Fuck that Crazy Hacker Dude
Disclaimer: I describe something that happened that I did that is illegal in some way, involves the hacker convention DefCon, which happened over twenty-five years ago and the statute of limitations is probably expired because the monetary damages were only some $3000. I also worry that I might get this insane person after me again after two decades or so, but I’m not going to mention them by name so they don’t come and shoot one of the security guards where I live. We will call him Crazy Hacker Dude.
My misspent youth has gotten me into more than one moment where I questioned what the hell happened to get me here. As a teen, I was busted and jailed for breaking into a DEC VAX computer that was installed at the Georgia World Congress Center to manage the Democratic National Convention of 1988. As a kid who’d been inspired by the movie WarGames, it was a real lesson in “don’t wish for something you just might get it”. What I got was a reputation as a hacker, despite my determination that I suck because I got caught.
Flash forward to when I could leave Georgia after seven years on probation, and I land in San Francisco because I can put hacking on my resume here. Specifically, I land in a giant yellow seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom Victorian near Alamo Square Park on Fulton Street, owned by a former San Francisco police chief and sheriff who had a peace symbol on his badge to symbolize how he was a “peace” officer (LOL). This was about 1996. I had a wide variety of roommates, and most of them were in the Otaku Patrol Group. The mere name of this group is a multi-lingual joke — “otaku” in Japanese means “stay at home”, so to get a group of them patrolling is just a funny concept. The thread that bound us together was our ham radio licenses and being in the social circle of Desmond Crisis, which is another part of this story.
I could go on about radios forever, to be honest. I am a radio geek. It is an expensive hobby, but I got the bug watching a dorm mate build a high-powered FM transmitter out of vacuum tubes in Techwood Dorm at Georgia Tech. It was natural for me to gravitate towards Desmond, who is still one of the bigger ham radio geeks I know.
Desmond also happened to be famous, of a sort. He was a presenter on c|net. Their website lives on but it’s another one of those dotcom stories from the 1990’s that is still around in zombie form. Back then, c|net was the hot property with a website and a whole channel on regular TV as well as streaming. It was cable television trying hard to adapt to this new medium and having a pretty good run at it. Desmond was on-screen talent because he had a striking look with blue hair and was decked out in a leather motorcycle jacket with radio mikes and other gadgets all over it. The problem with fame, as I have found, is that it invariably attracts nutjobs. The story I’m relating is not even the worst I heard while living with Desmond.
One of the things about being a hacker is that you get invited along to a bunch of hacker conventions. I had been to about a half dozen of them before I got married at DefCon. This incident happened before I got married though. My second wife was my girlfriend and lived with me in two rooms that we rented in the Big Yellow House on the floor under Desmond. To give you an idea of the dynamic of this place, the entire house was rented for $2500 and the master tenant charged us $800 for two rooms. There were seven of us with pretty much the same deal and we could all do math so the mood in the house was pretty tense — it was my first lesson in master tenant politics in San Francisco.
There was a Crazy Hacker Dude from Berkeley who was well-known at DefCon during this time. Some of the old-school people who read this might recognize who I am talking about. I’m still not exactly sure why he was “somebody”, but his main claim to fame seemed to be that he was an asshole and a pervert. I don’t have anything against perverts, to be honest, but when people are assholes I try to give them a wide berth before they realize I exist. Unfortunately, I‘m not sure how I got on this person’s radar. I don’t think it was at DefCon. I knew all about him from DefCon because he was infamous among attendees — it used to be a DefCon tradition to toss this asshole in the pool, preferably when he had as many electronic devices on his person as possible.
At any rate, because Desmond had this groomed “hacker-like” persona on c|net this person ended up latching onto him as a target for his assholishness AWAY from DefCon, back here in San Francisco. I was suddenly alarmed because I watched this guy from afar for a couple of years and was thankful he’d never noticed me — but now he probably knew about me as a roommate of Desmond’s. He made a lot of threats towards Desmond which mostly involved stupid things I did not think he was technically capable of, such as building an EMP gun and pointing it at the Big Yellow House. Yes, this was an actual thing he threatened. It went from amusement to concern when he started threatening to just burn down the house. His picture was posted on the bulletin board in the kitchen, and we all memorized what he looked like, just in case, and also to give the cops if we needed to.
At the time, my second wife worked at a fetish store called Stormy Leather. This was a female-owned version of Mister S Leather, and it was sold to a large fetish company in Los Angeles decades ago. This was in the years that Mister S was NOT friendly to women so this alternative sprang up to sell dildos, vibrators, fetish gear, whips, latex, leather, you name it. And the more heterosexual perverts like our crazy DefCon hacker probably felt more at home there too. This was soon confirmed one incredible day when she came home clutching an envelope.
“Guess who came into the store today!” she asked, and I knew instantly who she was talking about. Threats to burn down the house had us all unified on a front as never before. I opened the envelope to reveal old-fashioned credit card carbons in the envelope. This is another fun thing to remember — back then, there were no credit card terminals or if there were they broke down a lot. The way you charged something was that you put your card in a machine and laid a piece of carbon paper across the card, then ran a roller back and forth to make an imprint of the credit card number that could be used to phone in later and have the money put directly into a bank account that way.
“I saved his American Express card number!”
Of course, because I was a “hacker” everyone expected me to know what to do with a credit card number. OF COURSE. I tried to overlook this little bit of assumption on the part of my larcenous ex-wife and think about it. This “brilliant hacker” had forgotten all of his operational security while buying dildos and harnesses for his girlfriend at the only place he felt comfortable doing so, not knowing that he had threatened to burn down the house that the girl behind the counter lived in. It was a pretty delicious irony to me. So the question remained. How exactly could I use this little bit of information that found its freedom? How could I out-hacker this “master hacker”?
Like every egotistical hacker in the 90s, this dude had his own website. He had his own domain and a group of folks that used his domain for email addresses. This was not as common in the 90s to have a whole domain, but it was common enough in our circles. I decided to see if looking at his website would offer me any clues as to what I could do with his American Express card number. The answer presented itself rather quickly, because of his photos. Being an “upper middle class” white boy who grew up in the Bay Area, a great deal of his ego was wrapped up in featuring pictures of his car and his custom license plate. I would say the license plate number but again it would tip off exactly who this person is.
This period of the mid-90s was a transition period towards great progress. Paying for things on the web was not a big thing yet. My first job was helping to code SSL into webservers so there were not a lot of web-based payment systems around at the time. There were a lot of telephone-based payment systems around, though. The sight of his license plate made me remember one I was very familiar with — the San Francisco parking ticket payment line.
Like everyone in San Francisco, when I own a car I make sure to budget for parking tickets. You’re going to get them. Everyone does. Paying the fines on the rental cars that IBM rented for me drilled it into my brain that the only thing you needed for ID was the license plate number of the car. Once you typed that in, it would give you a spoken summary in a chip voice of how much you owed in parking tickets in San Francisco. You could get a detailed breakdown with other menu options.
My friends, Crazy Hacker Dude owed more than $3000 in unpaid parking tickets. So I paid them for him. With his own American Express card. Then I threw away the carbons.
I don’t know if he even noticed it on his bill, but I suspect that after I told a few people what happened it got back to him. After we’d all held our breath waiting for someone to burn our house down, he just stopped with his threats and as a household we never really heard from him again. But for the next decade, he seemed to know exactly who I was and had something against me. I didn’t tell many people about what I’d done, least of all my roommates including Desmond. He’s a big fan of never doing anything illegal, even if it kinda sends a message.
As for Crazy Hacker Dude, I’ve had him thrown out of clubs after he threw drinks on me, I’ve had him try to stomp on my toes in crowds (I wear steel-toed boots) and he’s tried to start scenes out at trade show events with me. I guess he thinks at some point I’ll get annoyed enough to punch him or something but it’s much easier to just call security. I haven’t heard about him in over a decade so I’m hoping he’s dead or something. Fuck that Crazy Hacker Dude.
