Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,12
a good enough principle for most of the male population... His lectures on telephone technology had been mildly inter¬esting the first time around. After a month of them, there wasn't a court in the land that would have convicted me of anything other than self-defense if I'd succumbed to the temptation of burying a meat cleaver in his skull. But he had introduced me to Gizmo, which gave me something good to remember him by.
If Judy Garland was born in a trunk, Gizmo was born in an anorak. In spite of having the soul of a nerd, he had too much attitude for the passivity of collecting stamps. So he became a computer whiz. That was back in the steam age of computers, when the most powerful of machines took so long to scroll to the end of a ten-page document that you could go off and drip a pot of filter coffee without missing a thing. When 99.99 percent of the population still thought bulletin boards were things you found on office walls, Gizmo was on-line to people all over the world. The teenagers who invented phone phreaking and hacking into the Pentagon were close per¬sonal friends of his. He'd never met them, you under¬stand, just spent his nights typing his end of conversations with them and like-minded nutters all over the planet.
When the FBI started arresting hackers and phreakers on the grounds that America has never known what to do with nonconformists, and the British police started to take an interest, Gizmo decided it was time to stop playing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and come out into the sunlit uplands. So he started working for Telecom. And he manages to keep his face straight when he tells people that he's a computer systems manager there. Which is another way of saying he actually gets paid to keep abreast of all the information technology that allows him to remain king of the dark-side hackers. Gizmo's like Bruce Wayne in reverse. When darkness falls on Gotham City, instead of donning mask and cape and taking on the bad guys, Gizmo goes on-line and becomes one of the growing army who see cyberspace as the ultimate subversive, anar¬chic community. And Telecom still hasn't noticed that its northern systems manager is a renegade. It's no wonder none of Gizmo's friends have Telecom shares.
If I had to pick one thing that demonstrates the key dif¬ference between the U.K. and the U.S.A., it would be their attitudes to information. Americans get everything unless there's a damn good reason why not. Brits get nothing unless a High Court judge and an Act of Parlia¬ment have said there's a damn good reason why we should. And private eyes are just like ordinary citizens in that respect. We don't have any privileges. What we have are sources. They fall into two groups: the ones who are motivated by money and the ones who are driven by prin¬ciple. Gizmo's belief that information is born free but everywhere is in chains has saved my clients a small for¬tune. Police records, driver and vehicle licensing infor¬mation, credit ratings: they're all there at his fingertips and, for a small donation to Gizmo's Hardware Upgrade Fund, at mine. The only information he won't pass on to me is anything relating to phone bills or numbers. That would be a breach of confidence. Or something equally arbitrary. We all have to draw the line somewhere.
I draw it at passing Gizmo's info on to clients. I use him either when I've hit a dead end or I know he can get something a lot faster than I can by official routes, which means the client saves money. I know I can be trusted not to abuse that information. I can't say the same about the people who hire me, so I don't tell them. I've had people waving wads of cash under my nose for an ex-directory phone number or the address that goes with a car license plate. Call me a control freak, but I won't do that kind of work. I know there are agencies that do, but that doesn't keep me awake at night. The only conscience I can afford to worry about is my own.
Gizmo recently moved from a bed-sit in the busiest red-light street in Whalley Range to a two-bedroom flat above a shop in Levenshulme, a stretch of bandit country grouped around Stockport Road. The shop sells recondi¬tioned vacuum cleaners. If you've ever wondered where vacs