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APPROACHING ZERO

of Lords - Britain's highest court - upheld Lord Lane. Gold and Schifreen were therefore acquitted.

Since the case Gold and Schifreen have both gone on to respectable careers in computer journalism. And they still meet, from time to time, in Chinese restaurants - though neither continues to hack.

But their case, which cost the British taxpayers some £1.8 million, gave a misleading signal to the country's hackers and phreakers. Because Gold and Schifreen had admitted hacking while denying forgery, it was assumed the courts had decided that hacking itself was not against the law.

That's certainly what Nick Whiteley believed.

The only times Nick Whiteley was ever approached to do something he thought was illegal was when he was already in jail. The first attempt was made in the exercise yard in London's Brixton prison: Whiteley was a hacker, wasn't he? He could break into computers, right? Well, couldn't he hack into the Police National Computer and change a few files? It would be worth £10,000 to some people to have their police records deleted. Nick declined.

The second approach was made in the laundry room. A group of fellow prisoners had a proposition: they wanted access to the computer at the DVLC, Britain's national car registration centre. What they wanted to do was change the recorded owners of cars they were planning to steal from the real owner to another name. There would be a six-figure fee in it for Nick. What's more, he didn't need to do the dirty work himself. Just go by an address and pick up the money and explain how to do it and someone else would press the numbers on the keyboard.

Nick didn't play ball. He was in prison for only two months, part of a longer sentence imposed for 'criminal damage'. The judge had suspended all but four months of the jail term, which meant that Nick would only serve two. But it was still the severest punishment ever imposed in Britain for hacking and prison was an unnerving experience for a twenty-one-year-old computer operator who had never previously been in trouble with the police.

Nick Whiteley was briefly, in 1990, the most famous hacker in Britain. A quiet, unremarkable young man with a pedestrian job at

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