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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 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.

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