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time. The clock controlled the telephone company's charges, so until the billing department noticed it was out of kilter local telephone users enjoyed a period of relatively inexpensive calls. Pat says he also learned how to disconnect subscribers' phones and how to tie into the accounts files. The latter facility enabled him to 'pay' bills, at first at the phone company and later, he says, at the power company and at credit card offices. He would charge 10 per cent of the bill for this service, which became a useful source of extra income.

He also started to play on the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) computer network. ARPANET was the oldest and the largest of the many computer nets — webs of interconnected mainframes and workstations — that facilitated the transfer of information and data. ARPANET was conceived in the 1950s — largely to protect the ability of the US military to communicate after a nuclear strike — and established in the late 1960s. It eventually linked about 60,000 computers, or nodes, and also interconnected to other networks, both in the US and elsewhere in the world, making it an integral part of Worldnet. Most universities, research centres, defence contractors, military installations and government departments were connected through ARPANET. Because there was no 'centre' to the system, it functioned like a highway network, connecting each node to every other. Accessing at one point meant accessing the whole system.

Pat used to commune regularly with other hackers on pirate bulletin boards that relayed information on hacking sites, known computer dial-ups and sometimes even stolen IDs and passwords. From one of these Pat got the dial-ups for a number of ARPANET nodes.

Pat began his ARPANET hack by first breaking into Sprint, the long-distance phone carrier. He was looking for long-distance access codes, the five digit numbers that would get him on to the long-distance lines for free. In the old days he could have used a blue box, but since then the phone system had become more sophisticated. Blue boxes were said to have been killed off once and for all in 1983 when Bell completed the upgrading of its system to what is called Common Channel Interoffice Signalling (CCIS). Very simply, CCIS separates the signalling — the transmission of the multi-frequency tones — from the voice carrier.¹

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