169: MoD

Legion of Doom, step aside. There’s a new elite hacker group in town, and they’re calling themselves Masters of Deception (MoD). With tactics that are grittier and more sophisticated than those of the LoD, MoD has targeted high-profile entities and left an indelible mark on the internet. This is part 2 of the LoD/MoD series. Part 1 is episode 168: “LoD” https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/168. SponsorsSupport for this show comes from ThreatLocker® https://www.threatlocker.com/. ThreatLocker® is a Zero Trust Endpoint Protection Platform that strengthens your infrastructure from the ground up. With ThreatLocker® Allowlisting and Ringfencing™, you gain a more secure approach to blocking exploits of known and unknown vulnerabilities. ThreatLocker® provides Zero Trust control at the kernel level that enables you to allow everything you need and block everything else, including ransomware! Learn more at www.threatlocker.com https://www.threatlocker.com/. This show is sponsored by Red Canary https://redcanary.com/. Red Canary is a leading provider of Managed Detection and Response (MDR), helping nearly 1,000 organizations detect and stop threats before they cause harm. With a focus on accuracy across identities, endpoints, and cloud, we deliver trusted security operations and a world-class customer experience. Learn more at redcanary.com https://redcanary.com/. This show is sponsored by Maze http://mazehq.com/darknet. Maze uses AI agents to triage and remediate cloud vulnerabilities by figuring out what’s actually exploitable, not just what’s theoretically risky. They remove the noise, prioritize vulns that matter, and manage remediation, so your team stops wasting time on meaningless vulns. Visit MazeHQ.com/darknet http://mazehq.com/darknet for more information. Sources Book: Masters of Deception https://amzn.to/4q3O0gJ Book: The Hacker Crackdown https://amzn.to/3N4bovY https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,982254-1,00.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/14/nyregion/reprogramming-convicted-hacker-his-line-friends-phiber-optik-virtual-hero.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/101/pg101-images.html https://phrack.org/issues/31/5 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/2/small-scale-sin

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jack Rhysider?

  This story picks up from where we left off in part one. So if you haven't heard it yet, you need to go back one episode and listen to that one before listening to this, because this is part two.

• 0:13Jack Rhysider?

  These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

• 0:20Jack Rhysider?

  I'm Jack Resider. This is Darknet Diaries.

• 0:40Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by ShipStation. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, things can get a bit hectic. Millions of people scrambling to find the lowest price online and then all clicking "buy" multiple times within a 72-hour period. Now, retailers all over have to somehow ship those orders out on time, and that seems like a whole new level of hectic, one that ShipStation is built to help businesses manage. ShipStation is an end-to-end order fulfillment platform, built to handle the order surge of peak season and bring all your orders into one place, so your team isn't scrambling when volume spikes. Over 1 million businesses have learned on ShipStation to get through peak season, scaling fulfillment up to 40 times while cutting costs up to 30%. If I needed to ship a lot of stuff, I would definitely be using ShipStation.

• 1:25Jack Rhysider?

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• 1:45Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by DeleteMe. Have you ever thought, "I should really be doing something to protect myself from stalkers, scammers, and hackers"? But you're not sure what? Here's what you do. Go to joindelete.me/darknetdiaries and enter code DD20, and you'll get 20% off DeleteMe. A few years ago, I signed up, and ever since then, DeleteMe has been busy scouring the internet for my name and giving me reports on what they found and deleted stuff. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount just for my listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to www.joindelete.me/darknetdiaries and use promo code DD20 at checkout.

• 2:29Jack Rhysider?

  The only way to get 20% off is to go to www.joindelete.me/darknetdiaries and enter code DD20 at checkout. That's www.joindelete.me/darknetdiaries code DD20.

• 2:47Jack Rhysider?

  The New York Telephone Company was the face of the phone system in New York City in the 1980s. Whether you were in the New York Stock Exchange making phone calls or walking up to payphones in the streets of Manhattan, you were using the New York Telephone Company. And there were two guys who worked there that were in charge of securing the system, Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples. Tom and Fred each had their own specialty. Fred engineered the phone network infrastructure and Tom oversaw it. If you broke into the system, it was because Fred overlooked some sort of vulnerability and then Tom was the one who had to catch you. Their jobs became infinitely more difficult and interesting when a strange letter arrived at Tom's Times Square office in November 1988. It stated that a kid up in the Bronx was hacking into the phone grid

• 3:32Jack Rhysider?

  who was calling himself "The Technician." The letter wasn't signed. It was an anonymous tip. But Tom suspected it might have been written by a family member of "The Technician" because the tone was caring. It was a plea to stop this kid for his own good. Sure enough, when Tom pulled up the records associated with the Technician's address, the proof was right there. Technician had been connecting to switches at AT&T from home with no real attempt to hide it either. So Tom turned to a nifty device that he had, which was called the Dialed Number Recorder, DNR. A DNR is a little box that you might mistake for an answering machine or a tape recorder. Tom had some small, black DNRs that click-clacked and spat out some paper tape when they were triggered. But these weren't exactly wiretaps.

• 4:15Jack Rhysider?

  They couldn't record the contents of what anyone said or typed. What they could do is record the metadata, which number connected to which and for how long. It was a DNR device that led investigators to catch Fry Guy. Maybe that same device will be useful here to find out what this Technician guy was doing. And there's an interesting thing to point out that if the police wanted to do that, they would need a court order and approval from the judge to conduct a wiretap. But if the security team at the New York telephone company wanted to do that, they didn't need a court order to monitor the activity of one of their customers. They're a private company. They can do what they want. So Fred and Tom were able to use this DNR phone monitoring tool without any red tape. A couple of things stood out in the data.

• 4:59Jack Rhysider?

  First, there was a clear evidence that this technician was hacking into something called a dial hub, which was in the New York telephone network. The dial hub had just been invented that year, and it was pretty new even for Tom and Fred, and they even had to ask, like, what is this thing? It was essentially a remote access point into the entire New York telephone company computer network. Employees had a password that they could use to log in from home to reach whatever system they needed to do their job. Somehow, this guy, calling himself the technician, had not only learned about the dial hub, but obtained a login token for it, meaning he could use it as if he was any employee in the company. What's worse is that Tom couldn't keep track of him once he got in there. This was serious, and this is where Tom's second interesting discovery came in.

• 5:44Jack Rhysider?

  Over time, whenever the DNR started chirping, Tom would get up from his desk, rush over to it, and read where the technician was calling. Over time, a pattern emerged. First, this Bronx hacker would dial into the phone company network, and he'd hang around there for a bit, do his thing, and then he'd disconnect. And then he would always call a phone number after that, which routed to a middle-class Queens neighborhood. And it was the same number every time. This call would last for a bit, and then he'd disconnect and check in with Queens again, and so on and so on, back and forth, into the phone company, call to Queens, into the phone company, call to Queens. Tom and Fred had a guess that the actual brains behind this operation might be in Queens. And they looked at all the call records to that number that was going to Queens,

• 6:28Jack Rhysider?

  and they noticed that there were a few other calls that came into that number in Queens quite often, too. And they were able to trace these calls, figure out whose numbers they were. And this led them to discover two other hackers. One was corrupt, and the other was outlaw. Why were so many hackers calling this number in Queens? Who were these guys? Maybe members of the notorious Legion of Doom? Everyone knew Legion of Doom at the time. The number in Queens was registered to a red Brick Row house. It belonged to Charles Abin, a middle-aged man who was a school custodian, actually, an officer in the school custodians' union. Not a very likely person to be a hacker. But Charles Abin's son was a teenager who spiked up his hair.

• 7:13Jack Rhysider?

  He kept terrible bedtime hours and got a lot of stomach aches. His name was Mark, but online and throughout the country, Mark was known as Fiber Optic, a notorious hacker. And even compared to the other members of Legion of Doom, Mark was really good at hacking, probably too good. Maybe the best phone system hacker in America. No, on the planet, maybe ever, actually. From the compact TRS-80 on his desk in his tiny bedroom, Mark ingested enough knowledge to outwit even the technicians working at the phone company. He wasn't just fluent in the New York telephone system, but also the 9X, the packet-switching networks running all the way up and down New England. Basically, he had encyclopedic knowledge of telecommunications systems, and he could name pretty much any of them.

• 7:57Jack Rhysider?

  He could rattle off the most obscure details about any random machine or protocol. Of course, he could place a call anywhere in the country without paying a cent or triggering any alarms. That was the easy part. When Mark, aka Fiber Optic, was on a BBS, other hackers listened. He liked sharing his knowledge, and the reputation it afforded him. But don't you dare cross him. It was easy enough for him to cut your phone service or overload it with endless calls, or much worse. As I researched this story, The Whole Earth Catalog kept coming up and up. And I didn't really know about it before. Like, I heard about it, but I didn't really look at it. But now, I got a copy of it, and I'm looking at it. And it's like, amazing. It's like, one of my favorite things now. You know what? I'll let Steve Jobs tell you about it.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park. And he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing. So it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

• 9:15Jack Rhysider?

  This catalog is amazing. It's filled with really helpful articles like "How to build a shelter" or "Water pump", and it also has glimpses into the future and technologies and ideas for structures and systems. And sometimes there's theoretical things in here, sometimes it's practical. But there's just a ton of wonderful, unique ideas on how to navigate the modern world. And Stuart Brand, the guy who made this, took a big fascination with computers and especially hacking. He spun up his own BBS called "The WELL", which stood for Whole Earth Electronic Link. It became the place to post helpful information, to post things that were culturally relevant at the time, things like tech, art, and politics, but also significantly highlighting counterculture movements and ideas.

• 9:59Jack Rhysider?

  There were areas for niche hobbies and sharing software. At the core of it was self-empowerment and open dialogue. The WELL was the Internet's first real online community. It attracted journalists and artists and activists and poets, and yes, hackers. Like Neil Stephenson would pop in there from time to time. Craig from Craigslist was there, and that's where he got inspired to make Craigslist. And The WELL was the birthplace for a lot of the Internet culture and norms that we still use today.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  One longtime supporter of hackers is Stuart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalogues.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant, and I think more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  To make his point, Brand invited 100 top computer designers to an exclusive hackers conference in this secluded campsite north of San Francisco. Despite bad weather and crude living conditions, the camp was a true hacker heaven, well-stocked with plenty of computer toys and, of course, enough candy and soda to last through the night. But the real purpose of the get-together was to discuss the unique set of values that made the computer revolution possible and brainstorm about its future.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  My political platform is that we need an electronic Declaration of Independence.

• 11:23Jack Rhysider?

  That last guy talking was John Perry Barlow, who at the time was a poet and essayist and lyricist for The Grateful Dead. And he stayed true to that mission. He did, in fact, go and publish a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. I'm not going to read to you the whole thing, but let me at least quote to you the opening paragraph of this. "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." That's quite an opening for a declaration, right? John Perry Barlow is a bit of a badass, if you ask me.

• 12:06Jack Rhysider?

  Okay, so Harper's Magazine, this was a mainstream magazine at the time, which was covering things like politics, culture, literature. It had thought-provoking essays in it. And one thing it did regularly was featured articles that they called "The Forum," where like three to five contributors would all try to answer big questions like, "What do we owe the planet?" and "Is the American experiment failing?" And the contributors would try to provide high-minded, thoughtful responses. Well, Harper's saw that these computers were rising in popularity and saw that a lot of great thinkers were gathering there on Stewart Brands, BBS, The Well, so they decided to run their very first virtual forum. Basically, a live chat room on The Well, where they'd ask users big questions to get the conversations going for their magazines.

• 12:51Jack Rhysider?

  Questions like, "Do we have a right to privacy?" and "Should hackers respect that right?" "What ethical considerations arise when we become more connected digitally?"

• 13:03Jack Rhysider?

  So in December 1989, Harper's Magazine held this virtual forum, basically an open chatroom for anyone to respond to on the well. John Perry Barlow was there, Clifford Stoll was there, Steven Levy was there. A lot of influential people actually were watching the chat, even some notable hackers like Mark, AKA Fiber Optic, and Mark's friend Eli, who went by the name Acid Freak. But the internet did what the internet does, and it didn't quite fit into the high-minded discourse that Harper's was hoping for. Instead, the place turned vulgar, immature, insulting. And yeah, lots of asky art was posted. In fact, the participants flooded the chatroom with over 100,000 words during the forum. John Perry Barlow thought he was on the hacker's side,

• 13:46Jack Rhysider?

  being libertarian and kind of punk by nature, and really was into computers himself. Except these guys were just too annoying on the well and not at all receptive to the simple arguments. The hacking was troublesome. At a heated moment in the chat, John Perry Barlow wrote that, "With hackers like Acid Freak and Fiber Optic, the issue is less intelligence than alienation. Trade their modems for skateboards, and only a slight conceptual shift would occur." Acid Freak and Fiber Optic didn't like being called out like that, and they replied, "You have some pair of balls comparing my talent with that of a skateboarder? Huh. Well, this was indeed boring, but nonetheless." Fiber Optic then, somehow,

• 14:31Jack Rhysider?

  found a copy of John Perry Barlow's credit history and posted it to the forum for anyone to see. Like, what a crazy thing to drop in the middle of chat, right? Just someone's credit report, bam! Well, that spooked John Perry Barlow. He later wrote about how he felt when he saw his credit history posted like that. He said, quote, "I've been stuck in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls. I've been in police custody while on acid, and in Harlem after midnight. But no one has ever put the spook in me quite as Fiber Optic did at that moment." It never took anybody long to realize that Mark, aka FiberOptic, was the best hacker they knew. And that's how he got into the Legion of Doom. He borrowed a password from a friend,

• 15:15Jack Rhysider?

  then he navigated to the section where members discussed phone freaking, and thought, "These guys are a joke. Sure, they have a few old technical manuals that I could recite in my sleep." So he started flooding them with new information, sort of like an all-knowing god. And being an all-knowing hacker god can get to a kid's head, you know? Like, he liked the attention that people were giving him, who thought he was amazing. And that's how Eric Bloodaxe felt about Mark. This guy who went by Eric Bloodaxe was a short guy with a goatee and grungy, long blond hair, and hung out in the LOD forums. Bloodaxe was a member of the LOD, but Mark? Mark said he was, and he was in the forums that was members-only, but he wasn't listed as an actual member. It's like he hacked his way into the group. Well, Bloodaxe was confused,

• 16:00Jack Rhysider?

  but quickly realized how good Mark was. A few weeks later, Mark was officially voted in. Bloodaxe respected Mark as a really great hacker, but he didn't really like Mark. He didn't like how Mark would trap hackers, who would talk a big game, and then he would totally embarrass them with his superior skills. And then, one day in 1989, he got a call from Mark. Mark wanted a backdoor that he knew Bloodaxe had to the 9X packet-switching network. But Bloodaxe is like, "Well, what are you gonna give me in return? If I give you this exploit, what are you gonna give me?" And Mark just hung up, and called Bloodaxe's friend, and told Bloodaxe's friend, "Hey, Bloodaxe wants me to have the backdoor into 9X. Can you send it to me?" And his friend did send it to him.

• 16:44Jack Rhysider?

  And then Bloodaxe found out about this and called Mark back. Bloodaxe was mad, but Mark wasn't having it. Mark just told him, "I don't know you shit." And Bloodaxe was like, "Whoa, excuse me? I don't know you shit. I didn't get it from you. I got it from Bob. Fuck you." And Bloodaxe was like, "What? Did he just really curse out a member of the LOD?" Mark said, "I don't have time for this," and hung up. And that's how Mark, aka Fiber Optic, got kicked out of the Legion of Doom by tricking Eric Bloodaxe's friend into giving him an exploit and then cursing out Bloodaxe. The two clearly didn't get along. Mark figured, "Whatever," and shrugged it off. He could run circles around anyone in LOD, or around all of them combined. If they were ever cool, they definitely weren't anymore.

• 17:27Jack Rhysider?

  He was convinced that the Legion of Doom were has-beens, and he wasn't the only one who thought that.

• 17:36Jack Rhysider?

  In the last episode, I told you about this guy, Paul, who was trying to get into computer, but all he was getting was S's and W's back, and then he blew into the phone, and all of a sudden, he was in. Well, last we left him, he broke into the phone company, gave his friend free three-way calling, and he told his friend Eli about this, who's also known as Acid Freak. And Eli figured, "This must be a switching control center system, a SCCS." And so Acid Freak was like, "Oh, that's really cool. We should show this to Mark, aka Fiber Optic, and see what he has to say about this." So they decided to call him up. "Hey, what do you want?" Mark asks. He gets called all the time by a lot of hackers. Paul and Eli were a bit intimidated, but excited. So they told Mark that they think they got into an SCCS, but they don't know what to do.

• 18:20Jack Rhysider?

  "You think or you know?" Mark asked. Paul handed over the information, and Mark checked it out. And Mark quickly figured it out. It wasn't an SCCS. It was a telephone switch, specifically a DMS-100 switch. Mark got back on the line. "It's not a SCCS. It's a DMS-100." Of course, the system Paul had been trying to figure out for well over a year now, Mark identified in seconds. But Mark was sort of impressed that these two guys brought this to him, and asked if Paul and Eli wanted to meet up.

• 18:52Jack Rhysider?

  It started with the three of them getting together at Eli's house. Mark did the typing and explaining. Paul and Eli watched. And when they got hungry, they went to the mall. Mark liked to eating the mashed potatoes at KFC because it calmed his stomach. It was fun, but Eli had bigger plans. He wanted to recruit more hackers to their little club, like this hot-shot kid that they heard about just down the road. They were talking about a hacker, calling himself Corrupt, whose real name was actually John Lee. He was a black kid who lived with his mom in Bed-Stuy, which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. And this was back when it was hardcore, like John was in a gang, and not like a cyber gang, but an actual gang where guys robbed and sold drugs and stuff. IRL. But from a little beater Commodore 64 in his cramped bedroom, John Lee was a savant.

• 19:36Jack Rhysider?

  Eli kept talking, saying that John Lee's specialty is VAX computers. And these things have way more hard drive space, more CPU power than anything most people touched those days. And VAXs were popular in large businesses and universities. Some of the best secrets in cyberspace were kept on VAXs. Eli called John on his phone. John was impressed. "How'd you get my number? Do you want to join our hacker club?" "Hmm, I'm interested." So John Lee came over and he brought his friend Julio, whose hacker name is Outlaw. And he lived in the Bronx, and he was barely 15 at the time. And so this new hacker collective was starting to form. The best of the best hackers in New York City were all coming together. There was Mark, aka Fiber Optic. Eli, which was going by Acid Freak. Paul, who was Scorpion.

• 20:20Jack Rhysider?

  John Lee, who was Corrupt. And Julio, who called himself Outlaw. The place they started meeting at was at the Citicorp Center, 601 Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan. It's one of the funkiest skyscrapers you'll ever see, and makes no sense architecturally. And from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, Citicorp Center was home for some of the big time companies, like Citibank, of course, IBM, law firms. But once a month, on a weekend at 6:00 PM, a totally different demographic would emerge. From the grimy subways, young men in oversized jeans, skateboards, sneakers, and backwards baseball caps would come into the Citicorp building. Because this is where the 2600 meetup would happen.

• 21:00Jack Rhysider?

  2600 is also a hacker magazine, which would host local meetups in different cities. It's Frac's most well-known counterpart. Readers brought stuff they'd find from their spoils, from dumpster dives, and their latest stolen passwords. They traded knowledge and they would mess with the payphones in the atrium, like trying to get free phone calls on them, or dial someone to social engineer them. And of course, they always found ways so they didn't have to pay for it. Somebody would know the right number to call to avoid a toll, or they'd bring a blue box or something. And at this 2600 hacker meetup is where Mark, Eli, Paul, John Lee, and Julio would meet up. They enjoyed showing off what they learned, and they learned new things from other hackers. They'd talk shop, they'd get info, they'd show off their tricks, and network with other hackers.

• 21:45Jack Rhysider?

  For the most part, the people who came to the 2600 hacker meetup didn't have any intent of causing destruction or making money. Everyone was all just so curious, wanted to know how computers worked, and find really clever ways to do things with them. It was sort of the essence of what they were all about. They shared the Legion of Doom's moral code: no making money, no causing harm. But they were also cut from a different cloth. They weren't just as good, no, they were better than Legion of Doom. Definitely better. And a bit tougher, too. Not like those guys in the suburbs who had nice computers and drove cars. These guys pulled together salvaged and scrapped computer parts to build things, and they rode the subway.

• 22:26Jack Rhysider?

  Ira Glass was able to interview Eli on This American Life in the early 90s, and it's an incredible view into what these kids were doing then. Here, listen.

• 22:35Speaker 05

  We did this for payphones. We have a line of payphones. We'd get into the computer, first liberate one phone. Liberating meaning make so that you don't need quarters for that payphone. You just pick up and dial like a regular house phone. So that way, we could make endless amount of phone calls without putting quarters. Next step was to get into the network, find a session that was already going, and then knock them off while they were connected, and then sit there watching them. In other words, put us in their place, in the place of the computer that we're going to connect to. So next time they tried to log in, they would get our computer, and we'd type in "login", and they'd put in their login account. Then we'd go "password", you know? The password, they'd say, "Okay, password", and they put their password in.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  And then we would have, you know, all these things were already encoded in one key, so we could just hit one key, and, you know, it wouldn't look like we were typing it.

• 23:26Jack Rhysider?

  Login would just appear, "pump", with password "pump".

• 23:29Speaker 05

  And then we'd hit the password key, password. Then we'd say "login incorrect", and then disconnect from them, but we already got their login and password. And then when they reconnected, it would be the regular system. So they'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?

• 23:53Speaker 06

  You get into things that are good. You start targeting systems that are interesting. And then you start developing a collection. It's like baseball cards. I have NASA. I have 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. Marian Marietta. You know, TRW, CBI, TransUnion. What else can I get? You know? You try to get the, like, big names. You know? So you start developing a collection, you know? Then after a while, it became fun to, like, look up famous people. Let's look up John Gotti's credit. You know, let's see what he owns. Let's look up Julia Roberts. You know, let's get her home phone number. Let's get this guy's home phone number. We were just so excited we were getting all that stuff. And it was just a rush, you know? It was the flow, you know?

• 24:37Speaker 06

  Once you start going, you can't stop. You know, you're just steamrolling one after the other. 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.

• 25:00Jack Rhysider?

  That was Eli, talking about what him, Mark, Paul, John Lee, and Julio were doing in New York City back then. It was a golden time. And Paul came up with an idea. He said, "They should give their little hacker group a name, like MOD." Which was a joke, like LOD, but one letter higher, MOD? 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.

• 25:36Jack Rhysider?

  If anything, it's surprising how little they did with their power over computers. It was mostly pranks. Making somebody's phone ring continuously. Turning an enemy's home phone line into a pay phone line. So when the guy picked up his phone at home, it demanded that he deposit a quarter.

• 25:53Speaker 07

  Of course, there's no way he could do that because it's his home phone. They did actually call Julia Roberts once. They called Queen Elizabeth too. But, but there's an emptiness at the heart of a lot of these stories. Once you've got the Queen on the phone, you know, what do you say?

• 26:11Speaker 06

  She's like, hello? You know, she's talking to us and stuff and we don't know what to say. Hi, we're calling from the United States and this and that. And she knew what was up. She's like, okay, hello. And then she said goodbye and that was it. You know? We didn't know what to say. What do you say to Queen Elizabeth? You know? Hi, so, uh, you see that movie, uh, True Lies? You know, what do you say? You know, it's just like, the, the, the fun of it is finding the number.

• 26:39Speaker 07

  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.

• 26:52Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so do your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls and playing catch up when audit season is coming around the corner again. Vanta works differently. Their Agentic Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work,

• 27:36Jack Rhysider?

  whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools like Claude or Cursor. Want proof? Over 16,000 fast-growing companies like Ramp, Writer and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. Learn more at vanta.com/darknet. That's spelled V-A-N-T-A. Vanta.com/darknet.

• 28:00Jack Rhysider?

  Now, all that was brewing in New York City right before that big phone outage in AT&T that happened on MLK Day in 1999, right where we left off at the last episode. Remember the one that caused millions of calls to not go through? That one that made the police and Secret Service go into full panic mode? Yeah, LOD was their initial suspect, but maybe this new group, MOD, had something to do with it too, right? The police didn't necessarily know of Masters of Deception as their group name, but they definitely were tracking these people individually. Why? Because Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples, the engineers from the New York Telephone Company, were on to them. They were watching their phone calls and tracing numbers around. That number they kept calling in Queens? That was Mark's number. And the people calling it

• 28:44Jack Rhysider?

  were Paul, Eli, John Lee, and Julio. The New York Telephone Security Team was watching all these kids hacking 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.

• 29:01Speaker 08

  Bell South cracked down hard on Adam and the others, even though it acknowledges they never disrupted phone service or changed any customer accounts.

• 29:10Speaker 09

  We don't care what the motive may or may not be.

• 29:14Speaker 08

  Scott Tyser is a corporate spokesman for Bell South.

• 29:18Speaker 09

  We are not talking about Wally and the Bee, much less Eddie Haskell. We're not dealing with a bunch of mischievous pranksters playing in some high-tech tournament. This is a crime.

• 29:30Speaker 08

  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, Martin Marietta, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell, New York Telephone, TRW, Information America, and New York University.

• 29:54Jack Rhysider?

  Jeez, what a list. And the police were trying to piece all this together and trying to figure out who was doing what. But that's a huge list of companies. How did they get into all those things? Partly thanks to Jason, Jason Snitker, AKA Paramaster, and his strange, magical backdoor. A backdoor that was bigger than any backdoor I've ever heard of. This is another one of those parts of the story that's so crazy that I didn't even believe it at first. But in preparing for this episode, we managed to find and get ahold of Jason, and he confirmed what really happened. His 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

• 30:39Jack Rhysider?

  for different banks in Saudi Arabia. He saw this and tried to mint his own cards. And yeah, he was able to use the Citibank computer to create 10,000 new debit card numbers, which were all valid since they were in the bank's database. And you know, sharing is caring. He couldn't even use a fraction of these cards, so he just spread them around in all the hacking forums. And now suddenly, everyone had their own blank check from the bank. He worried that he might 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 backdoor got him into a lot of other places, too. Places in cyberspace that no ordinary person should go. He saw stuff, military secrets,

• 31:23Jack Rhysider?

  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? Even today, almost 40 years later, Jason talks about what he found with some feeling. He told us about a press release that he saw for that satellite with information about a laser system that never became public. He sent us this ominous message. Quote, "When you could show what is being changed to withhold information, what might the government be protecting?" Just imagine these being your problems as a teenager.

• 32:08Jack Rhysider?

  I remember when I was that age, I would get a bad grade in school or some girl wouldn't like me or something. And that felt like the end of the world to me. But for Jason Snick, Curry was stressed out simply by knowing things, top secret things that the government didn't really want him to know. So he decided to split out of there from California and move to New York, Coney Island. But now, New York State Police were starting to get suspicion of what hackers were up to. And an officer 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 like what he saw on the military's computers. Because he wasn't keeping these secrets to himself. Like while he was in New York, he met up and hung out with John Lee at Grand Central Station.

• 32:53Jack Rhysider?

  And in a deal over the phone, he traded his back door to Mark. And then almost immediately after that, he got arrested and was brought to court over all those stolen credit cards. So what was this back door that he gave to John Lee and Mark? Well, it was a back door to let you in a huge network. It would get you into the lowest, most inner core of 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 back door

• 33:38Jack Rhysider?

  to unlock the core of the internet is ridiculous. But on TimeNet, it was possible. Because while there were a lot of companies using TimeNet and connected to it, TimeNet itself was operated by a single company. 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 back door gave them access to. They were in a supervisor level of one of the biggest networks in the world at the time. Jason had managed to get access to this through a network engineer in the company's internal network, and he told us that it allowed him to drop right into their shell. And he stole TimeNet's source code, which was proprietary at the time.

• 34:22Jack Rhysider?

  This was about as deep as you could possibly go. And honestly, even now, I have questions about this thing. When we asked for specifics, Jason described it more like a numerical algorithm than code, so complicated that he claims even Mark couldn't figure it out. 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 gonna master it. And 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

• 35:06Jack Rhysider?

  were used to store administrative manuals and a bunch of other stuff. Administrator manuals might sound boring to you, but to Mark and MoD, these were priceless. Instruction guides for how to go further and further into every corner of the internet. At a certain point, Mark literally couldn't go any deeper. Where TimeNet's staff might only be able to see what's relevant to their jobs, and TimeNet users could only see what's on their own networks, the masters of deception could see it all and access it all, too. He was tapped into the matrix. It's odd to say, but hacking the NSA, Bank of America, whatever, it was almost trivial with this backdoor. They could easily find their way into a ton of interesting networks.

• 35:48Jack Rhysider?

  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. They could anticipate anything that might threaten their access, because they knew about new security features and plans before those features and plans were even implemented. Now, remember when I talked about Esquire magazine interviewing the guy who made the Blue Box in 1971? Well, at one point, Esquire interviewed someone from the masters of deception and

• 36:33Jack Rhysider?

  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. Well, Legion of who? Oh, yeah, I almost forgot about them. Because by this time, by at least some accounts, the Legion of Doom was dead. Like, Frac 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 telecommunications knowledge has survived longer, and none probably will.

• 37:18Jack Rhysider?

  The Legion of Doom, from 1984 to 1990." End quote. The article ended with a list of all the LOD members, and when they'd left, and why they left, like it was some kind of memorial. The Prophet, member from 88 to 89, reason for leaving? Bust hacking. Fiber Optic, 89 to 90, New York, reason for leaving? Bust hacking. Which, that's known actually to Mark, or Fiber Optic, got kicked out, remember? You know whose name is not on here is Eric Bloodaxe, whose real name is Chris Goggins, or his sidekick Scott Chason, 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,

• 38:02Jack Rhysider?

  "We are still alive." Lex Luthor wrote it, and it says, "If you believe the rumors, LOD has been dead many times, but that's, again, untrue." But in reality, due to the CFAA being passed, and the major outage at New York, arrests were starting to be made on hackers all over. Three days after that major outage at AT&T on January 18th, 1990, two agents from the US Secret Service, a security employee from Southwestern Bell and a security guard from the University of Missouri, knocked on the door of a frat house, and they found Craig Nydorff, aka Night Lightning, the co-founder of the notorious hacker magazine Frac, and accused him of crashing the AT&T phone system.

• 38:46Jack Rhysider?

  They arrested him and took all his computers and took him into custody. Craig seemed pretty surprised that the Secret Service was arresting him. Yeah, he could have done it, sure, but he swore he didn't, and he would never do that. Any fight that Craig had in him, though, disappeared when the cops confronted him about the document that he posted to 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

• 39:27Jack Rhysider?

  relating to stealing and posting this E911 file. They even told the parents of these guys, "Your son has caused billions of dollars' worth of damage. He's crashed the AT&T network." Eventually, almost every LOD member either got busted or gave up. Lex Luthor announced his retirement. He's the one who started LOD. Here's Mark again.

• 39:49Speaker 10

  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 now that the climate had changed so much. Other hackers, a few, let's say, thought that it might be good to go in the other direction and attempt to gain clout with the government and telco security by inviting them onto a bulletin board that was set up under the auspices of

• 40:33Speaker 10

  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.

• 40:49Jack Rhysider?

  So while people from LOD were being nabbed by the police and others were scattering, it looks like LOD was dead. But it wasn't entirely. There was one person who was trying to keep it alive. Eric Bloodaxe, aka Chris Gorgons.

• 41:03Speaker 10

  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.

• 41:16Jack Rhysider?

  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 6:00 in the morning. But 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.

• 41:58Jack Rhysider?

  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, at least in 1983. But Bloodaxe always held on to the belief that there shouldn't be any destruction when it comes to hacking. So they didn't find much evidence on him committing crimes, other than he was a member of the Legion of Doom. And they let him go without any charges.

• 42:23Jack Rhysider?

  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.

• 42:38Speaker 10

  There was a great amount of disagreement and dissension within LOD in the late 1980s because of the fact that there was informing going on. Several people, several members of the Legion of Doom had gotten busted under mysterious, let's just say mysterious circumstances. People that we knew, people that we were affiliated in other countries, for example, a hacker group in Australia, 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

• 43:16Speaker 10

  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.

• 43:31Jack Rhysider?

  Bloodaxe started a company called ComSec Data Security.

• 43:34Speaker 10

  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. But he was trying to gain clout with the government to bolster his business, and in doing so was turning in hackers. When hackers found out he was doing this, they began harassing him and his business and so on, which is, you know, what hackers do in general, and certainly someone who's informing on other hackers is gonna earn the wrath of other hackers.

• 44:08Jack Rhysider?

  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. And that would last all day until people got bored and had to go eat dinner at like 8:30 or so. A legendary hacker feud was starting to stir up: LOD versus MOD. But Eric Bloodaxe from LOD could handle 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, aka Corrupt, a member of MOD, would hear about these calls and join in.

• 44:50Jack Rhysider?

  And one day, he jumped on the call and introduced himself as "Dope Fiend from MOD", and someone shouted, "Get that N-word off the line!" John Lee was black and took offense to this. Bloodaxe would always deny that he was the one who said it, but we called John, 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, and just hanging up.

• 45:34Jack Rhysider?

  But still, Bloodaxe kept his cool and didn't do anything back. Remember earlier in this episode, I told you about a super-secret file on LOD's Fifth Amendment BBS? It allowed anyone to hack into the PBX system developed by the company called Rome? And even LOD members were explicitly instructed to never copy it? Well, John Lee got into the Fifth Amendment, and he stole the file, and he spread it to other BBSs around the country just to spite LOD. And now, Bloodaxe 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,

• 46:19Jack Rhysider?

  which he then published to the world, and everybody knew who he was trying to annoy. There was only one black hacker in MOD. John Lee then took a shot at Bloodaxe's sidekick, Scott Chason, 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-conditioned apartment in Brooklyn, he wanted to mess with Bloodaxe even more by tapping his phone.

• 47:02Jack Rhysider?

  He wanted to get in Bloodaxe's head. First, 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 Nidorf, aka Night Lightning, aka the co-founder of Frac 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. Craig was calling Comsec for help.

• 47:43Jack Rhysider?

  He was getting harassed with constant phone calls lately, and he was fed up. Bloodaxe felt his pain. He'd been dealing with the same problem. He's like, "You know who Corrupt is, aka John Lee? Yeah, well, it sounds like something he would do." A minute later, Bloodaxe got a call on another line, and he told Craig, "Hang on just one minute. Hello? Yeah, that does sound like something I would do." 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.

• 48:28Jack Rhysider?

  And John Lee listened to him admit it. Eric Bloodaxe realized, this is no way to run a security company. He had to do something, not just about John Lee, but about Mark. 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.

• 49:00Speaker 10

  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.

• 49:16Jack Rhysider?

  Remember I told you about Tom and Fred, the security engineers at the New York telephone company? Well, they figured out the people hacking into their network were John and Julio from MOD. With months and months of records documenting following every single time that they did it, there was enough evidence to send to the police. But the police needed to verify the evidence themselves, so a judge looked over the paper trail and decided to approve a wiretap for both John and Julio. And not just wiretaps. For the first time, US authorities were granted the ability to tap computer communications, too. Data taps, they called it. And I guess the term we might use today is man in the middle, or even spyware. In a suite of borrowed offices in Manhattan's World Trade Center, the Secret Service set up a war room, well, a wire room is actually what they called it, and it was overseen by the FBI,

• 50:01Jack Rhysider?

  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 US government, working in 12-hour shifts, tapping the lines of these teenagers recording all of their internet behavior. And back then, nothing was encrypted, so all their passwords and commands and everything that they were doing could easily be seen by the FBI, listening and watching everything these kids did with the same intensity of like, a Soviet nuclear launch. Meanwhile, the Secret Service made a deal with Eric Bloodaxe. Anytime Comsec got a call from MOD,

• 50:45Jack Rhysider?

  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. The 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.

• 51:24Speaker 10

  As things fell apart, EFF was supporting us to go to trial.

• 51:29Jack Rhysider?

  Wait, the EFF? Yeah, sorry, I hate to interrupt here, but I know this story has been like gone in seven different directions and things are mashed together all over, but this is something I think I need to talk about. When John Perry Barlow clashed with Mark and he got spooked, remember? He dropped his credit report in the chat, spooked more than he's ever been before, but he also realized, petty arguments aside, something much greater is happening in the country right now, and these kids were bearing the brunt of it. After their argument, John Perry Barlow asked Mark, "Give me a call." And rumor has that he didn't even give Mark his number because he felt 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,

• 52:13Jack Rhysider?

  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." It's such a great analogy. John Perry Barlow wondered whether what Mark and his annoying friends were doing was really as bad as the police would have him believe. Is transmission through an otherwise unused data channel really theft? He asked himself this question. Or put another way, is there a difference between exploring and exploiting?

• 52:52Jack Rhysider?

  If you break in just to look around and cause no damage, maybe you're just exploring. In the months that followed, John Perry Barlow kept an eye out as Secret Service agents were busting in through hackers' doors across the country, including Mark and Eli's houses, carrying guns, taking all of the things, and cordoning off their family members. This was all part of what the Secret Service called Operation Sun Devil, which resulted in 27 warrants for hackers spread across 14 cities. It was a massive crackdown nationwide on hackers. It was very serious and very scary.

• 53:29Speaker 11

  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.

• 53:47Speaker 12

  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.

• 53:56Speaker 13

  It is not a game. They're tempting and are getting into credit cards, are getting into telephone systems, they're getting into medical records, credit records, they're getting into everything.

• 54:08Speaker 12

  The raids come after a two-year nationwide investigation called Operation Sun Devil.

• 54:12Jack Rhysider?

  Like even the guy who reported the prophet 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 CFIA to justify arresting dozens of people for being curious. Everyone in MOD was accused of violating the CFIA. 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 K. Por. This guy was on The Well, too, and K. Por was known for inventing the spreadsheet program called Lotus 123.

• 54:56Jack Rhysider?

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

• 55:39Jack Rhysider?

  And Steve was so into it that he pitched in some of his own money to get things started. And it was settled. The EFF was born, and its online home at the time was The Well. And the EFF is still going strong today. It is a leading voice for advocating for digital rights in the United States. 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? And one of the Legion of Doom members worked there.

• 56:23Jack Rhysider?

  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 were sure that Lloyd hacked into BellSouth, 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. But Steve Jackson himself was like, "Whoa, that is not a hacker manual. It's a work of fiction. We just made that story up."

• 57:09Jack Rhysider?

  And this was one of the first cases that the EFF took on to help out, claiming the Secret Service was totally overreaching with this CFAA, and it's just way too broad of a law. This is the dumbest law ever. And so that case got dropped when they found absolutely no evidence of a crime, which was a huge win 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, aka FireOptic, was another one of EFF's first cases.

• 57:41Speaker 10

  They felt that we were not guilty of what the US Attorney's 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 US Attorney's Office did not allow them to do this. So we were never given the opportunity to clear our name. So we were basically treated like criminals. And due to that fact, one by one, my friends, the guys that were named in the indictment, decided to plead guilty,

• 58:26Speaker 10

  until I was the only one remaining. And it's the typical cliche of the last guy standing without a chair when the music stops.

• 58:34Jack Rhysider?

  The judge even said, "A message must be sent." So that was Mark. And then there was Eli, aka Acid Freak, one of the members of MOD who also got arrested.

• 58:44Speaker 07

  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. And they copied some credit reports, and they sold the information to other people. And he was named as a member of this conspiracy.

• 59:04Speaker 06

  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. You know, what we did was such a small thing in such a larger scheme of things, you know? It's kind of depressing in a way. There's so many things we could have done. We could have monitored, you know, Peter Lynch, you know? And what's the next best investment for the day, you know? And we'd make millions of dollars, you know, investing or shorting some stock. But we never did, and, you know? Now we wonder why. We're like, "Damn! There's so many applications for this kind of stuff. What happened?" But then we're like, "Ah, you know, we were just kids."

• 59:50Jack Rhysider?

  MOD co-founders Paul and Eli each got half a year in jail. Mark got a whole year in jail. And John Lee got a year in jail, too. Julio, who did all of John's crimes along with him, got off free, which is probably because he cooperated with the police. A few LOD members, Adam and The Profit, 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 Profit got 21 months in prison. And then there was Craig's case, aka Night Lightning, the co-founder of Frac. He was in trouble for publishing the E911 file. He was also one of the first cases that the EFF took on. And if you think about it, this is a federal case,

• 1:00:33Jack Rhysider?

  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. Profit was charged with the same stuff, and he just admitted guilt. But Craig, no, no, no. Craig was like, "I am not guilty." And so a trial began. And the trial was absolutely ridiculous. For one, they wouldn't show the E911 file to the jury or put it in evidence for fear that it would become public record and then anyone could see it. Two, Bell South claimed it caused the company

• 1:01:17Jack Rhysider?

  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 FRAC. 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. It 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.

• 1:02:00Jack Rhysider?

  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. It was basically available free from the very company that was accusing him of theft. From what I understand is that it wasn't the exact same file, but the contents had the same information in it.

• 1:02:44Jack Rhysider?

  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 FRAC and the EFF. For FRAC, this put them down into legendary status. They weren't just a hacker easying 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

• 1:03:28Jack Rhysider?

  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 internets, or just a $13 pamphlet, it almost didn't even matter in the end. Because 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.

• 1:04:11Jack Rhysider?

  And 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. And here's Eli again, and this was where Ira Glass interviewed him after he got out of prison and wasn't allowed to touch a computer for a while.

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  So I was like, "Damn, this is like, I have to fill this void. What should I do?" You know, and I didn't know what to do anymore. It was like horrible, just, you know. It was sad. We would call 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." "Uh, I cleaned my room yesterday." "Yeah, they came over and cleaned my room too, pretty well." "Yeah, I know." "So, uh, what do you want to do?" "I don't know." Because it's like, such a large part of our lives at that point, you know? You have so much power, to lose it in an instant like that

• 1:05:28Speaker 05

  is 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 gonna do? Uh-oh, I'm a regular guy now. I'm not an acid freak anymore. You know, what's acid freak without a computer, you know? Just a regular guy. So, it was a bummer.

• 1:05:50Jack Rhysider?

  And I think that marks when the sun set on the golden age of hacking. What began as a thousand screeching modems in 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 baud rates and antsy colors.

• 1:06:35Jack Rhysider?

  But it didn't matter. The spell had been broken. The new digital frontier was now off-limits to exploration. You could feel it. The stakes were higher now. The channels were quieter. The boards went dark. The legends disappeared. The ones who stuck around, 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 baud. Unregulated, uncharted, unsupervised, pure signal and no static, punk rock energy. A crooked little utopia that was inside all our computers.

• 1:07:18Jack Rhysider?

  And 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 CFIA 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.

• 1:08:08Jack Rhysider?

  This episode was researched and written with help from Nate Nelson. Together, we crushed a ton of books and scoured the far reaches of the internet, and we kept getting pulled in so many directions, which is why this episode was so long. I got super fascinated by so many aspects of hacking in the 80s and went down some really fun memory lanes. 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 Slattala and Joshua Quitner. These books captured what was happening in the shadows at the time in such a clear and remarkable way. You definitely should check them out if you want to hear more about what happened then, or for a totally different story of hacking in the 80s, check out the book Cuckoo's Egg, which is a classic hacker story.

• 1:08:50Jack Rhysider?

  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 the show, plus 11 bonus episodes. Not only that, it's an amazing way to show your support for the show and to keep the lights on over here. If you like what we're doing and you want more of it, please consider supporting by going to plus.darknetdiaries.com. This episode was created by me, Sir Crash-a-lot Jack Rees-Sider. 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 Meriwether. Mixing by Proximity Sound. Intro music by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. So I remember I got banned from a BBS.

• 1:09:34Jack Rhysider?

  A sysop just was like, "You're not welcome here anymore." Why? Because I uploaded 12 incomplete copies of King's Quest because I was trying to download Leisure Suit Larry. This is Darknet Diaries.