Operation Weather

but he didn’t want to seek professional help – he just ran away from the problem. The situation only became worse after he was involved in a serious car accident. He became afraid to leave the house at night. He couldn’t drive. Whenever he was in a car, he had to fight an overwhelming desire to fling the door open and throw himself out on to the road. In 1989, his local GP referred Trax to a psychiatrist, who tried to treat the phreaker’s growing anxiety attacks with hypnosis and relax- ation techniques.

Trax’s illness degenerated into full-fledged agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces. When he rang the police in late October 1991 – just days before the AFP raid – his condition had dete- riorated to the point where he could not comfortably leave his own house.

Initially he rang the state police to report a death threat made against him by another phreaker. Somewhere in the conversa- tion, he began to talk about his own phreaking and hacking. He hadn’t intended to turn himself in but, well, the more he talked, the more he had to say. So many things had been weighing on his mind. He knew that Prime Suspect had probably been traced from NorTel as a result of Mendax’s own near miss in that system. And Prime Suspect and Mendax had been so active, breaking into so many systems, it was almost as if they wanted to be caught.

Then there was Prime Suspect’s plan to write a destructive worm, which would wipe systems en route. It wasn’t really a plan per se, more just an idea he had toyed with on the phone. Nonetheless, it had scared Trax. He began to think all three IS hackers were getting in too deep and he wanted out.

He tried to stop phreaking, even going so far as to ask Telecom to change his telephone number to a new exchange which he knew would not allow him to make untraceable calls. Trax reasoned that if he knew he could be traced, he would stop phreaking and hacking.

For a period, he did stop. But the addiction was too strong, and before long he was back at it again, regardless of the