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DATA CRIME ARPANET became a game for Pat. He saw it as ‘a new frontier to play in’. He jumped from computer to computer within the system, accessing everything from the Network Control computers to mainframes at the Pentagon, Air Force and Army installations and research centres. He says it was like ‘going through an electronic road map, trying to get somewhere, but not sure where’. If he was not certain of the where, he is even less certain of the why. Pat talks in vague terms of downloading information from the computers he accessed but is unspecific about what he did with it. He says some of it could be sold, though what he sold and to whom and for how much remains unclear. It is more likely that the data was of secondary concern. Pat says he was ‘fascinated’ by the intricacies of the new technology. ‘This is the information age,’ he says. ‘You could play with computers. It made me feel more intelligent, knowing about them. Very few people had access to them and even fewer understood them.’ At about the time that Pat was first hacking into ARPANET, there appeared a new program called Super Zap which could by-pass ‘copy protection’ on IBM PC-type software.2 Pat thought that its function mirrored his own activities. So Pat Riddle became Captain Zap. By 1980 Captain Zap was becoming more and more adventurous. He had by then learned the dial-ups for the White House computer network, which he accessed regularly over the next year. He also dialled into the Pentagon directly. He was going for prestige hacks. He used to download information from the White House, reams and reams of computer paper, and take it home to his then wife. ‘Look what I’ve found!’ he would shout. She was less interested in what he had found than in the fact he might get caught, he says now. Whatever it was that Pat had in fact discovered, he himself can’t remember. ‘There was all sorts of bullshit,’ he says. Some of it was encrypted, some not. He can’t remember what the unencrypted stuff was about. There was another use for the White House phone number. He would sometimes call the central operator number – a voice number, not a dial-up – and in his best bureaucratic style say, ‘This is Mr McNamara, admin counsel. I need a secure line to the American
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