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place precisely to stop someone like him. Eventually the machine yielded. On his first hack Nick had managed to capture system-manager status.

He decided not to play with the QMC computer too much – the capture of sysman status was too valuable to lose by leaving obvious evidence; also, he needed QMC as a jumping off point for other computers on JANET. He roamed about the QMC computer for a bit, looking at electronic mailboxes and accessing different files. Then he used his sysman status to create four new user-names, OLAD011, OLAD024, OLAD028 and OLAD059, which would allow him continual entry to the QMC machine. He assigned the four user-names to Alan Dolby.

The best part of the JANET network, from Nick’s point of view, was that it was a freeway: entry into one point on the system gave a direct route to other points. That meant he could dial into QMC and then link into other ICLs at different sites in the UK. Conveniently, the network listed the sites on the system by computer manufacturer, so he knew just where to go to find more ICLs.

One of Nick’s targets was an ICL at Glasgow University in Scotland. Eventually he linked into Glasgow by logging in as a guest user. He used the same technique to break into the ICL at Hull University and others in Nottingham, Belfast and Bath.

Nick saw hacking as simply a means to play on ICLs. He wasn’t interested in stealing information from the network. In fact, he had no real purpose at all. He was hooked on ICLs and wanted only to be able to work on them, to play around on the operating system, to explore the complexities of the network. He told his parents there wasn’t anything illegal in what he was doing, and he was correct: at the time there were no laws in the UK which specifically addressed hacking, and the Gold–Schifreen case had seemed to make the practice beyond the law.

Once Nick had started hacking, the Whiteley family phone bills soared from £60 a quarter to £600. But Nick always paid his share. He could afford to do so because he had no other social life: no expensive habits, no girlfriends. He went to work and he came home and then he started hacking. He hacked at night because it fitted into his schedule, but also because the phone rates were cheaper, there

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