The Hacker War That Ended the Cyber Golden Age ⚔ Darknet Diaries Ep. 169 MoD
Jack Rhysider
0:00 This story picks up from where we left off in part one.
0:02 So, if you haven't heard it yet, you need to go back one episode and listen
0:05 to that one before listening to this because this is part two.
0:09 [music] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.
0:18 [music] I'm Jack Reider.
0:22 This is Darknet Diaries.
0:25 [music] [music] The New York Telephone Company was the face
0:41 of the phone system in New York City in the 1980s.
0:44 Whether you were in the New York Stock Exchange making phone
0:47 calls or walking up to pay phones in the streets of Manhattan,
0:50 you were using the New York Telephone Company.
0:53 And there were two guys who worked there
0:54 that were in charge of securing the system.
0:56 Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples.
0:58 Tom and Fred each had their own specialty.
1:00 Fred engineered the phone network infrastructure and Tom oversaw it.
1:04 If you broke into the system,
1:05 it was because Fred overlooked some sort of vulnerability.
1:08 And then Tom was the one who had to catch you.
1:10 Their jobs became infinitely more difficult and interesting when a strange
1:14 letter arrived at Tom's Times Square office in November 1988.
1:18 It stated that a kid up in the Bronx was
1:22 hacking into the phone grid who was calling himself the technician.
1:26 The letter wasn't signed.
1:28 It was an anonymous tip, but Tom suspected [music] it might have been written
1:31 by a family member of the technician because the tone was caring.
1:36 It was a plea to stop this kid for his own good.
1:39 Sure enough, when Tom pulled up
1:40 the records associated with the technician's address, the proof was right there.
1:44 technician had been connecting to switches at AT&T
1:47 from home with no real attempt to hide it either.
1:50 So Tom turned to a nifty device that he
1:52 had which was called the dialed number [music] recorder DNR.
1:56 A DNR is a little box that you might
1:58 mistake for an answering machine or a tape recorder.
2:00 Tom had some small black DNRs that click clacked [music]
2:02 and spat out some paper tape when they were triggered.
2:05 But these weren't exactly wire taps.
2:07 They couldn't record the contents of what anyone said or typed.
2:10 What they could do is record the metadata.
2:12 [music] which number connected to which and for how long.
2:16 It was a DNR device that led investigators to catch Fry Guy.
2:19 Maybe that same device will be useful here
2:21 to find out what this technician guy was doing.
2:25 And there's an interesting thing to point out that if the police wanted to do
2:28 that, they would need a court order
2:30 and approval from the judge to conduct a wiretap.
2:33 But if the security team at the New York Telephone Company wanted to do
2:36 that, they didn't need a court order
2:38 to monitor the activity of one of their customers.
2:40 They're a private company.
2:41 they can do what they want.
2:43 So Fred and Tom were able to use
2:45 this DNR phone monitoring tool without any red tape.
2:48 A couple of things stood out in the data.
2:50 First, there was a clear evidence that this technician
2:53 was hacking into something called a dial hub,
2:55 which was in the New York telephone network.
2:58 The dial hub had just been invented that year and it was pretty new even
3:01 for Tom and Fred and they even had to ask like what is this thing?
3:04 It was essentially a remote access point
3:07 into the entire New York telephone company computer network.
3:10 employees had a password that they could use to login
3:13 from home to reach whatever system they needed to do their job.
3:16 Somehow this guy calling himself the technician had not only learned
3:20 about the dial hub but obtained a login token for it,
3:23 meaning he could use it as if he was any employee in the company.
3:26 What's worse is that Tom couldn't keep track of him once he got in there.
3:31 This was serious.
3:32 And this is where Tom's second [music] interesting discovery came in.
3:36 Over time, whenever the DNR started chirping, Tom would get up from his desk,
3:40 rush over to it, and read where the technician was calling.
3:42 Over time, a pattern emerged.
3:44 First, this Bronx hacker would dial into the phone company network,
3:48 and he'd hang around there for a bit, do his thing, and then he'd disconnect.
3:52 And then he would always call a phone number
3:54 after that, which routed to a middle-class Queens neighborhood,
3:57 and it was the same number every time.
3:59 This call would last for a bit,
4:01 and then he'd disconnect and check in with Queens again, and so on and so on.
4:05 back and forth into the phone company,
4:07 call to Queens, into the phone company, call to Queens.
4:10 Tom and Fred had a guess that the actual
4:12 brains behind this operation might be in Queens.
4:16 And they looked at all the call records to that number that was going to Queens.
4:20 And they noticed that there were a few other calls
4:22 that came into that number in Queens quite often, too.
4:24 And they were able to trace these calls, figure out whose numbers they were.
4:28 And this led them to discover two other hackers.
4:31 One was corrupt and the other was Outlaw.
4:34 Why were so many hackers calling this number in Queens?
4:37 Who were these guys?
4:39 Maybe members of the notorious Legion of Doom.
4:42 Everyone knew Legion of Doom at the time.
4:44 The number in Queens was registered to a red brick row house.
4:48 It belonged to Charles Abin, a middle-aged man who was a school custodian,
4:54 actually an officer in the school custodian's union.
4:57 Not a very likely person to be a hacker.
5:00 But Charles Abin's son was a teenager who spiked up his hair.
5:04 He kept terrible bedtime hours and got a lot of stomach aches.
5:07 His name was Mark.
5:08 But online and throughout the country, Mark was known as fiber optic.
5:13 A notorious hacker.
5:15 And even compared to the other members of Legion of Doom,
5:17 Mark was really good at hacking.
5:19 Probably too good.
5:20 Maybe the best phone system hacker in America.
5:23 No, [music] on the planet.
5:25 Maybe ever, actually.
5:27 From the compact TRS80 on his desk in his tiny bedroom,
5:31 Mark ingested enough knowledge to outwit even
5:34 the technicians working at the phone company.
5:36 He wasn't just fluent in the New York telephone system, but also the 9X,
5:39 the packet switching networks running all the way up and down New England.
5:42 Basically, he had encyclopedic knowledge of telecommunication systems
5:46 and he could name pretty much any of them.
5:48 He could rattle off the most obscure
5:50 details about any random machine or protocol.
5:52 Of course, he could place a call anywhere
5:54 in the country without paying a scent or triggering any alarms.
5:57 That was the easy part.
5:58 When Mark, [music] aka Fiber Optic, was on a BBS, other hackers listened.
6:02 He liked sharing his knowledge, and the reputation it afforded him.
6:06 But don't you dare cross him.
6:08 It was easy enough for him to cut your phone
6:10 service or overload it with endless calls, or much worse.
6:13 As I researched the story, the whole Earth catalog kept coming up and up.
6:18 And I didn't really know about it before.
6:20 Like I heard about it, but I didn't really look at it.
6:22 But now I got a copy of it and I'm looking at it and it's like amazing.
6:27 It's like one of my favorite things now.
6:29 You know what?
6:30 I'll let Steve Jobs tell you about it.
6:32 When I was young, there was
6:34 an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog,
6:37 which was one of the Bibles of my generation.
6:40 It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menllo Park,
6:45 and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
6:48 This was in the late60s before personal computers and desktop publishing.
6:52 So it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras.
6:57 It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along.
7:02 It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
7:07 This catalog is amazing.
7:08 It's filled with really helpful articles like
7:10 how to build a shelter or water pump.
7:12 And it also has glimpses into the future
7:13 and technologies and ideas for structures and [music] systems.
7:17 And sometimes there's theoretical things in here, sometimes it's practical,
7:20 but there's just a ton of wonderful unique
7:22 ideas on how to navigate the modern world.
7:26 And Stuart Brand, the guy who made this, took
7:28 a big fascination with computers and especially hacking.
7:31 He spun up his own BBS called the Well,
7:34 which stood for Whole Earth Electronic Link.
7:38 It became the place to post helpful information,
7:41 to post things that were culturally relevant at the time,
7:44 things like tech, art, and politics,
7:46 but also significantly highlighting counterculture movements and ideas.
7:50 There were areas for niche hobbies and sharing software.
7:54 At the core of it was self-empowerment and open dialogue.
7:57 The well was the internet's first real online community.
8:01 It attracted journalists and artists and activists and poets and yes
8:06 hackers like Neil Stevenson would pop in there from time to time.
8:10 Craig from Craigslist was there and that's where
8:12 he got inspired to make Craigslist and the well
8:15 was the birthplace for a lot of the internet
8:17 culture and norms that we still use today.
8:20 [music] One longtime supporter of hackers is Stuart Brand,
8:24 editor of the Whole Earth Cataloges.
8:27 They are uh shy, sweet,
8:32 incredibly brilliant and uh I think more effective in pushing the culture
8:40 around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of.
8:45 To make [music] his point,
8:45 Brand invited a 100 top computer designers to an exclusive
8:49 hackers conference in the secluded campsite north of San Francisco.
8:52 Despite bad weather and crude living conditions,
8:54 the camp was a true hacker heaven.
8:56 Well stocked with plenty of computer toys and of course
8:59 enough candy and soda to last through the night.
9:02 But the real purpose of the get together was to discuss the unique set
9:05 of values that made the [music] computer
9:07 revolution possible and brainstorm about its future.
9:11 My political platform is that we need an electronic declaration of independence.
9:14 That last guy talking was John Perry Barlo,
9:17 who at the time was a poet, an essayist, and lyricist for the Grateful Dead.
9:22 And he stayed true to that mission.
9:23 He did in fact go and publish a declaration of independence of cyberspace.
9:28 I'm not going to read to you the whole thing,
9:29 but let me at least quote to you the opening paragraph of this.
9:33 Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
9:37 I come from cyberspace, a new home of mind.
9:41 On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.
9:45 You are not welcome among us.
9:46 You have no sovereignty where we gather.
9:50 That's quite an opening for a declaration, right?
9:54 John Perry Barlo is a bit of a badass if you ask me.
9:57 Okay, so Harper's magazine, this was a mainstream magazine at the time
10:01 which was covering things like politics, culture, literature.
10:04 It had thought-provoking essays in it.
10:06 And one thing it did regularly was a featured article that they called
10:09 the forum where like three to five contributors would all try to answer
10:13 big questions like what do we owe the planet and is the American
10:17 experiment failing and the contributors would
10:20 try to provide high-minded thoughtful responses.
10:23 Well Harper saw that these computers were rising in popularity and saw
10:27 that a lot of great thinkers were
10:28 gathering there on Steuart Brand's BBS the well.
10:31 So, they decided to run their very first virtual forum,
10:35 basically a live chat room on the well, where they'd ask users big questions
10:40 to get the conversations going for their magazines.
10:42 Questions like, "Do we have a right
10:44 to privacy?" And, "Should hackers respect that right?
10:49 What ethical considerations arise when we become
10:52 more connected digitally?" So in December 1989,
10:56 Harper's magazine held this virtual forum,
10:59 basically an open chat room for anyone to respond to on the well.
11:02 John Perry Barlo was there, Clifford Stole was there, Steven Levy was there.
11:06 A lot of influential people who actually were watching the chat,
11:09 even some notable hackers like Mark [music] aka Fiber Optic,
11:12 and Mark's friend Eli, who went by the name Acid Freak.
11:15 But the internet did what the internet does,
11:18 and it didn't quite fit into the high-minded
11:20 discourse that Harpers was [music] hoping for.
11:23 Instead, the place turned vulgar, immature, insulting,
11:26 and yeah, lots of asky art was [music] posted.
11:29 In fact, the participants flooded the chat room
11:31 with over a 100,000 [music] words during the forum.
11:35 John Perry Barlo thought he was on the hacker side,
11:38 being libertarian and kind of punk by nature
11:40 [music] and really was into computers himself,
11:42 except these guys were just too annoying on the well [music]
11:45 and not at all receptive to the simple arguments that hacking was troublesome.
11:51 At a heated moment in the chat, John Perry [music] Barlo wrote that quote,
11:55 "With hackers like Acid Freak and Fiber Optic),
11:58 the issue is less intelligence than alienation.
12:01 Trade their modems for skateboards,
12:02 and only a slight conceptual shift would occur." Acid Freak and Fiber
12:07 Optic didn't like being called out like that, and they replied,
12:11 "You have some pair of balls comparing
12:12 my talent with that of a skateboarder, huh?
12:15 Well, this was indeed boring, but nonetheless,
12:19 Fiber Optic then [snorts] somehow found a copy of John Perry Barlo's
12:25 credit history and posted it to the forum for anyone to see.
12:29 Like, what a crazy thing to drop in the middle of chat, right?
12:31 Just someone's credit report.
12:33 Bam.
12:34 Well, [snorts] that spooked John Perry Barlo.
12:37 He later wrote about how he felt when
12:38 he saw his credit history posted like that.
12:40 He said, quote, "I've been stuck in redneck bars wighing shoulderlength curls.
12:45 I've been in police custody while on acid and in Harlem after midnight,
12:49 but no one has ever put the spook
12:51 in me quite as Fiber Optic did at that moment."
12:55 It never took anybody long to realize that Mark
12:58 aka Fiber Optic was the best hacker they knew.
13:02 And that's how he got into the Legion of Doom.
13:04 He borrowed a password from a friend.
13:06 Then he navigated to the section where members discussed
13:08 phone freaking and thought these guys are a joke.
13:11 Sure, they have a few old technical manuals that I could recite in my sleep.
13:15 So he started flooding them with new information.
13:18 Sort of like an all- knowing god.
13:20 And being an all- knowing hacker god can get to a kid's head, you know,
13:24 like he liked the attention that people
13:26 were giving him who thought he was amazing.
13:28 And that's how Eric Bloodax felt about Mark.
13:31 This guy who went by Eric Bloodax was a short guy with a goatee
13:35 and grungy long blonde hair and hung out in the LOD forums.
13:38 Bloodax was a member of the LOD,
13:40 but Mark Mark said he was and he was in the forums that it was members only,
13:45 but he wasn't listed as an actual member.
13:47 It's like he hacked his way into the group.
13:50 Well, Bloodax was confused, but quickly realized how good Mark was.
13:54 A few weeks later, Mark was officially voted in.
13:57 Bloodax respected Mark as a really great hacker, but he didn't really like Mark.
14:02 He didn't like how Mark would trap hackers who would talk a big
14:06 game and then he would totally embarrass them with his superior skills.
14:10 And then one day in 1989, he got a call from Mark.
14:13 Mark wanted a back door that he knew
14:15 Bloodax had to the 9X packet switching network.
14:18 But Bloodax is like, "Well, what are you going to give me in return?
14:21 If I give you this exploit, what are you going to give me?" [music]
14:24 And Mark just hung up and called Bloodax
14:26 his friend and told Bloodax his friend, "Hey,
14:28 Bloodax wants me to have the uh back door into NX,
14:31 can you send it to me?" And the his friend did send it to him.
14:35 And then Bloodax found out about this and called Mark back.
14:38 Bloodax was mad, but Mark wasn't having it.
14:40 Mark just told him, "I don't know you
14:42 shit." And Bloodax was like, "Well, excuse me.
14:45 I don't owe you shit.
14:46 I didn't get it from you.
14:47 I got it from Bob.
14:48 Fuck you." And Bloodax was like, [music] "What?
14:51 Did he just really curse out a member of the LOD?
14:54 Mark said, "I don't have time for this." and hung up.
14:57 And that's how Mark aka Fiber Optic got kicked out of the Legion of Doom
15:01 by tricking Eric Bloodax's friend into giving him
15:04 an exploit and then cursing out Blood Axe.
15:06 The two clearly didn't get along.
15:08 Mark figured whatever and shrugged it off.
15:11 He could run circles around anyone in LOD or around all of them combined.
15:15 If they were ever cool, they definitely weren't anymore.
15:18 He was convinced that the Legion of Doom were hasbins.
15:21 And he wasn't the only one who thought that.
15:24 [music] In the last episode,
15:28 I told you about this guy Paul who was trying to get into a computer,
15:31 but all he was getting was S's and W's back and then
15:33 he blew into the phone and all of a sudden he was in.
15:36 Well, last we left him, he broke into the phone company,
15:38 gave his friend three three-way calling,
15:40 and he told his friend Eli about this, who's also known as Acid Freak.
15:44 And Eli figured this must be a switching control center systems.
15:48 And so Acid Freak was like, "Oh, that's that's really cool.
15:51 We should we should show this to Mark aka Fiber Optic.
15:54 See what he has to say about this." So they decided to call him up.
15:58 Hey, what do you want?
16:00 Mark asks.
16:01 He gets called all the time by a lot of hackers.
16:03 Paul and Eli were a bit intimidated but excited.
16:06 So they told Mark that they think they got into an SECs,
16:09 but they don't know what to do.
16:11 You think or you know?
16:12 Mark asked.
16:13 Paul handed over the information and Mark checked it out.
16:16 And Mark quickly figured it out.
16:18 It wasn't an SECS.
16:19 It was a telephone switch.
16:21 Specifically, a DMS 100 switch.
16:24 Mark got back on the line.
16:25 It's not a SECS.
16:27 It's a DMS 100.
16:29 Of course, the system Paul had been trying
16:31 to figure out for well over a year now.
16:33 Mark identified in seconds.
16:35 But Mark was sort of impressed that these two guys brought
16:38 this to him and asked if Paul and Eli wanted to meet up.
16:43 [music] It started with the three of them getting together at Eli's house.
16:46 Mark did the typing and explaining.
16:48 Paul and Eli watched and when they got hungry, they went to the mall.
16:52 Mark liked eating the mashed potatoes at KFC because it calmed his stomach.
16:55 It was fun, but Eli had bigger plans.
16:58 He wanted to recruit more hackers to their little club,
17:01 like this hot shot kid that they heard about just down the road.
17:04 They were talking about a hacker calling himself corrupt,
17:07 whose real name was actually John Lee.
17:09 He was a black kid who lived with his mom in Bedstey,
17:11 [music] which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn.
17:13 And this was back when it was hardcore.
17:14 Like John was in a gang.
17:15 And not like a cyber gang,
17:17 but an actual gang where guys robbed and sold drugs and stuff.
17:20 IRL, but from a little beater Commodore 64 in his cramped bedroom,
17:25 John Lee was a savant.
17:27 [music] Eli kept talking saying that John Lee's specialty is vax computers.
17:31 And these things have way more hard drive space,
17:33 more CPU power than anything most people touch those days.
17:37 [music] And vaxes were popular in large businesses and universities.
17:40 Some of the best secrets in cyerspace were kept on vaxes.
17:43 [music] Eli called John on his phone.
17:45 John was impressed.
17:46 How'd you get my number?
17:48 Do you want to join our hacker club?
17:50 H I'm interested.
17:52 So John Lee came over and he brought his friend Julio whose hacker name is
17:55 Outlaw and he lived in the Bronx and he was barely 15 at [music] the time.
17:59 And so this new hacker collective was starting to form.
18:03 The best of the best hackers in New York City were all coming together.
18:06 There was Mark aka Fiber Optic, Eli which was going by Acidre Freak,
18:10 Paul who was Scorpion, John Lee who was corrupt,
18:13 and Julio who called himself Outlaw.
18:16 The place they started meeting at was at the City Corp Center,
18:18 601 Lexington Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
18:21 It's one of the funkiest skyscrapers you'll
18:23 ever see and makes no sense architecturally.
18:25 From 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday,
18:27 City Corp Center was home for some of the big time companies like City Bank,
18:31 of course, uh IBM, uh law firms.
18:34 But once a month on a weekend at 6:00 p.m.,
18:36 a totally different demographic would emerge from the grimy subways, young men,
18:41 and oversized jeans, skateboards, sneakers,
18:45 and backwards baseball caps would come into the City Corp
18:48 building because this is where the 2600 meetup would happen.
18:51 [music] 2600 is also a hacker magazine
18:54 which would host local meetups in different cities.
18:57 It's Frack's most well-known counterpart.
19:00 Readers brought stuff they'd find from their spoils
19:02 from dumpster dives and their latest stolen passwords.
19:05 They traded knowledge and they would mess with the pay phones in the atrium,
19:08 like trying to get free phone calls
19:09 on them or dial someone to social engineer them.
19:12 And of course, they always found ways so they didn't have to pay for it.
19:15 Somebody would know the right number to call to avoid
19:17 a toll or they bring a blue box or something.
19:20 And at this 2600 hacker meetup is where Mark,
19:23 Eli, Paul, John Lee, and Julio would meet up.
19:27 They enjoyed showing off what they learned,
19:29 and they learned new things from other hackers.
19:31 They'd talk shop, they'd get info,
19:33 they'd show off their tricks and network with other hackers.
19:36 For the most part, the people who came to the 2600
19:39 hacker meetup didn't have any intent of causing destruction or making money.
19:43 Everyone was all just so curious and wanted to know how
19:46 computers worked and find really clever ways to do things with them.
19:50 It was sort of the essence of what they were all about.
19:52 They shared the Legion of Doom's moral code.
19:55 No making money, no causing harm, but they were also cut from a different cloth.
20:00 They weren't just as good.
20:01 No, they were [music] better than Legion of Doom.
20:04 Definitely better.
20:05 And a bit tougher, too.
20:07 Not like those guys in the suburbs who had nice computers and drove cars.
20:11 These guys pulled together salvaged and scrapped computer parts to build things,
20:16 and they rode the subway.
20:18 Ira Glass was able to interview Eli on This American Life in the early
20:21 90s and it's an incredible view into what these kids were doing then.
20:26 Here, listen.
20:27 We did this from payoneses.
20:28 [music] We'd have a line of payoneses.
20:30 We get into the computer first liberate one phone with liberating [music]
20:33 meaning make it so that you don't need quarters for that pay phone.
20:37 You just pick up and dial like a regular house phone.
20:39 [music] So that way we can make
20:40 endless amount of phone calls without putting quarters.
20:43 Next step was to [music] get into the network,
20:46 find a session that was already going [music] and then knock
20:50 them off while they were connected and then sit there watching them.
20:54 In other words, put us in their place in [music]
20:57 the place of the computer they were going to connect to.
20:58 So next time they try to log in, they would get our computer
21:01 and we'd type in login and they'd put in their login account.
21:05 Then we'd go password, you know, the password there, okay, password.
21:09 They put their [music] password in and then we would have,
21:11 you know, all these things were already encoded in one key.
21:13 So we could just hit one key and, you know,
21:16 it wouldn't look like we were typing it.
21:18 We would login would just appear password.
21:20 Then we hit the password key, password.
21:22 [music] Then we'd say login incorrect and then disconnect from them,
21:25 but we already got their login and password and then when they reconnected,
21:28 it would be the regular system.
21:29 So they figure, hey, [music] I made a mistake typing it in or something.
21:32 And that's how we would get an account.
21:35 It was like it was funny, you know.
21:45 [music] You get into things that are good.
21:46 You start targeting systems that are interesting
21:48 and then you start developing a collection.
21:50 It's like baseball cards.
21:51 I have NASA.
21:52 I have uh you know [music] NSA.
21:54 I've got uh Phone Company computers.
21:56 I've got My Misar.
21:57 I've got Cosmos.
21:58 I've got this.
21:58 I've got that.
21:59 McDonald Douglas.
22:00 Marian Marietta.
22:01 [music] You know, TRW, CBI, TransUnion.
22:04 What else can I get?
22:05 you know, you try to get the [music] like big names,
22:08 you know, so you start developing a collection, you know.
22:10 Then after a while, it became fun to [music] like look up famous people.
22:14 Let's look up John Gotti's credit, you know, let's see what he owns.
22:17 [music] Let's look up uh Julia Roberts,
22:20 you know, let's get our home phone number.
22:21 Let's get this [music] guy's home phone number.
22:23 We were just so excited.
22:24 We were getting all that stuff and it was just a rush, you know.
22:26 It was the flow, you know, once you once you start going, you can't stop.
22:31 You know, you're just steamrolling one after the other
22:32 and the flow gets you going and then you're just like,
22:35 "Yeah, we're we rule." You know, we're it.
22:38 It breaks down all barriers.
22:40 Nothing can [music] stop the flow.
22:41 If you got the flow, you can conquer everything.
22:43 This what people call being in the zone.
22:45 You know, once [music] you're in there, you can't stop.
22:47 It's the juice.
22:52 That was Eli talking about what him, Mark, Paul, John Lee,
22:55 and Julio were doing in New York City back then.
22:57 [music] It was a golden time.
22:58 And Paul came up with an idea.
23:00 He said they should give their little hacker group
23:02 a name like M O, which was a joke.
23:06 Like L OD, but one letter higher, M O.
23:09 Did it stand for anything?
23:11 Nah, who cares?
23:12 Wait, [music] okay, it could.
23:13 Um, Masters of Disaster.
23:16 No, Masters of Deception.
23:18 Yeah.
23:19 And so [music] a new hacker group was born.
23:22 Masters of Deception.
23:28 [music] If anything, it's surprising how little
23:30 they did with their power over computers.
23:32 [music] It was mostly pranks, making somebody's phone ring continuously,
23:36 turning an enemy's home phone line into [music] a pay phone line.
23:39 So, when the guy picked up his phone at home,
23:41 it demanded that he deposit a quarter,
23:44 you know, because there's no way he could do that because it's his home phone.
23:48 They did actually call Julia Roberts once.
23:51 They called Queen Elizabeth, too.
23:53 But but [music] there's an emptiness at the heart of a lot
23:56 of these stories once you've [music] got the queen on the phone.
24:00 You know what do you say?
24:02 She's like hello you know she's talking to us
24:06 and stuff and we don't know what to say.
24:07 Hi we're calling from the United States
24:09 and this and that and she knew what was up.
24:10 He's like okay hello and she said goodbye and that was it.
24:14 You know we didn't know what to say.
24:16 What do you say to Queen Elizabeth?
24:17 You know hi.
24:18 So, uh, you see [music] that movie, uh, True Lies?
24:23 You know, what do you say?
24:24 You know, it's just like the the the fun of it is finding the number.
24:30 I'd probably ask her what kind of computer she has.
24:32 I mean, she's the queen.
24:33 She's got to have the best computer in the world, right?
24:35 All right, we're going to take a quick uh ad break here,
24:37 but stay with us cuz when we come back, everything's about to get crazy.
24:42 Now, all that was brewing in New York City right before
24:45 that big phone outage in AT&T that happened on MLK Day in 1999.
24:49 Right where we left off at the last episode.
24:51 Remember the one that caused millions of calls to not go through?
24:54 That one that made the police and Secret Service go into full panic mode?
24:58 Yeah.
24:58 LOD was their initial suspect,
25:01 but maybe this new group mod had something to do with it too, right?
25:05 The police didn't necessarily know of Masters of Deception as their group name,
25:09 but they definitely were tracking these people individually.
25:12 Why?
25:13 Because Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples,
25:15 the engineers from the New York Telephone Company, were on to them.
25:19 They were watching their phone calls and trace the numbers around.
25:22 That number they kept calling in Queens, that was Mark's number.
25:25 And the people calling it were Paul, Eli, John Lee, and Julio.
25:29 The New York telephone security team was watching all
25:32 these kids hack into phone systems all over and called
25:36 the police and the police called the Secret Service who
25:40 was already working with Bell South to try to catch hackers.
25:43 Bell South cracked down hard on Adam and the others even though
25:46 it acknowledges they never disrupted phone
25:49 service or changed any customer accounts.
25:52 We don't care what the motive may or may not be.
25:56 Scott Tyer is a corporate spokesman for Bell South.
26:00 We are not talking about Wall-E and the Bee, much less Eddie Haskell.
26:04 We're not dealing with a bunch
26:06 of mischievous pranksters playing in some high-tech toilet.
26:10 This is a crime.
26:12 Bell South is just one example of a company stalked by hackers.
26:16 In a recent New York case,
26:18 members of a club known as the Masters of Deception were indicted,
26:22 accused of hacking into institutions like the Bank of America.
26:26 Martin Marietta, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell, New York Telephone,
26:32 TRW, Information America, and New York University.
26:36 Jeez, what a list.
26:38 And the police were trying to piece all this together
26:40 and trying to figure out who was doing what.
26:42 But that's a huge list of companies.
26:45 How did they get into all those things?
26:48 Partly thanks to Jason.
26:50 Jason Snitker aka Paramaster and his strange magical back door.
26:55 A back door that was bigger than any back door I've ever heard of.
27:00 This is another one of those parts of the story
27:02 that's so crazy that I didn't even believe it at first.
27:04 But in preparing for this episode, we managed to find and get a hold of Jason,
27:07 and he confirmed what really happened.
27:09 The story dates back to 1988 when Jason was in high school.
27:13 He got curious with his modem and computer and ended
27:15 up getting into a bunch of computers at City Bank.
27:18 In fact, he got into a system that was used
27:20 to mint debit cards for different banks in Saudi Arabia.
27:23 He saw this and tried to mint his own cards.
27:25 And yeah, he was able to use the City
27:27 Bank computer to create 10,000 new debit card numbers,
27:29 which were all valid since they were in the bank's database.
27:32 And you know, sharing is caring.
27:34 He couldn't even use a fraction of these cards.
27:36 So, he just spread them around in all the hacking forums.
27:38 And now, suddenly, everyone had their own blank check from the bank.
27:42 He worried that he might get caught for that.
27:44 [music] But that wasn't his biggest worry.
27:47 The way he'd gotten into City Bank in the [music]
27:49 first place was this back door he had.
27:51 And the back door got him into a lot of other places, too.
27:56 Places in cyberspace that no ordinary person should go.
28:01 He saw stuff.
28:03 Military secrets.
28:05 A killer satellite that could cut up Soviet satellites with a laser.
28:10 top secret stuff.
28:13 He wondered if he saw something so important or so
28:16 top secret that if they found out that he saw it,
28:19 they would delete him because doesn't the government
28:22 try to make people disappear that they don't like?
28:26 Even today, almost 40 years later,
28:28 Jason talks about what he found with some feeling.
28:30 He told us about a press release that he saw
28:33 for that satellite with information about
28:35 a laser system that never became public.
28:37 He sent us this ominous message.
28:39 quote, "When you could show what is being changed to withhold information,
28:43 what might the government be protecting?" Just
28:47 imagine these being your problems as a teenager.
28:50 I remember when I was that age,
28:51 I would get a bad grade in school or some girl wouldn't like
28:54 me or something and that felt like the end of the world to me.
28:56 But for Jason Snick Curry, he was stressed out simply by knowing things,
29:01 top secret things that the government didn't really want him to know.
29:05 So he decided to split out of there
29:07 from California and move to New York Coney Island.
29:10 But now New York State Police were starting
29:12 to get suspicion of what hackers were up to.
29:14 And an officer went to spy on the 2600
29:16 hacker meet up in the city court building.
29:18 Yeah.
29:19 A cop came to the hacker meetup to try to look around.
29:22 But luckily Jason wasn't there to accidentally reveal like what he saw
29:25 on the military's computers because he wasn't keeping these secrets to himself.
29:29 Like while he was in New York,
29:30 he met up and hung out with John Lee at Grand Central Station
29:34 and in a deal over the phone he traded his back door to Mark.
29:40 And then almost immediately after that, he got arrested
29:43 and was brought to court over all those stolen credit cards.
29:46 So what was this back door that he gave to John Lee and Mark?
29:51 Well, it was a back door to let you in a huge network.
29:56 It would get you into the lowest most inner core of timeet.
30:03 Timeet was an international communication network before
30:06 the internet that we know today was invented.
30:08 It serviced the kind of organizations
30:10 that needed to perform heavyduty possibly international communications,
30:15 government agencies, large companies, that sort of thing.
30:17 Today, of course, the idea that you could use a back
30:20 door to unlock the core of the internet is ridiculous.
30:23 But on timeet it was possible because while
30:26 there were a lot of companies using timeet
30:28 and connected to it timeet itself was operated
30:32 by a single company someone had to manage the infrastructure
30:35 for it and so it was a centralized
30:37 network [music] there was a computer which was
30:39 a supervisor that could oversee the whole network
30:42 and that's what this back door gave them access to.
30:45 [music] They were in a supervisor level of one
30:48 of the biggest networks in the world at the time.
30:50 Jason had managed to get access to this through a network
30:53 engineer in the company's internal network and he told us
30:56 that it allowed him to drop right into their shell
30:59 and he stole timeet's source code which was proprietary at the time.
31:04 This was about as deep as you could possibly go.
31:06 And honestly, even now I have questions about this thing.
31:08 When we asked for specifics,
31:10 Jason described it more like a numerical algorithm than code.
31:13 So complicated that he claims even Mark couldn't figure it out.
31:17 [music] Mark who could figure out anything.
31:20 Whether he understood it or not, for Mark,
31:22 this magic access must have made him feel like Dorothy stepping into Oz.
31:26 You know that famous scene where it's black
31:28 and white and then the screen suddenly fills with color.
31:31 Mark had a whole new system to explore,
31:33 a whole new network to explore and so many computers
31:36 were on this and he was going to master it.
31:39 And boy did he.
31:40 [music] The sugar rush that came with hacking company after company.
31:44 Mark found some of Timeet's own PDP10s and these were big hulking mainframes
31:48 that were used to store administrative manuals and a bunch of other stuff.
31:51 [music] Administrator manuals might sound boring to you,
31:54 but to Mark and MOD, these were priceless.
31:56 Instruction guides for how to go further
31:58 and further into every corner of the internet.
32:01 At a certain point, Mark literally couldn't go any deeper.
32:04 Where [music] Timeet's staff might only be able to see what's relevant
32:08 to their jobs and Timeet users could only see what's on their own networks.
32:12 [music] The masters of deception could see it all and access it all, too.
32:17 He was tapped into the matrix.
32:20 It's odd to say, but hacking the NSA, Bank of America,
32:23 whatever, [music] it was almost trivial with this back door.
32:26 They could easily find their way into a ton [music] of interesting networks.
32:30 Spying on any person was simple, too,
32:33 because the companies that held everyone's personal information were on Time.
32:37 Through them, you could look up yourself, your rival hacker,
32:40 or Julie Roberts to [music] see her finances
32:42 or her phone number or even where she lived.
32:45 At this point, the masters [music] of deception must have felt unstoppable.
32:50 Mark, John, and Julio would watch
32:52 Timeet's administrators as they change their passwords,
32:55 or they could read the Timeet security department's [music] emails.
32:58 They could anticipate anything that might
33:00 threaten their access because they knew about
33:02 new security features and plans before
33:04 those features and plans were even implemented.
33:06 Now, remember when I talked about Esquire magazine,
33:09 interviewing the guy who made the blue box in 1971?
33:12 Well, at one point, Esquire interviewed someone
33:14 from the Masters of Deception and said,
33:15 "Hey, if you're really good as you say you are, prove [music] it.
33:18 Hack into the White House right now." And the story goes
33:21 that mod members hacked into the White House in front of Esquire reporters.
33:26 That's how wild of a time it was.
33:28 The masters of deception were the most powerful people in cyberspace.
33:35 Well, Legion of who?
33:37 Oh yeah, I almost forgot about them.
33:39 Because by this time, by at least some accounts, the Legion of Doom was dead.
33:43 Like Frack magazine published their obituary on May 28th, 1990.
33:48 Quote, "The Legion of Doom will long be remembered
33:50 in the computer underground as an innovative and pioneering force.
33:53 No other group dedicated to the pursuit
33:55 of computer and telecommunication knowledge has survived longer,
33:59 and none probably will.
34:00 The Legion of Doom from 1984 to 1990." End quote.
34:05 The article ended with a list of all the LOD members and when
34:08 they'd left and why they left like it was some kind of memorial.
34:11 The prophet member from 88 to 89.
34:13 Reason for leaving bust hacking fiber optic 89
34:16 to 90 New York reason for leaving bust hacking.
34:19 Which that that's not actually true.
34:21 Mark or fiber optic got kicked out.
34:23 Remember you know whose name is not on here is Eric Bloodax whose
34:27 real name is Chris Gogggins or his sidekick Scott Chason which is Doc Holiday.
34:32 And it makes me wonder if this obituary was some kind of power move or a prank.
34:37 The author was blank.
34:39 And it's very curious because 8 days earlier,
34:42 LOD released an article which said,
34:44 "We are still alive." Lex Luthther wrote it um and it says,
34:48 "If you believe the rumors,
34:50 LOD has been dead many times, but that's again untrue." But in reality,
34:54 due to the CFAA being passed and the major outage at New York,
34:59 [music] arrests were starting to be made on hackers all over.
35:03 3 days after that major outage at AT&T on January 18th,
35:08 1990, two agents from the US Secret Service,
35:11 a security employee from Southwestern Bell
35:13 and a security guard from the University of Missouri,
35:16 knocked on the door of a frat house,
35:18 and they found Craig Najdorf, aka Night Lightning,
35:20 the co-founder of the notorious hacker magazine, Frack,
35:24 and accused him of crashing the AT&T phone system.
35:28 They arrested him and took all his computers and took him into custody.
35:31 Craig seemed pretty surprised that the Secret Service was arresting him.
35:35 Yeah, he could have done it, sure,
35:36 but he swore he didn't, and he would never do that.
35:39 Any fight that Craig had in him, though,
35:41 disappeared when the cops confronted him about the document
35:45 that he posted to Frack, the E911 file.
35:49 In a 4-hour interrogation, he admitted to publishing it,
35:53 and he agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
35:57 And ditto happened for the prophet,
35:59 the guy who originally copied the E911 file from Bell South.
36:02 He also got arrested by the police and the Secret Service.
36:06 And they were both charged on seven counts
36:09 relating to stealing and posting this E911 file.
36:13 They even told the parents of these guys,
36:15 "Your son has caused billions of dollars worth of damage.
36:18 He's crashed the AT&T network." Eventually,
36:22 almost every LOD member either got busted or gave up.
36:26 Lex Luthther announced his retirement.
36:28 He's the one who started LOD.
36:29 Here's Mark again.
36:31 There was a lot more government
36:32 involvement in the Hacker Underground in general.
36:34 And because of that fact, two things happened.
36:36 A lot of people who had not gotten in trouble yet, didn't want to risk anymore.
36:41 They were already older.
36:42 Particularly the older generation of hackers,
36:44 some guys that I knew who started LOD,
36:46 for example, withdrew from uh the hacker underground.
36:50 uh simply didn't want to risk getting in trouble
36:53 anymore now that the the climate had changed so much.
36:56 Other hackers, a few, let's say,
36:58 thought that it might be good to go in the other direction and attempt
37:03 to uh gain clout with the government
37:07 and telco security by inviting [clears throat]
37:09 them onto a bulletin board that was set up uh under the opices of creating
37:15 a dialogue between hackers and security people
37:19 and uh the FBI and secret service.
37:22 Well, might sound [clears throat] a little ridiculous to think about,
37:25 but um the FBI thought it was great because it gave
37:28 them a chance to chat with hackers and then arrest them.
37:31 So, while people from LOD were being
37:33 nabbed by the police and others were scattering,
37:35 it looks like LOD was dead, but it wasn't entirely.
37:39 There was one person who was trying to keep it alive.
37:42 Eric [music] Bloodax, aka Chris Gogggins.
37:45 Eric Bloodex thought it would be a really great idea
37:47 to try to bring back LOD for what it was.
37:50 In the absence of any real leadership in the group
37:52 anymore because anyone who mattered anymore had withdrawn,
37:56 he basically appointed himself leader of the group and he
37:59 had ideas to take it in a new direction.
38:01 Bloodax himself was a longtime member of LOD and was an editor, a frack, too.
38:06 So he suspected the police would come after him, too.
38:09 And they did.
38:10 On March 1st, 1990, his off-campus townhouse at the University
38:14 of Texas was raided at 6:00 in the morning, but [music] he was expecting them.
38:18 So, even though there were six armed policemen in his bedroom,
38:22 Blood X was pretty calm.
38:23 In fact, he basically staged the place for them,
38:26 like he left out a brochure that he knew they'd see, and it said,
38:30 "How to become a Secret Service agent." One of the agents,
38:33 rifling through his stuff, grabbed it and asked him about it.
38:36 Bloodax told him that, you know, maybe when all this is over, I could help out.
38:40 He actually had been thinking about switching sides for a while now,
38:43 and he picked up the idea from a book
38:45 called Fighting Computer Crime, released in 1983.
38:48 But Blood Axe always held on to the belief
38:51 that there shouldn't be any destruction when it comes to hacking.
38:54 So, they didn't find much evidence on him committing crimes uh other than he was
38:58 a member of the Legion of Doom and they let him go without any charges.
39:04 Bloodax tried making a BBS to bring together hackers,
39:08 security teams from Telos and police, but it didn't go well and it closed up.
39:13 He then decided to start a business to try
39:14 to advise companies about hacking from an office in Texas,
39:18 but he was doing more than that.
39:20 There was a great amount of disagreement and dissension within LOD in the uh
39:26 late 1980s because of the fact that there was informing going on.
39:32 Several people, several members of the Legion
39:34 of Doom had gotten busted under mysterious,
39:37 let's just say mysterious circumstances.
39:40 People that we knew, people that we were affiliated in other countries.
39:43 For example, a hacker group in Australia
39:46 were busted under suspicious uh circumstances
39:50 which all led to uh certain individual that we all uh know and love
39:55 in Texas who um had started one of the first uh hacker consultancies uh
40:01 under the opices of uh gaining clout uh with the FBI and telco security.
40:08 Uh the person I'm referring to is is Eric Bloodax
40:10 in case it wasn't clear to anyone in the audience.
40:13 Bloodax started a company called Comse SEC data security.
40:16 It became known to even other LOD members who were wondering
40:20 if I had heard anything about Eric Bloodax because so they were
40:23 concerned for their own safety when they heard about what happened
40:26 with some hackers in Australia and others and suspected that he was involved.
40:31 But he was trying to gain clout with the government
40:33 to bolster his business and in doing so was turning in hackers.
40:37 When hackers found out he was doing this, they began
40:40 harassing him and his business and so on, which is,
40:43 you know, what hackers do in general.
40:45 And certainly someone who's informing on other hackers is
40:47 is going to earn the wrath of of other hackers.
40:50 From the City Corp atrium, everyone who could would pick up a pay
40:54 phone and start calling the Comsac phone number.
40:57 It was a denial of service attack, if you will,
40:59 which tied up the phone lines and made
41:00 it so nobody could ever get through to Commac.
41:03 And that would last all day until people got bored
41:05 and had to go eat dinner at like 8:30 or so.
41:08 A legendary hacker feud was starting to stir up.
41:12 LOD versus MOD.
41:14 But Eric Bloodax from LOD could handle all these prank phone calls.
41:18 This wasn't a big deal to him, so no shots fired back yet.
41:23 LOD would sometimes host conference [music]
41:25 calls to chat about what was happening.
41:27 John Lee, aka Corrupt, a member of MOD,
41:30 would hear about these calls and join in.
41:32 And one day he jumped on the call and introduced himself as Dope Fiend from MOD.
41:36 And someone shouted,
41:38 "Get that nword off the line." John Lee was black and took offense to this.
41:43 [music] Bloodax would always deny that he was the one who said it,
41:46 but we called John and John knows what he knows.
41:49 John Lee and his buddy Julio joined more of these LOD bridges.
41:54 But they listened in silently after that without
41:56 introducing themselves [music] and they heard it again.
41:59 The slurs that the Texan hackers would use to refer [music] to them,
42:02 these definitely were not slips of the tongue.
42:05 So John Lee decided to make Blood Ax's life hell.
42:09 He and Julio prank called him incessantly, taunting him,
42:12 dialing again and again, over and over, and just hanging up.
42:16 But still, Blood Axe kept his cool and didn't do anything back.
42:20 Remember earlier in this episode,
42:21 I told you about a super secret file on LOD's Fifth Amendment BBS?
42:25 It allowed anyone to hack into the PBX system developed by the company
42:28 called Rome and even LOD members were explicitly instructed to never copy it.
42:33 Well, John Lee got into the fifth amendment and he
42:36 stole the file and he spread it to other BBS's
42:39 around the country just [music] despite LOD and now blood
42:44 got bad that John took this file and [music] spread it.
42:47 So in return he took a copy of the history of mod a file written
42:51 by Eli describing the group and how it
42:53 came together and ran it through a program
42:55 that converted it to jive language like
42:57 a comically racist impression of the original text
43:00 which he then published to the world
43:02 and everybody knew who he was trying to annoy.
43:06 There was only one black hacker in mod.
43:10 John Lee then took a shot at Blood Ax's
43:12 sidekick Scott Chason by publishing his mom's credit history,
43:17 phone number, and home address on a popular BBS.
43:20 And as a bonus, he even included some sexual commentary about her.
43:24 Then Eric Bloodax got a password to MOD's
43:27 BBS from a guy who really didn't like John.
43:30 And the spat just kept going up and up,
43:32 and John Lee wanted to take it a step up.
43:36 In the summer of 1991, from his humid, air conditionless apartment in Brooklyn,
43:40 he wanted to mess with Blood Axe even more by tapping his phone.
43:44 He wanted to get in Blood Ax's head.
43:47 First, he broke into Southwestern Bell casually,
43:49 like he's done a thousand times before.
43:51 Then, he connected to a switch that controlled Comac's phone line,
43:55 which is Blood Ax's official line.
43:57 Using computer commands,
43:59 he asked the switch if the line was currently in use, and it was.
44:03 So he tapped into the call and spied on what they were discussing at Comsack.
44:08 What he heard was a call where Eric Bloodax was talking
44:11 to Craig Najdorf aka Night Lightning aka the co-founder of Frack magazine.
44:16 At the time Craig was as famous as any hacker in the world
44:19 was the kind of guy Bloodax was probably wanting to impress.
44:23 Craig was calling Compsack for help.
44:25 He was getting harassed with constant phone calls lately and he was fed up.
44:30 Bloodax felt his pain.
44:31 He'd been dealing with the same problem.
44:33 He's like, "You know who Corrupt is, aka John Lee?" "Yeah,
44:37 well, it sounds like something he would do." A minute later,
44:42 Blood Axe got a call on another line and he told Craig,
44:45 "Hang on just one minute." Hello.
44:48 Yeah, that does sound like something I would do.
44:50 [music] Click.
44:52 That was badass.
44:53 Eric Bloodax knew exactly what just happened.
44:56 John Lee was listening in on that call.
45:00 Now, Blood Axe had to go back to the most
45:02 famous hacker in the country who needed help dealing
45:04 with an attack on his phone line and admit
45:06 that the very call that they were having was under attack.
45:10 And John Lee listened to him admit it.
45:13 Eric Bloodax realized this is no way to run a security company.
45:17 He had to do something not just about John Lee, but about Mark.
45:20 He knew Mark was the puppet master.
45:23 Take out [music] Mark and everyone at MOD would scatter.
45:26 The whole MOD needed to go.
45:28 And this is where the legendary hacker war began between MOD and LOD.
45:34 Eric Blood Axe wanted to take out Mark and John
45:38 Lee wanted to annoy the hell out of Blood Axe.
45:41 Here's Mark again.
45:42 So he decided that I was responsible for this based on some
45:45 previous uh disagreements we had had and uh decided that he was going
45:50 to inform on me and various of my friends here in New York
45:54 by giving information to the FBI about us and so on and so forth.
45:58 Remember I told you about Tom and Fred,
45:59 the security engineers at the New York Telephone Company?
46:02 Well, they figured out the people hacking
46:03 into their network were John and Julio from MOD.
46:06 With months and months of records documenting,
46:08 following every single time that they did it,
46:10 there was enough evidence to send to the police.
46:12 But the police needed to verify the evidence themselves.
46:15 So, a judge looked over the paper trail and decided
46:17 to approve a wire tap for both John and Julio.
46:20 And not just wiretaps.
46:21 For the first time, US authorities were
46:24 granted the ability to tap computer communications, too.
46:27 Data taps, they called it.
46:29 And I guess the term we might use today is man-in-the-middle or even spyware.
46:33 In a suite of borrowed offices in Manhattan's World Trade Center,
46:36 the Secret Service set up a war room.
46:39 Well, a wire room is actually what they called [music] it.
46:41 And it was overseen by the FBI, filled with computers,
46:45 storage tapes, disc [music] drives, and cables in every direction.
46:48 A system specifically designed for one occasion
46:52 to track these teenage hackers on their computers.
46:56 staffed by two dozen trained agents of the US government working in 12-hour
47:01 shifts tapping the lines of these teenagers
47:04 recording all of their internet behavior.
47:07 And back then, nothing was encrypted.
47:09 So all their passwords and commands and everything that they
47:11 were doing could easily be seen by the FBI,
47:14 listening and watching everything these kids did
47:17 with the same intensity of like a Soviet nuclear launch.
47:21 [music] Meanwhile, the Secret Service made a deal with Eric Bloodax.
47:25 Anytime CO Comse got a call from MOD,
47:27 he would [music] walk down the street to a specific
47:29 pay phone and inform his FBI and Secret Service handler,
47:32 never using the agent's real name just in case mod was listening there, too.
47:36 The investigation into the Masters of Deception [music] took one year.
47:41 In June 1992, Mark, John, Julio, Eli,
47:45 and Paul each received an envelope in the mail.
47:48 [music] letter informed them that they were
47:50 the subject of a grand jury investigation,
47:52 which means they are suspects in a crime.
47:55 And soon after that, they were all arrested and formerly charged with violating,
48:01 yep, [music] you guessed it, the CFAA.
48:04 I'll let Mark tell it from here.
48:06 As things fell apart, EFF was uh was supporting us to go to trial.
48:11 Wait, the EFF?
48:12 Yeah, sorry.
48:12 All right, I hate to interrupt here, but I know the story has been like gone
48:15 in seven different directions and things are mashed together all over,
48:19 but this is something I think I need to talk about.
48:21 When John Perry Barlo clashed with Mark and he got spooked,
48:25 remember he dropped his credit report in the chat.
48:28 Spooked more than he's ever been before.
48:29 But he also realized, petty arguments aside,
48:32 something much greater is happening in the country right now.
48:35 And these kids were bearing the brunt of it.
48:37 After their argument, John Perry Barlo asked Mark,
48:40 "Give me a call." And rumor has it that he didn't even give Mark
48:42 his number because he felt that would be an insult to such a powerful freaker.
48:46 But soon his phone rang and of course it was Mark.
48:48 And later John actually wrote about this call.
48:50 He said, "In this conversation and the others that followed,
48:53 I encountered an intelligent, civilized,
48:55 and surprisingly principled kid of 18 who sounded and continues to sound
48:59 as if there's little harm in him to man or data.
49:03 His cracking impulses seemed purely exploratory.
49:06 And I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard
49:08 spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.
49:13 It's such a great analogy.
49:15 John Perry Barlo wondered whether what Mark and his annoying friends were
49:18 doing was really as bad as the police would have him believe.
49:22 Is transmission through an otherwise unused data channel really theft?
49:26 He asked himself this question.
49:28 Or put another way, is there a difference between exploring and exploiting?
49:34 If you break in just to look around and cause no damage,
49:38 maybe you're just exploring.
49:40 In the months that followed, John Perry Barlo kept an eye out as Secret Service
49:45 agents were busting in through hackers doors across the country,
49:48 including Mark and Eli's houses, carrying guns,
49:51 taking all of the things and cordoning off their family members.
49:54 This was all part of what the Secret Service called Operation Sunundevil,
49:59 which resulted in 27 warrants for hackers spread across 14 cities.
50:04 It was a massive crackdown nationwide on hackers.
50:08 It was very serious and very scary.
50:11 Search warrants are going out here in Chicago
50:13 and a dozen other cities coast to coast in an effort to stop computer fraud
50:17 that is costing companies and consumers millions of dollars.
50:21 As Elizabeth Vargas reports, authorities have already seized computer
50:24 equipment and thousands of computer records.
50:29 They say it is the white collar crime of the '9s.
50:31 Raids in Chicago and a dozen other cities
50:34 this week exposed a million-doll ring of high-tech computer hackers.
50:38 It is not a game.
50:39 Uh they're attempting and are getting into credit cards.
50:42 They're getting into [music] telephone systems.
50:45 They're getting into medical records, credit records.
50:48 They're getting into everything.
50:49 The raids come after a 2-year
50:51 nationwide investigation called Operation Sunundevil.
50:54 Like even the guy who reported the prophet for stealing
50:57 the E911 file and stashing on his computer, he even got raided.
51:01 He's like, "Man, I'm the one who found it.
51:02 I'm the one who turned it in and I'm
51:04 also suffering." [music] That guy was cooked.
51:06 John Perry Barlo saw that the government was overstepping and using
51:10 the CFAA to justify arresting dozens of people for being curious.
51:15 Everyone in MOD was accused of violating the CFAA.
51:19 Members of LOD were arrested for it and so many other innocent bystanders.
51:23 So John Perry Barlo was seeing all
51:25 these people getting scooped up left and right.
51:27 And he thought someone needs to do something about this.
51:30 And he met with Mitch Kapor.
51:31 Um this guy was on the well too.
51:33 And Kapor was known for inventing the spreadsheet program called Lotus 123.
51:38 They both lived in San Francisco which is where the well was hosted too.
51:41 And together the two of them got together and said,
51:44 "Let's do something here." And they started the EFF,
51:47 the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
51:49 They wanted to fund education, lobby for digital rights,
51:52 and help with the legal cases related to constitutional rights in cyerspace.
51:57 They were worried that law enforcement
51:58 and lawmakers didn't understand the digital world
52:01 that they were trying to regulate
52:03 and that ignorance was turning curiosity into crime.
52:05 And I want to remind you that John Perry Barlo
52:07 was the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.
52:11 He loved the internet.
52:12 [music] And so together they had dinner with big names in tech like Stuart
52:16 Brand and Steve Wnjak to go over the ideas of what the EFF was.
52:21 And Steve was so into it that he pitched
52:24 in some of his own money to get things started.
52:26 And it was settled.
52:27 The EFF was born.
52:28 And its online home at the time was the well.
52:31 And the EFF is still going strong today.
52:34 It is a leading voice for advocating for digital rights in the United States.
52:38 And the thing was almost all of those arrests were resulting in nothing.
52:43 The police were raiding offices and homes and taking computers but finding no
52:48 evidence of computer crimes at all and letting people go without any charges.
52:53 Like the most comical of all these raids was on Steve Jackson Games.
52:56 So this was a game studio that made board games
52:59 like roll the dice role playing type board games, right?
53:02 And one of the Legion of Doom members worked there.
53:05 In fact, you heard his voice at the very beginning of the last episode.
53:07 The guy who wrote the hacker manifesto, Lloyd Blankenship.
53:12 The Secret Service was sure that Lloyd hacked into Bell South,
53:16 stole some stuff, and was using it at work.
53:18 The proof that the Secret Service had,
53:21 the role playing game that Lloyd was making was
53:25 a cyberpunk game which had a hacker campaign in it.
53:29 They thought this was an instruction manual for hackers.
53:33 So they raided the entirety of Steve Jackson games,
53:36 seized computers, seized emails,
53:39 arrested people, took notebooks, took everything.
53:41 But Steve Jackson himself was like, "Wo, that is not a hacker manual.
53:46 It's a work of fiction.
53:48 We just made that story up." And this was one
53:52 of the first cases that the EFF took on to help out,
53:55 claiming the Secret Service was totally overreaching with the CFAA,
53:59 and it's just way too broad of a law.
54:01 this is the dumbest law ever.
54:03 And so that case got dropped when they found absolutely no evidence of a crime,
54:08 which was a huge win for the EFF.
54:11 In fact, it got dropped so hard that the court criticized the Secret
54:14 Service for such a sloppy understanding of crimes that they were chasing.
54:18 And then Mark aka Fiber Optic was another one of EFF's first cases.
54:23 They felt that we were not guilty of what the US attorneys were saying we did.
54:28 There was even at least one attempt by one of the complainants
54:31 in the case uh British Telecom Timenet wanting to actually interview us
54:37 which if we were given the opportunity would have shown cooperation and would
54:42 have given us the opportunity to tell them exactly what we did.
54:45 We would have met the engineers that built the network.
54:47 They were interested how we defeated their security.
54:49 Sounds like a movie.
54:51 But unfortunately the US Attorney's Office did not allow them to do this.
54:56 So we were never given the opportunity to clear our name.
54:58 So we were basically treated like criminals and due to that fact one by one
55:04 my friends the guys that were uh named in the indictment decided to plead
55:08 guilty until uh I was the only one remaining and it's you know
55:11 the typical cliche of the last guy
55:14 standing without a chair when the music stops.
55:16 The judge even said a message must be sent.
55:19 So that was Mark.
55:20 And then there was Eli aka Acid Freak,
55:23 one of the members of MOD, who also got arrested.
55:26 Eli was thrown into prison for a relatively minor offense.
55:30 Some of the members of his crew broke
55:31 into the computers that list everybody's credit ratings,
55:34 [music] you know, and they copied some credit
55:36 reports and they sold the information to other people.
55:41 And he was named [music] as a member of this conspiracy.
55:46 They said we missed, you know, we abused our power,
55:49 but [music] we didn't abuse it at all.
55:51 We did nothing compared to the things that could have been done.
55:54 You know, [music] what we did was such a small
55:56 thing and such a larger scheme of things, you know.
55:59 It's kind of depressing in a way.
56:01 I mean, there's so many things we could have done.
56:03 We could have monitored uh you know [music] Peter
56:05 Lynch you know and what's the next best investment
56:08 for the day you know and and we'd make millions
56:11 of dollars you know investing or shorting [music] some stock
56:14 but uh we never did and you know now
56:18 we wonder why [laughter] we're like damn there's so many
56:23 applications for [music] this kind of stuff what happened
56:25 but then we're like ah you know we were just kids
56:32 mod co-founders Paul and Eli each got half a year in [music] jail.
56:36 Mark got a whole year in jail, and John Lee got a year in jail, too.
56:40 Julio, who did all of Jon's crimes along with him,
56:43 got off free, which is probably because he cooperated with the police.
56:46 A few LOD members, Adam and the Prophet,
56:49 faced [music] up to $2 million in fines and 40 years in prison,
56:53 which would have been ridiculous.
56:54 But in the end, [music] Adam got sentenced to 14
56:57 months and the prophet got 21 months in prison.
57:00 And then there was Craig's [music] case,
57:02 aka Night Lightning, the co-founder of Frack.
57:05 He was in trouble for publishing the E911 file.
57:08 [music] He was also one of the first cases that the EFF took on.
57:13 And if you think about it, this is a federal case,
57:15 so they couldn't charge him with just [music] publishing the article
57:18 because that would just go completely against the First Amendment.
57:22 So instead, they were charging him with theft [music]
57:24 and wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property.
57:29 Bell South was saying that the E911 file
57:32 was worth $79,000 and contained highly sensitive information.
57:36 Prophet was charged with the [music] same stuff and he just admitted guilt.
57:39 But Craig, no, no, no.
57:41 Craig was like, I am not guilty.
57:43 [music] And so a trial began.
57:45 And the trial was absolutely ridiculous.
57:48 For one, they wouldn't show the E911 file to the jury or put it
57:52 in evidence for fear that it would become
57:54 public record and then anyone could see it.
57:57 Two, Bell Cells claimed it cost the company a ridiculous amount of damage,
58:00 but they couldn't produce a shred of evidence
58:02 to show where they got that number.
58:05 The prosecutors wanted to put Craig in prison for 30
58:08 years and find him $122,000 for publishing this file in Frack.
58:13 But as the trial went on, they learned that the E911
58:16 file didn't in fact have any information on how to configure it,
58:20 change it, or use it.
58:22 It wasn't a technical manual at all,
58:24 but more of an escalation path for troubleshooting emergency services.
58:28 If this breaks, call this office.
58:30 If that breaks, call this office.
58:32 That sort of thing.
58:33 It had a lot of technical jargon, which made it incredibly hard to read.
58:38 But it didn't teach anyone how to take down the 911 system.
58:42 And the prosecutors were pitting their whole
58:44 argument against how dangerous it was to publish
58:47 that, saying that anyone who reads it could go and take down the 911 system,
58:51 but it just wasn't the case.
58:53 All you got out of it were definitions and escalation paths,
58:56 barely anything to actually do anything with.
58:59 And the trial just kept going on.
59:02 But then suddenly, EFF got a hot tip from someone.
59:06 It [music] was discovered that if you called up Bell South,
59:09 they would actually send you the E911 file
59:12 and just charge you a $13 printing and shipping fee.
59:15 It was basically available free from the very
59:18 company that was accusing him of theft.
59:21 From what I understand is that it wasn't the exact same file,
59:23 but the contents had the same information in it.
59:26 So, whatever [music] was supposed to be secret and sensitive was not
59:30 in fact secret or sensitive [music] because they were giving it away.
59:33 The prosecution had no legs to stand
59:36 on after that and [music] the case got dropped.
59:39 This was not a holy manual worth $79,000.
59:43 It was a common technical document that the very company
59:45 would give away for free if you just asked for it.
59:48 This was a monumental win for Frack and the EFF for Frack.
59:53 This put them down into legendary status.
59:56 They weren't just a hacker eene anymore.
59:58 They were the hackers who got arrested by the Secret Service,
1:00:01 fought the law, and won.
1:00:03 How badass is that?
1:00:05 And for the EFF, this was proof to them that the CFAA legislation was
1:00:09 prone to overreach and was improperly being
1:00:12 used to criminalize the dissemination of information.
1:00:15 This solidified the idea that the EFF was an important
1:00:18 entity that had to keep fighting for our digital rights.
1:00:23 Man, there couldn't be a better symbol
1:00:25 to wrap up this story with because whether
1:00:27 the E911 file was the most dangerous document
1:00:29 on the internets or just a $13 pamphlet,
1:00:32 it almost didn't even matter in the end.
1:00:35 Because what if I told you the day before
1:00:37 authorities raided Craig and a week before they raided MOD,
1:00:41 AT&T admitted very publicly that the outage was
1:00:45 caused by a bug in their own software.
1:00:48 It was self-inflicted by AT&T itself by accident,
1:00:51 but still it was their own doing.
1:00:53 One of their programmers put in the word break in a wrong part
1:00:57 of the code and that just caused all their computer switches to crash.
1:01:00 So all that kurfuffle, all those arrests which was triggered by the AT&T
1:01:05 outage was all because AT&T broke their own systems.
1:01:12 It took years for people to get their lives back on track.
1:01:15 And there's still a lot of bitterness between people in those circles.
1:01:19 And here's Eli again.
1:01:20 And this was where Ira Glass interviewed him after he got out
1:01:23 of prison and wasn't allowed to touch a computer for a while.
1:01:26 So I was like, uh, damn, this is like I have to fill this void.
1:01:30 What's what should I do, you know?
1:01:31 And I I didn't know what to do anymore.
1:01:34 It was like horrible.
1:01:35 Just, you know, it was sad.
1:01:37 I would we would call each other up and usually
1:01:39 we'd be talking about computers and trading passwords and did
1:01:42 we get into this and that and I remember
1:01:44 the first time we call I was like so what's up?
1:01:48 Nothing.
1:01:49 [snorts] Uh I cleaned my room yesterday.
1:01:52 Yeah, they came over and cleaned my room too pretty well.
1:01:55 Yeah, I know.
1:01:57 So, uh what do you want to [music] do?
1:02:01 I don't know.
1:02:02 [snorts] Cuz it's like such a large part of our lives at that point, you know?
1:02:06 You have so much power.
1:02:07 To lose it in an [music] instant like that is just so such a shock, you know?
1:02:12 It's like bam, you don't have that power anymore.
1:02:15 You can't sit on your computer.
1:02:16 What are you going to do?
1:02:17 Uh-oh.
1:02:18 I'm a regular guy now.
1:02:19 I'm not I'm not acid freak anymore.
1:02:21 You know what's what's acid freak without a computer?
1:02:24 You know, just a regular guy.
1:02:27 So, it was a bummer.
1:02:32 And I think that marks when the sun set on the golden age of hacking.
1:02:39 What began as a thousand screeching modems and dim bedrooms lit
1:02:43 by the glow of heavy monitors fueled by curiosity and rebelliousness.
1:02:48 It ended in knock knocks at the door.
1:02:52 And the wires got heavy.
1:02:53 The fun got serious.
1:02:55 Too serious.
1:02:56 The thrill of dialing blindly into [music]
1:02:58 the unknown gave way to lawyers, headlines,
1:03:01 and the cold steel of federal laws written
1:03:04 by people who never touched a terminal in their lives.
1:03:07 The federal government raided people's homes.
1:03:10 They looked [music] for digital demons and found instead a bunch
1:03:13 of misfit kids arguing about baud rates and antsy colors.
1:03:17 But it didn't matter.
1:03:18 The spell had been broken.
1:03:20 The new digital frontier was now off limits to exploration.
1:03:24 You could feel it.
1:03:25 The stakes were higher now.
1:03:26 The channels were quieter.
1:03:28 The boards went dark.
1:03:30 The legends disappeared.
1:03:32 The ones who stuck around.
1:03:34 Well, they took jobs behind desks that [music] they used to try to hack into.
1:03:38 But back then, during that fleeting stretch of time,
1:03:42 it really did feel like this is our world now.
1:03:45 [music] The world of the electron and the switch and the beauty of the baud.
1:03:50 unregulated, uncharted, unsupervised,
1:03:53 pure signal and no static punk rock energy.
1:03:57 A crooked little utopia that was inside all our computers.
1:04:00 And if you were lucky enough to log in while it lasted,
1:04:03 you know it wasn't just hacking.
1:04:05 It was freedom.
1:04:06 It was adventure into a new frontier.
1:04:09 It was the last beautiful accident before the [music] age of control.
1:04:14 Because when the CFAA showed up, a law written by people who couldn't
1:04:18 tell the difference between terrorism and curiosity,
1:04:22 it didn't catch real criminals,
1:04:24 just [music] the kids who still believed that the frontier was worth exploring.
1:04:29 You can't hack the world forever,
1:04:32 but for that brief moment in time, it sure felt like we could.
1:04:37 You may stop an individual, but you can't stop us all.
1:04:41 After all, we're all alike.
1:04:50 This episode was researched and written with help from Nate Nelson.
1:04:54 Together, we crushed a ton of books and scoured the far reaches of the internet.
1:04:57 And we kept getting pulled in so many directions,
1:04:59 which is why this episode was so long.
1:05:01 I got super fascinated by so many aspects of hacking in the 80s,
1:05:04 went down some really fun memory lanes.
1:05:06 I want [music] to specifically mention two books
1:05:08 that were super helpful for us to write this episode.
1:05:11 Um, there's Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling and Masters
1:05:15 of Deception by Michelle Slatala and Joshua Quitner.
1:05:18 These books captured what was happening in the shadows
1:05:20 at the time in such a clear and remarkable way.
1:05:22 [music] You definitely should check them out if
1:05:24 you want to hear more about what happened then,
1:05:26 or for a totally different story of hacking in the 80s.
1:05:28 Check out the book Cuckoo's Egg, which is a classic hacker story.
1:05:32 As a reminder, you can get
1:05:33 a premium listening experience by going to plus.darknetdiaries.com.
1:05:38 If you sign up, you'll get an ad-ree version of this show,
1:05:41 plus 11 bonus episodes.
1:05:43 Not only that, it's an amazing way to show your support
1:05:45 for the show and to keep the lights on over here.
1:05:48 If you like what we're doing and you want more of it,
1:05:50 please consider supporting by going to plus.darknetdi.com.
1:05:55 This episode was created by me, Sir Crashot, Jackider.
1:05:59 This episode was written by Freaku, Nate Nelson.
1:06:02 Our editor is the laser disck lord, Tristan Ledger.
1:06:04 This episode is scored by the blind SQL Injection, Andrew Merryweather,
1:06:08 mixing by Proximity Sound, intro music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.
1:06:13 So, I remember I got banned from a BBS.
1:06:16 SISOP just was like, "You're not welcome here anymore." Why?
1:06:20 Because I uploaded 12 incomplete copies of King's Quest
1:06:24 because I was trying to download Leisure Suit Larry.
1:06:27 This is Darknet Diaries.