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former church that had been turned into a thousand-seat theatre. The Paradiso was the home of Amsterdam’s alternative culture; it specialized in musical events, underground exhibits and drugs. The Galactic Hacker Party – or, more grandly, the International Conference on Alternative Use of Technology – brought together some 400 to 450 hackers, hangers-on, journalists and, inevitably, undercover cops, to swap stories, refine techniques, gather information and simply enjoy themselves. It was, participants have said, mostly a party.

The conference took place on all three floors of the Paradiso. On the top floor, above what had been the nave of the church, participants were provided with computers to play with. (Their popularity decreased after one wit programmed each of them to flash ‘This machine is being monitored by the Dutch police’ when they were turned on.) The ground floor, the theatre itself, was reserved for speakers and demonstrations; across the back of the stage drooped a white banner emblazoned ‘Galactic Hacker Party’. The crypts in the basement of the Paradiso were reserved for partying.

At 10 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, 2 August, the opening day, a large monitor displayed the head of a computer-generated hacker. ‘Keep on hacking,’ he urged in an American accent, as the multinational gathering milled about in the disorganized way of a large group of people who lack a common language. Then a bearded, bespectacled, balding figure shuffled unheralded on stage. He was the key-note speaker, the man who, more than anyone, had given rise to the whole phenomenon.

At forty-six, Captain Crunch looked strangely out of place among the younger hackers. It was eighteen years since the Captain had first come to symbolize the new technological underground, ten years since he had last been jailed for a second time for phone phreaking. And here he was in Amsterdam, on a month’s vacation in Europe, still spreading the word.

The Captain began a rambling discourse in English about the Soviet phone system, information gleaned on an earlier visit to the country. The phone network in Russia, the Captain reported, was old, of mixed origin and, he suspected (probably quite accurately), continuously monitored by the KGB. He then began the slow process of

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