Gold, and fellow hacker Robert Schifreen, were said to have accessed, inter alia, the personal message account of Prince Philip.
The facts as outlined in The Hacker's Handbook are that he was 'fitted' up, having tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to warn BT's Prestel via Micronet of the security holes.
[1] In 1984, Gold and fellow journalist/hacker Robert Schifreen demonstrated an "ad hoc penetration test" of a Prestel network which, according to the writer Nick Barron, used "a combination of clever shoulder surfing and good old-fashioned hacking skills".
[1] An archive telling the story of how the 1980s hack of Prince Philip’s mailbox led to UK anti-hacking legislation is held at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley.
The appeals were pursued right up to the House of Lords by BT at taxpayers expense[citation needed] during the Thatcher era.