Yesterday, the South Australian police started an operation to put bulletin boards operating in that state under surveillance.
And in Western Australia, both political parties agreed they would proceed with an inquiry into computer hacking, whoever was in government.
The Victoria Police fraud squad last week announced it had set up a computer crime squad that would investigate complaints of computer fraud.
The articles were painful reading for most in the computer underground.
Who was this Captain Cash? Who was the Killer Tomato? Many believed they were either Stuart Gill, or that Gill had forged messages by them or others on Bowen's board. Was the underground rife with credit card frauders? No. They formed only a very small part of that community. Had the Melbourne hackers stolen half a million dollars from Citibank? Absolutely not. A subsequent police investigation determined this allegation to be a complete fabrication.
How had six months' worth of messages from PI and Zen found their way into the hands of the Victoria Police Bureau of Criminal Intelligence? Members of the underground had their suspicions.
To some, Stuart Gill's role in the underground appeared to be that of an information trader. He would feed a police agency information, and garner a little new material from it in exchange. He then amalgamated the new and old material and delivered the new package to another police agency, which provided him a little more material to add to the pot. Gill appeared to play the same game in the underground.
A few members of the underground, particularly PI and Zen regulars Mentat and Brett MacMillan, suspected chicanery and began fighting a BBS-based war to prove their point. In early 1989, MacMillan posted a message stating that Hackwatch was not registered as a business trading name belonging to Stuart Gill at the Victorian Corporate Affairs office. Further, he stated, DPG Monitoring Services did not exist as an official registered business trading name either. MacMillan then stunned the underground by announcing that he had registered the name Hackwatch himself, presumably to stop Stuart Gill's media appearances as a Hackwatch spokesman.
Many in the underground felt duped by Gill, but they weren't the only ones. Soon some journalists and police would feel the same way. Stuart Gill wasn't even his real name.
What Gill really wanted, some citizens in the underground came to believe, was a public platform from which he could whip up hacker hype and then demand the introduction of tough new anti-hacking laws. In mid-1989, the Commonwealth Government did just that, enacting the first federal computer crime laws.