For hacktivists, web-based attacks are a legitimate form of protest, comparable to real-world disruptive demonstrations. "If the computers carrying out the DDoS attack are controlled by voluntary users rather than a botnet, I really don’t see any difference between that and a real-life sit-in,” said Mustafa Al-Bassam, who was 16 when he was arrested for his part in the LulzSec hacks.The authorities disagreed, and took a hard line on hacking to make examples of those involved and to deter other potential hacktivists. Once the hackers started targeting government agencies and corporate giants, the establishment didn’t see the funny side of Lulz."The harm they caused was foreseeable, extensive and intended,” said Andrew Hadik of the Crown Prosecution Service at the sentencing of the LulzSec Four. "They set out to hack and publish hundreds of thousands of innocent individuals’ private details. Companies also suffered serious financial and reputational damage.

"To say it was all a bit of fun in no way reflects the reality of their actions,” he added. "They were in fact committing serious criminal offences.”Some in the security industry think the authorities came down too hard on those involved, questioning why the courts chose to throw the book at these young offenders when the cybercrime syndicates responsible for credit-card fraud and malware are arguably more damaging to the wider world."They seem to think ‘if we don’t stop these guys when they’re young, they’re going to get worse,’ but maybe if you left them alone they’d grow out of it like anyone else,” said Sean Sullivan, a security advisor with F-Secure. "Some of these actions are misdemeanours and we’re treating them like felonies, to use US-speak. We’re throwing the book at people that don’t deserve to have that book thrown at them.”He gives the example of a British member of hacking group TeaMp0isoN, Junaid Hussain – who’s known online as Trick. In 2012, he was sentenced to six months in prison for his role in leaking Tony Blair’s personal details, alongside "phonebombing” the UK’s anti-terror hotline in a bid to disrupt the service.

Now released, Hussain is alleged to have reoffended; he was being investigated over non-hacking allegations when it’s believed he skipped bail and left the country to take part in political action in Syria in 2014."Trick’s in Syria. He’s probably doing campaign videos or other stuff – there’s no evidence that he’s in ISIS,”"Trick’s in Syria. He’s probably doing campaign videos or other stuff – there’s no evidence that he’s in ISIS,” said Sullivan. "He’s one of these young Brits who, because he ran foul of the law, probably sees no future for himself in the UK, and so off he went to Syria. He seemed an intelligent guy; it’s a pity that we deal with hacking activists in a way that makes them feel that it’s impossible to do anything legitimate afterwards.”Post-prison falloutYou may think that gaining notoriety as a hacker would attract interest from security companies eager to use those skills for penetration testing, but the reality is very different.

A criminal record rules out working in public-sector intelligence services, and corporate-security employers are equally sniffy about bringing hackers in from the cold. "In the past we’ve received applications from Asia that linked to a virus that they’ve claimed credit for; of course they go straight into the bin,” said Sean Sullivan, an analyst at security company F-Secure. "They may think you can switch from the dark side to the light side, but we draw a distinction between the two. Those involved in DDoSing or writing malware code are right out of the pool of candidates we’re willing to consider.”Although former hacker James Jeffery has been contacted by a few people interested in exploiting his skills for purposes unknown, he hasn’t yet found full-time employment. "I have applied for a couple of jobs, for which I’ve been refused, mainly because I have a criminal record,” he said. "Having a criminal record isn’t beneficial to finding work.”

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Instead, he’s working on several web-based projects for himself, while occasionally collecting payments from both Google and Facebook under their vulnerability reward programmes. "As a white hat, there’s no looking over your shoulder fearing there’s going to be a knock on the door,” he said.As the four reacquainted LulzSec members talked at the Royal Court Theatre about the betrayal that led to their own arrests, they were remarkably sanguine about their former colleague Sabu’s defection to the FBI. At least on stage.Hector Xavier Monsegur was a co-founder of the LulzSec movement, but turned informant after being arrested during the summer of 2011. He worked with the FBI for more than ten months, continuing his Sabu persona. It’s quite possible that Jeffery and others wouldn’t have been arrested without his help.

"Prison isn’t really an issue. I don’t fear that, or the law. But I did miss my girlfriend, my stepson and my parents. I can’t afford to put them through all this again,”"Prison isn’t really an issue. I don’t fear that, or the law. But I did miss my girlfriend, my stepson and my parents. I can’t afford to put them through all this again,” he said. "I’m away from the whole Anonymous thing now.”However, he warns that there are plenty of people ready to fill the hole left by LulzSec’s disintegration. Other groups are still going strong, and intelligent young people with a cause will continue to seek justice and prestige from behind their keyboards. "We need more people to take a stand and expose the truth. I’ve always said, ‘it’s power in numbers’. With a big enough force, you can make changes happen,” he said, adding a word of warning: "If you run a website, you can’t be completely secure from hacking.”If I told you I own 14 laptops and seven desktop computers, you might conceivably be impressed. If I confess that most of them were made last century, you would probably be less so. If I went on to disclose that I bought them only recently – that is, they’re not just former buys that I’ve hung onto because they’ve since been superseded, but instead are machines that I sought out and paid good money for – you might feel the need to extricate yourself from this conversation altogether.

However, all this vintage tech – or "obsolete Mac crap”, as my wife affectionately calls it – fulfils an important function in my life: it makes me happy.I’m willing to bet one (and just one, mind you) of my beloved Macintosh Classic IIs that, like me, you and your family couldn’t afford to buy the computers, cameras, printers and other gadgets that you desired as a kid, because who could? This was expensive stuff, and when you look at the price lists for early laser printers and megabyte-grade hard disks today, you wonder who could ever have afforded this stuff.Therein lies the key to understanding why my dining-room table is currently dominated by the looming bulk of a 21in CRT Apple Studio Display – and it’s this: I can afford it all now.

Moore’s law is unsentimental and unforgiving; I just stopped myself bidding on an eBay auction that offered 15 Power Mac G5s for 99p. Sure, a G5 sucks up vastly more power and takes up far more space than a Raspberry Pi – and both are probably about as useful as each other – but back in the day a G5 would have cost a whopping £1,549-plus. And that day wasn’t all that long ago.That 21in Apple Studio Display? A tenner – as opposed to $1,499 in 1999. The elegant iMac G4 sitting beside me as I type – with its iconic "Anglepoise” design that was Apple’s high water mark for ergonomics – fifty quid, from just down the road. Immaculate.The unattainably expensive Amstrad NC200, the model up from the NC100 for which I saved up for and on which I wrote many a secondary-school essay? Pennies.I wanted all this kit when I was a boy, not only because of what I could do with it but because of the glamorous, desirable, enigmatic designs that bore straight through my eyes and lodged themselves into my hindbrain. They were exciting, and full of promise – and there was nothing I could do except yearn for them and fruitlessly pester my parents.

Now in my thirties, though, I can own them – and because they’re essentially (if not actually) useless, I can pick them up for pocket change. And it isn’t only about finally scratching that itch and fulfilling my boyhood fantasies – some of which were dispensed with some years earlier – but about the sheer joy and delight of surrounding myself with these perennially beautiful objects.I get to admire them, play with them, discover now what I couldn’t afford to discover back then: how they work, how they feel under my fingers, and how they’re finished and detailed. I get to observe the broader context of the march of technology: to remind myself of the difference in quality of the picture on a flat-screen monitor having only used smeary, bulging CRTs before it; to remember little hacks and tricks we all knew and used daily that have since passed.While I don’t often use these old machines, I’m comforted by having them in my life. It’s an unconventional form of respect; I’m saying that while the rest of the world may have deemed you obsolete, I still think you look as wonderful and fascinating and beguiling as when I first saw you as a kid, and I want to treasure you.

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There is a certain sense of injustice: Jeffery was arrested before it was revealed Sabu was working for the FBI, so the police had to use another explanation as to how they found him. "They said they’d caught me through my IP address, but this isn’t possible because I’d been doing other things using the IP address, for which I wasn’t caught,” he said. "I used Tor and proxy changers, anonymous proxies in Russia, and VPN. It would have been impossible to trace that back to my address so quickly – there were only two people who were aware of what I was doing, and Sabu was one of them.”LulzSec members say, in hindsight, that there were changes to Sabu’s online personality over the course of his time with the FBI. He’d be digging for more information about operations or asking about new members, presumably prompted by his FBI handler.

Above all, for someone like Jeffery – who didn’t have many close friends, but counted Sabu as one of them – there’s an ongoing sense of treachery that leaves a sour taste."It was shocking at first. When I found out he was an informant, I didn’t really believe it and I continued talking to him for a while,” says Jeffery. "When I was in prison, I was angry at his actions because I’d thought we were buddies. I knew a lot about him and he knew a lot about me. There was a sense of betrayal.”Given the betrayal, the stress of going through prison and the ongoing difficulties posed by a criminal record, it’s easy to believe that convicted hackers would be disenchanted with the entire scene, but Jeffery still believes in the hacktivist movement – even if he chooses to steer clear of black-hat operations these days.

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