The Legion of Doom is the best of the best from the 50 states. How does one become a member? It isn't like you have to prick your finger and swap blood with Chris Goggans. Gang members on the electronic frontier don't live in the same state, wouldn't recognize each other if they were standing shoulder to shoulder on the bus. Here's how Mark Abene got into the Legion of Doom in the first place. Although Mark swears he never spoke to Chris before joining LOD, here's how Chris remembers it (Mark, typically, says Chris is all wrong): one day a few months ago, down in Texas where he was a college student, Chris noticed that Mark Abene had started signing his postings, "Phiber Optik of the LOD." And Chris thought, Who is
this kid?
He immediately phoned north.
"Hi, is this Mark?"
"Yeah."
"This is Chris - Erik Bloodaxe," said Chris. "Why in the hell are you signing your name LOD? You're not in LOD."
Mark thought for a second, then said solidly, "I'm in LOD."
"No one is in LOD unless we all vote on it," corrected Chris, who explained the "rules," among them the necessity of a unanimous vote.
Then, for some reason, the tone of the conversation shifted to what both teenagers really cared about: hacking the phone company. And Chris realized that Mark really did know as much as people had been saying, maybe more. This guy was good.
The actual vote came a few weeks later. Mark was in.
Just like any schoolyard pack of boys born in the shadow of The Dirty Dozen, Hogan's Heroes, and Mission Impossible, the LOD members all fancy themselves specialists in some dark art. One kid might know how to make a wicked blue box, a device cobbled together from top-secret Radio Shack parts that simulates the tones of coins dropping into a pay phone. Another might be an expert in programming Basic. And Mark? He can trace the route of a phone call from New York to Paris, detailing in loving techno-babble each photonic hop. He can describe, in detail, the different kinds of computers that run different aspects of the phone company's business. He knows the meaning of the phone system's every English-language-mangling acronym: MIZAR, COSMOS, SAG, LMOS. He can explain the phone system to anyone. Indeed, he loves to, in eye-glazing, brain-fogging, overdosing detail.
And in 1989, Mark has just turned 17.
To tell the truth, a few members soon get a little sick of the new prodigy. He is brash and has what some out-of-state members recognize as New York attitude. And he doesn't give a rat's ass who thinks so.
If Phiber Optik graces a bulletin board with comments about this or that phone company secret, then other hackers spread the word: Phiber's on. This place is hot. A crowd congregates. The phone lines are all busy. Hackers desperately call, using the redial feature, trying anything to get through, trying to get past a busy signal as implacable as any nightclub bouncer.
Phiber seems to revel in belittling blustery hackers who post misinformation. He loves
nothing better than trapping some nitwit who thinks COSMOS is some double-secret key to the phone company kingdom. (Duh, the name sure sounds important, doesn't it?)
People are starting to notice. Like Chris Goggans. One day in 1989, he and a friend, Dr. Who, are hanging out on a hot bulletin board called The Phoenix Project. Who do they run across but Phiber Optik of the LOD, eviscerating some poor pretender.
And this was what Chris thought about Mark: a real arrogant, smart-ass punk.
Mark and Chris never settle their difference. Mark gets kicked out of the Legion of Doom.
He has a disagreement with Chris, and Chris starts bad-mouthing him to the rest of the
members of LOD. Word of Mark's expulsion leaks out, all over the underground. How did it happen?
There's an idea he's had for awhile, it turns out, and one day in the summer of 1989 he tells Paul on the phone.
"MOD," Eli says.
"Mod?" Paul asks.
"M-O-D," says Eli, spelling the letters out.
So what is it?
"We should call ourselves MOD," Eli says. It's like a joke. It's a finger in the eye of LOD. He explains that it's an allusion to LOD, the Legion of Doom. From L to M, the next iteration, the new "kewl dewds" of cyberspace. The boys from New York are the opposite of the boys from Texas. How better to define themselves?
The boys from New York can figure out who they are simply by opposing the Legion of Doom and everything it stands for. Mark will love it, right? Whatever it stands for. That's not important right now. What is important, Eli says, is the joke: MOD. It stands for nothing. It stands for everything. Masters of Disaster. Mothers on Drugs. Masters of Deception.
The Masters of Deception don't know it, but in the summer of 1989 they already face a threat far greater than the Legion of Doom. By getting together in Eli's bedroom for late-night hacking sessions that lead to carousing in computers owned by the phone company, they have attracted the attention of two of the finest lawmen on the frontier of cyberspace: New York Telephone investigators Tom Kaiser and Fred Staples.
Kaiser, who has been monitoring some of the teenagers' phones for months, awakens early one morning in August 1989 and thinks, Today could be the day that we nab the hackers. He already feels the summer heat through his shirt as he leaves his house on Long Island to make an early train to Manhattan. This morning he will tell the Feds about the case.
Having reserved the big conference room, Kaiser finds it full of phone company people and their invited guests - investigators from the New York Police Department special frauds unit and the US Secret Service.
Knowing that the technical aspect of the case might make it difficult for non-technicians to grasp, Kaiser and Staples explain the case in general terms.
"We may be coming to you with this case we have, and how should we do that?" Kaiser
inquires.
"What have you got?" asks one of the federal investigators.
"We have three hackers," Kaiser says.
Mark, Paul, and Eli.
Many months will pass before anyone gets indicted.
There comes a time in any good history where the plot twists unexpectedly. Life is moving along, developing its own routine and rhythm, when all of a sudden, something - or someone - intervenes, and the pace accelerates, faster, and faster still. And the story hurtles off in a new direction.
One day, in the fall of 1989, Eli is cruising the familiar territory of cyberspace and decides to check out reports about some hot hacker in Brooklyn.
The Brooklyn hacker calls himself Corrupt. He's rumored to be a specialist. MOD can always use another specialist, and Corrupt supposedly knows more about the ubiquitous and powerful corporate computers called VAXEN (the plural for VAX) than the founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation. Which would be some feat, considering that Digital manufactures the damn machines.
An expert who understands the intricacies and nuances of running VAX computers could really widen MOD's power base. A VAX master could help the other MOD boys navigate through some computers that for now seem tantalizingly obscure. Not only is VAX a type of computer prized by hackers, who love the versatility and power of the machine, but VAXEN also are indispensable to universities, corporations, small companies, database archives, and libraries all over the country. Oh yeah, and the government owns a lot of them, too. The government keeps a lot of its secrets hidden on VAXEN.
And Corrupt can crack them. Sign him up!
Now, there's plenty that Eli doesn't know about Corrupt. He doesn't know, for instance, that he lives with his mom in a third-floor walk-up apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant (that's Bed-Stuy; you've heard of it as surely as you've heard of Cabrini Green and East LA), one of New York's toughest neighborhoods. Eli doesn't know that Corrupt will need no introduction whatsoever to the concept of MOD, because Corrupt is intimately acquainted with gangs. Out in the real world, out on the streets where you measure distance with your feet instead of your modem, Corrupt used to belong to a gang called the Decepticons. One thing Eli quickly learns: Corrupt's real name is John Lee.
John Lee dials "0."
It's early 1990 now, and John Lee is in MOD. 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 bird feeder, dialing and hanging up, trying random phone numbers. About 50 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 at around 6 o'clock, just when the office drones fled the Citicorp building for the subway. The kids come every few weeks, 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 weighing up to 5 pounds. They sport peach-fuzz mustaches and slicked-back buzz cuts. You can't miss them. The gathering is their "meeting."
John Lee's induction into MOD is only natural, because of his intense thirst for computer conquests; all he wants to do is penetrate new systems. He's learned so much about hacking and cracking in the one year since he got his modem that he's caught up with the rest of the MOD pack. He'll do anything to get into a new computer. He breaks into a network, then turns over the information to the other MOD members. He's the scout; they chart the territory.
On the pay phone, John connects to an operator. "Hey, I'm up on a pole here," he says, using his deepest, most authoritative, most adult voice. If only the operator could see John, a tall, 20-year-old black kid in stubby dreadlocks, white T-shirt, and khaki pants so baggy they could hold a friend. He doesn't look at all the part he's playing - a white, middle-aged, tool-belted lineman doing a service check. But he sounds the part.
And maybe that's enough. Just maybe the operator will fall for his smooth line of
