Melbourne in the late 1980s is home to a loose network of teenage hackers who call themselves the computer underground, working from locked suburban bedrooms with little more than modems and home computers. Two of them, known online as Electron and Phoenix, join an alliance called The Realm and get hold of a restricted security document called the Zardoz list, using it to break into some of the world's most sensitive government and military computer systems. The intrusions move so fast that investigators initially assume an automated program is responsible, until Phoenix phones The New York Times to boast about it. That call brings the US Secret Service and FBI into the case, and within months the Australian Federal Police are raiding houses. Filmed roughly a decade after the arrests, the film combines interviews with the hackers and investigators with dramatic reconstructions of screens, keystrokes, and late-night sessions to show how the break-ins actually worked. It is one of the earliest documentaries to treat hacking as a subculture rather than a crime spree alone.