



Slayo wrote a protest letter to Mr Conroy that he never posted, but the bright VCE student later flexed his considerable computer skills in helping to launch damaging ''hacker'' attacks on Australian government websites.

A court yesterday heard Slayo, 19, incited ''distributed denial of service attacks'' organised by an American mastermind on government websites that included Mr Conroy's and then prime minister Kevin Rudd's.


Commonwealth prosecutor Stephen Young said Slayo's sophisticated and co-ordinated offences exploited the ''anonymity of the internet'' to bring down the websites and attract media attention.

Mr Young said the attacks, also unleashed on the parliamentary and Australian government websites, were designed to disrupt electronic infrastructure and ''embarrass the government over its stated policy of imposing internet filters''.

He said Mr Conroy's website was forced off-line ''for some time'' and the parliamentary site was unavailable for more than five hours.


Mr Young said an Australian Federal Police high-tech crime investigations team acted on February 5 after a group posted plans to attack the sites through an ''internet relay chat''.

Slayo, using the online pseudonym, Rand, became a ''channel operator'', able to remove people from forums and to moderate discussion.

With the operator privileges and through his ''fight censorship'' website and forum he later allowed unknown people to enter the channel.


After his arrest, Slayo admitted he encouraged others to ''attack Commonwealth computers'' but had not participated.

Defence lawyer Melainie Vinton said Slayo had ''repeated directives given by others further up the chain'', including an American nicknamed ''Pulsar'', the main co-ordinator of the raids.

Ms Vinton said Slayo, who had legitimate concerns about planned filters, believed the internet ''should be fully accessible to everyone''.

''Unfortunately, he chose very much the wrong way to go in sticking his hand up.''

She told magistrate Donna Bakos, who questioned his motivation, that police found a letter to Mr Conroy in his mother's home that ''detailed his legitimate concerns in relation to censorship of the internet''.

Ms Vinton said Slayo once sat in his bedroom at his computer to ''all hours of the night'', but his lifestyle was now more balanced - he had a girlfriend, played sport and piano and focused on his studies in pharmaceutical science.

Ms Bakos will sentence him next month.