He looked Mendax dead in the eye and said, `Is this
a hijacked telephone line?'
Hijacked? Day's comment took Mendax by surprise. What surprised him
was not that Day suspected him of hijacking the line, but rather that
he didn't know whether the line had been manipulated.
`Well, don't you know?' he taunted Day.
For the next half hour, Day and the other officers picked apart
Mendax's telephone, trying to work out what sort of shenanigans the
hacker had been up to. They made a series of calls to see if the
long-haired youth had somehow rewired his telephone line, perhaps to
make his calls untraceable.
In fact, the dial tone on Mendax's telephone was the very normal sound
of a tone-dial telephone on an ARE-11 telephone exchange. The tone was
simply different from the ones generated by other exchange types, such
as AXE and step-by-step exchanges.
Finally Mendax was allowed to call a lawyer at Alphaline. The lawyer
warned the hacker not to say anything. He said the police could offer
a sworn statement to the court about anything the hacker said, and
then added that the police might even be wired.
Next, Day tried the chummy approach at getting information from the
hacker.
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