“It turned out that the Americans were now claiming that certain things on the computer I had supposedly hacked had been changed”
The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies: Area 51
“Well, everyone had a bit of a laugh at that point. However, when the prosecution asked, ‘Can you confirm if Hangar 18 exists or if it’s a myth?’ Hanson replied, ‘I can neither confirm nor deny as I’m not in possession of that information.’ But it was interesting that Hanson had traveled all the way from the States, and that he had specific knowledge of my attempts to find out information on Hangar 18.” Bevan adds: “As all of this was going on, there was a guy named Richard Pryce, who went under the hacking name of Data Stream Cowboy, and who was someone who I had been in touch with over the Internet.
However, we’d never personally met or spoken, in fact. But, as it turned out, Pryce and myself had been hacking into the same places. He eventually got a £1,200 fine in March 1997 after he admitted a number of offences. These resulted from investigations into penetrations of the Rome Labs’ computer systems. Pryce pleaded guilty to twelve counts under the Computer Misuse Act and was fined £100 on each charge. As a result, the judge, in a later hearing, said that bearing in mind Pryce’s sentence, he could not impose a custodial sentence on me, and really couldn’t fine me any more than Pryce was fined. ‘I suggest you think hard and long about this case,’ he told the prosecution.”
The case continued to rumble along, but finally, Bevan saw a light at the end of the tunnel: “Bear in mind that the prosecution had changed their charges from straightforward hacking to hacking with intent to impair the operation of their computer system. Also it was estimated that the costs to prosecute me in a full court case were likely to be in the order of 10,000 pounds per day. Well, as a result, the prosecution eventually came back, said they weren’t going to offer any evidence—the Americans, remember, wouldn’t make anything available for the judge, my defense or the prosecution—and they dropped the case. This was on November 21, 1997.”
Things weren’t quite over for Bevan, though, as he notes: “As all of this was going on, the Americans stated that someone who had hacked into their systems had actually from there penetrated a nuclear institute in North Korea.
The worry was that the North Koreans would believe that it was the Americans doing the hacking when it was really a hacker using their system. Well, I began to get a series of funny ’phone calls. I would answer the ’phone, or my wife would answer the ’phone, and the person on the other end of the line would hang up. I then began to get a number of calls from a guy with the Chinese military. I would get my wife to answer the calls, but when I came to the ’phone he would hang up. My worry was that maybe the Chinese had got wind of this Korean situation and that they were either going to get me to work for them or shut me up. It was a very unstable time.