169: MoD

This story picks up from where we left
off in part one. 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
two. [music]
These are true stories from the dark
side of the internet.
[music] I'm Jack Reider.
This is Darknet Diaries. [music]
>> [music]
>> 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. And there
were two guys who worked there that were
in charge of securing the system. Tom
Kaiser 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. 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
[music] 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
associated 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 [music]
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
[music] 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. [music] 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. And
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
wiretap. 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 a 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 and they even had to ask like
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 login 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 login 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.
>> This was serious. And this is where
Tom's second [music] 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. And then he
would always call a phone number after
that, which routed to a middle-class
Queens neighborhood, and 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. And 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. And
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 Abin,
a middle-aged man who was a school
custodian, actually an officer in the
school custodian's union. Not a very
likely person to be a hacker. But
Charles Abin's son was a teenager who
spiked up his hair. He kept terrible
bedtime hours and got a lot of stomach
aches. His name was Mark. But online and
throughout the country, Mark was known
as fiber optic. A notorious hacker. And
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,
[music] on the planet. Maybe ever,
actually. From the compact TRS80 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
9X, 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 scent or triggering any alarms.
That was the easy part. When Mark,
[music] aka Fiber Optic, 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 the 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 like
amazing. It's like one of my favorite
things now. You know what? I'll let
Steve Jobs tell you about it. 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 Stuart
Brand not far from here in Menllo Park,
and he brought it to life with his
poetic touch. This was in the late60s
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 35 years before Google
came along. It was idealistic,
overflowing with neat tools and great
notions. This catalog is amazing. It's
filled with really helpful articles like
how to build a shelter or water pump.
And it also has glimpses into the future
and technologies and ideas for
structures and [music] 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. And Stuart Brand, the guy who
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
counterculture 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
Stevenson would pop in there from time
to time. Craig from Craigslist was there
and that's where he got inspired to make
Craigslist and the well was the
birthplace for a lot of the internet
culture and norms that we still use
today. [music]
>> One longtime supporter of hackers is
Stuart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth
Cataloges.
They are uh shy,
sweet, incredibly brilliant and uh I
think more effective in pushing the
culture around now in good ways than
almost any group I can think of.
>> To make [music] his point, Brand invited
a 100 top computer designers to an
exclusive hackers conference in the
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 [music] computer
revolution possible and brainstorm about
its future.
>> My political platform is that we need an
electronic declaration of independence.
That last guy talking was John Perry
Barlo, who at the time was a poet, an
essayist, and lyricist for the Grateful
Dead. And he stayed true to that
mission. He did in fact go and publish a
declaration of independence of
cyberspace. I'm not going to 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, a 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 Barlo 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
like three to five contributors would
all try to answer big questions like
what do we owe the planet and is the
American experiment failing and the
contributors would try to provide
high-minded thoughtful responses. Well
Harper saw that these computers were
rising in popularity and saw that a lot
of great thinkers were gathering there
on Steuart 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?"
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 Barlo was there,
Clifford Stole was there, Steven Levy
was there. A lot of influential people
who actually were watching the chat,
even some notable hackers like Mark
[music] aka Fiber Optic, 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
Harpers was [music] hoping for. Instead,
the place turned vulgar, immature,
insulting, and yeah, lots of asky art
was [music] posted. In fact, the
participants flooded the chat room with
over a 100,000 [music] words during the
forum. John Perry Barlo thought he was
on the hacker side, being libertarian
and kind of punk by nature [music] and
really was into computers himself,
except these guys were just too annoying
on the well [music] and not at all
receptive to the simple arguments that
hacking was troublesome. At a heated
moment in the chat, John Perry [music]
Barlo wrote that quote, "With hackers
like Acid Freak and Fiber Optic), the
issue is less intelligence than
alienation. Trade their modems for
skateboards, and only a slight
conceptual shift would occur." Acid
Freak and Fiber Optic 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,
Fiber Optic then [snorts] somehow found
a copy of John Perry Barlo's credit
history and posted it to the forum for
anyone to see. Like, what a crazy thing
to drop in the middle of chat, right?
Just someone's credit report. Bam. Well,
[snorts] that spooked John Perry Barlo.
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 wighing shoulderlength
curls. I've been in police custody while
on acid and in Harlem after midnight,
but no one has ever put the spook in me
quite as Fiber Optic did at that
moment." It never took anybody long to
realize that Mark aka Fiber Optic was
the best hacker they knew. And 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 freaking 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, like he liked the attention that
people were giving him who thought he
was amazing. And that's how Eric Bloodax
felt about Mark. This guy who went by
Eric Bloodax was a short guy with a
goatee and grungy long blonde hair and
hung out in the LOD forums. Bloodax was
a member of the LOD, but Mark Mark said
he was and he was in the forums that it
was members only, but he wasn't listed
as an actual member. It's like he hacked
his way into the group. Well, Bloodax
was confused, but quickly realized how
good Mark was. A few weeks later, Mark
was officially voted in. Bloodax
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. And then one day in
1989, he got a call from Mark. Mark
wanted a back door that he knew Bloodax
had to the 9X packet switching network.
But Bloodax is like, "Well, what are you
going to give me in return? If I give
you this exploit, what are you going to
give me?" >> [music]
>> And Mark just hung up and called Bloodax
his friend and told Bloodax his friend,
"Hey, Bloodax wants me to have the uh
back door into NX, can you send it to
me?" And the his friend did send it to
him. And then Bloodax found out about
this and called Mark back. Bloodax was
mad, but Mark wasn't having it. Mark
just told him, "I don't know you shit."
And Bloodax was like, "Well, excuse me.
I don't owe you I didn't get it
from you. I got it from Bob. you."
And Bloodax was like, [music] "What? Did
he just really curse out a member of the
LOD? Mark said, "I don't have time for
this." and hung up. And that's how Mark
aka Fiber Optic got kicked out of the
Legion of Doom by tricking Eric
Bloodax's friend into giving him an
exploit and then cursing out Blood Axe.
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 hasbins. And he
wasn't the only one who thought that.
[music]
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
S's and W's back and then he blew into
the phone and all of a sudden he was in.
Well, last we left him, he broke into
the phone company, gave his friend three
three-way calling, and he told his
friend Eli about this, who's also known
as Acid Freak. And Eli figured this must
be a switching control center systems.
And so Acid Freak was like, "Oh, that's
that's really cool. We should we should
show this to Mark aka Fiber Optic. 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 SECs, 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. And Mark
quickly figured it out. It wasn't an
SECS. It was a telephone switch.
Specifically, a DMS 100 switch. Mark got
back on the line. It's not a SECS. 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 and when they got hungry,
they went to the mall. Mark liked eating
the mashed potatoes at KFC because it
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 Bedstey, [music] which is a
neighborhood in Brooklyn. And 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.
[music] Eli kept talking saying that
John Lee's specialty is vax computers.
And these things have way more hard
drive space, more CPU power than
anything most people touch those days.
[music] And vaxes were popular in large
businesses and universities. Some of the
best secrets in cyerspace were kept on
vaxes. [music] Eli called John on his
phone. John was impressed. How'd you get
my number? Do you want to join our
hacker club? H I'm interested. So John
Lee came over and he brought his friend
Julio whose hacker name is Outlaw and he
lived in the Bronx and he was barely 15
at [music] the time. And 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 Fiber Optic, Eli which was
going by Acidre 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
City Corp Center, 601 Lexington Avenue
in Midtown Manhattan. It's one of the
funkiest skyscrapers you'll ever see and
makes no sense architecturally. From
9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday, City
Corp Center was home for some of the big
time companies like City Bank, of
course, uh IBM, uh 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, and oversized jeans, skateboards,
sneakers, and backwards baseball caps
would come into the City Corp building
because this is where the 2600 meetup
would happen. [music] 2600 is also a
hacker magazine which would host local
meetups in different cities. It's
Frack'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 to 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 bring a blue box or
something. And 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
[music] 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 90s and it's an
incredible view into what these kids
were doing then. Here, listen. We did
this from payoneses. [music] We'd have a
line of payoneses. We get into the
computer first liberate one phone with
liberating [music] 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. [music] So
that way we can make endless amount of
phone calls without putting quarters.
Next step was to [music] get into the
network, find a session that was already
going [music] and then knock them off
while they were connected and then sit
there watching them. In other words, put
us in their place in [music] the place
of the computer they were going to
connect to. So next time they try to log
in, they would get our computer and we'd
type in login and they'd put in their
login account. Then we'd go password,
you know, the password there, okay,
password. They put their [music]
password in and then we would have, you
know, all these things were already
encoded in one key. So we could just hit
one key and, you know, it wouldn't look
like we were typing it.
>> We would login would just appear
password.
>> Then we hit the password key, password.
[music] Then we'd say login incorrect
and then disconnect from them, but we
already got their login and password and
then when they reconnected, it would be
the regular system. So they figure, hey,
[music] 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. >> [music]
>> 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 uh
you know [music] NSA. I've got uh Phone
Company computers. I've got My Misar.
I've got Cosmos. I've got this. I've got
that. McDonald Douglas. Marian Marietta.
[music] You know, TRW, CBI, TransUnion.
What else can I get? you know, you try
to get the [music] like big names, you
know, so you start developing a
collection, you know. Then after a
while, it became fun to [music] like
look up famous people. Let's look up
John Gotti's credit, you know, let's see
what he owns. [music] Let's look up uh
Julia Roberts, you know, let's get our
home phone number. Let's get this
[music] 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, you know, once
you once you start going, you can't
stop. You know, you're just steamrolling
one after the other and the flow gets
you going and then you're just like,
"Yeah, we're we rule." You know, we're
it. It breaks down all barriers. Nothing
can [music] stop the flow. If you got
the flow, you can conquer everything.
This what people call being in the zone.
You know, once [music] you're in there,
you can't stop. It's the juice.
That was Eli talking about what him,
Mark, Paul, John Lee, and Julio were
doing in New York City back then.
[music] It was a golden time. And Paul
came up with an idea. He said they
should give their little hacker group a
name like M O, which was a joke. Like L
OD, but one letter higher, M O. Did it
stand for anything? Nah, who cares?
Wait, [music] okay, it could. Um,
Masters of Disaster. No, Masters of
Deception. Yeah. And so [music] a new
hacker group was born. Masters of
Deception. >> [music]
>> If anything, it's surprising how little
they did with their power over
computers. [music] It was mostly pranks,
making somebody's phone ring
continuously, turning an enemy's home
phone line into [music] a pay phone
line. So, when the guy picked up his
phone at home, it demanded that he
deposit a quarter, you know, because
there's no way he could do that because
it's his home phone. They did actually
call Julia Roberts once. They called
Queen Elizabeth, too. But but [music]
there's an emptiness at the heart of a
lot of these stories once you've [music]
got the queen on the phone. You know
what do you say?
>> She's like hello you know she's talking
to us and stuff and we don't know what
to say. Hi we're calling from the United
States and this and that and she knew
what was up. He's like okay hello and
she said goodbye and that was it. You
know we didn't know what to say. What do
you say to Queen Elizabeth? You know hi.
So, uh, you see [music] that movie, uh,
True Lies? You know, what do you say?
You know, it's just like the the the fun
of it is finding the number.
>> I'd probably ask her what kind of
computer she has. I mean, she's the
queen. She's got to have the best
computer in the world, right? All right,
we're going to take a quick uh ad break
here, but stay with us cuz when we come
back, everything's about to get crazy.
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? That 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 Kaiser and Fred Staples, the
engineers from the New York Telephone
Company, were on to them. They were
watching their phone calls and trace the
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
and the police called the Secret Service
who was already working with Bell South
to try to catch hackers.
>> Bell South cracked down hard on Adam and
the others even though it acknowledges
they never disrupted phone service or
changed any customer accounts.
>> We don't care what the motive may or may
not be. Scott Tyer is a corporate
spokesman for Bell South.
>> We are not talking about Wall-E and the
Bee, much less Eddie Haskell. We're not
dealing with a bunch of mischievous
pranksters playing in some high-tech
toilet. This is a crime.
>> Bell South 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. Jeez, what a list. And the
police were trying to piece all this
together and trying to figure out who
was doing what. But that's a huge list
of companies. How did they get into all
those things? Partly thanks to Jason.
Jason Snitker aka Paramaster and his
strange magical back door. A back door
that was bigger than any back door 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 a hold of Jason,
and he confirmed what really happened.
The 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
City Bank. 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 City
Bank computer to create 10,000 new debit
card numbers, which were all valid since
they were in the bank's database. And
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. And now, suddenly,
everyone had their own blank check from
the bank. He worried that he might get
caught for that. [music] But that wasn't
his biggest worry. The way he'd gotten
into City Bank in the [music] first
place was this back door he had. And the
back door 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 40 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 Snick
Curry, 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 meet up in the city court
building. Yeah. A cop came to the hacker
meetup to try to look around. But
luckily Jason wasn't there to
accidentally reveal like what he saw on
the military's computers because he
wasn't keeping these secrets to himself.
Like while he was in New York, he met up
and hung out with John Lee at Grand
Central Station and in a deal over the
phone he traded his back door to Mark.
And then almost immediately after that,
he got arrested and was brought to court
over all those stolen credit cards. So
what was this back door that he gave to
John Lee and Mark? Well, it was a back
door to let you in a huge network. It
would get you into the lowest most inner
core of timeet.
Timeet was an international
communication network before the
internet that we know today was
invented. It serviced the kind of
organizations that needed to perform
heavyduty possibly international
communications, government agencies,
large companies, that sort of thing.
Today, of course, the idea that you
could use a back door to unlock the core
of the internet is ridiculous. But on
timeet it was possible because while
there were a lot of companies using
timeet and connected to it timeet itself
was operated by a single company someone
had to manage the infrastructure for it
and so it was a centralized network
[music] there was a computer which was a
supervisor that could oversee the whole
network and that's what this back door
gave them access to. [music] They were
in a supervisor level of one of the
biggest networks in the world at the
time. Jason had managed 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 timeet's
source code which was proprietary at the
time. This was about as deep as you
could possibly go. And 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. [music] 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 and he was going
to master it. And boy did he. [music]
The sugar rush that came with hacking
company after company. Mark found some
of Timeet's own PDP10s and these were
big hulking mainframes that were used to
store administrative manuals and a bunch
of other stuff. [music] 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
[music] Timeet's staff might only be
able to see what's relevant to their
jobs and Timeet users could only see
what's on their own networks. [music]
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, [music] it was almost trivial
with this back door. They could easily
find their way into a ton [music] of
interesting networks. Spying on any
person was simple, too, because the
companies that held everyone's personal
information were on Time. Through them,
you could look up yourself, your rival
hacker, or Julie Roberts to [music] see
her finances or her phone number or even
where she lived. At this point, the
masters [music] of deception must have
felt unstoppable. Mark, John, and Julio
would watch Timeet's administrators as
they change their passwords, or they
could read the Timeet security
department's [music] emails. 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 [music] it. Hack
into the White House right now." And 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.
Well, 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 Frack 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
fiber optic 89 to 90 New York reason for
leaving bust hacking. Which that that's
not actually true. Mark or fiber optic
got kicked out. Remember you know whose
name is not on here is Eric Bloodax
whose real name is Chris Gogggins or his
sidekick Scott Chason which is Doc
Holiday. And it makes me wonder if this
obituary was some kind of power move or
a prank. The author was blank. And it's
very curious because 8 days earlier, LOD
released an article which said, "We are
still alive." Lex Luthther wrote it um
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, [music]
arrests were starting to be made on
hackers all over. 3 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 Najdorf, aka Night
Lightning, the co-founder of the
notorious hacker magazine, Frack, 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 Frack, the E911 file. In a
4-hour interrogation, he admitted to
publishing it, and he agreed to
cooperate with the investigation.
And ditto happened for the prophet, the
guy who originally copied the E911 file
from Bell South. 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
Luthther announced his retirement. He's
the one who started LOD. Here's Mark
again.
>> 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 anymore. They were already
older. Particularly the older generation
of hackers, some guys that I knew who
started LOD, for example, withdrew from
uh the hacker underground. uh simply
didn't want to risk getting in trouble
anymore now that the 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 uh gain clout with the government and
telco security by inviting
[clears throat] them onto a bulletin
board that was set up uh under the
opices of creating a dialogue between
hackers and security people and uh the
FBI and secret service. Well, might
sound [clears throat] a little
ridiculous to think about, but um the
FBI thought it was great because it gave
them a chance to chat with hackers and
then arrest them. So, while people from
LOD were being nabbed by the police and
others were scattering, it looks like
LOD was dead, but it wasn't entirely.
There was one person who was trying to
keep it alive. Eric [music] Bloodax, aka
Chris Gogggins. Eric Bloodex 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 and he had ideas to take it in
a new direction. Bloodax himself was a
longtime member of LOD and was an
editor, a frack, 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 [music] he was expecting
them. So, even though there were six
armed policemen in his bedroom, Blood X
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. Bloodax 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 Blood Axe
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
uh other than he was a member of the
Legion of Doom and they let him go
without any charges.
Bloodax tried making a BBS to bring
together hackers, security teams from
Telos 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.
>> There was a great amount of disagreement
and dissension within LOD in the uh 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 we were
affiliated in other countries. For
example, a hacker group in Australia
were busted under suspicious uh
circumstances which all led to uh
certain individual that we all uh know
and love in Texas who um had started one
of the first uh hacker consultancies
uh under the opices of uh gaining clout
uh with the FBI and telco security. Uh
the person I'm referring to is is Eric
Bloodax in case it wasn't clear to
anyone in the audience. Bloodax started
a company called Comse SEC data
security.
>> It became known to even other LOD
members who were wondering if I had
heard anything about Eric Bloodax
because so 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, you
know, what hackers do in general. And
certainly someone who's informing on
other hackers is is going to earn the
wrath of of other hackers. From the City
Corp atrium, everyone who could would
pick up a pay phone and start calling
the Comsac 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 Commac.
And that would last all day until people
got bored and had to go eat dinner at
like 8:30 or so. A legendary hacker feud
was starting to stir up. LOD versus MOD.
But Eric Bloodax 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 [music] calls to chat about
what was happening. John Lee, aka
Corrupt, a 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. And
someone shouted, "Get that nword off the
line." John Lee was black and took
offense to this. [music] Bloodax 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 [music]
and they heard it again. The slurs that
the Texan hackers would use to refer
[music] to them, these definitely were
not slips of the tongue. So John Lee
decided to make Blood Ax'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, Blood Axe 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 Rome 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 BBS's around the
country just [music] despite LOD
and now blood got bad that John took
this file and [music] 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 Blood Ax's
sidekick Scott Chason by publishing his
mom's credit history, phone number, and
home address on a popular BBS. And as a
bonus, he even included some sexual
commentary about her. Then Eric Bloodax
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
conditionless apartment in Brooklyn, he
wanted to mess with Blood Axe even more
by tapping his phone. He wanted to get
in Blood Ax's head. First, he broke into
Southwestern Bell casually, like he's
done a thousand times before. Then, he
connected to a switch that controlled
Comac's phone line, which is Blood Ax'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 Comsack. What he
heard was a call where Eric Bloodax was
talking to Craig Najdorf aka Night
Lightning aka the co-founder of Frack
magazine. At the time Craig was as
famous as any hacker in the world was
the kind of guy Bloodax was probably
wanting to impress. Craig was calling
Compsack for help. He was getting
harassed with constant phone calls
lately and he was fed up. Bloodax felt
his pain. He'd been dealing with the
same problem. He's like, "You know who
Corrupt is, aka John Lee?" "Yeah, well,
it sounds like something he would do." A
minute later, Blood Axe 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. [music]
Click. That was badass. Eric Bloodax
knew exactly what just happened. John
Lee was listening in on that call. Now,
Blood Axe 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. Eric
Bloodax 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 [music] 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.
Eric Blood Axe wanted to take out Mark
and John Lee wanted to annoy the hell
out of Blood Axe. Here's Mark again. So
he decided that I was responsible for
this based on some previous uh
disagreements we had had and uh 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.
>> 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 wiretaps. For the first time,
US authorities were granted the ability
to tap computer communications, too.
Data taps, they called it. And I guess
the term we might use today is
man-in-the-middle or even spyware. 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 [music] it.
And it was overseen by the FBI, filled
with computers, storage tapes, disc
[music] 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 12-hour
shifts tapping the lines of these
teenagers recording all of their
internet behavior. And 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. [music] Meanwhile, the Secret
Service made a deal with Eric Bloodax.
Anytime CO Comse got a call from MOD, he
would [music] 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 [music] took one year. In June
1992,
Mark, John, Julio, Eli, and Paul each
received an envelope in the mail.
[music] letter informed them that they
were the subject of a grand jury
investigation, which means they are
suspects in a crime. And soon after
that, they were all arrested and
formerly charged with violating, yep,
[music] you guessed it, the CFAA.
I'll let Mark tell it from here.
>> As things fell apart, EFF was uh was
supporting us to go to trial.
>> Wait, the EFF? Yeah, sorry. All right, 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 Barlo 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 Barlo asked
Mark, "Give me a call." And rumor has it
that he didn't even give Mark his number
because he felt that would be an insult
to such a powerful freaker. But soon his
phone rang and of course it was Mark.
And 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 18 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 Barlo 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 Barlo
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
Sunundevil, which resulted in 27
warrants for hackers spread across 14
cities. It was a massive crackdown
nationwide on hackers. It was very
serious and very scary.
>> Search warrants 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.
>> They say it is the white collar crime of
the '9s. Raids in Chicago and a dozen
other cities this week exposed a
million-doll ring of high-tech computer
hackers.
>> It is not a game. Uh they're attempting
and are getting into credit cards.
They're getting into [music]
telephone systems. They're getting into
medical records, credit records. They're
getting into everything. The raids come
after a 2-year nationwide investigation
called Operation Sunundevil.
>> Like even the guy who reported the
prophet for stealing the E911 file and
stashing 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." [music] That
guy was cooked. John Perry Barlo 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 Barlo was
seeing all these people getting scooped
up left and right. And he thought
someone needs to do something about
this. And he met with Mitch Kapor. Um
this guy was on the well too. And Kapor
was known for inventing the spreadsheet
program called Lotus 123. 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 cyerspace. 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. And I want to remind you
that John Perry Barlo was the guy who
wrote the Declaration of Independence of
Cyberspace. He loved the internet.
[music] And so together they had dinner
with big names in tech like Stuart Brand
and Steve Wnjak to go over the ideas of
what the EFF was. And Steve was so into
it that he pitched in some of his own
money to get things started. And it was
settled. The EFF was born. And its
online home at the time was the well.
And the EFF is still going strong today.
It is a leading voice for advocating for
digital rights in the United States. And
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.
Like 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 role playing type board
games, right? And 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, Lloyd Blankenship.
The Secret Service was sure that Lloyd
hacked into Bell South, stole some
stuff, and was using it at work. The
proof that the Secret Service had, the
role playing game that Lloyd 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 emails,
arrested people, took notebooks, took
everything. But Steve Jackson himself
was like, "Wo, that is not a hacker
manual. It's a work of fiction. We just
made that story up." And 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. And 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. And then Mark aka Fiber
Optic was another one of EFF's first
cases.
>> 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
uh British Telecom Timenet 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 how we defeated their
security. 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 uh named in the indictment decided
to plead guilty until uh I was the only
one remaining and it's you know the
typical cliche of the last guy standing
without a chair when the music stops.
>> The judge even said a message must be
sent. So that was Mark. And then there
was Eli aka Acid Freak, one of the
members of MOD, who also got arrested.
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, [music] you know, and they
copied some credit reports and they sold
the information to other people. And he
was named [music] as a member of this
conspiracy.
They said we missed, you know, we abused
our power, but [music] we didn't abuse
it at all. We did nothing compared to
the things that could have been done.
You know, [music] what we did was such a
small thing and such a larger scheme of
things, you know. It's kind of
depressing in a way. I mean, there's so
many things we could have done. We could
have monitored uh you know [music] Peter
Lynch you know and what's the next best
investment for the day you know and and
we'd make millions of dollars you know
investing or shorting [music] some stock
but uh we never did and you know
now we wonder why [laughter]
we're like damn
there's so many applications for [music]
this kind of stuff what happened but
then we're like ah you know we were just
kids
>> mod co-founders Paul and Eli each got
half a year in [music] jail. Mark got a
whole year in jail, and John Lee got a
year in jail, too. Julio, who did all of
Jon'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
[music] up to $2 million in fines and 40
years in prison, which would have been
ridiculous. But in the end, [music] Adam
got sentenced to 14 months and the
prophet got 21 months in prison. And
then there was Craig's [music] case, aka
Night Lightning, the co-founder of
Frack. He was in trouble for publishing
the E911 file. [music] He was also one
of the first cases that the EFF took on.
And if you think about it, this is a
federal case, so they couldn't charge
him with just [music] publishing the
article because that would just go
completely against the First Amendment.
So instead, they were charging him with
theft [music] and wire fraud and
interstate transportation of stolen
property. Bell South was saying that the
E911 file was worth $79,000 and
contained highly sensitive information.
Prophet was charged with the [music]
same stuff and he just admitted guilt.
But Craig, no, no, no. Craig was like, I
am not guilty. [music] And 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 in
evidence for fear that it would become
public record and then anyone could see
it. Two, Bell Cells 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 30 years and find
him $122,000 for publishing this file in
Frack. 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. And 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. And the trial
just kept going on. But then suddenly,
EFF got a hot tip from someone. It
[music] was discovered that if you
called up Bell South, 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 [music] was supposed to
be secret and sensitive was not in fact
secret or sensitive [music] because they
were giving it away. The prosecution had
no legs to stand on after that and
[music] 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 Frack and the EFF for
Frack. This put them down into legendary
status. They weren't just a hacker eene
anymore. They were the hackers who got
arrested by the Secret Service, fought
the law, and won. How badass is that?
And 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 internets 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
kurfuffle, 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. And 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.
>> So I was like, uh, damn, this is like I
have to fill this void. What's what
should I do, you know? And I I didn't
know what to do anymore. It was like
horrible. Just, you know, it was sad. I
would we would call each other up and
usually we'd be talking about computers
and trading passwords and did we get
into this and that and I remember the
first time we call I was like so what's
up? Nothing. [snorts] Uh I cleaned my
room yesterday. Yeah, they came over and
cleaned my room too pretty well. Yeah, I
know. So, uh what do you want to [music]
do? I don't know. [snorts] Cuz it's like
such a large part of our lives at that
point, you know? You have so much power.
To lose it in an [music] 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 going to do? Uh-oh. I'm a
regular guy now. I'm not I'm not acid
freak anymore. You know what's what's
acid freak without a computer? You know,
just a regular guy.
So, it was a bummer.
And I think that marks when the sun set
on the golden age of hacking. What began
as a thousand screeching modems and dim
bedrooms lit by the glow of heavy
monitors fueled by curiosity and
rebelliousness. It ended in knock knocks
at the door. And the wires got heavy.
The fun got serious. Too serious. The
thrill of dialing blindly into [music]
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 [music] for digital demons and
found instead a bunch of misfit kids
arguing about baud rates 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 [music] 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. [music] 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. And 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 [music] 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
[music] 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.
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 80s, went down some
really fun memory lanes. I want [music]
to specifically mention two books that
were super helpful for us to write this
episode. Um, there's Hacker Crackdown by
Bruce Sterling and Masters of Deception
by Michelle Slatala and Joshua Quitner.
These books captured what was happening
in the shadows at the time in such a
clear and remarkable way. [music] 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 80s. 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-ree
version of this show, plus 11 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.darknetdi.com.
This episode was created by me, Sir
Crashot, Jackider. This episode was
written by Freaku, Nate Nelson. Our
editor is the laser disck lord, Tristan
Ledger. This episode is scored by the
blind SQL Injection, Andrew
Merryweather, mixing by Proximity Sound,
intro music by the mysterious
Breakmaster Cylinder.
So, I remember I got banned from a BBS.
SISOP just was like, "You're not welcome
here anymore." Why?
Because I uploaded 12 incomplete copies
of King's Quest because I was trying to
download Leisure Suit Larry. This is
Darknet Diaries.