Show Notes

Cold Open

It was a rainy December in Boston, 2001. Christopher Tresco was sitting in his cramped office inside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Economics. He was 23 and the department’s system’s administrator.

But Christopher had a secret.

Right now, he wasn’t doing any work for MIT. He was logged onto Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, where he went by the name “BiGrAr.” Christopher was a member of DrinkOrDie. It was a loose collection of software pirates, as well as a hangout spot.

Christopher was DrinkOrDie’s systems admin, too. From inside MIT’s Economics Department, Christopher helped DrinkOrDie run its day-to-day operations, moderated its IRC channel, and ran its website. Of course, there were also fringe benefits, like access to the latest movies, video games, and software.

Most of all, there was camaraderie. Even friendship. Christopher and his friends weren’t out to make money. They were computer nerds who enjoyed a programming challenge. They were his tribe.

Christopher fired off a message to a friend, Bandido, who had contacts with several other warez groups.

Hey Bandido, do you know anyone who has a copy of the new Lord of the Rings movie? It comes out next week but I don’t wanna wait.

Let me check…

A few seconds later, Bandido sent Christopher a link to an FTP site, where there was a link to the movie. Score!

Christopher began the download. Even with MIT’s high-speed broadband, it would still take several minutes. He sat back and watched the progress bar fill.

But then the progress bar stalled and the download stopped. Christopher paused and restarted, but it wasn’t responding. Then he checked his web browser and discovered that his internet connection had been cut. 

Goddamn it.

Christopher hauled himself up and headed for the server room down the hall, where he would reset the router for the millionth time. For a university with the latest in high-speed Internet, MIT’s broadband was surprisingly spotty.

When Christopher entered the hallway, he was surprised to find a middle-aged man in a winter coat waiting for him, already holding out a badge.

Mr. Tresco? I’m Special Agent Allan Doody. I’m with the US Customs Department.

Agent…Doody? Is that really your name?

Yes, and I’d suggest you get over it quickly. Would you come with me, please?

Agent Doody wasn’t really asking. Christopher followed him around the corner. There, about 20 federal agents and campus police officers were ransacking the Economics Department and its computers. The head of the economics department stood watching, dumbfounded. They looked over at Chris, but Chris averted his eyes.

Agent Doody brought him to a conference room. It was mostly filled. There was James D. Bruce, a university vice president and the head of the Information Systems department. Not Christopher’s boss. More like his boss’s boss’s boss. Alongside him were several other Information Service department members, and a university lawyer. And they didn’t look happy.

Christopher. You’re going to tell Agent Doody everything you know. Understood?

Christopher withered under Vice President Bruce’s glare, then offered a weak nod.

Have a seat, Agent Doody said. They all did.

Christopher, before we begin, you need to know that you could be in serious trouble. If you cooperate with us, we can make this go a lot easier for you.

Wh-what is this about?

Are you a member of any online software piracy groups?

Christopher froze. They were here because of that?! Because of DrinkOrDie? They were small time, barely more than a few dozen people. They didn’t even profit from their activities. Why did the feds care about them?  

What we really want is the personal details about the leaders of DrinkOrDie.

Christopher swallowed. Could he betray his friends? No, they were more than friends. They were…cue Vin Diesel voice: family.

On the other hand, Christopher was just starting his adult life. He’d never been in trouble before. A criminal conviction could derail his future. What was he going to do?

He wished he could warn his friends before they met the same fate. Christopher didn’t know it, but it was already too late. He was just one suspect in the biggest software piracy bust of all time. 

On this episode: warez groups, undercover cops, and the war on software piracy. I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.

INTRODUCTION

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 Operation Buccaneer.

Act One 

On August 24th, 1995, Bill Gates was waiting backstage on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington. The temporary stage had been built to house 12,500 journalists and Microsoft employees. Thousands more watched via satellite from 42 countries around the world.

Today, they were about to witness the most important event in the company’s history. The unveiling of Windows 95.

SFX: Windows 95 Startup Sound

Since March 1992, Gates and his team of software developers had labored to make this happen. Most had sacrificed their personal lives, their health, and hygiene. Many slept in the office. One software developer liked doing backflips to blow off steam. One day he broke his neck, but still returned to the office a week later to fix bugs.

The company had spent $300 million just to advertise Windows 95. Gates was betting Microsoft’s future on the operating system—and his own.

Gates watched Jay Leno take the stage. The 45-year-old gangly comedian had been the host of the Tonight Show for three years now, and he certainly hadn’t come cheap. Leno made the requisite jokes about the O.J. Simpson trial, the Whitewater scandal, and Microsoft’s recent antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department.

But now let’s welcome the chairman of Microsoft…listen to this. This is a man so successful, his chauffeur is Ross Perot, ladies and gentlemen. Please welcome Bill Gates and the Bill Gates dancers!  

Gates walked stiffly to center stage. Just shy of his 40th birthday, he was clad in a blue polo shirt tucked into pleated khakis.   

Gates winced from the constant glare of hundreds of camera flashes. The photographers would keep shooting like this for the entire presentation. It was already giving him a headache. He swallowed and began his presentation.

In contrast with Leno’s jokesy style, Gates offered an earnest sales pitch. He emphasized that Windows makes computing faster, easier, and more fun. Then, he and Leno traded some barbs.

I’m kind of a computer virgin here, Bill. And as we go through this, I hope you’ll be gentle, I hope you’ll be kind.

Well, Windows 95 is so easy, even a talk-show host can figure it out

https://youtu.be/_JzfROUDsK0?t=746)

Over the next hour, the late-night talk show host and the computer genius demonstrated Windows 95 and how it worked, with the help of several of Microsoft’s top engineers.

To close out their presentation, Microsoft had one more surprise: a featurette highlighting Windows 95’s “Start” button, using the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”—that alone had cost $3 million.

Onstage, Gates attempted to dance along to the Stones, but he struggled to keep up with the rhythm. As he danced, he thought about everything that was riding on Windows 95. They needed to sell tens of millions of copies just to break even.

And it certainly didn’t help that Windows 95 was already available online--for free.

In early August, a hacking group calling itself DrinkOrDie had published a free-to-download version of Windows 95. Already, thousands of potential customers had stolen the software. Countless others were probably sifting through Windows 95’s source code, looking for weaknesses that Gates’ engineers hadn’t discovered yet.

Gates finished dancing, walked offstage with Leno, and mingled with the crowd. He couldn’t enjoy the triumph. All he thought about was making DrinkOrDie pay.

Easier said than done, at least in 1995.

Software piracy has been a problem for publishers since the 1970’s. Gates knew this, both because he was a software publisher and because he was a former hacker. It was why Gates had founded the Business Software Alliance in 1988. Along with the other major software special interest group, the Software Publishers Association, the BSA represented Gates’ interests in Washington.

Software piracy started in the United States. In the earliest days, the software piracy scene, also called the “warez scene,” or just “the scene,” was mostly limited to highly skilled computer users at companies and universities—people who could sift through software code to find vulnerabilities in its copyright protection, then exploit those to “crack” the software and make it free to use. They started with computer games, then graduated to software. Later, they would learn how to crack music, movies, and video games.

Early on, they mainly communicated through BBS message boards. Later they graduated to Internet Relay Chats, or IRCs. They spoke in “leetspeak,” online slang that marked who was in the know and who wasn’t.

As personal computers became more available, more and more people became interested in warez trading. Soon, groups became international. They organized themselves into loose hierarchies.

Groups had leaders, who managed the site’s operations and vetted new applicants. Then there were the crackers, who specialized in removing copyright restrictions. This was the most valuable skill, and not every warez group had a cracker. Below them were the couriers, who transferred the cracked software to the masses. Below them were the traders, members of the community who swapped software with others.

You didn’t want to be a lurker, who just hung out on forums, or a leecher, who just downloaded software without sharing any of their own. You most definitely didn’t want to be a lamer, or their word for “outsider.”

Most of the women and men who made up the warez scene didn’t do it to make money. Many didn’t even use the programs they stole, just downloaded them onto their hard drive and forgot about them.

For warez groups, cracking and amassing software was like trophy hunting. They wanted the most exclusive and proprietary software available, and they wanted it faster than anyone else. Soon, groups became private, and rivalries developed between them.

Most of all, the warez scene was about community. Dozens of warez traders have said that the scene helped them form some of the strongest friendships of their lives. Believe it or not, the Internet’s always had a way of bringing people together.

But software publishers didn’t find the warez scene amusing or endearing. To them, it was an existential threat. They claimed the software industry lost $4 billion a year to piracy. This number is disputed. After all, since most people in the warez scene didn’t use the software they stole, it’s not like they would have bought a copy if piracy weren’t available to them.

Problem was, in the US, no laws existed that specifically outlawed software piracy. The Feds learned this the hard way when they tried to prosecute David LaMacchia.

In 1994, LaMacchia was a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Like Christopher Tresco would seven years later, LaMacchia used university computers to set up a warez group. His was called Cynosure, and he posted under the aliases “Grimjack” and “John Gaunt.” Altogether, his collection included hundreds of megabytes of stolen software programs, like the Sims 2000, Microsoft Excel 5.0, and WordPerfect 6.0. It was estimated to be worth more than $1 million. The Boston US attorney called it the biggest case of software theft in history.

And yet, the judge threw out the case. LaMacchia hadn’t actually profited from hosting Cynosure. Simply stealing the software wasn’t a crime.

The Windows 95 leak changed that.

After an extensive lobbying campaign from the BSA and the SPA, Congress passed the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997, which made it illegal to steal copyrighted software. A year later, it passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which made it illegal to bypass copyright restrictions.

Now, the Justice Department had powerful new weapons in the fight against software piracy.

But most warez traders were barely aware of these developments. Most assumed that since they weren’t making money, the government wouldn’t care about them. On top of that, so far the United States was the only country to outlaw software piracy. Non-American warez scene members figured they were safe.

Like the members of DrinkOrDie.

DrinkOrDie was one of the older warez groups on the scene. It was founded in 1993 in Moscow by a Russian hacker who went by the aliases “deviator” and “Jimmy Jamez.”

DoD’s first successful crack came in May 1993, when it uploaded a free version of PCBoard 15.0, a professional bulletin board software. It followed that up by releasing the full version of Windows 95 in August 1995, weeks before Microsoft made it available to the public.

The score made DrinkOrDie one of the most respected warez groups on the scene, rivaling groups with names like Pirates with Attitudes, Razor 1911, or the Rogue Warriorz.  

Deviator left DrinkOrDie in 1997. By then, it had become an international operation with about 65 members in 12 countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Most were in their 20’s and 30’s, and many had jobs in the tech industry 

DrinkOrDie had two leaders who shared responsibilities.

One was John Sankus Jr. In 1997, he was 23 years old and still lived with his parents outside Philadelphia. John was a soft-spoken “gentle giant”-type. By day, he worked as a technician at a store that sold Gateway computers. That was also where he managed DrinkOrDie and its members, directing them on which files to crack and upload to the site. Online, he went by the handle eriflleH, or “Hellfire” backwards.

The other co-leader was Hew Griffiths. Born in England and raised in Australia, he was 34 and lived with his elderly father in Australia’s Central Coast region. He had no job and lived on disability. On DrinkOrDie, he went by the handle Bandido.

Bandido started out as a trader, working his way up to the group’s leadership. Of everyone in DrinkOrDie, Bandido was probably the most plugged into the lifestyle. He was part of the leadership of another group, and he had contacts across the warez scene. He would spend 12 hours a day, seven days a week on DoD’s message boards and its FTP site, along with all the other warez groups. He loved every minute of it.

Neither eriflleH nor Bandido had any coding experience. They weren’t crackers, they were managers. Bandido didn’t even keep cracked warez on his computers.

Cracking was a job for buj, or Sabuj Pattanayek. Originally from Nashville, he was a college student at Duke University. He was both DoD’s top cracker as well as one of the twelve people on its advisory committee.  

Buj had gotten into cracking for a simple reason: he wanted to break down barriers: As he put it, Technology is to be used for the good of all, not some fat ass company man who doesn't know the first thing from a rar to an iso!

But buj also had to admit it: the gravy was awful good.

In addition to the crackers, there were the suppliers like Barry Erikson. He was in his early 30’s and a systems engineer for Symantec, a cybersecurity company that sold the Norton line of products. Erikson went by the handle radsl. His main contribution was providing unrestricted versions of the software made by his company.

Finally, there were rank and file members of DrinkOrDie, who didn’t provide any software, but instead offered services. Many were college students who took advantage of their universities’ ultra-fast WiFi to help run the site. Like Christopher Tresco, who ran DrinkOrDie’s website from MIT—and yes, this software piracy group had a website. Another was Mike Nguyen, aka HackRat. He helped run the site’s FTP server’s from UCLA.

Since August 1995, DrinkOrDie had several more successes, but nothing that rivaled the Windows 95 hack. Mostly, they focused on cracking proprietary software sold by small companies. In one case, they cracked and distributed engineering software made by Vold Solutions, an eight-person company based in Cincinnati. The software retailed for $9,500.

Bandido, eriflleh, and buj, probably would have continued doing just that. But in early May 2000, everything changed.

It was the middle of the night, and Bandido was on the computer in his bedroom at his Dad’s place on Australia’s Central Coast. Like he was every night.

A chat window popped up. It was his co-leader, eriflleH 

Bandido…have you heard anything from your friends in the PWA?  

“PWA” stood for “Pirates with Attitudes.” They were one of the top warez groups on the scene, and one of DoD’s main rivals. They didn’t make money off their software cracking, yet they had more resources than almost any other group. Every year, the PWA member who brought in the most software would be gifted with a new computer.

Bandido knew several members of PWA. But he hadn’t spoken to them since January.

No. Why?

Check your email.

Bandido did. There was a “busted list,” a periodic scene-wide announcement that informed the warez community who had been caught by law enforcement. Usually it was one or two people at a time, but this one had seventeen names on it—all members of the PWA.  

Bandido was in no mood to gloat. He knew what this meant. Law enforcement operations against software pirates were getting bigger and more sophisticated.

You don’t think we could get busted, do you?

I don’t have any warez on my computer. Plus, I’m not in the US, and it’s not illegal here in Oz. So I should be safe.

Bandido hoped that was true. 

Act Two 

In September 2000, US Customs Special Agent-in-Charge Allan J. Doody walked into a crowded conference room inside the Baltimore Field Operations Office, a stately red brick federal building that sits on Baltimore’s harbor. It was full of men and women in business suits, all career law enforcement professionals from three different agencies.

Thank you all for coming. And thank you to everyone who drove in from DC and Virginia.  

Special Agent Doody was 45, tanned and fit (like me), and kind of resembled a young James Garner (yup, exactly like me). He’d started out as a customs inspector at LAX in the late 1980’s.

Recently, his office had busted several marijuana smuggling rings, child pornographers, and would-be industrial spies. He wasn’t much of a computer person—he preferred motorcycling and golf—but since cybercrime and intellectual property theft fell under the Customs Agency’s remit, he was on the case.

As you know, special interest groups have been lobbying Attorney General Ashcroft to crack down on cybercrime. DoJ had its first big win a few months ago with the operation to take down Pirates with Attitudes. But that was easy compared with what we’re about to do.

Doody picked up a dry-erase marker and wrote on the whiteboard: Operation Buccaneer.

This is our target.

Below “Operation Buccaneer” he wrote: DrinkOrDie.

Some of the agents shared looks.

Most of you know them as the folks who leaked Windows 95. We believe they’re one of the oldest and most active groups on the warez scene.

This wasn’t actually true, but Agent Doody didn’t know that.

We believe they’re much bigger and more spread out than Pirates with Attitudes were--which is why we have so many agencies involved.

He looked out over the crowd of agents. Some were from Customs, some from the FBI, and some from the Justice Department. Cooperation between them would be key. Special Agent Doody would be acting as a manager and mediator as much as he would be an investigator.

On top of that, if his hunch was right, DrinkOrDie members would be much more international. Pirates with Attitudes members were mostly from the US, with a few from Canada and one from Belgium. DrinkOrDie members on the other hand, might be found in more than a dozen countries. And they might be operating in a dozen more.

But Operation Buccaneer isn’t the only game in town, folks. DoJ has two other investigations that are happening concurrently with ours: one in Boston and one in Nevada.

He also knew what that meant. It was inevitable that these three investigations would get competitive…but they also needed to work together.

Your team leaders will brief you on the rest. Cudney, come with me for a minute. The rest of you, get to it.

Special Agent James Cudney nodded. He was in his mid 30’s, slim and wore glasses. As the meeting filed out, Doody and Cudney walked towards Doody’s office.

What’s your experience level with these groups?

I’ve been studying them since the NET Act, but haven’t actually infiltrated one before.

They entered the office and sat down.

What are you going to need?

High-speed modem and broadband, obviously. I’m also probably going to need some warez to offer.

I’ll reach out to the software special interest groups and see if they can help us with that. What else?

It’s just going to take time. These people don’t trust outsiders, especially now that Pirates with Attitudes got busted.

Well, you’ll just have to be creative.

In that moment, Special Agent Cudney came up with his warez trader handle: “Bcrea8tiv,” spelled with an eight and no “E” on the end. He wrote it down on a legal pad.

Over the next several weeks, Cudney got set up in the Baltimore field office. The Business Software Alliance and the Software Publishers Association gave Cudney some proprietary software that would allow him to ingratiate himself with DrinkOrDie’s leadership.

We don’t actually know what he offered…that’s classified. So, if anyone wants to hack the US government to get us that information, we’ll update this episode. To be clear: we’re not asking anyone to actively hack the US government. But if you do and see this information, let us know. As the kids say: our DM’s are open…

Based on interviews with the Pirates with Attitudes members who had been arrested months earlier, Cudney knew had two options. He could pass off the software as something he had cracked himself, making him a cracker. Or, he could just claim to work for the company that made the software, making him a supplier.

Knowing how in-demand crackers were, and doubting his own cracking abilities—Cudney went with the second option.

So, Cudney sketched out a vague biography for his warez supplier cover story. Then, as BeCrea8tiv, he made his way onto the public DrinkOrDie IRC channel. He introduced himself as a low-level employee at a software company in San Francisco who happened to have access to some proprietary warez, which he then uploaded onto the group’s FTP site.  

This was enough to convince DrinkOrDie’s leadership, including eriflleh and Bandido, that DrinkOrDie wasn’t a cop. 

Cudney started out small. He volunteered to do the grunt work necessary to keep running the site. He worked as a trader, scanning warez news groups and posting requests for more warez, like Javascript Applications or Photoshop plugins—nothing that the DrinkOrDie members would ever actually use.

While Cudney labored, he also created several other dummy IRC accounts and reached out to the group. Sometimes he would pose as a newbie who’d get rebuffed. Other times he’d pose as a leecher. Sometimes he’d just act like a lamer. All of this was a smokescreen designed to distract attention away from Becrea8tiv.

Slowly, he gained their trust and was given more responsibility. Eventually he got access to the group’s FTP server. This allowed him to record their locations.

But most of all, he was their friend. Someone to lean on, listen to their personal troubles, their anxieties about getting caught by law enforcement, or just shit-talking other members.

Cudney did this for months. And months. And months. Fall 2000 turned to spring 2001, and then summer. And the deeper he dug, the more he found.

As Cudney gained the DrinkOrDie members’ trust, he learned just how tangled the warez community was. Warez scenesters belonged to multiple groups at a time. Bandido co-ran DrinkOrDie, was on the council of another group called Risc, and was a member of a third group called Razor 1911. Other DrinkOrDie members had affiliations with groups like RequestToSend, ShadowRealm, WeLoveWarez and POPZ.

These groups tended to specialize in different media. Razor 1911, for example, was founded in Norway in 1992 and specialized in cracking and distributing video games like Quake, Red Alert, Terminal Velocity, and Warcraft II and III.

As Becrea8tiv, Cudney and the DrinkOrDie members swapped tales of warez heists, and bragged about their personal software collections—all of it obtained from different groups, using different FTP sites.

When Cudney updated Special Agent Doody, Doody knew that his hunch had been right—this investigation was indeed getting more and more complicated. Operation Buccaneer was expanding, as were the other two federal investigations in Boston and Nevada.

The Boston investigation was called Operation Digital Piratez, named after a hacker group that it was infiltrating.

The Nevada investigation, Operation Bandwidth, was even more elaborate. There, undercover agents set up an actual warez site and lured warez traders onto it, entrapping them into incriminating themselves.  

Special Agent Doody had his hands full running Operation Buccaneer and coordinating with Boston and Nevada. On top of that, Doody and his team were cooperating with agencies in Canada, the UK, Australia, Finland, Norway and Sweden, all of which started their own investigations.

And then, a little thing called 9/11 happened.

After 9/11 if you were a federal law enforcement officer in the Washington D.C. area, most likely you got reassigned. In the weeks after the terrorist attacks, Attorney General Ashcroft called for a “wartime reorganization” of the Justice Department, with agents from all agencies reassigned to cases involving terrorism. On top of that, members of Congress were receiving suspected anthrax in the mail.

Special Agent Doody started with 80 customs investigations working on Buccaneer. Now, dozens of customs agents were leaving to become air marshals, to investigate laundering for terrorism, or to follow up leads for the FBI.

Doody didn’t have enough resources for Operation Buccaneer. The situation was dire enough that he went on the record with the Baltimore Sun to complain about it. But it did no good. Suddenly, an investigation into software priority wasn’t a priority. At best, Agent Doody felt like number two.

SFX: Trumpet playing “wah-wah”

He had to make do with what he had. As summer turned to fall and fall turned to winter, a date was set for the culmination of Operation Buccaneer: December 11, 2001.

Like any multinational bust of an online criminal gang, timing was everything. Police had to grab their targets before they could fire off a message warning other members that they’d been busted, and thus delete any sensitive information that might be used as evidence.

For Operation Buccaneer, this meant serving 70 search warrants in six countries, all coordinated down to the minute. Operation Buccaneer also had to coordinate with the other two investigations in Nevada and Boston, which would also be executing their search warrants.

Special Agent Doody prayed that luck was on their side.

Do you want toast with your eggs? 

No. 

Dad, you need to eat. 

Bandido’s father Neil was in his late 70’s and nearly blind. He depended on Bandido for nearly everything.

Bandido popped some bread into the toaster. He was preoccupied, as he always was with running DrinkOrDie. It consumed most of his life. He thought about today’s pressing tasks. As usual. They needed to find more crackers if they wanted to keep up with groups like 1911 Razor and RiSC. There was also a member he was considering blackballing. He didn’t care if he was 14 years old or not.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door.

I’ll go see who that is.

When Bandido opened it, there were several officers from the Australian Federal Police.

Good morning, Mr. Griffiths. We’re investigating a case of software piracy.

But…that’s not illegal.

May we come in?

What’s going on? What have you done, Hew?

Not now, Dad! Just wait in your room while I handle this.

It’s my house. I deserve to know why the police are in my—

SFX: door slam

Bandido and returned to the officers.

As we’re sure you’re aware, we’re investigating you for involvement in the DrinkOrDie software piracy group.

Am I under arrest?

Not yet. This entitles us to confiscate any computer equipment in the house.

The officer produced a search warrant. Bandido gritted his teeth and showed them to his room, where they dismantled his PC and boxed it away.

We’d advise you not to flee the area. You’ll be hearing from us soon.

Bandido watched the cops drive away, with his computer. He was cut off. From the Internet, from his friends on DrinkOrDie, practically from the outside world.

Are you going tell me what the hell is going on?

Bandido looked at Neil, who was now standing by his side. The gravity of the situation hit him.

What if he got arrested? What if he went to jail? Was that even possible?  

Bandido was Neil’s primary caregiver. They didn’t have family or close friends who could help. They didn’t have the money to hire someone.

What would Neil do without him.

Bandido couldn’t run for it. He’d never leave Neil. And where would he even go? All he could do was wait for the hammer to come down.

Act Three

In August 2003, Antony Townsden was escorted through the Silverwater Correctional Facility, 13 miles west of downtown Sydney.

The balding middle-aged Legal Aid Commission lawyer—Australia’s version of a public defender—was here to see one of his many clients. Silverwater could be a rough place, he knew.  

Finally, Townsden arrived in the visiting area, where Hew Griffiths, aka Bandido, was waiting.

Hello, Hew. Good to see you again.

Bandido had only been in here for a few weeks, but he looked terrible. He’d been roughed up a few times already. This was a guy who sat in a chair all day. On top of that, he’d been severely depressed for months. Poor bastard.

I’m making progress on your bail arrangements.

Bandido winced. He and his father would have to scrape the money together for that somehow.

Good, but what about my case? Can’t I just pay a fine and be done with this?  

If this were an Australian case, you probably could. But this is an American case.

But that’s ridiculous! Why would Australia play ball? Software piracy isn’t even illegal here!

We’re making that argument, Hew. But the Americans are saying that your warez group stole $50 million in software.

Look, am I going to be extradited or not?

Townsden looked him in the eye and told him the truth:

I just don’t know.

After eight weeks, Bandido was released on bail. He was allowed to return to his father’s house. In those eight weeks, some of the neighbors had agreed to look in on Neil from time to time, but there was no replacing Bandido’s care

Bandido and Neil dreaded that his return home was just a temporary reprieve from what was to come.

Since the worldwide raids in December 2001 that culminated Operation Buccaneer, as well as the other two federal investigations in Boston and Nevada, Bandido and Neil had watched the developments in the US closely.

Around the world, federal agents had approached the members of DrinkOrDie just like they had approached Bandido. Christopher Tresco was approached at MIT’s economics department. Sabuj Pattanayek’s dorm room at Duke was raided, as was Mike Nguyen’s at UCLA. They busted Barry Erikson at his office at Symantec, and John Sankus at his Gateway store in Philadelphia. Others busted college students at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

The agents confiscated all the computer equipment they could get their hands on. Altogether, they harvested 150 computers containing more than 50 terabytes of data. It would take months just to sift through it.

But fortunately for the feds, and unfortunately for the group, two of its members decided to flip.

Under pressure from the cops, Mike Nguyen, the UCLA student who ran DrinkOrDie’s FTP site, agreed to cooperate with the police, along with his friend and fellow DrinkOrDie member, Kentaga Kartadinata of Los Angeles.

With the duo’s testimonies, along with that of Special Agent James Cudney, aka Bcrea8tiv, the cases progressed swiftly. Beginning in January 2002, and continuing until August, prosecutors handed down indictments against 17 American members of DrinkOrDie. Many pleaded guilty and received between two and four years in prison.

Many others had been arrested and prosecuted in the UK, Sweden, Germany, and Norway. Altogether, Operation Buccaneer targeted 62 people in six countries.

Then there were the other two investigations. Operation Bandwidth in Nevada added 30 more arrests to the tally, and Operation Digital Piratez in Boston added another nine.

By all accounts, the crackdown was a success, and the many prosecutions would hopefully serve as an example to other software pirates.

In every other case involving Operation Buccaneer and the software piracy crackdown, every suspect was prosecuted in their home country—except for one: Bandido’s.

Without his computer, Bandido was indeed cut off from the habit that had consumed so much of his life. He enjoyed mountain biking and mowing the lawn, but he struggled to fill the void. He became severely depressed.

After Bandido was released from prison in the fall of 2003, his legal case dragged on in the courts. Since Bandido was the co-leader of DrinkOrDie, the United States wanted to make an example out of him. It requested that Bandido be extradited to the United States to face trial.

Australia was receptive to the idea. In the months after 9/11 the Bush Administration, needing allies in the newly launched War on Terror, reached out to Australian prime minister John Howard and pledged to cooperate in the fight on terrorism—but this arrangement also included cooperating on various other law enforcement issues, including software piracy and copyright infringement.

Further complicating matters, Bandido technically didn’t have Australian citizenship. He and Neil moved there from the UK when Bandido was seven. He didn’t own an Australian passport.

Bandido’s lawyer, Antony Townsden argued that he shouldn’t be extradited to the US, because what Bandido did wasn’t illegal in Australia. In March 2004, the court agreed with him.

But the United States appealed the decision, and in July, Bandido was arrested once again—this time without bail.

Bandido was held in Australian prison until February 2007, totaling three years—all of it away from Neil. Then, Australia finally agreed to send Bandido to the US to face a trial. Bandido pleaded guilty to his two counts of copyright infringement. He was sentenced to 51 months. With time already served, that meant Bandido spent another 15 months in American prison until 2008.

Altogether, Bandido was apart from his elderly, nearly blind father Neil for more than four years.

Bandido’s arrest, along with all the other members of DrinkOrDie, was supposed to serve as an example to the other pirates on the warez scene. The group had been decimated.

But software piracy wasn’t going anywhere—and the war on software piracy wasn’t either.

Act Four 

Under the George W. Bush administration, the crackdown on software piracy continued, with operations both big and small.  

In 2004, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, and the Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section launched Operation Digital Gridlock, which targeted the four leaders of the warez group Silent Echoes, who traded in movies, computer software, computer games, and music.

In 2005, the FBI launched Operation Site Down. This was a series of undercover operations from the Chicago, Charlotte and San Jose branches of the FBI to dismantle more warez groups, leading to 40 convictions. This included 19 members of the group RISC-ISO, who stole 19 terabytes worth of movies and software worth $6.5 million.

That same year, the FBI and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency launched Operation D-Elite. This resulted in the arrest of three members who ran the Bit Torrent site EliteTorrents, which had leaked a copy of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.

And hey, releasing that movie in the first place should be a crime, copyright infringement or not.  Hey-o!

One year later, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Interpol carried out Operation Fastlink.

This was a massive investigation that targeted warez groups like Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class, and DEViANCE. Altogether, it executed 120 search warrants in 27 states and 10 countries, resulting in 60 convictions. It also confiscated $50 million worth of illegally copied software, games, movies and music.

All of these operations were clear wins for American and international law enforcement agencies.

But all of these prosecutions cost millions of dollars. On top of that, software companies have spent billions trying to protect themselves from software piracy—as one expert put it, every dollar spent on security is a dollar not spent on software development.

All of which begs the question—did these operations stop software piracy? Yes and no. Individual groups were decimated, and the warez scene is a shadow of what it once was.

Operation Buccaneer mostly affected the lives of the people who were prosecuted. Even so, given the non-violent nature of their crimes, most of them have gone on to have successful careers in the tech industry.

Still, most of them would say they regret it. Today, Hew Griffiths, aka Bandido, advises against stealing software—but at least he’s allowed to use a computer again.

Today, online piracy continues to be a major loss of revenue for software and media companies. Rather than collect esoteric software that sits unused on their hard drives, today’s pirates swap cracked versions of pre-released movies, or shows for streaming platforms like Netflix and HBO. That’s projected to cost $11.6 billion in 2022. 

Meanwhile, the music industry still loses $12.5 billion annually to piracy.  

And In most countries, unlicensed use of software is above 50%. That means more than half of people using software haven’t paid for it. Altogether In 2022, the Business Software Alliance, which was founded by Bill Gates, estimated that software piracy losses total $19.8 billion in lost revenue.

Law enforcement hasn’t given up trying to stop it. But as long as we want our media and software to be easily accessible anywhere in the world, piracy will be the cost of doing business. 

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. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. 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 Jim Rowley. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka . 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!