I, Hacker: Chapter 2, Part 4: “Root Access, Root Consequences”

That made the fall harder. You get comfortable with anonymity the same way you get comfortable with a chair — you stop feeling the edges. You stop looking for them. Months of careful work had taught me how to move through the system like a ghost: aliases, rotated passwords, clean login timestamps, mimicry of normal user behavior. I had routines that looked boring by design. I left the logs with plausible noise. I never edited files in place; I made copies and left originals untouched. I never ran anything noisy in system directories. I was surgical.

Then, one idle night, tired and overconfident, I grew careless. It was the sort of mistake that wears the face of boredom. A grad student – an actual person, not one of my ghost accounts — had left a file in /tmp with the permissions set to 777. The name was test_build.tar.gz. Because I was human, because the night was long and my coffee was weak, I couldn’t resist. I untarred it in my own workspace just to see what someone else was doing. The archive had a few test binaries and a script that referenced an absolute path I didn’t recognize.

I thought nothing of it — until I ran the script to see if it did anything interesting. It did. It spat out a log entry into a global log because the author, bless him, had hard-coded /var/log/compile.log for debugging and forgotten to remove it. The log entry contained the hostname of my terminal. Just my hostname. Only a hairsbreadth of proof. But logs are like DNA: small, stubborn, and keyed to a place.

The next morning the campus systems phone rang at 8:03 a.m. It was the network admin — a guy named Morales — his voice low and careful on the line. He asked whether anyone else had access to my terminal. I lied. Smoothly. Too smoothly, maybe. I said no.

By noon, Morales had a pattern. Over the last three weeks there had been a cluster of odd cron runs at 2:00 a.m., originating from different user IDs but all inheriting the same PATH quirks. He pulled the headers, grepped the audit logs, and found the duplicates. Duplicates led to a shared HOME folder. The HOME folder led to a list of small scripts with weak obfuscation — nothing complex, but enough to show a human hand. Which is how they found me.

They didn’t show up with handcuffs or drama. They sent one of the grad student sysadmins first — a kid named Allen with wire-frame glasses and the kind of casual cruelty you only find in architecture students. He came by the lab and watched me type for a while, making small talk about compiler versions while his fingers hovered over a terminal. He nodded at nothing and left.

That night, I slept badly. Not because I thought they would find anything — my routines should have covered it — but because I’d felt, for the first time in months, the cold breath of scrutiny. It’s a discrete thing: a cursor that isn’t yours, a keystroke you can’t explain. It makes the edges of the world sharp.

On Thursday, I sat in Dr. Harkness’s lecture on UNIX scheduling — the kind of class where the professor makes padding sound like a thesis — and halfway through his anecdote about AT&T’s early misadventures, two men in plain clothes appeared in the doorway.

At first I didn’t notice them. They were unremarkable: blue suits that had never seen a darts night, shoes shined the way men who don’t do dishes shine shoes, hair cut in sanctioned shapes. One of them scanned the room like a man making a shopping list, then his eyes landed on me.

The professor stopped mid-sentence. The class quieted, as if every student had simultaneously remembered they were in a building with real rules. The men walked down the aisle. One of them had a badge, small and discreet, clipped inside his jacket where no one could easily read it. The other smiled like a man arranging a surprise party, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“Daniel Smith?” the taller one asked, as if reading my name from a script.

Heads turned. Nobody had called me Daniel since orientation. The room smelled suddenly like stale chalk and fear.

I stood slowly. “That’s me.”

“You need to come with us,” he said. No explanation. No malice. No performance. The words were like blueprints: precise and final.

I caught sight of Morales near the back, holding a printout like a rosary. Allen was next to him, looking triumphant and fifteen. There was a small, clinical look on Morales’s face — the face of someone who’d solved a math problem and wanted to put the answer on the board.

I left my stuff, walking past the rows of students who gave me looks that were curiosity and accusation braided together. Someone whispered, “What did you do?” and another said, “He’s that Dent42 guy, right?” Someone else laughed, like the sound of a bubble popping.

Outside the lecture hall, the cold air hit me like reality. The taller man led; the other watched. They didn’t touch me. They didn’t have to. They took me to a small windowless room in the administration building. The chairs were hard. The table had a blotchy veneer. A fluorescent light hummmed overhead with the patience of bureaucracy.

“Do you know why you’re here?” the tall one asked.

“Yes,” I said.

They put printouts on the table. Lines of cron output. IP headers. The hostname that had leaked. A timestamp. A spiral of evidence that built to an ugly little tower.

“Where did these scripts originate?” Morales asked, not unkindly. It was almost pity. He wanted an answer.

I could have lied. I could have fumbled. Instead I did the worst thing I could have done: I smiled.

“Curiosity,” I said. “Testing the system.”

Testing. The word sounded childish in the room. The tall man’s jaw tightened a fraction.

“You understand this looks like unauthorized access?” he asked. “Tampering with administrative scripts. Root-level implications.”

“Yes.” The truth: I did understand.

I also understood the calculus of their options. Expulsion. Criminal charges. Public university, public embarrassment. The administration did not want that. They wanted containment, minimal spectacle.

Instead of immediate legal action, they called the police. Not campus security — the actual local force. Two officers arrived, polite and perfunctory. They asked me the same questions Morales had asked, but with the added weight of law behind them. I tried to answer as little as possible, which is what you do when you don’t know what they can prove.

They took me to a holding room for questioning. The detectives were more patient than the officers — they asked about motives, about whether I’d shared the tools, about whether anyone else had access. Their voices were soft, civilized. They listened to my answers and wrote them down in a way that made them look like facts.

When they showed me the evidence printouts, I noticed something else: a line of notes in Morales’s handwriting. 

“Possible student misuse. Recommend referral to judicial.”

 The words were a polite litany for escalation. I was aware, in a slow, awful way, that this was no longer just a technical problem — it was a career event. My freedom hinged on a conversation on a different floor, between men who wore different coats.
 
They didn’t read me my rights. Not yet. It was all procedural. We were all performing the right choreography: the sysadmin found the anomaly, he alerted administration, they contacted the police, the detectives read the printouts, and I sat in a chair and tried not to look like I loved the smell of money in the bursar’s logs.

“You should have reported this, Daniel,” one of them said finally. “If you saw something insecure, report it. Don’t take it upon yourself.”

“I reported things to the lab,” I said. “I reported bugs. I told them about the cron job months ago.”

“No record,” Morales interjected. “No report. We found scripts and code in user space. We found evidence of deliberate path poisoning.”

The word “poisoning” sounded theatrical. It was theatrical. They wanted the story to be criminal, not curious. Crime makes eyes look away. Curiosity makes them look inside. I suppose I couldn’t blame them.

After hours of questioning that felt like being moved through a sequence of gates — watchful face, stunned silence, the politely delivered threat — they let me go. No handcuffs. No arrest. Not that night, anyway. They wanted my cooperation, or at least my silence.

“You’ll be hearing from Judicial Affairs,” Morales said as they handed me back my jacket.

“And the campus will be… handling this internally. If we decide to press charges, that’s on the record.”

They dropped me off at the dorm. The street was the same as when I had left it, but the air tasted like metal. My roommate asked if I was okay. I said “Fine,” which was a mutation of the truth.
That night I lay awake listening to the radiator clank and the distant clatter of the vending machine. I had been careful for months, and a single boredom-driven run had handed them a breadcrumb. It was almost laughable. You spend so much time avoiding the obvious that you miss the obvious sitting in front of you.

Within a week, an official letter arrived: summons to a campus hearing. The language was neutral, the font neutral.

“Allegation of unauthorized access to university computing resources. Hearing scheduled.”

Hearing. They did not say “criminal.” They did not say “jail.” They left the teeth unsaid.
But the implication was there. They could expel me. They could press charges. They could call the police and hand the case to the county prosecutor. The choices hung just out of sight like storm clouds.

I sat with my mother one evening and watched her sew a loose seam on a dress she kept for church. I thought about telling her everything. I thought about telling her that this was my life now, that the blinking cursor was the only place that made sense. But I didn’t. You don’t tell the people who love you the parts that will make them worry. You protect them by keeping secrets.

On the day of the hearing, I walked into a small committee room smelling of cheap coffee and dust. Two administrators sat on one side, their faces a judgmental symmetry. On the other side, there was a clerk and Morales with his stack of printouts. I had a single sheet of paper — a typed statement I had practiced to sound contrite but reasonable.

They asked me to explain. I explained that I’d been experimenting, that I hadn’t stolen anything, that I understood security. I pointed out the weaknesses, the sloppy scripts, the overbroad permissions. I thought perhaps an appeal to professionalism would make them step back. Instead, they read the official manual language about unauthorized access and network integrity. Manuals are blunt instruments. They like to close the aperture tightly.

When the head of the committee — a gray woman whose name I still remember simply as Dean Ellis — looked at me with the small, precise pity of someone who has had to discipline a problem child for the umpteenth time, I felt the chill. She told me what I already knew: that the university had to be seen to act, that outsiders would not understand if they did not, that precedent had to be set.

“You need to understand the consequences,” she said. “This is theft of resources. This is unauthorized use of staff accounts. We have obligations to our funders.”

Obligations meant publicity. Publicity meant lawyers. Lawyers meant jail was an option on the table.
They recommended suspension pending further review and hinted, carefully, that criminal referral was possible. 

“You’ll have a chance to respond,” Dean Ellis said, “but let me be clear: the university will not be lax.”

I walked out with a campus restriction and the feeling that the world had drawn a line in the sand and I had placed my foot on the wrong side.

That night, I started packing a small bag. Not to run. Not yet. But to prepare. The realization had arrived like a spectral ledger: there are consequences to touching root. There are consequences to waking systems that are meant to be asleep.

As I folded a T-shirt, I felt something else settle in my chest — a strange, quiet excitement. The same part of me that loved breaking into systems loved the idea of solving problems under constraints. If the university wanted to muscle me out, the world beyond the college gates might have other, darker doors to open.

I slept badly again, that night, but I didn’t regret it. Regret is a thing that comes later, with the bills and the phone calls and the people you hurt. Right then I felt only the prickling, nervous energy of a man who had been seen and who had, in turn, glimpsed the faces of the watchers.