Cold Open
The following presentation is not suitable for young children. Listener discretion is advised. It also contains discussion of self-harm.
One afternoon in late 1998, a 15-year-old boy named Jonathan James sat in his bedroom in front of his beige gray Gateway computer, and booted up his 56k modem.
SFX: MODEM STARTUP SOUNDS
While he waited for the modem to connect, he looked around his room. On his desk was a set of narrow sunglasses he’d bought at the local convenience store that he hoped made him look like the hacker Neo from the Matrix, which he’d seen three times already that summer. Behind the glasses was a signed picture of astronaut Mike Coats that said “To Jonathan - Dare to Dream”
SFX: AOL STARTUP SOUND
He dreamed alright. When he finally got online, he knew he only had an hour or two max before his Dad Robert came home. Robert was a computer analyst—probably the reason Jonathan had gotten into computers in the first place. But also competition for the internet, which meant that Jonathan couldn’t stay online forever. Back then only one person could access the web at a time. So with a crack of his knuckles, he went to work.
SFX: KNUCKLE CRACK
MUSIC CUE: FUN SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC
Jonathan wasn’t online to talk to friends. He had way more important things to do today.
His Dad had been pissed at him for how much time he’d spent online, and was threatening to get him in real trouble if his grades started suffering. His Dad might even send him to military school. And tonight was the night his quarterly report card was going to go out. He couldn’t let his Dad see his grades. Or at least, his real grades.
SFX: KEYS TYPING
He navigated to the Miami-Dade school district’s website, and went to the administration portal. New superintendent Roger Cuevas had come to office hoping to fix inequality across the school system. One of his initiatives had been to get the school onto the Information Superhighway, and put grades online.
SFX: KEYS TYPING
So Jonathan logged in. Using superintendent Cuevas’s credentials.
SFX: KEY IN DOOR
Two weeks before, while he was in detention for skipping class, he’d installed a simple keytracker using the programming language C on the administrative computer. And now he had a backdoor into the whole system.
SFX: CAR COMING INTO THE DRIVEWAY
As he logged in, he looked out the window. His Dad was home early. Shit.
SFX: KEYS TYPING
He scrolled using his beige trackball, while out front his Dad fumbled with the keys.
The page with the grades on it started to load. Slowly.
SFX: FOOTSTEPS
“Johnathan, you here?” His Dad called from the front room. “Yeah, just in my room!” He called back. Jonathan frantically changed the D’s and C’s in his card to all A’s.
SFX: MOUSE CLICK
He pressed submit. But just then, his door handle jiggled.
SHIT. Jonathan turned the computer monitor off, and pulled out a magazine, to pretend he was reading.
SFX: DOOR OPENING
“Oh,” his Dad stared at him, then down at the magazine. It was the October issue of Maxim magazine, with a scantily clad Rebecca Geyheart on the cover. “Uh. You get your report card yet?”
Jonathan nodded. “They’re online.” His Dad grunted. “Don’t let your mother see that,” he said, pointing at the magazine, then walked out.
Phew.
SFX: CRT MONITOR STARTING UP
He turned back on his computer monitor while his Dad’s footsteps went to the front room.
As his Dad settled into his office chair, Jonathan shut down the modem. He’d gotten away with it. That night they’d celebrate Jonathan’s good grades with pizza.
MUSIC CUE: MORE THOUGHTFUL TURN
His parents didn’t know what he did online, but school seemed good, the phone company never charged them for extra time on the internet, and for all intents and purposes they seemed to have a golden child.
They didn’t know that within a year he’d break into the department of defense, and force the grounding of key parts of the International Space Station.
And they couldn’t know that within ten years, it would all end in tragedy.
On this episode: a real life Ferris Bueller, Janet Reno decides how to prosecute minors, and a mystery with life or death implications. I’m Keith Korneluk and this is Modem Mischief.
You're listening to Modem Mischief. In this series we explore the darkest reaches of the internet. We'll take you into the minds of the world's most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We'll also show you places you won't find on Google and what goes on down there. This is the story of Jonathan James.
Act 1
It can be hard to remember now, in the year 2024, how the 1990s transformed American’s relationships with computers.
In 1990, only fifteen percent of Americans owned a computer. More likely than not, if they did, they were engineers or people involved in computer-specific fields. But by 1999 more than half the United States not only owned computers, but were online, and came from a wide variety of backgrounds.
SFX: AOL SOUNDS
Jonathan James’s dad was one of those early adopters. Richard worked as a computer-analyst in South Florida. He was a quiet man, more comfortable with machines than people. Sometimes he could seem off-putting, but it was mostly because he was to the point, and believed in authority. He was one of those guys who followed the rules, and was rewarded for it. He was happily married to the love of his life-Anne, and they lived together in a quiet suburban house in the town of Pinecrest, eleven miles south of Miami.
And on December 12, 1983, their son Jonathan was born. They raised him with love, and while Anne was the primary caregiver, Richard would proudly rock young Jonathan on his knees while coding in the C programming language, or tell him stories about NASA, based not too far away in Florida.
Richard had been a lonely kid, and he saw in little Jonathan a way to finally have a kindred spirit. He was thrilled when at the age of 6, in 1990, Jonathan started playing with Richard’s PC, and learned to draw using MS Paint.
Richard was proud of his son and thought he was following in his footsteps. He gave him books on programming in C, and spent hours at the dinner table explaining how circuits worked, much to Anne’s dismay.
But soon Richard started seeing differences between him and his son. Richard believed in authority—he’d studied computer science at university, back when he had to use punch cards to access the mainframes. His son on the other hand—while technically brilliant—didn’t have any patience. He was self-taught, and would bend the rules.
Richard taught him to program using his beloved programming language, C, and lectured him on the importance of following the right syntax. But then Jonathan just ignored him, and would write sloppy-seeming code that, while it worked, made Richard’s classically trained engineer’s blood boil.
SFX: WIND
And as Hurricane Andrew devastated the area in August of 1992 when Jonathan was 11 years old, Richard was distracted boarding up windows, and Jonathan installed Linux on the machine.
SFX: LINUX STARTUP SOUND (SOMETHING LIKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REAOYmpCz48)
Richard was mad, but he needed a new computer anyway, so just let Jonathan have that one. But soon, Jonathan’s computer obsession started to interfere with Richard’s work. He’d gotten internet for the home shortly after Hurricane Andrew had come through, and had proudly explained to 12-year old Jonathan how it worked. But within months Jonathan had started to understand it too well.
SFX: AOL LOGIN
Jonathan devoured early internet culture. He browsed geocities sites, forums on angelfire, all the rest. Then started diving deeper. Like a lot of other kids, Jonathan started staying awake later and later, because there was always more online for him to find.
SFX: MODEM SCREECH
Richard or Anne stopped getting calls late at night, because Jonathan was online, tying up the phone line to all hours. And one day, first Richard got the phone bill from BellSouth, which was astronomically high due to Jonathan’s time online, then he discovered Jonathan awake and on the computer at 3am. This was too much. Richard had had enough.
SFX: COMPUTER SHUT DOWN SOUNDS
Richard lay into him-this kid wasn’t just getting grounded, he was going underground. No more computer, no more programming, not until he could follow the rules.
SFX: DOOR SLAM
13-year old Jonathan didn’t take that lying down. The next morning when Anne went to go check on him, his bedroom was empty. Jonathan had run away from home.
SFX: CURTAIN FLUTTERING IN THE WIND
Richard was furious, Anne freaked out. He was just a kid.
SFX: PHONE RINGS
After a couple hours, the phone rang. Richard picked up the phone, and loudly called out “Jonathan?” There was just heavy breathing and muffled sounds of people on the other end, then it hung up.
SFX: CLICK
SFX: PHONE RINGS
The phone rang again, this time when Richard answered, after a pause, Jonathan, his voice cracking, asked to talk to his mom.
When Anne picked up the phone, he told her he’d only come home when he got his PC back.
Richard started to swear. Jonathan hung up again.
But he’d left his parents a clue-in the background they’d heard a coffee maker go off in a busy room, and the shuffling of paper.
SFX: CAR DRIVING
So they drove to the Borders Books down the street, where they found Jonathan hiding in the computer section. A scared thin face poking out of the sea of yellow “For Dummies” books.
Richard was mad, but Anne talked him down. She was so happy Jonathan was safe. And she promised that as long as she was around, she’d take care of him. She made Richard promise to get less mad at Jonathan, and extracted a promise from Jonathan to be on the computer less. After all, he was going to go to high school soon, he couldn’t let his grades slip.
But his parents didn’t realize that Jonathan’s time online had given him insight into how to get around all their rules. Because while most of America was getting connected, people hadn’t figured out how to keep information completely secure yet.
So that night, after his parents went to sleep, Jonathan logged in, pressing a blanket over the modem to muffle its sounds.
SFX: MUFFLED MODEM
And the first thing he did was log into the admin page for their telephone utility company, BellSouth. It wasn’t as simple as going to bellsouth.net or whatever. But during some investigation he’d found the page the billing department used, and without much work figured out the password to get in.
SFX: KEY UNLOCKING
That night, he went in and changed the records for his dad’s bill. Richard didn’t know it, but his unorthodox son, too young to even get a job, had just halved his phone bill.
The next month when the bill showed up, Richard and Anne privately talked about how impressed they were that Jonathan had stopped going online all the time. Which was weird, since it still felt to them like he was on the internet constantly, but clearly not.
Jonathan spent the next few years living like a teenage king. Richard and him fought—with their personalities it was hard not to—but there was never anything on record to get Jonathan in trouble, so long as Richard didn’t catch him on the computer late at night. Meanwhile his grades seemed fine. They didn’t think he had many friends, but his parents weren’t worried, Richard hadn’t had many friends either. Like father, like son.
But what Richard didn’t know was that online Jonathan had friends. He picked a username that showed he was part of a society, he went by c0mrade, spelled with a zero instead of an o, and trafficked in late 90s internet culture. He loved lolspeak, spamming chat rooms, and showing off simple Unix programs.
He wasn’t malicious, or a hacker per se, he was just a smart kid who didn’t want his Dad to get mad at him. But he was also a teenager, and could get bored easily.
Summer break 1999, Jonathan was fifteen years-old, and was excited by all the time at his disposal. School was over, and his Dad was busy with a big project at work. His Mom was supposed to be watching him, but she kept going on a lot of mysterious trips to the hospital. He kind of thought she might be pregnant, he’d seen her throw up a few times.
So with this time to himself, he decided to explore a little. He tried logging into the webpage of the local newspaper the Miami Herald, but didn’t find anything that interesting.
SFX: KEYS TYPING
He tried the whitehouse.gov. Couldn’t get in, they had real security there. But that gave him a challenge. Could he get into a government website?
SFX: MOUSE CLICKING
The afternoon of June 28, 1999, he tried a series of sites: FBI.gov, CIA.com, the Pentagon, Congress…
SFX: ERROR CODE
None of them worked.
But Jonathan was resourceful, and very patient. He started looking at smaller agencies that might not be as tightly guarded.
By around 3am, it had taken hours. In the next room he could hear Richard snoring, and Anne shivering even though it was a hot south Florida night. He thought about going to bed. But then he noticed something. The NASA website he was on-which was a total bust-had a directory of links. And one of them was for a non-descript-sounding “Defense Threat Reduction Agency Administration”.
SFX: KEYS CLICKING
Jonathan made his way over to the site, checked out its source, and saw it was still written in simple HTML, easy for him to interpret and navigate. Inside the code there was a link to an administration page.
SFX: FEVERISH CLICKING
On the page, he found something very simple. An HTML page, not designed to be seen by the outside world, definitely just installed by an IT department that didn’t think anyone would care to look at it.
Jonathan tried a username, “IT”
SFX: ERROR CODE
That didn’t work, what about… “admin”
SFX: QUESTIONING BEEP
That was a username. He just needed to figure out a password. Something that might be tricky now, where systems lock you out automatically after a certain number of failed guesses. But this was a simple setup, Jonathan could see that brute force would get in there.
SFX: MOUSE CLICK
He set up a simple UNIX program to try random numbers and letters to try to break in.
SFX: KEY TYPE, FOLLOWED BY ERROR
He turned off his monitor, and lay in bed, exhausted. He didn’t mean to fall asleep, but the next thing he knew, he was awake.
SFX: DOOR KNOCK
Richard was outside his door, mad the internet was being used. Jonathan wiped his bleary eyes and yelled out that he was just finishing some homework, he’d be done in a minute.
He went to his computer and turned on his monitor so he could log out.
SFX: CRT MONITOR TURN ON
On the screen, a simple message waited for him. “WELCOME TO DEFENSE THREAT REDUCTION AGENCY ADMINISTRATION PAGE”
Jonathan James, 15, had broken into the Department of Defense. Now what was he going to do?
SFX: ROCKETS GOING OFF
Act 2
Jonathan James was a 15-year-old living in South Florida in the late 1990s. His father Richard had taught him how to use computers, but had trouble connecting with how Jonathan used the web in an intuitive way of someone raised on computers.
Jonathan meanwhile had developed a need to be plugged in, and had gone to greater lengths to avoid getting in trouble for always being online. First changing his grades to make them look better, then lowering his family’s phone bills.
Now, summer of 1999 he’d stumbled into something a little bigger than his local school district or the phone company. He’d found a way to get into the admin page of a group within the US Government: The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA.
The DTRA was a new agency, just established the year before. Following the end of the cold war, officials in the defense department realized that a lot of their tools to stop large-scale attacks had been rendered useless. By the 90s, there wasn’t the same threat of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union anymore. Instead the more pressing danger was that a small extremist group would get a hold of weapons of mass destruction.
SFX: AIR RAID SIREN
The 1990s saw the rise of extremist terror attacks, from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing, to the sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995.
New Defense Secretary William Cohen was scared by the rise of these smaller-scale attackers; they’d proven that they could kill hundreds with fertilizer and other easy to find materials. What would happen if someone like a Timothy McVeigh or Osama Bin Laden could get a hold of serious weapons?
SFX: BOMB GOES OFF
Worse, the military wasn’t set up to go after this kind of terrorism, instead they were built to ward off other big militaries like the Soviets, which weren’t around anymore.
So in October 1998, Cohen set up the DTRA to specifically go after terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. Because their targets were so small and amorphous, the DTRA worked closely with the rest of the defense department, and needed to be able to communicate across the whole government.
Which is a long way of saying that getting into the DTRA’s system, was like getting into the backdoor of the entire military and government.
SFX: DOOR OPENS
Jonathan James didn’t know it, but he’d just walked into a world of trouble. He didn’t even know what the DTRA did, he just figured out that it was a government website he could get in. And in the way that drove his Dad crazy, Jonathan didn’t bother researching, he just dove right in.
SFX: KEYS TYPE
Early that morning June 29th, 1999, when Jonathan got access to the server he started snooping around, and found the UNIX mainframe that housed everything for the agency with over 1,000 employees spread out across the world.
SFX: MACHINE HUMS
Jonathan loved that they ran on UNIX, he understood how that operating system worked. It was what his Dad had taught him to use first. When he was 11 he’d replaced the windows operating system on the family computer with a form of UNIX. He was in his element here.
So Jonathan looked around this comfortable environment, and started seeing big markers that the DTRA server had more than just some agency’s materials he’d never heard of. There was a lot on here. And other agencies, agencies that he cared more about. He couldn’t get into these other places, but he could lay traps for people from those agencies.
SFX: KEYS TYPING
He installed a backdoor to read messages sent through the server, with flags that would send him a message if there was anything from agencies he’d heard of.
SFX: COUNTLESS EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS
And there were a lot of messages. With a lot of info. DTRA read and intercepted military chatter, the state department, FBI, you name it.
“Hoooooly shit,” he said to himself. “I’m inside the Matrix”.
Using his username-c0mrade-he posted screenshots excitedly in a blackhat forum.
SFX: MESSAGES
“Be careful c0mrade,” one messager responded. “That’s some intense shit.”
SFX: KEYS TYPING
Jonathan knew it. But he couldn’t stay away. He spent the next few weeks using his backdoor to get into even more government machines. As he later remembered, “The government didn’t take too many measures for security on most of their computers.”
By early August he’d hacked into 13 federal servers, holding thousands of messages from between DTRA employees and other agencies.
And on the thirteenth machine, he found something really big. The source code for the newly-launched International Space Station. That’s right, the International Space Station.
SFX: SATELLITE IN ORBIT
Jonathan looked over at his signed photo of astronaut Mike Cartwright. Richard had taken him to go see the astronaut a couple years earlier. It had been one of the biggest bonding trips the two of them had gone on. Richard loved space, and while Jonathan didn’t want to admit he had anything in common with his Dad… he’d inherited that fascination with astronauts.
Put yourselves in his shoes. If you were 16 and just found the keys to drive the International Space Station, what would you do?
SFX: ROCKET ROAR “WE HAVE LIFT-OFF”
He pressed download. He was going to dive in and figure out how the Space Station, ISS for short, worked. Over the next month he combed through the code for everything from climate control, to navigation, and communications on the 3 billion dollar a year station shared between all the major powers on Earth.
SFX: SATELLITE PINGS
He was fascinated. Jonathan wasn’t here to mess things up, kill or hurt people. He didn’t want to blackmail the US Government, or ransom the astronaut’s lives up there. He just was fascinated by how computers worked, and he’d found a computer system that was literally out of this world. He wasn’t going to do anything about it, other than maybe brag about it online. It’s not like anyone IRL would care.
MUSIC CUE: THRILLER MUSIC
Or would they? Because while Jonathan happily browsed through the code in his sweaty bedroom in South Florida, an IT staffer in Virginia was about to make his life very messy.
During a routine sweep, the DTRA noticed that messages were slowing down when they went through the thirteen machines Jonathan had infiltrated. Not by a lot, but by a noticeable amount. The IT staff at first thought this was a bug or some kind of routine problem with the machines.
But after a few hours of clearing out memory, they found something strange. The flag Jonathan had installed to alert him if anything interesting came through. Following that up, the found the backdoor.
SFX: SIRENS GOING OFF
The IT staff tried not to panic. But this was something scary. The agency had been setup just a year earlier to try to stop unconventional attacks. Now it looked like it was under direct attack itself.
They told the superiors, and the DTRA jumped into action. They quarantined the machines, cut off the internet access, and copied every line of code, and every trace of the hack.
Back in Florida, Jonathan noticed he hadn’t gotten a flag message from his backdoor in a little while, so tried to log into one of his servers.
SFX: ERROR CODE
Hunh. He tried a different one.
SFX: ERROR CODE
You know that feeling as a kid after you did something fun, only to realize when you get in trouble that you did something wrong?
Jonathan had that sinking pit in his stomach.
“SHIT SHIT SHIT”
He closed the remote login. Then turned off his modem.
SFX: CLICK OFF SWITCH
It was going to be okay, he told himself. He didn’t do anything. This probably didn’t mean anything. Servers go down all the time. Maybe there was a storm. Or maybe they changed things around. No big deal.
He tried to convince himself it was nothing. But that sinking pit in his stomach knew.
That night at dinner, Jonathan buried his face in the TV dinner his dad Richard had made, and ignored whatever it was that his Dad was trying to talk to him about.
SFX: UTENSILS CLINK
Which drove Richard crazy. His son-who he saw so much of himself in-never listened. And this was serious, Jonathan’s mom Anne was sick. Richard tried to get through to Jonathan, but he was too distracted worrying about the Men in Black from the X-Files showing up at the front door. Richard gave up, hoping against hope that Anne would pull through, and there was no need to talk to Jonathan about it.
But he did, and soon Jonathan knew the truth: his mother had breast cancer, and wasn’t expected to live long.
Jonathan went into a deep funk. His mother was dying, and he couldn’t even do the one activity that had been giving him joy. His grades started slipping, and he stopped bothering to hide it. Not like Richard cared, he was distracted. The James family was going through a dark time, each of them retreated into themselves.
One strange side-effect of this all though, was that Jonathan started seeing people in person. He befriended some of the stoners at school, and self-medicating. Not a lot, just a little to take the edge off.
SFX: PIPE PUFF
Meanwhile in Virginia, the DTRA was doing what it was supposed to do—reduce threats.They opened a case, just like it was any other kind of attack. Which, in 1999 felt very strange. No one quite knew who should be in charge. The FBI? Internal DTRA IT.
SFX: PAPERS SHUFFLING
But after endless-seeming meetings that stretched during the fall, they found out something important: the break-ins were all coming from a single computer. And-even better for them, they could trace the IP address.
SFX: CODE
That pesky identifier all computer’s accessing a service provider’s network needs to have. The thing people use VPNs to hide.
Jonathan was 16. It was 1999. He didn’t know he needed to hide it.
When the FBI showed up to Bellsouth asking for the location of the IP address, they pointed straight to the James household.
SFX: PHONE RINGS
“Hello?”
Richard answered the phone. Jonathan was still in school, and Richard was taking care of Anne who rested in the other room.
The FBI was on the other end. At first Richard thought it was a prank. Why would the FBI be calling?
But when they explained what they were looking for, Richard buried his head in his hands.
“Oh my god I’ve raised an idiot,” Richard said quietly, then laughed. He explained what was going on. He thought this was something like when a kid gets in trouble for breaking into a park after dark. He just needed to talk reasonably to the authorities, promise to punish Jonathan, and the trouble would go away. And he would for sure punish him.
But he didn’t realize what kind of trouble Jonathan had gotten into. No one really did, much less the FBI and DTRA. Cybercrime was still in its infancy, much less enforcement. And there’d never been someone so young as Jonathan charged.
The FBI didn’t want to push too hard, so they offered Jonathan a plea deal considering how young he was: if he wrote some apology letters, and went under house arrest, he’d avoid anything more serious. But unfortunately for Jonathan, when they did a routine drug test, some of his self-medication showed up in the sample. For the first time in US history, a juvenile was going to go to jail.
Little did Jonathan know, his life was just going to get worse from here.
SFX: JAIL CELLS CLOSING
Act 3
Early in the year 2000, Jonathan James became infamous for being the youngest hacker at the time to get jail time, at 16. He spent 6 months in jail for hacking into new defense department agencies and downloading the source code to the International Space Station.
His father Richard, a computer analyst who’d taught his son to code, was strangely proud. He told the Miami Herald that he’d “been in computers for 20 years, and [he] couldn’t do what he was doing… He didn’t do anything destructive”
But after Jonathan got out of jail, he couldn’t forgive his father for not protecting him, and worse, helping sell him out to the FBI. The father and son had fought before, but they’d always made up before because Anne, Jonathan’s mother, had been there as a bridge.
And when Jonathan was 18, Anne succumbed to a battle with breast cancer and passed away.
SFX: BRIDGE CRUMBLES
She left Jonathan a trust that included the family house. Richard moved out. The family couldn’t come back together again.
The double blow of jail time and his mother’s death profoundly shook Jonathan. Over Richard’s objections he didn’t go to college.
He went on a birthright trip to Israel in his early 20s, but otherwise stayed at home. He didn’t have any interest in working, but found ways to live off his inheritance and by keeping his expenses low. Richard didn’t know what he was up to, and worried about his son. But like father-like son, they were both stubborn people
SFX: EMAIL NOTIFICATION
Which made the email that he got in May, 2008 that much stranger. His 24-year old son reached out, asking if he wanted to get dinner. He wondered if Jonathan was getting married.
SFX: SIRENS
The next day though, Richard got a call from a family friend: the FBI had raided Jonathan’s house, and taken him in for questioning.
There had been one of the biggest hacks in US history, and Jonathan was a person of interest.
SFX: PARKING LOT SOUNDS
Jonathan never had many friends, especially during this time in his life, but one person he did know was Chris Scott. Chris had a lot in common with Jonathan. He was just a year older than him, also spent most of his time online, and didn’t seem to have any interest in having a real job. Except unlike Jonathan, starting in late 2005, Chris started showing off a lot of money. One night after going to see V for Vendetta together, Jonathan asked how Chris had money. And that’s when Chris told him about his friend Albert Gonzalez, aka Soupnazi. If you go back to episode 8, you can hear our episode all about him.
Albert liked computers too, though not as much as Chris or Jonathan. Chris didn’t really respect Albert, he wasn’t as good at programming. And there were some weird unsavory rumors about him, like maybe he was a snitch for the feds.
But he had vision, and saw something that they didn’t: he could use what smart computer-literate people knew to make some serious cash.
SFX: CASH REGISTER JINGLES, GUN COCKS
Albert started a scheme he called Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and had brought in Chris, because his specialty was wireless security. He’d figured out something ingenious, and needed someone who could help.
SFX: WIRELESS SIGNAL
In 2005, wi-fi was starting to be everywhere. But people didn’t realize how much sensitive info was flowing through it. Every day millions of people used barely secured wireless networks to send credit card numbers, personal info, and more. Albert wanted to get some of that.
SFX: MOTOR RUMBLES
So he started what he called war drives, where a group of guys would drive around Miami with their laptops open, searching for wifi networks that either didn’t have passwords, or with easy to crack ones.
In 2005 with Chris in the car, they found a jackpot: a Marshalls store on the south side, that used weak security for their corporate wifi.
Chris and someone else—and we’ll get to this person in a moment—sat in the parking lot, laptops out, breaking into the wifi.
SFX: KEY UNLOCKS
After a few minutes, they were in. They installed a SQL (pronounced “sequel”) script to automatically funnel all information from credit card purchases to them-first from the store itself, and then once the script had wormed its way into the corporate center, the whole company.
Which meant that every time someone swiped a credit card at any Marshalls, the credit card information was sent to Albert Gonzalez. Not just any Marshalls, but the parent company TJX owned OfficeMax, Home Goods, TJ Maxx… In July 2005 alone they downloaded more than eighty gigabytes of customer information from TJX.
SFX: CASH REGISTER
Albert sold the numbers to contacts in Latvia and Ukraine, mostly to the Ukrainian counterfeiter Maksym "Maksik" Yastremskiy, who paid Albert millions. Chris alone got four hundred thousand from his role in Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
Over the next few years Albert and his gang went on dozens of war drives, and went after companies like Dave & Busters, and Barnes and Noble. Anywhere from 45-90 million people’s credit card information was stolen.
But in 2007, the Ukrainian contact Maksik who had made over eleven million in selling the stolen credit cards, was arrested while vacationing in Turkey.
Turkish police turned over information to the FBI, and in early 2008 the government arrested Gonzalez. Then a few days later Scott. Weirdly though, they only charged Gonzalez with the Dave & Busters break-in, with no sign of blaming him for TJX or the others.
When they arrested Chris though, the government found messages saying that Chris had gone on his war drives using UNIX-based malware that had enabled them to steal all that credit card info in the first place. Chris hadn’t made the malware. Someone else had, someone who Gonzalez called “J.J.”
And who was one of Chris’s friends, but the most famous former teen hacker of all time-Jonathan James, J.J.
SFX: SIRENS
MUSIC CUE: FOOL ON THE HILL SOUNDALIKE
The FBI searched Jonathan’s house in May of 2008, and brought him in for questioning. While looking through the house they found a suicide note and a gun, but didn’t think much of it. Instead they wanted to know if he was Chris Scott’s “J.J.”
They didn’t have any proof, so let him go. But Jonathan could see the unmarked cars nearby. They were watching him.
SFX: PHONE RINGS
When Jonathan answered the phone after he got home, he could hear a telltale hiss and extra click on the line. His phone was being tapped.
“Hello?”
It was Richard, calling to check in on him. Richard didn’t know what to say. He’d been so excited to finally meet back up with his son. But now this. After asking how Jonathan was, Richard was at a loss. He finally asked:
“Are they going to find anything incriminating that you've been doing?”
Jonathan took a deep breath. His own father didn’t believe him. Just like he’d never really had his back.
“No,” Jonathan finally replied. On the other end, his father sighed then started to lecture him about how serious this was. After a few minutes, Jonathan hung up the phone. They both felt distant from each other, frustrated at what wasn’t said.
That was the last time they spoke.
On May 18, 2008, Jonathan went into his room, cued up an MP3 of The Beatles’ Fool on the Hill, and closed the door.
A moment later, a gunshot rang out.
SFX: GUNSHOT
MUSIC CUE: MUSIC ENDS
At age 24, Jonathan killed himself. He left a note, detailing his passwords, and saying that he was innocent. But that there was no point in fighting, since clearly the feds thought that he was guilty. Gonzalez was getting off light, Chris had already left jail which must be because they were pinning the blame on Jonathan.
The Feds must be salivating. In his note he says that “if they could tie me to this case I’d be like [Kevin] Mitnick times ten”. Side note, for more about notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick, listen to episode 3 of Modem Mischief. But with all this, there was no way he wasn’t going to jail again. Hell, even his own Dad thought he might be involved.
The note ends with him writing “My soul is dead, so I will look after the flesh… I am the master of this computer, for me the gates will open.”
Still too young to run for congress, Jonathan was dead. What happened? Had he even been involved in the TJX hacks?
Act 4
In May 2008, Jonathan James committed suicide after being questioned in connection with the biggest case of identity theft in US history, the so-called TJX hacks. Eight years earlier, he went to jail as the first teen hacker to serve prison time, and he didn’t want to go back.
He was convinced that the feds were building a case to blame him for the hacks, since as the former teen hacker, he was a great public face. He knew that Albert Gonzalez, the mastermind of the hacks, had snitched for the government before, and he found it strange that Gonzalez had only been charged with infiltrating one company, when he’d been responsible for dozens.
And there seemed like a smoking gun pointing towards him. His friend Chris Scott had broken into TJX along with someone they called JJ who specialized in UNIX. How many other early 20-something hackers who used UNIX named JJ were there anyway?
Well.
Stephen Watt, 24, met Albert Gonzalez in his senior year of high school. They bonded over computers, and a shared love of weightlifting, and trying to impress each other. Watt was reclusive, but a genius when it came to programming, especially UNIX. During high school, he got a 4.37 GPA, while at night he was a proud hacker who specialized in breaking into UNIX systems. And his most famous alias? Jim Jones. JJ.
In August 2008, 3 months after Jonathan’s death, the FBI raided Stephen’s work in New York. They’d found messages from Albert, and started digging. Pretty quickly it was clear that he was the programming genius behind this, not Jonathan. In December 2008 he pled guilty for his role and was sentenced to 2 years of prison.
And Albert might have cooperated with his former handlers, but he was still charged with TJX and the other hacks.
In 2010 Albert was sentenced to twenty years of jail time for masterminding the biggest consumer fraud attacks in US history.
Chris Scott was sentenced to seven years in jail for his role in the TJX attacks that cost the company nearly two hundred million dollars.
If Jonathan had lived another two years, he would have seen all the major players get punished for their hacks, and him in the clear. But instead, feeling all alone, he jumped to conclusions and impulsively cut his life short.
His father Richard never had a chance to say goodbye, or to apologize for being so hard on him all those years. And for all their fights over the years, it was always because they were so similar. Just two computer-loving men, staring up at the night sky.
I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.
NOTE: If you’re struggling with mental health or feelings of self-harm, help is available. Call or text 9-8-8 now.
CREDITS
Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. And another way to support us is on Patreon or a paid subscription on Apple Podcasts. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. You can also support us through our merch store if soft tees, cool stickers and comfy hoodies is your thing. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by David Burgis. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka The HamGregglur. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!