The door of the apartment opens onto an impressive library of comic books. The owner, Max Louarn, 50, has been cultivating this passion for three decades, ever since the time when, as an engineer, he would spend all of his nights on his computer. He needed to decompress by reading comics before going to bed. After having traveled around the world, he is now back in his hometown of Avignon, preparing a bedroom for his second child in this loft apartment located in the heart of the city. On the wall, a large photo portrait shows him, in shape from boxing sessions, with his partner, a former Russian model, in a neon blue dress. The picture dates from January 2020, on Saint-Barthélemy, the island where they met.
The comic book wall and the blue dress were also the first things two American police officers came across on November 10, 2020. That day, accompanied by their counterparts from the Montpellier regional judicial police (SRPJ - Service Régional de Police Judiciaire), they pounded on the door at 6:30 am. "I remember being knocked to the ground," Mr. Louarn said. The FBI has been interested in him for almost 30 years. They knew his reputation as a pioneer in the world of hackers. Today's 40-somethings, who spent their teenage years on game consoles, have stars in their eyes when they hear his name. At the beginning of the 1990s, "Maximilian" was the leader of Paradox, a group of geeks who flooded the market with pirated games.
As he tells it, his life story is that of a digital rebel. "Not pirates, armed branches of rogue states or criminal gangs using ransomware," he says. "The fact that today we have the freedom of YouTube, that we have MP3s and WeTransfer, that jailbreaking [unlocking a device to remove the manufacturer's restrictions] is allowed, is thanks to us, the hackers. We've always been pro-liberty, that's our mindset: to do what we want with the machines and for everyone to have access to them."
His hacking story began in the mid-1980s, in the early days of personal computing. Max was 14 years old and a top student, exceptionally gifted in math. When his parents wanted to reward him, instead of asking for a moped, he asked for a Commodore C64, the computer he would use to explore the nascent world of digital piracy. His pen pals, a Dane, an American and an Englishman, would send each other letters before exchanging files on BBS (Bulletin Board System), the Internet's ancient predecessor. Their first challenge? To hack into telephone systems. At the time, international communications cost a lot of money. "My first big hack was making free calls using the bluebox system. We wanted to have fun, we set up a worldwide network of friends," Mr. Louarn explained. He met Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs. It was the golden age of piracy. The police were not interested in these young people and the challenges they set for themselves, such as breaking into Hewlett-Packard, or the Holy Grail: NASA's computer system.
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