ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. (AP) - In 1983, 17-year old Neal Patrick sat before a senate science subcommittee to talk about computer safety. Patrick had been one of a number of teens in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who had hacked into dozens of high-profile computers that summer.
“At what point did you understand the ethical implication of what you were doing?” a U.S. Senator asked Patrick.
“When the FBI was at my door,” he responded.
And the agent standing at his door was Elizabeth City resident and attorney, John Sauls.
Sauls, who was interviewed for the documentary short film, “The 414s,” screening at The Sundance Film Festival this month, was only 29-years old. He was also only seven months into his career with the FBI.
So Sauls was a rookie when this case came across his desk. He was the low guy on the totem pole and no one, he recalled, would have wanted a case such as this, thinking the whole thing was likely some sort of prank.
But what took place would be a landmark case not only for the FBI, but also for the world. It would become the first computer hacker case prosecuted by the U.S. government, and it would set in motion a future that today is rife with so-called cyber warfare, “hack-tivism,” and even cyber extortion if you consider the most recent case of Sony Entertainment’s film, “The Interview.”
In 1983 it set off a media feeding frenzy that introduced the world to the problems with computer connectivity, something that had likely fallen on the radar of most average Americans.
As for Sauls, all he knew once the case was handed to him was that someone had managed to break into the computers at the nuclear weapons research center in Los Alamos, N.M., and the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. And all of this was apparently happening from somewhere inside the city of Milwaukee, where Sauls was assigned as a field agent in the white-collar crime division of the FBI.
“I had to learn what the heck was going on,” recalled Sauls. “I didn’t know what a modem was. I had to learn from the ground up.”
So on a Friday afternoon Sauls went to a local bookstore where he purchased the book, “Personal Computers.” He spent the weekend, a two-day crash course, learning as much as he could about computers.
Beyond the book he had purchased, this is what Sauls knew about the case: A man had reported being harassed over the phone lines, and Wisconsin Bell, the phone company at that time, had reported a series of long distant calls that had been made, but there was no one who could pay for them.
The man being harassed, explained Sauls, was a “computer hobbiest” who had set up a message board for computer users. The harassing calls were happening that summer by a group of teenage boys toying around with computers. Apparently they were angry with the man and decided to express it in a very juvenile manner.
The thing is, by using the phone lines to harass someone - someone who knew their names - the teens had committed a crime. The man was able to share those names with Sauls.
At the same time all of this was going on, someone had found a way to hack inside the computers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos was the place where the bombs that would end World War II, “Fat Boy” and “Little Man,” were developed and created.
No one up to that point had reported anything like this. Although, later that same summer the popular film, “War Games,” about a teenage hacker, would make it to theaters across the country, it seemed that mainstream America was oblivious to the world of computers, modems and what would later become known as hacking. The synchronicity was accidental, but implications of all this hadn’t even begun to sink into the country’s collective psyche.
So Sauls would have to get the ball rolling and solve this case.
“They were breaking into computers around the country,” said Sauls of The 414s. “And this guy (the computer hobbiest) was the only one to connect them.”
Now Sauls had the names of several Milwaukee teens. They were a group of boys who had all been a part of a Boy Scout Explorer troop, sponsored by IBM.
Sauls says IBM sponsored this group, teaching them about the early technology available to the public. The personal computer in 1983 was like the television in the early 1950s. Maybe one family on the block would have a personal computer back then. It was a rarity in those days.
But IBM taught these Scouts how to use computers. They also gave them operations manuals for the Vax computers. The manuals included some basic commands and default passwords.
That meant these guys had access to other computers as long as they had computers and modems. And they did.
“The kids broke in and floundered around,” said Sauls of their hacking efforts.
In other words, they got into the computers at Los Alamos and the cancer center, but all they did was poke around, and maybe play a game.
According to the interviews on the documentary film, these guys were just curious about what they could do with these computers. There was no criminal intent involved, and really no one understood the broader implications of what these kids had accomplished - but they would.
“They didn’t realize at what level they were doing this,” said Sauls. “They weren’t professional criminals by any stretch of the imagination.”
By now Sauls had figured out who was doing this, but he also had to figure out “how to make it stop.” That’s what he was told by his supervisors.
“I had to figure out what that meant,” he said of his directive to, “make it stop.”
There was, Sauls recalled, a high-level of pressure to get it resolved. The story was getting a lot of press, painting the case to be more serious than Sauls believed it to be then, and now.
Sauls obtained a search warrant using wire fraud as a means of obstaining the legal document. Back then there was no legal language that specifically addressed this problem, so they had to use what was available to them.
Sauls and another agent had already interviewed one of the hackers, Gerald Wondra. Wondra was actually a legal adult.
When Sauls and other agents went to serve the warrant, they found Wondra to be cooperative and the warrant wasn’t officially served.
Sauls and his team were able to quickly find the evidence that linked Wondra, Patrick and others to this first, high profile hacking case. And in the end, well it wasn’t that difficult to pin them down, says Sauls.
“Relatively speaking, my group of hackers were not especially talented,” Sauls said.
Patrick, who was 17 and therefore a juvenile, would get an attorney, and eventually make the celebrity circuit talking about his experience. He would be featured on the cover of Newsweek Magazine, sitting in front of a computer, looking like the archetype nerd society would come to recognize in the coming years.
Patrick would also be a featured guest on The Today Show, The Phil Donahue Show, and he would speak before a senate subcommittee. The publicity the case garnered would bring what we now call cyber safety to the public’s attention, and in the subsequent years, laws and agencies have been created to keep the world of computers safe.
For the hackers, the punishment was light. The prosecution only pressed on misdemeanor charges, so in the end their future lives were spared the rigors of a felony record.
For Sauls, it’s one of many memories of his years as a special agent with the FBI. And it is one that will live on thanks to creation of this short film, “The 414s: The Original Teenage Hackers.”
A film that will screen for the first time later this month at Sundance.
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Information from: The Daily Advance, https://www.dailyadvance.com/
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