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MAX VISION

After two nights in jail, Max was brought in front of a federal magistrate in San Jose for arraignment. Kimi, Tim Spencer, and a dozen Hungry Programmers filled the gallery. Max was released on a $100,000 bond—Tim signed for half, and a fellow Hungry who’d struck it rich at a dot-com put down the remainder in cash.

The arrest sent shock waves through the computer security world. Hiverworld canceled its job offer on the spot—no security start-up could hire a man facing current computer intrusion charges. The community fretted over what would happen to the arachNIDS database without Max’s curatorship. “It’s his stuff,” Roesch ruled in a post on a security mailing list. “So barring him explicitly ceding it to someone, it’s still his to maintain.”

Max responded personally in a long message sweeping through his early love of computers and the future direction of intrusion detection. Whitehats.com and arachNIDS would continue no matter what, he predicted. “My family and friends have been incredibly supportive and there are offers to maintain the sites to a certain degree should tragedy occur.”

Casting himself as a victim, he railed against the “frenzy of the hacker witch-hunt” and slammed Hiverworld for disloyalty. “After the smoke cleared and I was in the press, Hiverworld decided not to continue our relationship,” he wrote. “The corporation expressed cowardice that is deplorable. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to feel the complete lack of support from the Hive.”

“I am innocent until proven guilty,” he wrote. “And would appreciate the recognition of this by our community.”

Six months later, Max pleaded guilty. The news was nearly lost amid a flurry of federal hacker prosecutions. The same month, Patrick “Most-HateD” Gregory, the leader of a hacker gang called globalHell, was sentenced to twenty-six months in prison and ordered to pay $154,529.86 in restitution for a string of website defacements. At the same time, prosecutors charged twenty-year-old Jason “Shadow Knight” Diekman of California with cracking NASA and university systems for fun, and sixteen-year-old Jonathan James, known as “C0mrade,” received a six-month sentence for