The Secret Phone Numbers That Unlocked the Entire Network š Darknet Diaries Ep. 168: LoD
Jack Rhysider
0:00 JACK: I want to play for you
0:02 a narration of a piece of classic hacker literature.
0:06 Everyone should be familiar with this.
0:08 Some of you may even have parts of this memorized.
0:10 Here, take a listen from the author himself.
0:13 LOYD: Another one got caught today thatās all over the papers.
0:17 Teenager arrested in computer crime scandal.
0:20 Hacker arrested after bank tampering.
0:22 Damn kids, they're all alike.
0:24 Iām a hacker.
0:25 Enter my world.
0:26 I made a discovery today.
0:28 I found a computer.
0:30 And then it happened; a door opened to a world,
0:33 rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addictās veins.
0:36 This is it.
0:37 This was where I belong.
0:38 But this is our world now,
0:40 the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.
0:43 We make use of a service already existing without paying for what
0:47 could be dirt cheap if it wasnāt run by profiteering gluttons,
0:50 and you call us criminals.
0:51 <!--more--> We explore, and you call us criminals.
0:55 We seek after knowledge, and you call us criminals.
0:58 You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us,
1:03 and try to make us believe that itās for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
1:07 Yes, I am a criminal.
1:09 My crime is that of curiosity.
1:12 My crime is that of judging people by what they say and they think,
1:16 not what they look like.
1:18 My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you'll never forgive me for.
1:23 I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
1:26 You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all.
1:30 After all, we're all alike.
1:33 That was written in 1986.
1:37 [Applause] My nameās Loyd, by the way, also known as the Mentor.
1:46 JACK: That was indeed Loyd Blankenship,
1:49 the author of the legendary Hacker Manifesto,
1:52 so legendary that it actually appeared in the movie Hackers.
1:55 Here, take a listen.
1:56 AGENT BOB: This is our world now,
1:59 the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.
2:03 Yes, I am a criminal.
2:06 My crime is that of curiosity.
2:08 I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
2:13 Huh, right?
2:14 Manifesto?
2:14 You may stop me, but you can't stop us all.
2:20 AGENT RAY: Thatās cool.
2:22 AGENT BOB: Cool?
2:24 AGENT RAY: Yeah, cool.
2:25 AGENT BOB: You think itās cool?
2:26 AGENT RAY: Itās cool.
2:27 AGENT BOB: Itās not cool.
2:29 Itās commie bullshit.
2:31 JACK: Loyd wrote that a few days after being arrested for hacking.
2:35 Loyd was a member of one of the most
2:40 infamous hacker groups of all time, the Legion of Doom.
2:46 (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories
2:48 from the dark side of the internet.
2:53 Iām Jack Rhysider.
2:58 This is Darknet Diaries.
3:05 [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] JACK: Hey.
3:13 I am in San Francisco and I am looking for a specific building,
3:19 and while I look for it,
3:22 Iām gonna walk, and Iām gonna tell you a story, and I want you to come with me.
3:28 So, you've probably heard of the term āphreakerā, right, spelled with a PH?
3:33 This is basically a phone hacker.
3:35 What a phreaker is is someone who manipulates
3:38 the phone system to make phreak phone calls or whatever.
3:42 But did you know that the term āphreakerā and the whole
3:46 idea of it was injected into the mainstream by Esquire Magazine?
3:52 Yeah, so, in 1971, Esquire interviewed the guy who created the blue box,
3:58 and was like, show us how itās done and all this stuff.
4:01 The blue box is a magical thing thatā you push buttons on it,
4:04 it had certain tones and things, and if you hold it up to the phone,
4:08 you can make a phreak phone call or whatever.
4:10 It was basically a little box that hacked phones.
4:13 So, they interviewed this guy,
4:14 and he showed them how it works and all this sort of thing,
4:18 and took themā kind of a tour of the underground world of phreakers,
4:22 which at the time was very small and esoteric.
4:25 Well, you had to be a geek of geeks in order to be a phreaker at the time.
4:31 I mean, 1971, this is early phreaking days.
4:35 So, that article came out, and it pretty much glorified phreaking,
4:40 saying this is your way to empower yourself.
4:44 So, that article came out, and it inspired thousands andā tens
4:47 of thousands of people were reading this thing.
4:49 Like, how do I get a blue box?
4:51 How do I make this?
4:52 I want to get one, too.
4:54 So, there was just all this fever suddenly about people asking around,
4:58 and kids on college campuses were now making blue
5:01 boxes and getting together and trying to build these things.
5:04 Of course, it didnāt explain in the article how to make it.
5:07 So, finding that, it was very difficult.
5:08 Google wasnāt around at the time.
5:09 I mean, gosh, the internet wasnāt even around at the time.
5:12 So, trying to find information on how to build these was pretty hard.
5:15 But if you looked in the right areas,
5:17 you could find them, and you ask the right people.
5:21 Famously, Steve Wozniak read that article and worked with Steve Jobs to say,
5:25 hey, letās start building these blue boxes and sell them, and they did.
5:29 This was their very first company before they started Apple.
5:31 They even said, if we didnāt do that, weād never make Apple,
5:34 because this was a really good stepping stone
5:36 to figure out how to work together and build things.
5:40 So, it wasnāt just like, hereās how to do this cool electrical thing,
5:44 but something about phreaking was just really cool at the time.
5:47 The cool kids were doing it.
5:49 They were like wizards.
5:49 They could do things to the phones that normal people couldnāt do,
5:52 and it was real magical at the time to be able
5:55 to send these crazy signals into the phone and make it do stuff.
5:58 But the phreakers weren't just cool kids; they were anti-establishment.
6:01 It was like, we all have these little rebels inside us as teenagers,
6:05 and this was a way to really let that rebel fly.
6:08 Phreakers were a way to push back, to empower yourself,
6:12 to fight the big monopolies of the world like Ma Bell.
6:16 There was a magazine being published at the time called Ramparts,
6:20 which was being published right here out of San Francisco.
6:23 Thatās where Iām headed right now.
6:25 Rampartsā I feel like their whole attitude was poke
6:28 their finger in the eye of the establishment, right?
6:31 It was like, big corporations are corrupt,
6:33 and hereās how youā could do to fight back.
6:35 They were very critical of Christianity and sympathetic of Black Panthers,
6:41 which wereā the government considered them a terrorist group at the time.
6:46 One of their most famous articles was when
6:49 they found evidence that the CIA was secretly funding
6:52 the student protests and student groups on college
6:57 campuses to try to manipulate political discourse and ideas,
7:02 and that turned into a huge investigation, and it was a big problem.
7:07 So, Ramparts was doing this crazy journalism at the time.
7:11 Oh, I think I see their office now.
7:15 Gosh, these buildings are so cool.
7:18 They're so old and so beautiful.
7:21 So, Ramparts saw the phreaker movement stirring up,
7:24 and they're like, letās write an article.
7:26 The article came out,
7:28 and it was called How to Hack the Phone Company in Your Home.
7:31 But it didnāt use the word āhackā; it said āregulate;
7:34 How to Regulate the Phone Company in Your Home.
7:40 I mean, I just read the article, so Iāll summarize it for you.
7:43 Itās basically saying, you've heard of the blue box,
7:46 but do you know about the mute box?
7:48 The mute box is pretty cool.
7:50 Basically, when you're going to make a long-distance call to someoneā now,
7:54 this was back in the seventies, right?
7:56 So, I can't believe I have to explain this.
7:59 There werenāt mobile phones yet,
8:01 so long-distance calls actually cost by the minute,
8:03 and it was very expensive to make long-distance phone calls.
8:06 So, what the article says is that when a long-distance phone call connects,
8:11 thereās a certain signal that gets sent from the receiverā
8:14 from the receiverās phone to the phone
8:17 company indicating this call has connected; let the timer start.
8:22 So, the toll begins.
8:23 What this mute box does is it mutes that signal to never let the phone
8:29 company know that the call started to start
8:31 the timer for how long the call lasted.
8:33 It would allow you to receive long-distance calls.
8:36 Kind of a weird idea, but thatās what a mute box does.
8:40 The article goes on to explainā now letās
8:42 show you how itās done, how to make one.
8:44 It has a parts list.
8:45 Itās like, get a capacitor and get a resistor and get
8:48 these kind of switches and put it in a box like this.
8:52 It tells you how to solder it, how toā what wires to connect,
8:55 where to put your phone in, and all this kind of stuff.
8:59 Itās a step-by-step tutorial on how to make a mute box.
9:03 Not only that; it says, now that you've built it, hereās how to use it.
9:06 Then when you're using it, hereās how to verify when you're getting a free call.
9:09 If you're hearing these tones, itās not working.
9:11 If you're hearing these tones, it is working.
9:14 Itās really in depth of how this works and how to make it.
9:18 I have arrived to where the Ramparts office used
9:22 to be here on Pine Street in San Francisco.
9:26 When they published this article in May of 1972, the police raided this office.
9:33 They went up and they forced them to recall all the issues that they published.
9:38 Said, get them back here.
9:39 Call up every news stand that you sold it to, everyone that you've sent it to.
9:43 Get the article back.
9:44 You cannot publish this.
9:45 They were like, what?
9:47 You're crazy.
9:47 They were like, you want a felony?
9:49 Do you want a felony?
9:51 Get the articles back here.
9:52 Do you want a big fine?
9:54 Either that or get your articles back here.
9:56 So, they felt really pressured,
9:58 and they called up as many places as they could to bring the articles back.
10:02 It cost them $50,000 in lost revenue for buying
10:05 back their articles or their magazines that they've already sold.
10:08 When I heard that story, my immediate thing was, wait, what?
10:13 The First Amendment of the constitution says Congress shall make
10:17 no laws to restrict freedom of speech or freedom of press, and this is a press.
10:22 They're just making magazines.
10:24 They're doing journalistic work here.
10:27 What happened was the phone company was so mad that this article
10:33 came out that they asked the California police to do something.
10:37 What the California police did was they found a rule in the law,
10:43 California penal code 502.7.
10:45 It says you cannot sell devices that will be used to defraud the phone company,
10:50 and you cannot sell schematics or distribute plans
10:54 or teach others how to defraud the phone company.
11:01 I am just perplexed by this becauseā what?
11:06 How is any YouTube video existā¦?
11:09 This law still exists on the books.
11:13 Itās never been recalled or appealed or anything like that.
11:16 So, how does any YouTube video exist that teaches you how to hack?
11:19 How does any article exist that teaches you how to hack?
11:22 I mean, shoot, just a little bit down the road from me is Stanford,
11:27 and Stanford has classes on how to hack, how to do this exact thing.
11:33 There are certificates on how to hack.
11:35 Itās like, all these things exist,
11:38 yet itās against the law to teach someone how to hack?
11:41 Are you serious?
11:44 So, Ramparts couldn't recover from this, and that was
11:48 the article that ended all articles for them.
11:52 After that, the damage to the company, the reputation,
11:55 the legal threats, the financial blow, was too much.
12:00 So, Ramparts had to shut down, and that was it for them.
12:06 [Music] I feel like as Iām sitting here looking up at the Ramparts office,
12:11 the old building there,
12:12 I could see that times have changed between then and now.
12:16 These are old buildings.
12:17 But that fight still wages on.
12:20 Itās still going strong.
12:21 Is there forbidden knowledge that we shouldn't share?
12:25 Is there stuff that should be hushed up?
12:29 Is there illegal tutorials out there that we shouldn't put out?
12:34 Itās often questioned.
12:36 All I gotta say is rest in peace, Ramparts.
12:41 I think you started something much bigger than what you were.
12:55 Okay, Iām back in the studio now, and I just pulled something out of storage.
12:58 Iām gonna turn it on, and you see if you can guess what this is.
13:02 [Machine whirring, clicking] That noise right there is so nostalgic to me.
13:06 Itās the sound of the Apple IIe starting up.
13:10 This wasnāt my computer.
13:12 It was the family computer, right?
13:15 I just inherited it.
13:16 [Whirring] You hear that?
13:18 This thingās mad because I don't have a disc in the drive.
13:21 It doesn'tā see, hereās the thing; this is an Apple IIe, right?
13:24 Even though itās an Apple product,
13:26 it does not resemble anything that you imagine an Apple product to resemble.
13:30 This thing is a full computer but has no hard drive.
13:34 It has no operating system at all.
13:36 So, for anything to get working,
13:37 you have to put a floppy disc in the disc drive.
13:41 Thatās like opening up an app, though, right?
13:43 You can only have one app open on this computer at a time.
13:46 It is ridiculous.
13:47 So, I have to push this in, close this door, and then itās still mad.
13:52 [Whirs] Itās still trying to find the disc.
13:54 Oh my gosh, hearing these noises invokes so many memories.
13:58 When did circuitry stop humming and making noise?
14:01 I miss that.
14:01 These were the days when you didnāt just use a computer;
14:05 you kind of danced with it.
14:07 Getting things to work felt more like alchemy than anything.
14:09 You might try something three times and it would work
14:12 one out of three times even though you didnāt change anything.
14:15 Manuals and books were impossible to find.
14:17 So, you were on your own figuring out commands and settings without a tutorial.
14:21 There was one sound in particular that when you heard it, it gave you a rush.
14:25 It made you feel like this thing is capable of infinite possibilities.
14:30 That sound was [dial tone] the dial tone.
14:34 Hearing that noise from your computer felt like
14:39 you had the whole world at your fingertips,
14:41 a world where you could go anywhere and do anything.
14:44 [Music] The dial tone was the sound of potential, pure potential.
14:50 We're so hyper-connected these days that you
14:52 donāt even realize that you're always online,
14:55 but back in the eighties it was a big deal to go online,
14:58 and it wasnāt like anything it is now.
14:59 BBSs were popular then, which stands for bulletin board system,
15:02 and it was often just some person running a computer out of their house,
15:06 and if you call their house
15:08 with a telephone which was connected to your computer,
15:11 you could connect to their computer and read what it had on it.
15:14 But it was way more complicated than that.
15:16 Finding their phone number to dial was hard, to start with.
15:19 Google wasnāt around yet to ask, hey,
15:21 what phone number should I dial and what BBSs should I check out?
15:23 So, you had to ask around in person, like to your friends and family.
15:27 Maybe a local electronics shop might be able to help.
15:29 Hey, do you know any good BBSs I should try?
15:32 They might give you a few phone numbers.
15:34 Then setting up your modem was a whole thing.
15:36 You had to configure it for like, twenty minutes just to get it to work right.
15:40 When you finally get it working and you dial the number, the line was busy.
15:44 Of course, because any popular BBS would have all kinds
15:47 of people trying to connect to it and see whatās there.
15:49 So, you had to just keep dialing it again
15:51 and again and again in hopes to get through eventually.
15:54 When you finally got through, it felt like wizardry.
15:57 The pixels on your screen would light up,
16:00 showing you a portal into another world, and you'd get this sudden rush
16:04 of excitement that you made a successful connection.
16:06 You were in.
16:07 Now it was time to look around and see whatās in there.
16:11 BBSs might show you articles, like technical articles or political things.
16:15 There might be programs to try,
16:17 or there would just be messages from other users talking about their day.
16:21 As you connected to these BBSs, you'd start to draw a map of the internet.
16:26 You would take notes of all the places that you visited; their phone numbers,
16:30 what they had, tips on connecting into it, your username that you used there.
16:34 Often a BBS might lead you to another BBS, where it would say,
16:37 if you like this place, you might also like this other place.
16:40 Now you're starting to build a list of potential phone numbers that might work.
16:44 The internet was rapidly changing, so a lot of phone numbers that you got
16:47 were old phone numbers and they didnāt work anymore.
16:49 They were for old BBSs that shut down or just stopped working.
16:52 So, for a lot of people in the eighties,
16:54 they really wanted to know more of what was out there.
16:57 You could dial any phone number,
16:58 and it may or may not have a computer connected to it.
17:01 There was no official map or search engine
17:03 back then to show you around the internet.
17:05 The internet was very dark, and it was hard to navigate.
17:08 Like, you have no idea how exhausting it was to try to do
17:11 all this without a manual or a clear tutorial on how anything worked.
17:16 But while it was cool and all to connect to a BBS,
17:19 thatās just one other computer in the world.
17:21 Thatās just a computer you dialed into at someoneās house or something,
17:24 which wasnāt connected to anything else.
17:27 Surely there are bigger,
17:28 more powerful computers in the world out there, but where?
17:32 Surely there must be whole computer networks out there
17:35 where you could bounce around from machine to machine.
17:39 Yes, in fact, businesses, governments,
17:41 and universities often had the biggest computers
17:43 and the coolest networks to get into.
17:46 So, what was the biggest computer network back then?
17:50 [Music] It was the telephone system, or technically the PSTN,
17:53 which stands for public switched telephone network.
17:56 By the 1980s, the phone system was being more and more controlled by computers.
18:01 Back in the early days, you had switchboard operators,
18:03 actual humans that you told them what number you wanted to connect
18:06 to, and they would connect that call for you by plugging in a wire.
18:09 It wasnāt until the 1980s where electronic switches became so popular
18:13 that there was no longer a need for human switchboard operators.
18:17 These electronic phone switches were fascinating.
18:19 Theyād listen to the tones on the phone line to make their decisions;
18:23 to connect people, to disconnect people, and of course,
18:26 hackersā or I should say phreakersā were very curious what
18:31 tones they could send the switches to make them do things.
18:36 As technology progressed, those phone switches became computer-driven,
18:39 which meant it was possible to get
18:42 into a phone switch and see all the calls connected,
18:45 disconnect them if you want, listen in on calls.
18:48 Yeah, those computers were sometimes remotely accessible so that the phone
18:51 company could get in there and configure and troubleshoot things, too.
18:54 So, it meant that you could technically control the phones
18:58 from a terminal on your computer in your house.
19:02 It was just a matter of knowing what phone
19:04 numbers to dial into and which computer to connect to.
19:07 So, you can imagine the phone company did not want
19:10 the phone number to these switches to be publicly known.
19:13 At the same time, phreakers were desperate to find them.
19:18 Because it was the largest network in the world,
19:20 it became the coolest thing to hack back in the 1980s.
19:23 They weren't just trying to figure out how to make free calls.
19:26 They were also trying to figure out how the phone system worked in general.
19:30 It was about being able to touch
19:32 and interact with the largest network in the world.
19:35 It was all about learning something new.
19:37 There was one guy who was very curious how the phone network worked,
19:41 and wanted to get in and learn more.
19:44 His name was Paul.
19:45 [Music] Paul Stira was a high-schooler living in Queens, New York.
19:49 What Paul liked doing was war dialing.
19:52 Heād just dial phone number after phone number to see if
19:54 there was a computer on the other end that would pick up.
19:57 But if you just dial random numbers, you're likely to get someoneās house.
20:01 Someone would pick up the phone and say, hello?
20:03 And then you'd hang up and try another number.
20:04 But then someone gave him a tip.
20:06 They said, hey, try calling higher numbers, like the last numbers in a block.
20:11 Like, you know, phone numbers that end in 9999.
20:14 Those numbers are often reserved by the telephone company themselves,
20:17 so thereās a higher chance that they might be connected to a computer.
20:23 So, he tried calling 555-9900, then 9901 and 9987, 9955.
20:28 He didnāt like doing things in sequential order.
20:31 Eventually Paul found a few numbers that responded
20:33 to his calls and had computer tones on the other end.
20:36 This is what he was hunting for.
20:39 A computer on the other end was answering his call.
20:42 This fascinated him.
20:43 So, he would use his computer to try dialing
20:46 that phone number just to see what the computer was saying.
20:49 So, he connected to it, and it said something; S.
20:54 S.
20:54 Thatās it?
20:55 One letter, the letter S?
20:57 What does S even mean?
20:58 He tried typing some commands,
20:59 but he just kept getting the same response; S, S, S.
21:03 Hm, that was weird.
21:05 It seemed like anything he typed, he would just get an S back.
21:09 Then he tried typing some numbers, but this time he got something different; W.
21:13 W?
21:14 This was all too obscure, and frustrated Paul.
21:17 S or W is all he was getting from this computer?
21:21 He started smashing all the keys to see if any of them worked, and nope.
21:24 All of them either gave S or W back.
21:27 Lame.
21:27 Out of desperation, he picked up his phone,
21:29 which was connected to his modem, and he just blew into it.
21:34 Take that, computer!
21:35 [Music] Then his computer lit up.
21:37 Suddenly, a series of characters began to fill the screen.
21:41 He was getting way more than S and W now.
21:44 He tried new commands now, and whoa,
21:46 suddenly he could talk to the computer on the other end of the line,
21:50 and it would respond to him in code.
21:52 Whoa, he got in!
21:53 With the brief gust of hot air, Paul had reset and taken control
21:58 of a machine that belonged to the phone company.
22:01 He tried typing a command; log in.
22:03 He had been on BBSs before and read
22:06 about what commands that phone computers use, so he was just trying random ones.
22:11 āPrintā got him access to useful files.
22:13 āShow usersā returned a list of employees that he could
22:16 impersonate to gain access to get more privileges on this network.
22:19 He told his friend Eli about this computer.
22:22 Eli thought, oh, you must have gotten into an SCCS,
22:25 a Switching Control Center System,
22:27 AKA the beating heart of the cityās telephone system.
22:30 It appeared he was, in fact, in a telephone switch,
22:33 and this was for the New York Telephone Company.
22:35 This controlled calls and phone numbers.
22:37 It was part of the inner workings of the phone company.
22:40 He wanted to try something.
22:41 Nothing big, just a little something just to prove this wasnāt a dream.
22:45 So, he looked up his friendās phone number,
22:48 which was in there, and it showed which features his friend had.
22:51 So, he gave his friend a new feature free of charge,
22:54 three-way calling, and then logged out.
22:56 This is where you could call two people at once.
22:58 It was real fancy at the time, and cost extra.
23:02 This was hacking at its finest in the 1980s.
23:05 Discovering a computer all on your own by war-dialingā
23:07 out of all the numbers in the world,
23:09 you found one that worksā figuring out a way to get into it,
23:13 and then finding some useful commands,
23:15 then to do a little something just to prove you were there?
23:19 Oh man, how cool.
23:21 Paul got a real high from this experience.
23:23 If connecting to BBSs felt like wizardry,
23:26 getting into a computer like this was on another level.
23:29 It wasnāt just magic anymore.
23:31 This was god powers.
23:33 This was bending reality, creating from nothing,
23:36 unlocking truths that were buried deep in the mysteries of the internet.
23:40 This is what hackers lived for in the eighties.
23:44 [Music] Ever since that Esquire article in 1971,
23:47 people got more and more interested in phreaking, and that just grew and grew.
23:52 By the way, even though Esquire
23:54 popularized and romanticized blue boxes and phreaking,
23:58 they never got in any trouble for doing that.
24:01 In November of 1985, a new online magazine published their first issue.
24:06 It was called Phrack, which starts with a PH.
24:10 Itās a combination of āphreakā and āhackā.
24:13 Now, back in 1985, there weren't even web browsers yet,
24:17 so Phrack didnāt have their own website to publish their e-zine, too.
24:21 Instead, they published Issue #1 on a BBS and encouraged people to share it,
24:25 spread it to other BBSs.
24:26 So, it did.
24:27 Any hacker BBS worth its salt back then had a copy of Phrack.
24:32 Honestly, it was just a text document, no photos in it.
24:35 Text files were king back then mainly because
24:37 it was faster to send text over the internet,
24:39 because images were really big and took forever to see.
24:42 So, text files were just where it was at.
24:45 Issue #1 of Phrack had some interesting articles.
24:47 Like, well, there was one just how to make international calls.
24:50 Not for free; just how to call internationally if you ever have to.
24:54 It had a list of country codes and had to dial them.
24:56 But it had some pranky stuff in there, too.
24:59 Like, did you know you could call a phone company,
25:01 state that you're someone else, and tell them āI no longer want service,
25:04 and could you please terminate my number?ā Thatās how you
25:07 can get the phone company to disconnect someone elseās telephone.
25:11 Thereās stuff in there like how to use a PBX if you're ever on one,
25:14 and thereās an article about how to pick locks,
25:17 and an article on how to make acetylene blue bombs,
25:20 basically saying put some rocks and Fun Snaps in a plastic bag,
25:23 fill the plastic bag with acetylene, a highly flammable gas,
25:26 throw it off a building, and when it hits the ground,
25:29 the Snaps create a spark, and that explodes the balloon,
25:32 making a loud noise and a big ball of fire.
25:35 See, anarchy was pretty popular on BBSs back then.
25:39 It was everywhere you looked;
25:41 bomb-making tutorials, lock-picking techniques, shoplifting advice,
25:44 how to bypass security systems, and other urban survival guides.
25:48 I just ran a Twitter poll asking people if they ever went online
25:53 when they were a kid and saw plans on how to make a flamethrower.
25:57 Half my followers said, yes,
25:58 they did see plans on how to make a flamethrower when they were a kid.
26:03 A real popular book among teenagers then was The Anarchist Cookbook,
26:07 which had schematics and diagrams on how to make bombs,
26:10 explosives, and cause havoc.
26:12 I was fifteen when I first saw it, and it spooked me a bit.
26:16 This seemed like serious destruction.
26:18 But I took a look at it again just now,
26:21 and it looks like it was written by kids for kids.
26:24 Itās not very detailed.
26:25 Some of the ideas donāt work at all,
26:27 and thereās no safety precautions to follow.
26:30 I remember going into a bookstore when I was a kid.
26:33 It was Walden Books, actually, in the mall.
26:35 I was just walking through the bookstore,
26:37 and one book caught my eye and it made me stop dead in my tracks.
26:42 The title of the book was Steal This Book.
26:45 [Music] It stared at me like a dare.
26:48 Go ahead, steal me.
26:49 I swear, I thought long and hard about it, but ultimately didnāt.
26:53 I couldnāt ask my dad to buy it for me either,
26:56 because it seemed like it was a book I wasnāt supposed to have.
26:59 So, I just grabbed it and flipped through it,
27:01 and it was wild, very anti-establishment,
27:04 part survival guide, part political manifesto.
27:07 It was encouraging me to steal, to rebel against capitalism.
27:11 Crazy stuff was in it; how to hitchhike,
27:13 how to dumpster dive, where to get free clothes,
27:16 how to make smoke bombs and disrupt phone lines,
27:19 how to run a pirate radio station.
27:21 It was written in 1971.
27:23 Again, itās wild to me that Ramparts was raided
27:26 for publishing an article on how to make a mute box,
27:29 but half the kids in the seventies and eighties
27:31 were finding schematics on how to make bombs online.
27:34 A good percentage of them were actually trying to make them,
27:37 which is even more wild.
27:38 eBay has banned The Anarchist Cookbook now from being sold there,
27:43 whichā a book that practically half my followers have
27:46 read as a teenager is now banned on eBay.
27:49 Iām telling you, anarchy was in style in the eighties.
27:53 There was a certain attitude that Steal
27:55 This Book and The Anarchist Cookbook possessed,
27:57 and that seemed to carry right on over
27:59 into what the internet culture was like in the eighties.
28:03 It was counter-culture, anti-establishment.
28:04 There was distrust of authority.
28:06 Smash the system.
28:07 It wasnāt just a vibe.
28:09 It was practically the first principles that a lot of people were operating at.
28:13 The early internet wasnāt slick or sanitized.
28:16 It was raw, lawless, DIY.
28:18 Sharing of text files was like sharing of contraband.
28:22 Whether you were reading articles on how to pick
28:24 a lock or get a free phone call,
28:26 on how to make a bomb, it all seemed to have some sort of cloak of secrecy.
28:30 What you were doing was accessing forbidden
28:32 information that they didnāt want you to see.
28:34 The internet felt like a digital back
28:37 alley where SysOps were gatekeepers to secret knowledge.
28:40 [Music] It was punk rock at its core.
28:43 It was cyber-anarchy.
28:44 It was the idea that the system could be subverted, bent, and reprogrammed.
28:48 It wasnāt just fun.
28:50 It was freedom.
28:51 These kids would take the shiny,
28:53 polished world and peel it back and look into the guts
28:57 and wires and bits and bytes that controlled it.
28:59 They found themselves in control of it.
29:02 They didnāt need to ask for permission.
29:04 You scavenge parts to build computers.
29:06 You cracked programs instead of buying them.
29:08 Itās like the rules were suddenly optional.
29:11 Obstacles were just challenges,
29:12 and the world was incredibly fun for those who were curious of how it worked.
29:18 A lot of these ideas were coming across my screen as a teenager,
29:23 and that shaped me to who I am today.
29:26 Yeah, thereās a schematic for how to build a flamethrower on my computer.
29:32 Interesting.
29:33 This stuff gave me an enormous amount of destructive power,
29:37 and I had to learn what to do with that power.
29:41 Did I make a flamethrower as a kid?
29:43 Absolutely.
29:44 It was just hairspray and a lighter, but it did spray fire.
29:48 Did I make bombs?
29:49 Absolutely.
29:50 Iāve gotta say, Iām really lucky that I didnāt blow
29:52 off a finger or set the whole house on fire,
29:55 since that could have easily happened with all the things I was doing.
29:58 The ethics of stealing would come up again and again.
30:01 Stealing is wrong, but the phreakers of the 1980s
30:04 had a different way of looking at things.
30:07 To them, making a free phone call by hacking the system wasnāt theft.
30:11 It was exploration.
30:12 Hereās the logic; theyād place calls late
30:14 at night when the phone lines weren't very busy.
30:16 The infrastructure was already up and running whether they were using it or not.
30:21 Their calls didnāt displace anyone else.
30:22 It didnāt congest the network.
30:24 It didnāt cause the phone company anything extra.
30:27 So, if no one lost anything, was anything really taken?
30:30 That was the ethical loophole that they lived in.
30:33 If thereās no marginal cost, no harm,
30:35 and no deprivation, then how could it be theft?
30:38 Many phreakers genuinely believed this.
30:40 Others didnāt care because, letās be honest,
30:42 a big part of the scene was driven by anti-authoritarianism,
30:47 curiosity, and a taste for anarchy.
30:51 Things really started to heat up in 1984.
30:54 At that time, AT&T wasnāt just a phone company; it was the phone company,
31:00 a telecommunications giant with a stranglehold
31:03 on every call made across America.
31:06 It was massive, monolithic, and seemingly unbreakable.
31:10 To many in the underground, anarchists, hackers, phreakers,
31:14 it was the very symbol of centralized control, the system incarnate.
31:19 But in January of that year, the unthinkable happened.
31:24 The US government stepped in and forced a breakup.
31:28 AT&T was declared a monopoly too powerful for its own good,
31:32 and under legal pressure,
31:34 it was torn apart, shattered into eight separate entities,
31:38 the so-called Baby Bells.
31:40 For those watching from the digital shadows, it was seismic.
31:45 The unbreakable had broken.
31:47 [Music] A vast, unified network had splintered overnight,
31:50 and with fragmentation came opportunity,
31:52 new cracks in the system, new scenes to explore.
31:56 The wires were alive again with people probing,
31:59 learning, exploiting, looking for hidden stuff.
32:01 It was the dawn of something wild, a freer, looser, more chaotic network,
32:07 and the perfect playground for cyber-anarchists ready to test their limits,
32:12 and Phrack was there watching it all.
32:14 The digital magazine seemed squarely planted in the hacker,
32:18 phreaker, and anarchy culture.
32:19 The authors of the articles were kids in the scene,
32:23 voices from the digital underground.
32:25 Let me read a passage from Phrack.
32:27 āDuring the summer of 1984, an idea was formulated that would ultimately
32:32 change the face of the computer underground forever.
32:34 This particular summer,
32:35 a huge surge in interest in computer telecommunications placed an incredibly
32:39 large number of new enthusiasts on the national computer scene.
32:42 From out of this chaos came a need for learned instructors
32:46 to help pass on their store of information to new throngs.
32:50 The need was met by nine hackers who
32:53 formed a group called the Legion of Doom.ā Now,
32:57 the name sounds pretty menacing, Legion of Doom, or LoD for short.
33:01 But really, the name comes from a comic book.
33:04 The group of super villains in DC Comics is called the Legion of Doom.
33:07 In fact, one of the guys who started
33:09 the LoD hacking group went by the name Lex Luthor,
33:13 which was the arch nemesis of Superman.
33:15 Phiber Optik was one of the members of Legion of Doom,
33:18 and thatās Phiber spelled with a PH.
33:20 Hereās a clip of him talking at a convention
33:22 in New York fifteen years ago explaining what it was.
33:25 PHIBER OPTIK: LoD was one of the first
33:27 organized hacker groups in a very disorganized computer underground.
33:31 The main purpose of LoD initially was to take
33:36 information primarily that was found trashing at Telcoās
33:40 central offices and type it in and make it
33:43 available in what were known as LoD tech journals,
33:46 which were available online in text file sections of bulletin board systems,
33:51 so-called elite bulletin board systems.
33:54 JACK: Oh yeah, trashing was big back then.
33:56 This is where you would go behind an office and look through their trash.
34:00 They would look for phone numbers or computers
34:02 or manuals on how to configure things,
34:04 or any sensitive information that the company had thrown out.
34:07 Phone companies were of particular interest to trash.
34:10 Again, the ethics of stealing comes in.
34:12 Is it stealing when you're taking it from someoneās trash can?
34:16 The sixteenth episode of Dateline NBC actually
34:18 interviewed one of the Legion of Doom members.
34:21 JANE: Good evening.
34:21 Iām Jane Pauley.
34:22 STONE: And Iām Stone Phillips, and welcome to Dateline NBC.
34:26 How do real hackers operate, and just what kind of damage can they do?
34:30 JACK: Itās so weird to me that you could turn
34:32 on the TV back then and learn what trashing was.
34:34 STONE: Adam belonged to an elite hacker club called the Legion of Doom.
34:39 One of the methods he used to obtain secret computer
34:42 codes was to rummage through the trash at Bell South,
34:46 the regional phone company in Atlanta.
34:48 ADAM: Letās see, back a few years ago, they weren't locked.
34:50 You could just slide the doors open, reach in, grab a bag, and leave.
34:54 JACK: [Music] Now, one thing that was worth its weight
34:56 in gold to these hackers were simply manuals for how computers worked.
34:59 Again, there was no Google to search for how something worked.
35:02 Again, there were no browsers even invented yet.
35:05 There was no YouTube to walk you through a tutorial
35:08 on how to use a computer or an application.
35:10 If you got into a computer that was giving you funky messages back,
35:14 you probably had no idea how to operate it.
35:17 A simple manual on how to use that computer would have been amazing,
35:22 but it was extremely rare.
35:23 You had no idea what commands to type on it.
35:26 The phone company did have manuals to these computersā obviously someone had
35:30 to know how to use themā but they were very well-guarded documents.
35:34 They did not want to share it, because if the wrong person got the manual,
35:37 it meant they could do anything they wanted in the telephone network.
35:40 Keep in mind, passwords were not always mandatory back then.
35:44 Security was often through obscurity, actually.
35:48 Like, hide your computer by not sharing the phone number with anyone,
35:51 and donāt show anybody how to use it who isn't authorized.
35:53 So, they often relied on nobody knowing what the phone number was
35:57 and nobody knowing how to use it even if they did dial it.
36:00 The word ācybersecurityā didnāt show up until 1983.
36:02 We're talking about the land of computers before cybersecurity was even a thing.
36:07 What a magical time that was, because honestly,
36:10 the whole internet had doors wide open anywhere you looked.
36:13 Itās just that the doors were hidden, and it was up to you to find them.
36:17 So, members of the Legion of Doom would
36:19 go searching through trash cans behind telephone companies,
36:21 and when they found something,
36:23 they would type it up and share it on their LoD BBS for others to see.
36:27 In this way, they started amassing all kinds of random
36:30 manuals and documentation that the phone company was throwing out.
36:33 I want to stress so many of these articles didnāt show you how to hack anything.
36:38 It simply was a manual that the manufacturer
36:40 gave out for how to use their own computers.
36:43 Legion of Doom quickly became the most respected,
36:46 most desirable BBS in the entire hacking scene,
36:49 trafficking in all kinds of precious
36:51 information about telephone and computer systems.
36:53 It was the place where any hacker worth their salt wanted to be.
37:02 Okay, so, Ronald Reagan comes into our story here,
37:08 president of the United States at the time.
37:10 He went to the movies, and he saw this.
37:13 DAVID: [Typing] People sometimes make mistakes.
37:17 COMPUTER: Yes, they do.
37:19 JENNIFER: How can it talk?
37:20 DAVID: Itās not a real voice.
37:22 This box just interprets signals from the computer and turns them into sound.
37:26 COMPUTER: Shall we play a game?
37:28 DAVID: Oh.
37:30 JENNIFER: I think it missed him.
37:32 DAVID: Yeah, weird, isn't it?
37:36 [Typing] Love to.
37:38 How about global thermo-nuclear war?
37:42 COMPUTER: Wouldnāt you prefer a good game of chess?
37:47 DAVID: [Typing] Later.
37:50 Letās play global thermo-nuclear war.
37:54 COMPUTER: Fine.
37:56 DAVID: Alright.
37:58 Wow.
38:00 JACK: Thatās the 1983 movie WarGames.
38:01 Itās a film about a kid who got
38:04 into a computer thinking he was just playing a video game,
38:06 but it turned out to be a military computer,
38:08 and it triggered a bunch of real alerts
38:10 thatā the government thought they were under attack,
38:12 and all-out war was breaking out.
38:14 Well, the story goes President Reagan saw it and asked around,
38:18 is that possible that that could happen to us?
38:21 They thought about it and came back to him and said, yes,
38:24 a kid could trigger a war if he got into the wrong computer.
38:29 Then Reagan said, well, what law is there to stop someone from doing that?
38:33 And there wasnāt one.
38:34 There was no law against hacking into computers in the 1980s.
38:38 Technology always moves faster than the government.
38:41 If you broke into a computer,
38:43 looked around, downloaded things, changed data on there,
38:46 there was no law saying that what you were doing was illegal.
38:48 It was a paradise for hackers to just roam free and explore without worry.
38:52 Can you imagine such a time and place?
38:54 [Music] So, Reaganās like, well, we can't have that.
38:58 On October 12th, 1984,
38:59 US Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, or CCCA.
39:04 It was a classic tough-on-crime bill.
39:06 It upped the penalties for growing and selling marijuana,
39:09 it expanded judgesā powers to deny bail to defendants,
39:12 and it created for the first time ever a computer crime law.
39:16 The police were excited to use this law to catch āem some hackers.
39:21 I think honestly WarGames and Hollywood scared the government so bad
39:24 that they thought hackers were capable
39:26 of anything and they were dangerous thugs,
39:29 terrorists, causing chaos and destruction on the internet.
39:31 They were the next big threat to America,
39:33 and the feds wanted to get ahead of this and stop it.
39:37 The police started their campaign with sting boards,
39:40 BBSs designed to look like a hacker BBS,
39:43 but it was secretly operated by the cops.
39:46 The first ones were created in 1985.
39:49 There was the Underground Tunnel, and it was operated out of Austin, Texas.
39:52 It was run by a hacker calling himself Pluto,
39:55 but really it was just a police sergeant.
39:58 There was another BBS set up by the Maricopa County Sheriffās Office in Phoenix,
40:02 Arizona called The Phone Company.
40:04 It sounded a little like āon the internet,
40:06 no one knows you're a dogā kind of operation.
40:09 But according to Bruce Sterling,
40:10 the guy who wrote the book The Hacker Crackdown,
40:13 these sting boards actually worked, at least sometimes.
40:15 Most hackers at the time were just young men
40:17 who barely knew how to type twenty words per minute,
40:20 and maybe they watched the movie WarGames themselves,
40:23 and they were curious on how to hack.
40:25 So, theyād float into a cool-sounding BBS like Underground Tunnel.
40:28 It seemed legit and allowed them in, so theyād look
40:31 around and then theyād slip up and get in trouble,
40:34 maybe by trying to buy or sell something stolen like a credit card.
40:38 But all they ever saw were noobs doing dumb things,
40:41 like people saying they can hack into something, but then itās all talk,
40:45 and police had no evidence to prove that they actually were dangerous.
40:49 As far as I know, the sting boards did not result in any actual arrests.
40:54 I really think itās because most of the phreakers
40:56 and hackers back then weren't really doing anything that bad.
41:00 There was something I came across which I
41:02 think really emphasizes the lightheartedness of it all.
41:04 Here, let me show you.
41:06 Back in the early nineties, there was a radio program called This American Life.
41:09 They interviewed some teenage hackers at the time,
41:12 and they found this one kid who would try to steal credit
41:15 cards from people and then use that to buy things for himself.
41:19 It sounds bad when I say it,
41:21 but listen to how this kid describes how he stole someoneās credit card.
41:24 CARDER: Basically, the way it works is this.
41:26 You call up somebody.
41:27 You say, this is the AT&T operator.
41:29 I have a priority collect call for so-and-soās name.
41:33 You have toā the whole point is you have to sound
41:36 like you're not calling somebody up with the intention of getting
41:38 themā you have to sound like you've been sitting
41:41 in this chair for ten hours and you want to go home.
41:44 So, you gotta go, this is the AT&T operator.
41:46 I have a collect call from Paul.
41:48 Will you accept charges, sir?
41:50 Uh, yeah, Iāll accept charges.
41:51 Alright, hold on one second.
41:52 You tap on the keyboard.
41:53 You say, Iām sorry, you seem to have a restriction on your phone line.
41:56 You can't accept collect calls to this line.
41:58 Then they yell and they go,
41:59 what do you mean I can't accept collect calls to my line?
42:02 Iāve been getting collect calls to this line for twenty years.
42:04 Then you gotta go, sir, thereās nothing I can do about it.
42:07 My computer says you can't receive a collect call on this line.
42:09 Would you like to try an alternate billing method?
42:11 In which case theyāll proceed to either give
42:13 you a calling card or a major credit card.
42:15 JACK: But the thing was, despite this clever,
42:17 little plan of theirs, they were wildly unsuccessful at it.
42:20 I mean, listen to what Ira Glass thinks of these kids.
42:23 IRA: But K-Rad, Mr.
42:25 Warez, and Fred were involved in very low-level types of crimes.
42:29 All of them involved computers.
42:31 They pirated software.
42:33 They scammed free CD-ROM games.
42:35 They cheated one of the big online computer services
42:38 out of a few hundred dollars and online time.
42:41 Oh no, they didnāt steal very much,
42:44 and they didnāt steal very effectively, but they did try to steal.
42:47 JACK: He doesn't think much of these kids, does he?
42:50 Heās not scared or intimidated by these crazy hackers at all.
42:54 He seems to understand just how low level of a crime this whole thing is,
42:59 and maybe doesn't even believe that they've done any of this.
43:02 Oh, and itās kind of funny;
43:03 Iāve been accused of being Ira Glass a lot, actually.
43:07 Iām not Ira, but This American Life was a huge inspiration to me.
43:11 I adore Ira Glass, even met him once.
43:13 So, I actually have a picture with me and Ira, and heās kind of a hero of mine.
43:18 But itās wild.
43:19 In this episode, Ira Glass follows these three
43:21 hackers into a hacker convention in New York City.
43:24 HACKER1: Yeah, I just really want to stress that, you know,
43:27 we're not thatā in other ways we're not bad people and we
43:30 donāt go around trying to screw off people in any way we can,
43:33 'cause we're not at all.
43:35 You know, I do social work, I tutored kids,
43:40 I do a lot of stuff which isn't necessarily evil and more good.
43:47 But sometimes itās just likeā I don't know, man.
43:50 I like doing it.
43:51 I can't explain it.
43:53 IRA: Well, talk about that part of it.
43:54 What is the thrill of doing it?
43:56 HACKER1: Thatās the firstā that was
43:58 the reason I started carding, was the reason.
44:00 It was the thrill of goingā when you went in there,
44:04 it was realā it was like Mission Impossible.
44:06 We went in; we had gloves on and stuff, and we picked it up.
44:10 We had likeā we had it all worked out.
44:12 We were connected.
44:13 We had lookouts and stuff.
44:15 Itās a lot of fun.
44:17 Itās like, you're doing stuff that is not exactly
44:21 legal andā not legal at all, and itās fun.
44:24 IRA: We took the elevators up to the floor
44:28 where the hackers convention was taking place.
44:30 K-Rad said that real hackers do not use their skills like this.
44:34 They do not use their skills for personal gain.
44:37 They donāt do carding.
44:39 They donāt steal.
44:40 The whole idea of computer hacking is thatā for these guys,
44:43 anyway, is that itās a kind of pure Zen pursuit.
44:45 Itās an ends in itself.
44:47 You break into the computer for its own sake
44:50 and to look around and for the knowledge of everyone, especially you.
44:54 We stood in the hallway.
44:56 People streamed by.
44:57 We tried to move to a corner where we would not be overheard,
45:03 and K-Rad said actually that they had never really
45:06 talked about their illegal activities this much before with anyone.
45:09 K-RAD: The most thing Iām worried about is Iām actually
45:12 starting for the first time to say this all out loud, everything Iāve done,
45:15 and suddenly it doesn't sound as hacker-much anymore,
45:18 and Iāve known that ever since I moved
45:20 intoā and doing maybe some credit card thing.
45:23 That's why Iām in fact even considering giving up on doing
45:26 all the carding and stuff like that, which isā seriously, I am.
45:28 HACKER2: My worst fear is that Iām gonna end up
45:30 going to hell for doing this, and thatās my worst fear.
45:32 IRA: Do you believe in hell?
45:34 HACKER2: Yeah, I do.
45:37 IRA: And you think you can go to hell
45:39 for getting a computer on somebody elseās credit card?
45:41 HACKER2: I don't know, I hope not.
45:43 I really hope not.
45:45 JACK: See, thatās the kind of kids that the police
45:49 were creating laws for, they were setting up sting boards for.
45:53 The Secret Service was investigating kids like
45:56 this because they thought they were dangerous criminal terrorists.
46:00 Did they sound like dangerous criminal terrorists to you?
46:04 Federal authorities were putting a ton of effort
46:07 and time and resources into stopping these kind of kids.
46:10 It just seems disproportionate to me.
46:13 I was just reading the book Hacker Crackdown today,
46:15 and I read this part where lawmakers in Arizona,
46:18 the people who were trying to crack down on hackers,
46:21 were scared to leave their office at night because they
46:24 park their car in a bad area of downtown Phoenix.
46:28 They said people would rob their cars, break into windows,
46:31 and threaten them if they went to their cars too late.
46:34 Yet, these lawmakers seem to ignore the crime going on in their own parking
46:38 lot and focused on kids like this who
46:41 often weren't even stealing anything at all,
46:43 just poking their nose into the phone companyās computers just to look around,
46:47 to do something to prove they got in.
46:49 I mean, listen to what Adam says,
46:51 a member of the Legion of Doom, when questioned on Dateline NBC.
46:55 ADAM: At Bell South,
46:56 we were able to get into all manner of computers, the phone switches themselves.
47:02 HOST1: In essence, you got to where you
47:04 could have turned off everybodyās phones in Georgia.
47:06 ADAM: Just about any one of a couple dozen of us could have done that.
47:10 HOST1: For more than a year, Adam and his friends had free access
47:14 to the inner workings of twelve Bell South computer systems.
47:17 [To Adam] They say you could have crashed or broken the 911 system here.
47:23 ADAM: The operative word for me is ācould haveā.
47:25 HOST1: You could have done that?
47:27 ADAM: Yes.
47:28 I could go out and shoot people.
47:31 You can.
47:32 JACK: See, thatās one of the big things I see again and again in this story,
47:36 breaking in versus causing harm.
47:38 Legion of Doom seemed to love the challenge of getting
47:41 in, but rarely did much once they did get in.
47:44 Just getting in was fun enough.
47:46 There was no need to cause damage.
47:48 That wasnāt their goal.
47:49 It wasnāt what they did.
47:51 They just liked finding ways in.
47:53 But the more Legion of Doom got access to, the more the police got more
47:57 worried that they would take down the whole
48:00 internet or the phone system or something.
48:02 Maybe in some way I could see why the police were worried,
48:05 because of all this anarchy rhetoric online at the time.
48:07 All this talk about bomb-making and stealing
48:09 and tearing down the government and smashing
48:11 the system might have caused the police to worry even more than they needed to.
48:16 At times it did feel like the internet
48:19 was forming some kind of army to cause chaos.
48:22 But a lot of hackers and phreakers had no intention of causing chaos.
48:27 [Music] The police didnāt have a very keen
48:30 eye when it came to trying to catch hackers.
48:32 They didnāt understand this culture at all.
48:34 They accused a lot of people of being part of Legion
48:37 of Doom even when they had nothing to do with LoD.
48:39 LoD was trying to be pretty secretive.
48:41 To get into their BBS, you had to be on the allow list,
48:45 which meant the police couldn't get in to see what was going on there.
48:48 That was a double-edged sword.
48:49 The more notorious that LoD became,
48:51 it meant the more interested that the police became in them.
48:54 But if you did happen to get the password to get into the LoD BBS,
48:58 you'd see technical journals describing telecommunications and computer
49:01 systems in a remarkable level of detail.
49:04 Just looking at the table of contents of one of their now-leaked documents,
49:08 I see Part 3: Step-By-Step Switching System Nodes.
49:11 Part 4: A Guide to the PrimeOS Operating System.
49:15 Part 5: Identifying and Defeating Physical Security Intrusion Detection Systems,
49:19 Part 2: The Exterior.
49:20 That last one is written by the LoD founder, Lex Luthor.
49:24 Lex Luthorās post, despite it being Part 2, is still 5,200 words long.
49:28 This kind of insider knowledge and exclusivity
49:31 was enough to earn LoD plenty of respect,
49:34 but they also had information that they refused to publish
49:37 even to their private board because it was too sensitive.
49:40 Even members were limited to how much they could see.
49:43 Like, there was a special section on the board called The Fifth Amendment,
49:46 which had a document describing in detail how to break
49:49 into PBX phone systems developed by the Rome Corporation.
49:53 A PBX is a device used to make
49:56 phone calls typically operating internally in the phone network,
49:58 but sometimes in large businesses who have a lot of phone lines.
50:02 Someone at LoD got the manual for this PBX and read through it,
50:06 and in there they learned that phone technicians can use a PBX
50:10 to listen in on phone calls to perform maintenance and troubleshoot.
50:14 Built into the PBX was a way to spy on calls.
50:18 Because LoD knew this, they could if they wanted spy on phone calls, too.
50:23 They could listen in on someone elseās call.
50:26 That was one of the documents posted on their Fifth Amendment BBS,
50:30 which members were only allowed to read but never copy.
50:33 Hereās Phiber Optik, one of the members of LoD,
50:36 talking about it at the Hope Conference.
50:38 PHIBER OPTIK: I want to take a few moments to rewind
50:41 a little bit and speak on behalf of our rules
50:44 that we live by in our community long before
50:47 the FBI and Secret Service succeeded in infiltrating our community.
50:51 What I will say is this, is that weāve always spoken
50:56 of the quest for knowledge as being most important in our pursuits,
51:01 that this was always a noble cause, that the destruction of systems,
51:07 crashing systems, was always something that we avoided doing at all costs.
51:12 Whether by accident or as a joke, it was something that was always frowned upon.
51:20 The fact that information about technology should be freely available
51:25 was something that we always held to be of great importance.
51:30 So, we always frowned upon companies who charged
51:33 money for technical documentation and information about operating systems,
51:37 which was very hard to find in the 1980s, for example,
51:42 which is why trashing and things of that nature were so popular,
51:46 wasā a lot of the times was to find manuals
51:50 on how to use the systems that we were getting access to.
51:53 JACK: I think that was where the heart of it all was,
51:57 the belief that information should be free.
51:59 [Music] Not stolen, not sold.
52:02 Free.
52:02 It was less about exposing secrets and more about liberating knowledge
52:07 that was locked behind corporate firewalls or buried in obscure systems.
52:12 Hackers weren't trying to destroy anything.
52:14 They were trying to understand it, document it, and share it.
52:19 Phone manuals, switchboard maps, internal memos, obscure technical how-toās,
52:23 all of it was fuel for their curiosity.
52:26 Publishing that information wasnāt just rebellion; it was a public service.
52:30 It was about leveling the playing field,
52:32 about making the closed systems of power readable
52:34 to anyone with a terminal who was willing to learn.
52:38 For many, that was the real prize.
52:40 Not money, not chaos.
52:42 Access.
52:43 The idea that no system should be so sacred that it couldn't be understood,
52:47 that knowledge wasnāt a crime, that documentation wasnāt dangerous,
52:51 that teaching others how things worked wasnāt subversion.
52:55 That was empowerment.
52:57 Again, let me quote from Phrack Magazine.
53:00 āLoD members may have entered into systems numbering in the tens of thousands.
53:04 They may have peeped into credit histories.
53:06 They may have monitored telephone calls.
53:07 They may have snooped into files and buffered interesting texts.
53:10 They may still have total control over entire computer networks,
53:14 but what damage have they done?
53:16 None, with the exception of the unpaid
53:18 use of CPU time and network access charges.
53:22 What personal gains have any members made?
53:25 None.ā They were curious teens testing the limits of what was possible.
53:28 They weren't supposed to be able to get into the Telco
53:31 and listen in on phone calls, but they could,
53:33 and that made it feel like what they were doing was impossible,
53:36 and that brought a great sense of satisfaction on its own.
53:40 But the police were convinced they were evil anarchist super villains.
53:44 I mean, Legion of Doom is a group of super villains in the comic books, right?
53:48 I was talking with a friend the other day,
53:50 and he said that the more menacing a hacker group name sounds,
53:54 the likely more innocent that they are,
53:56 and the more innocent the name is, the more dangerous it probably is.
54:00 Like, Legion of Doom sounds dangerous, and Lizard Squad sounds pretty silly,
54:04 yet itās really the other way around.
54:08 [Music] The sting boards caught some of the noobs who wanted to be in LoD,
54:12 but the police really wanted to stop the core members of Legion of Doom.
54:16 There was one hacker named Wasp who started crashing computers at Bellcore.
54:21 Thatās the telecommunications research and development
54:23 arm of the Bell Telephone Company.
54:25 He was just going in smashing up the place,
54:28 taking things down, just causing havoc in the phone company.
54:32 Long-time Legion of Doom member named Ctrl C saw this and was like,
54:36 no, no, no, thatās not right.
54:38 We donāt crash systems.
54:39 You're gonna give hackers a bad name.
54:41 This guy, Ctrl C, he has his own storied history with Bell.
54:45 He used to do trashing runs behind the companyās branch in Michigan,
54:49 and he learned what documents they would toss behind,
54:51 and he learned enough that way to learn how to hack
54:54 in and give himself free long-distance calling whenever he wanted,
54:57 mostly so he could connect to BBSs around
54:59 the country without having to pay long-distance fees.
55:01 But Michigan Bell caught Ctrl C in 1987, and they found out that this big,
55:06 bad hacker was actually a pretty likeable, harmless kid.
55:09 He definitely didnāt have any money
55:11 to pay back all those long-distance connections,
55:13 and arresting him wasnāt worth their time,
55:15 so they turned him into a kinda local mascot.
55:18 Posters went up with Ctrl Cās face on them around Michigan Bellās offices,
55:22 warning employees to shred their trash.
55:25 He actually signed the posters.
55:27 Even better, he got on their payroll
55:29 to help them secure their phone company better,
55:32 all while he was still in Legion of Doom.
55:35 This wasnāt as uncommon as you'd think, too,
55:37 and in this case it ended up benefiting everyone.
55:40 So, when this Wasp guy came in crashing around at Bellcore, breaking things,
55:45 Ctrl C recruited some of his LoD colleagues,
55:49 which included people from Georgia like the Prophet, Leftist, and Urvile.
55:53 Together, the LoD members helped Bellcoreās security
55:55 team lure Wasp into a honey pot,
55:58 which is a machine used to log a bunch of activity once someone connects to it,
56:02 and Wasp was caught, and LoD came out feeling good about it.
56:05 Donāt go crashing systems or LoD will come after you,
56:07 and you don't want a hacker group coming after you.
56:11 Of course, the cops didnāt focus on that side of LoD.
56:15 They thought they knew LoD,
56:17 and they stuck to their preconceptions that hackers are troubled criminals.
56:20 In fact, the investigation got bigger.
56:23 The Secret Service started getting involved.
56:25 I think the FBI starts getting in there
56:27 since hackers are getting free long-distance calls,
56:29 and this makes it a federal crime.
56:32 Let me read to you a passage from The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterlingās book.
56:37 āAs early as 1986, the police were under the vague
56:40 impression that everyone in the underground was Legion of Doom.
56:44 LoD was never that large, but LoD got tremendous press, especially in Phrack,
56:49 which at times read like a LoD fan magazine,
56:52 and Phrack was everywhere, especially in the offices of Telcoās security.
56:55 You couldn't get busted as a phone phreak, a hacker,
56:58 or even a lousy codes kid or warez dude without the cops asking
57:03 if you were a member of LoD.ā LoD complained about this on Phrack.
57:07 The Legion of Doom has been called
57:09 everything from organized crime to a communist threat
57:11 to national security to an international conspiracy of computer
57:13 terrorists bent on destroying the nationās 911 service.
57:16 Nothing comes closer to the truth than
57:18 bored adolescents with too much spare time.
57:21 Now, despite the almost total lack of cybersecurity in a lot of systems then,
57:26 there were hacker conferences going on.
57:28 The oldest-running hacker conference is Summercon.
57:30 It started in the eighties by Phrack Magazine.
57:33 The feds thought, well, if we want to catch a hacker,
57:36 Summercon is the place to be.
57:38 Itās swarming with hackers.
57:39 [Music] So, in 1988, the Secret Service went to Summercon in St.
57:44 Louis to try to find hackers committing crimes.
57:47 Now, if the Secret Service shows up
57:49 to a hacker conference with their earpieces and nice suits,
57:52 theyāll stick out like a sore thumb,
57:54 so they needed a disguise, but not just a disguise;
57:57 someone to pose as a hacker themselves, an insider.
58:00 So they got a mole, someone who looked and talked like a hacker.
58:04 They even gave their mole a nickname, Dictator.
58:06 Dictator and the Secret Service went to St.
58:09 Louis and got a hotel room right next to the conference.
58:12 It was your classic sting operation.
58:14 The Secret Service set up in the hotel room right next to Dictatorās room,
58:18 and then drilled holes in the walls of the hotel room
58:22 so they could put cameras up and one-way mirrors and microphones.
58:25 They had full surveillance of Dictatorās room.
58:28 So, then Dictator goes into Summerconā hey,
58:31 fellow hackersā and meets some dudes at the conference and invites them
58:35 back to his room for a hang-out sort of party thing and stuff.
58:39 The Secret Service got all excited when they saw hackers filling the hotel room.
58:43 They watched intently, excited to catch a hacker in the act.
58:47 So, they sat and watched, ears perked, equipment on.
58:51 But they were disappointed.
58:52 It was just a bunch of nerds hanging out talking nerdy,
58:56 like how frustrated they get when someone picks up
58:58 a phone in their house and disconnects them from the internet,
59:01 or they were comparing modem speeds.
59:03 It was a big waste of time.
59:06 But then they do witness a crime.
59:10 One of the hackers pulls out a can of beer and drinks it.
59:16 Oh no, he happened to be under the legal drinking age.
59:20 That was the only crime that the Secret Service saw at Summercon in 1988.
59:27 These curious and bored teenagers involved with LoD
59:32 stayed out of trouble for the most part.
59:35 They didnāt think being a hacker was bad or illegal at all.
59:38 If we back up a bit,
59:40 the word āhackerā was coined by the kids at MITās Model Railroad Club.
59:43 To them, a hack was simply a playful or clever solution to a technical problem.
59:49 The computer hackers of the eighties had their own idea of what a hacker was,
59:54 and it was never criminal.
59:55 Hereās some people at a hacker camp in the 1980ās
59:58 explaining what they think the word āhackerā means.
1:00:01 CAMPER: A hacker is just a person who hacks
1:00:03 away at the computer keyboard until the program works.
1:00:06 Now, a cracker on the other hand is almost the same thing.
1:00:10 He just hacks away at that keyboard but until
1:00:12 he breaks into, cracks the system security on a computer.
1:00:15 CAMPER2: A hacker never finishes a program.
1:00:17 A hacker will get to a point where a program
1:00:20 does somethingā they maybe take a deep breath and say,
1:00:23 how can I make it do this?
1:00:24 How can I make it do that?
1:00:26 Itāll just keep working.
1:00:27 The hacker often will show up with a computer
1:00:30 until he collapses at the keyboard or something.
1:00:32 STEVE: They do not have so much the normal friends to distract them,
1:00:36 other activities to go to.
1:00:38 They donāt generally have girlfriends,
1:00:39 anything thatās gonna need a large attachment, commitment of their time.
1:00:42 The computer is it and only it.
1:00:44 JACK: That last voice was Steve Wozniak,
1:00:47 who we can easily say was one of the greatest
1:00:50 hackers of all time for creating Apple computers.
1:00:53 [Music] LoD kept out of trouble for the most part,
1:00:56 even when they broke into newer and bigger networks,
1:00:59 but this wasnāt going to last forever.
1:01:01 This was going to be the last time that hackers got to enjoy free,
1:01:07 un-scrutinized, harmless fun.
1:01:08 On October 16th, 1986,
1:01:10 President Ronald Reagan signed into law an amendment to the CCCA,
1:01:15 that computer crime law I talked about earlier.
1:01:18 The amendment was called The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,
1:01:22 or CFAA, and this was legendary.
1:01:24 This one was important.
1:01:26 You see, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, the CCCA,
1:01:30 from 1984 only defined a very narrow range of illegal computer crimes.
1:01:34 It banned using computers to try to obtain national secrets
1:01:37 or financial records or hack into government computers in general,
1:01:41 and that was about the gist of it.
1:01:43 The CFAA starts out with a whopper of a statement
1:01:48 saying itās illegal to access a computer without authorization.
1:01:53 Wow.
1:01:53 But wait, it goes on.
1:01:55 It also says itās illegal to exceed authorized access.
1:01:59 That part, exceeding authorized access,
1:02:01 is one of the most absurdly broad and legally
1:02:05 sloppy phrases to ever make its way into federal law.
1:02:09 What does that even mean, because who decides whatās authorized?
1:02:13 Because the truth of it is that everyone violates this all day, every day,
1:02:17 because the way itās written means that if you violate
1:02:21 the terms of service of an app or a website,
1:02:24 that means you exceeded your authorized access or used
1:02:27 the site in a way that you weren't authorized to do.
1:02:31 That means you just committed a federal offense.
1:02:34 So, that lie you put on your dating profileā
1:02:38 itās against the terms of service to lie on there,
1:02:40 which means you're using the site in an unauthorized manner.
1:02:43 Your company issued you a computer for work?
1:02:46 Itās for business use only.
1:02:48 If you check Facebook on it, thatās not authorized activity.
1:02:51 Sharing your Netflix or Spotify password with a friend?
1:02:54 Thatās unauthorized use of the service.
1:02:55 I could just go on and on about how many times
1:02:58 you've probably violated this or used a website in an unauthorized way.
1:03:02 Like, have you used a browser plug-in to fill
1:03:04 in a form on a job application or when purchasing concert tickets?
1:03:07 Thatās a violation of their terms of service since
1:03:09 you can't use automation when interacting with the site.
1:03:12 Have you played Solitaire on a school computer?
1:03:14 Illegal.
1:03:15 You're authorized to use that computer for educational purposes only.
1:03:19 Used a coffee shop Wi-Fi without buying anything?
1:03:22 Illegal.
1:03:23 Unauthorized access.
1:03:23 Thatās for customers only.
1:03:25 Can you tell I hate the CFAA?
1:03:28 Thatās just the first line of it.
1:03:32 The CFAA effectively criminalizes violating the terms of service.
1:03:36 Every day millions of people technically break
1:03:40 this law by doing totally harmless things,
1:03:42 and while most people aren't prosecuted,
1:03:44 the law gives prosecutors a loaded weapon to easily take someone down,
1:03:49 and they do it all the time.
1:03:52 The law goes on.
1:03:53 It talks about spreading malware, performing denial-of-service attacks,
1:03:57 insider attacks, stealing passwords,
1:03:58 altering and destroying someone elseās data,
1:04:00 and this law made in 1986 still reigns
1:04:03 as one of the predominant computer hacking laws today.
1:04:06 Itās poorly written, vague, and outdated, but most of all, itās misused.
1:04:11 If you've ever heard someone get arrested on this show,
1:04:14 they probably got charged with violating
1:04:16 the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
1:04:19 What it meant back then for hackers like the LoD was that all of a sudden,
1:04:25 a lot of what they were doing was no longer childās play.
1:04:29 It was now a federal offense.
1:04:31 A federal offense.
1:04:32 Did they understand that?
1:04:33 Did these guys follow what politicians were doing in Washington DC?
1:04:37 I bet most of them did not have a clue.
1:04:40 But more importantly, have you ever met a teenager?
1:04:42 The quickest way to get them to do something
1:04:45 is to tell them that they can't do it.
1:04:47 HOST2: Whatās the lesson in your story for other hackers?
1:04:50 ADAM: Donāt get caught.
1:04:52 HOST2: Not ādonāt do itā.
1:04:54 ADAM: People are going to do what they're going to do.
1:04:57 HOST2: How do you think it plays to people
1:05:00 at home when you tell others simply donāt get caught?
1:05:04 ADAM: Thatās their own business.
1:05:05 I don't think itās right for other people to tell me how to live my life,
1:05:10 so I shouldnāt tell other people how to live their lives.
1:05:13 HOST2: Yet you acknowledge that hacking is wrong.
1:05:16 ADAM: Smoking is wrong.
1:05:17 Taking drugs is wrong.
1:05:19 People do it all the time.
1:05:21 JACK: That was Adam, a member of the LoD.
1:05:24 In September 1988, Adamās friend, another member of the LoD called The Prophet
1:05:30 came across a document that stunk of wrong.
1:05:33 He got into a computer at Bell South and was looking at the files on it,
1:05:37 just curiously looking for manuals that might be interesting,
1:05:40 and he stumbled onto a three-page text
1:05:42 file called Bell South Standard Practice Control Office
1:05:46 Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services
1:05:50 in Major Account Centers Dated in March 1988.
1:05:54 Itās a long file name, so Iām just gonna call it the E911 file.
1:05:58 But it was an incredibly technical and boring document to read.
1:06:01 Itās just a few pages of the thickest jargon you can imagine.
1:06:05 There weren't many people in the country who would be able to make
1:06:07 sense of this, but The Prophet thought
1:06:09 that this was something special, something coveted.
1:06:11 A manual for Bellās 911 service?
1:06:13 [Music] The Prophet grabbed this document from Bell Southās computer.
1:06:17 Again, the ethics of stealing is brought up here.
1:06:20 He didnāt rob Bell South of the document.
1:06:22 He copied the document, and Bell South still had their copy and had
1:06:26 no idea that he grabbed a copy of it.
1:06:28 So, is it really stealing?
1:06:30 The Prophet was a little scared of this document,
1:06:33 so he stashed it on a friendās computer.
1:06:35 He didnāt even want it on his own device.
1:06:37 The Prophet then shared this E911 manual with Craig Neidorf.
1:06:42 Thatās White Lightning.
1:06:43 Craig was one of the founders of Phrack Magazine.
1:06:47 Craig was like, whoa.
1:06:49 Prophetās like, yeah, whoa.
1:06:51 Craig was like, we should publish this in Phrack.
1:06:53 Prophetās like, I don't know, thereās a lot of sensitive stuff in here.
1:06:57 But together the two of them censored out all the extra
1:07:00 sensitive stuff like phone numbers and specific Bell South employeesā names,
1:07:04 and that pesky warning at the top, āNot for public use or disclosureā.
1:07:08 So, on February 25th, 1989,
1:07:10 Phrack published this E911 document under a random name that they made up.
1:07:16 But now everyone could see it.
1:07:18 It was spreading around all the BBSs in the underground.
1:07:21 The Prophet tried to distance himself from this document.
1:07:23 Thatās why he stashed it on someone elseās computer.
1:07:26 But that guyās computer that he stashed it on found it and saw it,
1:07:30 and saw that Prophet is who put it there.
1:07:32 He looked at it, and this E911 file looked serious,
1:07:36 so he passed it on to a friend, and his friend agreed and passed it on to AT&T,
1:07:41 and they passed it over to Bell South.
1:07:44 Bell South was very upset that their manual was exposed.
1:07:48 There were two versions, a highly-redacted one on Phrack,
1:07:52 and the original one that Prophet copied.
1:07:54 It made Bell very uncomfortable to see such
1:07:57 a highly-sensitive document out there in the hands of hackers.
1:08:01 By the time Phrack published the E911 file,
1:08:04 [music] the telephone companies and police were already on high
1:08:06 alert for what hackers might be plotting against the phone system.
1:08:09 So, this made them turn all their attention to Phrack to find
1:08:12 out who was making this and put an end to them, and who published this article.
1:08:16 Their worries were validated a few months later.
1:08:19 On June 13th, 1989, it was a really
1:08:21 weird day for criminals of Palm Beach County, Florida.
1:08:24 If you had to call your probation officer on that day
1:08:27 and you dialed up the number for the Delray Police Station,
1:08:30 you'd end up chatting with a lady named Tina.
1:08:34 Tina was in New York, and she was a phone sex worker.
1:08:38 Itād be weird.
1:08:39 So, you'd be like, what?
1:08:40 So, you'd hang up and say, I must have gotten the wrong number.
1:08:44 So, you'd dial the police station again,
1:08:46 but again you would get Tina saying something sexy.
1:08:49 Someone had rerouted the Palm Beach probation department
1:08:52 number to a phone sex line in New York, which I think is pretty funny, right?
1:08:57 This is classic hacker pranks.
1:08:59 Come on, thatās funny, right?
1:09:01 The cops didnāt think it was funny at all, though, nor did Bell South,
1:09:04 and it was time to put an end to these hackers.
1:09:07 Bell long suspected that hackers would come after them,
1:09:09 and this was proof that they were able to attack.
1:09:12 Bell South quickly formed an intrusion task
1:09:15 force with more than forty employees working overtime.
1:09:18 For weeks, twenty-four hours a day,
1:09:20 security experts rotated in twelve-hour shifts,
1:09:23 running through countless records, trying to piece together what happened.
1:09:27 How were these calls being rerouted to a phone sex line?
1:09:31 What they found out shocked them.
1:09:33 Someone had remotely connected into the phone
1:09:35 company and tampered with the database.
1:09:37 They were creating ghost phone numbers with no
1:09:40 personal information attached and nowhere to bill to.
1:09:43 How dare someone generate phone numbers with no one to bill to?
1:09:47 Quick, someone tell the Secret Service how awful this crime is!
1:09:51 So, they called the Secret Service and told them.
1:09:54 Not long before that, the company had
1:09:57 introduced a new digital diagnostics program called REMOB,
1:09:59 short for remote observation.
1:10:01 Hackers not only knew about it,
1:10:02 but they figured out how to reprogram it and take control of it.
1:10:06 It allowed them to eavesdrop and spy on any calls they wanted.
1:10:10 Ira Glass went into the apartment of one of the hackers
1:10:13 who was there in the eighties doing all this.
1:10:15 ACID PHREAK: So, I got kind of a lot of equipment around here.
1:10:17 Iāve got a fax machine here.
1:10:18 Iāve gotā in my room Iāve got five phone lines.
1:10:20 I got a two-line phone,
1:10:21 but Iāve gotā everything else connects to computers or a fax.
1:10:24 IRA: There were cheesy kung-fu movies on video.
1:10:27 In a CD-player there was old-school rap,
1:10:29 Nine Inch Nails, The Doors, Jimmy Hendrix.
1:10:31 Then he says, let me show you the good stuff,
1:10:34 and he pulls out Xeroxes of old spiral notebooks.
1:10:36 ACID PHREAK: I have here what was seized
1:10:39 from me that they had to return back to me.
1:10:43 Itās my evidence examination report by the United States Secret Service,
1:10:47 subject Acid Phreak.
1:10:49 These notes have basically all the systems I got into.
1:10:57 Look, I have little sketches and diagrams of how things work,
1:11:01 different protocols and networks, definitions.
1:11:02 See, all that stuff was really good.
1:11:06 I had stuff outside the country, NASA.
1:11:09 IRA: Itās something defense?
1:11:10 What is that?
1:11:11 ACID PHREAK: Government defense.
1:11:11 IRA: Government defense.
1:11:12 ACID PHREAK: Yeah, thatās a Washington number.
1:11:15 McDonaldās.
1:11:16 Since I had Telenet, I had McDonaldās accounts.
1:11:19 If you were a McDonald employee, I could raise your pay.
1:11:24 So, that way you'd get $15 an hour for shuffling burgers and stuff.
1:11:28 IRA: So, did you decide just at random to help someone out?
1:11:31 ACID PHREAK: Iād do it to anybody.
1:11:32 I just wanted to know how.
1:11:34 JACK: Can you imagine that, changing the pay rate of your friends at McDonaldās?
1:11:39 Well, this guy Ira interviewed says he didnāt do it.
1:11:42 However, there was a kid who did.
1:11:44 A sixteen-year-old kid in Indiana learned what
1:11:47 was needed to get into McDonaldās computers, and his friends did work there.
1:11:50 So, he stole one of the logins for the managers at McDonaldās and got access,
1:11:54 and he actually gave his friends raises, which was epic.
1:11:58 From then on, that kid was known as the Fry Guy.
1:12:02 Fry Guy was immature, though; loud, a bit annoying.
1:12:05 He was the kinda kid who would claim to be in LoD
1:12:08 but actually wasnāt and would never be because he was a scammer.
1:12:12 He created this crazy,
1:12:13 elaborate way to steal money from Western Union and credit card companies.
1:12:17 It was really intricate,
1:12:18 and he would reroute the victimsā phone numbers to a nearby pay phone so
1:12:22 that when the credit card company would call the victim to confirm a charge,
1:12:25 it would then go to the pay phone outside Fry Guyās house.
1:12:28 He would answer it and say, yeah, yeah, I do approve that charge.
1:12:31 [Music] He ended up stealing $6,000 this way,
1:12:33 and he would boast about this on BBSs.
1:12:35 People would be like, dude, you are breaking the hacker code.
1:12:38 Stop doing that.
1:12:39 A month after the phone-sex prank, on July 22nd,
1:12:42 the police caught Fry Guy, and suddenly he wasnāt cocky anymore.
1:12:47 He buckled pretty quickly under pressure,
1:12:49 and he admitted to all the stuff he did.
1:12:52 But then he just kept talking.
1:12:53 He added like, oh, it wasnāt all me; Legion of Doom was doing it, too.
1:12:58 This was a story that made sense.
1:13:00 In the copsā eyes, the Legion of Doom were the bad guys.
1:13:04 Fry Guy offered to testify against the Legion
1:13:07 of Doom despite never even being part of it.
1:13:10 He told the police that the Legion of Doom are planning
1:13:13 to take out the telephone network on a major US holiday.
1:13:16 I think itās the fourth of July.
1:13:18 Iām pretty sure he just made it up to try to get out of trouble,
1:13:22 but the cops took him very seriously.
1:13:24 He became a golden informant.
1:13:26 But this news was every police investigator and phone companyās worst nightmare.
1:13:31 The Legion of Doom was going to take out the phone company?
1:13:35 Man, that would bring America to a standstill.
1:13:37 But July fourth was a long ways off, so the prosecutors were starting to think
1:13:41 that maybe this kid was just a windbag,
1:13:44 and they again focused on trying to figure out who
1:13:46 was in LoD and to find them and arrest them.
1:13:49 But the LoD was good at hiding,
1:13:51 and the cops could simply not find enough evidence
1:13:53 on them to figure out who was in it,
1:13:55 and would have to wait for someone to slip up.
1:13:59 [Music] On January 15th, 1990, it was a US holiday, MLK Day.
1:14:05 At 2:25 p.m.
1:14:07 Eastern Time, a call-routing computer switch at AT&T failed.
1:14:11 No problem.
1:14:12 There are other switches, backups.
1:14:14 A single failure is not a big deal.
1:14:17 But the failed switch sent a message, āhelp meā,
1:14:20 to a second switch, and the second switch didnāt help.
1:14:24 It failed, too, and on to the third, the fourth, the fifth, the fiftieth.
1:14:29 A cascade of phone switches were all failing one after another.
1:14:33 The AT&T network was going dark across the country.
1:14:38 In the control room at AT&T headquarters in New Jersey,
1:14:42 dozens of screens were stacked two stories high.
1:14:45 They showed data feeds, charts, and maps of the US peppered with dots and lines
1:14:50 representing phone services to hundreds of millions of people.
1:14:53 This afternoon, engineers and technicians watched as red
1:14:57 flashes spread from one screen to another.
1:15:00 Around 60,000 people lost their phone service.
1:15:03 This was before the internet,
1:15:04 so it wasnāt like you could just text someone instead.
1:15:09 Businesses froze.
1:15:09 Services were interrupted.
1:15:11 Conversations and lunch dates were abandoned.
1:15:13 Almost 50% of calls through AT&T failed.
1:15:17 For around nine hours, more than 70 million phone calls were impacted in all.
1:15:23 News of this outage started spreading through all the LoD members.
1:15:27 Hey man, did you hear?
1:15:28 AT&T is down.
1:15:29 Oh, what happened?
1:15:30 Nobody knows.
1:15:31 Did you do it?
1:15:32 No, of course not.
1:15:34 [Music] LoD started to get nervous, though.
1:15:36 Maybe one of them did do it.
1:15:38 If not them, then maybe it was the work of a cyber-attack,
1:15:42 maybe someone that they taught.
1:15:44 They were puzzled, too, and worried.
1:15:47 Imagine being that US attorney from Indiana that day.
1:15:50 Fry Guy said that LoD was planning a big attack on a major US holiday,
1:15:55 and hereās a major outage on Martin Luther King Junior Day.
1:15:58 Was this what the sixteen-year-old scamp predicted?
1:16:00 He just got the date wrong?
1:16:02 The police thought this must be the work of Legion of Doom.
1:16:05 They were the ones with the stolen telephone manuals,
1:16:08 hacking the phone companies,
1:16:09 and they could reroute calls and mess with the 911 systems.
1:16:11 If anyone could take out the phone company, it was definitely Legion of Doom.
1:16:16 But was there any evidence?
1:16:18 Some initial reports suggested that there might have been a bug in the system.
1:16:22 Did hackers exploit that bug or did they trip over it?
1:16:25 Did that matter?
1:16:26 The phone companies were down and someone was to blame.
1:16:30 Nobody really knew, but the police and Secret Service
1:16:33 weren't going to take any chances of this happening again.
1:16:37 They decided now is the time to strike,
1:16:39 to take out whoever they thought hacked the system,
1:16:42 and their number-one suspect was the Legion of Doom.
1:16:46 But they were gonna discover that Legion of Doom was only the beginning.
1:16:50 There was a second hacker group called the Masters of Deception,
1:16:53 and this story is about to get way more crazy.
1:16:56 Not because of the hackers, though,
1:16:59 but because of the police who totally got out of control.
1:17:05 But you'll have to join me in Part 2 to hear the rest of this story.
1:17:10 Part 2 comes out in one week.
1:17:13 [END OF RECORDING]