- 2 months ago
Hack3rs Wanted (2009) is an insightful and engaging documentary film that explores the world of computer curiosity, digital creativity, and the people who helped shape modern technology culture. The film looks at the history of hacking as a form of exploration, problem-solving, and innovation, focusing on how curiosity and creativity can influence technological progress. This Movie features interviews, real-life stories, and thoughtful perspectives that highlight learning, ingenuity, and ethical curiosity in the digital age. Hackers Wanted (2009) offers an informative and accessible viewing experience for audiences interested in technology, history, and character-driven documentaries.
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00:00:56Man has been, and will always be, simultaneously fascinated and terrified of the unknown.
00:01:08Change is the necessary ingredient for all advancement, and yet it is something that very few can accept without a fight.
00:01:16In the quest to understand outer space, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras was the first to propose that the world was a sphere rotating on its own axis,
00:01:27an idea that seemed absurd to a 6th century BC society that believed in a flat, stationary world.
00:01:34They outcast Pythagoras and insisted that an invisible man in a chariot with flying horses dragged the sun across the sky each day.
00:01:46Supported by the newly formed Roman Catholic Church, this Earth-centered universe model remained generally accepted for 15 centuries.
00:01:57In that time, many scientists theorized that the model was incorrect, but few dared to share their findings, and those who did were outcast.
00:02:07The last of these rebels was Galileo, the first astronomer to use a telescope,
00:02:13and the last to be persecuted by the church for suggesting that the Earth traveled around the sun.
00:02:19He was summoned to answer on charges of heresy.
00:02:22At his trial before the church, Galileo was forced to curse, abjure, and detest his theory that the Earth moved around the sun.
00:02:31Had he not done this, he would have been burned alive at the stake.
00:02:36Although Galileo complied, he was ordered to spend the rest of his life under house arrest and was allowed no visitors or outside contact.
00:02:46Immediately after being sentenced, a stunned Galileo calmly declared,
00:02:51and yet the Earth moves.
00:02:54Seven, six, five, six, three, two, one, two.
00:03:03Today, you know, all of our infrastructure is run by computers.
00:03:16Computers are playing a central role in electricity, oil distribution.
00:03:31Water, water treatment, finances, everything.
00:03:43If you roll back a few years at times, you didn't have computer attacks doing things like causing air traffic delays,
00:03:49shutting down ATM systems, shutting down 911 emergency systems, and so on.
00:03:54That wasn't happening so much.
00:03:55You know, now we get, you know, that can happen.
00:04:00When I first started working with computer security, I think like a lot of security practitioners,
00:04:06I had this mental image that, you know, these guys at the CIA and the NSA and the FBI,
00:04:12you know, they were like the computer systems of Mission Impossible, you know,
00:04:16where they had these incredibly secure systems and they actually knew what they were doing.
00:04:20And within a couple of years, I realized I was teaching them.
00:04:25Imagine a bar graph.
00:04:27And government computer security is here.
00:04:30And corporate computer security is here.
00:04:33And my home network is up about there.
00:04:36Cyber terror is a kind of warfare on the virtual frontier.
00:04:49Sometimes, though, it can leap outside of the virtual realm into the physical world,
00:04:53such as when, for example, automated controls on power systems are attacked.
00:04:58And then they cause power outages or they cause dams to burst or pipelines to cease their flows.
00:05:04And this is the realm of the cyber terrorist.
00:05:07You know, I think as computers continue to underpin our society and become really part of what we are now seeing,
00:05:16I think, as really a digital nervous system that underpins our entire economy,
00:05:19we all have to be cognizant of the threat of computer crime and computer criminals.
00:05:23You know, a hacker isn't necessarily, in a popular vernacular, a bad thing.
00:05:28A hacker is somebody who explores in a quest for knowledge,
00:05:32who wants to look at a system and see how it works.
00:05:34The life around me greatly changes.
00:05:36I mean, for one, my analytical skills skyrocketed once I started programming.
00:05:41It's more, actually, a burden of analyzing things crazily.
00:05:45And just walking down the street, I look, I wonder how these buses work
00:05:50or how this door is opening, how this automatic door is opening.
00:05:53I just think about it. I think about the inner workings of it.
00:05:55All hacking is, is expanding the boundaries, is exploring.
00:05:59And instead of exploring the globe or exploring space,
00:06:01you're exploring the inner space of telecommunications networks,
00:06:04of the personal computer, and trying to find out what more you can do.
00:06:08A cracker is somebody who takes those skills and uses them for ill,
00:06:11uses them for bad things.
00:06:13Most hackers are a benign intent. They're just curious.
00:06:17And those hackers who are destructive or criminal, they should be punished.
00:06:22The FBI doesn't track the average white-head hacker, if you will.
00:06:26We don't have the resources or the interest in doing that.
00:06:29We're specifically interested in individuals that are breaking federal law.
00:06:32Hacking, to me, is expressing human drive to know more, to go farther to experiment.
00:06:38And that, to me, is fundamental.
00:06:41I think the Wild West is the best analogy for this.
00:06:44I mean, you're here in an area where the laws never really considered any of this stuff.
00:06:51And where new things are happening, exciting things are happening.
00:06:55And we don't know what's right and wrong exactly.
00:06:57It's a little fuzzy.
00:06:59A white-hat hacker is someone who might, say, explore their own company network
00:07:05to determine how it's vulnerable and how to protect against it.
00:07:08Black-hat hackers or crackers are those that use that knowledge
00:07:11and use that ability to commit crimes.
00:07:13And those are the people that we're interested in.
00:07:16Between the white-hat good guys and the black-hat bad guys
00:07:19is a very interesting character known as the Gray Hat,
00:07:23an ethical vigilante of the Cyber West.
00:07:26Although he's not paid for his services, like some white hats,
00:07:30the curious Gray Hat takes it upon himself to hack into computers and find security holes.
00:07:36He then informs the owners of these vulnerable computers about the problems.
00:07:40to help them prevent any villainous black hats
00:07:43from later exploiting the holes for unethical or criminal purposes.
00:07:47They're individualists of the first degree. That's what they are.
00:07:50They're the cowboys. They're out there on the edge of the Wild West,
00:07:54of the outlaw world, going out and trying new stuff.
00:07:59And seeing where the borders are, seeing where the edges lie,
00:08:02seeing where, you know, there be monsters.
00:08:04Well, what monsters are out there?
00:08:06We need those people.
00:08:08And, you know, you've got your Wyatt Earps who are going out there
00:08:10and trying to shut these guys down.
00:08:12It's very hard to make the distinction between legal and legal
00:08:14when you're talking hacking,
00:08:15because intent is very much part of our criminal justice system.
00:08:19It's very hard to know what somebody's intent was.
00:08:22I understand the government's point of view.
00:08:24I understand that they feel they need to send a message
00:08:26that crime can't be tolerated no matter how well-intentioned it is.
00:08:30And I think that in some ways they're unable to look beyond that message.
00:08:35I don't think that they necessarily see the social impact of what they do.
00:08:38And I think that you can't use old models and rules
00:08:43and apply them to these new situations.
00:08:46They don't apply them anymore.
00:08:48As convoluted as its modern-day usage,
00:09:16the dictionary definition of the word hack
00:09:18is either the act of cutting through something with quick, unskilled blows,
00:09:23or the ability to find a way to manage a given challenge,
00:09:26such as, can you hack it or not?
00:09:30How this word transformed into what we know today as the hacker
00:09:34was not through the computer, but through the model train.
00:09:38In 1946, the Tech Model Railroad Club was formed at MIT.
00:09:45Comprised of engineering students and model train enthusiasts of all ages,
00:09:50the purpose of the club was to challenge and modify
00:09:53the functional design of model trains in order to hack a better train.
00:09:58They defined a hacker as one who applies ingenuity
00:10:02to create a clever result called a hack.
00:10:07Still in existence today, the Tech Model Railroad Club remains proud
00:10:11that it originated the word hacker
00:10:13and disapproves using the term to represent illegal acts of computer crimes.
00:10:18As the term hacker moved from the world of model trains to modern computers,
00:10:29one of its key evolutionary phases was the telephone.
00:10:33In 1969, nobody had a computer at home.
00:10:37Phone-freaking was, at that time, hacking the phone system.
00:10:40There were no computers to hack. There was only the phone system.
00:10:43They had always been working in electronics, experimenting around with things,
00:10:46trying different things, finding out why things did work
00:10:49and why they worked so well and why others don't work so well.
00:10:52And I did it mostly through experimentation, just by trial and error.
00:10:56I had not actually been the discoverer of the Captain Crunch whistle.
00:11:00The Captain Crunch whistle was discovered by the blind kids.
00:11:06And it was just by chance they happened to play around with the whistle
00:11:11and they experimented around with pressing different holes to get to different pitch.
00:11:15Like they tried this one, that's not 2600.
00:11:18With a perfect pitch, now that's 2600.
00:11:23The 2600 tone is used to activate and hang up the long-distance trunk.
00:11:30I read a newspaper article that it was now possible from certain cities to dial overseas directly
00:11:41without going through an operator.
00:11:43I said, gee, how is that possible?
00:11:45So through a little social engineering...
00:11:47Social engineering is an attack where basically what you're doing is
00:11:50you're fooling someone into giving you access to some place that you don't have any business being.
00:11:56And this is a technique that a lot of people use, not just hackers.
00:12:00For example, sales guys will use social engineering.
00:12:03For selling is working with people.
00:12:06It's helping them make decisions.
00:12:09Good decisions.
00:12:10Helping them buy.
00:12:12So through a little social engineering, I was able to get an operator to tell me,
00:12:15oh, you dial key pulse 182 start, and that will get you to the overseas sender.
00:12:19From there you just do key pulse 044 and the country code and the city code and the number start,
00:12:25and you get connected.
00:12:26Oh, wow.
00:12:27So I took down and mapped out the entire country code of the world.
00:12:32Not only can I call countries, but I can experiment around with these codes.
00:12:35I can find out where these codes go to.
00:12:36And I discovered a lot of codes that were not published.
00:12:39The codes would get into satellite systems and phone systems,
00:12:44ship-to-shore phone systems.
00:12:45They have their own country code.
00:12:47The thrill of it was just understanding how the phone system worked.
00:12:51Hackers have thus been involved with each new technological development
00:12:55leading to the computer for centuries,
00:12:57enjoying the intellectual challenges of creatively overcoming the limitations of each age.
00:13:03Contrary to popular belief,
00:13:05when hackers finally did meet modern-day computers,
00:13:08they did not intrude upon them.
00:13:11They invented them.
00:13:13To those of us who are real hardcore in the computer industry,
00:13:17the word hacking was applied to people who hacked away all night long.
00:13:23People usually that didn't have computers of their own,
00:13:26they didn't have any money, but they were at a university.
00:13:29And they found out that if they stayed up all night long,
00:13:31there were some computers unused.
00:13:33And they called it hacking because they hacked away.
00:13:35They took a program and hacked it up
00:13:37and tried to make it a little better and a little better.
00:13:39Way back at the end of high school,
00:13:41I told my dad I'm going to have a computer someday,
00:13:43and he said it costs as much as a house.
00:13:45And I said, well, I'll live in an apartment.
00:13:47I was going to have a computer even if it cost me a house.
00:13:49I got a phone call from a friend.
00:13:53Well, there's a group getting together
00:13:55and they're interested in things like terminals.
00:13:57I had just designed a video terminal
00:13:59that worked with my home color TV.
00:14:00And so I could type in and talk to a thing called the ARPANET.
00:14:03The ARPANET was started by the military
00:14:05and hooked a whole bunch of campuses across the United States together.
00:14:08So I could actually play chess on a computer at MIT
00:14:12and bounce over to a computer at Stanford and see some files
00:14:15and over to Berkeley to other parts of the world long before the Internet.
00:14:19I had to have that, so I built my own terminal.
00:14:21And when Alan Bowne said there's a computer club starting
00:14:24for people who have terminals and things,
00:14:25I thought I'll be able to show off my great little low chip design.
00:14:28I went to the club, so excited about it,
00:14:30and found out these people were all talking about microprocessors.
00:14:33Had suddenly made it possible to have a computer at a low cost.
00:14:36It came out of a group of people
00:14:38that were kind of liberal thinking about computers for the people.
00:14:41The whole mentality of the Homeward Computer Club was extremely open.
00:14:45Information should be published, handed out,
00:14:47because basically we were creating stuff that was going to move the world forward
00:14:51and we should do our best to be good contributors to society in that way.
00:15:00And that's really where that word hacker originated.
00:15:04For a long time, technology, computer technology, digital technology
00:15:07was the realm of the hacker alone.
00:15:09People who were really into it, that was theirs.
00:15:12Big business laughed at it.
00:15:14IBM said there'll never be a market for more than 20 computers in the world.
00:15:18There's no market for that.
00:15:19So personal computing was really created by hackers for hackers,
00:15:24and that's what, you know, we played with this stuff.
00:15:26Then business, industry, government started to say,
00:15:29oh, wait a minute.
00:15:30Oh, there's some money to be made here.
00:15:32And they started to take it over, first by commercializing the Internet.
00:15:36Over the last decade, commercialization of the Internet has exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry,
00:15:42prompting governments to argue that they must control the Internet to ensure the economy's safety.
00:15:48An international organization named ICANN was thus created by the United States government in 1998.
00:15:55Based in Marina del Rey, California, ICANN controls the 13 computers which manage the domain names of the world.
00:16:04Whomever controls these 13 computers controls the World Wide Web.
00:16:10The rest of the world opposed this United States-dominated control of ICANN,
00:16:15and so it was agreed that the UN would create an international body in 2006 to run ICANN
00:16:21and ensure equal Internet availability to all countries.
00:16:25When the time came to relinquish its power, however,
00:16:28the United States Department of Commerce instead declared that the United States would keep control of ICANN indefinitely.
00:16:36The United States has since made controversial use of this self-declared monopoly on the Internet,
00:16:42such as taking over the country codes for Iraq and Kazakhstan without requiring consent from either country,
00:16:50and by asking popular search engines to hand over private user information and Internet activity patterns.
00:16:57The Internet is quickly becoming less of a public information-sharing network
00:17:02and more a corporate tool for profit and a government tool for control.
00:17:06I think hacking skills are going to become critical to liberty in this country,
00:17:13because as government and industry start to realize they can use technology to shut people down,
00:17:18to reduce our liberties, the only freedom fighters out there will be hackers.
00:17:22The next war is not going to be fought with bullets and guns and bombs.
00:17:25It's going to be fought with code.
00:17:26It's going to be fought with technology, with computers.
00:17:28That's how the war is going to be fought.
00:17:30And if you want to preserve liberties in this country,
00:17:32I don't think it has anything to do with the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms.
00:17:35It's the right to bear computers.
00:17:37And over time, the term hacking sort of nowadays has a meaning of,
00:17:44I'm hacking my way in.
00:17:46I'm chopping my way into somebody else's computer.
00:17:48And the newspapers and the media have tried to make hacking to be a word that means,
00:17:53oh my gosh, it's something bad.
00:17:54It's a threat.
00:17:55It's one of these invisible threats that you don't know about.
00:17:57There's a lot of, like, just built in like a kind of church.
00:18:00Here's the dogma.
00:18:01And that's what we have in our society today, even just government and people.
00:18:05Hackers are bad.
00:18:06It's just one of those church realms, you know?
00:18:08It's like hackers are Satan.
00:18:15Socrates was a humble Greek philosopher who debated with patrons in the streets,
00:18:20winning every argument yet crediting his opponents for any insights that may have arisen.
00:18:25He chose not to teach for money, as did the many professional sophists of the time,
00:18:31and yet he was considered by the masses to be the most wise of all men.
00:18:35The Athenian powers, however, paranoid over Athens' inevitable defeat by the attacking Spartans,
00:18:42concluded that intellectuals like Socrates were weakening Athenian society by undermining its traditional views and values.
00:18:50Socrates was arrested on charges of refusing to recognize the official gods of the state,
00:18:56introducing new gods and corrupting the young.
00:19:01At his trial, Socrates insisted that he did not know enough to teach anybody anything, claiming,
00:19:06I am very conscious that I am not wise at all.
00:19:12He was sentenced to death by drinking a cup of poisonous herb called hemlock,
00:19:16which produces a slow death by gradually paralyzing the central nervous system.
00:19:21Socrates would be his own executioner.
00:19:26The philosopher was taken to the nearby jail, where his sentence would be carried out in the comfort of his friends and disciples.
00:19:33When he drank the cup of hemlock, his friends could not help but weep.
00:19:38He consoled them.
00:19:40To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without being wise.
00:19:46For it is to think that we know what we do not know.
00:19:50Society is always going to have trouble with people who want to push the envelope.
00:19:56Societies are designed around conformity.
00:20:00What hacking is is saying, I am going to do it different.
00:20:03I am going to see what else I can do.
00:20:04I am going to see where else I can go.
00:20:06Society is never going to like that.
00:20:08Society will always make laws against that.
00:20:11And that is appropriate for society to do.
00:20:14But I would submit it is very important for society to have people who are willing to push the envelope.
00:20:19Otherwise society does not grow.
00:20:21So hackers are a very, very important part of technology.
00:20:26Without it you have no innovation, you have no growth, you have stagnation.
00:20:29And yet they pose a threat.
00:20:31Because they are breaking the rules.
00:20:34They are going too far.
00:20:36That is their job.
00:20:37You have got to have them.
00:20:39Over my lifetime, the last 50 years, we have stomped out so many things that are seeds of creativity in this country.
00:20:46A lot of teachers will just tell you we do not really have school systems that encourage the children to think of a problem and what could a solution be.
00:20:55No, just to identify the solution you were taught in this chapter and use that one.
00:21:00So we do not teach thinking as much as we teach rigorous rote.
00:21:04And intelligence is not defined as somebody having a brain that can think and think and consider all the possibilities and come up with the best solution.
00:21:11Oh no, no.
00:21:12Intelligence is saying the exact same things as everyone else.
00:21:15You read the same newspaper articles.
00:21:16You watch the same news shows.
00:21:17You read the same books.
00:21:18And now you can say exactly the same things about how the world works.
00:21:22So you all know you're a group.
00:21:23It's almost like a religion.
00:21:24And we're all the same.
00:21:25And we're intelligent because I say it and you say it.
00:21:28And you're intelligent, so I'm intelligent.
00:21:30And we never really have a real good way of measuring are you really thinking and putting it together and coming up with your own solutions.
00:21:38No.
00:21:39We don't define that as intelligent.
00:21:40We often define it as dumb.
00:21:51What we see as a growing and emerging threat is the professional cyber criminal.
00:21:55From the former Soviet Union, from places like that where you have an educated populace.
00:21:58A lot of people are starving for money there.
00:22:01And so it's not uncommon to find what are called large programming houses.
00:22:06These are houses where the huge networks are set up, usually out in the countryside, totally nondescript, mostly funded by the Russian mafia types.
00:22:16Organized crime is very much involved in hacking.
00:22:19There's a vast conspiracy among financial institutions and government to hide the degree in the amount of hacking that's going on.
00:22:26FBI, Secret Service don't want you to know how often they're being hacked.
00:22:31It would rock people's confidence.
00:22:33And now you're looking at organizations that what used to be a department that had human beings that could actually do the job.
00:22:42And you've replaced it with a department that consists of a bunch of human beings who know how to click on a web page on a server someplace and fill out a form.
00:22:51And any place where you're in an economic situation where you are completely de-skilled about the problem you're trying to solve, you're basically a born victim.
00:23:02We heard about the situation in New York on 9-11 where the ambulances couldn't talk to the police, who couldn't talk to the fire department, who couldn't talk to the FBI,
00:23:12because they were all using different radio systems that couldn't interoperate.
00:23:17And this is a massive problem and it's pervasive across all of federal computing.
00:23:22The GAO, I guess, issues these reports that rate the security of government systems.
00:23:27The grades that they assign to the government have often been, you know, D's and F's.
00:23:31One of the greater concerns of those interested in stemming the tide of cyber terror is protecting our power grids.
00:23:39The nation's economy, its defense, its transportation systems all run entirely dependent on smooth flows of power.
00:23:48And if these were disrupted, the economic and the strategic consequences would be simply incalculable.
00:23:54Power for the American systems operate on something called SCADA, System Control and Data Acquisition,
00:24:00which means controls are entirely automated.
00:24:03In the case of a dam, for example, how much water to let through and how much to hold back.
00:24:08And if these controls are played with in some unfortunate fashion, they could well result in a buildup of too much pressure at a particular area.
00:24:19Or it could, simply by opening up all the sluices, create flooding downstream from a dam.
00:24:25A lot of gas pipelines run on these SCADA systems and simple things like regulation of temperatures could cause coagulation within pipelines.
00:24:37Or automated scrubbers working inside the pipelines to clean them could be used instead to block the pipelines causing some kind of rupture.
00:24:45But you have to remember now that over 90% of all military communications go over civilian systems.
00:24:51In the military, for example, we have two extremely highly automated systems.
00:24:56It marries up equipment and troops being moved halfway around the world in a synchronized way.
00:25:01If either of those systems were intruded upon by hackers and disrupted, the delays that could be caused in the physical world could run in weeks to up to a month.
00:25:13In a place like the Korean Peninsula, Seoul is already an artillery range from the north.
00:25:18And so slowing down reinforcements coming to the peninsula, that would make a very big difference.
00:25:24You know, the interesting case is the case that took place in Australia a few years ago.
00:25:30Somebody had hacked the sewage treatment system and they were able to actually cause raw sewage overflows.
00:25:38And so it caused some environmental damage and some marine life were killed.
00:25:43Wireless networking is almost the poster child, from a computer security standpoint, of a technology that's extremely cool,
00:25:58that has suddenly become extremely pervasive, and as a result has been a security problem.
00:26:04Simply capturing wavelengths around these various wireless hotspots that are being created.
00:26:09Again, for efficiency's sake, it's also creating magnets to draw the hackers who would get inside our systems.
00:26:17An airline had a curbside check-in over wireless.
00:26:21And this allowed anybody in the parking lot for that airport to have access to the internal system of the airline.
00:26:27With wireless access points, if someone can pull up in front of your house with a computer,
00:26:32they can do pretty much anything they want anonymously on the Internet.
00:26:36If they're a terrorist, they could be untraceable.
00:26:43Terrorist groups are beginning to look at the possibilities of cyber terror,
00:26:47but they have to make a decision about whether to develop their own cyber terror capabilities
00:26:53or to recruit others from the outside.
00:26:55Some of the people affiliated with the Madrid train bombings,
00:26:59they had actually freaked the telephone system in order to make free phone calls prior to the bombings.
00:27:06Most of the hardcore terrorist groups out there, certainly the ones that I monitor,
00:27:10have no interest at all in hiring outside hackers because of the security risks that they entail.
00:27:16It was paid a lot of attention to when it was discovered that the Amish and Rico cult,
00:27:20the group that had used sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, was in the software development business.
00:27:27And that they were developing software for Japanese business firms and including the Japanese government.
00:27:33And that they could put back doors into that software and then exploit those.
00:27:39So they're trying to develop their own cyber terrorists from within their ranks,
00:27:43someone who's already a radical.
00:27:45They want to turn into a hacker.
00:27:48There are about five or six different cyber wars going on around the world today.
00:27:54When India detonated its nuclear blasts and Pakistan followed through two days later in May 1998,
00:28:13then what happened was that a few days of nuclear blasts at the atomic research center,
00:28:19which is India's major nuclear installations.
00:28:23Its website was hacked by an actual nuclear group, a big group called Bill Worms.
00:28:30The first Pakistan group was called Pakistan Hackers Plus.
00:28:35The second group, which is probably the best, is one called 34 Pakistan.
00:28:40They broke into some of the networks of the army.
00:28:43They gave a warning to the India Gandhi research, nuclear research center at Al-Paqam,
00:28:51where he told Pakistan and told them,
00:28:53one day we'll scratch you on Thursday afternoon.
00:28:56And despite having, you know, two or three days' notice,
00:29:00the people of Pakistan went to scratch.
00:29:04They met to scratch you on Thursday afternoon.
00:29:06There's a cyber jihad going on along with the intifada in Palestine against the Israelis.
00:29:12with a great deal of attacks upon information infrastructures.
00:29:17The other example of cyber war is coming out of Chechnya.
00:29:20This is one of those cases that we have to be extremely mindful of
00:29:24because there's a lot of information moving from the Chechens to Al-Qaeda and its other affiliates.
00:29:29I think something else that we need to be concerned about is the possibility of terrorists creating an incident,
00:29:35like a power outage that's going to put people out on the streets on foot,
00:29:39and then marry that attack up with a biological assault of some sort,
00:29:45some kind of, in the military we would call this combined arms approach.
00:29:49So a physical attack that would come along with the virtual attack.
00:29:52If you, as a hacker, brought down emergency services in an area and then destroyed a nuclear power plant,
00:30:00the effect of destroying the nuclear power plant would be far greater than if 9-1-1 were working,
00:30:05than if emergency services were working.
00:30:07Now, the thing about China is that it is not done so much by students and leaders.
00:30:19In China, it's the PLA, the People's Liberation Army,
00:30:22which is actually preparing for a very advanced program in information warfare.
00:30:29Here is a really organized initiative at the state level, at the army level.
00:30:35Well, they are conducted in a group of cyber war exercises of the army,
00:30:40which was directed against the United States,
00:30:44to direct against Taiwan, Japan, South Korea.
00:30:48And there were simulations on how to bring the electronic infrastructure,
00:30:53their trading systems, dystopic changes,
00:30:57their electricity grid to a halt.
00:31:00China's seafood staff and civil tenders were involved.
00:31:04in this planning exercise.
00:31:07Above all, they did a lot of analysis on how they could carry out what are called discreet attacks,
00:31:17which are sudden attacks paralyzed in space networks.
00:31:22The primary aim was the U.S. aircraft carriers,
00:31:27and some of the missile systems, and then the aircraft.
00:31:31You know, they tried to incorporate a theory to warfare.
00:31:35So these two Hebrides rules for warfare, thousands of years ago,
00:31:41when you try to get somebody else to carry out the recession.
00:31:46The idea is to make you believe that it came from within,
00:31:50that they do crack a group to various other countries,
00:31:54such as students, to act to the front of the PLA.
00:31:59People who are attacked, who think that it has come out of the university,
00:32:03whereas it really has come out of the people's liberation army.
00:32:08I don't know how much time we have left before the radical develops the skills of the hacker,
00:32:17before the gap between the two is narrowed.
00:32:19I only know that it's not a great deal of time.
00:32:22And as I look around, I see very little effective preparation for this threat.
00:32:28I think those in the hacker community realize that I have a respect for their skills,
00:32:35for what they do, and therefore for their ability to help us in the current conflict that we're in.
00:32:42And they realize that global terror networks rely inordinately on the web and the net to coordinate their operations.
00:32:48So they're in a unique position to help us in the war on terror.
00:32:51And we should be cultivating them.
00:33:05You know him as a guy who hacked Yahoo, AOL, Time Warner, MCI, WorldCom, Microsoft,
00:33:09and very famously the New York Times.
00:33:11And that's just a few of his hacks.
00:33:13Adrian Lama, one of the most celebrated hackers in the world today.
00:33:16Do you define yourself as a hacker?
00:33:17Do you consider yourself a hacker?
00:33:18It's not a term that I try to sell myself as.
00:33:20Yeah.
00:33:21People use hacker to mean a lot of different things, and I really just do what I do.
00:33:24It's not limited to computers, so I really don't know if it's hacking.
00:33:27I think Adrian is a really example of a guy with very strongly held beliefs.
00:33:34His ethical scheme may not match society's or other people's, but he believes in it, and he's living up to his own ethical precepts.
00:33:45And you've got to admire a guy like that.
00:33:47He's almost a savant when it comes to cracking.
00:33:50Any company that you hear is a common brand name pretty much had a router with WorldCom, had network connectivity with WorldCom, was managed by WorldCom.
00:33:57They were considered to be highly secure.
00:33:59They managed traffic for individual bank branches, potentially even for ATM devices.
00:34:03WorldCom used their employee social security numbers as identifiers, pretty much as employee numbers.
00:34:11The passwords also weren't hard. Some of them had random alphanumeric passwords, but some of the companies that you do business with every day had passwords that were simple dictionary words, names of animals.
00:34:20Here you have companies that on one hand have paid millions of dollars for this network infrastructure, and they can't even be bothered to think of a good password.
00:34:27By combining these dial-up numbers and the logins, anyone, anyone at all with this information could have connected to each and every router that handled the data for Bank of America, Ford, Chrysler, NASA.
00:34:42There were very detailed routing paths, like I could see how the Goddard Space Center talked to NASA headquarters.
00:34:48Really, in just the course of a few hours, anybody could have gone through and turned them all off.
00:34:54Network connectivity for a huge chunk of corporate America and for the government would have just gone away.
00:34:59Anybody thinking about it should be scared by the possibility of just how vulnerable it was to anybody that could have used that information.
00:35:05You didn't need to be a programmer. You didn't have to be a technical wizard. You could have done it from a pay phone.
00:35:09Nobody would have ever known who was responsible for it.
00:35:12And he would find the flaws and notify the companies that had the flaws in line with a lot of other hackers.
00:35:18They have this journal 2600. They all promote, we've got to be ethical hackers.
00:35:22You're going to be on our bad side if you go out and abuse this the wrong way, which means being destructive or if you're going to use it for your own personal game to make profits and all that.
00:35:31There are these guys and they call themselves helpful hackers.
00:35:34I mean, the truth is that the media wants to portray these guys as helpful hackers because that makes them more interesting.
00:35:41Because the media doesn't have a very good story if they go and say,
00:35:45Well, there's this borderline sociopath, Adrian Lamo, who breaks into these corporations in order to professionally humiliate the people who are responsible for managing the networks.
00:35:55And then for some reason he expects us to thank him for that.
00:35:59Do you consider yourself on a mission to get these companies to realize that they have poor security?
00:36:03I don't consider it my responsibility to reform security in the world as we know it.
00:36:07I think, if anything, I'm on automation to be in the right place at the right time.
00:36:11Most hackers, when they're trying to hack into something, they'll have all kinds of programs that they run.
00:36:17There's things that are called exploits.
00:36:25Adrian just goes to a web page and starts clicking around a little bit and all of a sudden he's at some stage.
00:36:32At some sensitive company information.
00:36:34I mean, just the fact that he uses a web browser from Kinkos.
00:36:38I've never seen him use anything other than just a web browser.
00:36:42Adrian never damaged any company that he had any dealings with.
00:36:48I mean, he never asked for money, never asked for anything.
00:36:52The companies that he helps is just a consequence of what he does.
00:36:57He doesn't wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to hack so-and-so or I'm going to help so-and-so.
00:37:03He just finds himself someplace looking at some information and thinks, you know, these people might want to close this down so other people don't follow my path in here.
00:37:13If I can get in here, other people can too.
00:37:15He's a good example of a guy who lived on the fringes of society and didn't want to be part of mainstream society.
00:37:21He didn't want to hold down a job. He didn't want to go to college. He wanted to explore.
00:37:25We call you the homeless hacker because you don't have a residence that you live in all the time.
00:37:28You move around from friends house to house. Is that how you do it?
00:37:31I sort of have a long-term tendency to move around.
00:37:33I've been a little bit more stable lately, but I wouldn't say I'm slowing down.
00:37:36I had an apartment in San Francisco for about six months or so, and I was working consistently at the time.
00:37:41I had the opportunity to save up money. I realized Greyhound was cheaper and it let me see more of the world.
00:37:47And I just started going places probably from when I was 18 or 19 up until 22, so three or four years.
00:37:54I would decide that I wanted to visit someplace since I had my entire life on my back.
00:37:58I would just wander out and find myself never coming back and moving on to a new city.
00:38:03It spoke to what must have been the sense of wonderment that the people that sighted new land for the first time must have felt.
00:38:11I do it because it's what I do and what comes naturally to me.
00:38:13In any environment that I'm in, I notice things and I follow up on them.
00:38:17I often meet people that have lived places their whole lives and find them terribly boring because they were raised there
00:38:23and only know one way of seeing it as this place that they're stuck and they want to get out of.
00:38:27And they're often amazed just by my sense of wonderment at many of the places around them of my ability to just walk around
00:38:36and find so much uniqueness about it that they've lived with every day and never really noticed before.
00:38:45I had very low expenses. For a lot of the time I could usually live on less than 50 bucks a week, 100 bucks a week if I had to.
00:38:51And frequently I would end up somewhere where I knew nobody and had nowhere to go.
00:38:55You know there have been times that I've slept in abandoned buildings and that is just as important to me
00:39:02because of the sense of improbability, of the sense of newness, of uniqueness as any network, network compromise
00:39:08because, again, it's another layer of things that you don't usually see.
00:39:12I try to find locations that don't show signs of traffic and that are likely not to have anybody coming around,
00:39:21at least during the evening. Sometimes I've used construction sites that were active during the day but at night were relatively secure
00:39:30as long as I got out before normal business hours.
00:39:34This gives me an idea of when the last time this might have been used was.
00:39:38Even the container of beef broth mix is a little bit retro and it's not that old but the font is off.
00:39:44You don't see this in advertising anymore.
00:39:48Not unless somebody's trying to be deliberately retro and they generally only do that on outside packaging.
00:39:53For me, at least, one of the prime ways of determining the age of the place that I'm in is the various brands that I find scattered around,
00:39:59the fonts they use and the advertising they use because that's one of the most distinctive marks of progression of time around civilization these days.
00:40:06Insofar as I'm concerned, the most attractive aspect of this particular location is that it has two places where one could rest.
00:40:15The chair and the couch. Although the couch would be more comfortable, I would offer the chair because it doesn't have a line of sight for the door.
00:40:22That way, if somebody was going to walk in, the first thing that they saw wouldn't be me giving me time to react to their presence.
00:40:29That door has seen better days but it's also a bright side because since I don't have a line of sight for that door,
00:40:39if somebody were to come in, I'd be able to leave through there if I had to.
00:40:42My obvious preference would always be to be on someone's couch but if it's a choice between not having a place to stay and staying here, I'd certainly choose here.
00:40:54I had been reading Yahoo News for some time, you know. It's a credible source. I mean, the CIA reads Yahoo News because it's one of the first places that AP wires post.
00:41:06But their page for editing news stories was accessible. It didn't require a password. It didn't require authentication.
00:41:14It didn't tell you, hey, this is a private page, please don't use it. It was just there.
00:41:18I think the first thing I did was edit the punctuation on the abbreviation of US on their front page.
00:41:24And I was just floored when I reloaded the page and it posted.
00:41:28I found a story about Dmitry Sklyrov, a Russian programmer charged here in the United States based on some software that he produced.
00:41:37Legitimate software with legitimate purposes that allowed a user to bypass password protection on protected e-books
00:41:45that would allow them to bypass the restrictions that are placed on that content.
00:41:50The penalties that they had in mind for him were ludicrous enough, so I added a line stating that he was eligible for the death penalty.
00:41:58And added an additional one.
00:42:00Whomsoever told them that the truth shall set them free was obviously and grossly unfamiliar with federal law.
00:42:06The NSA is the entity that's tasked with monitoring electronic communications throughout the world.
00:42:12I figured somebody would have to notice this. Days over a week went by and nobody ever did.
00:42:18They had an option that allowed you to change stock tickers.
00:42:21I could have made Microsoft's stock reflect the values for Excite at Home.
00:42:26Journalism is a great venue for truth, but it's dangerous when people accept it so blindly.
00:42:31I had this access through September of 2001, and I found myself sitting, looking at Yahoo News,
00:42:37at all of the servers that they had added to keep up with the millions of hits on the morning of September 11th.
00:42:43And had anyone wanted to, they could have changed any aspect of the story.
00:42:49Shit!
00:42:52After September 11th, I had a change of heart. You know, it was all about money and all that,
00:43:02but I started looking at things a lot differently, a lot of things differently, and our security being one of them.
00:43:08And I knew that I had a certain skill that I could apply to help secure the government's critical infrastructure.
00:43:15It's a general understanding within the underground hacker community that emails and any type of communication
00:43:24to government officials or military most of the time don't listen to our warnings.
00:43:30I first tried to inform the government years back. I was 15, 16, 17, and then finally 18, 19,
00:43:40I don't see anything happening. I'm going to have to take the next step.
00:43:44And basically a Deceptive Duo was created in order to publicly expose the vulnerabilities
00:43:50in our critical information infrastructure.
00:44:00And by doing that, we forced them to secure their systems or make our country more secure, electronically speaking.
00:44:08One of the most initial steps was targeting. We had to acquire the most likely target, you know, for a terrorist.
00:44:13We had to recreate the scenario as real as possible, you know, how it would play out as a cyber terrorist attack.
00:44:18So what we did was we targeted certain government and military agencies, the Navy, the Army, the Pentagon.
00:44:25We exposed specifically documents that we shouldn't have in the first place.
00:44:30What we did was illegal, yes, I'll admit that. We accessed their computers without their permission.
00:44:35But that was the whole point, you know, we needed to do that. We needed to recreate a terrorist scenario.
00:44:41Now, why do these networks wind up getting connected to the Internet or connected through a firewall to some other network?
00:44:47It's so people can send email.
00:44:49You go to the systems administrators and you say, which systems can you never afford to have go down?
00:44:55And they'll say, the mainframe. Okay, so the mainframe must be segregated.
00:45:01And then everybody goes, well, they all need to get to the mainframe from their desktops. Okay.
00:45:05Then you're saying that the security perimeter around that mainframe has to encompass these desktops, right?
00:45:12Yeah, sure. Okay.
00:45:13Well, then those desktops should not be connected to the Internet.
00:45:16Well, how do people read their email?
00:45:19Well, the simple answer there is you have to make an intelligent and rational decision.
00:45:26Is it more important that people be able to read their email or is it more important that that system be inviolable and tamper-proof?
00:45:34And if the answer is that that system really has to be kept safe, it's the control system for a nuclear reactor, it's the stock exchange, it's whatever, the answer is build two networks.
00:45:46We would hack into some agencies and they'd know about it, obviously, because we defaced their homepage.
00:45:51They would fix their homepage, they'd put their original content back up, and yet the hole is still open, the vulnerability is still there.
00:45:58They failed to patch it because we performed follow-up tests to ensure efficiency.
00:46:05We got tons of emails, tons of emails from supporters saying that, you know, they believed in what we were doing.
00:46:12We weren't looking to be called patriots, we weren't looking to be recognized as something like that, you know, we just wanted to do what we did.
00:46:18Yes, people would call us patriots, but, you know, refer to us as just hackers, that's it, you know, just people.
00:46:27Having worked for nonprofits as long as I did, I saw a lot of people that went in really energized about what they did,
00:46:36excited, feeling like they were doing something that they were good at, they could make a difference,
00:46:40and came out a couple of years later burnt out from having to take something that they loved and have it be their day job day after day,
00:46:48no longer being something that they enjoyed, but instead had to go to work and do.
00:46:52Really, no compensation would be worth that for me.
00:46:55In 1962, Desmond Morris published his book, The Biology of Art, which details his experiments teaching chimpanzees to paint.
00:47:05The chimps enjoyed painting immensely and eagerly created works of energetic colors and strokes.
00:47:11One phase of Morris' experiment involved rewarding the chimps for producing their paintings.
00:47:17Whenever a chimp painted, he received a peanut.
00:47:21Surprisingly, though, very soon the quality of the paintings began to degenerate until the chimps produced the bare minimum that would satisfy the experimenter.
00:47:31Any joy found in the act of painting was lost as the chimps uncaringly slapped paint on their canvases and ran to collect their peanuts.
00:47:40You're just doing it because you like it. Were you always like this? I mean, as a kid did you do this kind of thing?
00:47:44As a kid, in like the fifth grade, I would sift through teachers' garbage cans to see when the fire drills were coming up and when pop quizzes were, that sort of thing.
00:47:52It gave me a sense of the system that I inhabited while I was going to school as it operated around me in ways that I would otherwise never see.
00:48:00Normally, I would just see the effects of these things. Oh, the fire alarm is ringing, but here I know there's planning for this. They have meetings. They haven't sent so-and-so dates for a reason. The fire department is warned.
00:48:11And it does me no good to know this, but it's still fascinating.
00:48:16Dumpster diving is the art and science of sifting through other people's trash. They frequently go into it with the sense of a target.
00:48:23They look for a company that they are interested in, or they look for a target-rich environment, an area that contains lots of interesting corporations that may have a common dumpster if the companies share a building.
00:48:35I don't go into dumpster diving with the sense that I'm going to come away with something that will help me with a particular target or a particular project.
00:48:43People throw out things for the damnedest reasons, and I never know what I'm going to find.
00:48:48One of my dad's wireless microphones, he used to do video production, and I was playing around with one of his wireless mics.
00:48:54I heard a scream, and it was a child's scream, and it turned out that I was listening to a baby monitor from a nearby house.
00:49:01But the fact that this device here, intended for something completely different, could bring to me just through the air, invisibly, sounds and experiences that were going on in a house across the block was really amazing to me.
00:49:16It's just the sense that, you know, this thing's intended for one thing, but look at what it can do.
00:49:21A baby that's born wants to explore. A brand new baby, a couple days old, you can clap your hands, and their head kind of goes in your direction, built in with,
00:49:28I want to find out about the world. If you carry a baby around and feel its muscles, they're pulling different places, and the baby will go right over and want to touch things in the house.
00:49:37Let him touch them. Let him feel what things are. Let him feel what things can fall. Occasionally something breaks.
00:49:42I believe in that. I think we're, our brain wants to have experiences, and to learn how the world is constructed, and that's part of our growing up.
00:49:50And why should we inhibit it? I think we are the guides, and we will let this creature develop. No, let much more of it come out.
00:49:57On the surface, it looks just like a sheer rock face, but as you walk towards it, it becomes apparent that there's a small hole in the ground,
00:50:04and somebody prior to us had spray-painted a red arrow on the wall above it, pointing down.
00:50:10And while in the area, I saw so many people walk by it, glance at the arrow, and just sort of shrug.
00:50:15And I like to think that it's there for the people who would look at the arrow and wonder what it's pointing at,
00:50:20who would take the time out of their day to step forward and have a closer look.
00:50:24You know, I've ended up in some pretty awkward places. I've done my share of crawling through mud,
00:50:29but the entrance to the mines was probably the most enclosed space that I've ever had to navigate.
00:50:33On the way in, you have to make your mind up ahead of time, whether you want your arms above your waist or below it,
00:50:39because once you're crawling, you're not going to be able to change. There's not enough room.
00:50:43It's easy to be paranoid, because many of the upper levels are flooded,
00:50:47and you have this sense of countless thousands, millions of gallons of water all sitting above you,
00:50:53knowing that the slightest thing could bring it all down.
00:50:56It continues underground, where the most impressive fixture that I got to was the underground lake.
00:51:01The lake is perfectly still, not even a ripple.
00:51:04It's not silent. There's constant dripping or rushing water, depending on where you are.
00:51:08But if your light goes out, it's total darkness, and everyone's been in the dark,
00:51:13but it's sort of hard to appreciate the sense of total darkness of having your eyes wide open
00:51:18and not being able to see a damn thing.
00:51:21Yeah, can you put it back on? And now can you take it off?
00:51:26I didn't go out with the intention of compromising the New York Times.
00:51:29I was initially looking at something else and somehow got sidetracked through the New York Times.
00:51:33They had a lot of information that was accessible to anybody that cared to browse around.
00:51:38For their internal system, the password by default was the last four digits of the social security number,
00:51:45and nobody ever changed it.
00:51:47People feel like social security numbers are these, you know, private secret things that nobody ever knows about,
00:51:53but anybody that wants one can get one for, really, once they sign up for any of the services that they give them,
00:51:59just a couple of pennies. Mine's 042-746804. Anybody could get it. It's not a big deal.
00:52:05From there, I had a list of every password at the New York Times.
00:52:08The culture in the late 1990s for anyone who was involved in stuff to do with the web was,
00:52:14here's this wonderful medium by which we can publish anything we want to.
00:52:17So what we're going to do is we're going to take our hard disk and we're going to publish it.
00:52:21Because we're dealing with high tech, you get the freedom of information advocates who go,
00:52:26you know, it's good, this information must be published.
00:52:29But to the guy in the field whose cover identity got blown, this could mean a bullet in the back of your neck.
00:52:35This is serious stuff and there are lies at stake and because we Americans treat high tech as a toy,
00:52:44we don't take this stuff anywhere near seriously enough.
00:52:46We just treat it like it's something that we can change after we've made a profound mistake.
00:52:52I think that it's a really good illustration of competing mindsets where people believe that legislation somehow makes things secure.
00:52:58You know, legislation is fiction. It's up to people to believe in it before it will be effective.
00:53:04As a news organization, they should have known that social security numbers are not private.
00:53:08I mean, nothing that's even remotely personally identifiable should be used as a login or as authentication or anything like that ever.
00:53:14I gained access to their subscriber database, their addresses, their billing information,
00:53:19former presidents, actors, other politicians, people that are actually relevant if you believe in the whole international stage thing.
00:53:29Don't you worry about that though? That somebody's going to come along and put you in handcuffs?
00:53:32I recognized that there was the possibility of consequences.
00:53:35But really, I don't think that it's one of those things where consequences can be a deterrent because it's my nature.
00:53:40It's what comes naturally to me and I think it's what comes naturally to a lot of people.
00:53:43And I just figured that while I'm doing it, I should do it in a way that sets a precedent so that anyone who ends up doing something similar to what I do
00:53:50might be in a situation where they can contact a company and the company can say,
00:53:53you know, this is where things happened before and maybe we don't have to put him in jail and things will be okay anyways.
00:53:58It's an impulse and it's something that I really don't think that I could stop doing if I tried.
00:54:02Even in a prison cell, I would find ways to find discrepancies and anomalies in the system.
00:54:08Whatever it is that the system may be there.
00:54:19Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, was renowned for his adventurous antics in the world of science.
00:54:26In 1942, Feynman was invited to be a part of Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.
00:54:32There he helped develop the first atomic bomb.
00:54:38Confined to the base during this top secret mission, Feynman conquered his boredom and relieved his stress
00:54:44by learning to pick the locks of his colleagues' safes and filing cabinets.
00:54:48These safes and filing cabinets contained all the secrets of the Manhattan Project, everything about the atomic bomb.
00:54:57Feynman felt Los Alamos a very cooperative place where everyone was encouraged to point out
00:55:01things that should be improved, so he approached a colonel with this problem.
00:55:06He explained the weakness of the locks, which was that so long as anyone left his safe or filing cabinet open,
00:55:12it was very easy for someone else to examine the open lock and discover the combination.
00:55:17Feynman recommended that the colonel write a memo insisting that everybody at Los Alamos
00:55:22keep their safe and cabinets locked even during the workday because they were very vulnerable when open.
00:55:28The colonel posted a memo, but to Feynman's surprise, instead of warning the staff to keep their safes locked during the day,
00:55:36he instructed them to change the combination on their safes because Feynman could hack into them,
00:55:42and thus he himself was the danger.
00:55:45It has been a long day.
00:55:50I, you know, tracked down my cell phone and I was told that it had been ringing off the hook.
00:55:57My mother alluded to three cars currently parked staggered along the block.
00:56:02I'm concerned. I'm concerned, probably a little bit paranoid, as I think almost anyone would be in my place.
00:56:09And I don't have a clear idea of what the morning will bring, other than that I'll probably, for better or for worse,
00:56:17find out more and have to make some decisions.
00:56:21There is a big story just breaking now. A little earlier today I got a phone call from a production crew,
00:56:28actually somebody from Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street Productions, Dana Brunetti, and he called me up and said,
00:56:33we've got a film crew doing a documentary on hacking.
00:56:36And they have been following around a guy named Adrian Lamo.
00:56:39You may remember Adrian Lamo.
00:56:40Right. He doesn't steal any information. He doesn't take anything and use it for bad.
00:56:44He's a good hacker.
00:56:45So now when you said that they wanted to have a word with you, they actually have a warrant for your arrest right now.
00:56:49Is that correct?
00:56:50Yes, they have a federal arrest warrant out of New York City.
00:56:55And do you know what the charges are, Adrian?
00:56:57I'm just, nobody's saying anything.
00:56:59But I have reasons to believe that they relate to a criminal complaint that was made by the New York Times relating to my publicized intrusion into their systems last year.
00:57:08It took me by surprise how big the story was.
00:57:10I think it reflects a certain naivety on my part.
00:57:12I just didn't know that it would take on so much momentum.
00:57:15I think I misjudged the public mind in that respect because to me the access at WorldCom,
00:57:21being able to essentially shut down the infrastructure for some of the most powerful companies in the world, that was important.
00:57:27The phone number for, you know, Rush Limbaugh, that's not so much.
00:57:30What are you going to do with that?
00:57:32But again, people are obsessed with celebrity, so that's what got play.
00:57:35Freelamba.org has a link on their page.
00:57:38It requires absolutely no criminal intent on the part of the person doing it.
00:57:48It requires no conscious effort to intrude.
00:57:50It requires no technical skill.
00:57:51You're going to a website.
00:57:53And as much as anybody might want to argue that because the website contained confidential information,
00:57:59that it in itself was confidential, that's just silly.
00:58:02The fact remains that it was a public website.
00:58:05From a practical standpoint, you cannot put a database on the net where anybody can access it with no protections,
00:58:11no indication that it's confidential, and expect that nobody's going to access it.
00:58:16Well, the consequences of Lama's arrest was very simple.
00:58:19It means now that computer hackers are going to be a lot less inclined to point out system flaws that they discovered.
00:58:28They're going to keep them to themselves.
00:58:30Not been willing to report these security flaws means that these security flaws could be discovered by other people,
00:58:36like Al-Qaeda or terrorists or anything like that.
00:58:39They're certainly not going to let the company know that they broke in their system.
00:58:43They're going to keep it quiet, and they're going to do what they can,
00:58:45and they're going to explain it to the best of their ability.
00:58:47That, of course, is bad.
00:58:49So it's important for a company to not prosecute somebody for finding a flaw in their system.
00:58:57They should reward them.
00:59:02Some people will argue that the New York Times erred in bringing a case against him,
00:59:07that the New York Times should have, you know, instead embraced him and said,
00:59:11oh, thank you for telling us about the problem that you found,
00:59:15and, you know, here maybe we'll even pay you for your services.
00:59:19And that I'm very much against.
00:59:22Adrian, I think, is a very accomplished hacker,
00:59:24who from a very interesting ethical point of view said,
00:59:26I'm not going to hide my activities.
00:59:28I am, you know, Adrian, I'm sure, is competent enough to not have been caught.
00:59:33But he, at no point did he try to hide what he was doing.
00:59:36Coming from a philosophical and ethical perspective that I have a lot of respect for.
00:59:42Are you afraid, Adrian?
00:59:44I'm worried.
00:59:45And, of course, there's always fear.
00:59:47It's a shame that it had to come to this.
00:59:49I think that it could have been done better.
00:59:50I think that the New York Times could have conducted itself better.
00:59:53If that's the president they want to say, I think that it's better than them.
00:59:56It's bad for people that want to help security,
00:59:58and it's really bad for the companies that are getting intruded upon
01:00:00because it really cuts down their level of support.
01:00:02He's not the guy you should be worried about.
01:00:03The guy you should be worried about is the guy who is working for the mafia,
01:00:06who is, you will never know about, you will never hear about.
01:00:09The guy, he doesn't boast in chat rooms.
01:00:11He doesn't put his name in the code.
01:00:12He doesn't say what school he goes to.
01:00:14He doesn't do a shout out to his peeps in the virus code.
01:00:17He's doing stuff cleverly and successfully,
01:00:21and you never hear about that stuff because, frankly, they can't catch him.
01:00:25If you're the New York Times or somebody like this,
01:00:27and Adrian Lamo goes and breaks into your network,
01:00:29and then he calls you up and he says,
01:00:31I've found a way to break into your network,
01:00:33and I'll tell you how to do it.
01:00:34Of course, I'm also going to tell the press about this, right?
01:00:38Now, what effect is that going to have on the network manager
01:00:41whose job it is to keep that network secure?
01:00:43Do you think he's going to be overwhelmed with gratitude?
01:00:46Do you think this guy is going to be popping champagne corks and going,
01:00:49Wahoo, Adrian Lamo came and helped my network get better?
01:00:52This guy's going to probably lose his job.
01:00:55And I hope that the people out there who are considering courses of life of their own
01:01:01will not let the people that want to criminalize curiosity
01:01:04stop them from doing what they want to do.
01:01:06To achieving the goal before this decade is out
01:01:10of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
01:01:14In my view, hackers today are the latter-day equivalents of German rocket scientists
01:01:21at the end of World War II.
01:01:23Until May of 1945,
01:01:25Wernher von Braun and his colleagues were trying to drop missiles
01:01:29on British and American troops.
01:01:31As soon as the war was over,
01:01:33they became our boys,
01:01:35as many of them as we could get,
01:01:37and they developed ballistic missiles, rockets,
01:01:39our ability to go to the moon was dependent upon them.
01:01:42They were treated as heroes.
01:01:44When I was growing up in the 1950s,
01:01:47Wernher von Braun was my great hero,
01:01:50and I really didn't pay attention to what he was doing
01:01:53when he was fighting against us.
01:01:55Well, today we have to look at these hackers
01:01:57and see that even though they do some malicious things,
01:02:00they have a knowledge that's extremely important to our security,
01:02:04to our safety, and to our ability to confront terror.
01:02:08I think the government's real challenge right now
01:02:11is to bring them on the inside
01:02:14to help train our own information specialists,
01:02:17to work to track terrorist organizations.
01:02:20Frankly, we could own all the master hackers in our country
01:02:25for half the price of an advanced fighter jet.
01:02:29So we're not talking about much cost.
01:02:31We need to recruit these people.
01:02:33We need to use them.
01:02:34They're Americans too.
01:02:35They're patriots too.
01:02:37They can help win this war on terror.
01:02:40They count more than a carrier battle group, quite frankly.
01:02:43Unfortunately, we have a much different relationship
01:02:47between government and hackers today
01:02:49than we had between governments
01:02:50and those German rocket scientists nearly 60 years ago.
01:02:54We have, in fact, a poisoned relationship
01:02:56in which a hacker can do more hard time than an armed felon.
01:03:00He would do stuff like he'd call the telephone line crew support number and say,
01:03:05Hey, I'm so-and-so, and I'm up here on a pole in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
01:03:10and I'm trying to test a circuit.
01:03:11Could you reroute this or could you make this particular change?
01:03:15And it's amazing how effective those kinds of attacks are.
01:03:18He re-recorded the voicemail with his voice, one of the VPs of Novell,
01:03:21and then what happened is he had placed a fake phone call with the engineer
01:03:24and said, Hey, you know, just leave the passcodes on my voicemail.
01:03:27Well, they then called back his voicemail, confirmed that it was him
01:03:31by hearing the same voice, so they had no problem to leave those passcodes on there.
01:03:35So it's just one of those things where you're tricking people, you're outsmarting them.
01:03:39One of the reporters, John Markoff, essentially invented the myth of Kevin Mitnick
01:03:44and aggrandized his crimes and his menace,
01:03:47and the upshot was that Mitnick went from being another relatively low-profile case
01:03:51to being a top priority for the FBI,
01:03:53and that's one of the reasons that he ended up in custody without bail,
01:03:56without trial for as long as he did.
01:03:58You could have beat a prison guard over the head
01:04:00and gotten less periods of time in solitary confinement than he did.
01:04:04When Kevin was in prison, he was kept away from payphones,
01:04:10that they weren't afraid he was going to hack a voicemail system
01:04:13or open prison doors.
01:04:15They were afraid that he was going to whistle missile launch codes.
01:04:19They felt that he was dangerous enough that just off the top of his head,
01:04:24he could dial up a modem, whistle the appropriate tones needed to connect,
01:04:27and whistle the appropriate codes to launch nuclear missiles.
01:04:34In many ways, his civil rights were violated by a court system and a legal system
01:04:42that just didn't know what to do with him.
01:04:44They were terrified of him.
01:04:45They were afraid of letting him go because they were afraid.
01:04:47They didn't know what he could do.
01:04:49What they did to him was criminal,
01:04:50and I think even they would admit now that they went too far.
01:04:53We're in a certain time right now where things aren't completely ironed out
01:04:59when it comes to laws and the internet.
01:05:01I see government officials, a lot of them, just being completely against hackers
01:05:07because they're misinformed or they don't have enough information.
01:05:10And hackers, I think they're more open to developing relationships with the government.
01:05:15I knew it was going to happen.
01:05:17They have to do it. It's their job, you know.
01:05:20I first thought I was going to be rated because we set up covert communications between each other,
01:05:26me and Ben Stark, another member of the Deceptive Duo.
01:05:29We were supposed to check in with each other every day, no matter what,
01:05:32to make sure that we didn't get rated because we knew we were going to get rated.
01:05:35We just didn't know exactly when.
01:05:37So finally, a weekend came up and he didn't come online.
01:05:40And from there, I took suspicion and stayed up all night because I knew they were going to come.
01:05:47They wanted to be rudely awakened.
01:05:49I sat in front of my computer, waited until they knocked on the door, as I suspected.
01:05:53And they did. They banged on it. My sister let them in.
01:05:56I lived with my mom at the time. She didn't know what was going on.
01:06:00And at first she was pissed because she didn't really understand what was going on.
01:06:03She didn't know the whole story.
01:06:05Finally she ran around and she began to realize that, yeah, I did have some real intentions, some true motives.
01:06:11I think she has some sort of serenity within her knowing that I'm fighting the good fight.
01:06:16Once the trial comes about, I think we're going to make some very good points and hopefully some things will change.
01:06:23I think people realize that, you know, these guys are offering something good to the community.
01:06:28I definitely feel the group was successful because I feel that I accomplished the goal I set out to do,
01:06:39which was to secure our nation's critical infrastructure as much as I could in the position I was in.
01:06:46I would love to help, you know, I would love to continue to help, but the situation does not permit me to.
01:06:57I was sitting in the rec room and then the news came out on the TV about me being arrested and showing up in Lompoc.
01:07:05And everybody looked around and saw me there.
01:07:08So everybody knew that I was who I was.
01:07:11And that was where I actually had been approached by some underground mafia type who really wanted me to show them how to detect whether a phone's being tapped.
01:07:21I gave them bogus information because I thought he was a plant by the police.
01:07:26What I did not know was the fact that he had actually gone out there and verified that the information I was given him was true or not.
01:07:34And then they came back and they beat the holy crap out of me.
01:07:39I mean, really, I was really screwed up, really bad.
01:07:41I mean, it ruptured a disc in the lower back, so I couldn't walk for weeks at a time.
01:07:46And I never was the same physically ever again at that point.
01:07:49And if I let the guards know that I got beat up, then my life in prison would be as a snitch.
01:07:55And you don't want to have a snitch jacket when you're in jail, especially when you're in jail with a bunch of mafia types.
01:08:02You'll wind up stabbed the next day.
01:08:05In terms of the messages that this sends, I believe that they're well-intentioned in wanting to prevent crime and wanting to prevent damage.
01:08:12But in the way that they're going about it, I believe that ultimately it's not going to achieve the goals that they think it will.
01:08:21It certainly strikes a blow against openness.
01:08:23It strikes a blow against people's ability to stumble across something and report it in good faith.
01:08:29I'm not a saint, and what I did was illegal no matter how well-intentioned I did it.
01:08:35But the fact that what they're essentially saying is that it doesn't matter if you come clean.
01:08:41It doesn't matter if you don't profit.
01:08:43It doesn't matter if you do no damage.
01:08:44It doesn't matter if you cooperate.
01:08:46It doesn't matter if you discourage others from doing harm.
01:08:49We're still going to come after you.
01:08:51What does that leave people with?
01:09:05If they're going to come after me no matter what, then why exercise restraint?
01:09:16Why exercise good faith?
01:09:17Why be honest?
01:09:19But I hoped and believed that I could do it in a way that would set a precedent,
01:09:25that would allow people to come forward in good faith, to try and do the right thing,
01:09:29to let them believe that maybe motives did matter, that it wasn't all black and white.
01:09:34I think this is symptomatic of something that we see in our government today.
01:09:38In many ways, they're eliminating shades of grey.
01:09:41They want to polarize people.
01:09:43It's important to our national agenda today to see good guys and bad guys,
01:09:47because as soon as we start to believe that maybe it's not all black and white,
01:09:52that somebody can do wrong for a good reason,
01:09:55that not every action of law is inherently infallible,
01:09:58it strikes a very dangerous precedent for the government the way it wants to operate today.
01:10:02On the other hand, I believe this is positive,
01:10:06because it places a certain amount of stress on the system we inhabit.
01:10:10It makes it much more difficult for people to remain neutral.
01:10:13It forces them to polarize.
01:10:15And when that happens, systems tend to evolve.
01:10:18Ultimately, I think it will lead us to a better place.
01:10:21Step 2
01:10:39Step 2
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