Judgement Day

when the verdict was read out the courtroom erupted with a wave of emotion.

Not guilty. On all counts.

Wandii’s mother burst into a huge smile and turned to her son, who was also smiling. And the defence team couldn’t be happier. Kelman told journalists, ‘The jury felt this was a sledge hammer being used to crack a nut’.7

The prosecution was stunned and the law enforcement agents flabbergasted. Detective Sergeant Barry Donovan found the verdict bizarre. No other case in his 21 years in law enforce- ment had as much overwhelming evidence as this one, yet the jury had let Wandii walk.

And in a high-pitched frenzy rivalling its earlier hysteria, the British media jumped all over the jury’s decision. ‘Hacker who ravaged systems walks free’, an indignant *Guardian* announced. ‘Computer Genius is cleared of hacking conspiracy’, said the *Evening Standard*. ‘Hacking “addict” acquitted’, sniffed *The Times*. Overpowering them all was the *Daily Telegraph*’s page one: ‘Teenage computer addict who hacked White House system is cleared’.

Then came the media king-hit. Someone had leaked another story and it looked bad. The report, in the *Mail on Sunday*, said that the three hackers had broken into a Cray computer at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting at Bracknell. This computer, like dozens of others, would normally have been relegated to the long list of unmentioned victims except for one thing. The US military used weather data from the centre for planning its attack on Iraq in the Gulf War. The media report claimed that the attack had slowed down the Cray’s calculations, thus endangering the whole Desert Storm operation. The paper announced the hackers had been ‘inad- vertently jeopardising – almost fatally – the international effort against Saddam Hussein’ and had put ‘thousands of service- men’s lives at risk’.8

Further, the paper alleged that the US State Department was so incensed about British hackers’ repeated break-ins