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When the police arrived at Jake Davis’s door in July 2011, he says, it was almost a relief. As one of the founders of LulzSec, the elite hackers who had recently scored high-profile “hits” on government websites, he was beginning to fear things were getting out of hand. “I’d seen people who I’d thought of as these invincible programmers being arrested. I realised this was the real world. People have jobs with a brief to take us down.”

The end came with a polite knock on his door. At the time, Davis was 18 and had not been in formal education since he was 13. From the age of 17 he had lived alone in a council flat in Lerwick, the main port of the Shetland Islands — isolated after his stepfather had died and his mother and brother had moved to England. Six detectives entered and seized his computers. It was “horrible”, of course — “they were throwing around numbers like 890 years in prison”. But he describes it as “blissful”, too. “It was sort of like an addiction being taken away. When you’re in your house for that long, you forget what you’re doing. Small things become huge. Day becomes night. You take a walk and think ‘Hang on. What did I just do?’”

Davis was among four British men arrested in a joint FBI-Scotland Yard investigation. He was flown to London under armed guard and interrogated for the maximum 96 hours (it took a couple of hours just to read his charge sheet, which ran to 89 cautions). He was eventually charged with five offences, let out on bail and put on home detention. Not only banned from all internet-enabled devices in the two years leading up to his trial, he was banned from getting anyone else to use the internet on his behalf. And the internet, up until this point, had been his entire existence.

The extraordinary story of how a teenager from a remote Scottish island came to pose such a grave threat to international security inspired Tim Price’s new play at the Royal Court, Teh Internet is Serious Business (the typo is deliberate). For Davis, who has helped develop the production, it represents an entry into normal adulthood and a chance to use his obvious creative talents. After serving 36 days in the Feltham Young Offender Institution in 2013 for conspiracy to commit computer misuse, he completed his probation period earlier this summer. Now 21, dressed all in black, he proves to be gentle, philosophical, genuinely remorseful — and eager to warn of the dangers of the internet.

“I don’t think people have been able to represent the world of the internet very well before now,” he says of the play. “They rarely capture the human element. The hackers do the hacking, they look cool, and then they disappear. But I want to know: how did they get to that point? What were the links between the online and the offline world?”

DAVIS’S own journey began in a village on the remote Shetlands where “everyone knows everyone”. He was “painfully awkward” and by the age of 13 he had pretty much dropped out of school. “I just put my foot down and refused to go in a really teen-angsty sort of way. I was known as the kid who didn’t leave the house.” While his classmates used sites such as Bebo to extend their world, he used the internet to transcend it. “I went straight for the blank-canvas, raw-information, talk-about -anything-with-anyone sites. I couldn’t really do the ice-breaking thing, I preferred to jump in and get straight to the point.”

By the time he was 14 he was a regular user of 4chan, an “imageboard” where most users go by the screen name “Anonymous”. At first, he used it for the cooking forums (“which are surprisingly good”) but soon he was “sucked in” to the singular mentality of the site where there is little that users will not do or say for “lulz” — laughs. “In 4chan everyone is anonymous. You have to take the content at its face value,” he explains. It creates a survival of the nastiest dynamic, where only the most obscene, surreal and extreme content commands attention. “People talk about 4chan as if it’s this other thing; they don’t realise that when they go there, they themselves are creating it.”

Davis wasn’t surprised when a 4chan user uploaded hundreds of stolen photos of female celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian. “They do this thing called gamifying — turning everything into a game. So they collect naked pictures of girls like Pokémon and trade them for kudos and wins. When I was 14 we used to find these groups, try to expose them and send their information to the police.”

It was also 4chan that gave rise to Anonymous, the nebulous hacking collective that became the online wing of the global protest movement, famous for their Guy Fawkes masks and ominous statements: “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We don’t forgive. We don’t forget.”

Davis first became aware of Anonymous around the time of the WikiLeaks “cablegate” scandal of 2010. He found a link to an Internet Relay Chat, where he found about 8,000 people plotting “Operation Payback”, a series of revenge attacks on Visa and PayPal, which were withdrawing funding from WikiLeaks. “I’d never seen a room this frantic and large, everyone aggressively shouting for attention. Usually the attention fizzles out and everyone goes and watches videos of cats. This time, people were using the ominous tone they’d previously applied to petty things to something quite serious.”

The attacks on PayPal and Visa were a success. The following month, Anonymous was attacking dictators in the name of the “Free Internet”. Its hackers managed to reverse-engineer the Egyptian internet back into operation after Hosni Mubarak’s government had attempted to shut it down, for example. “I wasn’t one of the most technically able individuals but I was certainly involved later on,” says Davis. “I wrote a fair few of those ominous statements.”

Later, operating under the username “Topiary”, he became the spokesman for LulzSec, a breakaway group that he hoped would have a more satirical edge (he says he was more inspired by Chris Morris than Julian Assange). The group earned rapid notoriety with an attack on the Westboro Baptist Church, a quasi-Christian hate group based in Kansas. “But because we got so much attention online, we started to attract a lot of really hardcore hackers, Nineties guys, anti-security, anti-state, who wanted to use our platform to leak police databases and police home addresses, things like that.”

One of his co-defendants, Mustafa al-Bassam, was 16 at the time. “Neither of us had this extreme mentality but we were beginning to hang around with people who did. It was life or death for them.” Little did any of them know that one of their number — known as Suba online — had been arrested by the FBI and persuaded to be an informant. Davis concedes that the sting operation was “very clever”.

As he awaited trial, Davis moved to the Midlands (where his mother had relocated) and spent most of his two internet-free years under curfew preparing for the case. He wasn’t allowed to read anything on his computer, so vanloads of transcripts had to be printed off and delivered by post. Getting work and applying to college were all but impossible without an email address. He had to beg mobile-phone companies to allow him to get a non-internet-enabled phone.

In the end, he pleaded guilty and, in view of the two years he had already spent under effective house arrest, he was sentenced to 36 days in Feltham. His cellmates included a teenager on remand for manslaughter and someone who had smashed up a car with a pickaxe.

All the same, he says: “I got a strange level of respect from a culture I didn’t understand. They were all over the anti-government thing. I played it up a bit for that reason.” At times, the experience reminded him of the kind of conversations he’d had online. “You’re locked up for 23 hours a day and the only communication you have is the ventilation system between your cells. Cell one wants to get some noodles from cell 10, so they use cell five as a liaison. You felt very disconnected from each other but keenly aware at the same time.”

ONCE he was released, he says, it took him a long time to get a grip on being a “professional adult”, but my sense is that he has done it remarkably well. He now lives in Hampstead and has a day job with a film-distribution company. “It’s easy to forget all this stuff happened. I have so much other stuff on now, it feels like a completely different person.”

Still, he finds the general levels of ignorance about what happens online terrifying. “You log into Facebook and it tells you your profile is 64.1 per cent complete. They want to know everything. People think that’s normal.” In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency — not to mention the recent leaked celebrity photos — we need to become more serious.

“People need to think about the process of a needle moving around on a hard-drive and inscribing their data. Where is it stored? What happens when you send an email? How long-lasting is a picture? How far do the people who have your data have to be pushed to give it up to other people? People don’t think of the net as a physical thing — they imagine it’s all in this ethereal cyberspace. It’s a lot more personal than that.”

Teh Internet is Serious Business runs until October 25 at the Royal Court (020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com). Jake Davis will appear in conversation with other former LulzSec hackers at the theatre on September 29.