Keyboard warrior: the British hacker fighting for his life

In October 2013, Lauri Love was drinking coffee in his dressing gown in his bedroom at his parents' house in the village of Stradishall, Suffolk, when his mother called upstairs to say there was a deliveryman at the front door. Love, whose first name is pronounced "Lowry", like the English painter, clomped downstairs. In the front doorway was a man dressed in a UPS uniform. "Are you Lauri Love?" the man asked. In a single motion, the man grabbed Love's arm while presenting, not a package, but a pair of rattling handcuffs. For the next five hours, while dusk turned to evening outside, Love, then 28, and his parents sat in the front room as a dozen or so men from the National Crime Agency, which investigates organised crime and other serious offences, checked the computers in the house. In Love's bedroom, they found two laptops, and a PC tower humming on his desk. Among the bewildering Rolodex of open tabs in Love's internet browsers, the officers found accounts logged into several hacker forums and arcane internet chatrooms. Downstairs, Love, who knew that anything said in these limbo moments of investigation could be later used against him, kept the conversation to small talk about the weather and football. A little before midnight, Love was told that he was being arrested on suspicion of offences under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act, which covers, among other things, criminal hacking. He was not informed of what crimes he had allegedly committed, and was pressed into the back of an unmarked car, and driven to the police investigation centre in Bury St Edmunds. Love's computers, along with USB drives and old computing hardware, much of which belonged to his father, a computing enthusiast, left, too. Love, who was subsequently diagnosed with Asperger syndrome – a form of autism that causes him to fret and obsess – did press-ups in his cell until, in the early hours of the morning, he fell into a brief and fitful sleep.