169: MoD

Introduction

0:00This story picks up from where we left off in part one. So, if you haven't heard it yet, you need to go back one episode and listen to that one before listening to this because this is part two. [music] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. [music] I'm Jack Reider. This is Darknet Diaries. [music]

0:34>> [music]

New York Telephone Company

0:38>> The New York Telephone Company was the face of the phone system in New York City in the 1980s. Whether you were in the New York Stock Exchange making phone calls or walking up to pay phones in the streets of Manhattan, you were using the New York Telephone Company. And there were two guys who worked there that were in charge of securing the system. Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples. Tom and Fred each had their own specialty. Fred engineered the phone network infrastructure and Tom oversaw it. If you broke into the system, it was because Fred overlooked some sort of vulnerability. And then Tom was the one

1:09who had to catch you. Their jobs became infinitely more difficult and interesting when a strange letter arrived at Tom's Times Square office in November 1988. It stated that a kid up in the Bronx was hacking into the phone grid who was calling himself the technician. The letter wasn't signed. It was an anonymous tip, but Tom suspected [music] it might have been written by a family member of the technician because the tone was caring. It was a plea to stop this kid for his own good. Sure

1:39enough, when Tom pulled up the records associated with the technician's address, the proof was right there. technician had been connecting to switches at AT&T from home with no real attempt to hide it either. So Tom turned to a nifty device that he had which was called the dialed number [music] recorder DNR. A DNR is a little box that you might mistake for an answering machine or a tape recorder. Tom had some small black DNRs that click clacked [music] and spat out some paper tape when they were triggered. But these weren't exactly wire taps. They couldn't record the contents of what anyone said

2:09or typed. What they could do is record the metadata. [music] which number connected to which and for how long. It was a DNR device that led investigators to catch Fry Guy. Maybe that same device will be useful here to find out what this technician guy was doing. And there's an interesting thing to point out that if the police wanted to do that, they would need a court order and approval from the judge to conduct a wiretap. But if the security team at the New York Telephone Company wanted to do that, they didn't need a court order to monitor the activity of one of their

2:39customers. They're a private company. they can do what they want. So Fred and Tom were able to use this DNR phone monitoring tool without any red tape. A couple of things stood out in the data. First, there was a clear evidence that this technician was hacking into something called a dial hub, which was in the New York telephone network. The dial hub had just been invented that year and it was pretty new even for Tom and Fred and they even had to ask like what is this thing? It was essentially a remote access point into the entire New York telephone company computer network.

3:10employees had a password that they could use to login from home to reach whatever system they needed to do their job. Somehow this guy calling himself the technician had not only learned about the dial hub but obtained a login token for it, meaning he could use it as if he was any employee in the company. What's worse is that Tom couldn't keep track of him once he got in there.

Hacker Investigation

3:31>> This was serious. And this is where Tom's second [music] interesting discovery came in. Over time, whenever the DNR started chirping, Tom would get up from his desk, rush over to it, and read where the technician was calling. Over time, a pattern emerged. First, this Bronx hacker would dial into the phone company network, and he'd hang around there for a bit, do his thing, and then he'd disconnect. And then he would always call a phone number after that, which routed to a middle-class Queens neighborhood, and it was the same number every time. This call would last for a bit, and then he'd disconnect and

4:02check in with Queens again, and so on and so on. back and forth into the phone company, call to Queens, into the phone company, call to Queens. Tom and Fred had a guess that the actual brains behind this operation might be in Queens. And they looked at all the call records to that number that was going to Queens. And they noticed that there were a few other calls that came into that number in Queens quite often, too. And they were able to trace these calls, figure out whose numbers they were. And this led them to discover two other hackers. One was corrupt and the other

4:33was Outlaw. Why were so many hackers calling this number in Queens? Who were these guys? Maybe members of the notorious Legion of Doom. Everyone knew Legion of Doom at the time. The number in Queens was registered to a red brick row house. It belonged to Charles Abin, a middle-aged man who was a school custodian, actually an officer in the school custodian's union. Not a very likely person to be a hacker. But Charles Abin's son was a teenager who

5:03spiked up his hair. He kept terrible bedtime hours and got a lot of stomach aches. His name was Mark. But online and throughout the country, Mark was known as fiber optic. A notorious hacker. And even compared to the other members of Legion of Doom, Mark was really good at hacking. Probably too good. Maybe the best phone system hacker in America. No, [music] on the planet. Maybe ever, actually. From the compact TRS80 on his desk in his tiny bedroom, Mark ingested enough knowledge to outwit even the

5:34technicians working at the phone company. He wasn't just fluent in the New York telephone system, but also the 9X, the packet switching networks running all the way up and down New England. Basically, he had encyclopedic knowledge of telecommunication systems and he could name pretty much any of them. He could rattle off the most obscure details about any random machine or protocol. Of course, he could place a call anywhere in the country without paying a scent or triggering any alarms. That was the easy part. When Mark, [music] aka Fiber Optic, was on a BBS, other hackers listened. He liked sharing his knowledge, and the reputation it

6:05afforded him. But don't you dare cross him. It was easy enough for him to cut your phone service or overload it with endless calls, or much worse. As I researched the story, the whole Earth catalog kept coming up and up. And I didn't really know about it before. Like I heard about it, but I didn't really look at it. But now I got a copy of it and I'm looking at it and it's like amazing. It's like one of my favorite things now. You know what? I'll let Steve Jobs tell you about it. When I was young, there was an amazing publication

6:35called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menllo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late60s before personal computers and desktop publishing. So it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great

7:06notions. This catalog is amazing. It's filled with really helpful articles like how to build a shelter or water pump. And it also has glimpses into the future and technologies and ideas for structures and [music] systems. And sometimes there's theoretical things in here, sometimes it's practical, but there's just a ton of wonderful unique ideas on how to navigate the modern world. And Stuart Brand, the guy who made this, took a big fascination with computers and especially hacking. He spun up his own BBS called the Well, which stood for Whole Earth Electronic

7:37Link. It became the place to post helpful information, to post things that were culturally relevant at the time, things like tech, art, and politics, but also significantly highlighting counterculture movements and ideas. There were areas for niche hobbies and sharing software. At the core of it was self-empowerment and open dialogue. The well was the internet's first real online community. It attracted journalists and artists and activists and poets and yes hackers like Neil

8:08Stevenson would pop in there from time to time. Craig from Craigslist was there and that's where he got inspired to make Craigslist and the well was the birthplace for a lot of the internet culture and norms that we still use today. [music]

Whole Earth Catalog

8:21>> One longtime supporter of hackers is Stuart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Cataloges. They are uh shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant and uh I think more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of. >> To make [music] his point, Brand invited a 100 top computer designers to an exclusive hackers conference in the secluded campsite north of San

8:51Francisco. Despite bad weather and crude living conditions, the camp was a true hacker heaven. Well stocked with plenty of computer toys and of course enough candy and soda to last through the night. But the real purpose of the get together was to discuss the unique set of values that made the [music] computer revolution possible and brainstorm about its future. >> My political platform is that we need an electronic declaration of independence. That last guy talking was John Perry Barlo, who at the time was a poet, an essayist, and lyricist for the Grateful Dead. And he stayed true to that

9:23mission. He did in fact go and publish a declaration of independence of cyberspace. I'm not going to read to you the whole thing, but let me at least quote to you the opening paragraph of this. Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, a new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. That's quite an opening for a declaration, right? John Perry Barlo is

9:55a bit of a badass if you ask me. Okay, so Harper's magazine, this was a mainstream magazine at the time which was covering things like politics, culture, literature. It had thought-provoking essays in it. And one thing it did regularly was a featured article that they called the forum where like three to five contributors would all try to answer big questions like what do we owe the planet and is the American experiment failing and the contributors would try to provide high-minded thoughtful responses. Well Harper saw that these computers were

10:25rising in popularity and saw that a lot of great thinkers were gathering there on Steuart Brand's BBS the well. So, they decided to run their very first virtual forum, basically a live chat room on the well, where they'd ask users big questions to get the conversations going for their magazines. Questions like, "Do we have a right to privacy?" And, "Should hackers respect that right? What ethical considerations arise when we become more connected digitally?" So in December 1989, Harper's magazine

10:57held this virtual forum, basically an open chat room for anyone to respond to on the well. John Perry Barlo was there, Clifford Stole was there, Steven Levy was there. A lot of influential people who actually were watching the chat, even some notable hackers like Mark [music] aka Fiber Optic, and Mark's friend Eli, who went by the name Acid Freak. But the internet did what the internet does, and it didn't quite fit into the high-minded discourse that Harpers was [music] hoping for. Instead, the place turned vulgar, immature, insulting, and yeah, lots of asky art

11:28was [music] posted. In fact, the participants flooded the chat room with over a 100,000 [music] words during the forum. John Perry Barlo thought he was on the hacker side, being libertarian and kind of punk by nature [music] and really was into computers himself, except these guys were just too annoying on the well [music] and not at all receptive to the simple arguments that hacking was troublesome. At a heated moment in the chat, John Perry [music] Barlo wrote that quote, "With hackers like Acid Freak and Fiber Optic), the

11:58issue is less intelligence than alienation. Trade their modems for skateboards, and only a slight conceptual shift would occur." Acid Freak and Fiber Optic didn't like being called out like that, and they replied, "You have some pair of balls comparing my talent with that of a skateboarder, huh? Well, this was indeed boring, but nonetheless, Fiber Optic then [snorts] somehow found a copy of John Perry Barlo's credit history and posted it to the forum for anyone to see. Like, what a crazy thing

12:30to drop in the middle of chat, right? Just someone's credit report. Bam. Well, [snorts] that spooked John Perry Barlo. He later wrote about how he felt when he saw his credit history posted like that. He said, quote, "I've been stuck in redneck bars wighing shoulderlength curls. I've been in police custody while on acid and in Harlem after midnight, but no one has ever put the spook in me quite as Fiber Optic did at that moment." It never took anybody long to realize that Mark aka Fiber Optic was

13:00the best hacker they knew. And that's how he got into the Legion of Doom. He borrowed a password from a friend. Then he navigated to the section where members discussed phone freaking and thought these guys are a joke. Sure, they have a few old technical manuals that I could recite in my sleep. So he started flooding them with new information. Sort of like an all- knowing god. And being an all- knowing hacker god can get to a kid's head, you know, like he liked the attention that people were giving him who thought he was amazing. And that's how Eric Bloodax

13:30felt about Mark. This guy who went by Eric Bloodax was a short guy with a goatee and grungy long blonde hair and hung out in the LOD forums. Bloodax was a member of the LOD, but Mark Mark said he was and he was in the forums that it was members only, but he wasn't listed as an actual member. It's like he hacked his way into the group. Well, Bloodax was confused, but quickly realized how good Mark was. A few weeks later, Mark was officially voted in. Bloodax respected Mark as a really great hacker,

14:00but he didn't really like Mark. He didn't like how Mark would trap hackers who would talk a big game and then he would totally embarrass them with his superior skills. And then one day in 1989, he got a call from Mark. Mark wanted a back door that he knew Bloodax had to the 9X packet switching network. But Bloodax is like, "Well, what are you going to give me in return? If I give you this exploit, what are you going to give me?" >> [music] >> And Mark just hung up and called Bloodax his friend and told Bloodax his friend, "Hey, Bloodax wants me to have the uh back door into NX, can you send it to

14:32me?" And the his friend did send it to him. And then Bloodax found out about this and called Mark back. Bloodax was mad, but Mark wasn't having it. Mark just told him, "I don't know you shit." And Bloodax was like, "Well, excuse me. I don't owe you I didn't get it from you. I got it from Bob. you." And Bloodax was like, [music] "What? Did he just really curse out a member of the LOD? Mark said, "I don't have time for this." and hung up. And that's how Mark aka Fiber Optic got kicked out of the Legion of Doom by tricking Eric

15:02Bloodax's friend into giving him an exploit and then cursing out Blood Axe. The two clearly didn't get along. Mark figured whatever and shrugged it off. He could run circles around anyone in LOD or around all of them combined. If they were ever cool, they definitely weren't anymore. He was convinced that the Legion of Doom were hasbins. And he wasn't the only one who thought that. [music]

Masters of Deception

15:27In the last episode, I told you about this guy Paul who was trying to get into a computer, but all he was getting was S's and W's back and then he blew into the phone and all of a sudden he was in. Well, last we left him, he broke into the phone company, gave his friend three three-way calling, and he told his friend Eli about this, who's also known as Acid Freak. And Eli figured this must be a switching control center systems. And so Acid Freak was like, "Oh, that's that's really cool. We should we should show this to Mark aka Fiber Optic. See what he has to say about this." So they decided to call him up. Hey, what do you

15:59want? Mark asks. He gets called all the time by a lot of hackers. Paul and Eli were a bit intimidated but excited. So they told Mark that they think they got into an SECs, but they don't know what to do. You think or you know? Mark asked. Paul handed over the information and Mark checked it out. And Mark quickly figured it out. It wasn't an SECS. It was a telephone switch. Specifically, a DMS 100 switch. Mark got back on the line. It's not a SECS. It's a DMS 100. Of course, the system Paul

16:30had been trying to figure out for well over a year now. Mark identified in seconds. But Mark was sort of impressed that these two guys brought this to him and asked if Paul and Eli wanted to meet up. >> [music] >> It started with the three of them getting together at Eli's house. Mark did the typing and explaining. Paul and Eli watched and when they got hungry, they went to the mall. Mark liked eating the mashed potatoes at KFC because it calmed his stomach. It was fun, but Eli had bigger plans. He wanted to recruit more hackers to their little club, like

17:02this hot shot kid that they heard about just down the road. They were talking about a hacker calling himself corrupt, whose real name was actually John Lee. He was a black kid who lived with his mom in Bedstey, [music] which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. And this was back when it was hardcore. Like John was in a gang. And not like a cyber gang, but an actual gang where guys robbed and sold drugs and stuff. IRL, but from a little beater Commodore 64 in his cramped bedroom, John Lee was a savant. [music] Eli kept talking saying that John Lee's specialty is vax computers. And these things have way more hard

17:33drive space, more CPU power than anything most people touch those days. [music] And vaxes were popular in large businesses and universities. Some of the best secrets in cyerspace were kept on vaxes. [music] Eli called John on his phone. John was impressed. How'd you get my number? Do you want to join our hacker club? H I'm interested. So John Lee came over and he brought his friend Julio whose hacker name is Outlaw and he lived in the Bronx and he was barely 15 at [music] the time. And so this new hacker collective was starting to form.

18:03The best of the best hackers in New York City were all coming together. There was Mark aka Fiber Optic, Eli which was going by Acidre Freak, Paul who was Scorpion, John Lee who was corrupt, and Julio who called himself Outlaw. The place they started meeting at was at the City Corp Center, 601 Lexington Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It's one of the funkiest skyscrapers you'll ever see and makes no sense architecturally. From 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday, City Corp Center was home for some of the big time companies like City Bank, of course, uh IBM, uh law firms. But once a

18:34month on a weekend at 6:00 p.m., a totally different demographic would emerge from the grimy subways, young men, and oversized jeans, skateboards, sneakers, and backwards baseball caps would come into the City Corp building because this is where the 2600 meetup would happen. [music] 2600 is also a hacker magazine which would host local meetups in different cities. It's Frack's most well-known counterpart. Readers brought stuff they'd find from their spoils from dumpster dives and their latest stolen passwords. They

19:05traded knowledge and they would mess with the pay phones in the atrium, like trying to get free phone calls on them or dial someone to social engineer them. And of course, they always found ways so they didn't have to pay for it. Somebody would know the right number to call to avoid a toll or they bring a blue box or something. And at this 2600 hacker meetup is where Mark, Eli, Paul, John Lee, and Julio would meet up. They enjoyed showing off what they learned, and they learned new things from other hackers. They'd talk shop, they'd get info, they'd show off their tricks and network with other hackers. For the most

19:37part, the people who came to the 2600 hacker meetup didn't have any intent of causing destruction or making money. Everyone was all just so curious and wanted to know how computers worked and find really clever ways to do things with them. It was sort of the essence of what they were all about. They shared the Legion of Doom's moral code. No making money, no causing harm, but they were also cut from a different cloth. They weren't just as good. No, they were [music] better than Legion of Doom. Definitely better. And a bit tougher, too. Not like those guys in the suburbs

20:08who had nice computers and drove cars. These guys pulled together salvaged and scrapped computer parts to build things, and they rode the subway. Ira Glass was able to interview Eli on This American Life in the early 90s and it's an incredible view into what these kids were doing then. Here, listen. We did this from payoneses. [music] We'd have a line of payoneses. We get into the computer first liberate one phone with liberating [music] meaning make it so that you don't need quarters for that pay phone. You just pick up and dial like a regular house phone. [music] So

20:39that way we can make endless amount of phone calls without putting quarters. Next step was to [music] get into the network, find a session that was already going [music] and then knock them off while they were connected and then sit there watching them. In other words, put us in their place in [music] the place of the computer they were going to connect to. So next time they try to log in, they would get our computer and we'd type in login and they'd put in their login account. Then we'd go password, you know, the password there, okay, password. They put their [music]

21:10password in and then we would have, you know, all these things were already encoded in one key. So we could just hit one key and, you know, it wouldn't look like we were typing it. >> We would login would just appear password. >> Then we hit the password key, password. [music] Then we'd say login incorrect and then disconnect from them, but we already got their login and password and then when they reconnected, it would be the regular system. So they figure, hey, [music] I made a mistake typing it in or something. And that's how we would get an account. It was like it was funny, you know. >> [music]

21:44>> You get into things that are good. You start targeting systems that are interesting and then you start developing a collection. It's like baseball cards. I have NASA. I have uh you know [music] NSA. I've got uh Phone Company computers. I've got My Misar. I've got Cosmos. I've got this. I've got that. McDonald Douglas. Marian Marietta. [music] You know, TRW, CBI, TransUnion. What else can I get? you know, you try to get the [music] like big names, you know, so you start developing a collection, you know. Then after a while, it became fun to [music] like look up famous people. Let's look up John Gotti's credit, you know, let's see

22:16what he owns. [music] Let's look up uh Julia Roberts, you know, let's get our home phone number. Let's get this [music] guy's home phone number. We were just so excited. We were getting all that stuff and it was just a rush, you know. It was the flow, you know, once you once you start going, you can't stop. You know, you're just steamrolling one after the other and the flow gets you going and then you're just like, "Yeah, we're we rule." You know, we're it. It breaks down all barriers. Nothing can [music] stop the flow. If you got the flow, you can conquer everything. This what people call being in the zone. You know, once [music] you're in there,

22:46you can't stop. It's the juice. That was Eli talking about what him, Mark, Paul, John Lee, and Julio were doing in New York City back then. [music] It was a golden time. And Paul came up with an idea. He said they should give their little hacker group a name like M O, which was a joke. Like L OD, but one letter higher, M O. Did it stand for anything? Nah, who cares? Wait, [music] okay, it could. Um, Masters of Disaster. No, Masters of

23:17Deception. Yeah. And so [music] a new hacker group was born. Masters of Deception. >> [music] >> If anything, it's surprising how little they did with their power over computers. [music] It was mostly pranks, making somebody's phone ring continuously, turning an enemy's home phone line into [music] a pay phone line. So, when the guy picked up his phone at home, it demanded that he deposit a quarter, you know, because there's no way he could do that because it's his home phone. They did actually

23:48call Julia Roberts once. They called Queen Elizabeth, too. But but [music] there's an emptiness at the heart of a lot of these stories once you've [music] got the queen on the phone. You know what do you say? >> She's like hello you know she's talking to us and stuff and we don't know what to say. Hi we're calling from the United States and this and that and she knew what was up. He's like okay hello and she said goodbye and that was it. You know we didn't know what to say. What do you say to Queen Elizabeth? You know hi. So, uh, you see [music] that movie, uh,

24:21True Lies? You know, what do you say? You know, it's just like the the the fun of it is finding the number. >> I'd probably ask her what kind of computer she has. I mean, she's the queen. She's got to have the best computer in the world, right? All right, we're going to take a quick uh ad break here, but stay with us cuz when we come back, everything's about to get crazy. Now, all that was brewing in New York City right before that big phone outage in AT&T that happened on MLK Day in 1999. Right where we left off at the last episode. Remember the one that

24:52caused millions of calls to not go through? That one that made the police and Secret Service go into full panic mode? Yeah. LOD was their initial suspect, but maybe this new group mod had something to do with it too, right? The police didn't necessarily know of Masters of Deception as their group name, but they definitely were tracking these people individually. Why? Because Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples, the engineers from the New York Telephone Company, were on to them. They were watching their phone calls and trace the numbers around. That number they kept

25:22calling in Queens, that was Mark's number. And the people calling it were Paul, Eli, John Lee, and Julio. The New York telephone security team was watching all these kids hack into phone systems all over and called the police and the police called the Secret Service who was already working with Bell South to try to catch hackers. >> Bell South cracked down hard on Adam and the others even though it acknowledges they never disrupted phone service or changed any customer accounts. >> We don't care what the motive may or may

25:55not be. Scott Tyer is a corporate spokesman for Bell South. >> We are not talking about Wall-E and the Bee, much less Eddie Haskell. We're not dealing with a bunch of mischievous pranksters playing in some high-tech toilet. This is a crime. >> Bell South is just one example of a company stalked by hackers. In a recent New York case, members of a club known as the Masters of Deception were indicted, accused of hacking into institutions like the Bank of America.

26:26Martin Marietta, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell, New York Telephone, TRW, Information America, and New York University. Jeez, what a list. And the police were trying to piece all this together and trying to figure out who was doing what. But that's a huge list of companies. How did they get into all those things? Partly thanks to Jason. Jason Snitker aka Paramaster and his strange magical back door. A back door

26:57that was bigger than any back door I've ever heard of. This is another one of those parts of the story that's so crazy that I didn't even believe it at first. But in preparing for this episode, we managed to find and get a hold of Jason, and he confirmed what really happened.

Jason Snitker's Back Door

27:09The story dates back to 1988 when Jason was in high school. He got curious with his modem and computer and ended up getting into a bunch of computers at City Bank. In fact, he got into a system that was used to mint debit cards for different banks in Saudi Arabia. He saw this and tried to mint his own cards. And yeah, he was able to use the City Bank computer to create 10,000 new debit card numbers, which were all valid since they were in the bank's database. And you know, sharing is caring. He couldn't even use a fraction of these cards. So, he just spread them around in all the hacking forums. And now, suddenly,

27:39everyone had their own blank check from the bank. He worried that he might get caught for that. [music] But that wasn't his biggest worry. The way he'd gotten into City Bank in the [music] first place was this back door he had. And the back door got him into a lot of other places, too. Places in cyberspace that no ordinary person should go. He saw stuff. Military secrets. A killer satellite that could cut up Soviet satellites with a laser. top secret

28:11stuff. He wondered if he saw something so important or so top secret that if they found out that he saw it, they would delete him because doesn't the government try to make people disappear that they don't like? Even today, almost 40 years later, Jason talks about what he found with some feeling. He told us about a press release that he saw for that satellite with information about a laser system that never became public. He sent us this ominous message. quote, "When you could show what is being changed to

28:42withhold information, what might the government be protecting?" Just imagine these being your problems as a teenager. I remember when I was that age, I would get a bad grade in school or some girl wouldn't like me or something and that felt like the end of the world to me. But for Jason Snick Curry, he was stressed out simply by knowing things, top secret things that the government didn't really want him to know. So he decided to split out of there from California and move to New York Coney Island. But now New York State Police were starting to get

29:12suspicion of what hackers were up to. And an officer went to spy on the 2600 hacker meet up in the city court building. Yeah. A cop came to the hacker meetup to try to look around. But luckily Jason wasn't there to accidentally reveal like what he saw on the military's computers because he wasn't keeping these secrets to himself. Like while he was in New York, he met up and hung out with John Lee at Grand Central Station and in a deal over the phone he traded his back door to Mark. And then almost immediately after that, he got arrested and was brought to court

29:44over all those stolen credit cards. So what was this back door that he gave to John Lee and Mark? Well, it was a back door to let you in a huge network. It would get you into the lowest most inner core of timeet. Timeet was an international communication network before the internet that we know today was invented. It serviced the kind of organizations that needed to perform heavyduty possibly international communications, government agencies,

30:16large companies, that sort of thing. Today, of course, the idea that you could use a back door to unlock the core of the internet is ridiculous. But on timeet it was possible because while there were a lot of companies using timeet and connected to it timeet itself was operated by a single company someone had to manage the infrastructure for it and so it was a centralized network [music] there was a computer which was a supervisor that could oversee the whole network and that's what this back door gave them access to. [music] They were in a supervisor level of one of the

30:48biggest networks in the world at the time. Jason had managed to get access to this through a network engineer in the company's internal network and he told us that it allowed him to drop right into their shell and he stole timeet's source code which was proprietary at the time. This was about as deep as you could possibly go. And honestly, even now I have questions about this thing. When we asked for specifics, Jason described it more like a numerical algorithm than code. So complicated that he claims even Mark couldn't figure it out. [music] Mark who could figure out

31:18anything. Whether he understood it or not, for Mark, this magic access must have made him feel like Dorothy stepping into Oz. You know that famous scene where it's black and white and then the screen suddenly fills with color. Mark had a whole new system to explore, a whole new network to explore and so many computers were on this and he was going to master it. And boy did he. [music] The sugar rush that came with hacking company after company. Mark found some of Timeet's own PDP10s and these were big hulking mainframes that were used to

31:48store administrative manuals and a bunch of other stuff. [music] Administrator manuals might sound boring to you, but to Mark and MOD, these were priceless. Instruction guides for how to go further and further into every corner of the internet. At a certain point, Mark literally couldn't go any deeper. Where [music] Timeet's staff might only be able to see what's relevant to their jobs and Timeet users could only see what's on their own networks. [music] The masters of deception could see it all and access it all, too. He was tapped into the matrix. It's odd to say,

32:20but hacking the NSA, Bank of America, whatever, [music] it was almost trivial with this back door. They could easily find their way into a ton [music] of interesting networks. Spying on any person was simple, too, because the companies that held everyone's personal information were on Time. Through them, you could look up yourself, your rival hacker, or Julie Roberts to [music] see her finances or her phone number or even where she lived. At this point, the masters [music] of deception must have felt unstoppable. Mark, John, and Julio

32:51would watch Timeet's administrators as they change their passwords, or they could read the Timeet security department's [music] emails. They could anticipate anything that might threaten their access because they knew about new security features and plans before those features and plans were even implemented. Now, remember when I talked about Esquire magazine, interviewing the guy who made the blue box in 1971? Well, at one point, Esquire interviewed someone from the Masters of Deception and said, "Hey, if you're really good as you say you are, prove [music] it. Hack into the White House right now." And the story goes that mod members hacked into

33:23the White House in front of Esquire reporters. That's how wild of a time it was. The masters of deception were the most powerful people in cyberspace. Well, Legion of who? Oh yeah, I almost forgot about them. Because by this time, by at least some accounts, the Legion of Doom was dead. Like Frack magazine published their obituary on May 28th, 1990. Quote, "The Legion of Doom will long be remembered in the computer underground as an innovative and pioneering force. No other group

33:54dedicated to the pursuit of computer and telecommunication knowledge has survived longer, and none probably will. The Legion of Doom from 1984 to 1990." End quote. The article ended with a list of all the LOD members and when they'd left and why they left like it was some kind of memorial. The prophet member from 88 to 89. Reason for leaving bust hacking fiber optic 89 to 90 New York reason for leaving bust hacking. Which that that's not actually true. Mark or fiber optic got kicked out. Remember you know whose

34:25name is not on here is Eric Bloodax whose real name is Chris Gogggins or his sidekick Scott Chason which is Doc Holiday. And it makes me wonder if this obituary was some kind of power move or a prank. The author was blank. And it's very curious because 8 days earlier, LOD released an article which said, "We are still alive." Lex Luthther wrote it um and it says, "If you believe the rumors, LOD has been dead many times, but that's again untrue." But in reality, due to

34:55the CFAA being passed and the major outage at New York, [music] arrests were starting to be made on hackers all over. 3 days after that major outage at AT&T on January 18th, 1990, two agents from the US Secret Service, a security employee from Southwestern Bell and a security guard from the University of Missouri, knocked on the door of a frat house, and they found Craig Najdorf, aka Night Lightning, the co-founder of the notorious hacker magazine, Frack, and accused him of crashing the AT&T phone

35:27system. They arrested him and took all his computers and took him into custody. Craig seemed pretty surprised that the Secret Service was arresting him. Yeah, he could have done it, sure, but he swore he didn't, and he would never do that. Any fight that Craig had in him, though, disappeared when the cops confronted him about the document that he posted to Frack, the E911 file. In a 4-hour interrogation, he admitted to publishing it, and he agreed to cooperate with the investigation.

35:57And ditto happened for the prophet, the guy who originally copied the E911 file from Bell South. He also got arrested by