Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (2 page)

Why do some people feel offended by the word
shit, but not by the word poop? Because some little old lady at the
FCC decided that good citizens don't use the word shit, and
suddenly using a word like shit or fuck becomes an act of civil
disobedience. Suddenly a little four-letter word has the power to
shock.

If a guest host on Saturday Night Live
disobeys the rules and uses the word fuck on the air, it's a big
deal, and the morning shows talk about it for days. That's so
silly.

If a German farmer is being interviewed on
the news, because a severe storm ruined his crop, nobody would
bleep him, and nobody would make a big deal of it, if he said:
"That God damn storm ruined my fucking crop! FUCK MY LIFE!" If he
doesn't curse on the air, it's not because he's being censored, but
because he chooses not to, because he doesn't want to sound like an
ignorant brute. Germans don't need someone telling them what they
can and cannot say. They decide for themselves what is
appropriate.

Medical studies have shown that cursing
reduces levels of stress and pain. Repressing your anger is not
healthy. It's much better to verbalize it, and let off steam. Maybe
all that repressed anger is the reason why there are so many serial
killers in America.

And although Europeans have a much more
relaxed attitude when it comes to sexuality, and they don't feel
the need to protect children from "bad" words or "bad" images of
harmless nudity, the levels of teen pregnancy are much lower over
there than in America. Telling American teenagers that words
describing sex are off limits, makes sex a tempting forbidden
fruit, and it only makes them think about it more.

Educating European teenagers about their own
sexuality, and that it's a natural part of life, but teaching them
to censor themselves, because it's important to get an education
before you start a family, is obviously a much more effective way
to reduce teen pregnancy.

Anyway, this is my book. I curse when I get
really upset. Letting off steam that way makes me feel a little bit
better. I've been through a lot, but I have never had the urge to
go postal. I thank fuck for that.

And whether I write that I had sex with a
girl, or I fucked her, or we screwed, or we copulated, or had
intercourse, or a romp in the hay, it all conjures up the same
mental image.

This book contains a lot of "bad" words. So
if you are easily offended, go fuck yourself.

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF HACKING

"I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual
challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for
stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses."

"Hacking to me was like a video game. It was about
getting trophies. I just kept going on and on, despite all the
trouble I was getting into, because I was hooked."

"I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had
been able to control my passion for hacking."

Kevin Mitnick

I moved to the States for love. I had met a
girl over the Internet. This was in the 1990s, before the Internet
was widely used by the public. As a teenager, I used to be a
computer geek, when not everyone had a computer yet. I was a
hacker. If you've ever seen the movie War Games, you get the idea.
We used unbelievably slow dial-up modems and 8-bit computers. It
was the stone age of the PC revolution.

My friends and I didn't hack into government
computers to start World War 3 though. We didn't even hack into
bank computers to steal millions. All we did was play video games,
before playing video games became mainstream. And if the games had
copy protection, we removed the protection so we could copy the
games for our friends. That was called "cracking" a game. We felt
like the Robin Hoods among computer geeks, because we "stole" from
the rich software companies and gave to the poor kids who couldn't
afford to buy games.

There was an active hacking/cracking scene
in Europe, America and Australia, and hackers/crackers or "sceners"
from all over the world met at gatherings that were called copy
parties.

I never liked to be a follower. I didn't
want to be a member of someone else's crew, so I started my own
cracking group. It didn't matter to me if my group wasn't going to
be the biggest or the best, as long as it was my own. Why be a
follower when you can be a leader?

At first I only gave floppy disks with my
cracked games to my friends in my own class at school. Soon kids in
other classes got my games from their friends. It didn't take long
until I was known among kids at other schools in my home town, the
ancient Roman city of Aachen.

After a few months, my class went on a
school trip to Trier, another old Roman city, a few hundred miles
away from Aachen. We were supposed to go explore the ancient
downtown area on our own, without adult supervision. But it was
raining, so I decided to hang out in the computer section of a
department store instead. I played some of the video games I had
cracked, and caught the attention of some local kids.

Cracking groups back then used to put their
own little intro or cracktro in front of a cracked game. It's
similar to the 20th Century Fox or Universal logo you see at the
beginning of a movie. That was our way of getting famous. Cracktros
with our crew's name were basically high tech graffiti. Every time
someone played a game we cracked, they had to look at our name
first. That's really what it was all about. Not money. Just fame.
Kinda like kids who spray graffiti on walls all over town, to
spread their name.

Anyway, the local kids in that department
store recognized my hacking crew's name in front of the games I was
playing. That was the first time I realized that I was getting
famous in the hacking scene. People in cities hundreds of miles
away knew my name. It was a pretty amazing feeling. As I found out
later, it was addicting. At that department store in Trier, I ended
up recruiting one of those local kids into my group that day,
because he turned out to be an excellent programmer.

As time went by, my crew grew larger. At
first I had only recruited some of my classmates at school. But now
we had grown so much, that we had members all over Germany,
Belgium, Holland, France, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark,
England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia and America. Everyone in the
hacking scene knew us. We were at the very top of the game. Our
cocky slogan was "Europe's #1." That didn't sit too well with some
competing hacking crews. There was constant bickering between the
various crews about who was the best. A bit like the east coast -
west coast war in the hip hop scene. The more successful you were,
the more haters talked trash about you. And we had a lot of haters.
But our fans far outnumbered our enemies.

Going to copy party gatherings was an
amazing feeling. Everyone knew me and my crew. Everyone wanted to
shake my hand or talk to me. I felt like a rockstar. I was
literally world-famous. Among sceners anyway.

In order to spread our cracks to as many
people as possible, cracking crews used online bulletin board
systems, or BBS for short. They were the precursors to Internet
websites. Each crew had members that specialized in different
aspects of hacking. Almost like different members in a drug gang
have different jobs. Some cook the drug, some stand guard, some
sell the product on the streets.

In cracking crews back then, original
suppliers provided the games through their connections at game
stores or software companies. Crackers removed the copy protection
of the games. Swappers exchanged floppy disks with the swappers of
other crews. Spreaders uploaded the games to an online BBS to
distribute the games as quickly as possible to as many people as
possible. And leechers downloaded the latest cracks from other
crews' BBS.

But in order to connect to a BBS, our
computers had to make calls over regular phone lines. And long
distance calls were still very expensive back then. There were no
unlimited calling plans yet. International calls were virtually
unaffordable. So every elite crew had members called phreakers.
They were the ones who provided the means to make free
international phone calls to connect to a BBS on the other side of
the globe. The real world needs oil to move wares around. The
hacking scene back then needed ways to make free phone calls to
move digital warez around.

Usually phreakers got credit cards and
passed them on to the spreaders, so they could use the cards to
make expensive phone calls for free, to upload the latest cracked
games to a bunch of boards online. Phreakers had several different
ways to get their hands on credit cards. The most popular way was
phishing. Basically the phreakers called a bunch of random numbers
and tried to convince the people on the other end that they were
talking to an employee of the fraud department of their credit card
company.

If the phreaker was good at his game, the
person on the other end would give him all their personal
information, their credit card, social security number, date of
birth, etc. It's amazing how gullible people are when you use the
right inflection in your voice. Random strangers will trust you
very quickly, if you speak to them calmly, quietly, and with
confidence.

If you saw the movie Indentity Thief, you
get the idea. Melissa McCarthy plays a phreaker who phishes Jason
Bateman's identity, by convincing him that she works for the fraud
department of his credit card.

Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with
Steve Jobs, once said: "A lot of hacking is playing with other
people, you know, getting them to do strange things." A good hacker
is a master manipulator. Some hackers are good at manipulating
computer systems, others are good at manipulating brains.

Nowadays identity theft is a billion dollar
industry. Even organized crime, like the Russian mob, employ
phreakers to steal credit cards and then the mob uses these cards
to make online purchases. There is a black market online, where
hackers buy and sell people's information.

But back then, we weren't interested in
making online purchases or selling people's ID to the mob. Crews
back then just used the credit cards to make free phone calls
around the world to spread their cracked games.

The phone system in Europe was more advanced
than the American phone system. Countries like Germany had switched
to an all digital phone network long before the US did. And on
digital lines, it was much easier for the authorities to find and
trace hackers who abused credit cards to make calls. So European
hackers called the free 800 numbers of American phone companies,
and from those American lines called back to European lines with
stolen credit cards. The American phone lines were still analog,
and didn't allow the companies to trace the calls back. So European
hackers became invisible by re-routing all their calls through
America.

But then at some point the US phone
companies finally switched over to a digital network as well, and
suddenly phreaking became a lot more dangerous. Hackers started
getting arrested left and right. So more and more crews relied on a
different way to make free phone calls, called "blue boxing."
Instead of using someone else's credit card, hackers played a tone
into the phone that had the exact same frequency as the tone the
phone companies used to release a line for a free phone call. So,
simply by playing that tone, you could suddenly make a free phone
call to China or Europe.

A phreaker who called himself Captain Crunch
had discovered by accident, that the toy whistle that came in
Captain Crunch serial boxes played exactly the right tone at
exactly the right frequency to get a free phone line. He became a
legend in the hacking scene.

SEX AND CRIME

"Any publicity is good publicity."

Unknown

Girls were rare in the hacking scene. I knew
hundreds of guys in the scene, but there were only 3 or 4 girls.
Two of them were famous because they ran popular online boards. And
of course they hated each other and had cat fights online. Donna
lived in New York, and her arch nemesis Tammy lived in California.
Each one wanted to have the most important BBS, where the best
crews uploaded their cracked games, or "warez" first.

Back then, having "zero day warez" (brand
new cracked games that are not even one day old yet) on your BBS
first was a big status symbol. The competition between the crews
and the BBS they favored was fierce. Whoever had the most "first
releases" (cracking and spreading a new game before anyone else)
was considered the best or most elite crew. Being part of the
hacker elite was everything back then. Kids today think they sound
cool when they spell everything wrong. That wasn't any different
back then. The word elite for example was often spelled "leet" or
"1337."

If a hacking crew associated with the BBS of
one of those 2 girls to spread their first release warez, they
weren't really welcome on the other girl's BBS. Donna ran a very
popular BBS that was frequented by many elite hackers from around
the world. I decided to ask her to make her BBS in New York the
exclusive headquarters for my European hacking crew, which meant we
would upload all our warez on her BBS first. And then the leechers
of other crews would have to come to her BBS to download our warez
and upload them on other boards. It also meant that the hackers who
were loyal to Tammy's board in California were now automatically
our enemies.