Re: gregg

On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

I was born in a town that no longer exists, having been swallowed up by Dallas in the years since.

I have an older sister with cerebral palsy

My dad had furniture stores, dodge charges, corvettes.

He and brother and a few others started what amounted to a gang. They didnt have any special reason for doing so.

Dad and uncle ended up on run from the feds, who may not have known who they were. One of them ended up dead. I cant say what he actually did. He corraborated that he was doing bad things. Info comes from mom, other relatives.

Mom filed for divorce

He still wanted to raise me, threatened to come find me, so we moved around. Figured out the threat was over.

Moved in with my grandmother. Mom was working waitressing jobs, drawing upon high school and no job experience.

The fellow who died was the son of a man named John, who had moved in with my grandma long after she and my grandpa had separated. Didnt seem like they were in love. It was an interesting friendship. He needed a place and she needed someone else living there. He was drunk every night that I knew him.

A few years after his son died, his daughter died of a cocaine overdose. And a few years ago he killed himself in my grandmas backyard. Called him Uncle John. Boxer dogs. Mom kept working to support my sister. There were days when we only had one meal.

And I wasnt much help. Not that good of a kid. Ive since apologized to her for everything I did as a child. From four to ten, things were relatively uneventful. Dad showed up when I was nine driving a Porsche. A very expensive Porsche. Said he had a job driving better cars from one lot to another where they might sell better. This was true in a way. At any rate I got to drive around in a couple of them.

Made a couple of friends who are my best friends even today. But always in the back of my mind, there was the threat, or not really, that he would come and kidnap me. Always wondering what my dad was up to. In the meantime there were other men. One of them, Rick, was a professor. But none of them ever really stuck.

Craig shows up on the scene when Im 13. Considered myself man of the house. And was already making money. I was a jerk to him, and regret it to this day.

There was an arcade in that area called Tilt. They had filled up a whole mall, with all the Macys and Sears, with video games. Street Fighter 2 was just out. I went to go and kick peoples ass at it.

Then Lotto Fun came out. Little ping pong balls. Pick out your six numbers, which would appear on the screen on the left. Every time you pushed a button, whichever ball closest falls in. The more numbers you got in order, the more you won. And it was a sliding scale, like a slot machine. If you put in four tokens and won, youd get sixteen.

But there was a glitch. Ive never been able to figure out if it was intentional or not, but it sure seemed like a programmer was cheating the system. There was a pixel that turned yellow. There was a lot of animation going on but it was that one specifically that looked funny to me. I figured it out on about my 4th time playing. So I kicked its ass and filled my pockets up.

It was about a week before class picture.

Not enough security. Watch the pattern they were assigned to walk. When someone comes up to the machine, you offer them more tokens than theyd get. Id say, wait a minute, youre only going to get four token for a dollar. And Id put in to prove it. People started learning where to find me, and I started making decent money my first night.

That was an amazing amount of money for a 13-year-old from a poor family.

There were several of those games. So I taught a friend.

I hadnt seen any of the mobster movies. I didnt know anything about RICO or racketeering or any of those things But the fundamentals of crime are universal. He wasnt as good as me but he could pull out $50 in a day and he paid me 25 percent of what was made. I bought myself a moped. Made about $400 a week for about six months.

I had a relatively large wad of cash such that I had a tennis ball cannister to store it. I came home one night and my mom was holding it. She asked where it had come from. I told her, no violence, no drugs, nothing stupid. Okay, she said, so how could you possibly pull this off? I explained the game to her and what I had done. She laughed and said, you probably cant even get in trouble for that. It was a low form of theft, but theyd have a hard time prosecuting me for any of it. I dont blame her for taking it that way, either. But looking back, that was the moment when I realized I could probably get away with some of these things.

But then one day I walked in to Tilt and an employee pulled me off to the side. A 25-year-old guy with a mustache and beard. We need to walk, he said.

Am I in trouble?

No, no, no.

Are you calling security?

No, no.

He took me off to the side and explained that he had been watching me. He knew what I was doing, he knew everything that I was doing, and he had a pretty good idea of how much money I was making. And he wanted in.

Being the dumb kid I was, I told him exactly how much I was making. And he ended up with about 25 percent of the overall take for every day I did this. He made sure I had a solid area each night when I wouldnt get caught. And of all the cameras in the sky, he informed me, about five percent of them worked, and none of those were in our area.

But the place went out of business. Im not sure how much I contributed to that, but I assume I made a dent. Began my belief that law no longer applied to me.

Ended up working at Wendys, where I threw a soda at my bosss face. Tried again at McDonalds before I threw my manager onto the grill, whose hands were burned in the process. Which he deserved, because hed burned me with the fry thing, the one you drop into the oil.

It didnt seem intentional but he bumped into me in a stupid way in which it seemed like he was probably going to burn me, instead of being careful. So I elbowed him into the grill; his hands were burned from trying to break his fall. Luckily, never ever came from that; I just went home. Anyway, jobs werent my thing.

Then I got sick of school. I hassled my teachers with endless questions in order to spur on their job performance.

Principal told me Id be suspended if I showed up in his office again. Then the coach made a similar threat, except he would kick my ass out back. So I recruited a couple of friends to go bust up the school with crow bars. And we destroyed the school. Desks, lamps, etc in pieces. For a four-hour romp we just obliterated the place. We did one very interesting thing which saved our asses. One of the kids we brought along, his dad was the sheriff. We werent getting in trouble, because daddy wouldnt let anything happen to his son.

The other kid decided to talk about it, and did so while a teacher was standing behind him, listening. The other guy and me were rounded up and told the sheriff was on his way.

One kid was shipped off to Illinois before the paperwork would be available to the effect that he was a hoodlum. The son of the sheriff was sent to military school. But nothing really happened to me. I was told Id have to get a better Moped because she wasnt going to drive me around all summer.

When I turned 16, I got a computer, and a few weeks afterwards I was able to code. It came naturally to me, unlike most things. I was playing on BBSs and internet with a research account, in 92, before it was effectively open to the public. NCSA, and they were playing around with some interesting browser ideas. But there werent many of us who even knew what HTML meant. Headhunters couldnt reliably find people who knew the term.

This group in Kansas City needed someone who knew HTML, could convert a database to a website. Mosaic didnt show images at that point. A neighbor of mine told them that I was 16 and could do it. They said they didnt give a shit if I were 12. I interviewed, they hired me to come out to Kansas City. And it happened that my dad was living there at the time. So I decided to move in with him.

He was doing well - owned a house on a golf course and that type of thing. And we got to know each other, because Id only spent a total of a few days with him since I was four. It was interesting. He worked for my uncle and I did a good job - good enough to automate everything and put myself out of work, as back then there wasnt a constant push for change in online set-ups; just setting up a website was like organizing a multi-man theft of an art museum, and when it was done, everyone was satisfied.

But eventually I found other companies that needed similar things done, and so began a career as a legitimate citizen. Consultancies and full-time positions. Worked at Ringside, the largest manufacturer of boxing equipment in the US; the head, John Brown, did pretty much all film consulting there was to be done on the matter of boxing. That was an interesting job to have; I was MIS there, running their computer network. I worked at American Century, one of the largest investment firms in the world at the time. We were doing a huge computer migration from OS2 to NT4, I was brought in to help and stayed on for a little while afterwards.

Had just turned 18. Was in Chicago. Met a girl while helping to run Rocky Horror Picture Show, when I was playing Brad. Did that for six years. Got married, had a child. A few months into that, she cheated on me with an old friend, I divorced her, and she moved back home with our daughter.

Then my dad showed up. He stayed on my couch at first, and ended up being there for a year. Things were going awesome. My bank account got screwed up with a lein against it, though it had been intended for someone else. While that was getting sorted out - and it took a week, whereas today these things are handled much more quickly - bills came up. Electricity, gas, rent, etc. I got together $1700 one evening with the intention of paying everything in cash the next morning. But I woke up late and had a business meeting I couldnt skip - a job handling the accounting software for Ameritech, the regional Ma Bell. My dad - who by this point had gotten a good job himself - tells me hes off that day, and offered to go pay them for me while I was at work. So I handed him the $1700. When I came home, my car was still gone, along with my dad and the money, none of which ever showed up again.

I had to call up the people to whom this money was owed and explain what had happened and hoped they believed it.

When I was 16 and still living in Kansas City, I made some interesting friends on the dial-up bulletin board systems that were still popular at the time. Among them was a kid who told me that everything is on IRC. Screw the BBSs, he said. He told me that I should come over, that he would show me everything. So we meet up, I go over to his place, and he teaches me how to go on IRC was internet relay chat, and remains so; today its the central means of communication for Anonymous and similar phenomenon. Even back then, it was the ground on which hundreds of the near futures millionaires would congregate.

He shows me the warez world. I had downloaded a few things off BBSs, but hadnt seen anything like this. From the second this kid introduced me to it, I was in. My mind has a very organizational side to it; it wants to fix everything, make everything run smoother. And seeing the nascent structure that this illegal sub-industry had taken, my mind attacked it. Soon I had helped to form or re-organize some of the biggest groups out there.

This wasnt just in terms of programming, but social engineering - itself a term that one will come across quite a bit in this book, and which describes... I built sources inside of major firms dealing in both software and hardware.

Sprint, then and now, was based in the Kansas City area, which itself was at the time of the backbones of the growing internet; most of the nets traffic went through there. Among the many research facilities that had sprung up as a result, one was working on a new technology called DSL - and so had a lot of bandwidth lying around the building. Six OC3s, each at 155 megabytes. And it was all unmetered. They didnt care how much bandwith they used; they were scientists. They could use all of it one day and then use none of it for a week afterwards.

So I meet this guy who works there, online, in the course of looking for such useful people. We talk, and it turns out we have a mutual friend in real life, beyond the world of BBSs. That mutual friend facilitates a meeting. We went out to lunch, and after an hour and a half, I convinced him that what I was out there doing on the internet is far more fun than what hes doing on the internet. He happens to control the racks servers that are connected to all these OC3s. And all of the bandwidth and all of the hard drives and all of the servers are basically in his hands. Altogether, its more bandwidth than any warez or piracy group in the world has, times about fifty. And having made the case that not only would this be lots of fun, but also that we were by this point fairly capable of preventing him from getting caught for his part... And, oh yeah, all the software, games, apps, music, porn - anything that anyone could possibly want pirated - would actually be sitting on hard drives right there behind your desk at work. Well put it there the second its released. And I do mean the second. I dont mean two seconds. I dont mean three seconds. The second its released, it will already be uploading to the servers right behind you, no matter where in the world it originally comes out of. And sometimes, it will be there months before the software hits store shelves - already cracked and ready to go. Oh, and well also feed you all the hardware you could possibly want - hard drives, computer cases, CPUs - as weve made a series of agreements with other folks who can get it - people in positions of power at hardware companies. One of them, for instance, worked at a really big company that bought so much hardware in a month that sliding another twenty hard drives into the order didnt even show up on the paperwork. So he was shipping those to us every month - the biggest hard drives that could be had commercially at the time.

I helped to build that network of people, even to the point where I got us a source inside of Microsoft willing to get us the various beta builds of Windows long before each was available as a commercial product. We were able to get Windows 95 out almost a year before it hit. It was a beta version, with Chicago 32 in the background. But it installed and worked and was interesting to play with. And that really pissed Microsoft off a lot. But so long as we had direct, internal, and hidden access to the beta build server, we had everything they had within minutes solid - no activation necessary, no serial number needed.

That went on for a while. And then one of the people who was peripherally involved with all of this got caught - and was offered immunity to turn me in. Me, in this case, meant a particular screenname that had been identified long before as among the chief reasons why so many millions of dollars in potential revenue had been lost. Before that, they had never gotten close to me on their own.

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302