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BREAKING AND ENTERING

he had never been locked out of the QMC mainframe because the system manager wanted him to test the security, that he was playing the game too. Nick was the stereotypical hacker: a kid who wanted to play a big-time computer game to demonstrate how clever he was. He didn’t want to damage anything, although he did enjoy playing a few malicious pranks from time to time. When he was busted, Nick had only been hacking for six months.

Two days after the raid he was taken to Bow Street magistrate’s court and charged with having caused a total of £60,000 damage to computer hardware and disks. But what concerned the authorities the most were the suggestions that Nick had been hacking into the MoD and MI5. They found a little red notebook with access numbers, including dial-ups for ICLs operated by government agencies. They also wanted to know about the messages that had been left by Nick on the QMC computer, alleging that he had knowledge of ‘surveillance’ of the Labour Party, CND and the cabinet.

Nick told the police, and later two presumed agents from the MoD and MI5, that he had never used the access numbers in his book. They were for future reference. As for the messages about surveillance, they were fantasy, part of the games he was playing with the sysman at QMC.³

Nick was released on bail, but only after promising not to continue hacking. In May 1990, almost two years after the incidents took place, he was tried for criminal damage at London’s Southwark crown court. The defence accepted the prosecution’s charges but argued that there had been no real criminal damage. Nick’s lawyers were confident of getting him off but it’s said that he made a bad impression as a witness in his own defence: he was too sure of himself, too clever. Bob Jones later said he was ‘flippant and sneering’. Nick himself thinks he was destined for a harsh sentence from the start. ‘They wanted to make an example of me,’ he said. ‘They’d have sent me to jail for a parking ticket.’

In the end, amid a flurry of national publicity, he was cleared of causing criminal damage to computer hardware but convicted on four counts of damaging disks. After the verdict, defence counsel asked for but was refused bail. Whiteley was given a year’s imprisonment,

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