Judgement Day

reconnected it. She installed a security calling-code on the phone to stop him calling out. He broke it. She worried he wouldn't go out and do normal teenage things. He continued to stay up all night – and sometimes all day – hacking. She returned from work to find him unconscious – sprawled across the living room floor and looking as though he was dead. But it wasn't death, only sheer exhaustion. He hacked until he passed out, then he woke up and hacked some more.

The stories of Wandii's self-confessed addiction over- whelmed, appalled and eventually engendered pity in the courtroom audience. The media began calling him 'the hermit hacker'.

Wandii's defence team couldn't fight the prosecution's evidence head-on, so they took the prosecution's evidence and claimed it as their own. They showed the jury that Wandii hadn't just hacked the institutions named by the prosecution; he had hacked far, far more than that. He didn't just hack a lot – he hacked too much. Most of all, Wandii's defence team gave the jury a reason to acquit the innocent-faced young man sitting before them.

During the trial, the media focused on Wandii, but didn't completely ignore the other two hackers. Computer Weekly hunted down where Gandalf was working and laid it bare on the front page. A member of 'the UK's most notorious hacking gang', the journal announced, had been working on software which would be used at Barclay's Bank.⁶ The implication was clear. Gandalf was a terrible security risk and should never be allowed to do any work for a financial institution. The report irked the hackers, but they tried to concentrate on preparing for their sentencing hearing.

From the beginning of their case, the hackers had problems obtaining certain evidence. Pad and Gandalf believed some of the material seized in the police raids would substantially help their case – such as messages from admins thanking them for pointing out security holes on their systems. This material had not been included in the prosecution's brief. When the