Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (17 page)

Eli is alone in the lobby. He waits. He admires a large Plexiglas-covered display of U. S. currency and another that shows all the presidents. Until recently, these were the two major mandates of the Secret Service: protecting the currency from counterfeiters and protecting high-ranking officials. It's the former role that has evolved into fighting credit card fraud and computer crimes.

How is it that of the three MOD boys that the Secret Service raided today, Eli is the one who finds himself standing in this antechamber, waiting to confess?

The scene when he'd arrived home from the movies at around seven o'clock was chaotic. A tall man in a suit had come out of the house with a box. Eli said hi, and the man said, "Who are you?"

"I'm Eli, " he said.

"Do you know who I am?" the man said.

"Yeah, you have a badge around your neck. "

When Eli opened the door and walked in, a group of men he'd never seen before all yelled in unison, "Eli!" and it scared him.

Eli stood in the dining room, near the doorway to his bedroom, and there saw his mother, Maria, very upset. He greeted her in Spanish. She alternated between crying and digging out family photographs to show the Secret Service agents evidence that the Ladopoulos family had good friends in Costa Rica. One of the Secret Service agents said, "You're kidding. I was just guarding the president of Costa Rica. " And Maria pulled from the buffet in the dining room a snapshot of the Costa Rican president himself. Her sister had worked for the Costa Rican Embassy at the United Nations and as a kid Eli liked to go there and try on the headphones and listen to all the different languages.

The way Eli remembers it, the agents told him he was in a lot of trouble and said that if he didn't come downtown with them right now to cooperate, it would look bad later on. The way Eli remembers it, one of the agents asked him if he was a Communist. They asked him what his hacker "alias" was, and Eli told them, "Acid Phreak... it's like a pen name. "

Now, several hours later, Eli still hasn't had dinner. He's waited for nearly an hour in this lobby, flopping on the couches, standing up again, pacing. Finally, Special Agent Martin Walsh comes out to escort Eli into a conference room.

Walsh, Harris's colleague and the lead agent on this case, looks like what you'd want in a career cop. Neutral. He's a block of a man, square and sturdy, no soft spots. You can try as hard as you want to describe him, but you won't get the color of his hair right. It's not blond, it's not brown, it's not black. It's not straight, it's not thick, it's not thin. His eyes are deep set and earnest.

To Walsh, Eli seems unusually cooperative and eager to give a statement. Walsh thinks Eli is cocky, because Eli keeps boasting about how talented he is on computers. Walsh tells Eli he is not under arrest and is free to go whenever he wants. He also reads him his Miranda rights: Eli has the right to remain silent, anything he says may be used against him.

Walsh says that if Eli cooperates, well then, Walsh will let the U. S. Attorney know. That could help Eli's case.

Eli cooperates.

He writes out a three-page statement:

Having started playing and learning about the telephone network at an early age (since about ten years old) I feel what I know should have been put to good use. Hands-on experience was impossible at age fifteen (I got my first computer then, I only played with the phone from 10-15 yrs old), so I basically started learning from others interested in learning such as I.

Being that the telephone network was easily one of the most technically prominent was probably the reason I chose to learn more about it. I think I should make clear my standpoint on 'hacking' and 'hackers' in general.

Hacking to me is more than just hacking out 'PIN' codes (which I do not do). Any idiot can leave his computer running a software program to scan from them all night. Many consider themselves hackers, they post as many as possible or trade them (on bulletin boards

BBSs).

I particularly do not like this 'hacker's scene' since it misinterprets what hacking really is to me: learning about a system by asking a lot of questions. I knew from the start I would someday work as a computer security consultant or investigator for the telco or gov't agency. What troubled me the most was: how was I supposed to come out and say, 'Hey, I'm a hacker.... I know this and this about your systems!! I need a job, ' without the possibility of being attacked....

So I set out to find out more about the system by reading documentation and by using the systems. Using 'PINS' was only a 'bridge' to come off a tandem trunk in order to gain entry into the system I wanted to learn more about. I pay for most of my calls and could have had free service had 1 wanted it, but that would be going against my primary goal, to know and learn.

Eli stops writing and hands the confession to his inquisitors, who now include a Bellcore investigator as well as Walsh.

They stand above Eli, and they look very disapproving.

"I'm done, " Eli says.

They look it over and one of them says, "This is like an inaugural speech. "

"I don't know what to tell you, " Eli says.

One of them leaves for a minute, then returns with a stack of technical manuals. "We already know what you did, so you might as well tell us, " he says.

Eli is scared. "Can I call my mom first?"

But then Eli agrees to give it another shot.

Walsh says to Eli, "You know what a switch is, right? Put that in there. "

They discuss MIZAR, COSMOS, LMOS, and Eli helpfully writes out four more pages of detailed explanation that define these acronyms and the extent to which he explored those computers. Eli notes that of all the phone company's switches, DMS 100s "are my favorites. "

I set up forwarding lines in order to reach people that were far for me to be called 'locally, ' thereby / wouldn't have to use another person's 'PIN. '

... My intentions were not criminal in my eyes. My only intent was to learn, and in the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to work for a telco, whether RBOC or interlata [long-distance] carrier, I did not care. This is what I know best and my career was spelled out. If I had had on-hands experience or had been working for telco, I wouldn't have done what I did. I saw no 'channel' I could use to get a job with them (telephone co. ), so I applied with a management company in hopes of getting a computer-related job.

... I was a 'pioneer' in my eyes, since me and my friends were more advanced than the majority of the 'hacker population. ' I learned everything on my own and from friends, but had no criminal intent. I feel it is a waste of talent when the 'hackers' are viewed, generally, as evil mischievous people.

... I was looked up upon by most of the 'lesser' hackers and I would guide some and help with programming (not to enter systems, I never posted a dialup or password to telco systems on any system).

Eli goes on to write about all the times he called long-distance carriers and New York Telephone looking for a job, and notes that no one ever returned his calls.

He writes that he never meant to do any harm, "which I feel sorry for if I have. This is not B. S., or a cop-out.... I just think my side should be told, and I am happy to cooperate. "

Walsh looks it over, then says, "Okay, this is better. "

Walsh shows Eli a sheet of paper on which is written the electronic message that flashed across the screen when The Learning Link crashed the previous fall: "HAHAHAHA... Happy Thanksgiving you turkeys, from all of us at MOD. "

Eli writes across the sheet of paper: "This is a true copy of what I put in the computer. " He signs his name.

Then Walsh says, "Just write here, at the bottom, that you did this of your own free will. "

Eli signs his name again.

The session is over, and now Walsh brings Eli into a small room in the back of the office where there is a coffee machine and a telephone on the wall. Walsh gets some coffee, and Eli calls his mother to tell her he is okay and will be coming home soon.

Eli is so confused. He just wants to get out of here.

John Lee dials "0. " The hacker leans against a bank of pay phones in the atrium of the soaring Citicorp Building in midtown Manhattan. He's much too cool to check out his reflection in the plate-glass window of the Italian restaurant at the edge of the open space.

All around him, teenagers peck at phones like sparrows at a birdfeeder, dialing and hanging up, trying random phone numbers. About fifty teenagers are hanging out, swapping information on how to break into computer systems, forming energetic clusters. Kids dial a number that someone said would connect to a New York Telephone switch. The number worked last week.

The hackers had materialized out of nowhere around six o'clock, just when the office drones fled the Citicorp building for the subway. The kids came here once a month, on the first Friday of the month. No matter the season, they wear beat-up fatigue coats, baggy jeans, clunky-soled shoes, thick-thick black belts with square metal buckles that weigh five pounds.

They sport peach fuzz moustaches and slicked-back buzz cuts. You can't miss them. The gathering is their "meeting, "

and it's organized by the semi-official hacker house organ, a quarterly magazine called 2600 that's published out of Long Island. The magazine's name is an allusion to history: back in the Dark Ages of the 1960s, a 2600 hertz tone was used to control all the phone company's trunk lines. Today, the tone is obsolete, but the magazine still pays homage to the days when a street-smart hacker named Captain Crunch figured out that blowing a freebie whistle from a cereal box produced the precise tone necessary to make free phone calls. The articles in 2600 tend toward telco technicalities. Every issue sports a photo spread of pay phones around the world, hacker pinups: a pay phone kiosk in Belgium, airport pay phone in Rome, London phone box. The magazine is eclectic, and so are the meetings held in its name. There's no agenda at a 2600 meeting, no call to order, no parliamentary procedure. It's much more informal than that. The editor of 2600 is Eric Corley, and you can see him today cutting through the crowd, long black curls flying, as he passes out copies of the latest issue of the magazine. At thirty, Corley is the dean of the Citicorp crowd, a college kid who never left campus, a radical who never mellowed with age. He has a weekly radio show in Manhattan (tune in on Wednesday nights to hear him on such esoteric topics as how New York Telephone could trace kidnappers' ransom calls more efficiently), and for all intents and purposes, in 1990 Corley represented hackerdom to the rest of the world. He was the unofficial spokesman. Or at least he was until recently. The Secret Service raids had changed some things.

In fact, in the weeks since word of the raids first spread, the 2600 meetings have become much more of a crowd scene.

This afternoon, some hackers have traveled from as far away as Syracuse to make the meeting. A few kids cluster by the potted plants, planning an after-hours dumpster dive. "We got thirty garbage bags of printouts from the Bank of Tokyo a few months ago. Found five passwords, " says a chubby high school student wrapped in an army coat.

It's quite a scene, and no serious hacker in the New York City area would miss it. Most of the MOD boys are here; they come every month. One time a dozen MOD boys posed for a group photo. Red Knight, an Indian kid with a penchant for collecting telco manuals, was wearing a sweatshirt that said "MOD" in big white letters. He stood in the middle of the group, and they all draped their arms around one another. Solidarity.

Today, the only MOD member missing is Paul. He's away at college, and he might not be here even if he were home. The raid really scared him, and he's vowed not to hack anymore. Eli and Mark see things differently. They've gone one-on-one with the government, and are happy to supply the details to other hackers. Paul has been feeling distance growing between himself and his friends, because he's not comfortable with how they behave. He doesn't like to boast. The three of them don't argue about it, because that's not Paul's way. He doesn't confront them; he just withdraws subtly. Paul has never been an easy talker. The joke was that you had to know him for months before you ever got to hear his voice. He'd sit in the background of any social gathering and just listen. Eli and Mark loved to talk, but Paul might not say a word for days. It made some people uneasy, but the fact is that it made Paul blush even to think about talking about himself.

Eli and Mark stand at the center of a gaggle of fascinated acolytes near the payphones. How does it feel to be raided by the Secret Service? Hey, were your parents freaked?

Eli and Mark have become a walking enlistment poster for hacking. MOD WANTS YOU

TO THWART UNCLE SAM.

The fear the two had felt upon walking into their houses and confronting a bunch of armed federal agents has faded; it's been replaced by a certain complacency. They'd been raided, and here they are to tell the story. Never been arrested.

Never heard back from the Secret Service in the few weeks since the January 24th raids.

Although they lost their computers in the raids, MOD was as alive as ever. Eli has seen to that. He's even gotten back to

"The History of MOD" and updated it. The phile was making the rounds among MOD and its closest associates: MoDmOdMoDmOdMoDmOdMoDmOdMoDmOdMoDOdMoD

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[The History of MOD] BOOK THREE: A Kick in the Groin

Well, suffice it to say, the fun couldn't last forever.... the Secret Service visited the homes of Acid Phreak, Phiber Optik and Scorpion....

Days later they had gone to meet The Wing, which wasn't able to

talk for too long since he was too busy. He had been anticipating this little visit for a while, though. His dad didn't exactly like the idea of their presence and kicked their lack-of-a-warrant asses out before they got a chance to put to use their years of interrogation techniques

classes. Seems they think he showed his teacher a credit report or

something....

The group's popularity soared in such a short period of time, but