Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (19 page)

Alfredo called his board Crime Scene, a pretty boastful name for a warez board that didn't attract any heavyweight hacker types. Even worse, he was just asking for trouble with his I'm-so-cool handle: Renegade Hacker.

The first contact Alfredo had with any of the MOD boys, well before today's 2600 meeting, was when some of them called up to harass him. Alfredo didn't know who the callers were, he says it could have been either John or Julio or Zod on the phone, could have been all of them, for all he knows.

They said, "Give us access to your board or suffer the consequences. "

Alfredo hung up, but they called back on his other private line immediately. Then they called again on his mom's phone line. He was impressed that they had all his numbers.

A week later, Long John Silver phoned Alfredo and filled him in on the whole MOD thing. Who they were. What they did.

Why he should be friendly. He got the picture, and now Alfredo really wanted to be in MOD.

He even set up an exclusive sub-network on his bulletin board so the MOD guys could log in and hang out, like sparrows at a bird feeder. They called a couple of times, but then Alfredo's mom made him take down the board because his grades were slipping. Thanks, Mom.

Of everybody in MOD, Julio was the most cordial to Alfredo. Julio called him on the phone sometimes, and he called him

"Alf. " He even came over to Alfredo's spotless apartment with the sculpture of the Madonna and Child looming over the dining room table and the shiny linoleum floor that the chihuahua is not allowed to walk on. The yappy dog stays in the hall, behind a toddler guard-gate. You could hear the dog's toenails clacking back there all day.

Sometimes Julio brought John over to Alfredo's. But it was a lot different from the scene in Eli's bedroom. It was no meeting of the minds. For one thing, Julio and John didn't really like Alfredo, at least that's what Alfredo thought from how they acted. One time after they left, Alfredo was missing a modem, worth maybe fifty bucks, and a beeper as well. He suspected that John stole the stuff, but John remembers the situation differently. He says Alfredo wanted him to have the modem. Also a pocketful of change.

It really burned Alfredo, if you must know. You let some guys into your house, you think they're your friends, and then they pull something like that. Alfredo might be guilty of bad judgment, but he was no geek.

He invited Julio and John over again, pretended to forget all about the modem and beeper. He played the lamer supplicant: Show me some stuff on the computer. Pretty please. Julio and John were only too happy. (If they hack into stuff from Alfredo's building, how could the feds ever trace the intrusions back to them? Slick. ) They would take him on a tour, a hacker's tour of Fun Sites. Julio would do the typing.

They go to New York University, calling a campus computer system that lets them dial out through another modem. From that point on, whatever they do is very hard to trace, and even better, free. To them at least. They take Alfredo to the Internet (big deal) where they show him a whole collection of special-interest bulletin boards known as USENET. They browse one board dedicated to discussing telecommunications. It's just like a hack/phreak board, except it's for adults. No one uses a handle. The users sign their real names! What fools.

Show me something better, says Alfredo.

They log in to TRW. Easy. Nothing to it. Who do you want to look up?

Geraldo.

Of all the people in the world whose confidential credit histories are online, whose would you like to pull? Geraldo Rivera's. The dude's mean, in your face, and right to the point. Just like them. He's Latino and he's from the city.

A credit record spews out:

JK2N RIVERA G. 0 < 10000

9 10: 10: 04 CU06 502 RIVERA TNJ1

A-P11 PEOPLES WESTCHESTER BK 1008880 0

Could it really be Geraldo's? Cool. The talk show host's credit history goes on for pages. American Express, a student loan from Florida, a credit inquiry from World Book, a Citibank preferred VISA card, a satisfied loan to Manufacturer's Hanover Trust, and a mortgage through Citicorp. Of course, they don't know for sure if it is the right Geraldo Rivera. But it's the only one who comes up in a classy neighborhood in the metropolitan area.

Eventually they tire of Geraldo and his secrets and move on, to the Information America Network. It's an online service that has all sorts of interesting personal data about you and me. That's how Information America makes a living. You have a civil judgment against you and it goes into the network. The kind of house you live in, the names of the other people who live there, even your neighbors.

INFORMATION AMERICA NETWORK

P E O P L E F I N D E R

(Copyright Information America Inc. )

Client Billing Code: 7689

Who do you want to look up?

But before anyone else can answer, John decides:

Last Name: duke

First Name: david

Enter XX=state abbr MU=Multiple state (3)

US-Nationwide: la

Would you like to narrow your search to a

specific city? (Y/N): n

Searching...

The anticipation is palpable. What would you say to David Duke if you could call him on the blower? What would you say to the redneck Lousiana legislator, the racist who openly admits to being a Ku Klux Klan boss? Within a few seconds, Duke's address, birth date, length of residence appear. Best of all, there's the man's telephone number.

John dials. A man answers. He sounds a little old, but what the hell. "Yo, " says John, slowly, dragging it out to three syllables. He sure doesn't sound like a white telephone lineman now. "I wanted to talk to you about your daughter.... "

And on and on. It is a wonderful night for Alfredo because, wouldn't you know it, he's been recording the whole session.

He records it on his computer, secretly, so that John and Julio don't even know. Every keystroke, every line of text that's printed out on the screen is secretly buffered in a file on Alfredo's computer.

After they go home, he prints it out and admires the captured session. It might be useful some day.

Alfredo adds it to his collection of confidential documents. He's also managed to procure a printout of the updated "History of MOD. " That technically may be a confidential MOD phile, but hey, it's not so hard to get hold of, if you know the right people.

John and Julio think they're so smart, dissing Alfredo. But Alfredo knows a lot of the right people. He's friendly with a lot of guys, guys who might be just as fed up with the MOD boys' posturing and crowing as Alfredo is.

Alfredo knows some of the guys in LOD, for instance. Well, he sort of knows them, at least well enough to type greetings when they're all logged in to the same chat system or something. Alfredo knows Chris Goggans himself, and knows all about the feud between Mark Abene and Chris.

If Alfredo can't get into MOD, he wouldn't mind getting into LOD.

As far as Alfredo knows, the LOD boys haven't seen a copy of "The History of MOD" yet.

But they sure would be interested.

Downstairs, the front door opens.

It is a familiar sound. Although Chris Goggans is asleep in the second-floor bedroom of his off-campus townhouse in Austin, he wakes to register the click of the latch, and to wonder. The door shouldn't be opening at 6 A. M. His roommate isn't even awake yet.

There is no time for the wonder to turn to worry, no time at all it seems, because suddenly, Chris hears a gruff voice shout up the stairwell.

"Federal agents! Search warrant!"

Chris, bewildered in his boxers, wakes to see an agent in his room. Chris sits up in his bed and sees all of them, six men wearing badges and carrying guns in holsters, spilling into the house. If you had asked him yesterday, he would have said no way could that small entryway accommodate six grown men at once.

From the next room, Goggans's roommate awakens, and calls out, "Chris, you better wear socks! They make you take off your socks. "

This visit was no surprise. Both roommates know the agents have come to see Chris. The premonitions weren't exactly psychic. Three hackers in New York were busted in January. Three hackers in Atlanta were busted in February. If that weren't enough to give him a prickly feeling between the shoulder blades, Chris recently learned that his student records had been subpoenaed by a federal prosecutor. In fact, for weeks the University of Texas student has been semi-expecting just such a near-dawn arrival, expecting the government to come for the computers.

But Chris will fight them every inch of the way. Not for nothing has he chosen the hacker handle Erik Bloodaxe. His namesake, a brave Viking warrior with bizarre magical powers, captivated Chris when he read about him in a sixth-grade history book. Erik Bloodaxe is a persona worthy of membership in the Legion of Doom. The original Erik Bloodaxe might have slain these gun-wielding interlopers with a single swipe of his massive steel sword, glinting righteously in the sun.

Chris is armed with a more modern weapon: smart-ass college student sarcasm.

On Chris's dresser, laid out plain as anything (to be more obvious, it would need a big red arrow dangling from the ceiling, emblazoned with the words LOOK HERE) is a brochure on how to become a Secret Service agent. The raiders whisk it up, turn it over to their leader.

"So you're thinking about joining up, heh?"

"I think I could help you guys out, yes, " Chris says.

Thus is the bluster of Erik Bloodaxe translated for the late-twentieth-century ear.

The federal agents allow Chris to dress. He pulls on a pair of jeans, then goes to sit in the kitchen downstairs. He hears them overhead as they walk around the room where he so recently slept. He hears them pack up his equipment.

One of them rustles through papers and finds a copy of a song parody Chris wrote. It's called "The End of the Internet. "

"Is this some kind of a threat?" an agent asks him.

"No, just a song, " says Chris.

The six-man team is also curious about an arcade-size Pac Man machine. They suspect Chris stole it; he says he bought the game from a friend. They phone his friend at seven A. M. to verify the story. Also snapped up are a bag of stereo cables

-wires, hmm

and printouts from an electronic magazine called Phrack. The agents dig through cereal boxes, flour containers, detergent, apparently looking for drugs. Blue suds foam up.

They leave the house carrying boxes. Chris walks them to the car, then watches them drive off into the morning. He wonders if he will be arrested. When? He wonders if he will go to jail. For how long? Will it be a big case? Will he be sacrificed on the altar of some prosecutor's career?

Pity Chris. The Viking Erik Bloodaxe could have relieved his anxieties by slaughtering a few goats, at least. But Chris is left at the curb, left to turn and walk back into his townhouse. He closes the door behind him. He hears the familiar muted click.

Again, no one got arrested. And maybe because of that, the whole thing took on surreal overtones during the next few days and weeks. Maybe this was some kind of Big Brother bad dream. Maybe it would all go away. Maybe it was just the government's way of harassing a bunch of kids you know, shut them down by expropriating their computers.

That approach didn't work with Chris, who was pugnaciously dialing underground bulletin boards again almost as soon as the federal agents disappeared from his life.

There was a new, super-elite board that he had to check out.

It was called Fifth Amendment.

The board ran on an IBM computer in a private home in Houston. What was it that would start the buzz? Why did some boards spring from nowhere and overnight build a reputation for being the new, hot lure, the BBS with the phrankest philes, the baddest place to post?

Fifth Amendment was suddenly a sensation, no less so than a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Hundreds of hackers knew there was a bright, warm place behind the locked door, but only a dozen or so were privy to the password that would get them beyond the bouncer. What made Fifth Amendment so alluring was the crowd inside. The patrons were a collection of the world's best hackers, or so the huddled masses outside whispered to one another.

Word got around. Fifth Amendment boasted an international clientele. Dutch hackers (the Dutch) were said to be on the board. So were the guys from the Chaos Computer Club. A man named Empty Promise, an ex-Navy cryptography expert, logs in from time to time to discuss the intricacies of the phone company's packet-switching networks. Some of LOD's rock-solid, original members were on the board. Here, on a personal computer on a desktop in a bedroom in Houston, the hacker underground's elite consorted with one another.

The board's operators, a hacker named Micron (who owned the actual IBM hardware) and his friend Scott Chasin, alias Doc Holliday, kept the list of users very small, very private. In this climate of uncertain civil liberties and Operation Sundevil, where the government cracked down on first one hacker and then another without warning or obvious patterns, a lot of the best hackers had put their modems on a back shelf in their closets. Micron and Scott wanted to bring them back from the dead by providing a safe haven for the free interchange of ideas and whatever. By being so exclusive,

Fifth Amendment would protect its users from incriminating themselves. Hence the name.

Chris logged in, using an authorized user name that came directly from the system operators. The password was changed often, disseminated directly from the system operators to each authorized user.

Chris would read the philes, chat with the other users, correspond for a while with Scott Chasin. Chris and Scott had an electronic friendship that dated back to the mid-1980s, back to the days when they accidentally bumped into each other in the Great Plains of cyberspace. They both were logged in to a midwestern-based underground bulletin board called World of Kryton. Kryton was run by a Milwaukee hacker who boasted membership in the elite gang that called itself the 414s (named after Milwaukee's area code). The gang's fame derived from the fact that members had figured out back in 1983