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characteristic hacker bravado was taken into account. It was, after all, just possible that American hackers would go into business selling military or industrial secrets to . . . well, to anybody. Foreign powers.

In reality, the Soviet hacker gang was only a momentary distraction for the Legion of Doom. By the next day the flurry of interest had died out; the bulletin board messages resumed the usual pattern – technical queries, reports on hacking sites, postings about police surveillance, about Secret Service monitoring, about the FBI and the CIA . . .

Black ICE was the LoD’s principal board, and was restricted to twenty users (mostly LoD members). It was accessed by remote call forwarding, which kept it – or so it was believed – one step ahead of the law.² The name Black ICE came from a novel by the science-fiction writer William Gibson. ICE, for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, was a program that kept watch for hackers; when it detected them it literally ‘fried their brains’ – the deadly ‘black’ countermeasure.

The author William Gibson is an icon in the computer underworld and his imaginative sci-fi thrillers have acquired cult status. In his best-known book, Neuromancer, Gibson painted a world he called Cyberspace (the name was taken from the most powerful computer of the time, the Cyber), populated by computer cowboys who roamed the space’s electronic systems. Neuromancer forecast the world of hackers – the networks and communication links in the ether that they inhabit – and gave them an alternate, more glamorous identity. The computers are Cyberspace; the hacker is a Cyberpunk.

The conceit became common in the late 1980s. The Cyberpunk image complemented the secrecy and role-playing of handles; it gave a whole new identity to fifteen-year-old computer wizards sitting behind VDUs, their faces pallid from hours sitting watching computer screens. They weren’t just teenagers, or even hackers – they were Cyberpunks, the meanest, toughest technology junkies in Cyberspace.

The Legion of Doom was the best-known Cyberpunk gang in America; certainly it generated the most press. Like Chaos in Germany, the gang was conscious of the publicity value of a sinister, slightly menacing name. One of its members was once asked why

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