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once more to see if anyone had replied to his message. According to the computer record, he logged on at 7.48 p.m.

Just a few minutes before 8 p.m. the Whiteley family heard a knock on the door. The police later described it as a gentle tap; to Nick, upstairs in his bedroom, it sounded like loud banging. He thought it odd: why didn’t they use the doorbell? Then he walked to his window and saw four men approaching the door. He said later that he could tell from their appearance they weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses. For one awful second he thought they might be Mafia.

Downstairs Nick’s father was at the door bewilderedly reading a warrant presented to him by the policemen. Nick sat down on his bed. He thought that perhaps they were after a spy or a murderer. They couldn’t be after him: he was nineteen years old and he liked to play games with computers, that was all.

The police moved upstairs to arrest Nick. There were twelve members of the team in the tiny house now, communicating by portable phone to their colleagues outside. John Austen from the CCU told Nick he was being arrested for ‘criminal damage’. Nick looked at him incredulously, then burst out laughing. He thought it must be a mistake.

It wasn’t. Though hacking wasn’t illegal at that time, the case against Whiteley had been put together around the concept of criminal damage, which boiled down to loss of data and denial of computer service as a result of his hacks. QMC alone had valued the downtime to fix its computers at £25,000.

The police photographer moved in to record the computer screen and the keyboard and modem. Every inch of the room was photographed: Nick’s files, the books on his bookshelf, the posters on the wall. The police stayed until midnight: they confiscated Nick’s Commodore and all the other equipment, loading the evidence into sacks; they removed from Nick’s room books, blank paper, empty folders, even the posters; and they interviewed Nick’s older brother Christopher. Nick’s mother, who was out at the time the raid began, came home to find the team searching Nick’s car.

Nick was still stunned: he was convinced it was all a mistake, and that soon the police would apologize and go away. He presumed that

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