UNDERGROUND

calling cards, but Trax discovered how to make phone calls which weren’t charged to anyone. The calls weren’t just free; they were untraceable.

Trax wrote 48 pages on his discovery and called it _The Australian Phreakers Manual Volumes 1-7_. But as he added more and more to the manual, he became worried what would happen if he released it in the underground, so he decided he would only show it to the other two International Subversive hackers.

He went on to publish _The Advanced Phreaker’s Manual_,¹ a second edition of the manual, in _The International Subversive_, the underground magazine edited by Mendax.

An electronic magazine, _The International Subversive_ had a simple editorial policy. You could only have a copy of the magazine if you wrote an ‘article’. The policy was a good way of protecting against nappies - sloppy or inexperienced hackers who might accidentally draw police attention. Nappies also tended to abuse good phreaking and hacking techniques, which might cause Telecom to close up security holes. The result was that IS had a circulation of just three people.

To a non-hacker, IS looked like gobbledygook - the phone book made more interesting reading. But to a member of the computer underground, IS was a treasure map. A good hacker could follow the trail of modem phone numbers and pass- words, then use the directions in IS to disappear through secret entrances into the labyrinth of forbidden computer networks. Armed with the magazine, he could slither out of tight spots, outwit system admins and find the treasure secreted in each computer system.

For Prime Suspect and Mendax, who were increasingly paranoid about line traces from the university modems they used as launchpads, Trax’s phreaking skills were a gift from heaven.

Trax made his great discovery by accident. He was using a phone sprinter, a simple computer program which automa- tically dialled a range of phone numbers looking for modems.