DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [45]
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 electronic 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 gathering. ‘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.
Things looked bad for Max. But they were about to get worse. Not only had he received a two-year sentence in Taft, but a month after he arrived there, Kimi announced she was leaving him.
Abandoned by his wife for another man, forsaken by his erstwhile friends in the FBI, Max Vision tumbled down the abyss, at the bottom of which lay a deep depression. Here he landed next to a fellow inmate, one Jeffrey Normington, who extended a hand of friendship when nobody else would.
On his release from prison, Vision was unable to find regular work that paid more than the minimum wage. He applied for jobs and was offered senior positions in security companies abroad, but as he was on parole, he was not eligible for a passport. In Silicon Valley, nobody wanted to employ someone whose CV included an indelible conviction for computer crime.
His debts mounted as his despair deepened. Then one day friend Normington reappeared, promising a path out of the abyss and back into California’s sunshine. The route was littered with goodies. Normington promised him a top-of-the-line Alienware laptop, a must-have but expensive accessory for hackers. That was just for starters. He said he’d find Vision an apartment and pay for it. Normington would arrange everything.
In exchange for a few favours.
Crime was not Vision’s sole option. There were other avenues to explore. He could have gone to friends and family. But he was