169: MoD

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1:03Again, that's datadog.com slash darknet. This story picks up from where we left off in part one, so if you haven't heard it yet, you need to go back one episode and listen to that one before listening to this, because this is part two.

1:23These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. This show has covered loads of crazy zero days that lead to massive cyber security attacks,

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2:28Stay smart out there. Visit joindeleteme.com slash D&D to get a demo of Delete Me's business platform today. That's joindeleteme.com slash D&D. joindeleteme.com slash D&D. This episode is sponsored by Shopify. I know my job is to make a podcast, but I really love designing artwork for Darknet Diaries, and I take that artwork and I turn it into t-shirts,

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The telephone company and an anonymous tip

3:52The 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,

4:22and then Tom was the one who had to catch you. Their jobs became infinitely more difficult and interesting when a strange letter arrived at Tom's Times Square office in November 1988. It stated that a kid up in the Bronx was hacking into the phone grid who was calling himself the technician. The letter wasn't signed. It was an anonymous tip. But Tom suspected 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.

4:53Sure enough, when Tom pulled up the records associated with the technician's address, the proof was right there. Technician had been connecting to switches at AT&T from home with no real attempt to hide it either. So Tom turned to a nifty device that he had, which was called the Dialed Number Recorder, DNR. A DNR is a little box that you might mistake for an answering machine or a tape recorder. Tom had some small black DNRs that click-clacked and spat out some paper tape when they were triggered. But these weren't exactly wiretaps. They couldn't record the contents of what anyone said or typed.

5:25What they could do is record the metadata, which number connected to which, and for how long. It was a DNR device that led investigators to catch Fry Guy. Maybe that same device will be useful here to find out what this technician guy was doing. And there's an interesting thing to point out, that if the police wanted to do that, they would need a court order and approval from the judge to conduct a wiretap. But if the security team at the New York Telephone Company wanted to do that, they didn't need a court order to monitor the activity of one of their customers. They're a private company.

5:56They can do what they want. So Fred and Tom were able to use this DNR phone monitoring tool without any red tape. A couple of things stood out in the data. First, there was a clear evidence that this technician was hacking into something called a dial hub, which was in the New York Telephone Network. The dial hub had just been invented that year, and it was pretty new, even for Tom and Fred. And they even had to ask, like, what is this thing? It was essentially a remote access point into the entire New York Telephone Company computer network. Employees had a password

6:26that they could use to log in from home to reach whatever system they needed to do their job. Somehow, this guy, calling himself the technician, had not only learned about the dial hub, but obtained a login token for it, meaning he could use it as if he was any employee in the company. What's worse is that Tom couldn't keep track of him once he got in there. This was serious, and this is where Tom's second 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.

6:57Over time, a pattern emerged. First, this Bronx hacker would dial into the phone company network, and he'd hang around there for a bit, do his thing, and then he'd disconnect. And then he would always call a phone number after that, which routed to a middle-class Queens neighborhood. And it was the same number every time. This call would last for a bit, and then he'd disconnect and check in with Queens again. And so on, and so on, back and forth. Into the phone company, call to Queens. Into the phone company, call to Queens. Tom and Fred had a guess that the actual brains behind this operation

7:28might be in Queens. And they looked at all the call records to that number that was going to Queens. And they noticed that there were a few other calls that came into that number in Queens quite often too. And they were able to trace these calls, figure out whose numbers they were. And this led them to discover two other hackers. One was corrupt, and the other was outlaw. Why were so many hackers calling this number in Queens? Who were these guys? Maybe members of the notorious Legion of Doom? Everyone knew Legion of Doom at the time.

7:59The number in Queens was registered to a red brick row house. It belonged to Charles Abbein, 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 Abbein's son was a teenager who spiked up his hair. He kept terrible bedtime hours and got a lot of stomach aches. His name was Mark. But online and throughout the country, Mark was known as Fiber Optic, a notorious hacker.

8:29And even compared to the other members of Legion of Doom, Mark was really good at hacking. Probably too good. Maybe the best phone system hacker in America. No, on the planet. Maybe ever, actually. From the compact TRS-80 on his desk, in his tiny bedroom, Mark ingested enough knowledge to outwit even the technicians working at the phone company. He wasn't just fluent in the New York telephone system, but also the 9X, the packet switching networks running all the way up and down New England. Basically, he had encyclopedic knowledge of telecommunication systems,

9:01and he could name pretty much any of them. He could rattle off the most obscure details about any random machine or protocol. Of course, he could place a call anywhere in the country without paying a cent or triggering any alarms. That was the easy part. When Mark, aka Fiber Optic, was on a BBS, other hackers listened. He liked sharing his knowledge and the reputation it afforded him. But don't you dare cross him. It was easy enough for him to cut your phone service or overload it with endless calls, or much worse.

The Whole Earth Catalog and The Well

9:28As I researched the story, the whole Earth catalog kept coming up and up. And I didn't really know about it before. Like, I heard about it, but I didn't really look at it. But now I got a copy of it, and I'm looking at it, and it's, like, amazing. It's, like, one of my favorite things now. You know what? I'll let Steve Jobs tell you about it. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park.

10:00And he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing. So it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools, and great notions. This catalog is amazing. It's filled with really helpful articles, like how to build a shelter or a water pump. And it also has glimpses into the future and technologies and ideas for structures and systems.

10:31And sometimes there's theoretical things in here. Sometimes it's practical. But there's just a ton of wonderful, unique ideas on how to navigate the modern world. And Stuart Brand, the guy who made this, took a big fascination with computers, and especially hacking. He spun up his own BBS called The Well, which stood for Whole Earth Electronic Link. It became the place to post helpful information, to post things that were culturally relevant at the time, things like tech, art, and politics, but also significantly highlighting

11:03counterculture 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, Neal Stephenson 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.

11:34One long-time supporter of hackers is Stuart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalogues. They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant, and I think more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of. To make his point, Brand invited 100 top computer designers to an exclusive hackers' conference

12:04in this secluded campsite north of San Francisco. Despite bad weather and crude living conditions, the camp was a true hacker heaven, well-stocked with plenty of computer toys, and of course, enough candy and soda to last through the night. But the real purpose of the get-together was to discuss the unique set of values that made the computer revolution possible and brainstorm about its future. Our political platform is that we need an electronic declaration of independence. That last guy talking was John Perry Barlow, who at the time was a poet and essayist

12:34and lyricist for The Grateful Dead. And he stayed true to that mission. He did, in fact, go and publish a declaration of independence of cyberspace. I'm not going to read to you the whole thing, but let me at least quote to you the opening paragraph of this. Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

13:04That's quite an opening for a declaration, right? John Perry Barlow is a bit of a badass, if you ask me. Okay, so Harper's Magazine, this was a mainstream magazine at the time, which was covering things like politics, culture, literature. It had thought-provoking essays in it. And one thing it did regularly was a featured article that they called The Forum, where 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

13:35high-minded, thoughtful responses. Well, Harper's saw that these computers were rising in popularity and saw that a lot of great thinkers were gathering there on Stuart 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

14:05when we become more connected digitally?

Harper's Magazine virtual forum clash

14:07So in December 1989, Harper's Magazine held this virtual forum, basically an open chat room for anyone to respond to on The Well. John Perry Barlow was there. Clifford Stoll was there. Stephen Levy was there. A lot of influential people actually were watching the chats, even some notable hackers like Mark, aka FiberOptic, and Mark's friend Eli, who went by the name AcidFreak. But the internet did what the internet does, and it didn't quite fit into the high-minded discourse that Harper's was hoping for. Instead, the place turned vulgar,

14:39immature, insulting. And yeah, lots of ASCII art was posted. In fact, the participants flooded the chat room with over 100,000 words during the forum. John Perry Barlow thought he was on the hacker's side, being libertarian and kind of punk by nature, and really was into computers himself. Except these guys were just too annoying on The Well, and not at all receptive to the simple arguments that hacking was troublesome. At a heated moment in the chat, John Perry Barlow wrote that,

15:10quote, With hackers like AcidFreak and FiberOptic, the issue is less intelligence than alienation. Trade their modems for skateboards, and only a slight conceptual shift would occur. AcidFreak and FiberOptic 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, FiberOptic then, somehow, found a copy of John Perry Barlow's credit history

15:40and posted it to the forum for anyone to see. Like, what a crazy thing to drop in the middle of chat, right? Just someone's credit report. Bam! Well, that spooked John Perry Barlow. He later wrote about how he felt when he saw his credit history posted like that. He said, quote, I've been stuck in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls. I've been in police custody while on Acid and on Harlem after midnight, but no one has ever put the spook in me quite as FiberOptic did at that moment. It never took anybody long

16:11to realize that Mark, aka FiberOptic, was the best hacker they knew. And that's how he got into the Legion of Doom. He borrowed a password from a friend, and 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.

16:43And that's how Eric Bloodaxe felt about Mark. This guy who went by Eric Bloodaxe was a short guy with a goatee and grungy long blonde hair and hung out in the LOD forums. Bloodaxe was a member of the LOD, but Mark, Mark said he was, and he was in the forums that it was members only, but he wasn't listed as an actual member. It's like he hacked his way into the group. Well, Bloodaxe was confused, but quickly realized how good Mark was. A few weeks later, Mark was officially voted in. Bloodaxe respected Mark as a really great hacker,

17:15but 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 backdoor that he knew Bloodaxe had to the 9X packet switching network. But Bloodaxe was like, well, what are you going to give me in return? If I give you this exploit, what are you going to give me? And Mark just hung up and called Bloodaxe's friend and told Bloodaxe's friend, hey, Bloodaxe wants me to have the backdoor into 9X.

17:46Can you send it to me? And his friend did send it to him. And then Bloodaxe found out about this and called Mark back. Bloodaxe was mad, but Mark wasn't having it. Mark just told him, I don't know you shit. And Bloodaxe was like, whoa, excuse me? I don't know you shit. I didn't get it from you. I got it from Bob. Fuck you. And Bloodaxe was like, what? Did he just really curse out a member of the LOD? Mark said, I don't have time for this and hung up. And that's how Mark, aka Fiber Optic, got kicked out of the Legion of Doom by tricking Eric Bloodaxe's friend

18:18into giving him an exploit and then cursing out Bloodaxe. The two clearly didn't get along. Mark figured whatever and shrugged it off. He could run circles around anyone in LOD or around all of them combined. If they were ever cool, they definitely weren't anymore. He was convinced that the Legion of Doom were has-beens and he wasn't the only one who thought that.

Forming the Masters of Deception

18:38In the last episode, I told you about this guy, Paul, who was trying to get into 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 free 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 system, a SCCS. And so Acid Freak was like, oh, that's really cool. We should show this to Mark, aka Fiber Optic,

19:09see what he has to say about this. So they decided to call him up. Hey, what do you want? Mark asks. He gets called all the time by a lot of hackers. Paul and Eli were a bit intimidated but excited. So they told Mark that they think they got into an SCCS, but they don't know what to do. You think or you know? Mark asked. Paul handed over the information and Mark checked it out. And Mark quickly figured it out. It wasn't an SCCS. It was a telephone switch, specifically a DMS-100 switch. Mark got back on the line.

19:40It's not an SCCS. It's a DMS-100. Of course, the system Paul had been trying to figure out for well over a year now, Mark identified in seconds. But Mark was sort of impressed that these two guys brought this to him and asked if Paul and Eli wanted to meet up. 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.

20:10It was fun, but Eli had bigger plans. He wanted to recruit more hackers to their little club. Like this hotshot kid that they heard about just down the road. They were talking about a hacker calling himself corrupt, whose real name was actually John Lee. He was a black kid who lived with his mom in Bed-Stuy, which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. 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.

20:42Eli kept talking, saying that John Lee's specialty is vax computers. And these things have way more hard drive space, more CPU power than anything most people touched those days. And vaxes were popular in large businesses and universities. Some of the best secrets in cyberspace were kept on vaxes. Eli called John on his phone. John was impressed. Well, how'd you get my number? Do you want to join our hacker club? Hmm, 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,

21:12and he was barely 15 at the time. And so this new hacker collective was starting to form. The best of the best hackers in New York City were all coming together. There was Mark, aka FiberOptic, Eli, which was going by Acid Freak, Paul, who was Scorpion, John Lee, who was corrupt, and Julio, who called himself Outlaw. The place they started meeting at was at the Citicorp Center, 601 Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan. It's one of the funkiest skyscrapers you'll ever see and makes no sense architecturally. And from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, Citicorp Center was home

21:43for some of the big-time companies like Citibank, of course, IBM, law firms. But once a month, on a weekend, at 6 p.m., a totally different demographic would emerge from the grimy subways. Young men in oversized jeans, skateboards, sneakers, and backwards baseball caps would come into the Citicorp building. Because this is where the 2600 meetup would happen. 2600 is also a hacker magazine which would host local meetups in different cities. It's Freak's most well-known counterpart.

22:14Readers brought stuff they'd find from their spoils, from dumpster dives, and their latest stolen passwords. They traded knowledge and they would mess with the pay phones in the atrium, like trying to get free phone calls on them or dial someone to social engineer them. And of course, they always found ways so they didn't have to pay for it. Somebody would know the right number to call to avoid a toll or they'd 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

22:44from other hackers. They'd talk shop, they'd get info, they'd show off their tricks and network with other hackers. For the most part, the people who came to the 2600 hacker meetup didn't have any intent of causing destruction or making money. Everyone was all just so curious and wanted to know how computers worked and find really clever ways to do things with them. It was sort of the essence of what they were all about. They shared the Legion of Doom's moral code. No making money, no causing harm, but they were also cut from a different cloth. They weren't just as good.

23:16No, they were better than Legion of Doom. Definitely better. And a bit tougher too. Not like those guys in the suburbs who had nice computers and drove cars. These guys pulled together, salvaged and scrapped computer parts to build things and they rode the subway. Ira Glass was able to interview Eli on This American Life in the early 90s and it's an incredible view into what these kids were doing then. Here, listen. We did this from pay phones. We have a line of pay phones. We get into the computer,

23:46first liberate one phone, with liberating meaning make it so that you don't need quarters for that pay phone. You just pick up and dial like a regular house phone. So that way we can make endless amount of phone calls without putting quarters. Next step was to get into the network, find a session that was already going and then knock them off while they were connected and then sit there watching them. In other words, put us in the place of the computer that we're going to connect to. So next time they tried to log in, they would get our computer and we'd type in login

24:17and they'd put in their login account. Then we'd go password, you know, the password, there's okay password and they put their password in and then we would have, you know, all these things were already encoded in one key so we could just hit one key and, you know, it wouldn't look like we were typing it. The login would just appear and then we'd hit the password key and then we'd say login and correct 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'd figure, hey, I made a mistake typing it in or something and that's how

24:47we would get an account. It was like, it was funny, you know? You get into things that are good, you start targeting systems that are interesting and then you start developing a collection. It's like baseball cards. I have NASA, I have, you know, NSA, I've got phone company computers, I've got Mizar, I've got Cosmos, I've got this, I've got that, McDonnell Douglas, Marion Marietta, you know, TRW, CBI,

25:18TransUnion, what else can I get, you know? You try to get the, like, big names, you know? So you start developing a collection, you know? Then after a while it became fun to, like, look up famous people. Let's look up John Gotti's credit. You know, let's see what he owns. Let's look up Julia Roberts. You know, let's get her home phone number. Let's get this guy's home phone number. We were just so excited we were getting all that stuff and it was just a rush, you know? It was the flow, you know? Once you start going, you can't stop, you know? You're just steamrolling one after the other and the flow gets you going

25:49and then you're just like, yeah, we rule. You know, we're it. It breaks down all barriers. Nothing can stop the flow. If you've got the flow, you can conquer everything. That's what people call being in the zone. You know, once you're in there, you can't stop. It's the juice. That was Eli talking about what him, Mark, Paul, John Lee, and Julio were doing in New York City back then. It was a golden time and Paul came up with an idea. He said, you should give their little hacker group a name like M-O-D,

26:20which was a joke, like L-O-D, but one letter higher, M-O-D. Did it stand for anything? Nah, who cares? Wait, okay, it could. Masters of disaster. No, masters of deception. Yeah. And so, a new hacker group was born, masters of deception.

26:41If anything, it's surprising how little they did with their power over computers. It was mostly pranks, making somebody's phone ring continuously, turning an enemy's home phone line into a pay phone line so when the guy picked up his phone at home, it demanded that he deposit a quarter, you know, because there's no way he could do that because it's his home phone. They did actually call Julia Roberts once. They called Queen Elizabeth too. But, but there's an emptiness at the heart of a lot of these stories.

27:12Once you've got the queen on the phone, you know, what do you say? She's like, hello? You know, and 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. She'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 the Queen Elizabeth? You know, hi, so, you see that movie, True Lies? You know, what do you say? You know, it's just like, the fun of it is finding the number.

27:44I'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 ad break here, but stay with us because when we come back, everything's about to get crazy.

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Operation Sun Devil and federal investigations

29:03Now, all that was brewing in New York City right before that big phone outage in AT&T that happened on MLK Day in 1999, right where we left off at the last episode. Remember the one that caused millions of calls to not go through? That one that made the police and Secret Service go into full panic mode? Yeah, LOD was their initial suspect, but maybe this new group MOD had something to do with it too, right? The police didn't necessarily know of Masters of Deception as their group name, but they definitely were tracking these people individually.

29:33Why? 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 tracing numbers around. That number they kept calling in Queens, that was Mark's number. And the people calling it were Paul, Eli, John Lee, and Julio. The New York Telephone Security team was watching all these kids hack into phone systems all over and called the police. And the police called the Secret Service, who was already working with Bell South to try to catch hackers.

30:04Bell South cracked down hard on Adam and the others, even though it acknowledges they never disrupted phone service or changed any customer accounts. We don't care what the motive may or may not be. Scott Tyser is a corporate spokesman for Bell South. We are not talking about Wally and the Beeb, much less Eddie Haskell. We're not dealing with a bunch of mischievous pranksters playing in some high-tech toilet. This is a crime.

30:33Bell South is just one example of a company stalked by hackers. In a recent New York case, members of a club known as the Masters of Deception were indicted, accused of hacking into institutions like the Bank of America, Martin Marietta, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell, New York Telephone, TRW, Information America, and New York University. Jeez, what a list. And the police were trying to piece all this together and trying to figure out who was doing what.

31:03But that's a huge list of companies. How did they get into all those things? Partly thanks to Jason. Jason Snitker, a.k.a. Paramaster, and his strange, magical backdoor. A backdoor that was bigger than any backdoor I've ever heard of. This is another one of those parts of the story that's so crazy that I didn't even believe it at first. But in preparing for this episode, we managed to find and get a hold of Jason and he confirmed what really happened. The story dates back to 1988 when Jason was in high school.

31:34He got curious with his modem and computer and ended up getting into a bunch of computers at Citibank. In fact, he got into a system that was used to mint debit cards for different banks in Saudi Arabia. He saw this and tried to mint his own cards and yeah, he was able to use the Citibank computer to create 10,000 new debit card numbers which were all valid since they were in the bank's database. And you know, sharing is caring. He couldn't even use a fraction of these cards so he just spread them around in all the hacking forums and now suddenly everyone had their own blank check from the bank. He worried that he might

32:04get caught for that but that wasn't his biggest worry. The way he'd gotten into Citibank in the first place was this back door he had and the back door got him into a lot of other places too. Places in cyberspace that no ordinary person should go. He saw stuff. Military secrets. A killer satellite that could cut up Soviet satellites with a laser. Top secret stuff. He wondered

32:34if he saw something so important or so top secret that if they found out that he saw it they would delete him. Because doesn't the government try to make people disappear that they don't like? Even today almost 40 years later Jason talks about what he found with some feeling. He told us about a press release that he saw for that satellite with information about a laser system that never became public. He sent us this ominous message. Quote, when you could show what is being changed to withhold information what might the government

33:05be protecting? Just imagine these being your problems as a teenager. I remember when I was that age I would get a bad grade in school or some girl wouldn't like me or something and that felt like the end of the world to me. But for Jason Snitker he was stressed out simply by knowing things top secret things that the government didn't really want him to know. So he decided to split out of there from California and move to New York Coney Island but now New York State Police were starting to get suspicion of what hackers were up to and an officer

33:35went to spy on the 2600 hacker meetup in the city court building. Yeah, a cop came to the hacker meetup to try to look around but luckily Jason wasn't there to accidentally reveal like what he saw on the military's computers because he wasn't keeping these secrets to himself. Like while he was in New York he met up and hung out with John Lee at Grand Central Station and in a deal over the phone he traded his back door to Mark and then almost immediately after that he got arrested and was brought to court over all those stolen credit cards.

TimeNet and the ultimate backdoor

34:07So 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 TimeNet.

34:24TimeNet was an international communication network before the internet that we know today was invented. It serviced the kind of organizations that needed to perform heavy duty possibly international communications government agencies large companies that sort of thing. Today, of course the idea that you could use a back door to unlock the core of the internet is ridiculous. But on TimeNet it was possible because while there were a lot of companies using TimeNet and connected to it TimeNet itself was operated by a single company.

34:55Someone had to manage the infrastructure for it and so it was a centralized network. There was a computer which was a supervisor that could oversee the whole network and that's what this back door gave them access to. They were in a supervisor level of one of the biggest networks in the world at the time. Jason had managed to get access to this through a network engineer in the company's internal network and he told us that it allowed him to drop right into their shell and he stole TimeNet's source code which was proprietary at the time.

35:25This 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. Mark who could figure out anything whether he understood it or not. For Mark this magic access must have made him feel like Dorothy stepping into Oz. You know that famous scene where it's black and white and then the screen suddenly fills with color. Mark had a whole new system to explore a whole new network

35:55to explore and so many computers were on this and he was going to master it. And boy did he. The sugar rush that came with hacking company after company Mark found some of TimeNet's own PDP-10s and these were big hulking mainframes that were used to store administrative manuals and a bunch of other stuff. Administrative 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

36:25where TimeNet's staff might only be able to see what's relevant to their jobs and TimeNet users could only see what's on their own networks the masters of deception could see it all and access it all too. He was tapped into the matrix. It's odd to say but hacking the NSA Bank of America whatever it was almost trivial with this backdoor. They could easily find their way into a ton of interesting networks. Spying on any person was simple too because the companies that held everyone's personal

36:56information were on TimeNet. Through them you could look up yourself your rival hacker or Julia Roberts to see her finances or her phone number or even where she lived. At this point the masters of deception must have felt unstoppable. Mark, John and Julio would watch TimeNet's administrators as they changed their passwords or they could read the TimeNet security department's 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

37:26implemented. Now remember when I talked about Esquire magazine interviewing the guy who made the blue box in 1971? Well at one point Esquire interviewed someone from the masters of deception and said hey if you're really good as you say you are prove it hack into the White House right now. And the story goes that MOD members hacked into the White House in front of Esquire reporters. That's how wild of a time it was. The masters of deception were the most powerful people in cyberspace.

37:56Legion of who?

The Legion of Doom obituary and hacker war

37:58Oh yeah I almost forgot about them. Because by this time by at least some accounts the Legion of Doom was dead. Like Frack Magazine published their obituary on May 28th 1990. Quote The Legion of Doom will long be remembered in the computer underground as an innovative and pioneering force. No other group dedicated to the pursuit of computer and telecommunication knowledge has survived longer and none probably will. The Legion of Doom from 1984 to 1990. End quote. The article ended with a list of all the LOD members and when they'd left

38:29and 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's not actually true. Mark or Fiber Optic got kicked out remember? You know whose name is not on here is Eric Bloodaxe whose real name is Chris Goggins or his sidekick Scott Chasen which is Doc Holliday and it makes me wonder if this obituary was some kind of power move or a prank. The author was blank

38:59and it's very curious because eight days earlier LOD released an article which said we are still alive. Lex Luthor wrote it and says if you believe the rumors LOD has been dead many times but that's again untrue. But in reality due to the CFAA being passed and the major outage at New York arrests were starting to be made on hackers all over. Three days after that major outage at AT&T on January 18th 1990 two agents

39:31from the US Secret Service a security employee from Southwestern Bell and a security guard from the University of Missouri knocked on the door of a frat house and they found Craig Neidorf aka Night Lightning the co-founder of the notorious hacker magazine Frack and accused him of crashing the AT&T phone system. They arrested him and took all his computers and took him into custody. Craig seemed pretty surprised that the Secret Service was arresting him. Yeah, he could have done it sure but he swore he didn't and he would never do that. Any fight that Craig had in him though

40:02disappeared when the cops confronted him about the document that he posted to Frack the E911 file in a four-hour interrogation he admitted to publishing it and he agreed to cooperate with the investigation and ditto happened for the prophet the guy who originally copied the E911 file from Bell South he also got arrested by the police and the Secret Service and they were both charged on seven counts relating to stealing

40:32and posting this E911 file. They even told the parents of these guys your son has caused billions of dollars worth of damage he's crashed the AT&T network. Eventually almost every LOD member either got busted or gave up. Lex Luthor announced his retirement he's the one who started LOD here's Mark again. There was a lot more government involvement in the hacker underground in general and because of that fact two things happened a lot of people who had not gotten in trouble yet didn't want to risk anymore they were already older

41:02particularly the older generation of hackers some guys that I knew who started LOD for example withdrew from the hacker underground simply didn't want to risk getting in trouble anymore now that the climate had changed so much other hackers a few let's say thought that it might be good to go in the other direction and attempt to gain clout with the government and telco security by inviting them onto a bulletin board

41:33that was set up under the auspices of creating a dialogue between hackers and security people and the FBI and Secret Service well it might sound a little ridiculous to think about but the FBI thought it was great because it gave them a chance to chat with hackers and then arrest them so while people from LOD were being nabbed by the police and others were scattering it looked like LOD was dead but it wasn't entirely there was one person who was trying to keep it alive Eric Bloodaxe

42:05aka Chris Gargans Eric Bloodaxe thought it would be a really great idea to try to bring back LOD for what it was in the absence of any real leadership in the group anymore because anyone who mattered anymore had withdrawn he basically appointed himself leader of the group and he had ideas to take it in a new direction Bloodaxe himself was a long time member of LOD and was an editor a frack too so he suspected the police would come after him too and they did on March 1st 1990 his off-campus townhouse at the University of Texas

42:35was raided at 6 in the morning but he was expecting them so even though there were 6 armed policemen in his bedroom Bloodaxe was pretty calm in fact he basically staged the place for them like he left out a brochure that he knew they'd see and it said how to become a secret service agent one of the agents rifling through his stuff grabbed it and asked him about it Bloodaxe told him that you know maybe when all this is over I can help out he actually had been thinking about switching sides for a while now and he picked up

43:05the idea from a book called Fighting Computer Crime released in 1983 but Bloodaxe always held on to the belief that there shouldn't be any destruction when it comes to hacking so they didn't find much evidence on him committing crimes other than he was a member of the Legion of Doom and they let him go without any charges Bloodaxe tried making a BBS to bring together hackers security teams from telcos and police but it didn't go well and it closed up he then decided to start a business to try to advise

43:36companies about hacking from an office in Texas but he was doing more than that there was a great amount of disagreement and dissension within LOD in the late 1980s because of the fact that there was informing going on several people several members of the Legion of Doom had gotten busted under mysterious let's just say mysterious circumstances people that we knew people that we were affiliated in other countries for example a hacker group in Australia

44:06were busted under suspicious circumstances which all led to a certain individual that we all know and love in Texas who had started one of the first hacker consultancies under the auspices of gaining clout with the FBI and telco security the person I'm referring to is Eric Bloodaxe in case it wasn't clear to anyone in the audience Bloodaxe started a company called Comsec Data Security

44:37it became known to even other LOD members who were wondering if I had heard anything about Eric Bloodaxe because they were concerned for their own safety when they heard about what happened with some hackers in Australia and others and suspected that he was involved but he was trying to gain clout with the government to bolster his business and in doing so was turning in hackers when hackers found out he was doing this they began harassing him and his business and so on which is you know what hackers do in general and certainly someone who's informing

45:07on other hackers is going to earn the wrath of other hackers from the Citicorp atrium everyone who could would pick up a pay phone and start calling the Comsec phone number it was a denial of service attack if you will which tied up the phone lines and made it so nobody could ever get through to Comsec and that would last all day until people got bored and had to go eat dinner at like 8.30 or so a legendary hacker feud was starting to stir up LOD versus MOD but Eric Bloodaxe from LOD could handle

45:38all these prank phone calls this wasn't a big deal to him so no shots fired back yet LOD would sometimes host conference calls to chat about what was happening John Lee aka Corrupt a member of MOD would hear about these calls and join in and one day he jumped on the call and introduced himself as Dope Fiend from MOD and someone shouted get that n-word off the line John Lee was black and took offense to this Bloodaxe would always deny that he was the one who said it but we called John

46:08and John knows what he knows John Lee and his buddy Julio joined more of these LOD bridges but they listened in silently after that without introducing themselves and they heard it again the slurs that the Texan hackers would use to refer to them these definitely were not slips of the tongue so John Lee decided to make Bloodaxe's life hell he and Julio prank called him incessantly taunting him dialing again and again over and over and just hanging up but still Bloodaxe kept his

46:38cool and didn't do anything back remember earlier in this episode I told you about a super secret file on LOD's Fifth Amendment BBS it allowed anyone to hack into the PBX system developed by the company called Rome and even LOD members were explicitly instructed to never copy it well John Lee got into the Fifth Amendment and he stole the file and he spread it to other BBSes around the country just to spite LOD and now Bloodaxe got mad that John took this file and spread it so in return

47:08he took a copy of the history of MOD a file written by Eli describing the group and how it came together and ran it through a program that converted it to jive language like a comically racist impression of the original text which he then published to the world and everybody knew who he was trying to annoy there was only one black hacker in MOD John Lee then took a shot at Bloodaxe's sidekick Scott Chasen by publishing his mom's credit history phone number and home address

47:39on a popular BBS and as a bonus he even included some sexual commentary about her then Eric Bloodaxe got a password to MOD's BBS from a guy who really didn't like John and this spat just kept going up and up and John Lee wanted to take it a step up in the summer of 1991 from his humid air conditionless apartment in Brooklyn he wanted to mess with Bloodaxe even more by tapping his phone he wanted to get in Bloodaxe's head first he broke into Southwestern Bell

48:10casually like he's done a thousand times before then he connected to a switch that controlled Comsec's phone line which is Bloodaxe's official line using computer commands he asked the switch if the line was currently in use and it was so he tapped into the call and spied on what they were discussing at Comsec what he heard was a call where Eric Bloodaxe was talking to Craig Neidorf aka Night Lightning aka the co-founder of Frack Magazine at the time Craig was as famous as any hacker in the world was

48:41the kind of guy Bloodaxe was probably wanting to impress Craig was calling Comsec for help he was getting harassed with constant phone calls lately and he was fed up Bloodaxe felt his pain he'd been dealing with the same problem he's like you know who Corrupt is aka John Lee yeah well it sounds like something he would do a minute later Bloodaxe got a call on another line and he told Craig hang on just one minute hello yeah that does sound like something I would do

49:11click that was badass Eric Bloodaxe knew exactly what just happened John Lee was listening in on that call now Bloodaxe had to go back to the most famous hacker in the country who needed help dealing with an attack on his phone line and admit that the very call that they were having was under attack and John Lee listened to him admit it Eric Bloodaxe realized this is no way to run a security company he had to do something not just about John Lee but about Mark

49:41he knew Mark was the puppet master take out Mark and everyone at MOD would scatter the whole MOD needed to go and this is where the legendary hacker war began between MOD and LOD Eric Bloodaxe wanted to take out Mark and John Lee wanted to annoy the hell out of Bloodaxe here's Mark again so he decided that I was responsible for this based on some previous disagreements we had had and decided that he was going to inform on me

50:12and various of my friends here in New York by giving information to the FBI about us

Wiretaps and grand jury indictments

50:17and so on and so forth remember I told you about Tom and Fred the security engineers at the New York telephone company well they figured out the people hacking into their network were John and Julio from MOD with months and months of records documenting following every single time that they did it there was enough evidence to send to the police but the police needed to verify the evidence themselves so a judge looked over the paper trail and decided to approve a wiretap for both John and Julio and not just wiretaps for the first time US authorities were granted the ability to tap computer communications

50:47to data taps they called it and I guess the term we might use today is man in the middle or even spyware in a suite of borrowed offices in Manhattan's World Trade Center the Secret Service set up a war room well a wire room is actually what they called it and it was overseen by the FBI filled with computers storage tapes disk drives and cables in every direction a system specifically designed for one occasion to track these teenage hackers on their computers staffed by

51:18two dozen trained agents of the US government working in 12 hour shifts tapping the lines of these teenagers recording all of their internet behavior back then nothing was encrypted so all their passwords and commands and everything that they were doing could easily be seen by the FBI listening and watching everything these kids did with the same intensity of like a Soviet nuclear launch meanwhile the Secret Service made a deal with Eric Bloodaxe anytime ComSec got a call from MOD

51:48he would walk down the street to a specific payphone and inform his FBI and Secret Service handler never using the agent's real name just in case MOD was listening there too the investigation into the Masters of Deception took one year in June 1992 Mark, John, Julio, Eli, and Paul each received an envelope in the mail a letter informed them that they were the subject a grand jury investigation which means they are suspects in a crime and soon after that they were all arrested

52:19and formally charged with violating yep, you guessed it the CFAA I'll let Mark tell it from here As things fell apart EFF was supporting us to go to trial Wait, the EFF sorry, I hate to interrupt here but I know the story has been like gone in seven different directions and things are mashed together all over but this is something I think I need to talk about when John Perry Barlow clashed with Mark and he got spooked remember he dropped his credit report in the chat spooked more than

52:49he's ever been before but he also realized petty arguments aside something much greater is happening in the country right now and these kids were bearing the brunt of it after their argument John Perry Barlow asked Mark give me a call and rumor has it he didn't even give Mark his number because he thought that would be an insult to such a powerful freaker but soon his phone rang and of course it was Mark and later John actually wrote about this call he said in this conversation and the others that followed I encountered an intelligent civilized and surprisingly principled kid of 18 who sounded and continues to sound

53:20as if there's little harm in him to man or data his cracking impulses seemed purely exploratory and I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves it's such a great analogy John Perry Barlow wondered whether what Mark and his annoying friends were doing was really as bad as the police would have him believe is transmission through an otherwise unused data channel really theft he asked himself this question or put another way is there a difference

53:51between exploring and exploiting if you break in just to look around and cause no damage maybe you're just exploring in the months that followed John Perry Barlow kept an eye out as Secret Service agents were busting in through hackers doors across the country including Mark and Eli's houses carrying guns taking all of the things and cordoning off their family members this was all part of what the Secret Service called Operation Sun Devil which resulted in 27 warrants

54:22for hackers spread across 14 cities it was a massive crackdown nationwide on hackers it was very serious and very scary search warrants are going out here in Chicago and a dozen other cities coast to coast in an effort to stop computer fraud that is costing companies and consumers millions of dollars as Elizabeth Vargas reports authorities have already seized computer equipment and thousands of computer records they say it is the white collar crime of the 90s raids in Chicago

54:53and a dozen other cities this week exposed a million dollar ring of high tech computer hackers it is not a game they're attempting and are getting into credit cards they're getting into telephone systems they're getting into medical records credit records they're getting into everything the raids come after a two year nationwide investigation called Operation Sun Devil like even the guy who reported the profit for stealing the E911 file and stashing it on his computer he even got raided he's like man I'm the one who found it I'm the one who turned it in

55:25and I'm also suffering that guy was cooked

Founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation

55:27John Perry Barlow saw that the government was overstepping and using the CFAA to justify arresting dozens of people for being curious everyone in MOD was accused of violating the CFAA members of LOD were arrested for it and so many other innocent bystanders so John Perry Barlow was seeing all these people getting scooped up left and right and he thought someone needs to do something about this and he met with Mitch Kapor this guy was on the well too and Kapor was known for inventing the spreadsheet program

55:57called Lotus 123 they both lived in San Francisco which is where the well was hosted too and together the two of them got together and said let's do something here and they started the EFF the Electronic Frontier Foundation they wanted to fund education lobby for digital rights and help with the legal cases related to constitutional rights in cyberspace they were worried that law enforcement and lawmakers didn't understand the digital world that they were trying to regulate and that ignorance was turning curiosity into crime and I want to remind you that John Perry Barlow

56:28was the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace he loved the internet and so together they had dinner with big names in tech like Stuart Brand and Steve Wozniak to go over the ideas of what the EFF was and Steve was so into it that he pitched in some of his own money to get things started and it was settled the EFF was born and its online home at the time was the well and the EFF is still going strong today it is a leading voice for advocating for digital rights in the United States

56:59and the thing was almost all of those arrests were resulting in nothing the police were raiding offices and homes and taking computers but finding no evidence of computer crimes at all and letting people go without any charges like the most comical of all these raids was on Steve Jackson games so this was a game studio that made board games like roll the dice role playing type board games right and one of the Legion of Doom members worked there in fact you heard his voice at the very beginning of the last episode the guy who wrote

57:29the hacker manifesto Lloyd Blankenship the Secret Service was sure that Lloyd hacked into Bell South stole some stuff and was using it at work the proof that the Secret Service had the role playing game that Lloyd was making was a cyberpunk game which had a hacker campaign in it they thought this was an instruction manual for hackers so they raided the entirety of Steve Jackson games seized computers seized emails

58:00arrested people took notebooks took everything but Steve Jackson himself was like whoa that is not a hacker manual it's a work of fiction we just made that story up and this was one of the first cases that the EFF took on to help out claiming the Secret Service was totally overreaching with this CFAA and it's just way too broad of a law this is the dumbest law ever and so that case got dropped when they found absolutely no evidence of a crime which was a huge win

58:30for the EFF in fact it got dropped so hard that the court criticized the Secret Service for such a sloppy understanding of crimes that they were chasing and then Mark aka Fiber Optic was another one of EFF's first cases they felt that we were not guilty of what the US attorneys were saying we did there was even at least one attempt by one of the complainants in the case British Telecom TimeNet wanting to actually interview us which if we were given the opportunity would have shown cooperation

59:01and would have given us the opportunity to tell them exactly what we did we would have met the engineers that built the network they were interested how we defeated their security sounds like a movie but unfortunately the US Attorney's Office did not allow them to do this so we were never given the opportunity to clear our name so we were basically treated like criminals and due to that fact one by one my friends the guys that were named in the indictment decided to plead guilty until I was the only one

59:31remaining and it's you know the typical cliche of the last guy standing without a chair when the music stops the judge even said a message must be sent so that was Mark and then there was Eli aka Acid Freak one of the members of MOD who also got arrested Eli was thrown into prison for a relatively minor offense some of the members of his crew broke into the computers that list everybody's credit ratings you know and they copied some credit reports and they sold the information to other people and he was named

1:00:02as a member of this conspiracy they said we missed you know we abused our power but we didn't abuse it at all we did nothing compared to the things that could have been done you know what we did was such a small thing in such a larger scheme of things you know it's kind of depressing in a way I mean there's so many things we could have done we could have monitored you know Peter Lynch you know and what's the next best investment for the day you know and we'd make millions of dollars you know

1:00:33investing or shorting some stock but we never did and you know now we wonder why we're like damn there's so many applications for this kind of stuff what happened but then we're like ah you know we were just kids MOD co-founders Paul and Eli each got half a year in jail Mark got a whole year in jail and John Lee got a year in jail too Julio who did all of John's crimes

1:01:03along with him got off free which is probably because he cooperated with the police a few LOD members Adam and the Prophet faced up to two million dollars in fines and 40 years in prison which would have been ridiculous but in the end Adam got sentenced to 14 months and the Prophet got 21 months

The E911 trial and monumental win

1:01:20in prison and then there was Craig's case aka Night Lightning the co-founder of Frack he was in trouble for publishing the E911 file he was also one of the first cases that the EFF took on and if you think about it this is a federal case so they couldn't charge him with just publishing the article because that would just go completely against the First Amendment so instead they were charging him with theft and wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property Bell South

1:01:51was saying that the E911 file was worth $79,000 and contained highly sensitive information Prophet was charged with the same stuff and he just admitted guilt but Craig no no no Craig was like I am not guilty and so a trial began and the trial was absolutely ridiculous for one they wouldn't show the E911 file to the jury or put it in evidence for fear that it would become public record and then anyone could see it two Bell South claimed it cost the company a ridiculous amount of damage but they couldn't

1:02:22produce a shred of evidence to show where they got that number the prosecutors wanted to put Craig in prison for 30 years and fine him $122,000 for publishing this file in frack but as the trial went on they learned that the E911 file didn't in fact have any information on how to configure it change it or use it it wasn't a technical manual at all but more of an escalation path for troubleshooting emergency services if this breaks call this office if that breaks call this office that sort of thing

1:02:54it had a lot of technical jargon which made it incredibly hard to read but it didn't teach anyone how to take down the 911 system and the prosecutors were pitting their whole argument against how dangerous it was to publish that saying that anyone who reads it could go and take down the 911 system but it just wasn't the case all you got out of it were definitions and escalation paths barely anything to actually do anything with and the trial just kept going on but then suddenly EFF got a hot tip

1:03:26from someone it was discovered that if you called up Bell South they would actually send you the E911 file and just charge you a $13 printing and shipping fee it was basically available free from the very company that was accusing him of theft from what I understand is that it wasn't the exact same file but the contents had the same information in it so whatever was supposed to be secret and sensitive was not in fact secret or sensitive because they were giving it away the prosecution had no legs

1:03:56to stand on after that and the case got dropped this was not a holy manual worth $79,000 it was a common technical document that the very company would give away for free if you just asked for it this was a monumental win for frack and the EFF for frack this put them down into legendary status they weren't just a hacker e-zine anymore they were the hackers who got arrested by the secret service fought the law and won how badass is that and for the EFF

1:04:27this was proof to them that the CFAA legislation was prone to overreach and was improperly being used to criminalize the dissemination of information this solidified the idea that the EFF was an important entity that had to keep fighting for our digital rights man there couldn't be a better symbol to wrap up this story with because whether the E911 file was the most dangerous document on the internet or just a $13 pamphlet it almost didn't even matter in the end because what if I told you the day before

1:04:58authorities raided Craig and a week before they raided MOD AT&T admitted very publicly that the outage was caused by a bug in their own software it was self-inflicted by AT&T itself by accident but still it was their own doing one of their programmers put in the word break in the wrong part of the code and that just caused all their computer switches to crash so all that kerfuffle all those arrests which was triggered by the AT&T outage was all

1:05:28because AT&T broke their own systems it took years for people to get their lives back on track and there's still a lot of bitterness between people in those circles and here's Eli again and this was where Ira Glass interviewed him after he got out of prison and wasn't allowed to touch a computer for a while so I was like damn this is like I have to fill this void what should I do you know and I didn't know what to do anymore it was like horrible just you know it was sad we would call

1:05:59each other up and usually we'd be talking about computers and trading passwords and did we get into this and that and I remember the first time we called I was like so what's up nothing I cleaned my room yesterday yeah they came over and cleaned my room too pretty well yeah I know so what do you want to do I don't know because it's like such a large part of our lives at that point you know you have so much power to lose it in an instant like that

1:06:30it's just so it's such a shock you know it's like bam you don't have that power anymore you can't sit on your computer what are you going to do oh oh I'm a regular guy now I'm not I'm not acid freak anymore you know what's acid freak without a computer you know just a regular guy so it was a bummer and I think

The end of the golden age

1:06:54that marks when the sun set on the golden age of hacking what began as a thousand screeching modems and dim bedrooms lit by the glow of heavy monitors fueled by curiosity and rebelliousness it ended in knock knock knocks at the door and the wires got heavy the fun got serious too serious the thrill of dialing blindly into the unknown gave way to lawyers headlines and the cold steel of federal laws

1:07:24written by people who never touched a terminal in their lives the federal government raided people's homes they looked for digital demons and found instead a bunch of misfit kids arguing about bawd rates and antsy colors but it didn't matter the spell had been broken the new digital frontier was now off limits to exploration you could feel it the stakes were higher now the channels were quieter the boards went dark the legends disappeared the ones who stuck around

1:07:54well they took jobs behind desks that they used to try to hack into but back then during that fleeting stretch of time it really did feel like this is our world now the world of the electron and the switch and the beauty of the bawd unregulated uncharted unsupervised pure signal and no static punk rock energy a crooked little utopia that was inside all our computers and if you were lucky enough to log in while it lasted you know it wasn't just hacking

1:08:26it was freedom it was adventure into a new frontier it was the last beautiful accident before the age of control because when the CFAA showed up a law written by people who couldn't tell the difference between terrorism and curiosity it didn't catch real criminals just the kids who still believed that the frontier was worth exploring you can't hack the world forever but for that brief moment in time it sure felt like we could

1:08:56you may stop an individual but you can't stop us all after all we're all alike this episode was researched and written with help from Nate Nelson together we crushed a ton of books and scoured the far reaches of the internet and we kept getting pulled in so many directions which is why this episode was so long I got super fascinated by so many aspects of hacking in the 80s and went down some really fun memory lanes

1:09:27I want to specifically mention two books that were super helpful for us to write this episode there's Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling and Masters of Deception by Michelle Slatala and Joshua Quitner these books captured what was happening in the shadows at the time in such a clear and remarkable way you definitely should check them out if you want to hear more about what happened then or for a totally different story of hacking in the 80s check out the book Cuckoo's Egg which is a classic hacker story as a reminder you can get a premium listening experience by going to

1:09:57plus.darknetdiaries.com if you sign up you'll get an ad-free version of this show plus 11 bonus episodes not only that it's an amazing way to show your support for the show and to keep the lights on over here if you like what we're doing and you want more of it please consider supporting by going to plus.darknetdiaries.com this episode was created by me Sir Crashalot Jack Recider this episode was written by Freakachoo Nate Nelson our editor is the Laserdisc Lord Tristan Ledger this episode was scored by the Blind SQL Injection

1:10:28Andrew Merriweather mixing by Proximity Sound intro music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder so I remember I got banned from a BBS a sysop just was like you're not welcome here anymore why? because I uploaded 12 incomplete copies of King's Quest because I was trying to download Leisure Suit Larry this is Darknet Diaries