169: MoD

23:17But 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 we would get an account. It was like, it was funny, you know?

23:36You get into things that are good You start targeting systems that are interesting And you start developing a collection It's like baseball cards I have NASA, I have 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 TRW, CBI, TransUnion What else can I get? You try to get big names. So you start developing a collection. Then after a while it became fun to look up famous people. Let's look up John Gotti's credit. Let's see what he owns. Let's look up Julia Roberts. Let's get her home phone number. Let's get this guy's home phone number.

24:15We were just so excited we were getting all that stuff. And it was just a rush. It was the flow. Once you start going, you can't stop. You're just steamrolling one after the other. and the flow gets you going and 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.

24:44That 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, they should give their little hacker group a name, like M-O-D, which 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.

25:19If anything, it's surprising how little they did with their power for 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. 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 there's an emptiness at the heart of a lot of these stories. Once you've got the queen on the phone, you know, what do you say? She's like, hello, you know, she's talking to us and stuff and we don't know what to say.

25:59Hi, 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. I'd probably ask her what kind of computer she has. I mean, she's the queen. She's got to have the best computer in the world, right? All right, we're going to take a quick ad break here, but stay with us, because when we come back, everything's about to get crazy.

26:35This episode is sponsored by DeleteMe. DeleteMe makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. It's easier than ever to find personal information about people online. Having your address, phone number, and family members' names hanging out there on the internet can have actual consequences in the real world and makes everyone vulnerable. Privacy is a super important topic to me. So a few years ago, I signed up and DeleteMe immediately got busy scouring the internet looking for my name and then gave me reports on what they found.

27:07And then they got busy deleting things showing me what they got rid of. It's great to have someone on my team when it comes to my privacy. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for my listeners, you can get 20 % off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash darknetdiaries and use promo code DD20 at checkout. The only way to get 20 % off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash darknetdiaries and enter code DD20 at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash darknetdiaries, code DD20.

28:08something to do with it too, right? The police didn't necessarily know of Masters of Deception as their group name, but they definitely were tracking these people individually. Why? Because Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples, the engineers from the New York Telephone Company, were onto 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.

28:47Bell 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. Bell South is just one example of a company stalked by hackers. In a recent New York case, members of a club known as the Masters of Deception were indicted, accused of hacking into institutions like the Bank of America.

29:31Martin Marietta, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell, New York Telephone, TRW, Information America, and New York University. Jeez, what a list. And the police were trying to piece all this together and trying to figure out who was doing what. But that's a huge list of companies. How did they get into all those things? Partly thanks to Jason. Jason Snitker, a.k.a. Paramaster. And his strange, magical backdoor. a back door that was bigger than any back door I've ever heard of. This is another one of those parts of the story that's so crazy that I didn't even believe it at first. But in preparing for this episode, we managed to find and get a hold of Jason, and he confirmed what really happened.

30:14The story dates back to 1988, when Jason was in high school. He got curious with his modem and computer and ended up getting into a bunch of computers at 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.

30:43And now suddenly everyone had their own blank check from the bank. He worried that he might get caught for that. But that wasn't his biggest worry. The way he'd gotten into Citibank in the first place was this backdoor 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 if he saw something so important or so top secret that if they found out that he saw it, they would delete him. because doesn't the government try to make people disappear that they don't like?

31:31Even 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 be protecting? Just imagine these being your problems as a teenager. I remember when I was that age, I would get a bad grade in school or some girl wouldn't like me or something. And that felt like the end of the world to me. But for Jason Snitker, he was stressed out simply by knowing things, top secret things that the government didn't really want him to know.

32:09So 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 went 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 what he saw on the military's computers. Because he wasn't keeping these secrets to himself. 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.

32:45And then almost immediately after that, he got arrested and was brought to court over all those stolen credit cards. So what was this backdoor that he gave to John Lee and Mark? Well, it was a backdoor to let you in a huge network. It would get you into the lowest, most inner core of TimeNet. TimeNet 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 backdoor to unlock the core of the internet is ridiculous.

33:28But 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. Someone 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 backdoor 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.

34:08This was about as deep as you could possibly go. And honestly, even now I have questions about this thing. When we ask 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 to explore. And so many computers were on this, and he was going to master it.

34:44And boy, did he. The sugar rush that came with hacking company after company. Mark found some of TimeNet's own PDP10s, 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, where 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.

35:22He 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 information 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.

36:03They could anticipate anything that might threaten their access because they knew about new security features and plans before those features and plans were even implemented. Now, remember when I talked about Esquire magazine, interviewing the guy who made the Blue Box in 1971? Well, at one point, Esquire interviewed someone from the Masters of Deception and said, hey, if you're really good as you say you are, prove 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.

36:40Legion of who? Oh yeah, I almost forgot about them Because by this time, by at least some accounts The Legion of Doom was dead Like Frack Magazine published their obituary On May 28, 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 and why they left, like it was some kind of memorial.

37:16The Prophet, member from 88 to 89, reason for leaving, bust hacking. Fiberoptic, 89 to 90, New York, reason for leaving, bust hacking. Which, that's not actually true. Mark, or Fiberoptic, 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. And 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.

37:58But 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 from the U.S. 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.

38:36Craig seemed pretty surprised that the Secret Service was arresting him. Yeah, he could have done it, sure, but he swore he didn't and he would never do that. Any fight that Craig had in him, though, disappeared when the cops confronted him about the document that he posted to FRAC, 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 and posting this E911 file.

39:18They 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, particularly 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.

39:58Now 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 that 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.

40:42But it wasn't entirely. There was one person who was trying to keep it alive. Eric Bloodaxe, a.k.a. Chris Goggins. 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 longtime 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 was raided at 6 in the morning.

41:21But he was expecting them. So even though there were six 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 the 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.

41:58So 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 companies 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.

42:44People that we knew, people that we were affiliated in other countries, for example, a hacker group in Australia, were 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. It 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.

43:35But 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 on other hackers is going to earn the wrath of other hackers. From the Citicorp atrium, everyone who could would pick up a payphone 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.

44:08And 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 all 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, a.k.a. 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.

44:48Bloodaxe would always deny that he was the one who said it, but we called John, and 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, just hanging up. But still, Blood Axe kept his cool and didn't do anything back.

45:24Remember, 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 Rolm. 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 BBSs around the country just to spite LOD. And now Blood Axe got mad that John took this file and spread it. So, in return, he 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.

46:11There was only one black hacker in MOD. John Lee then took a shot at Blood Axe's sidekick, Scott Chasen, by publishing his mom's credit history, phone number, and home address on 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 the 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.

46:51First, he broke into Southwestern Bell casually 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, the kind of guy Bloodaxe was probably wanting to impress.

47:28Craig was calling CompSec 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. He told Craig, hang on just one minute. Hello? Yeah, that does sound like something I would do. Click. 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.

48:15And 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. He 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 and various of my friends here in New York by giving information to the FBI about us and so on and so forth.

49:03Remember 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, U.S. authorities were granted the ability to tap computer communications, too.

49:32Data 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 two dozen trained agents of the U.S. government working in 12-hour shifts, tapping the lines of these teenagers recording all of their internet behavior.

50:12Back 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. Any time ComSec got a call from MOD, he 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.

50:53A letter informed them that they were the subject of a grand jury investigation, which means they are suspects in a crime. And soon after that, they were all arrested and 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.

51:40kids 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 as 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.

52:18It'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 between 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.

52:59This was all part of what the Secret Service called Operation Sun Devil, which resulted in 27 warrants for 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 and a dozen other cities this week exposed a million-dollar ring of high-tech computer hackers.

53:43It is not a game. They're attempting and are getting into credit cards, are getting into telephone systems, they're getting into medical records, credit records, are 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, and I'm also suffering. That guy was cooked. John Perry Barlow saw that the government was overstepping and using the CFAA to justify arresting dozens of people for being curious.

54:20Everyone 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 called 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.

54:54They 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 was 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.

55:31And 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. And 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?

56:07And 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 the 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, arrested people, took notebooks, took everything.

56:46But 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 the 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 for 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, a.k.a.

57:25FiberOptik, was another one of EFF's first cases. They felt that we were not guilty of what the U.S. 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 and 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 U.S. Attorney's Office did not allow them to do this.

58:00So 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 remaining. 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, a.k.a. 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.

58:40And they copied some credit reports, and they sold the information to other people. And he was named as a member of this conspiracy. They said we abused our power, but we didn't abuse it at all. We did nothing compared to the things that could have been done. What we did was such a small thing in such a larger scheme of things. It's kind of depressing in a way. There's so many things we could have done. We could have monitored Peter Lynch. What's the next best investment for the day? We'd make millions of dollars investing or shorting some stock, but we never did. Now we wonder why. We're like, damn, there's so many applications for this kind of stuff.

59:29What happened? But then we're like, ah, we were just kids.

59:37MOD 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 along 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$2 million 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 in prison. And then there was Craig's case, a.k.a. 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.

1:00:18And 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 was 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.

1:01:01Two, Bell Sells claimed it cost the company a ridiculous amount of damage, but they couldn't produce 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.

1:01:38It 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 from 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.

1:02:20It 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 to 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.

1:03:01They 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, this 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.

1:03:39Because what if I told you the day before authorities 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 because 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.

1:04:24And 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? And I didn't know what to do anymore. It was horrible. It was sad. We would call each 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.

1:05:02so 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 it's just so 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? uh oh I'm a regular guy now I'm not acid freak anymore you know what's acid freak without a computer you know just a regular guy It was a bummer.

1:05:37And I think that 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 written 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.

1:06:21But 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, well, 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 bod. unregulated, uncharted, unsupervised, pure signal and no static. Punk rock energy. A crooked little utopia that was inside all our computers.

1:07:05And if you were lucky enough to log in while it lasted, you know it wasn't just hacking. It 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. You may stop an individual, but you can't stop us all. After all, we're all alike.

1:07:55This 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. I went down some really fun memory lanes. I 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 Quintner 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 plus.darknetdiaries.com if you sign up you'll get an ad-free version of this show, plus 11 bonus episodes.

1:08:48Not 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.darknetdias.com This episode was created by me, Sir Crashalot, Jack Recider. This episode was written by Freakachu, Nate Nelson. Our editor is the Laserdisc Lord, Tristan Ledger. This episode was scored by the Blind SQL Injection, Andrew 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.

1:09:23Why? Because I uploaded 12 incomplete copies of King's Quest because I was trying to download Leisure Suit Larry. This is Darknet Diaries.