Transcription performed by LeahTranscribes[START OF RECORDING]
JACK: This story picks up from where we left off in Part 1, so if you haven’t heard it yet, you need to go back one episode and listen to that one before listening to this, because this is Part 2. (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
JACK: The New York Telephone Company was the face of the phone system in New York City in the 1980s. Whether you were in the New York Stock Exchange making phone calls or walking up to pay phones in the streets of Manhattan, you were using the New York Telephone Company. There were two guys who worked there that were in charge of securing the system, Tom Keiser and Fred Staples. Tom and Fred each had their own specialty. Fred engineered the phone network infrastructure, and Tom oversaw it. If you broke into the system, it was because Fred overlooked some sort of vulnerability, and then Tom was the one who had to catch you. [Music] Their jobs became infinitely more difficult and interesting when a strange letter arrived at Tom’s Times Square office in November 1988.
It stated that a kid up in the Bronx was hacking into the phone grid, who was calling himself the Technician. The letter wasn’t signed; it was an anonymous tip, but Tom suspected it might have been written by a family member of the Technician, because the tone was caring. It was a plea to stop this kid for his own good. Sure enough, when Tom pulled up the records associate with the Technician’s address, the proof was right there. Technician had been connecting to switches at AT&T from home with no real attempt to hide it, either. So, Tom turned to a nifty device that he had which was called the dialed-number recorder, DNR. A DNR is a little box that you might mistake for an answering machine or a tape recorder.
Tom had some small, black DNRs that click-clacked and spat out some paper tape when they were triggered. But these weren’t exactly wire taps. They couldn’t record the contents of what anyone said or typed. What they could do is record the metadata; which number connected to which and for how long. It was a DNR device that led investigators to catch Fry Guy. Maybe that same device will be useful here to find out what this Technician guy was doing. There’s an interesting thing to point out, that if the police wanted to do that, they would need a court order and approval from the judge to conduct a wire tap. But if the security team at the New York Telephone Company wanted to do that, they didn’t need a court order to monitor the activity of one of their customers. They’re a private company.
They can do what they want. So, Fred and Tom were able to use this DNR phone-monitoring tool without any red tape. A couple of things stood out in the data. First, there was clear evidence that this Technician was hacking into something called a dial hub, which was in the New York telephone network. The dial hub had just been invented that year, and it was pretty new even for Tom and Fred. They even had to ask, what is this thing? It was essentially a remote access point into the entire New York Telephone Company computer network. Employees had a password that they could use to log in from home to reach whatever system they needed to do their job.
Somehow this guy calling himself the Technician had not only learned about the dial hub but obtained a log-in token for it, meaning he could use it as if he was any employee in the company. What’s worse is that Tom couldn’t keep track of him once he got in there. [Music] This was serious, and this was where Tom’s second interesting discovery came in. Over time, whenever the DNR started chirping, Tom would get up from his desk, rush over to it, and read where the Technician was calling. Over time, a pattern emerged. First, this Bronx hacker would dial into the phone company network, and he’d hang around there for a bit, do his thing, and then he’d disconnect. Then he would always call a phone number after that which routed to a middle-class Queens neighborhood. It was the same number every time.
This call would last for a bit, and then he’d disconnect and check in with Queens again, and so on and so on, back and forth. Into the phone company, call to Queens. Into the phone company, call to Queens. Tom and Fred had a guess that the actual brains behind this operation might be in Queens. They looked at all the call records to that number that was going to Queens, and they noticed that there were a few other calls that came into that number in Queens quite often, too, and they were able to trace these calls, figure out whose numbers they were. This led them to discover two other hackers. One was Corrupt and the other was Outlaw. Why were so many hackers calling this number in Queens? Who were these guys? Maybe members of the notorious Legion of Doom?
Everyone knew Legion of Doom at the time. The number in Queens was registered to a red brick-row house. It belonged to Charles Abene, a middle-aged man who was a school custodian, actually an officer in the school custodians’ union, not a very likely person to be a hacker. But Charles Abene’s son was a teenager who spiked up his hair and kept terrible bedtime hours and got a lot of stomachaches. His name was Mark, but online and throughout the country, Mark was known as Phiber Optik, [music] a notorious hacker. Even compared to the other members of Legion of Doom, Mark was really good at hacking, probably too good, maybe the best phone system hacker in America.
No, on the planet. Maybe ever, actually. From the Compac TRS-80 on his desk in his tiny bedroom, Mark ingested enough knowledge to outwit even the technicians working at the phone company. He wasn’t just fluent in the New York telephone system, but also the NYNEX, the packet-switching networks running all the way up and down New England. Basically, he had encyclopedic knowledge of telecommunication systems, and he could name pretty much any of them. He could rattle off the most obscure details about any random machine or protocol. Of course he could place a call anywhere in the country without paying a cent or triggering any alarms. That was the easy part. When Mark, AKA Phiber Optik, was on a BBS, other hackers listened.
He liked sharing his knowledge and the reputation it afforded him. But don’t you dare cross him. It was easy enough for him to cut your phone service or overload it with endless calls, or much worse. As I researched this story, the Whole Earth Catalog kept coming up and up, and I didn’t really know about it before. Like, I heard about it, but I didn’t really look at it. But now I got a copy of it, and I’m looking at it, and it’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite things now. You know what? I’ll let Steve Jobs tell you about it.
STEVE: When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. [Music] This was in the late sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing. So, it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
JACK: This catalog is amazing. It’s filled with really helpful articles like how to build a shelter or a water pump, and it also has glimpses into the future and technologies and ideas for structures and systems, and sometimes there’s theoretical things in here; sometimes it’s practical, but there’s just a ton of wonderful, unique ideas on how to navigate the modern world. Stewart Brand, the guy who had made this, took a big fascination with computers, and especially hacking. He spun up his own BBS called the WELL, which stood for Whole Earth Electronic Link.
It became the place to post helpful information, to post things that were culturally relevant at the time, things like tech, art, and politics, but also significantly highlighting counter-culture movements and ideas. There were areas for niche hobbies and sharing software. At the core of it was self-empowerment and open dialogue. The WELL was the internet’s first real online community. It attracted journalists and artists and activists and poets, and yes, hackers. Like, Neil Stephenson would pop in there from time to time. Craig from Craigslist was there, and that’s where he got inspired to make Craigslist. The WELL was the birthplace for a lot of the internet culture and norms that we still use today.
HOST: [Music] One long-time supporter of hackers is Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalogs.
STEWART: They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant, and I think more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of.
HOST: To make his point, Brand invited a hundred top computer designers to an exclusive hackers’ conference in this secluded campsite north of San Francisco. Despite bad weather and crude living conditions, the camp was a true hacker heaven, well-stocked with plenty of computer toys, and of course, enough candy and soda to last through the night. But the real purpose of the get-together was to discuss the unique set of values that made the computer revolution possible and brainstorm about its future.
JOHN: My political platform is that we need an electronic Declaration of Independence.
JACK: That last guy talking was John Perry Barlow, who at the time was a poet, an essayist, and lyricist for The Grateful Dead. He stayed true to that mission. He did, in fact, go and publish a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. I’m not gonna read to you the whole thing, but let me at least quote to you the opening paragraph of this. ‘Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ That’s quite an opening for a declaration, right? John Perry Barlow is a bit of a badass, if you ask me. Okay, so, Harper’s Magazine — this was a mainstream magazine at the time which was covering things like politics, culture, literature.
It had thought-provoking essays in it, and one thing it did regularly was a featured article that they called The Forum, where three to five contributors would all try to answer big questions like what do we owe the planet, and is the American experiment failing? The contributors would try to provide high-minded, thoughtful responses. Well, Harper’s saw that these computers were rising in popularity and saw that a lot of great thinkers were gathering there on Stewart Brand’s BBS, the WELL, so they decided to run their very first virtual forum, basically a live chat room on the WELL where they’d ask users big questions to get the conversations going for their magazines, questions like, do we have a right to privacy, and should hackers respect that right?
What ethical considerations arise when we become more connected digitally? [Music] So, in December 1989, Harper’s Magazine held this virtual forum, basically an open chat room for anyone to respond to on the WELL. John Perry Barlow was there. Clifford Stoll was there. Steven Levy was there. A lot of influential people, actually, were watching the chat, even some notable hackers like Mark, AKA Phiber Optik, and Mark’s friend Eli, who went by the name Acid Freak. But the internet did what the internet does, and it didn’t quite fit into the high-minded discourse that Harper’s was hoping for. Instead, the place turned vulgar, immature, insulting, and yeah, lots of ASCII art was posted. In fact, the participants flooded the chat room with over 100,000 words during the forum.
John Perry Barlow thought he was on the hackers’ side, being libertarian and kind of punk by nature, and really was into computers himself. Except, these guys were just too annoying on the WELL, and not at all receptive to the simple arguments that hacking was troublesome. At a heated moment in the chat, John Perry Barlow wrote that, quote, “With hackers like Acid Freak and Phiber Optik, the issue is less intelligence than alienation. Trade their modems for skateboards, and only a slight conceptual shift would occur.” Acid Freak and Phiber Optik didn’t like being called out like that, and they replied, “You have some pair of balls comparing my talent with that of a skateboarder.”
Huh, well, this was indeed boring, but nonetheless…” Phiber Optik then somehow found a copy of John Perry Barlow’s credit history and posted it to the forum for anyone to see. What a crazy thing to drop in the middle of chat, right? Just someone’s credit report. Bam! Well, that spooked John Perry Barlow. He later wrote about how he felt when he saw his credit history posted like that. He said, quote, “I’ve been stuck in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls. I’ve been in police custody while on acid and on Harlem after midnight. But no one has ever put the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment.” It never took anybody long to realize that Mark, AKA Phiber Optik, was the best hacker they knew. That’s how he got into the Legion of Doom.
He borrowed a password from a friend, then he navigated to the section where members discussed phone phreaking, and thought, these guys are a joke. Sure, they have a few old technical manuals that I could recite in my sleep. So, he started flooding them with new information, sort of like an all-knowing god, and being an all-knowing hacker god can get to a kid’s head, you know? He liked the attention that people were giving him who thought he was amazing. That’s how Erik Bloodaxe felt about Mark. This guy who went by Erik Bloodaxe was a short guy with a goatee and grungy, long, blonde hair, and hung out in the LoD forums. Bloodaxe was a member of the LoD, but Mark — Mark said he was, and he was in the forums that was members only, but he wasn’t listed as an actual member.
It’s like he hacked his way into the group. Well, Bloodaxe was confused but quickly realized how good Mark was. A few weeks later, Mark was officially voted in. [Music] Bloodaxe respected Mark as a really great hacker, but he didn’t really like Mark. He didn’t like how Mark would trap hackers who would talk a big game, and then he would totally embarrass them with his superior skills. Then one day in 1989, he got a call from Mark. Mark wanted a backdoor that he knew Bloodaxe had to the NYNEX packet-switching network. But Bloodaxe was like, well, what are you gonna give me in return? If I give you this exploit, what are you gonna give me? Mark just hung up and called Bloodaxe’s friend, and told Bloodaxe’s friend, hey, Bloodaxe wants me to have the backdoor into NYNEX. Can you send it to me? And his friend did send it to him.
Then Bloodaxe found out about this and called Mark back. Bloodaxe was mad, but Mark wasn’t having it. Mark just told him, I don’t owe you shit. Bloodaxe was like, whoa, excuse me? I don’t owe you shit. I didn’t get it from you. I got it from Bob. Fuck you. Bloodaxe was like, what? Did he just really curse out a member of the LoD? Mark said, I don’t have time for this, and hung up. That’s how Mark, AKA Phiber Optik, got kicked out of the Legion of Doom, by tricking Erik Bloodaxe’s friend into giving him an exploit, and then cursing out Bloodaxe. The two clearly didn’t get along. Mark figured, whatever, and shrugged it off. He could run circles around anyone in LoD or around all of them combined. If they were ever cool, they definitely weren’t anymore. He was convinced that the Legion of Doom were has-beens, and he wasn’t the only one who thought that.
In the last episode, I told you about this guy Paul, who was trying to get into a computer, but all he was getting was Ss and Ws back, and then he blew into the phone — pssh — and all of a sudden he was in. Well, last we left him, he broke into the phone company and gave his friend free three-way calling. He told his friend Eli about this, who’s also known as Acid Freak, and Eli figured this must be a Switching Control Center System, a SCCS. So, Acid Freak was like, oh, that’s really cool. We should show this to Mark, AKA Phiber Optik, and see what he has to say about this. So, they decided to call him up. Hey, what do you want? Mark asks. He gets called all the time by a lot of hackers. Paul and Eli were a bit intimidated but excited, so they told Mark that they think they got into an SCCS, but they don’t know what to do.
You think or you know? Mark asked. Paul handed over the information, and Mark checked it out. Mark quickly figured it out. It wasn’t an SCCS. It was a telephone switch, specifically a DMS 100 switch. Mark got back on the line. It’s not a SCCS. It’s a DMS 100. Of course, the system Paul had been trying to figure out for well over a year now Mark identified in seconds. But Mark was sort of impressed that these two guys brought this to him, and asked if Paul and Eli wanted to meet up. [Music] It started with the three of them getting together at Eli’s house. Mark did the typing and explaining. Paul and Eli watched. When they got hungry, they went to the mall. Mark liked eating the mashed potatoes at KFC because they calmed his stomach. It was fun, but Eli had bigger plans.
He wanted to recruit more hackers to their little club, like this hot-shot kid that they heard about just down the road. They were talking about a hacker calling himself Corrupt, whose real name was actually John Lee. He was a black kid who lived with his mom in Bed-Stuy, which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. This was back when it was hardcore. Like, John was in a gang, and not like a cyber-gang, but an actual gang where guys robbed and sold drugs and stuff IRL. But from a little beater Commodore 64 in his cramped bedroom, John Lee was a savant. Eli kept talking, saying that John Lee’s specialty is VAX computers. These things have way more hard drive space, more CPU power than anything most people touched those days. VAXs were popular in large businesses and universities.
Some of the best secrets in cyberspace were kept on VAXs. Eli called John on his phone. John was impressed — how’d you get my number? Do you want to join our hacker club? Hm, I’m interested. So, John Lee came over, and he brought his friend Julio, whose hacker name is Outlaw. He lived in the Bronx and he was barely fifteen at the time. So, this new hacker collective was starting to form. The best of the best hackers in New York City were all coming together. There was Mark, AKA Phiber Optik, Eli, which was going by Acid Freak, Paul, who was Scorpion, John Lee, who was Corrupt, and Julio, who called himself Outlaw. The place they started meeting at was at the Citicorp Center, 601 Lexington Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It’s one of the funkiest skyscrapers you’ll ever see, and it makes no sense architecturally.
From 9:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday, Citicorp Center was home for some of the big-time companies like Citibank, of course, IBM, law firms. But once a month, on a weekend at 6:00 p.m., a totally different demographic would emerge from the grimy subways. Young men in oversized jeans, skateboards, sneakers, and backwards baseball caps would come into the Citicorp building, [music] because this is where the 2600 meetup would happen. 2600 is also a hacker magazine which would host local meetups in different cities. It’s Phrack’s most well-known counterpart. Readers brought stuff they’d find from their spoils from dumpster dives and their latest stolen passwords. They traded knowledge and they would mess with the pay phones in the atrium, like trying to get free phone calls on them or dial someone, social-engineer them.
And of course, they always found ways so they didn’t have to pay for it. Somebody would know the right number to call to avoid a toll, or they’d bring a blue box or something. At this 2600 hacker meetup is where Mark, Eli, Paul, John Lee, and Julio would meet up. They enjoyed showing off what they learned, and they learned new things from other hackers. They’d talk shop, they’d get info, they’d show off their tricks, and network with other hackers. For the most part, the people who came to the 2600 hacker meetup didn’t have any intent of causing destruction or making money. Everyone was all just so curious and wanted to know how computers worked and find really clever ways to do things with them. It was sort of the essence of what they were all about.
They shared the Legion of Doom’s moral code; no making money, no causing harm, but they were also cut from a different cloth. They weren’t just as good. No, they were better than Legion of Doom, definitely better, and a bit tougher, too, not like those guys in the suburbs who had nice computers and drove cars. These guys pulled together, salvaged and scrapped computer parts to build things, and they rode the subway. Ira Glass was able to interview Eli on This American Life in the early nineties, and it’s an incredible view into what these kids were doing then. Here, listen.
ELI: [Music] We did this from pay phones. We have a line of pay phones. We’d get into a computer, first liberate one phone. Liberating meaning make it so that you don’t need quarters for that pay phone. You just pick up and dial like a regular house phone. So, that way we could make endless amount of phone calls without paying quarters. Next step was to get into the network, find a session that was already going, and then knock them off while they were connected, and then sit there watching them. In other words, put us in their place, in the place of the computer we’re gonna connect to. So, the next time they try to log in, they would get our computer. We’d type in Login, and they’d put in their log-in account. Then we’d go, Password, you know? The password. Goes, okay, the password, and they put their password in. Then we would have — all these things were already encoded in one key, so we could just hit one key, and it wouldn’t look like we were typing it.
IRA: You would log in with just a few — with a password?
ELI: Then we’d hit the password key and a password would come out. Then we’d say, Login Incorrect, and then disconnect from them, but we already got their login and password. Then when they reconnected, it would be the regular system. So, they figure, hey, I made a mistake typing it in or something, and that’s how we would get an account. It was like — it was funny, you know? You get into things that are good. You start targeting systems that are interesting, and then you start developing a collection. It’s like baseball cards. I have NASA. I have, you know, NSA. I’ve got the phony company computers. I’ve got Mizar. I’ve got Cosmos. I’ve got this, I’ve got that, or Donald Douglas, Mary and Mariana. You know?
TRW, CBI, TransUnion. What else can I get, you know? You try to get the big names, you know? So you start developing a collection, you know? Then after a while it became fun to look up famous people. Let’s look up John Gotti’s credit. Let’s see what he owns. Let’s look up Julia Roberts. Let’s get her home phone number. Let’s get this guy’s home phone number. We were just so excited we were getting all that stuff, and it was just a rush, you know? It was the flow. Once you start going, you can’t stop. You’re just steam rolling one after the other. The flow gets you going and then you’re just like, yeah, we rule. We’re it. It breaks down all barriers. Nothing can stop the flow if you’ve got the flow. You could conquer everything. That’s why people call it being in the zone. Once you’re in there, you can’t stop. It’s the juice.
JACK: That was Eli talking about what him, Mark, Paul, John Lee, and Julio were doing in New York City back then. It was a golden time. Paul came up with an idea. He said they should give their little hacker group a name like MoD, which was a joke. Like LoD but one letter higher, MoD. Did it stand for anything? Nah. Who cares? Wait, okay, it could — Masters of Disaster. No, Masters of Deception. Yeah. So, a new hacker group was born, Masters of Deception.
IRA: If anything, it’s surprising how little they did with their power over computers. It was mostly pranks, making somebody’s phone ring continuously, turning an enemy’s home phone line into a pay phone line so when the guy picked up his phone at home, it demanded that he deposit a quarter, which there’s no way you could do that because it’s his home phone. They did actually call Julia Roberts once. They called Queen Elizabeth, too. But there’s an emptiness at the heart of a lot of these stories. Once you’ve got the Queen on the phone, what do you say?
ELI: She’s like, hello? She’s talking to us and stuff. We don’t know what to say. Hi, we’re calling from the United States and this and that. She knew what was up. She’s like, okay, hello. Then she said goodbye, and that was it. We didn’t know what to say. What do you say to Queen Elizabeth, you know? Hi. So, you see that movie, True Lies? What do you say? It’s just like, the fun of it is finding the number.
JACK: Now, all that was brewing in New York City right before that big phone outage in AT&T that happened on MLK Day in 1999, right where we left off at the last episode. Remember the one that caused millions of calls to not go through and the one that made the police and Secret Service go into full panic mode? Yeah, LoD was their initial suspect, but maybe this new group MoD had something to do with it too, right? The police didn’t necessarily know of Masters of Deception as their group name, but they definitely were tracking these people individually.
Why? Because Tom Keiser and Fred Staples, the engineers from the New York Telephone Company, were onto them. They were watching their phone calls and tracing numbers around. That number they kept calling in Queens, that was Mark’s number, and the people calling it were Paul, Eli, John Lee, and Julio. The New York telephone security team was watching all these kids hack into phone systems all over, and called the police. The police called the Secret Service, who was already working with BellSouth to try to catch hackers.
HOST: BellSouth cracked down hard on Adam and the others, even though it acknowledges they never disrupted phone service or changed any customer accounts.
SCOTT: We don’t care what the motive may or may not be.
HOST: Scott Ticer is a corporate spokesman for BellSouth.
SCOTT: We are not talking about Wally and the Beavs, much less Eddie Haskell. We’re not dealing with a bunch of mischievous pranksters playing in some high-tech toy. This was a crime.
HOST: BellSouth is just one example of a company stalked by hackers. In a recent New York case, members of a club known as the Masters of Deception were indicted, accused of hacking into institutions like the Bank of America, Martin Marietta, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell, New York Telephone, TRW, Information America, and New York University.
JACK: Geez, what a list. The police were trying to piece all this together and trying to figure out who was doing what. [Music] But that’s a huge list of companies. How did they get into all those things? Partly thanks to Jason, Jason Snitker, AKA Parmaster, and his strange, magical backdoor, a backdoor that was bigger than any backdoor I’ve ever heard of. This is another one of those parts of the story that’s so crazy that I didn’t even believe it at first. But in preparing for this episode, we managed to find and get ahold of Jason, and he confirmed what really happened. This story dates back to 1988, when Jason was in high school. He got curious with his modem and computer and ended up getting into a bunch of computers at Citibank.
In fact, he got into a system that was used to mint debit cards for different banks in Saudi Arabia. He saw this and tried to mint his own cards, and, yeah, he was able to use the Citibank computer to create 10,000 new debit card numbers which were all valid since they were in the bank’s database. You know, sharing is caring. He couldn’t even use a fraction of these cards, so he just spread them around in all the hacking forums. Now suddenly everyone had their own blank check from the bank. He worried that he might get caught for that, but that wasn’t his biggest worry. The way he’d gotten into Citibank in the first place was this backdoor he had. The backdoor got him into a lot of other places, too, places in cyberspace that no ordinary person should go.
He saw stuff; military secrets, a killer satellite that could cut up Soviet satellites with a laser, top-secret stuff. He wondered if he saw something so important or so top-secret that if they found out that he saw it, they would delete him. Because doesn’t the government try to make people disappear that they don’t like? Even today, almost forty years later, Jason talks about what he found with some feeling. He told us about a press release that he saw for that satellite with information about a laser system that never became public. He sent us this ominous message. Quote, “When you could show what is being changed to withhold information, what might the government be protecting?” Just imagine these being your problems as a teenager.
I remember when I was that age, I would get a bad grade in school or some girl wouldn’t like me or something, and that felt like the end of the world to me. But for Jason Snitker, he was stressed out simply by knowing things, top-secret things that the government didn’t really want him to know. So, he decided to split out of there from California and move to New York, Coney Island. But now New York State Police were starting to get suspicion of what hackers were up to, and an officer went to spy on the 2600 hacker meetup in the Citicorp building. Yeah, a cop came to the hacker meetup to try to look around. But luckily, Jason wasn’t there to accidentally reveal what he saw in the military’s computers, because he wasn’t keeping these secrets to himself.
While he was in New York, he met up and hung out with John Lee at Grand Central Station. In a deal over the phone, he traded his backdoor to Mark. Then almost immediately after that, he got arrested and was brought to court over all those stolen credit cards. So, what was this backdoor that he gave to John Lee and Mark? Well, it was a backdoor to let you in a huge network. It would get you into the lowest, most inner core of Tymnet. [Music] Tymnet was an international communication network before the internet that we know today was invented. It serviced the kind of organizations that needed to perform heavy-duty, possibly international communications; government agencies, large companies, that sort of thing.
Today, of course, the idea that you could use a backdoor to unlock the core of the internet is ridiculous, but on Tymnet it was possible because while there were a lot of companies using Tymnet and connected to it, Tymnet itself was operated by a single company. Someone had to manage the infrastructure for it, and so, it was a centralized network. There was a computer which was a supervisor that could oversee the whole network, and that’s what this backdoor gave them access to. They were in a supervisor level of one of the biggest networks in the world at the time. Jason had manged to get access to this through a network engineer in the company’s internal network, and he told us that it allowed him to drop right into their shell, and he stole Tymnet’s source code, which was proprietary at the time.
This was about as deep as you could possibly go. Honestly, even now I have questions about this thing. When we asked for specifics, Jason described it more like a numerical algorithm than code, so complicated that he claims even Mark couldn’t figure it out; Mark, who could figure out anything. Whether he understood it or not, for Mark, this magic access must have made him feel like Dorothy stepping into Oz. You know that famous scene where it’s black and white and then the screen suddenly fills with color. Mark had a whole new system to explore, a whole new network to explore, and so many computers were on this. [Music] He was gonna master it, and boy, did he.
The sugar rush that came with hacking company after company — Mark found some of Tymnet’s own PDP 10s, and these were big, hulking mainframes that were used to store administrative manuals and a bunch of other stuff. Administrator manuals might sound boring to you, but to Mark and MoD, these were priceless. Instruction guides for how to go further and further into every corner of the internet? At a certain point, Mark literally couldn’t go any deeper. Where Tymnet’s staff might only be able to see what’s relevant to their jobs and Tymnet users could only see what’s on their own networks, the Masters of Deception could see it all and access it all, too. He was tapped into the matrix. It’s odd to say, but hacking the NSA, Bank of America, whatever, it was almost trivial with this backdoor.
They could easily find their way into a ton of interesting networks. Spying on any person was simple, too, because the companies that held everyone’s personal information were on Tymnet. Through them, you could look up yourself, your rival hacker, or Julia Roberts to see her finances or her phone number or even where she lived. At this point, the Masters of Deception must have felt unstoppable. Mark, John, and Julio would watch Tymnet’s administrators as they changed their passwords, or they could read the Tymnet security department’s e-mails. They could anticipate anything that might threaten their access, because they knew about new security features and plans before those features and plans were even implemented.
Now, remember when I talked about Esquire Magazine interviewing the guy who made the blue box in 1971? Well, at one point, Esquire interviewed someone from the Masters of Deception and said, hey, if you’re really good as you say you are, prove it. Hack into the White House right now. The story goes that MoD members hacked into the White House in front of Esquire reporters. That’s how wild of a time it was. The Masters of Deception were the most powerful people in cyberspace. Legion of who? Oh yeah, I almost forgot about them. Because by this time, by at least some accounts, the Legion of Doom was dead. Like, Phrack Magazine published their obituary on May 28th, 1990. Quote, “The Legion of Doom will long be remembered in the computer underground as an innovative and pioneering force.
No other group dedicated to the pursuit of computer and telecommunication knowledge has survived longer, and none probably will. The Legion of Doom, from 1984 to 1990.” End quote. The article ended with a list of all the LoD members and when they’d left and why they left, like it was some kind of memorial. The Prophet; member from ‘88 to ‘89. Reason for leaving; bust hacking. Phiber Optik; ‘89 to 90, New York. Reason for leaving; bust hacking. Which, that’s not actually true. Mark or Phiber Optik got kicked out, remember? You know whose name is not on here is Erik Bloodaxe, whose real name is Chris Goggans, or his sidekick, Scott Chasin, which is Doc Holiday. It makes me wonder if this obituary was some kind of power move or a prank.
[Music] The author was blank, and it’s very curious because eight days earlier, LoD released an article which said, we are still alive. Lex Luthor wrote it, and it says, if you believe the rumors LoD has been dead many times — but that’s, again, untrue. But in reality, due to the CFAA being passed and the major outage at New York, arrests were starting to be made on hackers all over. Three days after that major outage at AT&T on January 18th, 1990, two agents from the US Secret Service, a security employee from Southwestern Bell, and a security guard from the University of Missouri knocked on the door of a frat house, and they found Craig Neidorf, AKA Knight Lightning, the co-founder of the notorious hacker magazine, Phrack, and accused him of crashing the AT&T phone system.
They arrested him and took all his computers and took him into custody. Craig seemed pretty surprised that the Secret Service was arresting him. Yeah, he could have done it, sure, but he swore he didn’t and he would never do that. Any fight that Craig had in him, though, disappeared when the cops confronted him about the document that he posted to Phrack, the E911 file. In a four-hour interrogation, he admitted to publishing it. He agreed to cooperate with the investigation. Ditto happened for the Prophet, the guy who originally copied the E911 file from BellSouth. He also got arrested by the police and the Secret Service, and they were both charged on seven counts relating to stealing and posting this E911 file. They even told the parents of these guys, your son has caused billions of dollars worth of damage. He’s crashed the AT&T network. Eventually, almost every LoD member either got busted or gave up. Lex Luthor announced his retirement. He’s the one who started LoD. Here’s Mark again.
MARK: There was a lot more government involvement in the hacker underground in general, and because of that fact, two things happened. A lot of people who had not gotten in trouble yet didn’t want to risk any more. They were already older, particularly of the older generation of hackers. Some guys that I knew who started LoD, for example, withdrew from the hacker underground, simply didn’t want to risk getting in trouble anymore now that the climate had changed so much. Other hackers, a few, let’s say, thought that it might be good to go in the other direction and attempt to gain clout with the government and telco security by inviting them onto a bulletin board that was set up under the auspices of creating a dialogue between hackers and security people and the FBI and Secret Service. [Music] Well, it might sound a little ridiculous to think about, but the FBI thought it was great because it gave them a chance to chat with hackers and then arrest them.
JACK: So, while people from LoD were being nabbed by the police and others were scattering, it looked like LoD was dead, but it wasn’t entirely. There was one person who was trying to keep it alive, Erik Bloodaxe, AKA Chris Goggans.
MARK: Erik Bloodaxe thought it would be a really great idea to try to bring back LoD for what it was. In the absence of any real leadership in the group anymore because anyone who mattered anymore had withdrawn, he basically appointed himself leader of the group.
JACK: He had ideas to take it in a new direction. Bloodaxe himself was a long-time member of LoD and was an editor of Phrack, too. So, he suspected the police would come after him, too, and they did. On March 1st, 1990, his off-campus townhouse at the University of Texas was raided at 6:00 in the morning. But he was expecting them. So, even though there were six armed policemen in his bedroom, Bloodaxe was pretty calm. In fact, he basically staged the place for them. Like, he left out a brochure that he knew they’d see, and it said, ‘How to become a Secret Service agent’. One of the agents rifling through his stuff grabbed it and asked him about it. Bloodaxe told him that, you know, maybe when all this is over, I could help out.
He actually had been thinking about switching sides for a while now, and he picked up the idea from a book called Fighting Computer Crime released in 1983. But Bloodaxe always held on to the belief that there shouldn’t be any destruction when it comes to hacking. So, they didn’t find much evidence on him committing crimes, other than he was a member of the Legion of Doom, and they let him go without any charges. Bloodaxe tried making a BBS to bring together hackers, security teams from telcos and police, but it didn’t go well, and it closed up. He then decided to start a business to try to advise companies about hacking from an office in Texas, but he was doing more than that.
MARK: There was a great amount of disagreement and dissension within LoD in the late 1980s. Because of the fact that there was informing going on, several people, several members of the Legion of Doom had gotten busted under mysterious — let’s just say mysterious circumstances, people that we knew, people that were affiliated in other countries — for example, a hacker group in Australia — were busted under suspicious circumstances which all led to a certain individual that we all know and love in Texas who had started one of the first hacker consultancies under the auspices of gaining clout with the FBI and telco security. The person I’m referring to is Erik Bloodaxe, in case it wasn’t clear to anyone in the audience.
JACK: Bloodaxe started a company called Comsec Data Security.
MARK: It became known to even other LoD members who were wondering if I had heard anything about Erik Bloodaxe, because they were concerned for their own safety when they heard about what happened with some hackers in Australia and others and suspected that he was involved. But he was trying to gain clout with the government to bolster his business, and in doing so was turning in hackers. When hackers found out he was doing this, they began harassing him and his business and so on, which is what hackers do in general, and certainly someone who’s informing on other hackers is gonna earn the wrath of other hackers.
JACK: From the Citicorp atrium, everyone who could would pick up a pay phone and start calling the Comsec phone number. It was a denial-of-service attack, if you will, which tied up the phone lines and made it so nobody could ever get through to Comsec. That would last all day. So, people got bored and had to go eat dinner at like, 8:30 or so. [Music] A legendary hacker feud was starting to stir up, LoD versus MoD. But Erik Bloodaxe from LoD could handle all these prank phone calls. This wasn’t a big deal to him, so no shots fired back yet. LoD would sometimes host conference calls to chat about what was happening. John Lee, AKA Corrupt, the member of MoD, would hear about these calls and join in, and one day he jumped on the call and introduced himself as dope fiend from MoD.
Someone shouted, get that n-word off the line. John Lee was black and took offense to this. Bloodaxe would always deny that he was the one who said it, but we called John, and John knows what he knows. John Lee and his buddy Julio joined more of these LoD bridges, but they listened in silently after that without introducing themselves, and they heard it again, the slurs that the Texan hackers would use to refer to them. These definitely were not slips of the tongue. So, John Lee decided to make Bloodaxe’s life hell. He and Julio prank-called him incessantly, taunting him, dialing again and again, over and over, and just hanging up. But still, Bloodaxe kept his cool and didn’t do anything back.
Remember earlier in this episode I told you about a super-secret file on LoD’s Fifth Amendment BBS; it allowed anyone to hack into the PBX system developed by the company called Rolm, and even LoD members were explicitly instructed to never copy it? Well, John Lee got into the Fifth Amendment and he stole the file, and he spread it to other BBSs around the country just to spite LoD. Now Bloodaxe got mad that John took this file and spread it, so in return he took a copy of the History of MoD, a file written by Eli describing the group and how it came together, and ran it through a program that converted it to jive language, like a comically-racist impression of the original text, which he then published to the world, and everybody knew who he was trying to annoy. There was only one black hacker in MoD.
John Lee then took a shot at Bloodaxe’s sidekick, Scott Chasin, by publishing his mom’s credit history, phone number, and home address on a popular BBS. As a bonus, he even included some sexual commentary about her. Then Erik Bloodaxe got a password to MoD’s BBS from a guy who really didn’t like John, and the spat just kept going up and up, and John Lee wanted to take it a step up. In the summer of 1991, from his humid, air-conditioned-less apartment in Brooklyn, he wanted to mess with Bloodaxe even more by tapping his phone. He wanted to get in Bloodaxe’s head. [Music] First, he broke into Southwestern Bell, casually like he’s done a thousand times before, then he connected to a switch that controlled Comsec’s phone line, which is Bloodaxe’s official line.
Using computer commands, he asked the switch if the line was currently in use, and it was. So, he tapped into the call and spied on what they were discussing at Comsec. What he heard was a call where Erik Bloodaxe was talking to Craig Neidorf, AKA Knight Lightning, AKA the co-founder of Phrack magazine. At the time, Craig was as famous as any hacker in the world was, the kind of guy Bloodaxe was probably wanting to impress. Craig was calling Comsec for help. He was getting harassed with constant phone calls lately, and he was fed up. Bloodaxe felt his pain. He had been dealing with the same problem. He was like, you know who Corrupt is, AKA John Lee? Yeah, well, it sounds like something he would do. A minute later, Bloodaxe got a call on another line, and he told Craig, hang on just one minute. Hello?
Yeah, that does sound like something I would do. Click. That was badass. Erik Bloodaxe knew exactly what just happened. John Lee was listening in on that call. Now Bloodaxe had to go back to the most famous hacker in the country who needed help dealing with an attack on his phone line and admit that the very call that they were having was under attack, and John Lee listened to him admit it. Erik Bloodaxe realized this is no way to run a security company. He had to do something, not just about John Lee, but about Mark. He knew Mark was the puppet master. Take out Mark, and everyone at MoD would scatter. The whole MoD needed to go, and this is where the legendary hacker war began, between MoD and LoD. Erik Bloodaxe wanted to take out Mark, and John Lee wanted to annoy the hell out of Bloodaxe. Here’s Mark again.
MARK: So, he decided that I was responsible for this based on some previous disagreements we had had, and decided that he was going to inform on me and various of my friends here in New York by giving information to the FBI about us and so on and so forth.
JACK: Remember I told you about Tom and Fred, the security engineers at the New York Telephone Company? Well, they figured out the people hacking into their network were John and Julio from MoD. With months and months of records documenting, following every single time that they did it, there was enough evidence to send to the police. But the police needed to verify the evidence themselves. So, a judge looked over the paper trail and decided to approve a wire tap for both John and Julio, and not just wire taps. For the first time, US authorities were granted the ability to tap computer communications, too. Data taps, they called it. I guess the term we might use today is man-in-the-middle or even spyware.
[Music] In a suite of borrowed offices in Manhattan’s World Trade Center, the Secret Service set up a War Room. Well, a Wire Room is actually what they called it, and it was overseen by the FBI, filled with computers, storage tapes, disc drives, and cables in every direction, a system specifically designed for one occasion, to track these teenage hackers on their computers, staffed by two dozen trained agents of the US government working in twelve-hour shifts, tapping the lines of these teenagers, recording all of their internet behavior. Back then, nothing was encrypted, so all their passwords and commands and everything that they were doing could easily be seen by the FBI, listening and watching everything these kids did with the same intensity of like, a Soviet nuclear launch.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service made a deal with Erik Bloodaxe. Any time Comsec got a call from MoD, he would walk down the street to a specific pay phone and inform his FBI and Secret Service handler, never using the agent’s real name just in case MoD was listening there, too. The investigation into the Masters of Deception took one year. In June 1992, Mark, John, Julio, Eli, and Paul each received an envelope in the mail. The letter informed them that they were the subject of a grand jury investigation, which means they are suspects of a crime. Soon after that, they were all arrested and formally charged with violating, yep, you guessed it, the CFAA. I’ll let Mark tell it from here.
MARK: As things fell apart, EFF was supporting us to go to trial.
JACK: Wait, the EFF? Yeah, sorry, I hate to interrupt here, but — I know the story has been like — gone in seven different directions and things are mashed together all over, but this is something I think I need to talk about. When John Perry Barlow clashed with Mark and he got spooked — remember; he dropped his credit report in the chat? — spooked more than he’s ever been before, but he also realized, petty arguments aside, something much greater is happening in the country right now, and these kids were bearing the brunt of it. After their argument, John Perry Barlow asked Mark, give me a call. Rumor has it he didn’t even give Mark his number because he felt that would be an insult to such a powerful phreaker. But soon his phone rang, and of course, it was Mark. Later, John actually wrote about this call.
He said, in this conversation and the others that followed, I encountered an intelligent, civilized, and surprisingly principled kid of eighteen who sounded and continues to sound as if there’s little harm in him to man or data. His cracking impulses seemed purely exploratory, and I’ve begun to wonder if we wouldn’t also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves. It’s such a great analogy. John Perry Barlow wondered whether what Mark and his annoying friends were doing was really as bad as the police would have him believe. Is transmission through an otherwise unused data channel really theft? He asked himself this question. Or put another way, is there a difference between exploring and exploiting?
If you break in just to look around and cause no damage, maybe you’re just exploring. In the months that followed, John Perry Barlow kept an eye out as Secret Service agents were busting in through hackers’ doors across the country, including Mark and Eli’s houses, carrying guns, taking all of the things, and cordoning off their family members. This was all part of what the Secret Service called Operation Sundevil, which resulted in twenty-seven warrants for hackers spread across fourteen cities. It was a massive crackdown nationwide on hackers. It was very serious and very scary.
HOST2: Search boards are going out here in Chicago and a dozen other cities coast to coast in an effort to stop computer fraud that is costing companies and consumers millions of dollars. As Elizabeth Vargas reports, authorities have already seized computer equipment and thousands of computer records.
ELIZABETH: [Music] They say it is the white-collar crime of the nineties. Raids in Chicago and a dozen other cities this week exposed a million-dollar ring of high-tech computer hackers.
SPEAKER: It is not a game. They’re attempting and are getting into credit cards. They’re getting into telephone systems. They’re getting into medical records, credit records. They’re getting into everything.
ELIZABETH: The raids come after a two-year nationwide investigation called Operation Sundevil.
JACK: Like, even the guy who reported the Prophet for stealing the E911 file and stashing it on his computer, he even got raided. He’s like, man, I’m the one who found it. I’m the one who turned it in, and I’m also suffering? That guy was cooked. John Perry Barlow saw that the government was overstepping and using the CFAA to justify arresting dozens of people for being curious. Everyone in MoD was accused of violating the CFAA. Members of LoD were arrested for it, and so many other innocent bystanders. So, John Perry Barlow was seeing all these people getting scooped up left and right, and he thought someone needs to do something about this. He met with Mitch Kapor. This guy was on the WELL, too, and Kapor was known for inventing the spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3.
They both lived in San Francisco, which is where the WELL was hosted, too, and together — the two of them got together and said, let’s do something here, and they started the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They wanted to fund education, lobby for digital rights, and help with the legal cases related to constitutional rights in cyberspace. They were worried that law enforcement and lawmakers didn’t understand the digital world that they were trying to regulate, and that ignorance was turning curiosity into crime. I want to remind you that John Perry Barlow was the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. He loved the internet. So, together they had dinner with big names in tech like Stewart Brand and Steve Wozniak to go over the ideas of what the EFF was.
Steve was so into it that he pitched in some of his own money to get things started. It was settled. The EFF was born, and its online home at the time was the WELL. The EFF is still going strong today. It is a leading voice for advocating for digital rights in the United States. The thing was, almost all of those arrests were resulting in nothing. The police were raiding offices and homes and taking computers but finding no evidence of computer crimes at all, and letting people go without any charges. The most comical of all these raids was on Steve Jackson Games. So, this was a game studio that made board games like roll-the-dice, roleplaying-type board games, right? One of the Legion of Doom members worked there.
In fact, you heard his voice at the very beginning of the last episode, the guy who wrote The Hacker Manifesto, Loyd Blankenship. [Music] The Secret Service was sure that Loyd hacked into BellSouth, stole some stuff, and was using it at work. The proof that the Secret Service had? The roleplaying game that Loyd was making was a cyberpunk game which had a hacker campaign in it. They thought this was an instruction manual for hackers, so they raided the entirety of Steve Jackson Games, seized computers, seized e-mails, arrested people, took notebooks, took everything. But Steve Jackson himself was like, whoa, that is not a hacker manual. It’s a work of fiction. We just made that story up.
This was one of the first cases that the EFF took on to help out, claiming the Secret Service was totally overreaching with the CFAA, and it’s just way too broad of a law. This is the dumbest law ever. So, that case got dropped when they found absolutely no evidence of a crime, which was a huge win for the EFF. In fact, it got dropped so hard that the court criticized the Secret Service for such a sloppy understanding of crimes that they were chasing. Then Mark, AKA Phiber Optik, was another one of the EFF’s first cases.
MARK: They felt that we were not guilty of what the US attorneys were saying we did. There was even at least one attempt by one of the complainants in the case, a British telecom, Tymnet, wanting to actually interview us, which if we were given the opportunity would have shown cooperation and would have given us the opportunity to tell them exactly what we did. We would have met the engineers that built the network. They were interested in how we defeated their security. It sounds like a movie. But unfortunately the US attorney’s office did not allow them to do this. So, we were never given the opportunity to clear our name. So, we were basically treated like criminals, and due to that fact, one by one, my friends, the guys that were named in the indictment, decided to plead guilty until I was the only one remaining. It’s the typical cliche of the last guy standing without a chair when the music stops.
JACK: The judge even said a message must be sent. So, that was Mark. Then there was Eli, AKA Acid Freak, one of the members of MoD, [music] who also got arrested.
IRA: Eli was thrown into prison for a relatively minor offense. Some of the members of his crew broke into the computers that list everybody’s credit ratings, you know, and they copied some credit reports, and they sold the information to other people. He was named as a member of this conspiracy.
ELI: They said we abused our power, but we didn’t abuse it at all. We did nothing compared to the things that could have been done. What we did was such a small thing in such a larger scheme of things, you know? It’s kinda depressing in a way. There’s so many things we could have done. We could have monitored Peter Lynch, you know? What’s the next best investment for the day? We’d make millions of dollars investing or shorting some stock, but we never did, you know? Now we wonder why. We’re like, damn. There’s so many applications for this kind of stuff. What happened? Then we were like, ah, we were just kids.
JACK: MoD co-founders Paul and Eli each got half a year in jail. Mark got a whole year in jail, and John Lee got a year in jail, too. Julio, who did all of John’s crimes along with him, got off free, which is probably because he cooperated with the police. A few LoD members, Adam and the Prophet, faced up to $2 million in fines and forty years in prison, which would have been ridiculous. But in the end, Adam got sentenced to fourteen months, and the Prophet got twenty-one months in prison. Then there was Craig’s case, AKA Knight Lightning, the co-founder of Phrack. He was in trouble for publishing the E911 file. He was also one of the first cases that the EFF took on.
If you think about it, this is a federal case, so they couldn’t charge him with just publishing the article, because that would just go completely against the first amendment. So, instead they were charging him with theft and wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property. BellSouth was saying that the E911 file was worth $79,000 and contained highly-sensitive information. Prophet was charged with the same stuff, and he just admitted guilt. But Craig? No, no, no. Craig was like, I am not guilty. So, a trial began, and the trial was absolutely ridiculous. For one, they wouldn’t show the E911 file to the jury or put it into evidence for fear that it would become public record and then anyone could see it.
Two, BellSouth claimed it cost the company a ridiculous amount of damage, but they couldn’t produce a shred of evidence to show where they got that number. The prosecutors wanted to put Craig in prison for thirty years and fine him $122,000 for publishing this file in Phrack. But as the trial went on, they learned that the E911 file didn’t, in fact, have any information on how to configure it, change it, or use it. It wasn’t a technical manual at all, but more of an escalation path for troubleshooting emergency services. If this breaks, call this office. If that breaks, call this office. That sort of thing. It had a lot of technical jargon which made it incredibly hard to read, but it didn’t teach anyone how to take down the 911 system.
The prosecutors were pitting their whole argument against how dangerous it was to publish that, saying that anyone who reads it could go and take down the 911 system, but it just wasn’t the case. All you got out of it were definitions and escalation paths, barely anything to actually do anything with. [Music] The trial just kept going on. But then suddenly, EFF got a hot tip from someone. It was discovered that if you called up BellSouth, they would actually send you the E911 file and just charge you a $13 printing and shipping fee. It was basically available free from the very company that was accusing him of theft. From what I understand is that it wasn’t the exact same file, but the contents had the same information in it.
So, whatever was supposed to be secret and sensitive was not, in fact, secret or sensitive because they were giving it away. The prosecution had no legs to stand on after that, and the case got dropped. This was not a holy manual worth $79,000. It was a common technical document that the very company would give away for free if you just asked for it. This was a monumental win for Phrack and the EFF. For Phrack, this put them down into legendary status. They weren’t just a hacker e-zine anymore. They were the hackers who got arrested by the Secret Service, fought the law, and won. How badass is that? For the EFF, this was proof to them that the CFAA legislation was prone to overreach and was improperly being used to criminalize the dissemination of information. This solidified the idea that the EFF was an important entity that had to keep fighting for our digital rights.
Man, there couldn’t be a better symbol to wrap up this story with, because whether the E911 file was the most dangerous document on the internet or just a $13 pamphlet, it almost didn’t even matter in the end, because what if I told you the day before authorities raided Craig and a week before they raided MoD, AT&T admitted very publicly that the outage was caused by a bug in their own software. It was self-inflicted by AT&T itself; by accident, but still, it was their own doing. One of their programmers put in the word ‘break’ in a wrong part of the code, and that just caused all their computer switches to crash. So, all that kerfuffle, all those arrests which was triggered by the AT&T outage was all because AT&T broke their own systems. It took years for people to get their lives back on track, and there’s still a lot of bitterness between people in those circles. Here’s Eli again, and this was where Ira Glass interviewed him after he got out of prison and wasn’t allowed to touch a computer for a while.
ELI: So, I was like, damn, this is like — I have to fill this void. What should I do, you know? I didn’t know what to do anymore. It was like, horrible. Just — it was sad. We would call each other up, and usually we would be talking about computers and trading passwords and did we get into this and that. I remember the first time we called. It was like, so, what’s up? Nothing. I cleaned my room yesterday. [Music] Yeah, they came over and cleaned my room, too, pretty well. Yeah, I know. So, what do you want to do? I don’t know. ‘Cause it’s like, such a large part of our lives at that point, you know? Yeah, so much power, and to lose it in an instant like that is just so — such a shock, you know? It’s like, bam, you don’t have that power anymore. You can’t sit on your computer. What are you gonna do? Uh-oh, I’m a regular guy now. I’m not Acid Freak anymore. What’s Acid Freak without a computer, you know? Just a regular guy. So, it was a bummer.
JACK: I think that marks when the sun set on the golden age of hacking. What began as a thousand screeching modems in dim bedrooms lit by the glow of heavy monitors, fueled by curiosity and rebelliousness, it ended in knock, knock, knocks at the door. The wires got heavy. The fun got serious, too serious. The thrill of dialing blindly into the unknown gave way to lawyers, headlines, and the cold steel of federal laws written by people who never touched a terminal in their lives. The federal government raided people’s homes. They looked for digital demons, and found instead a bunch of misfit kids arguing about baud raids and antsy colors. But it didn’t matter. The spell had been broken.
The new digital frontier was now off limits to exploration. You could feel it. The stakes were higher now. The channels were quieter. The boards went dark. The legends disappeared. The ones who stuck around, well, they took jobs behind desks that they used to try to hack into. But back then, during that fleeting stretch of time, it really did feel like this is our world now, the world of the electron and the switch and the beauty of the baud, unregulated, uncharted, unsupervised, pure signal and no static, punk rock energy, a crooked little utopia that was inside all our computers.
If you were lucky enough to log in while it lasted, you know it wasn’t just hacking. It was freedom. It was adventure into a new frontier. It was the last beautiful accident before the age of control. Because when the CFAA showed up, a law written by people who couldn’t tell the difference between terrorism and curiosity, it didn’t catch real criminals, just the kids who still believed that the frontier was worth exploring. You can’t hack the world forever, but for that brief moment in time, it sure felt like we could. You may stop an individual, but you can’t stop us all. After all, we’re all alike.
(Outro): [Outro music] This episode was researched and written with help from Nate Nelson. Together we crushed a ton of books and scoured the far reaches of the internet, and we kept getting pulled in so many directions, which is why this episode was so long. I got super fascinated by so many aspects of hacking in the eighties and went down some really fun memory lanes. I want to specifically mention two books that were super helpful for us to write this episode. There’s Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling and Masters of Deception by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner. These books captured what was happening in the shadows at the time in such a clear and remarkable way. You definitely should check them out. If you want to hear more about what happened then or for a totally different story of hacking in the eighties, check out the book Cuckoo’s Egg, which is a classic hacker story.
As a reminder, you can get a premium listening experience by going to plus.darknetdiaries.com. If you sign up, you’ll get an ad-free version of this show, plus eleven bonus episodes. Not only that; it’s an amazing way to show your support for the show and to keep the lights on over here. If you like what we’re doing and you want more of it, please consider supporting by going to plus.darknetdiaries.com. This episode was created by me, Sir Crash-A-Lot, Jack Rhysider. This episode was written by Phreakachu, Nate Nelson. Our editor is the laser disc lord, Tristan Ledger. This episode was scored by the blind SQL injection, Andrew Meriwether, mixing by Proximity Sound, intro music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. So, I remember I got banned from a BBS. A sysop just was like, you’re not welcome here anymore. Why? Because I uploaded twelve incomplete copies of King’s Quest because I was trying to download Leisure Suit Larry. This is Darknet Diaries.
[END OF RECORDING]