Darknet Diaries - 169: MoD

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

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”.SponsorsSupport for this show comes from ThreatLocker®. 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.This show is sponsored by Red Canary. 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.This show is sponsored by Maze. 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 for more information.Sources Book: Masters of Deception Book: The Hacker Crackdown 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

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. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recyder. This is Darknet Diaries. This episode is sponsored by Threat Locker. Ransomware, supply chain attacks, and zero-day exploits can strike without warning, leaving your business's sensitive data and digital assets for. vulnerable. But imagine a world where your cybersecurity strategy could prevent these threats.

And that's the power of threat locker, zero trust, endpoint protection platform. Robust cybersecurity is a non-negotiable to safeguard organizations from cyber attacks. Threat Locker implements a proactive, deny-by-default approach to cybersecurity, blocking every action, process, and user unless specifically authorized by your team. This least privileged strategy mitigates the exploitation of trusted applications and ensures 24-7, and 365 protection for your organization. The core of Threat Locker is its Protect Suite, including application allow listing, ring fencing, and network control,

additional tools like the Threat Locker detect EDR, storage control, elevation control, and configuration manager, enhance your cybersecurity posture and streamline internal IT and security operations. To learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats in your digital environment and align your organization with respected compliance frameworks, visit ThreatLocker.com. that's threat locker.com. This episode is sponsored by Red Canary.

Red Canary is a leader in managed detection response, also known as MDR. They serve companies from every size of industry, focusing on finding and stopping threats before they can have a negative impact. As the Cornerstone Security Operations partner for nearly 1,000 organizations, they provide MDR with industry leading threat accuracy across identities, endpoints, and cloud, and a world-class customer experience. For more information about Red Canary, visit Red Canary.com. That's Red Canary.com.

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

when a strange letter arrived at Tom's Times Square office in November 1988. It stated that a kid up in the Bronx was hacking into the phone grid who was calling himself the technician. The letter wasn't signed. It was an anonymous tip. But Tom suspected it might have been written by a family member of the technician because the tone was caring. It was a plea to stop this kid for his own good. 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 D&Rs that click-clacked and spat out some paper tape when they were triggered. But these weren't exactly wiretaps. They couldn't record the contents of what anyone said or typed. 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. 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 you're not. was any employee in the company. What's worse is that Tom couldn't keep track of him once he got in

there. This was serious, and this is where Tom's second interesting discovery came in. Over time, whenever the DNR started chirping, Tom would get up from his desk, rush over to it, and read where the technician was calling. 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. 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 Abing, a middle-aged man,

who was a school custodian, actually an officer in the school custodian's union, not a very likely person to be a hacker. But Charles Abine's son was a teenager who spiked up his hair, he kept terrible bedtime hours and got a lot of stomach aches. His name was Mark, but online and throughout the country, Mark was known as fiber optic, a notorious hacker.

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 in New England. Basically, he had encyclopedic. knowledge of telecommunication systems and he can name pretty much any of them. He could rattle off the most obscure details about any random machine or protocol. Of course, he could place a call anywhere in the country without paying a cent or triggering any alarms. That was the easy part. When Mark, a.k.a. 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,

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

In 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.

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

They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant, and I think more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of. To make his point, Brand invited 100 top computer designers to an exclusive hackers' conference in the 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.

My political platform is that we need an electronic declaration of independence. That last guy talking was John Perry Barlow, who at the time was a poet and essayist 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. Okay, so Harper's Magazine, this was a mainstream magazine at the time, which was covering things like politics, culture, literature. It had thought-provoking essays in it. And one thing it did regularly was a featured article that they called the forum, where like three to five contributors would all try to answer big questions like, what do we owe the planet? And is the American experiment failing? And the contributors would try to provide high-minded, thoughtful responses. Well, Harper saw that these

computers were 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 very first virtual forum, basically a live chat room on the well, where they'd ask users, big questions to get the conversations going for their magazines, questions like, do we have a right to privacy? And should hackers respect that right? What ethical considerations arise when we become more connected digitally? So in December 1989, Harper's Magazine held this virtual forum, basically an open chat room for anyone to respond to on the well. John Perry Barlow, was there. Clifford Stoll was there. Stephen Levy was there. A lot of influential people

actually were watching the chats. Even some notable hackers like Mark, aka 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 Aski Art was posted. In fact, the participants flooded the chat room with over 100,000 words during the forum. John Perry Barlow thought he was on the hacker's side, being libertarian and kind of punked 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, quote, 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, 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 men!

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

then he navigated to the section where members discussed phone freaking and thought, these guys are a joke. Sure, they have a few old technical manuals that I could recite in my sleep. So he started flooding them with new information, sort of like an all-knowing God.

And being an all-knowing hacker God can get to kids' 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 Bloodax was a short guy with a goatee and grungy long, blonde hair, and hung out in the LOD forums. Bloodax was a member of the LOD, but Mark 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, Blood Axe was confused, but quickly realized how good Mark was. A few weeks later, Mark was officially voted in. Bloodax respected Mark as a really great hacker, 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 back door that he knew Blood Axe had to the 9x packet switching network. But Blood Axe is like, well, what are you going to give me in return? If I give you this exploit, what are you going to give me? And Mark just hung up and called Blood Axe's friend. friend and told Blood Axe's friend, hey, Bloodax wants me to have the backdoor into Nineax.

Can you send it to me? And his friend did send it to him. And then BloodX found out about this and called Mark back. Blood Axe was mad, but Mark wasn't having it. Mark just told him, I don't know you shit. And Blood Axe 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 Blood X was like, what? Did he just really curse out a member of the LOD? Mark said, I don't have time for this. up. And that's how Mark, aka Fiber Optic, got kicked out of the Legion of Doom by tricking Eric Blood Axe's frayned into giving him an exploit and then cursing out Blood Axe. The two clearly didn't get along. Mark figured whatever and shrugged it off. He could run circles around anyone

and LOD, or around all of them combined. If they were ever cool, they definitely weren't anymore. He was convinced that the Legion of Doom were husbands, and he wasn't the only one who thought that. In the last episode, I told you about this guy, Paul, who 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 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 CCS. And so Acid Freak was like,

oh, that's really cool. We should show this to Mark, aka Fiber Optic, see what he has to say about this. So they decided to call him up. Hey, What do you want? Mark asks. He gets called all the time by a lot of hackers.

Paul and Eli were a bit intimidated but excited. So they told Mark that they think they got into an SCCS, but they don't know what to do. You think or you know, Mark asked. Paul handed over the information and Mark checked it out. And Mark quickly figured it out. It wasn't an SCCS. It was a telephone switch, specifically a DMS 100 switch.

Mark got back on the line. 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. 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 a 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 Bedstuy, 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. 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 touch those days. And Vaxes were popular in large businesses and universities. Some of the best secrets in cyberspace were kept on Vaxes. Eli called John on his phone. John was impressed.

How did 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, 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 Fibroptic, Eli, which was going by acid freak. Paul, who was Scorpion, John Lee, who was corrupt, and Julio, who called himself outlaw. The place they started meeting at was at the City Corpse 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 p.m., a totally different demographic would emerge from the Grimy Subways, young men and oversized jeans, skateboards, sneakers, and backwards baseball caps would come into the Citigorp building.

Because this is where the 2,600 meetup would happen. 2600 is also a hacker magazine which would host local meetups in different cities its Frack'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 pay phones in the atrium, like trying to get free phone calls on them or dial someone

to social engineer them. And of course, they always found ways so they didn't have to pay for it. Somebody would know the right number to call to avoid a toll or they bring a blue box or something. And at this 2,600 hacker meetup is where Mark, Eli, Paul, John Lee, and Julio would meet up. They enjoyed showing off what they learned, and they learned new things from other hackers. They'd talk shop, they'd get info, they'd show off their tricks, and network with other hackers. For the most part, the people who came to the 2600 hacker meetup didn't have any intent of causing destruction or making money.

Everyone was all just so curious and wanted to know how computers worked and find really clever ways to do things with them. It was sort of the essence of what they were all about. They shared the Legion of Doom's moral code, no making money, no causing harm, but they were also cut from a different cloth. They weren't just as good. 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. Ira Glass was able to interview Eli on This American Life in the early 90s, and it's an incredible view into what these kids were doing then. Here, listen. We did this from pay phones. We have a line of pay phones. We get into the computer. First, liberate one phone.

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

Then we'd go password, you know, the password, they're so okay password and they put their password in. And then we would have, you know, all these things were already encoded in one key, so we could just hit one key. And you know, it wouldn't look like we were typing it. Logging would just appear Whomp, Yeah, then we'd hit the password key and password

Then we'd say Logging and correct And then disconnect from them But we already got their login and password And then when they reconnected It would be the regular system So they'd figure, hey, I made a mistake typing it in or something

And that's how we would get an account It was like, it was funny You know You get into things that are good You start targeting systems that are interesting And then you start developing a collection It's like baseball cards I have NASA

I have you know of NSA. I've got phone company computers, I've got Mizar, I've got Cosmos, I've got this, I've got that, McDonnell Douglas, Marion Marietta, you know, TRW, CBI, 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. Once you start going, you can't stop. You know, you're just steamrolling one after the other, and the flow gets you going, and then you're just like, yeah, we rule. You know, we're it. It breaks down all barriers. Nothing can stop the flow. If you've got the flow, you can conquer everything.

That's what people call being in the zone. You know, once you're in there, you can't stop. It's the juice. That was Eli, talking about what him, Mark, Paul, John Lee, and Julio were doing in New York City back then. It was a golden time. And Paul came up with an idea. He said, 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. If 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, and she's talking to us and stuff, and we don't know what to say, hi, we're calling from the United States,

and this and that, and she knew what was up. He'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 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. This episode is sponsored by Shopify. Is there any better time to try out something new than at the start of a new year? I love it. I feel like I have permission to try learning a new skill or starting a new project

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Here you're your first this new year. with Shopify by your side. 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 going to full panic mode? Yeah, LOD was their initial suspect, but maybe this new group, MOD, had something to do with it too, right? The police didn't necessarily know of masters of deception as their group name, but they definitely were tracking these people individually.

Why? Because Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples, the engineers from the New York Telephone Company, were on to them. They were watching their phone calls and trace the numbers around. That number they kept 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 state. Secret Service, who was already working with Bell South to try to catch hackers. Bell South cracked down hard on Adam and the others, even though it acknowledges they never disrupted phone service or changed any customer accounts.

We don't care what the motive may or may not be. Scott Tyser is a corporate spokesman for Bell South. We are not talking about Wally and the Beave, much less Eddie Haskell. We're not dealing with a bunch of mischievous pranksters playing in some high-taxswain. what 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,

Martin Marietta, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell, New York Telephone, TRW, Information America, and New York University. Geez, 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 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 do. to find and get a hold 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 his 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. he just spread him around and 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 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? 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.

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-Kur, he was stressed out simply by knowing things, top-secret things that the government didn't really want him to know, So he decided to split out of there from California and moved 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 2,600 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. Like, while he was in New York, he met up and hung out with John Lee at Grand Central State. 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 backdoor 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 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. 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 going to master it.

And boy, did he, the sugar rush that came with hacking company after company, Mark found some of TimeNet's own PDP tens, and these were big, hulking mainframes that 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 back door.

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 Julie 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 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 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 MODD members hacked into the White House in front.

front of Esquire reporters, that's how wild of a time it was. The masters of deception were the most powerful people in cyberspace. Legion of Who? Oh yeah, I almost forgot about them. Because by this time, by at least some accounts, the Legion of Doom was dead. Like Frack Magazine published their obituary on May 28th, 1990. Quote, The Legion of Doom will long be remembered in the computer underground as an innovative and pioneering force. No other group 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. The profit, member from 88 to 89, reason for

leaving, bust hacking. Fiber optic, 89 to 90, New York. Reason for leaving, bust hacking. Which, that's not actually true. Mark or a fiber optic got kicked out, remember? You know whose name is not on here is Eric Bloodax, whose real name is Chris Gagins, 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 Luther wrote it and says, if you believe the rumors, LOD has been dead many times, but that's, again, untrue.

But in reality, due to the CFAA being passed, and the major outage at New York, arrests were starting to be made on hackers all over. Three days after that major outage at AT&T, on January 18th, 1990, two agents 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. Nightorf, aka Night Lightning, the co-founder of the notorious hacker magazine Frack, and accused him of crashing the AT&T phone system. They arrested him and took all his computers and took him into custody.

Craig seemed pretty surprised that the Secret Service was arresting him. Yeah, he could have done it, sure, but he swore he didn't, and he would never do that. Any fight that Craig had in him, though, disappeared when the cops confronted him about the document that he posted to Frack, the E911 file. In a four-hour interrogation, he admitted to publishing it, and he agreed to cooperate with the investigation. And ditto happened for the prophet, the guy who originally copied the E911 file from Bell South.

He also got arrested by the police and the Secret Service, and they were both charged on seven counts relating to stealing and posting this E911 file. They even told the parents of these guys, Your son has caused billions of dollars worth of damage. He crashed the AT&T network. Eventually, almost every LOD member either got busted or gave up. Lex Luther 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. 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 creating a dialogue between hackers and security. security people and the FBI in Secret Service. Well, it might sound a little ridiculous to think about, but the FBI thought it was great because it gave them a chance to chat with hackers and then arrest them. So while people from LOD were being nabbed by the police and others were scattering,

it looked like LOD was dead. But it wasn't entirely. There was one person who was trying to keep it alive, Eric Bloodax, aka Chris Gargans. Eric Bloodax 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. Blood Axe 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 rated at six in the morning. But he was expecting them. So even though there were six armed policemen in his bedroom, Bloodax 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.

Bloodax 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, at least in 1983. But Bloodax 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. Bloodax 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. 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 the first hacker consultancies under the auspices of gaining clout with the FBI and telco security. The person I'm referring to is Eric Bloodax, in case it wasn't clear to anyone in the audience. Bloodax 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 Bloodax 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, it was turning in hackers.

When hackers found out he was doing this, they began harassing him at 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 Citigorp atrium, everyone who could would pick up a pay phone and start calling the ComSec phone number. It was a denial of service attack, if you will, which tied up the phone lines.

It 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. And when 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. Blood Axe 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 Blood Axe's life. Hell. He and Julio prank called him incessantly, taunting him, dialing again, and again over and over and just hanging up. But still, Blood Axe 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 PBCX 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 despite 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 conferred it to jive language,

like a comically racist impression of the original text, which he then published to the world, and everybody knew who he was trying to annoy. There was only one black hacker in MOD. John Lee then took a shot at Blood Axis' 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 Bloodax got a password to MOD's BBS from a guy who really didn't like John, and this spat just kept going up and up, and John Lee wanted to take it a step up. In the summer of 1991 from his humid air-conditioned, in this apartment in Brooklyn. He wanted to mess with Blood Axe even more by tapping his phone.

He wanted to get in Blood Axe'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 ComSac's phone line, which is Blood Axe'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 Nightorff, 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 Blood Axe was probably wanting to impress. Craig was calling ComSec for help. He was getting harassed with constant phone calls lately, and he was fed up.

Blood Axe 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, Bloodax 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 Bloodax knew exactly what just happened. John Lee was listening in on that call. Now Bloodax had to go back to the most famous hacker in the country who needed help dealing with an attack on his phone line and admit that the very call that they were having was under attack. And John Lee listened to him admit it.

Eric Bloodax 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 Blood Axe.

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 the FBI about us and so on and so forth. Remember I told you about Tom and Fred, the security engineers at the New York Telephone Company?

Well, they figured out the people hacking into their network where 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 to data taps, they called it.

And I guess the term we might use today is man in the middle or even spyware. In a suite of borrowed offices in Manhattan's World Trade Center, the Secret Service set up a war room, well, a wire room is actually what they called it, and it was overseen by the FBI, filled with computers, storage tapes, disc drives, and cables in every direction. That 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. 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 Bloodax. Anytime 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.

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. Wait, the EFF.

Sorry, I hate to interrupt here, but I know the story has been 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 ringing, 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 Spalunkers

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? 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 see. 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. It is not a game.

They're attempting and are getting into credit cards or getting into telephone systems. They're getting into medical records, credit records, or getting into everything. The raids come after a two-year nationwide investigation called Operation Sundevil. Like even the guy who reported the problem, for stealing the E911 file and stashing on his computer, he even got rated.

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. Everyone in MOD was accused of violating the CFAA. Members of LOD were arrested for it and so many other innocent bystanders. So John Perry Barlow was seeing all these people getting scooped up,

left and right. And he thought, someone needs to do something about this. And he met with Mitch K-Poor. This guy was on the well, too. And K-Poor 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, and 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 Rand and Steve Wozniak to go over the ideas of what the EFF was. And Steve was so into it that he pitched in some of his. own money to get things started. And it was settled. The EFF was born. And its online home at the time was the well. And the EFF is still going strong today. It is a leading voice for advocating for

digital rights in the United States. 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. 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 made, was a cyberpunk game which had a hacker campaign in it. They thought this was an instruction manual for hackers. So they rated 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. And this was one of the first cases that the EFF took on. 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, aka Fiber Optic, 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. 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, and 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, aka Acid Free Free. One of the members of MOD who also got arrested. Eli was thrown into prison for a relatively minor offense. Some of the members of his crew broke into the computers that list everybody's credit ratings, you know. And they copied some credit reports, and they sold the information to other people. And he was named 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. You know, what we did was such a small thing and such a larger scheme of things, you know? It's kind of depressing in a way. I mean, there's so many things we could have done. We could have monitored, you know, Peter Lynch, you know,

and what's the next best investment for the day, you know? And we'd make millions of dollars, you know, 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 were like, ah, you know, we were just kids. MOD co-founders Paul and Eli each got half a year in jail.

Mark got a whole year in jail, and John Lee got a year in jail too. Julio, who did all of John's crimes 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,

aka Knight Lightning, the co-founder of Frack. He was in trouble for publishing the E911 file. He was also one of the first cases that the EFF took on. And if you think about it, this is a federal case. So they couldn't charge him with just publishing the article because that would just go completely against the First Amendment. So instead, they were charging him with theft and wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property.

Bell South 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, Belsow's 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. 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. 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. 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. They weren't just a hacker EZine 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. Because what if I told you, the day before authorities raided Craig and a week before they rated 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&D 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 I regularly, Glass interviewed him after he got out of prison and wasn't allowed to touch a computer for a while. So I was like, damn, this is like, I have to fill this void. What should I do? You know, and I didn't know what to do anymore. It was like horrible, just, you know, it was sad. We would call 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 call, I was like, so what's up? Nothing. I cleaned my room yesterday. Yeah, they came over and cleaned my room too. Pretty well. Yeah, I know. So, what do you want to do?

I don't know. Because it's like such a large part of our lives at that point, you know? You have so much power to lose it in an instant like that. 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 about acid freak anymore. You know, what's acid freak without a computer, you know? It's just a regular guy. So it was a bummer. And 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 bald rates and antsy colors, but it didn't matter. The spell had been broken. The new digital frontier was now off-limits to exploration. You could feel it.

The stakes were higher now. The channels were quieter. The boards went dark. The legends disappeared. The ones who stuck around, 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. 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 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.

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, 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 Slat Tala and Joshua Quittner. 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 Kuku's Egg,

which is a classic hacker story. As a reminder, you can get a premium listening experience by going to plus.darknetdires.com. If you sign up, you'll get an ad-free version of this show, plus 11 bonus episodes. Not only that, it's an amazing way to show your support for the show and to keep the lights on over here. If you like what we're doing and you want more of it,

please consider supporting by going to plus. darknetdires.com. This episode was created by me, Sir Crash a Lot, Jack Reider. 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.

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 theory. This is Darknet Diaries.