The bell has tolled for Julio Cesar Ardita, the Argentine hacker who was traced with a court-ordered computer network "wiretap" - the first ever of its kind - after his activities were detected in 1995.
Ardita entered a plea agreement today with the US District Court in Boston on charges of illegal wiretapping and computer-crime felonies. He waived extradition and will return to the United States on his own will.
"He agreed to plead guilty and return to this country," said Amy Rindskopf of the US Attorney's Office in Massachusetts. "We couldn't do anything until it became extraditable, or until he became extradited - or until he returned to this country for another reason. If he came into this country, then we could arrest him."
Because his charges do not apply to the US-Argentina extradition treaty, it was not possible to extradite Ardita, and he remained free after his apprehension almost two years ago. As per the joint sentence recommendation to the court, he will serve three years probation and pay a US$5,000 fine.
Twenty-one years old at the time of his spree, Ardita, whose nom de hack was "griton" - Spanish for "screamer" - operated from his parents' Buenos Aires apartment while studying computer science at nearby Universidad Argentina John F. Kennedy. He first obtained access to a system at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Using a sniffer - a program that displays all network activity on a machine - he was then able to obtain passwords as users accessed other systems.
He then used this information to breach those systems, and continued the process to obtain access to yet more systems. His motive was clear: a pure addiction to hacking computer systems.
He used the system at Harvard University as his base, and that proved to be his downfall. The FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service began to monitor his activity, counter-surveilling his hacking by using a program called I-Watch, run on a government computer installed at Harvard. It searched relentlessly through the goings-on of approximately 16,000 legitimate users of Harvard's network in its attempt to pinpoint the hacker.
Soon, US agents were confident they had found their man. Ardita's home was raided by authorities on 28 December 1995, and his computer equipment was seized.
By the time he was discovered, Ardita had worked up an impressive hacking résumé: in the US, he hacked computers at the Defense Department, Harvard University, Cal Tech, Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the Naval Command Control and Ocean Surveillance Center - as well as systems in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Korea, Mexico, and Taiwan.
An arrest warrant was filed by the US District Court in Boston in March 1996, charging him on two counts: one for intercepting communications on the government computer orac.wes.army.mil, and one for transmitting a program named "zap" to mindy.nosc.mil - another US government computer - in an attempt to damage its log files.
At a news conference after the warrant was filed, Attorney General Janet Reno said that some of the hacked systems contained sensitive, state-of-the-art government engineering research - including information on satellites, aircraft design, and radiation. She also defended the counter-surveillance tactics used to catch him. "This is an example of how the Fourth Amendment and a court order can be used to protect rights while adapting to modern technology," she said.
