> CHAPTER 2

> TEXAS T-FILES

LIKE MANY OF the internet’s earliest adopters, Kevin Wheeler willingly struggled to master the new and clunky medium out of a deep need for human connection. The nerdy son of a university administrator and a music teacher had enjoyed a group of similar friends in Kent, Ohio, where they played Dungeons & Dragons. But then the family moved to Lubbock, Texas, in 1983, and the thirteen-year-old had the culture shock of his life.

It was bad enough just being a rebellious teenager in the heart of the Reagan Republican era. But now, at his new junior high school, Kevin was lost among the culturally conservative evangelicals whose idea of a rebel was hometown hero Buddy Holly. Kevin tried to talk to the rich kids, but they were snobby and mean. He tried the poor kids, and they shocked him, trading tales of sex and drugs. But they let him sit with them, so he stayed.

A couple of other kids had parents working at the big Texas Instruments plant and were also technologically inclined. Others started paying attention to what could happen with computers after seeing the movie War Games, which came out the year Kevin arrived in town. The film depicted teenager Matthew Broderick dialing out randomly through a clunky gadget called a modem that sat between his computer and his home phone line. Broderick’s character accidentally tapped into a military supercomputer. The budding hackers of Lubbock weren’t looking for trouble either. A couple of the older kids had set up electronic forums known as bulletin boards, where strangers, using modems to call in over regular phone lines, could read or leave messages and text files, which the locals also called t-files. Widespread use of web browsers was still a dozen years away.

Kevin had put in two years on his Apple II by the time he moved to Lubbock, so he found the local bulletin boards in short order. There weren’t a lot in his 806 area code, and most were run by hobbyists talking about computers. Some older teenagers had one that was more freewheeling, and Kevin and a group of friends chatted there for a while, until the bigger kids got tired of the hangers-on and banned them. Kevin was indignant. “We have to make our own and truly be elite,” he told friends. Kevin and the others started several boards and filled them with text files on heavy metal and parodies of Star Wars and other pop culture topics, as well as satires of the more serious bulletin board operators and swaggering hackers. The boards cross-referenced each other’s titles and phone numbers and banded together under the name Pan-Galactic Entropy.

To dial interesting bulletin boards outside the area code meant hefty long-distance charges on the home phone bill. Anyone without rich and forgiving parents needed someone else’s credit card, or a five-digit code from a long-distance company like MCI, or some actual hacking ability. The easiest of those to come by was a five-digit code, which could be cracked by hand with repeated trial and error by those who were truly dedicated. The winning digits spread like hot gossip in the school lunchroom and by bulletin board postings at night. That worked until too many people used them and MCI noticed and revoked the number, which would usually take about a month. Then a new one would be discovered and passed around.

If you spent enough time at it, you could find a bulletin board with just your kind of content and just your kind of attitude. Most boards let you download what they had and repost it on your own board, if you had a modem that was fast enough or that you could let run all night to digest a big file—that is, if nobody needed to make a regular call, so you could stay connected. Kevin’s parents didn’t seem to mind his occupying the phone line and staying up late downloading files.

Like many his age, Kevin hunted for new programs he could run on his Apple, which meant obtaining and trading “cracked” versions with the digital controls limiting usage removed, known as warez. But reading and soon writing text files were what Kevin cared most about. It was a creative outlet for him, and he had an audience. He wanted his text files to be funny, or at least provocative, so he could connect to other kids who got the same jokes. After a 1985 summer job at a computer store brought in enough money for Kevin to buy a $715 hard drive, he launched his own bulletin board, Demon Roach Underground. One of the first files to go up was Kevin’s nonsense riff on the established genre of subversive files with material like that in the printed tome The Anarchist’s Cookbook, which gave instructions on most things dangerous and illegal.

Kevin’s offering was “Gerbil Feed Bomb,” and it used numbered instructions and advised readers to, among other things, grind pet food pellets up, pour the grains into a glass jar, and dump them out again. Then they were to pour gas into the jar, light a fuse, and run away screaming. It was passable juvenile humor. But while it made fun of anarchist credos, it also mocked the police who would respond to the explosion: “The police are your friends!” And it talked about how much fun it was to whack a bag of pet food with a bat and pretend it was Republican first lady Nancy Reagan, inventor of the “Just Say No” antidrug campaign. Kevin himself was never interested in drugs or even beer, but that didn’t mean the Reagans didn’t deserve to be mocked.

Online, everyone needed a handle. Kevin picked Swamp Rat because he loved playing in the marsh near his home. The nickname soon evolved to the more distinguished Swamp Ratte and eventually to Grandmaster Ratte. One of his earliest online cohorts took the unoriginal name Sid Vicious after the most pathetic, drug-addicted member of one of the first punk bands, the Sex Pistols. In reality, Sid was an eighth grader named Brandon Brewer who lived in the nearby town of Friendship. Unlike the pale and reclusive Kevin, Brandon played sports. But he and his older brother Ty, known as Graphic Violence, also ran a bulletin board called KGB, after the Soviet spy agency. It hosted real bomb-making instructions, among other things. But it also kept the brothers from getting drunk and getting in trouble outside their house. Kevin later told a friend that KGB “had some nutty retardo sex & violence stuff and some kinda phreaking thing about MCI,” referring to the telephonic equivalent of computer hacking.

Brandon had more technological ambition than Kevin. He went dumpster diving outside big company offices, looking for anything that would help him break electronically into those businesses. He also used “blue boxes,” which were prime devices for phreaking. They emitted tones over phone lines to rig free long-distance calls. A favorite game was to keep transferring calls to stations farther along in the same direction, eventually circumnavigating the world to ring a second phone in his own house. Such phone tricks were still easier than programming, though the great transition was coming soon. When the Brewer boys got new software for their computer, it still had to be keyed in by hand. One would dictate a line of code while the other one typed. When their fingers grew sore, they switched.

Brandon and Kevin didn’t want to seem as menacing as the serious hackers, the ones who might go to jail. “In our circle, there was nothing malicious; you never went in there trying to harm somebody’s system,” Brandon said. “It was all about getting through the wall.” Still, they wanted to be taken seriously. And the name Pan-Galactic Entropy didn’t sound menacing enough to be cool. It was too Hitchhiker’s Guide nerdy. They kicked around possible new names for their effort to tie together their small community of bulletin boards and writing and decided that something with the word cult would be sinister and mysterious enough. Cult of what? Some words were too silly, like strawberry. But a little silly would be good. “We wanted it to be weird,” Brandon said. “Just trying to thumb our nose at the establishment.” This was a place with a clubhouse feel, the liberal arts section of the hacker underground. Kevin thought of a creepy hangout nearby, an abandoned slaughterhouse, the unpleasant hind part of the most iconic Texas industry. In that moment, he hit upon the name: the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Though Brandon helped come up with the name and provided hacking prowess, the latter got him in trouble before long. It was the phone phreaking that did it. A friend of the Brewers was house-sitting, spotted an MCI calling card, wrote down the number, and shared it with the brothers, who dialed into other bulletin boards and told readers there to check out the Brewers’ board. After too many unexplained charges showed up on the bill of the card’s owner, he called police, who visited the friend, who named names. Soon men wearing suits were in the living room at the Brewer house. Thirty-odd years later, Brandon said he wasn’t sure exactly what happened next. Maybe the men took the computer away as evidence. Maybe his father threw it in the trash. Either way, that was the end of Sid Vicious. Brandon Brewer went to high school and discovered girls.

Brandon left the group before even meeting the kid that Kevin considers the third founder of the Cult of the Dead Cow, a boy calling himself Franken Gibe who frequented some of the same boards as Kevin. His real name was Bill Brown. In the spring of 1986, Bill called the number for Demon Roach Underground. The board itself didn’t appear, because Kevin was working on the software to make it function more smoothly or look stranger. Staring at an empty screen with a prompt, Gibe typed in “hello” and hit Return. “Who are you?” appeared on the next line. Bill hoped he was communicating directly with the system operator, or sysop. He was in luck; it was Kevin. They chatted for a while. Eventually, they worked out that they lived only a few blocks apart and got together in person.

Bill was more into fringe culture—UFOs, secret societies, and B movies—than writing computer code. After War Games, he had to beg for a computer from uncomprehending parents who would not even get a telephone answering machine until the late 1990s. “I knew nothing about computers,” he said. “What I liked was the idea of a bulletin board, this pre-internet, glorified shortwave radio network.” Both boys were outsiders in Lubbock in cultural taste and also within an early internet scene that celebrated hacking feats. They were like the early punk rock bands, who weren’t going to be quiet just because they couldn’t play their instruments well.

Avoiding the assigned work in his Catholic school, Bill helped mythologize the Cult of the Dead Cow along pseudoreligious lines by drafting an epic “Book of Cow” as his first text file. It was inane and sublime, a 1,100-word running gag on both testaments of the Bible. “The beast rumbled forth, and all was cud and the effluvium of animal. This was the beginning. And from the Moment of the Cow was born all that we call earth,” reads a section near the start. Toward the close: “So did the Cult spring in those barren times, and so did fertile minds harvest the crops of justice and truth. The Cult unsheathed the shining blade of knowledge, and into battle marched, resplendent in the dazzling garb of ideals.”

Later, Bill reflected on the fact that he had arrived on the hacking scene as a sort of court jester. “I took my stupidity very seriously, and chafed under the oppressive hierarchy of the Informed Aristocracy,” he wrote. “Before cDc, there were the Elites and the Losers. It was a simple, feudal, pre-pubescent system of class discrimination, based on connections (primarily) and knowledge or experience in the h/p [hacking/phreaking] arts.… cDc was really a liberating force.” After a while, Kevin and Bill decided the group couldn’t be all ridiculous humor and overwrought exhortations, that it needed some hacker credibility. And so it was that the decidedly untechnical Bill went to the Texas Tech library, studied a book on Unix operating systems, and posted a decent summary of software commands that continued to circulate online for years.

Most files back then were computer-language cheat sheets or pieces that taught readers how to connect and where, often for free. But they didn’t go anywhere after that. Bill pushed a cDc ethos with “telecom as a means, not an end.” The kids’ humor punctured any self-importance the group had and made it approachable. cDc slowly absorbed other boards and linked up with still more further afield, including ones run by an El Paso teen with the handle Psychedelic Warlord and someone in Michigan called G. A. Ellsworth, whose real name was Matt Kelly. Both contributed their own text files to the mother ship and were inducted as members. Published from 1987 until 1990, Warlord’s eight cDc files included transcribed lyrics by the funny punk band the Dead Milkmen. There was a fantasy about visions driving the narrator to murder: “No longer could this strong desire in my mind be suppressed. Recognize this fact, my one and only goal in life became the termination of everything that was free and loving.” The first cDc file Warlord published, the year he turned fifteen, asked readers to imagine a better world, or at least a better country, without money. After a nonviolent end to the government, he foresaw the end of starvation and class distinctions.

Another file Warlord submitted, the following year, was a transcribed interview with a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi who maintained that Hitler was misunderstood and didn’t personally want Jews killed. Warlord and a Jewish friend questioned the man about his theories and let him ramble. After the interview, Warlord wrote in the cDc file, “We were trying to see what made him think the horrible things that he did.” He added that he was opposed to censorship, so if people wanted to learn more about the man and his Aryan church, they could write to his post office box in El Paso. He hoped readers would inundate it with messages or counterarguments, or just antagonize the guy. “Surely they’d appreciate some ‘fan’ mail,” he wrote.

Though his family lived comfortably and were considered high status, Warlord felt like a misfit. He too abused phone cards and downloaded pirated games. “When Dad bought an Apple IIe and a 300-baud modem and I started to get on boards, it was the Facebook of its day,” he said. “You just wanted to be part of a community.”

By recruiting leaders of other boards, cDc began to act a little like the supergroup it would become a decade later. But in those simpler days of the late 1980s, the main criteria for membership in cDc were the following: (1) be known to an existing member, (2) don’t be boring, and (3) don’t be an asshole. A girl who went by “Lady Carolin,” actually named Carolin (Carrie) Campbell, got to know Warlord from his board and then joined cDc at age fifteen, making the group one of the small minority with female representation. Obscure Images, the handle of artistic Chicagoland teen Paul Leonard, regularly graced Matt’s board, Pure Nihilism, before becoming another mainstay of cDc.

“I’m the pretty much standard-issue, sort-of nerd, moody loner outcast kid,” Paul said later. Paul had hung around boards that emphasized trading pirated software, and he was friendly with one of the leading lights of the scene, before the young man became the first person to be tried and convicted under the 1986 hacking law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. After that, Paul was looking for something more fun and more legal. “The cDc people were, at least for the most part, up until the later 1990s, more interested in writing, music, art, and that sort of thing,” Paul said. “The technical issues were subsidiary to that.” He embraced the do-it-yourself publishing culture that overlapped with music and zines like Boing Boing, which morphed from paper to electronic form and is one of the few still around from back in the day. A graphic artist, Paul appreciated and contributed to cDc art made from text characters, which was all that most modems of the day could handle. The group’s collective childlike rendering of a dead cow with Xs for eyes stayed the cDc symbol long after members had the bandwidth to send high-definition movies.

Carrie Campbell provided a lot of the social glue of the group. After a phone call with Warlord to confirm she was one of the rare people with female nicknames who was actually female, he and later the rest of the cDc group welcomed her and treated her with respect. Carrie ran a bulletin board in San Diego and, like the others, phreaked just enough to communicate. She also wrote old-fashioned letters back and forth with Warlord and some of the rest. She never claimed to be a hacker, but she was smart and kind, and the one who kept track of everyone’s birthdays.

Except for the Lubbock originals, cDc members rarely met in person before 1990. While their various boards published official cDc files, they communicated among themselves on a secret part of Demon Roach Underground. Even Bill seldom showed up in person, because he went away to boarding school and then to college in Southern California. Warlord finished high school back east, at the private Woodberry Forest School in Virginia. With no computer there, he handed off his board, Tacoland, to Matt. In the summer of 1992, Matt came down to Lubbock, and he and Bill took a caravan road trip to San Francisco together, driving separate cars while chatting over walkie-talkies. As they passed through El Paso, they aimed for the address Matt had for Warlord’s house to surprise him. The neighborhoods got fancier and fancier, and they finally pulled up in front of a sprawling, stately mansion. When a housekeeper opened the door, the boys looked at each other in disbelief. Warlord had never mentioned that his father was a well-connected businessman and former county commissioner. “I just assumed he was middle-class like the rest of us,” Matt said. They didn’t have to worry about their lost composure, since it turned out Warlord wasn’t home that day.

Music, especially underground music, brought several members of the group closer together. Warlord played in a series of minor bands, while Kevin recorded demo tapes for aspiring musicians and became a fixture on the local Lubbock music scene. Matt, in Michigan, also cared deeply about alternative music, which made boards like Kevin’s and Warlord’s especially appealing: “In the eighties, it was hard to find out information about anything that was out of the mainstream.” Matt contributed interviews with post-punk bands Mudhoney and Big Black, led by future Nirvana producer Steve Albini. Matt went on to form a small indie record label and publish a music and culture zine, Cool Beans, which took its name from one of Kevin’s stock expressions.

Kevin stayed local, attending Texas Tech and working at its radio station as a DJ. Interested in metal, punk, and rap, he had to stick mostly to playlists handed down from above. So he faked song requests from fans in order to spin what he wanted. He played in multiple bands himself, and in 1995, he went in with Bill and a local skateboard-shop owner on a venue for live music, Motor 308. He would go through five locations, rarely taking in more than what he had to pay the bands, before moving to New York in 1999.

While still in college, Kevin took courses in media and advertising. That helped him plot a serious strategy for cDc distribution. A natural “hype man,” as he called himself, he would bundle up ten or so new text files and send them out to other bulletin boards for posting. Simply numbering the files was brilliant. That way, bulletin board operators around the country knew if they were missing some, and many would take the time to assemble a complete set. The golden decade of text files would last from 1985 until 1995, when America Online and Netscape’s web browser made cumbersome dial-ups to bulletin boards unnecessary. Kevin’s strategy, Bill’s vision, and the eclectic talents of those who joined them made the Cult of the Dead Cow the best-known and most widely read exemplars of the t-file craft.

Kevin also wanted to learn from hacking’s previous generation. A key early find was Chris Tucker, who dialed in from a board in Rhode Island as Nightstalker and became the second person from outside Texas to be asked to join the Cult of the Dead Cow. Chris had gone to Vietnam as a CIA contractor during the war, and he’d come back with a dark view of government power. On his way home in 1971, he read a seminal article in Esquire, Ron Rosenbaum’s “Secrets of the Little Blue Box.” Rosenbaum had spent serious time with the phone phreakers, the forerunners of today’s hackers, and he explained what they were doing in plain English. The phreakers were a diverse group, including John Draper, who called himself Cap’n Crunch after learning that whistles given out with that breakfast cereal could be used to blow 2600 hertz, which allowed free calls. The technical puzzles of phreaking would attract future innovators up to and including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who sold blue boxes to make free calls while in college.

The political divide in America at the end of the 1960s was the worst until the 2000s, and that helped push phreaking in a radical direction. The phone companies were very clearly part of the establishment, and AT&T was a monopoly to boot. That made it a perfect target for the antiwar left and anyone who thought stealing from some companies was more ethical than stealing from others. In June 1971, Yippie Abbie Hoffman and early phreaker Al Bell, actually Hoffman acquaintance and former engineering student Alan Fierstein, published the first issue of the Youth International Party Line. The newsletter began by printing secret calling-card codes and went on to publish explicit instructions on how to craft blue boxes and other gizmos for making free calls. After tiring of Hoffman’s antics, the publication renamed itself TAP, for “Technological American Party,” and continued to make the most of the free-press provisions in the US Bill of Rights. TAP published until 1984, the same year that the essential hacking publication 2600 began to publish.

Chris had his first blue box by January 1972, more than a dozen years before he connected to Kevin. Chris met another young veteran, Robert Osband, at a science-fiction convention in Boston in the early 1970s, and the two men bonded over politically tinged stories. Better known as Cheshire Catalyst, Osband was a ham radio enthusiast and phreaker, a longtime contributor to the TAP newsletter who served as its final editor. At the TAP offices in New York, it was Osband who suggested they host regular gatherings on the first Friday of every month, a tradition that 2600 later continued in multiple cities. “We were always about sharing the knowledge,” Osband said. “Share the knowledge and help people build things.”

In Lubbock, Kevin had been poring over photocopies of TAP newsletters. Now, with Chris, he knew someone who had been part of it. Chris told stories and patiently answered all Kevin’s questions. Chris had begun computer hacking in 1975, years before TAP started covering the topic, and he loved preserving and tinkering with old computers and helping newcomers. Chris lobbied anyone who would listen to use strong encryption and other privacy tools as they came along, and he posted purely political cDc files against Reagan conservatives. He embraced an unregulated internet not only as a great thing but as one needing active defense in the political realm. Faulting the libertarianism popular with many technologists as a “bottomless pit,” Chris wrote in cDc file “Political Rant #1”: “The Computer Underground, once made up of people interested only in free software, free phone calls, and flaming each other’s hardware, now finds itself having to actually think about politics and strategies. They have to get involved in the political process, and they may have to go out and vote, fer chrissakes!”

Kevin wanted to learn what he could from the past so he could plot the way forward. But the best way to do that was to get together in person, and he was in Lubbock, miles from anywhere.