The Iceman Cometh

able to exploit this vulnerability ever again in those particular govern-
ment departments.

Then came a turning point.
Both at the time and in retrospect it seemed insignificant. It was
minuscule, an act so fleeting it was barely recorded by time: an elec-
tronic pulse almost impossible to conceptualise; one stroke of a key,
one letter in pages upon pages of computer code, nothing but the
Pavlovian twitch of a born hacker. For in all those government
computers Max Vision left one tiny little hole open through which only
he could crawl and, a little later, an eagle-eyed cyber investigator from
the United States Air Force spotted that hole and traced it back to its
architect.

And that is why his friends from the FBI came knocking on his
door in Santa Clara, with the intimation that dark clouds were gath-
ering. 'You've been causing all sorts of problems, Max,' they said. 'This
is a national security issue - that's why the Air Force is here.'

Vision was upset and indignant. He had emailed the authorities in
advance, telling them about his suspicions regarding the vulnerability
and how he planned to scan them as a test.

How serious was this crime? His actions had not been motivated
by financial or any other type of gain. On the contrary, he had performed
a considerable favour to the federal agencies involved. Among other
services, Vision had made safe the computer systems of military bases
and nuclear research facilities, including the Brookhaven and Livermore
National Labs. And given that the damage he had caused was minimal
and that he had stolen nothing, how wise was it to prosecute one of
America's most gifted computer operators for this offence?

The airman's discovery not only led to Max Vision's arrest on charges
of releasing a malicious worm. The consequences were even more dire:
that tiny hole drilled into the entry ports of computer networks grew
and grew until it was transformed into an unholy abyss, the Taft
Correctional Institution, a federal prison that lies in the desert north
of LA. Vision was going to prison as a mature skilled hacker, not as a
criminal. He had only encountered professional criminals when his
contacts at the FBI were shooting the breeze with him. That was about
to change, of course, as Max (and his hacking skills) was deposited in
a low-security prison, many of whose inmates were incarcerated for
fraud and other financial crimes.