Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (14 page)

To this day, Eli swears he never meant to crash The Learning Link that November evening. He said he and another MOD

member were just exploring. He certainly had never crashed anything intentionally. (Plik. ) Of course, once when he was fooling around on a private computer, he accidentally deleted a critical command that the system administrator needed to keep track of what everyone was doing on the system at any "given time. That was almost as bad as crashing a system.

But that time, he got Paul to fix it.

Since it's almost Thanksgiving, Eli just wants to leave a greeting card. He wants to let everyone at PBS know he is there.

Let the media know that the most elite dewds in cyberspace live in the five boroughs, right under their noses, if anyone would care to check. The way Eli looked at the world, all the media wanted is a sensational story. MOD was a sensational story, and nobody even knew it.

Eli bypasses Hallmark and writes his own greeting, electronic style: Happy Thanksgiving you turkeys, from all of us at MOD:

The Wing / Acid Phreak / Scorpion / Supernigger / Nynex Phreak / HAC / Phiber Optik / Thomas Covenant Eli sends a command to The Learning Link computer, ordering it to type out that message on its printer. The printer will print the message over and over again, until paper spills out all over the floor. Now everyone at Channel 13 will know that they've been hacked by the best. It's just a spoof, a goof, a gag. Eli means no harm. He's just a kid. In his mind, it's like tying someone's shoelaces together to watch them trip.

But something else altogether happens in the early morning hours of November 28.

Eli would later tell a judge that some other MOD member took the message that Eli sent to the printer and modified it.

Then, Eli would say, that person rigged the system so that whenever anyone logged in, instead of seeing the familiar Learning Link greeting, the user got Eli's greeting card. For good measure, the system administrator's password was changed, so that the real system administrator couldn't run the system or erase the message. Like being locked out of your own house.

In fact, no one can get past the message. Every schoolteacher in a three-state area is locked out. And reading the graffiti that the MOD boys composed is not making them any happier. The message says: Haha! You want to log in? Why? It's empty! HAHAHAHA!

MOD brings Seasons Greetings to llunet

(Channel 13) ... Happy Thanksgiving you turkeys, from all of us at MOD: The Wing / Acid Phreak / Scorpion /

Supernigger / Nynex Phreak / HAC / Phiber

Optik / Thomas Covenant

Employees of WNET must rescue the system by reconstructing it from backup computer tapes they keep for emergencies.

Eli would later tell a judge that he was not responsible. But the very next day, the DNR on Eli's line notes that Eli calls The Learning Link again. And soon after, the whole system crashed again. Someone had erased all the files.

Eli said it wasn't him. He said when he found out The Learning Link system had crashed, he got a bad feeling in his gut, as if he were walking down the street with a friend and the friend said, "I'm going to trip this lady coming toward us. " And then he trips the lady!

Was this what real hackers do?

A day or so later, Allen and Eli have a three-way phone call with Paul at college. They tell him what happened.

Paul feels kind of sick. For some reason Paul can't figure out, Allen and Eli are laughing about it. Even Paul laughs a little bit at first, although he can't explain why. But it makes him uneasy.

Paul knows they went too far. Heckling your peers is one thing. Even scanning calling card numbers is okay, because it seems victimless, and how else can you afford to call out-of-state computers? But deliberately crashing a system that hundreds of people (hundreds of adults) depend on every day is, frankly, kind of stupid.

He thinks about the hacker ethic, and the conversation he had so long ago with Hac Hac!

about the difference

between hackers and crackers. The lines were starting to blur for Paul. Hackers are only trying to learn how things work: Thou shalt not destroy any system.

But on the phone to Eli and Allen, Paul says only this: "It doesn't seem like such a good idea. "

Now comes a weird coincidence.

On the day after the Learning Link crash, on the twenty-third floor of New York Telephone's midtown skyscraper, Tom Kaiser performs his morning DNR check. He looks down the list of calls made from Eli's house in the past twenty-four hours, and he comes across a phone number he's never seen before. It's a Manhattan number, and he looks it up in his directory. He sees that the phone number is registered to Channel 13, the PBS station. That's odd.

Kaiser is about to call WNET when his phone rings.

There's a woman on the other end of the line, and she's really upset. She tells Kaiser that she works at a place called The Learning Link. She didn't know who to report this to, but the phone company's business office gave her Kaiser's name in Security. She tells him what happened and asks Kaiser to trace the calls.

She wonders why anyone would do something like this.

Kaiser desperately wants to say, "My God, what a coincidence! I was just about to call you!" But he can't, of course, because he can't compromise the confidentiality of his investigation. All he can do is listen to her story, and then, at the end of it, say gently, "I know someone you can call. "

He gives her the phone number of Secret Service headquarters. The Secret Service is very cooperative, someone gets all the details of the crash, and tells the woman the agency will investigate. And that's how the Learning Link crash would become the pivotal event in the case that the federal government was slowly building against the boys in MOD.

Were it not for this confluence, the Learning Link incident might never have been singled out. But as it happened, the system crash was something that law enforcement could understand immediately. It was not as ephemeral as trying to grasp the definition of a switch. It was concrete. The system had been working, the system was now crashed. An organized gang of hackers did it. It was just the event to catapult the MOD case to the top of the pile in the Secret Service's telecommunications division. Secret Service agents started having frequent conversations with prosecutors in the U. S. Attorney's office. They made plans to execute search warrants at the hackers' houses. The Learning Link crash was, in fact, the event that four years later would cause a prosecutor to smile wryly, as he explained, "This made the case sexy. "

Even though Eli's missive to the media never got delivered, the general message was getting through. Hackers are out there, people, and we'd better figure out who they are and what they're doing. The Learning Link affair was remaining a secret for now, but thanks to the Morris story, newspapers and newsmagazines are assigning reporters to learn the new definition of the word hacker.

In that spirit, Harper's magazine decided to host an electronic forum on the topic of "Is Computer Hacking a Crime?"

The forum took place in cyberspace itself, during an eleven-day period in December. The gathering place, the little corner of the electronic world where the forum rambled like a never-ending cocktail party, is called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, better known as the WELL. The San Francisco Bay Area-based commerical bulletin board system is a seminal outpost that attracts some of the best minds of the communications revolution. On the WELL, an explosive mixture of computers and communications was being brewed.

About forty guests log in from their homes and participate in an open-ended, freewheeling debate. They were an eclectic group, and among their number were Eli and Mark (uninvited) and a retired cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, John Perry Barlow. Given the amount of time they spent there, it was bound to happen that the boys and Barlow would cross paths online one day. But who could have imagined the repercussions?

John Perry Barlow tells everyone he lives in Pinedale, Wyoming, but that's not really true. He actually lives in a much more isolated place, a place called Cora, pop. 4. Cora makes Pinedale look like Los Angeles.

Barlow's grandfather founded Sublett County and built a cattle ranch next to 15, 000 acres of forest service land. Barlow's great-granduncle was the first white man to winter on the upper headwaters of the Wind River.

Barlow went east (well, east to Colorado) to prep school, where he was schoolmates with future Grateful Dead band member Bob Weir. After Wesleyan College and a stint in New York City working on a never-published novel, Barlow wrote songs for the Dead before meandering home to the Bar-Cross Ranch. That's - + if you're branding calves, and as Barlow says, "They sure got the minus sign in the right place. "

Barlow traveled many trails in his youth and by the mid-1980s, with the ranch's fortunes in decline, he needed another way to make a living. He turned to the thing he knew best, writing. He bought a computer, a Compaq thirty-pound luggable, mainly because he figured it would be easier to use than a typewriter, "a better Wite-Out. " But in 1987, Barlow learned his computer was also good for something else.

That was the year he discovered that the futuristic place described by science fiction writer William Gibson as cyberspace was in fact here. A friend, a fellow Deadhead, convinced Barlow to buy a modem and log in to the WELL to communicate with other Dead fans. Right away, Barlow saw the similarities between this new electronic community and the small towns of his youth. Small towns were disappearing, but new ones, a generation of computer-connected villages, were replacing them.

And the beauty of it was, just like in small town life, everyone knew everyone else there. People worked together, shared information, and pooled their knowledge, creating a vast collective consciousness. It was a primitive settlement, people were still learning how to communicate. There were no rules or laws yet. Instead of physical possessions, all people carried was knowledge, which they shared. Barlow moved right in and started writing about it.

By now, two years later, Barlow was spending so many hours a week on the WELL that he was a beloved "net personality. " So it was no surprise that he was asked to participate in the Harper's Forum.

There Barlow met the two gate crashers, hackers who showed up uninvited and who called themselves Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik.

When they logged in to the forum early in the evening of Day One, the conversation's tenor shifted radically. Gone was the high-minded, theoretical discussion about the rights of privacy versus the right to explore. In its place appeared a challenge born of fluctuating hormones and adolescent invincibility: ACID PHREAK: There is no one hacker ethic. The hacker of old sought to find what the computer itself could do. There was nothing illegal about that. Today, hackers and phreaks are drawn to specific, often corporate, systems. It's no wonder everyone on the other side is getting mad. We're always one step ahead.

Even as he typed, Eli was defining himself, creating his own new hacker ethic. It was a philosophy in which exploration for the sake of discovery is its own justification. And it was also a philosophy in which he saw himself as the baddest gunslinger to ever ride into town.

But no hint of that teenage transformation got conveyed to the rest of the law-fearing, job-holding adult participants. They didn't even know who this Acid Phreak character was. They certainly had no way of knowing he was just a teenager with a poster of a bikini-clad model on the closet door in his bedroom. They didn't know that it had been a blind kid named Carlos, who lived across the street, who'd taught Eli the ABCs of phone phreaking. (Carlos's mom was from Argentina and Eli's mom was from Costa Rica and the two were friends. So it was only natural that Eli and Carlos would be friends, too. Carlos even had a computer, which, of course, he couldn't see. Later, Eli got his own computer, and learned enough to turn the pay phone down the block on Parsons Boulevard into a free phone. It was a kick to walk by the phone and see a line of people waiting to call home to Colombia. And he'd think of Carlos, and how much a guy could do if he put his mind to it. )

Of course, all the forum participants really needed to know was that the Harper's forum on hackers had flushed the elusive species from the bushes.

Barlow himself could well remember his own trespasses, including a late-night climb over a government defense installation's fence. In finding himself infatuated by the impulses of Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik, he was not alone.

Within hours, the forum's participants had declared their fascination with Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik, and by the afternoon of Day Six, the two hackers had become celebrities. Even their most outrageous adolescent crowing and foomphetting was given careful consideration.

This emboldened Eli, who espoused the view that any computer system vulnerable to hackers was fair game. It was the system administrator's fault if the computer got hacked. It was the administrator's responsibility to keep it secure, after all.

If he was too dumb to do that, then hackers had the right to trespass. It was the old Eye Center argument again.

Did Eli really believe that? Once this philosophy was posted on the WELL, he couldn't take it back. It became his position.

In a matter of weeks, it was going to be printed in Harper's and then every subscriber in the country would read it.

One participant questioned Eli's assertions, posting that computer networks "are built on trust. If they aren't, they should be. "

ACID PHREAK: Yeah. Sure. And we should use the "honor system" as a first line of security against hack attempts.

This cocksure disregard for honor and honesty struck a chord with the very hacker-gawking adults that Eli had charmed earlier. As Barlow later wrote, "Presented with such a terrifying amalgam of raw youth and apparent power, we fluttered like a flock of indignant Babbitts around the Status Quo, defending it heartily. " One participant, a former hacker named Jef Poskanzer, shot back this sarcastic reply: