

Those guys were the authorities. And we never met them. They would sometimes leave hidden messages inside the software, hidden under layers of encryption that we would have to get around, and sometimes the program was built in such a way as to attack parts of our computer as we struggled to decrypt the software. Our relationship with our computers was an important element in our own expanding minds. We had learned so much, so quickly, and we knew that we could teach the computer to expand its own complexity based upon our instructions. The competition between us and those initial software manufacturers actually speeded up the process: we may have been enemies, but together we pushed the art forward, which I suppose is what happens in a very good game of chess.

I began writing programs. Much later on, with WikiLeaks, some people would think it was all about politics. But much of what we are doing is locked into the logic of computer intelligence, and locked into what a precise interaction with computer intelligence makes inevitable. In many respects, nothing has changed since the box bedroom. The ultimate limits of computer power are not determined simply by the man who solders components together in the Chinese factory, they are written into the very meaning of what a computer is. It was Alan Turing who observed that any precise instruction that one could write on paper and give to another human being, could potentially be followed by a computer. And we championed that idea. People might get emotional about it, but it is simply what happens when inventions are allowed to fulfil their potential in company with ongoing human imagination. By cracking codes we were making the code better, and by writing code we were making the codes harder to crack. It was a circular irony and one that became joyful for teenagers inclined in that direction. Every night was like a new adventure.

I began receiving disks in the post from abroad. From America and Sweden and France, where new friends had cracked codes and would send me the stuff, and I would do the same, all of this postage coming for free because we had worked out a system of re-using stamps. It was great to be alive at a point when so much was changing – so much was new – and to feel the rush of progress flitting through your fingers and over the keyboard. I was sixteen and my time had come: I was finding my calling, my skill, my peer group and my passion, all at once. I’m sure we were, at some level, as arrogant as we were insubordinate, but young men need to feel their own power at that age, and we were flying.

I think it’s fair to say Australia was considered then to be some kind of provincial backwater. It suffered from a certain cultural cringe, a definite notion that the country existed as a permanent outback to the main currents of European culture and American life. And in a small way – a small way that became a big way – we opposed that. At this time I was living with my family in the suburbs just outside Melbourne, but I was beginning to take my place within an elite group of computer hackers. We felt we were the dead centre of the turning world, no less significant than cutting-edge computer guys in Berlin or San Francisco. Melbourne was prominent on the world computer map from early on, and we were partly responsible for that: we entertained a global notion of how the technology could work, and never for a second did we feel remote or provincial. We felt we could lead the world, which is a nice thing to feel at the bottom of the planet. Ordinarily, Australia is a lagoon in a sea of Englishness; the culture of Britain tended to wash over us, with its big colonial sense of national values. This had been our reality, so when we fought, we had to fight like kings. The hackers’ mentality in Melbourne was unashamed in that way. We had no sense of being away from the main currents: we were the main currents. And given that innovation often relies on self-certainty – however temporary, however misplaced – we found ourselves on top of the world. The Levellers of the seventeenth century aimed to turn a backwater into a political frontline: later historians would speak of A World Turned Upside Down. It was Christopher Hill who wrote of the possibility of ‘masterless men’, a population escaping lordship, who would become renegades or outlaws if need be. My former friends in the computer underground would have enjoyed the words of the Leveller called William Erbery: ‘Fools are the wisest of men, and mad men the most sober-minded . . . If madness be in the heart of every man . . . then this is the island of Great Bedlam . . . Come, let’s all be mad together.’

It was a time of new ideas, energy, engagement. The idea of popular sovereignty over the Internet, of ‘teeming freedom’ arriving in that arena, was a way off and would still need to be fought for, and hard. I didn’t know it until later, but we could have called on Milton, who wrote a kind of saintly justification for civil disobedience and spoke of ‘a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy in discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest human capacity can soar to’.

We were neither so ambitious nor so capable, but we knew we were onto something that the world had never known before. From our own suburban bedrooms, we were seeking and finding a global computer network. ‘The whirlwind comes from the North,’ wrote one of the Levelling heroes. Well, maybe. But in a modern world turned upside down, we might call it the south, and give Australia its due. In any event, the energy we had was connected, if only unconsciously, to many a great, untold effort to wrest freedom from the arms of invisible power. Some of us might have been deluded enough to think the future would thank us – it wouldn’t. There were prisons waiting for such victims of delusion.

The real morning of revelation came not with the computer, but with the modem. When I got that, I knew it was all over. The past. The old style. Australia as it used to be and the world as it once was. Over. I was about sixteen years old when this fresh dawn came in a little box that dialled up really slowly. Before the Internet, the sense of a global subculture in computing worked through bulletin boards. These isolated computer systems would be set up in, say, Germany, and you would dial in and swap messages and software. Suddenly, we were all connected. There was always a problem with the cost of these international calls, of course, but some of our friends became experts at manipulating the phone lines. They were called phreakers. There is all this nonsense about the early computer hackers stealing from banks and so on: most of the hackers I knew were only interested in pulling back some free phone time. That’s as rich as they got; but what riches, to spend the night connected to all this overseas expertise. And the sense of discovery was fairly galactic.

Within a few days of getting my modem, I had written a program to tell the modem how to seek out other modems. It scanned around the central business districts of Australia, and later other parts of the world, to discover which of the computers had modems. I knew there would be interesting things on the end of those telephone lines. I just wanted to find out what the numbers could lead you into; it was almost mathematical, seeing how the numbers could be played with. It’s not that it was subversive at that stage: it was simply a great reaching out and a great exploration of the world, and you felt you were riding on some brand new wave, the most technologically sophisticated part of industrial civilisation. It’s a grand thought, but it was a grand feeling and I can’t diminish it. The thing was sophisticated, but we weren’t, and to many of us it was like we were kids breaking into quarries or abandoned buildings. We had to see what was in there. We had to feel the rush of getting over the fence and making it inside. It was the thrill of making it into the adult world and being ready to challenge it.

That’s how hacking begins. You want to get past a barrier that has been erected to keep you out. Most of them had been erected for commercial reasons, to preserve profit flow, but for us it was a battle of wits, too, and in time we saw that many of those barriers were sinister. They were set up to limit people’s freedom, or to control the truth, which I suppose is just another kind of profit flow. We started by breaking the commercial desires of some companies, and the thrill was exorbitant. It was like the first time you beat an adult at chess. I’m amazed when I run into people who don’t understand the pleasure in this, for it is the pleasure of creation itself, of understanding something intimately and making it new. Hacking began to seem like a creative endeavour to us: it was a way of getting over the high walls set up to protect power, and making a difference. Keeping people out of the world’s computer systems was, for the people who ran them, a matter of control, much as Orwell understood the meaning of state control, and it was only a natural progression for us to go to work on them as part of our youthful attempt to explore the world.

Governments, of course, had computer systems at this time whose sophistication existed in direct proportion to that nation’s wealth and military might. For us the most interesting computer network was X.25, through which most countries ran their classified military computer sites. About eight hackers in the world had discovered and shared the access codes: it was just breathtaking to see how governments and corporations were working together across this kind of network. And the crème de la crème of the world hacking community was watching them. I was entering my later teenage years, and the Berlin Wall was about to come down and change everything; a great epochal change in the meaning of ideology that played out on the news every night. But we were already changing the world. When the TVs were switched off, when the parents went to bed, a battalion of young computer hackers were going inside those networks, seeking to create a transformation, I would argue, in the relationship between the individual and the state, between information and governance, that would come in time to partner the wall-breakers in their effort to bust the old order.

Every hacker has a handle, and I took the name Mendax, from Horace’s splendide mendax – nobly untruthful, or perhaps ‘delightfully deceptive’. I liked the idea that in hiding behind a false name, lying about who or where I was, a teenager in Melbourne, I could somehow speak more truthfully about my real identity. By now, the computer work was taking up a great deal of my time. I was beginning to get the hacker’s disease: no sleep, bottomless curiosity, single-mindedness, and an obsession with precision. Later, when I became well known, people would enjoy pointing out that I had Asperger’s or else that I was dangling somewhere on the autistic spectrum. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, so let’s just say I am – all hackers are, and I would argue all men are, a little bit autistic. But in my mid- to late teens I could barely focus on anything that didn’t seem to me like a major breakthrough. Homework was a struggle; ordinary conversation was a chore. In some way I found myself tuning out the local noise, the local weather, to maintain a sense of a frequency that was international. We saw a thousand tasks and became obsessed with exploring those early networks, the internet before the ‘Internet’. There was this American system called Arpanet, which, early on, Australians could only connect to if they were part of a university. That’s how we piggybacked onto the system. It was certainly addictive, projecting your mind across the world in that way, where every step was unauthorised. First you would have to hack the university computer system, then hack your way back out of it. While inside, you would then hack into some computer system elsewhere in the world – typically, for me at the time, the Pentagon’s 8th Command Group computers. You’d dive down into its computer system, taking it over, projecting your mind all the way from your untidy bedroom to the entire system along the halls, and all the while you’re learning to understand that system better than the people in Washington. It was like being able to teleport yourself into the interior of the Pentagon in order to walk around and take charge, like a film in which you got to bark orders at the extras in shirtsleeves sitting at banks of radar screens. Awesome was the word. And we quickly stepped away from the fantasy of it all to see that some bright new element of the future was being played with. Virtual reality – which used to be a mainstay of science fiction and is now a mainstay of life – was born for many of us in those highways we walked solo at night.

It was spatial. It was intellectual. You had to want to connect to the minds of the people who had built the paths. You had to understand the structure of their thinking and the meaning of their work. It was all wonderful preparation for dealing with power later, seeing how it works and what it does to protect its own interests. The weird thing is you didn’t especially feel like you were robbing anyone or engaging in any sort of crime or insurrection. You felt you were challenging yourself. People don’t get that: they think we were all rapaciously going after riches or engaged in some dark dream to run the world. No. We were trying to understand the scope and capacity of our own minds, and see how the world worked in order to fulfil a commitment, a commitment we all might have, to living in it fully and making it better if possible.

You would bump into your adversaries inside the system. Like meeting strangers on a dark night. I’d say there were maybe fifty people in the world at that time, adversaries and brethren, equally part of an elite group of computer explorers, working at a high level. On a typical night, you would have, say, an Australian computer hacker talking to an Italian computer hacker inside the computer system of a French nuclear complex. As experiences of young adulthood go, it was mindblowing. By day you’d be walking down the street to the supermarket, meeting people you know, people who have no sense of you as anything other than a slacker teenager, and you’d know you had spent last night knee-deep in NASA. At some basic level, you could feel you were taking on the generals, taking on the powerbrokers, and in time some of us came to feel we were in touch with the central thrust of the politics of our countries. It didn’t feel sinister; it felt natural. It didn’t feel criminal; it felt liberationist. And in the end, we had no sense of entitlement beyond that which came with our expertise. We owned the box. We looked at the Pentagon or Citibank and we said, ‘We hacked that. We came to understand that system. Now part of that computer system is ours. We have taken it back for general ownership.’

None of us ever harmed anybody or caused any damage in our night-time forays, but we were never naive enough to think that the authorities would see it that way. By about 1988, the Australian authorities were trying to establish some test cases to justify a new Computer Crimes Bill, and it was clear I had to be careful. I used to hide my floppy disks inside the beehive. I was sure the guys from the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence wouldn’t risk getting stung for real as they went about their sting.

There were some totally inspired hackers who were friends of mine: Phoenix, Trax and Prime Suspect. The latter two bonded together with me into a group we called the International Subversives. We were doing nightly raids on the Canadian telecom company, Nortel, on NASA and on the Pentagon. One time, I got the passwords I needed to access the Overseas Telecoms Commission by phoning their office in Perth pretending to be a colleague. As I spoke, I played around me a tape I had made of fake office noise – photocopiers whirring, keyboards clicking, a hum of conversation – just to create the right ambience for my fraud. They came up with the password in seconds. It sounds playful, and in a way it was, I suppose. But when the new legislation came in we went from feeling like climbers breaking into a nature reserve to explore, to criminals facing ten years in jail. Some of my friends had already been busted, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I got raided.

In the event, my brother let them in. He was only eleven. By sheer good fortune I wasn’t there. Anyway, the police had no evidence and the whole raid was a fishing expedition. There was a lot of fiction doing the rounds about hackers stealing from Citibank. Bullshit, actually. We were worried about stealing electricity to run our computers, and stealing phone calls and postage, but money, no. Far from looking for commercial gain, we were careful not to destroy anything in our path. If we hacked a system then we repaired our way back out of it, leaving, oftentimes, a back door to let ourselves back in again.

They started tapping some of our phones on a 24-hour basis. It was weird, and the weirdness crept into the characters of some of those kids. True to say, some of us were weird anyway, coming from what are now called dysfunctional families, where addictions had played a part, where disguises were already part of the picture. That was true enough of me, and I was probably one of the less obsessive kids. My friend Trax, for instance, had always been eccentric and seemed to suffer some kind of anxiety disorder. He hated to travel, rarely came to the city and once made reference to seeing a psychiatrist. But I have often found that the most interesting people are a little unusual, and Trax was both.

Hacking was a way for us to connect with other kids who didn’t feel like hostages to normality. We wanted to go our own way and we had an instinct for questioning authority. In my case, I was born into that instinct. We were born into a permissive society, but our generation was perhaps more questioning of what permission meant. We weren’t into ’60s psychobabble about freedom – neither were my parents, who always felt the hippies were appallingly apolitical – and what we wanted to do was not protest abusive power but unseat it. If we were at all subversive, it was the kind of subversion that worked from the inside. We had the same mindset as the boys who were running the computer systems. We knew the language and had cracked their codes. The question would increasingly become one of following the inevitable, following the logic of what we had discovered and seeing how it held society to account. Around the time of the Australian bicentenary, 1988, there was a new confidence, a new abundance of home computers, a new vibrancy in popular culture, and a sense among my kind that the military–industrial complex of bombing people and buying stuff should be subverted. We grew up fast and made ready for trouble. We were already being targeted by the Bureau.

It is probably right to say I was more political than many of my friends. I had always believed, and still believe, that oppressive forces draw much of their strength from their ability to wield their power in secret. It wasn’t long before I realised, from my experience inside the systems, that the ‘clandestine’ zone might be the right place to confront them. Hacking gave us a start. We knew from the hysteria our fun had created, and from the new government legislation, that we had hit upon something fundamental about how secrets were hidden. Governments were scared: much more scared, it turns out, than they were of people demonstrating in the street or throwing petrol bombs over barricades. The Internet would offer a model of insurrection that baffled corrupt authority with plain science. It said, ‘You no longer control how I think of you.’

One Australian headline, of 1990, read: ‘When sharing your disc can be as dangerous as sharing a needle.’ This manages to get information-sharing to sound like Aids-spreading, which is pretty much the level of attack we’ve been dealing with ever since. We were Ned Kelly; we were Robin Hood; we were the Mongol hordes: but, in fact, we were young men in our late teens, discovering what made the world tick and then asking why certain clocks were rigged. We had a finger on the pulse of our new technology and, when the opportunity arose, we wished to use our knowledge for justice and decency. But many people didn’t want that. Many authorities hated us. It has been the major element in the story of my life – lock him up, keep him quiet.

Only now, twenty years later, can I see how I was running on nervous energy. I thought high pressure was just how it rolled in a young life, never having known an extended period of calm since I was about ten. The sheer size of our trespassing was beginning to make me shudder. We were kids, and finally we were dealing with forces so sinister, and so powerful, it began to dawn on each of us that we would not only be raided but also that we would likely be marked for life. The world was full of Goliaths and we were vulnerable. Time teaches you – or my time has taught me, anyhow – the ways of smearing and avenging that characterise the powerful when they are forced into a corner. You learn to hold your position, correct errors where you can, keep your chin up and never forget that people who fight grand public liars have always been vilified. The wiles of vilification would become almost comic in my case, but, back then, as a teenager not quite ready for handcuffs, it was hard to keep my bottle. After the raid on my mother’s house I felt the shadowy forces getting nearer and nearer. I wiped all my disks and burned all my printouts and ran away from the suburbs with my girlfriend to live in a squat in the city. Life on the run had begun again in earnest, and it would never stop.