Hi I'm Jerrys brother. He asked me to put this here. I followed his instructions in typing this exactly, even the square brackets, he wrote this:
It ended like this: I was invited out to a dinner by the guy in charge of the computer forensics for my bust. This was five months after the first hearing at which the judge threw out my case.
Everyone else who got busted pled guilty and are doing six month stretches, but I was smarter and their raid on me was useless. I learnt my lesson in that particular brush with the law, I haven't even jaywalked since.
Five months later this guy phones me. Of all the agents I encountered there (most interstate crime is handled by the FBI) he was the one went through my ordeal calmly, like a game of go or something. As for the rest of them, they were assholes.
I wouldn't have gone but for my curiosity, and my arrogance. They still had six of my computers, four from my university and two from home. I thought that since they didn't have anything in discovery, and since they had nothing to present to the judge at the hearing, that meant that they had nothing whatsoever.
We are about half-way through a really good meal. He's paying. He's fairly short and has a thin beard and moustache. 'Till now it's all guarded pleasantries, and then he says: ''What you did with your computers. That was smart. An interesting principle.''
And I'm thinking, WTF? What do I say to that? He obviously has something to say, so I try and draw it out from him. ''And the execution?''
And now he has this half-smile on his face, and alarm bells are ringing in my head, very quietly, like a car alarm four blocks away, and he says ''There were one or two problems...''
''How...''
''I reverse engineered it.'' That strikes me speechless. This man dug through half a megabyte, half a million instructions, and suddenly I realise that I'm not as smart as I think I am, and I obviously have this frozen-cat-in-headlights look because he offers ''the key stays in swap on the disk...''
''It all stays in memory...''
''not when you send it the start signal...''
''but the swap wipes on shutdown...''
''controlled shutdown. When we raided you, we just unplugged everything.'' And that is it. Verbal sparring over. I lift my glass to see if my hands are shaking and they are, a bit. I look at my food, I don't feel hungry anymore but (and I almost smile at this) I get the impression I should really concentrate on enjoying this meal. We ate in silence.
I ordered a coffee. He's paying. A small price for his gloating. Outside there was a government sedan, driven by one of the fat piggy-eyed fuckers who stuck a gun in my face five months ago, and this time there was no bail. This time I plead guilty, because there was about 1K Gigs of warez as Exhibit A, and this time they won. The irony is that all my protective measures only served to prove in a very mathematical and absolutely incontrovertible manner that it was me and only me who was responsible for those servers and their contents.
Since then I've been using a pen that is - get this - actually tied to a desk, instead of a computer keyboard. It's tied on the right side, and I'm left-handed. My handwriting has become awful, but I expect it will improve with practice.
Thinking about it, I should've ordered dessert.