WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.541 Episode 155 [START OF RECORDING] 00:00:00.541 --> 00:00:03.680 JACK: Sometimes the people I want to talk to on this show are so cool that I want to 00:00:03.680 --> 00:00:05.200 be friends with them. JOE: Check, check. 00:00:05.200 --> 00:00:06.874 JACK: Hey, I m recording. JOE: Cool. Alright, let me get this 00:00:06.874 --> 00:00:10.280 JACK: Where are we going? JOE: Let s go to the lair, 00:00:10.280 --> 00:00:13.520 where the magic happens. JACK: Joe Grand is someone who because 00:00:13.520 --> 00:00:17.840 we have so much in common, I wanted to visit him in person to try to make that extra connection. 00:00:17.840 --> 00:00:22.040 JOE: Alright, here we go. JACK: Whoa, my. Quite the 00:00:22.040 --> 00:00:23.514 place. JOE: Yeah. 00:00:23.514 --> 00:00:26.880 JACK: Display case here, and then you ve got a table here 00:00:26.880 --> 00:00:31.520 with a ton of projects you're working on. JOE: Yeah. So, this is kinda the main table 00:00:31.520 --> 00:00:36.880 that people probably see in videos. I have my computer, my oscilloscope that is my one 00:00:36.880 --> 00:00:42.520 piece of test equipment that I m always using power supply, and a couple different projects; 00:00:42.520 --> 00:00:47.480 some fault injections set up here. All these circuit boards are for a class I m teaching in a 00:00:47.480 --> 00:00:51.560 couple weeks. I have to get those prepared. JACK: He showed me around his office, 00:00:51.560 --> 00:00:56.080 and I think a better description for his office would be a workshop. It s really a place that 00:00:56.080 --> 00:01:00.360 sparks creativity wherever you look. It s full of gadgets and tools that just beckon you to 00:01:00.360 --> 00:01:07.200 pick something up and start building something. JOE: work bench with various pieces of circuitry 00:01:07.200 --> 00:01:10.200 and, yeah, a lot of display stuff also. JACK: [Music] You got your 00:01:10.200 --> 00:01:13.941 YouTube plaque on the wall. JOE: Got the YouTube plaque on the wall, yeah. 00:01:13.941 --> 00:01:17.720 JACK: That s cool. We found some comfy spots to plop down on and have a chat for a while, 00:01:17.720 --> 00:01:22.960 because I wanted to hear all the stories that Joe had. How many books have you written? 00:01:22.960 --> 00:01:29.240 JOE: That s a good question. (INTRO): [Intro music] These are 00:01:29.240 --> 00:01:47.100 true stories from the dark side of the internet. I m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. 00:01:47.100 --> 00:01:57.040 JACK: Hi. JOE: Hey. Hey again. 00:01:57.040 --> 00:01:59.520 JACK: Why don t we start with your name, and what do you do? 00:01:59.520 --> 00:02:04.200 JOE: My name is Joe Grand, and I m a hacker. JACK: [Music] After hanging out with Joe a few 00:02:04.200 --> 00:02:09.080 hours, I think, yeah, he absolutely is a hacker, and I think it s becoming increasingly rare to 00:02:09.080 --> 00:02:14.640 find a hacker in their forties. I think we all rebel as teenagers. We have a lot of that youthful 00:02:14.640 --> 00:02:18.840 energy and are waking up to the world for the first time, and we start ignoring the advice of 00:02:18.840 --> 00:02:23.440 our parents and listen to music which talks about the problems of the world, and we resonate with 00:02:23.440 --> 00:02:29.200 it, and we come of age listening to that stuff, and we either want change or to fight the system. 00:02:29.200 --> 00:02:34.560 For me and for Joe, our teenage rebelliousness began as skateboarders. Back then, there was a 00:02:34.560 --> 00:02:39.600 sense that skaters were counter-culture, not abiding by the rules or the norms of society. 00:02:39.600 --> 00:02:43.440 I remember the first time I fell in love with skaters. It was in middle school, and I saw them 00:02:43.440 --> 00:02:48.080 all outside laying in the grass during lunch. It was fall out, so there were a lot of leaves 00:02:48.080 --> 00:02:51.880 everywhere, and a few of them were throwing leaves at each other and they were rolling around in it. 00:02:51.880 --> 00:02:57.880 Then the bell rang and we all had to go to class. They all looked at each other and silently agreed 00:02:57.880 --> 00:03:02.880 not to brush themselves off and instead come to class as messy as possible, with leaves 00:03:02.880 --> 00:03:07.800 all through their hair and clothes and grass everywhere. One sat in front of me in my class, 00:03:07.800 --> 00:03:14.120 totally a mess, and he paid absolutely no mind to it. He acted as if nothing was going on different, 00:03:14.120 --> 00:03:18.560 and I loved that attitude. It enticed me. It drew me in to not care about how you look or 00:03:18.560 --> 00:03:23.120 any norms or expectations that people have on you, to just be your wild and goofy self. 00:03:23.120 --> 00:03:27.320 There s a sense of freedom in that, and that s when I started hanging out with the skaters, 00:03:27.320 --> 00:03:31.400 and I felt completely at home there. I remained a skater all through middle school 00:03:31.400 --> 00:03:36.080 and high school. Joe and I both got into computers around the same time, too, and for both of us, 00:03:36.080 --> 00:03:40.920 we had just great fun in seeing all that it could do, building things, breaking things, trying just 00:03:40.920 --> 00:03:47.520 about every possible thing that we heard about; bulletin boards, floppy discs, DOS, AOL, IRC, FTP, 00:03:47.520 --> 00:03:54.160 Unix, Windows, programming, electronics, circuits. It was simply great fun to sit down Saturday night 00:03:54.160 --> 00:03:59.120 at a computer and just try to do something new with it, like to try out a new operating system or 00:03:59.120 --> 00:04:04.680 compile a kernel from scratch. We would absolutely try what other people tried before us, things that 00:04:04.680 --> 00:04:11.080 have tutorials for them, but then we d soon find ourselves in areas where no tutorials exist for 00:04:11.080 --> 00:04:16.560 this. No manuals explain what to do here. We were off the map, explorers of the digital 00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:21.440 world, and it felt like we were trying to get computers to do things they weren't intended to 00:04:21.440 --> 00:04:27.240 do, which in my opinion is the definition of a hacker, to push beyond the roadblocks that 00:04:27.240 --> 00:04:33.680 stop you from doing something and to try to get it done anyway. Living in that space is hard, though. 00:04:33.680 --> 00:04:38.040 It s like you're walking in the dark and you're constantly bumping into things. You feel stupid 00:04:38.040 --> 00:04:42.960 for not knowing what to do and just failing again and again, and it s frustrating when it doesn't 00:04:42.960 --> 00:04:49.320 work, and you give up. As a youth, you don t quite know that what you're doing is different than how 00:04:49.320 --> 00:04:53.920 other people are using these tools, so it just feels normal to stumble and struggle with whatever 00:04:53.920 --> 00:04:58.840 technology you have. You get used to that. [Music] But as you learn more about the world 00:04:58.840 --> 00:05:04.800 and grow up, you find your place in it and you try to be good in your domain of expertise. You want 00:05:04.800 --> 00:05:11.440 to find a place where you feel comfortable and confident. It s uncomfortable and hard to learn 00:05:11.440 --> 00:05:16.760 things without instruction manuals or YouTube videos to teach you. So, you wait for others 00:05:16.760 --> 00:05:22.000 to learn the things before you so that they could teach you, which means you lose your edge. You're 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:26.680 not on the frontier of knowledge anymore. You're not pushing the systems beyond their intended 00:05:26.680 --> 00:05:33.400 purpose. As we get older, we lose that drive and instead just become better at following the rules, 00:05:33.400 --> 00:05:38.880 and as you grow older, you stop rebelling, too, maybe because you're just tired or because you 00:05:38.880 --> 00:05:44.080 just accept that life is going to be unfair. You realize that you have responsibilities, too, 00:05:44.080 --> 00:05:50.800 so you can't afford to get in trouble anymore. You lose that punk side of yourself. But Joe never 00:05:50.800 --> 00:05:57.840 lost that. Joe never turned his curiosity down or off. Joe learned how to feel comfortable walking 00:05:57.840 --> 00:06:04.000 in the dark, bumping into things, failing again and again. In fact, he likes that place. He loves 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:08.480 that chase of finding the answer somewhere in the muck that nobody else has ever found before, 00:06:08.480 --> 00:06:13.440 that place of pushing things beyond their intended use. He ignores people telling him 00:06:13.440 --> 00:06:18.280 that s impossible . He pushes through roadblocks and just acts like they don t exist. While 00:06:18.280 --> 00:06:24.360 most of us have grown tired of inventing or finding creative ways to solve novel problems, 00:06:24.360 --> 00:06:30.080 Joe has more energy than ever to dance and play in that space, and it s amazing to watch him work. 00:06:30.080 --> 00:06:38.000 JOE: I still have this idealistic view of my little bubble of what a hacker is, and to me, 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:43.720 it basically is kind of somebody who s questioning the system and curious about 00:06:43.720 --> 00:06:49.280 technology and wanting to learn things and bypassing security. Really, I grew up even 00:06:49.280 --> 00:06:54.360 before I knew what a hacker was, I was pushing people s buttons. I was causing trouble. I had 00:06:54.360 --> 00:06:58.920 this mischievous side, and a hacker JACK: That s what I was gonna ask you. 00:06:58.920 --> 00:07:03.760 As a hacker, have you ever been arrested? JOE: I have been arrested, and it was a great 00:07:03.760 --> 00:07:11.440 lesson and a great experience. It did change some of my behavior, but the hacker mindset 00:07:11.440 --> 00:07:18.480 and that ethos is still with me, and it s been the same since I was a kid. I feel the same way 00:07:18.480 --> 00:07:26.240 that I felt then as a hacker and how I fit into the world and into the society that I do now, 00:07:26.240 --> 00:07:32.080 right? So, even though I got arrested and that changed my perspective a little bit, 00:07:32.080 --> 00:07:39.400 changed my behavior so I wouldn't get arrested again, my mindset is the same, and I don't know 00:07:39.400 --> 00:07:44.280 but I have a sense of like that that s changing with a lot of people, where somebody of my age, 00:07:44.280 --> 00:07:48.720 of my generation who grew up with computers, has maybe a different mindset than people who got into 00:07:48.720 --> 00:07:58.880 it later. I don't really know. I just know how I feel, and I m very kind of rigid in my beliefs as 00:07:58.880 --> 00:08:04.640 a hacker and my responsibilities as a hacker. JACK: In 1982, he got some Atari equipment when he 00:08:04.640 --> 00:08:08.920 was like, eight, nine, ten. He was just mesmerized by the world of electronics. This eventually led 00:08:08.920 --> 00:08:12.880 him to computers, and he got a modem. He could dial out to bulletin board systems and reach 00:08:12.880 --> 00:08:17.360 other computers somewhere else in the world. JOE: Which ultimately led me to hook up with 00:08:17.360 --> 00:08:22.560 some guys that I had met on some bulletin board sytems and was part of a group called 00:08:22.560 --> 00:08:29.800 Renegade Legion. [Music] We wrote some early text files on some phone phreaking, credit card fraud, 00:08:29.800 --> 00:08:34.760 how to break into the CBI credit bureau and pull credit records and then get actual credit cards, 00:08:34.760 --> 00:08:43.440 and things that as a kid didn t seem bad. It was a cool thing. I mean, even now, I don't yes, 00:08:43.440 --> 00:08:50.080 it s a crime. Do I feel bad about it? No. Has it happened to me? Dozens of times my credit 00:08:50.080 --> 00:08:55.800 card has been stolen. It s a fact of life now. JACK: Back then, to hack a system would sometimes 00:08:55.800 --> 00:09:00.640 simply be telling your computer to dial a phone number and it might let you into that system 00:09:00.640 --> 00:09:05.080 without a password, or maybe you could just mash the keyboard and it would let you in. Hacking 00:09:05.080 --> 00:09:09.840 was a lot simpler then, but there really weren't instructions on how to do it. You were kind of on 00:09:09.840 --> 00:09:13.560 your own to discover what was out there. JOE: But yeah, there so, getting into those 00:09:13.560 --> 00:09:19.280 systems, the process basically was like and this was when I was fourteen, fifteen at this point of 00:09:19.280 --> 00:09:24.280 like, alright, let s look through the White Pages, which was the book of everybody in your area. 00:09:24.280 --> 00:09:30.880 Let s find the doctor, let s find the dentist, look up their name in the credit bureau system, 00:09:30.880 --> 00:09:34.520 see what their credit was 'cause you could see their name, their social security number, 00:09:34.520 --> 00:09:39.640 credit rating, what credit cards they had pick the one that had a high credit, 00:09:39.640 --> 00:09:42.680 get all that information, call the credit card company, give them what they needed, and say, 00:09:42.680 --> 00:09:46.440 hey, I m doctor whatever. I m on vacation. Can you I lost my card. Can you send me another 00:09:46.440 --> 00:09:50.840 card? They d send you a new physical card and you d go use it. But that was later on. 00:09:50.840 --> 00:09:55.640 The earlier days, there was a lot of this curious exploration because we would war dial. We would 00:09:55.640 --> 00:10:00.920 take a prefix and say, okay just like in WarGames when David Lightman was trying to find out his 00:10:00.920 --> 00:10:06.000 school computer, I figured if our school computer was connected, it would be within that range. So, 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:11.600 doing those war-dialing sessions overnight, of course, so my parents wouldn't pick up the 00:10:11.600 --> 00:10:15.640 phone and hear everything, because at that point you still had a automatic you could do automatic 00:10:15.640 --> 00:10:20.840 dialing, but it was still everybody was sharing a single phone line in the house. Then you d wake 00:10:20.840 --> 00:10:25.240 up to a list of phone numbers, and you're trying those and you'd never know what it was. It was 00:10:25.240 --> 00:10:31.600 like this kind of treasure hunt. JACK: [Music] 00:10:31.600 --> 00:10:37.160 Joe grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. JOE: So, as part of joining Renegade Legion so, 00:10:37.160 --> 00:10:41.880 a bunch of teenagers doing stuff online and whatever we thought it would be cool 00:10:41.880 --> 00:10:47.520 for everybody to meet up in person during all of our winter break. Most of us were in high school. 00:10:47.520 --> 00:10:53.400 Some of the guys were a little bit older. One of the guys, whose name was Dr. Death, 00:10:53.400 --> 00:10:58.480 was in Michigan, and that was kind of a central point where everybody else was coming from. So, 00:10:58.480 --> 00:11:02.680 on one of our alliance teleconferences where we re all talking on the phone big party lines and, 00:11:02.680 --> 00:11:06.440 of course, being billed to somebody else, someone s like, hey, we should all get together. So, 00:11:06.440 --> 00:11:11.120 we decided during our school break, everybody meet up at Dr. Death s house, and we d hang 00:11:11.120 --> 00:11:18.040 out. He had an arcade game and a pool table. My parents talked to his parents and they're like, 00:11:18.040 --> 00:11:23.120 okay, this seems like a stable household. So, they actually let me fly to Michigan on my own, 00:11:23.120 --> 00:11:27.960 meet up with all these other hackers. Remember that this was already eight years after I had 00:11:27.960 --> 00:11:33.760 been using the computer. My parents knew what I was up to, but they didn t really know. So, we 00:11:33.760 --> 00:11:37.920 all got together and hung out, and then somebody had an idea of like, hey, let s break into the 00:11:37.920 --> 00:11:43.800 telephone company so we can get some hardware and get some documentation. At the time, the internet 00:11:43.800 --> 00:11:50.520 was starting to kinda be a thing, but not really. This was 92. So, really, it was hackers against 00:11:50.520 --> 00:11:58.560 the phone system. Ma Bell, New England Telephone, 9X Michigan Bell, whatever, Pacific Bell, 00:11:58.560 --> 00:12:05.840 all of those companies, that was the target of phone phreaking, exploring the phone network. 00:12:05.840 --> 00:12:12.120 That was for us, that was kind of the Holy Grail. We went to the hardware store and bought some big 00:12:12.120 --> 00:12:17.560 bolt cutters and some rubber gloves it was like a really bad movie and bought all the equipment 00:12:17.560 --> 00:12:22.720 to break into this place; some automatic center punches to break the windows. So, we basically 00:12:22.720 --> 00:12:27.360 went to the Michigan Bell telephone facility which was down the street from this guy s house, 00:12:27.360 --> 00:12:33.240 and went in and cut through the fence, pulled the fence back. I had this jacket at the time 00:12:33.240 --> 00:12:38.000 that I would wear every single day, and it tore a little hole in the shoulder on my way in. So, 00:12:38.000 --> 00:12:43.360 that was sort of this mark of pride after that. So, we didn t break into the building itself, 00:12:43.360 --> 00:12:48.480 but we smashed the windows of the vans that had all of the in-field equipment. 00:12:48.480 --> 00:12:53.560 JACK: What were you looking for? JOE: Documentation, manuals, hardware, 00:12:53.560 --> 00:12:58.080 telephone test equipment, things that other phone phreakers, other hackers didn t have, 00:12:58.080 --> 00:13:04.320 and took as much stuff as we possibly could. I think there were six of us. One of the guys 00:13:04.320 --> 00:13:10.360 was a larger fellow, so he was our lookout, and he was listening to the scanner radio to see when the 00:13:10.360 --> 00:13:16.920 police were called. Which, it turns out that if you use a scanner radio during committing a crime, 00:13:16.920 --> 00:13:18.920 that s an additional crime. JACK: Really? 00:13:18.920 --> 00:13:22.440 JOE: Yeah, at least at the time. I didn t know that. Especially a scanner radio there was no 00:13:22.440 --> 00:13:27.120 serial number on it 'cause it was scraped off because it was stolen. So, yeah, he ended up 00:13:27.120 --> 00:13:34.160 getting caught. The rest of us got away, but what happened is as we pulled up, next to the telephone 00:13:34.160 --> 00:13:38.360 facility was a park, and there was a nosy neighbor that was like, hey, there was a bunch of rowdy 00:13:38.360 --> 00:13:45.240 kids hanging out in the park. So, they called the police just because they thought kids were hanging 00:13:45.240 --> 00:13:51.000 out after curfew or something. By the time the cops showed up, they had the one guy there. He 00:13:51.000 --> 00:13:55.800 got caught in the car with the scanner radio. The police report when this guy called in said there 00:13:55.800 --> 00:14:00.440 were multiple kids. So, they're basically like, where are your friends? He flipped and was like, 00:14:00.440 --> 00:14:04.720 yeah, there was six of us or however many. We had all gotten home by that time or back to Dr. 00:14:04.720 --> 00:14:10.640 Death s house, and we're like, oh my god, where s this other guy? It turns out he got arrested. Then 00:14:10.640 --> 00:14:15.200 the next day, we all had to turn ourselves in. JACK: This was a pretty awful experience for Joe s 00:14:15.200 --> 00:14:19.840 parents, who had to fly to another state to rescue their son from juvenile detention. I could only 00:14:19.840 --> 00:14:23.280 imagine it s something like the movie Home Alone, where the mom was trying desperately to get home 00:14:23.280 --> 00:14:28.080 to her son. Luckily for him, because he was the youngest of the bunch, they let him off without a 00:14:28.080 --> 00:14:33.860 charge, but the others weren't so lucky. A bunch of them got felonies. Some served jail time. 00:14:33.860 --> 00:14:41.120 JOE: One of our other guys was already under I don't know if it was indictment or investigation 00:14:41.120 --> 00:14:46.240 or something by the Secret Service for some other phone phreaking stuff that we had done as a group, 00:14:46.240 --> 00:14:54.640 as Renegade Legion, and he ended up dying by suicide. That was a real eye-opener of like, 00:14:54.640 --> 00:14:59.040 holy shit, a law-breaker just killed himself over getting arrested? 00:14:59.040 --> 00:15:03.680 JACK: His parents were pretty mad and told him, look, you either need to get a job or take up 00:15:03.680 --> 00:15:08.720 a sport. He didn t want to get a job, so he joined the track team at school and started 00:15:08.720 --> 00:15:15.440 doing a lot of running. This gave him a group of normal friends, not rebels, not skaters, 00:15:15.440 --> 00:15:22.160 not hackers, just normal people. After this scare with the police and running track, 00:15:22.160 --> 00:15:27.880 he did straighten up a bit, which is how he got to join the L0pht. He had to actually tone down his 00:15:27.880 --> 00:15:33.600 rebelliousness to join this hacker space. JOE: So, L0pht or L0pht Heavy Industries was 00:15:33.600 --> 00:15:39.800 really just a safe space, possibly the first hacker space in the US as an organized space, 00:15:39.800 --> 00:15:46.480 and it really was just a clubhouse for seven Boston-area hackers to hang out and explore and 00:15:46.480 --> 00:15:52.120 have a place to play with technology. JACK: What did the space look like? 00:15:52.120 --> 00:15:57.640 JOE: It was very so, if you imagine a cyberpunk movie maybe Hackers; 00:15:57.640 --> 00:16:05.600 maybe the Hackers movie is probably the closest to sort of what it looked like, but it was in it 00:16:05.600 --> 00:16:15.720 was an artist loft space. So, it was a one one big room with old wood floors. There were PCs; Apple, 00:16:15.720 --> 00:16:24.560 Apple IIs, Macs. We had a VAX 11/780, I think. JACK: The L0pht was a magical place with about 00:16:24.560 --> 00:16:29.360 eight members. It was magical because computers weren't that popular yet. 00:16:29.360 --> 00:16:34.360 So, for there to be a space with electronics and computers, it was really ahead of its time. They 00:16:34.360 --> 00:16:39.640 were the weirdo nerds into that geeky stuff. Little did they know, the whole world would 00:16:39.640 --> 00:16:44.360 become weirdo nerds along with them, because we were all destined to buy computers and 00:16:44.360 --> 00:16:48.640 electronics in the coming decades. JOE: I remember seeing Count Zero give 00:16:48.640 --> 00:16:53.680 talks about stuff that we found from the trash or other things that he had been researching, 00:16:53.680 --> 00:16:59.640 and seeing his passion of sharing information in that way, of like, you don t need to hoard 00:16:59.640 --> 00:17:03.608 everything and as kids, we would hoard stuff but then we would trade bits and pieces, 'cause that 00:17:03.608 --> 00:17:09.760 s what would give you this power. But to see him just open up the kimono of like, here s everything 00:17:09.760 --> 00:17:14.360 I learned and maybe somebody can take a piece of that and do something else with it, I thought 00:17:14.360 --> 00:17:20.600 that was such a learning moment for me, and that when I started giving talks as well, it was like, 00:17:20.600 --> 00:17:25.880 alright, if I m gonna talk about something, I want to share as much as I possibly can, 00:17:25.880 --> 00:17:30.640 not to brag about it but to empower somebody else to say, oh, that s cool; I want to try that or I 00:17:30.640 --> 00:17:37.400 want to build upon this or maybe I can use this piece of that on something else. Once I learned 00:17:37.400 --> 00:17:44.080 that, everything changed [Music] because it was all about empowering this community to grow, 00:17:44.080 --> 00:17:47.920 and I would learn from other people and you'd learn from they would learn from somebody else and 00:17:47.920 --> 00:17:54.960 share that with you. So, it was this very communal sort of knowledge growth, I guess you could say, 00:17:54.960 --> 00:18:00.400 and that s the main thing I learned from the L0pht, and that for sure is of everything that 00:18:00.400 --> 00:18:07.480 I ve learned, that has stuck with me the most. JACK: L0pht was legendary. It was kinda 00:18:07.480 --> 00:18:12.720 like a research group. They found a lot of vulnerabilities in computers, and they released 00:18:12.720 --> 00:18:18.200 such tools like L0phtCrack, which can sometimes crack Windows passwords. They d publish new ideas 00:18:18.200 --> 00:18:23.400 of how to break systems or hack things. In fact, they were so legendary that they ended up going to 00:18:23.400 --> 00:18:29.080 Washington D.C. to testify before the Senate. JOE: I remember they called us up to the stand. 00:18:29.080 --> 00:18:34.240 We sit there, and there s all this so, we see the senators in front of us, but right 00:18:34.240 --> 00:18:40.160 below them facing us was this row of media. We sat down; it was just like, camera flash, 00:18:40.160 --> 00:18:45.520 camera flash. It was like the paparazzi, because it had never happened before. You 00:18:45.520 --> 00:18:49.760 never had hackers talking to the government. SENATE: We re joined today by the seven members 00:18:49.760 --> 00:18:57.080 of the L0pht hacker thinktank in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Due to the sensitivity of the 00:18:57.080 --> 00:19:09.160 work done at the L0pht, they ll be using their hacker names of Mudge, Weld, Brian Oblivion, 00:19:09.160 --> 00:19:17.160 Kingpin, Space Rogue, Tan, and Stefan. JACK: Joe s hacker name is Kingpin, 00:19:17.160 --> 00:19:21.640 and this was back in 1998. JOE: Morning. My name is Kingpin. I 00:19:21.640 --> 00:19:27.040 am the youngest member of the L0pht and one of the electrical engineers and hardware hackers. 00:19:27.040 --> 00:19:31.600 While some of the L0pht members concentrate on software programming, I work with hardward design 00:19:31.600 --> 00:19:37.440 and implementation of electronic circuits. My interests include embedded system design, 00:19:37.440 --> 00:19:42.280 surveillance and counter-surveillance tools, and wireless data transmissions. My current 00:19:42.280 --> 00:19:46.600 research project involves experimentation with the monitoring and eavesdropping of stray 00:19:46.600 --> 00:19:52.680 electromagnetic fields from computer terminals, otherwise known as TEMPEST monitoring. 00:19:52.680 --> 00:19:57.960 Using low-cost electronic equipment, one can capture the contents of computer screens from more 00:19:57.960 --> 00:20:04.080 than two hundred meters away, possibly gaining passwords and other sensitive information. The 00:20:04.080 --> 00:20:08.400 phenomenon of TEMPEST monitoring has been known to the industry for decades, but there is not 00:20:08.400 --> 00:20:13.920 much unclassified information available on how to both capture the emissions and also protect 00:20:13.920 --> 00:20:18.400 oneself from becoming an eavesdropping victim. My research will not only help me learn about 00:20:18.400 --> 00:20:22.960 the monitoring technology; it will enable me to educate others to help them protect their 00:20:22.960 --> 00:20:26.520 computer systems from prying eyes. JACK: Their message was simple; 00:20:26.520 --> 00:20:32.960 the internet is not as secure as you think, and we should embrace and welcome hackers 00:20:32.960 --> 00:20:38.720 to show us where the vulnerabilities are. SENATE: It s probably appropriate that gentlemen 00:20:38.720 --> 00:20:44.440 such as yourself were the ones who come forward and demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes, 00:20:44.440 --> 00:20:48.200 so we appreciate your coming here, especially in light of the fact that the Washington Post 00:20:48.200 --> 00:20:55.280 describe you as rockstars of the computer hacking elite. I am informed that you think 00:20:55.280 --> 00:20:59.800 that within thirty minutes, the seven of you could make the internet unusable for 00:20:59.800 --> 00:21:03.040 the entire nation. Is that correct? L0PHT: That s correct. Actually, 00:21:03.040 --> 00:21:07.800 one of us with just a few packets. JACK: How punk is that, to be this 00:21:07.800 --> 00:21:11.300 group of hackers coming up to the government saying, we could take down the internet? 00:21:11.300 --> 00:21:20.080 SENATE: Somebody had referred to you as rockstars of the new computer age. It s probably not what 00:21:20.080 --> 00:21:25.560 you came to hear, but actually, I think you're performing an act of very good citizenship, 00:21:25.560 --> 00:21:30.760 and I appreciate it. I d compare you I hope you don t mind that I m not gonna call you 00:21:30.760 --> 00:21:35.280 rockstars. I d compare you more to Rachel Carson, who sounded some early warnings 00:21:35.280 --> 00:21:39.960 about what environmental pollution was doing to the environment. [Music] In the defense context, 00:21:39.960 --> 00:21:46.210 you may be modern-day Paul Reveres, except in this case, it s not the British coming. We don 00:21:46.210 --> 00:21:51.920 t know who s coming; that s the problem. JOE: By that time in 98, a lot of the software 00:21:51.920 --> 00:21:56.560 guys had found vulnerabilities in Microsoft and they had actually had meetings with Microsoft at 00:21:56.560 --> 00:22:00.680 dinners where Microsoft s like, ah, we don t think that s gonna be a problem. Nobody s gonna exploit 00:22:00.680 --> 00:22:07.040 that. So, we would release exploit code. We were very early, if not the first, to have this sort of 00:22:07.040 --> 00:22:13.520 discussion of full disclosure or what would now be called coordinated disclosure or, in quotes, 00:22:13.520 --> 00:22:17.720 responsible disclosure . You know, how much time do you give the vendor to fix the problem? 00:22:17.720 --> 00:22:22.120 Do you trust that the vendor s gonna fix it? JACK: One of the things L0pht became known for is 00:22:22.120 --> 00:22:27.080 pioneering responsible disclosure. The problem was that hackers were looked at as criminals, 00:22:27.080 --> 00:22:32.120 hoodlums, untrustworthy, and L0pht thought of themselves as hackers, but didn t see 00:22:32.120 --> 00:22:36.760 themselves as hoodlums. They're just trying to warn the world of the problems they found, 00:22:36.760 --> 00:22:41.920 and they wanted people to fix it. They were here to help. But as they told companies about the bugs 00:22:41.920 --> 00:22:46.080 they found, the companies often misunderstood and thought these guys were there to cause trouble. 00:22:46.080 --> 00:22:50.400 So, L0pht was like, look, what do we have to do so you ll understand that we're here to help, 00:22:50.400 --> 00:22:56.080 not hurt you? That s where responsible disclosure came about. Companies learned that hackers can be 00:22:56.080 --> 00:23:01.040 very helpful at identifying vulnerabilities, and it s way better to work with them than to think of 00:23:01.040 --> 00:23:09.480 them as adversaries. So, I picture the old, old, old hacker spaces to not have many screens, and 00:23:09.480 --> 00:23:17.040 mostly just circuit boards you're looking at and maybe some visual aspect. I imagine you falling 00:23:17.040 --> 00:23:22.240 in love with this electronics aspect of it; the hardware components, how these things work. 00:23:22.240 --> 00:23:26.960 You can send signals here and make it do that, and all this kinda cool stuff. There s chips 00:23:26.960 --> 00:23:35.240 that have all this really cool CMOS in it. Then computers went in a direction of screens and 00:23:35.240 --> 00:23:42.440 programming languages and all this software. Did you go in that direction or did you say, no, no, 00:23:42.440 --> 00:23:46.680 no, I think you all need this hardware. I m gonna stay with the hardware. Or, 00:23:46.680 --> 00:23:51.200 how did you know that you were going to take a different route and not go 00:23:51.200 --> 00:23:54.680 with the software side of it, but instead you stayed on the hardware? Was that in 00:23:54.680 --> 00:24:00.160 L0pht that you kinda made that diversion? JOE: No. I had been as soon as I got attracted 00:24:00.160 --> 00:24:08.440 to computers, I was also getting attracted to electronics. I have an older brother, 00:24:08.440 --> 00:24:15.160 and he was more of an audiophile kind of person. He had radio receivers and things, but he had a 00:24:15.160 --> 00:24:18.960 lot of electronics that he would take apart and he would fix and put different capacitors in 00:24:18.960 --> 00:24:26.360 and everything, and he had this junk bin full of circuit boards. I just loved that tangible side of 00:24:26.360 --> 00:24:31.840 things, which to me makes sense of like, okay, I m using a computer, and the computer really is a 00:24:31.840 --> 00:24:41.360 very simple type of embedded system or electronic system like these other circuit boards, but I just 00:24:41.360 --> 00:24:46.360 loved the physical thing. I would start building projects out of magazines. There was a lot of 00:24:46.360 --> 00:24:51.440 hobbyist electronics magazines at the time. There were a couple people a couple text files 00:24:51.440 --> 00:24:58.560 you could read about of people making some interesting even this was pre-red box stuff, 00:24:58.560 --> 00:25:05.480 but different types of tone-dialers, blue boxes, and other telephone-related electronics. So, 00:25:05.480 --> 00:25:14.040 I started building things and I started building my own things. I knew from an early age you 00:25:14.040 --> 00:25:18.600 couldn't have a career as a hacker. When everybody would always say, what do you want to be when 00:25:18.600 --> 00:25:24.640 you grow up? and I always knew I m gonna be an engineer. I m gonna build electronics. So, that 00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:30.560 was something where it was a parallel path to the hacking, was building things, and the electronics 00:25:30.560 --> 00:25:38.000 that I was building were things like stun guns and some laser-listening systems to spy on rooms and 00:25:38.000 --> 00:25:43.240 kind of mischievous hardware, but things that I could use for the telephone system and subversive 00:25:43.240 --> 00:25:48.000 technology, like anything I thought was cool. JACK: Joe s specialty is hardware hacking. As I 00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:51.640 sit and look around his workshop, it s abundantly clear, too. [Music] He s got 00:25:51.640 --> 00:25:55.680 drawers full of parts. On the table in front of me is something like sixty circuit boards, 00:25:55.680 --> 00:25:59.200 and he says he s building all these for a class. There s a fault injector over there 00:25:59.200 --> 00:26:04.080 and soldering irons and an oscilloscope. There s something beautiful about the low-level aspect of 00:26:04.080 --> 00:26:11.880 electronics. There are no English words that you can use to program a circuit. Like, you can't say 00:26:11.880 --> 00:26:17.920 if this, then do that or write out a for-loop . No; here, at the circuitry level, you're dealing 00:26:17.920 --> 00:26:22.480 with electrons going through some metal, and you have to understand the physics of how to 00:26:22.480 --> 00:26:26.773 manipulate and move these electrons in order to make it do the things you want to do. It 00:26:26.773 --> 00:26:31.600 s amazing to watch the advancements in the electronic world. It feels like every now 00:26:31.600 --> 00:26:36.280 and then we reach a limit of how fast a CPU can operate, and it s like, well, that s it, 00:26:36.280 --> 00:26:39.920 everyone. This is the max speed. There s no way that we're gonna go beyond this. You just can't 00:26:39.920 --> 00:26:45.040 put more transistors on a chip. But then some scientists discover parallel processing, where 00:26:45.040 --> 00:26:49.880 they can make it go faster by breaking a CPU up into two or three smaller CPUs. Because there are 00:26:49.880 --> 00:26:55.040 now two or three things getting processed at once, it s faster than processing one at a time. 00:26:55.040 --> 00:27:00.520 So, this allows us to have faster computers. Then when that limit is hit and we hit a max there, 00:27:00.520 --> 00:27:06.360 someone else discovers FinFET transistors, where they can build transistors upwards in a 3D sort 00:27:06.360 --> 00:27:11.560 of way, like little fins. This invention improves processing speed again, and we reach higher and 00:27:11.560 --> 00:27:15.920 higher of what technology can do. Just the other day I heard about CPUs that are starting to be 00:27:15.920 --> 00:27:20.760 made out of glass. There s no doubt that the last thirty years we ve seen some incredible 00:27:20.760 --> 00:27:26.080 explosions in electronics and their capabilities and our understanding of physics. It s just a 00:27:26.080 --> 00:27:32.160 really great space to put focus into as the world is constantly evolving, and it s exciting. 00:27:32.160 --> 00:27:37.840 JOE: In the second L0pht space, we had a hardware room and a software room. The hardware room was 00:27:37.840 --> 00:27:45.120 me, Brian Oblivion, and Space Rogue. We were into scanner radios. POCSAG was the data transmission 00:27:45.120 --> 00:27:51.680 of pagers, and it turned out it s still being used to some extent today in certain environments. We 00:27:51.680 --> 00:27:56.880 basically loved and I loved being able to listen in on anything that I could. So, in college it 00:27:56.880 --> 00:28:01.920 was cordless phones. At the L0pht at the time it was POCSAG, listening in to transmissions so you 00:28:01.920 --> 00:28:05.840 can kinda see what s going on in the world around you, and the scanner radio listening to the cops 00:28:05.840 --> 00:28:11.380 and air traffic and all of these things. It was just getting insight into what s happening. 00:28:11.380 --> 00:28:15.520 JACK: Joe built a little device that lets you snag pager text messages out of the 00:28:15.520 --> 00:28:19.720 air and see what they say. The messages weren't intended for him. He was just seeing them fly by, 00:28:19.720 --> 00:28:24.440 and his antenna would capture it and decode it. This was something that the L0pht was actually 00:28:24.440 --> 00:28:27.300 selling to try to make enough money just to pay the rent for the place. 00:28:27.300 --> 00:28:30.800 JOE: Back in the day, you'd see all sorts of stuff, 'cause that s how people communicated, 00:28:30.800 --> 00:28:37.240 is with pagers. There d be stuff about buy groceries for me, or we saw some relationship 00:28:37.240 --> 00:28:45.560 sexting kinda one-way; kind of like, I can't wait for you to get home . You d see hospital 00:28:45.560 --> 00:28:55.040 a lot of hospital traffic, a lot of EMS traffic and emergency medical things. Yeah, 00:28:55.040 --> 00:28:58.160 it was just really fun to do, and that made a little bit of money. That was actually my first 00:28:58.160 --> 00:29:04.320 circuit board that I had mass produced. Then we d get our orders; they d all be mail order. We 00:29:04.320 --> 00:29:10.987 get our mail every week. I d build the circuitry or Space Rogue would build some circuitry, and we 00:29:10.987 --> 00:29:15.840 d package it up. If they wanted a kit, we d just give them the components. It was just a way to do 00:29:15.840 --> 00:29:24.080 something, but that really that was a contribution that I could help make to the L0pht to bring some 00:29:24.080 --> 00:29:29.480 money in. Then that kinda proved the concept of like, oh, we could make a little bit of money on 00:29:29.480 --> 00:29:34.240 this. What if we could do it full-time? JACK: [Music] I might have to do a whole 00:29:34.240 --> 00:29:38.520 episode on the L0pht someday. It was quite a remarkable chapter in hacker 00:29:38.520 --> 00:29:42.180 history. I bet we could sit here for hours to just talk about what happened there. 00:29:42.180 --> 00:29:48.080 JOE: It became a company. For me, as this kid who s still even though I was starting to grow up, 00:29:48.080 --> 00:29:55.120 I m still like I said at the beginning, I still have this punk aspect to me where that wasn t an 00:29:55.120 --> 00:30:01.080 environment I wanted to be in, and I realized, okay, the specialness of it. That group is gone. 00:30:01.080 --> 00:30:05.640 I don't want to work for somebody else. I can't stand if somebody s telling me what to do. In 00:30:05.640 --> 00:30:12.440 2003 I split and have been independent ever since. There s good and bad that has come with that. 00:30:12.440 --> 00:30:16.580 JACK: After that, Joe ended up hosting a cable TV show. 00:30:16.580 --> 00:30:20.120 JOE: It was a show called Prototype This! and it was on Discovery Channel, 00:30:20.120 --> 00:30:25.920 and it was made by the same production company as Mythbusters. The idea was that this would be the 00:30:25.920 --> 00:30:31.040 next show after Mythbusters sort of sunsets and goes away, which of course we know they didn t, 00:30:31.040 --> 00:30:36.640 and it lasted another ten years, and spin-offs are still happening. But the concept of the show 00:30:36.640 --> 00:30:42.000 was having four engineers building ridiculous prototypes. I got an e-mail and it was from a 00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:46.080 casting company, and they're like, yeah, we're looking for engineers. That was actually they 00:30:46.080 --> 00:30:49.640 had talked to Make Magazine, which was that had just come out and that s a maker 00:30:49.640 --> 00:30:55.280 magazine talking about electronics and hobby electronics. I was on the technical advisory 00:30:55.280 --> 00:30:59.960 board for them when they first started. This company had contacted Make Magazine saying, 00:30:59.960 --> 00:31:07.000 hey, do you know any engineers that might want to be on TV? They already had selected a mechanical 00:31:07.000 --> 00:31:12.360 engineer, a machinist, and a software engineer. So, to complete this circle, 00:31:12.360 --> 00:31:17.720 they needed a hardware person. So, they said, oh, you should talk to Joe. So, they reached 00:31:17.720 --> 00:31:21.720 out to me and I got this e-mail, and I remember showing it to my wife. I read it; I was like, 00:31:21.720 --> 00:31:25.520 I don't know. I was like, I don't know if I want to be on TV. I showed it to her and she was like, 00:31:25.520 --> 00:31:32.080 are you crazy? This is you can do what you love to do on TV. So, I didn t really just like with 00:31:32.080 --> 00:31:39.440 the Senate, I didn t know the impact or the implications of what it would become. I didn 00:31:39.440 --> 00:31:45.080 t know how special that was. I was like, alright, fine, I ll do a little interview with them. 00:31:45.080 --> 00:31:50.440 So, I showed all the stuff, didn t really think anything of it, said bye . I was riding my bike 00:31:50.440 --> 00:31:55.720 back from San Francisco to San Diego, which is where we lived at the time, just as a solo 00:31:55.720 --> 00:32:01.120 bike trip for fun. It was my first experience of like, I want to try to figure out what the 00:32:01.120 --> 00:32:07.360 hell I m doing, a little bit of self-love. I m gonna do some a little meditation kinda thing 00:32:07.360 --> 00:32:13.400 before that was even a known thing. It was just some I just needed to escape, and which 00:32:13.400 --> 00:32:19.360 is funny because we had just gotten married and talking to my wife about this recently, I m like, 00:32:19.360 --> 00:32:24.160 I can't believe that I did that, that we got married and then I went to San Francisco for 00:32:24.160 --> 00:32:28.280 a conference and then I rode my I didn t see you for ten days or whatever 'cause I just was doing a 00:32:28.280 --> 00:32:33.960 little bit at a time. She s like, well, you needed it. Like, very supportive, which was amazing. 00:32:33.960 --> 00:32:37.920 So, did this bike ride. I didn t have a phone or anything. This was like, 00:32:37.920 --> 00:32:44.240 Nokia-phone era. I didn t even bring a phone 'cause I really wanted to isolate myself. 00:32:44.240 --> 00:32:50.680 Come back from the trip, turn on my computer, and there was five e-mails of like, we want 00:32:50.680 --> 00:32:55.200 you on the show. Can you call us back? Call us back. So, it s amazing that they even waited, 00:32:55.200 --> 00:32:59.240 because they could have easily been like, alright, he s not answering. Let s go to somebody else. We 00:32:59.240 --> 00:33:04.640 spent the next year and a half in a warehouse on Treasure Island in the Bay Area in San Francisco 00:33:04.640 --> 00:33:09.440 building ridiculous, giant prototypes. JACK: [Music] Prototype This! was pretty 00:33:09.440 --> 00:33:14.120 darn cool. My favorite episode is where they came up with an idea to make a never-ending 00:33:14.120 --> 00:33:18.200 water slide. Can you imagine riding a water slide for as long as you wanted? 00:33:18.200 --> 00:33:22.680 JOE: Everybody needs an endless water slide. It was we called it the Backyard Water Slide. 00:33:22.680 --> 00:33:26.680 The concept the show really was like, in the future, you could have one of these, 00:33:26.680 --> 00:33:29.840 even though we were just prototyping. JACK: What they did was they connected 00:33:29.840 --> 00:33:35.600 curved water slide parts into a donut-looking shape, like a big circle, and they stood 00:33:35.600 --> 00:33:40.400 that up so it looked like a big wheel, and then they put water in it and spun it. So, 00:33:40.400 --> 00:33:45.080 if you're inside, you're always sliding down the side as long as it keeps spinning. 00:33:45.080 --> 00:33:51.360 JOE: We did a firefighter episode where we built a high-tech firefighter pack, and we had a drone 00:33:51.360 --> 00:33:56.960 that would go and help rescue somebody lost at sea. We did a pizza-delivering robot, which 00:33:56.960 --> 00:34:01.320 now there are food-delivering robots. Maybe they ripped it off the show; I don't know. Or like 00:34:01.320 --> 00:34:07.400 JACK: You had one where you tried to ride on a bug robot, right? 00:34:07.400 --> 00:34:09.600 JOE: Oh, yeah. JACK: A giant bug-looking thing, 00:34:09.600 --> 00:34:11.114 and then you would ride on it. JOE: Yeah, yeah. 00:34:11.114 --> 00:34:12.914 JACK: That s not even out yet. JOE: No. 00:34:12.914 --> 00:34:14.560 JACK: Fast-forward twenty years, right? What is it? 00:34:14.560 --> 00:34:17.720 JOE: Cause that was a really hard problem. JACK: Or fifteen years ago, and they 00:34:17.720 --> 00:34:20.074 still don t have rideable robots. JOE: Yeah. I know. What s up with that? 00:34:20.074 --> 00:34:23.280 JACK: You were building them then.