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Embassy in Germany’ (or wherever). He swears the operators would patch him through. And once connected to the American Embassy — on a secure line, from the White House — he would request another secure line to whatever local number he wanted to call. He was never turned down.

Mr McNamara was just a name he made up, Pat says. He never did find out if there really was a Mr McNamara.

Captain Zap had a knack for finding the right idiom: whether computerspeak or telco-speak or even bureaucrat-speak. It was a useful skill, and essential for getting information or convincing people on the other end of the phone line to do things. The practice is known as ‘social engineering’ and is a sort of by-product of hacking. Social engineering is simply getting information from someone by pretending to be someone else. It is an art practised by many hackers, not just Captain Zap. Fry Guy, in Indiana, used the technique when he fessed the credit agency code from an employee of a hi-fi store, and later when he convinced a flummoxed Indiana Bell operator to give him an unlisted number.

Social engineering requires the slickness of a con artist. Hackers pretend to be company insiders, exploiting the trust of the person on the other end of the line. Often they pose as telephone company employees, like repairmen. If a dial-up is needed, for instance, a solution is to call the target company, ask for the computer operator, and then say: ‘This is Mike at Southern Bell [or wherever] . . . We’re doing repairs on the lines in your area. Have you been having trouble with your computer?’ The answer is often yes. ‘Yeah, I thought so. Look, we need to check the line. Can you start up your system and run me through it? What’s your dial-up?’ And so on. In most cases the operator will volunteer not only the dial-up, but the log-in and password as well.

Social engineering takes a lot of the hassle out of hacking, and for adolescent hackers it has an additional attraction: it gives them a chance to put one over on an adult. Irritating the old folk has long been a youthful pastime. Social engineering requires it.

While Captain Zap was hacking the White House and the Pentagon, he was also putting his skills to a more profitable use — theft. Captain Zap and his friend, Doctor Diode, had learned how to crack

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