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KINGPIN

tric information from a world far beyond Meridian's sleepy borders. A typical issue was packed with tutorials on packet-switched networks like Telenet and Tymnet, guides to telephone-company computers like COSMOS, and inside looks at large-scale operating systems powering mainframe and mini-computers in air-conditioned equipment rooms around the globe.

Phrack also diligently tracked news reports from the frontier battleground between hackers and their opponents in state and federal law enforcement, who were just beginning to meet the challenges posed by recreational hackers. In July 1989, a Cornell graduate student named Robert T. Morris Jr. was charged under a brand-new federal computer crime law after he launched the first Internet worm—a virus that spread to six thousand computers, clogging network bandwidth and dragging systems to a halt. The same year, in California, a young Kevin Mitnick picked up his second hacking arrest and received one year in prison—a startlingly harsh sentence at the time.

Max became “Lord Max” on the Boise bulletin board systems and delved into phone phreaking—a hacking tradition dating to the 1970s. When he used his Commodore 64 modem to scan for free long-distance codes, he had his first run-in with the federal government: A Secret Service agent from the Boise field office visited Max at school and confronted him with the evidence of his phreaking. Because he was a juvenile, he wasn't charged. But the agent warned Max to change course before he got in real trouble.

Max promised he'd learned his lesson.

Then the unthinkable happened. Max noticed an odd shape on John's key ring and asked what it was. John confessed the truth.

Max and John entered the school that very night and went berserk. One or both of them scrawled messages on the walls, sprayed fire extinguishers in the hallways, and plundered the locked closet in the chemistry lab. Max carted off an assortment of chemicals and piled them into the backseat of his car.