The US military used
weather data from the centre for planning its attack on Iraq in the
Gulf War. The media report claimed that the attack had slowed down the
Cray's calculations, thus endangering the whole Desert Storm
operation. The paper announced the hackers had been `inadvertently
jeopardising--almost fatally--the international effort against Saddam
Hussein' and had put `thousands of servicemen's lives at risk'.9
Further, the paper alleged that the US State Department was so
incensed about British hackers' repeated break-ins disrupting Pentagon
defence planning that it had complained to Prime Minister John Major.
The White House put the matter more bluntly than the State Department:
Stop your hackers or we will cut off European access to our satellite
which provides trans-Atlantic data and voice telecommunications.
Someone in Britain seemed to be listening, for less than twelve months
later, authorities had arrested all three hackers.
Pad thought the allegations were rubbish. He had been inside a VAX
machine at the weather centre for a couple of hours one night, but he
had never touched a Cray there. He had certainly never done anything
to slow the machine down.
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