168: LoD

24:35Show users returned a list of employees that he could impersonate to gain access to get more privileges on this network. He told his friend Eli about this computer. Eli thought, oh, you must have gotten into an SCCS, a switching control center system, a.k.a. the beating heart of the city's telephone system. It appeared he was, in fact, in a telephone switch. and this was for the New York Telephone Company. This controlled calls and phone numbers. It was part of the inner workings of the phone company. He wanted to try something. Nothing big, just a little something. Just to prove this wasn't a dream.

25:07So he looked up his friend's phone number, which was in there and it showed which features his friend had. So he gave his friend a new feature, free of charge, three-way calling and then logged out. This is where you could call two people at once. It was real fancy at the time and cost extra. This was hacking at its finest in the 1980s. Discovering a computer all on your own by war dialing. Out of all the numbers in the world, you found one that works. Figuring out a way to get into it, and then finding some useful commands, then to do a little something just to prove you were there. Oh man, how cool.

25:42Paul got a real high from this experience. If connecting to BBSs felt like wizardry, getting into a computer like this was on another level. It wasn't just magic anymore. This was God powers. This was bending reality, creating from nothing, unlocking truths that were buried deep in the mysteries of the internets. This is what hackers lived for in the 80s. Ever since that Esquire article in 1971, people got more and more interested in freaking. And that just grew and grew. And by the way, even though Esquire popularized and romanticized blue boxes and freaking, They never got in any trouble for doing that.

26:21In November of 1985, a new online magazine published their first issue. It was called Frack, which starts with a P-H. It's a combination of freak and hack. Now, back in 1985, there weren't even web browsers yet. So Frack didn't have their own website to publish their e-zine to. Instead, they published issue number one on a BBS and encouraged people to just share it, spread it to other BBSs. And so it did. Any hacker BBS worth its salt back then had a copy of Frack. And honestly, it was just a text document. No photos in it. Text files were king back then, mainly because it was faster to send text over the internet because images were really big and took forever to see.

27:03So text files were just where it was at. Issue one of Frack had some interesting articles. Like there was one just how to make international calls, not for free, just how to call internationally if you ever have to. Like it had a list of country codes and how to dial them. But it had some pranky stuff in there too. Like, did you know you could call the phone company, state that you're someone else, and tell them, I no longer want service, and could you please terminate my number? And that's how you can get the phone company to disconnect someone else's telephone. And there's stuff in there like how to use a PBX if you're ever on one.

27:35And there's an article about how to pick locks. And an article on how to make acetylene balloon bombs. Basically saying, put some rocks and fun snaps in a plastic bag. Fill the plastic bag with acetylene. a highly flammable gas, and throw it off a building, and when it hits the ground, the snaps create a spark, and that explodes the balloon, making a loud noise and a big ball of fire. See, anarchy was pretty popular on BBSs back then. It was everywhere you looked. Bomb-making tutorials, lock-picking techniques, shoplifting advice, how to bypass security systems, and other urban survival guides.

28:11I just ran a Twitter poll asking people if they ever went online when they were a kid and saw plans on how to make a flamethrower. And half my followers said yes, they did see plans on how to make a flamethrower when they were a kid. A real popular book among teenagers then was the Anarchist Cookbook, which had schematics and diagrams on how to make bombs, explosives, and cause havoc. I was 15 when I first saw it, and it spooked me a bit. This seemed like serious destruction. But I took a look at it again just now, and it looks like it was written by kids for kids. It's not very detailed. Some of the ideas don't work at all, and there's no safety precautions to follow.

28:52I mean, I remember going into a bookstore when I was a kid. It was Walden Books, actually, in the mall. And I was just walking through the bookstore, and one book caught my eye, and it made me stop dead in my tracks. The title of the book was, Steal This Book. And it stared at me like a dare. Go ahead, steal me. And I swear, I thought long and hard about it. But ultimately didn't. And I couldn't ask my dad to buy it for me either because it seemed like it was a book I wasn't supposed to have. So I just grabbed it and flipped through it. And it was wild. Very anti-establishment. Part survival guide.

29:27Part political manifesto. It was encouraging me to steal. To rebel against capitalism. Crazy stuff was in it. How to hitchhike. How to dumpster dive. Where to get free clothes. How to make smoke bombs and disrupt phone lines. How to run a pirate radio station. and it was written in 1971. And again, it's wild to me that Ramparts was raided for publishing an article on how to make a mute box. But half the kids in the 70s and 80s were finding schematics on how to make bombs online. And a good percentage of them were actually trying to make them, which is even more wild. Like eBay has banned the anarchist cookbook now from being sold there, which a book that practically half my followers have read as a teenager is now banned on eBay.

30:11I'm telling you, anarchy was in style in the 80s. There was a certain attitude that steal this book and the anarchist cookbook possessed, and that seemed to carry right on over into what the internet culture was like in the 80s. It was counterculture, anti-establishment. There was distrust of authority. Smash the system. It wasn't just a vibe. It was practically the first principles that a lot of people were operating at. The early internet wasn't slick or sanitized. It was raw, lawless, DIY. Sharing of text files was like sharing of contraband. Whether you were reading articles on how to pick a lock or get a free phone call on how to make a bomb, it all seemed to have some sort of cloak of secrecy.

30:51And what you were doing was accessing forbidden information that they didn't want you to see. The internet felt like a digital back alley where sysops were gatekeepers to secret knowledge. It was punk rock at its core. It was cyber anarchy. and was the idea that the system could be subverted, bent, and reprogrammed. It wasn't just fun. It was freedom. These kids would take the shiny, polished world and peel it back and look into the guts and wires and bits and bytes that controlled it. They found themselves in control of it. They didn't need to ask for permission. You scavenged parts to build computers.

31:28You cracked programs instead of buying them. It's like the rules were suddenly optional. Obstacles were just challenges. And the world was incredibly fun for those who were curious of how it worked. And a lot of these ideas were coming across my screen as a teenager. And that shaped me to who I am today. Yeah, there's a schematic for how to build a flamethrower on my computer. Interesting. I mean, this stuff gave me an enormous amount of destructive power. And I had to learn what to do with that power. Did I make a flames for as a kid? Absolutely. It was just hairspray and a lighter, but it did spray fire.

32:09Did I make bombs? Absolutely. And I've got to say, I'm really lucky that I didn't blow off a finger or set the whole house on fire, since that could have easily happened with all the things I was doing. And the ethics of stealing would come up again and again. Stealing is wrong, but the freakers of the 1980s had a different way of looking at things. To them, making a free phone call by hacking the system wasn't theft. It was exploration. Here's the logic. They placed calls late at night when the phone lines weren't very busy. The infrastructure was already up and running, whether they were using it or not.

32:41Their calls didn't displace anyone else. It didn't congest the network. It didn't cost the phone company anything extra. So, if no one lost anything, was anything really taken? That was the ethical loophole that they lived in. If there's no marginal cost, no harm, and no deprivation, then how could it be theft? Many freakers genuinely believed this. Others didn't care because, let's be honest, a big part of the scene was driven by anti-authoritarianism, curiosity, and a taste for anarchy. Things really started to heat up in 1984. At that time, AT &T wasn't just a phone company. It was the phone company, a telecommunications giant with a stranglehold on every call made across America.

33:28It was massive, monolithic, and seemingly unbreakable. To many in the underground anarchists, hackers, freakers, it was the very symbol of centralized control, the system incarnate. But in January of that year, the unthinkable happened. The U.S. government stepped in and forced a breakup. AT &T was declared a monopoly, too powerful for its own good. And under legal pressure, it was torn apart, shattered into eight separate entities, the so-called baby bells. And for those watching from the digital shadows, it was seismic. The unbreakable had broken. A vast unified network had splintered overnight.

34:12And with fragmentation came opportunity. New cracks in the system, new seams to explore. The wires were alive again with people probing, learning, exploiting, looking for hidden stuff. It was the dawn of something wild. A freer, looser, more chaotic network. And the perfect playground for cyber anarchists ready to test their limits. And Frack was there watching it all. The digital magazine seemed squarely planted in the hacker, freaker, and anarchy culture. The authors of the articles were kids in the scene, voices from the digital underground. Let me read a passage from Frack. During the summer of 1984, an idea was formulated that would ultimately change the face of the computer underground forever.

34:55This particular summer, a huge surge in interest in computer telecommunications placed an incredibly large number of new enthusiasts on the national computer scene. From out of this chaos came a need for learned instructors to help pass on their store of information to new throngs. The need was met by nine hackers who formed a group called the Legion of Doom. Now, the name sounds pretty menacing, Legion of Doom, or LOD for short, but really the name comes from a comic book. The group of supervillains in DC Comics is called the Legion of Doom. In fact, one of the guys who started the LOD hacking group went by the name Lex Luthor, which was the arch-nemesis of Superman.

35:36Fiber Optic was one of the members of Legion of Doom, and that's fiber spelled with a P-H. Here's a clip of him talking at a convention in New York 15 years ago, explaining what it was. LOD was one of the first organized hacker groups in a very disorganized computer underground. And the main purpose of LOD initially was to take information, primarily that was found trashing at telco central offices, and type it in and make it available in what were known as LOD tech journals, which were available online in text file sections of bulletin board systems, so-called elite bulletin board systems. Oh, yeah, trashing was big back then.

36:18This is where you would go behind an office and look through their trash. They would look for phone numbers or computers or manuals on how to configure things or any sensitive information that the company had thrown out. And phone companies were of particular interest to trash. And again, the ethics of stealing comes in. Is it stealing when you're taking it from someone's trash can? The 16th episode of Dateline NBC actually interviewed one of the Legion of Doom members. Good evening, I'm Jane Pauley. And I'm Stone Phillips. And welcome to Dateline NBC. How do real hackers operate? And just what kind of damage can they do?

36:52It's so weird to me that you could turn on the TV back then and learn what trashing was. Adam belonged to an elite hacker club called the Legion of Doom. One of the methods he used to obtain secret computer codes was to rummage through the trash at Bell South, the regional phone company in Atlanta. Back a few years ago, they weren't locked. You could just slide the doors open, reach in, grab a baggie, leave. Now, one thing that was worth its weight in gold to these hackers were simply manuals for how computers worked. Again, there was no Google to search for how something worked. Again, there were no browsers even invented yet.

37:27There was no YouTube to walk you through a tutorial on how to use a computer or an application. If you got into a computer that was giving you funky messages back, you probably had no idea how to operate it. And a simple manual on how to use that computer would have been amazing, but it was extremely rare. You had no idea what commands to type on it. The phone company did have manuals to these computers. Obviously, someone had to know how to use them, but they were very well-guarded documents. They did not want to share it because if the wrong person got the manual, it meant they could do anything they wanted in the telephone network.

38:02Keep in mind, passwords were not always mandatory back then. Security was often through obscurity, actually. Like, hide your computer by not sharing the phone number with anyone and don't show anybody how to use it who isn't authorized. So they often relied on nobody knowing what the phone number was and nobody knowing how to use it even if they did dial it. I mean, the word cybersecurity didn't show up until 1983. we're talking about the land of computers before cyber security was even a thing what a magical time that was because honestly the whole internet had like doors wide open anywhere you looked it's just that the doors were hidden and it was up to you to find them so members of the legion of doom would go searching through trash cans behind telephone companies and when they found something they would type it up and share it on their LOD BBS for others to see in this way they started amassing all kinds of random manuals and documentation that the phone company was throwing out.

38:55And I want to stress, so many of these articles didn't show you how to hack anything. It simply was a manual that the manufacturer gave out for how to use their own computers. Legion of Doom quickly became the most respected, most desirable BBS in the entire hacking scene, trafficking in all kinds of precious information about telephone and computer systems. It was the place where any hacker worth their salt wanted to be. We're going to take a quick ad break here, but stay with us because when we come back, everything is about to change. This episode is sponsored by Meter, the company building networks from the ground up.

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40:34Okay, so Ronald Reagan comes into our story here. President of the United States at the time. He went to the movies and he saw this. People sometimes make mistakes. Yes, they do. How can I talk? It's not a real voice. This box just interprets signals from the computer and turns them into sound. Shall we play a game? Oh. I think I missed him. Yeah, weird, isn't it? Yeah. Love to. How about global thermo nuclear war? Wouldn't you prefer a good game or chess? Later. Let's play. Global Thermonuclear War. Fine. All right. Wow. That's the 1983 movie War Games. It's a film about a kid who got into a computer thinking he was just playing a video game, but it turned out to be a military computer, and it triggered a bunch of real alerts that the government thought they were under attack, and all that war was breaking out.

41:43Well, the story goes, President Reagan saw it and asked around, Is that possible that that could happen to us? And they thought about it and came back to him and said, yes, a kid could trigger war if he got into the wrong computer. Then Reagan said, well, what law is there to stop someone from doing that? And there wasn't one. There was no law against hacking into computers in the 1980s. Technology always moves faster than the government. If you broke into a computer, looked around, downloaded things, changed data on there, there was no law saying that what you were doing was illegal. It was a paradise for hackers to just roam free and explore without worry.

42:21Can you imagine such a time and place? So Reagan's like, well, we can't have that. And on October 12, 1984, the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, or CCCA. It was a classic tough-on-crime bill. It upped the penalties for growing and selling marijuana. It expanded judges' powers to deny bail to defendants. And it created, for the first time ever, a computer crime law. And the police were excited to use this law to catch them some hackers. I think, honestly, war games in Hollywood scared the government so bad that they thought hackers were capable of anything. And they were dangerous thugs, terrorists, causing chaos and destruction on the Internet.

43:00They were the next big threat to America. And the feds wanted to get ahead of this and stop it. The police started their campaign with sting boards. BBS is designed to look like a hacker BBS, but it was secretly operated by the cops. The first ones were created in 1985. There was the Underground Tunnel, and it was operated out of Austin, Texas. It was run by a hacker calling himself Pluto, but really it was just a police sergeant. And there was another BBS set up by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Phoenix, Arizona, called The Phone Company. It sounded a little like, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, kind of operation.

43:38But according to Bruce Sterling, the guy who wrote the book, The Hacker Crackdown, these stingboards actually worked, at least sometimes. Most hackers at the time were just young men who barely knew how to type 20 words per minute. And maybe they watched the movie War Games themselves. And they were curious on how to hack. So they'd float into a cool sounding BBS like the underground tunnel. And it seemed legit and allowed them in. So they'd look around and then they'd slip up and get in trouble. Maybe by like trying to buy or sell something stolen like a credit card. But all they ever saw were noobs doing dumb things.

44:10Like people saying they can hack into something but then it's all talk. and police had no evidence to prove that they actually were dangerous. As far as I know, the stingboards did not result in any actual arrests. And I really think it's because most of the freakers and hackers back then were really doing anything that bad. There was something I came across, which I think really emphasizes the lightheartedness of it all. Here, let me show you. Back in the early 90s, there was a radio program called This American Life, and they interviewed some teenage hackers at the time, And they found this one kid who would try to steal credit cards from people and then use that to buy things for himself.

44:47Like, it sounds bad when I say it, but listen to how this kid describes how he stole someone's credit card. Basically, the way it works is this. You call up somebody. You say, this is the AT &T operator. I have a priority collect call for so-and-so's name. You know, and you have the whole point is you have to sound like you're not calling somebody up with the intention of getting them. And you have to sound like you've been sitting in this chair for 10 hours, and you want to go home. So you've got to go, you know, this is the AT &T operator. I have a collect call for Paul. Will we accept charges, sir?

45:19Yeah, I'll accept charges. All right, hold on one second. And you tap on the keyboard. You say, I'm sorry, you seem to have a restriction on your phone line. You can't accept collect calls to this line. And then they yell, and they go, what do you mean I can't accept collect calls to my line? I've been getting collect calls to this line for 20 years. And then you've got to go, sir, there's nothing I can do about it. My computer says you can't receive a collect call on this line. We just like to try an alternate billing method, in which case they'll proceed to either give you a calling card or a major credit card.

45:44But the thing was, despite this clever little plan of theirs, they were wildly unsuccessful at it. I mean, listen to what Ira Glass thinks of these kids. But K-Rad, Mr. Juarez, and Fred were involved in very low-level types of crimes. All of them involved computers. They pirated software. They scammed free CD-ROM games. They cheated one of the big online computer services out of a few hundred dollars in online time. Oh, no, they didn't steal very much. And they didn't steal very effectively. But they did try to steal. He doesn't think much of these kids, does he? Like, he's not scared or intimidated by these crazy hackers at all.

46:23He seems to understand just how low level of a crime this whole thing is. And maybe doesn't even believe that they've done any of this. Oh, and it's kind of funny. I've been accused of being Ira Glass a lot, actually. I'm not Ira, but This American Life was a huge inspiration to me. I adore Ira Glass. Even met him once. So I actually have a picture with me and Ira, and he's kind of a hero of mine. But it's wild. In this episode, Ira Glass follows these three hackers into a hacker convention in New York City. And yeah, I just really want to stress that, you know, we're not bad. We're not like, in other ways, we're not bad people.

46:59and we don't like go around trying to screw off people in any way we can because we're not at all. I mean, like, you know, I do social work. I like, you know, tutored kids. I, like, do a lot of stuff which isn't, like, necessarily evil and, like, more good. But, you know, sometimes it's just like, I don't know, man. I like doing it. I can't explain it. Talk about that part of it. Like, what is the thrill of doing it? That's the first, that was the reason I started carding, And the reason was the thrill of, like, you know, going. We went in there. It was real, like, it was, like, mission impossible.

47:35We, like, we went in. We had gloves on and stuff. And we, like, picked it up. We had, like, we had it all worked out. We were, like, connected. We had, like, lookouts and stuff. And it's just a lot of fun. It's like, you know, you're doing stuff that is not exactly legal and not legal at all. And it's fun. We took the elevators up to the floor where the hackers convention. was taking place. K-Rad said that real hackers do not use their skills like this. They do not use their skills for personal gain. They don't do carding. They don't steal. The whole idea of computer hacking is that, for these guys anyways, that it's a kind of pure Zen pursuit.

48:15You know, it's an ends in itself. You break into the computer for its own sake and to look around and for the knowledge of everyone, especially you. We stood in the hallway. People streamed by. We tried to move to a corner where we would not be overheard. And KRAD said actually that they had never really talked about their illegal activities this much before with anyone. The most thing I'm worried about is I'm actually starting for the first time to say this all out loud, everything I've done. And suddenly it doesn't sound as hacker much anymore. And I've known that ever since I moved into doing maybe some credit card thing.

48:52That's why I'm in fact even considering giving up on doing all the carding and stuff like that. which is what seriously I am. My worst fear is that I'm going to end up going to hell for doing this, and that's, like, my worst fear. Do you believe in hell? Yeah, I do. And you think you can go to hell for getting a computer on somebody else's credit card? I don't know. I hope not. I really hope not. See, that's the kind of kids that the police were creating laws for. They were setting up sting boards for. The Secret Service was investigating kids like this because they thought they were dangerous criminal terrorists.

49:29Did they sound like dangerous criminal terrorists to you? The federal authorities were putting a ton of effort and time and resources into stopping these kind of kids. It just seems disproportionate to me. I was just reading the book, Hacker Crackdown, today, and I read this part where lawmakers in Arizona, the people who were trying to crack down on hackers, were scared to leave their office at night because they parked their car in a bad area of downtown Phoenix. They said people would rob their cars, break into windows, and threaten them if they went to their cars too late. Yet these lawmakers seemed to ignore the crime going on in their own parking lot and focused on kids like this who often weren't even stealing anything at all, just poking their nose into the phone company's computers just to look around to do something to prove they got in.

50:18I mean, listen to what Adam says. a member of the Legion of Doom when questioned on Dateline NBC. At Bell South, we were able to get into all manner of computers, the phone switches themselves. In essence, you got to where you could have turned off everybody's phones in Georgia. Just about anyone out of a couple of dozen of us could have done that. For more than a year, Adam and his friends had free access to the inner workings of 12 Bell South computer systems. They say you could have crashed or broken the 911 system here. Operative word for me is could have. You could have done that? Yes. I could go out and shoot people.

51:00You can. See, that's one of the big things I see again and again in this story. Breaking in versus causing harm. Legion of Doom seemed to love the challenge of getting in, but rarely did much once they did get in. Just getting in was fun enough. There was no need to cause damage. That wasn't their goal. It wasn't what they did. They just liked finding ways in. But the more Legion of Doom got access to, the more the police got more worried that they would take down the whole internet or the phone system or something. And maybe in some way, I could see why the police were worried because of all this anarchy rhetoric online at the time.

51:36All this talk about bomb making and stealing and tearing down the government and smashing the system might have caused the police to worry even more than they needed to. At times, it did feel like the internet was forming some kind of army to cause chaos. But a lot of hackers and freakers had no intention of causing chaos. The police didn't have a very keen eye when it came to trying to catch hackers. They didn't understand this culture at all. They accused a lot of people of being part of Legion of Doom, even when they had nothing to do with LOD. And LOD was trying to be pretty secretive. To get into their BBS, you had to be on the allow list, which meant that the police couldn't get in to see what was going on there.

52:17And that was a double-edged sword. The more notorious the LOD became, it meant the more interested that the police became in them. But if you did happen to get the password to get into the LOD BBS, you'd see technical journals describing telecommunications and computer systems in a remarkable level of detail. Just looking at the table of contents of one of their now leaked documents, I see part three, step-by-step switching system notes. Part four, a guide to the Prime OS operating system. Part 5, Identifying and Defeating Physical Security Intrusion Detection Systems, Part 2, The Exterior. That last one is written by the LOD founder, Lex Luthor.

52:52Lex Luthor's post, despite it being Part 2, is still 5 ,200 words long. This kind of insider knowledge and exclusivity was enough to earn LOD plenty of respect. But they also had information that they refused to publish, even to their private board, because it was too sensitive. Even members were limited on how much they could see. Like there was a special section on the board called the Fifth Amendment, which had a document describing in detail how to break into PBX phone systems developed by the Rome Corporation. A PBX is a device used to make phone calls, typically operating internally in the phone network, but sometimes in large businesses who have a lot of phone lines.

53:30And someone at LOD got the manual for this PBX and read through it. And in there, they learned that phone technicians can use a PBX to listen in on phone calls to perform maintenance and troubleshoot built into the PBX was a way to spy on calls. And because LOD knew this, they could, if they wanted, spy on phone calls too. They could listen in on someone else's call. And that was one of the documents posted on their Fifth Amendment BBS, which members were only allowed to read but never copy. Here's Fiber Optic, one of the members of LOD, talking about it at the HOPE conference. I want to take a few moments to rewind a little bit and speak on behalf of our rules that we live by in our community long before the FBI and Secret Service succeeded in infiltrating our community.

54:20What I will say is this, is that we've always spoken of the quest for knowledge as being most important in our pursuits, that this was always a noble cause, that the destruction of systems, crashing systems, was always something that we avoided doing at all costs, whether by accident or as a joke. It was something that was always frowned upon. The fact that information about technology should be freely available was something that we always held to be of great importance. We always frowned upon companies who charged money for technical documentation and information about operating systems, which was very hard to find in the 1980s, for example, which is why trashing and things of that nature were so popular.

55:16A lot of the times it was to find manuals on how to use the systems that we were getting access to. And I think that was where the heart of it all was. The belief that information should be free, not stolen, not sold, free. It was less about exposing secrets and more about liberating knowledge that was locked behind corporate firewalls or buried in obscure systems. hackers weren't trying to destroy anything. They were trying to understand it, document it, and share it. Phone manuals, switchboard maps, internal memos, obscure technical how-tos, all of it was fuel for their curiosity. Publishing that information wasn't just rebellion.

55:57It was a public service. It was about leveling the playing field, about making the closed systems of power readable to anyone with a terminal who was willing to learn. For many, that was the real prize. not money, not chaos, access. The idea that no system should be so sacred that it couldn't be understood. That knowledge wasn't a crime. That documentation wasn't dangerous. That teaching others how things worked wasn't subversion. That was empowerment. Again, let me quote from Frack magazine. LOD members may have entered into systems numbering in the tens of thousands. They may have peeped into credit histories.

56:35They may have monitored telephone calls. They may have snooped into files and buffered interesting text. They may still have total control over entire computer networks, but what damage have they done? None, with the exception of the unpaid use of CPU time and network access charges. What personal gains have any members made? None. They were curious teens, testing the limits of what was possible. They weren't supposed to be able to get into the telco and listen in on phone calls, but they could. And that made it feel like what they were doing was impossible. And that brought a great sense of satisfaction on its own.

57:09But the police were convinced they were evil, anarchist supervillains. I mean, Legion of Doom is a group of supervillains in the comic books, right? And I was talking with a friend the other day, and he said that the more menacing a hacker group name sounds, the likely more innocent that they are. And the more innocent the name is, the more dangerous it probably is. Like Legion of Doom sounds dangerous, and Lizard Squad sounds pretty silly, yet it's really the other way around. The Stingboards caught some of the noobs who wanted to be an LOD, but the police really wanted to stop the core members of Legion of Doom.

57:44There was one hacker named Wasp who started crashing computers at Bell Corps. That's the telecommunications research and development arm of the Bell Telephone Company. And he was just going in, smashing up the place, taking things down, just causing havoc in the phone company. and long time Legion of Doom member named Control C saw this and was like, no, no, no, that's not right. We don't crash systems. You're going to give hackers a bad name. This guy Control C, he has his own storied history with Bell. He used to do trashing runs behind the company's branch in Michigan and he learned what documents they would toss behind and he learned enough that way to learn how to hack in and give himself free long distance calling whenever he wanted.

58:26Mostly so he could connect to BBSs around the country without having to pay long distance fees. But Michigan Bell caught Control-C in 1987, and they found out that this big, bad hacker was actually a pretty likable, harmless kid. He definitely didn't have any money to pay back all those long-distance connections, and arresting him wasn't worth their time. So they turned him into a kind of local mascot. Posters went up with Control-C's face on them around Michigan Bell's offices, warning employees to shred their trash. And he actually signed the posters. Even better, he got on their payroll to help them secure their phone company better, all while he was still in Legion of Doom.

59:04This wasn't as uncommon as you'd think, too. And in this case, it ended up benefiting everyone. So when this WASP guy came in, crashing around in Bellcore, breaking things, Control-C recruited some of his LOD colleagues, which included people from Georgia, like The Prophet, Leftist, and Ervile. And together, the LOD members helped Bellcore's security team lure WASP into a honeypot, which is a machine used to log a bunch of activity when someone connects to it. And WASP was caught and LOD came out feeling good about it. Don't go crashing systems or LOD will come after you and you don't want a hacker group coming after you.

59:39Of course, the cops didn't focus on that side of LOD. They thought they knew LOD and they stuck to their preconceptions that hackers are troubled criminals. And in fact, the investigation got bigger. The Secret Service started getting involved. I think the FBI starts getting in there. since hackers are getting free long-distance calls, and this makes it a federal crime. Let me read to you a passage from The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling's book. As early as 1986, the police were under the vague impression that everyone in the underground was Legion of Doom. LOD was never that large, but LOD got tremendous press, especially in frack, which at times read like an LOD fan magazine.

1:00:20And frack was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco security. You couldn't get busted as a phone freak, a hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or wares dude without the cops asking if you were a member of LOD. LOD complained about this in frack. The Legion of Doom has been called everything from organized crime to a communist threat to national security to an international conspiracy of computer terrorists bent on destroying the nation's 911 service. Nothing comes closer to the truth than bored adolescents with too much spare time. Now, despite the almost total lack of cybersecurity in a lot of systems then, there were hacker conferences going on.

1:00:57The oldest running hacker conference is SummerCon. It started in the 80s by Frack Magazine. And the feds thought, well, if we want to catch a hacker, SummerCon is the place to be. It's swarming with hackers. So in 1988, the Secret Service went to SummerCon in St. Louis to try to find hackers committing crimes. Now, if the Secret Service shows up to a hacker conference with their earpieces and nice suits. They'll stick out like a sore thumb. So they needed a disguise, but not just a disguise, someone to pose as a hacker themselves, an insider. So they got a mole, someone who looked and talked like a hacker.

1:01:32They even gave their mole a nickname, Dictator. Dictator. And the Secret Service went to St. Louis and got a hotel room right next to the conference. It was your classic sting operation. The Secret Service set up in the hotel room right next to Dictator's room and then drilled holes in the walls of the hotel room so they could put cameras up and one-way mirrors and microphones. They had full surveillance of Dictator's room. So then Dictator goes into SummerCon, hey, fellow hackers, and meets some dudes at the conference and invites them back to his room for like a hangout sort of party thing and stuff.

1:02:08The Secret Service got all excited when they saw hackers fill in the hotel room. They watched intently, excited to catch a hacker in the act. until they sat and watched, ears perked, equipment on. But they were disappointed. It was just a bunch of nerds hanging out talking nerdy, like how frustrated they get when someone picks up the phone in their house and disconnects them from the internet, or they were comparing modem speeds. It was a big waste of time. But then, they do witness a crime. One of the hackers pulls out a can of beer and drinks it. Oh no, he happened to be under the legal drinking age.

1:02:49And that was the only crime that the Secret Service saw at SummerCon in 1988. These curious and bored teenagers involved with LOD stayed out of trouble for the most part. They didn't think being a hacker was bad or illegal at all. And if we back up a bit, the word hacker was coined by the kids at MIT's Model Railroad Club. To them, a hack was simply a playful or clever solution to a technical problem. And the computer hackers of the 80s had their own idea of what a hacker was, and it was never criminal. Here's some people at a hacker camp in the 1980s explaining what they think the word hacker means.

1:03:30A hacker is just a person who hacks away at the computer keyboard until the program works. Now, a cracker, on the other hand, is almost the same thing. He just hacks away at that keyboard, but until he breaks into, cracks the system security on a computer. A hacker never finishes a program. A hacker will get to a point where a program does something and maybe take a deep breath and say, how can I make it do this? How can I make it do that? And it'll just keep working. And the hacker often won't shut off the computer until he collapses at the keyboard or something. They do not have so much the normal friends to distract them, other activities to go to.

1:04:06They don't generally have girlfriends. Anything that's going to need a large attachment, commitment of their time, the computer is it and only it. That last voice was Steve Wozniak, who we can easily say was one of the greatest hackers of all time for creating Apple computers. LOD kept out of trouble for the most part, even when they broke into newer and bigger networks. But this wasn't going to last forever. This was going to be the last time the hackers got to enjoy free, unscrutinized, harmless fun. On October 16, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law an amendment to the CCCA, that computer crime law I talked about earlier.

1:04:46The amendment was called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA. And this was legendary. This one was important. You see, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, the CCCA, from 1984, only defined a very narrow range of illegal computer crimes. It banned using computers to try to obtain national secrets or financial records or hacking to government computers in general. And that was about the gist of it. The CFAA starts out with a whopper of a statement saying, it's illegal to access a computer without authorization. Wow. But wait, it goes on. It also says it's illegal to exceed authorized access.

1:05:28That part, exceeding authorized access, is one of the most absurdly broad and legally sloppy phrases to ever make its way into federal law. What does that even mean? Because who decides what's authorized? Because the truth of it is that everyone violates this all day, every day. Because the way it's written means that if you violate the terms of service of an app or a website, that means you exceeded your authorized access or used the site in a way that you weren't authorized to do. And that means you just committed a federal offense. So like that lie you put on your dating profile, it's against the terms of service to lie on there, which means you're using the site in an unauthorized manner.

1:06:13Your company issued you a computer for work? It's for business use only. If you check Facebook on it, that's not authorized activity. Sharing your Netflix or Spotify password with a friend? That's unauthorized use of the service. And I could just go on and on about how many times you've probably violated this or used a website in an unauthorized way. Like, have you used a browser plugin to fill in a form on a job application or when purchasing concert tickets? That's a violation of their terms of service since you can't use automation when interacting with the site. Have you played solitaire on a school computer?

1:06:43Illegal! You're authorized to use that computer for educational purposes only. Used a coffee shop Wi-Fi without buying anything. Illegal, unauthorized access. That's for customers only. Can you tell I hate the CFAA? And that's just the first line of it. The CFAA effectively criminalizes violating the terms of service. Every day, millions of people technically break this law by doing totally harmless things. And while most people aren't prosecuted, the law gives prosecutors a loaded weapon to easily take someone down. And they do it all the time. The law goes on. It talks about spreading malware, performing denial-of-service attacks, insider attacks, stealing passwords, altering and destroying someone else's data.

1:07:29And this law, made in 1986, still reigns as one of the predominant computer hacking laws today. It's poorly written, vague, and outdated. But most of all, it's misused. If you've ever heard someone get arrested on this show, they probably got charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. And what it meant back then for hackers like the LOD was that all of a sudden, a lot of what they were doing was no longer child's play. It was now a federal offense. A federal offense. Did they understand that? Did these guys follow what politicians were doing in Washington, D.C.? I bet most of them did not have a clue.

1:08:08But more importantly, have you ever met a teenager? The quickest way to get them to do something is to tell them that they can't do it. What's the lesson in your story for other hackers? Don't get caught. Don't do it. People are going to do what they're going to do. How do you think it plays to people at home when you tell others simply don't get caught? That's their own business. I don't think it's right for other people to tell me how to live my life. so I shouldn't tell other people how to live their lives. And yet you acknowledge that hacking is wrong. Smoking is wrong. Taking drugs is wrong.

1:08:48People do it all the time. That was Adam, a member of the LOD. In September 1988, Adam's friend, another member of the LOD called The Prophet, came across a document that stunk of wrong. He got into a computer at Bell South and was looking at the files on it, just curiously looking for manuals that might be interesting. and he stumbled onto a three-page text file called Bell South Standard Practice Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers dated in March 1988. It's a long file name, so I'm just going to call it the E-911 file, but it was an incredibly technical and boring document to read.

1:09:30It's just a few pages of the thickest jargon you can imagine. There weren't many people in the country who would be able to make sense of this, But the prophet thought this was something special, something coveted, a manual for Bell's 911 service? The prophet grabbed this document from Bell South's computer. And again, the ethics of stealing is brought up here. He didn't rob Bell South of the document. He copied the document. And Bell South still had their copy and had no idea that he grabbed a copy of it. So is it really stealing? The prophet was a little scared of this document. So he stashed it on a friend's computer.

1:10:04He didn't even want it on his own device. The Prophet then shared this E911 manual with Craig Neidorf. That's White Lightning. Craig was one of the founders of Frack Magazine. And Craig was like, whoa. And Prophet's like, yeah, whoa. And Craig was like, we should publish this in Frack. And Prophet's like, I don't know. There's a lot of sensitive stuff in here. But together, the two of them censored out all the extra sensitive stuff, like phone numbers and specific Bell South employees' names and that pesky warning at the top, not for public use or disclosure. And so on February 25th, 1989, Frack published this E911 document under a random name that they made up.

1:10:45Now everyone could see it. It was spreading around all the BBSs in the underground. The prophet tried to distance himself from this document. That's why he stashed it on someone else's computer. But that guy's computer that he stashed it on found it and saw it and saw that prophet who put it there and he looked at it. And this E911 file looks serious, so he passed it on to a friend, and his friend agreed, and passed it on to AT &T, and they passed it over to Bell South. And Bell South was very upset that their manual was exposed. There were two versions, a highly redacted one on Frack, and the original one that Prophet copied.

1:11:23It made Bell very uncomfortable to see such a highly sensitive document out there in the hands of hackers. By the time Frack published the E911 file, the telephone companies and police were already on high alert for what hackers might be plotting against the phone system. So this made them turn all their attention to Frack to find out who is making this and put an end to them and who published this article. Their worries were validated a few months later. On June 13th, 1989, it was a really weird day for criminals of Palm Beach County, Florida. If you had to call your probation officer on that day and you dialed up the number for the Delray Police Station you'd end up chatting with a lady named Tina.

1:12:02And Tina was in New York, and she was a phone sex worker. It would be weird. So you'd be like, what, Will? And so you'd hang up and say, I must have gotten the wrong number. And so you dial the police station again. But again, you would get Tina saying something sexy. Someone had rerouted the Palm Beach probation department number to a phone sex line in New York, which I think is pretty funny, right? I mean, this is classic hacker pranks. Come on, that's funny, right? The cops didn't think it was funny at all, though, nor did Bell South. And it was time to put an end to these hackers. Bell long suspected that hackers would come after them, and this was proof that they were able to attack.

1:12:41Bell South quickly formed an intrusion task force with more than 40 employees working overtime. For weeks, 24 hours a day, security experts rotated in 12-hour shifts, running through countless records, trying to piece together what happened. How were these calls being rerouted to a phone sex line? What they found out shocked them. Someone had remotely connected into the phone company and tampered with the database. They were creating ghost phone numbers with no personal information attached and nowhere to bill to. How dare someone generate phone numbers with no one to bill to? Quick, someone tell the Secret Service how awful this crime is.

1:13:20And so they called the Secret Service and told them. And not long before that, the company had introduced a new digital diagnostic program called REMOB, short for Remote Observation. Hackers not only knew about it, but they figured out how to reprogram it and take control of it. It allowed them to eavesdrop and spy on any calls they wanted. Ira Glass went into the apartment of one of the hackers who was there in the 80s doing all this. I got kind of a lot of equipment around here. I've got a fax machine here. In my room, I've got five phone lines. I got a two-line phone, but I've got everything else connected to computers or a fax.

1:13:53There were cheesy kung fu movies on video. On his CD player, there was old school rap, Nine Inch Nails, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix. And then he says, let me show you the good stuff. And he pulls out Xeroxes of old spiral notebooks. I have here what was ceased from me, but they had to return back to me. It was my evidence examination report by the United States Secret Service. Subject, acid freak. These notes have basically all the systems I got into. Look, I have little sketches and diagrams of how things work, different protocols and networks, definitions. See, a lot of the stuff was really good.

1:14:34I had stuff outside the country. NASA. Something defense? What is it? Government defense. Government defense. Yeah, that's a Washington number. McDonald's. Since I had Telenet, I had McDonald's accounts. If you're a McDonald's employee, I can raise your pay. So that way you get like, you know,$15 an hour for like shuffling burgers and stuff. So did you decide just at random to help someone out? I didn't do it to anybody. I just wanted to know how. Can you imagine that changing the pay rate of your friends at McDonald's? Well, this guy Ira interviewed says he didn't do it. However, there was a kid who did.

1:15:13A 16-year-old kid in Indiana learned what was needed to get into McDonald's computers. and his friends did work there. So he stole one of the logins for the managers at McDonald's and got access. And he actually gave his friends raises, which was epic. I mean, from then on, that kid was known as the Fry Guy. Fry Guy was immature though, loud, a bit annoying. He was the kind of kid who would like claim to be an LOD, but actually wasn't and would never be because he was a scammer. Like he created this crazy elaborate way to steal money from Western Union and credit card companies. It was really intricate.

1:15:46and he would reroute the victim's phone numbers to a nearby payphone so that when the credit card company would call the victim to confirm a charge, it would then go to the payphone outside Fry Guy's house and he would answer it and say, yeah, yeah, I do approve that charge. And he ended up stealing$6 ,000 this way and he would boast about this on BBSs and people would be like, dude, you are breaking the hacker code. Stop doing that. A month after the phone sex prank on July 22nd, the police caught Fry Guy and suddenly he wasn't cocky anymore. He buckled pretty quickly under pressure, and he admitted to all the stuff he did.

1:16:20But then he just kept talking. He added, like, Oh, it wasn't all me. Legion of Doom was doing it too. And this was a story that made sense. In the cop's eyes, the Legion of Doom were the bad guys. Fry Guy offered to testify against the Legion of Doom despite never even being part of it. And he told the police that the Legion of Doom are planning to take out the telephone network on a major U.S. holiday. I think it's the 4th of July. I'm pretty sure he just made it up to try to get out of trouble. But the cops took him very seriously. He became a golden informant. But this news was every police investigator and phone company's worst nightmare.

1:17:00The Legion of Doom was going to take out the phone company? Man, that would bring America to a standstill. But July 4th was a long ways off. So the prosecutors were starting to think that maybe this kid was just a windbag. and they again focused on trying to figure out who was in LOD and to find them and arrest them. But the LOD was good at hiding and the cops could simply not find enough evidence on them to figure out who was in it and would have to wait for someone to slip up. On January 15th, 1990, it was a U.S. holiday, MLK Day. At 2.25 p.m. Eastern Time, a call routing computer switch at AT &T failed.

1:17:41No problem. There are other switches, backups. A single failure is not a big deal. But the failed switch sent a message, help me, to a second switch. And the second switch didn't help. It failed too. And on to the third, the fourth, the fifth, the 50th. A cascade of phone switches were all failing one after another. The AT &T network was going dark across the country. In the control room at AT &T headquarters in New Jersey, dozens of screens were stacked two stories high. They showed data feeds, charts, and maps of the U.S. peppered with dots and lines representing phone services to hundreds of millions of people.

1:18:22This afternoon, engineers and technicians watched as red flashes spread from one screen to another. Around 60 ,000 people lost their phone service. And this was before the internet, so it wasn't like you could just text someone instead. Businesses froze. Services were interrupted. Conversations and lunch dates were abandoned. Almost 50 % of calls through AT &T failed for around nine hours. More than 70 million phone calls were impacted in all. News of this outage started spreading through all the LOD members. Hey man, did you hear? AT &T is down. Oh, what happened? Nobody knows. Did you do it?

1:19:01Oh, of course not. LOD started to get nervous, though. Maybe one of them did do it. If not them, then maybe it was the work of a cyber attack. Maybe someone that they taught? They were puzzled, too, and worried. And imagine being that U.S. attorney from Indiana that day. Fry guy said that LOD was planning a big attack on a major U.S. holiday. And here's a major outage on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Was this what the 16-year-old scant predicted? He just got the date wrong? The police thought this must be the work of Legion of Doom. They were the ones with the stolen telephone manuals, hacking the phone companies, and they could reroute calls and mess with the 911 systems.

1:19:40If anyone could take out the phone company, it was definitely Legion of Doom. But was there any evidence? Some initial reports suggested that there might have been a bug in the system. Did hackers exploit that bug or did they trip over it? Did that matter? The phone companies were down and someone was to blame. Nobody really knew. but the police and Secret Service weren't going to take any chances of this happening again. They decided now is the time to strike to take out whoever they thought hacked this system and their number one suspect was the Legion of Doom. But they were going to discover that Legion of Doom was only the beginning.

1:20:19There was a second hacker group called the Masters of Deception and this story is about to get way more crazy not because of the hackers though but because of the police who totally got out of control.

1:20:33But you'll have to join me in part two to hear the rest of the story. Part two comes out in two weeks.

1:20:56Thank you.