> CHAPTER 3

> THE CONS

THE 1990s STARTED off a lot better than the 1980s for Kevin and the others in cDc. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, George H. W. Bush wasn’t as bad as they had feared, and soon Bill Clinton, whom they saw as a reasonable southern Democrat, would take the White House. Computing was still arcane but getting more and more usable, bringing knowledge closer to people everywhere.

Texas had what might seem like a surprisingly strong crop of young hackers. In addition to the arts wing of the hacking community, represented by the earliest members of the Cult of the Dead Cow, there were plenty of others who operated mild-mannered bulletin boards for commentary, community, and, in some cases, conspiracy. On the darker end of the spectrum, some specialized in pirated software and credit cards as well as tips for breaking into big machines at phone companies, corporations, and government agencies. But Texas is a big place, and hackers there had a harder time getting together than their cohorts in New York, Boston, or San Francisco. That kept them from hanging out as much as their peers elsewhere, which meant less fun, less trust, and less deep collaboration and progress.

In 1990, Houston-area hacker Jesse Dryden set out to change that. The proprietor of hacking boards including K0de Ab0de and by then a two-year member of cDc, Dryden was one of a kind: hyperintelligent and deep into music, like some of the others, but possessed of a strong personality both in person and behind a computer keyboard. Dryden came by his passion for music in the most natural way possible: his father was the drummer for Jefferson Airplane, Spencer Dryden, who allied with romantic partner and singer Grace Slick and played a major role in the group’s artistic choices. Jesse’s mother, Sally Mann, ran off to Los Angeles and then San Francisco in the 1960s. Mann was smart, funny, and so ridiculously good-looking that she could charm her way past any obstacle that stood between her and whatever rock star she was interested in meeting. Her picture was used in a Rolling Stone article on groupies, but she was far more than that. She became Slick’s closest friend, caught the elder Dryden when he fell from Grace, and in 1971 gave birth to Jesse James Dryden.

Though it earned its own fame, Jefferson Airplane also served as an adjunct of the Grateful Dead, the center of the era’s counterculture in the Bay Area and by extension America. Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia personally approved Dryden’s joining Airplane, and members of both bands and their mutual friends lived together in Haight-Ashbury and other San Francisco neighborhoods. Along with shared creative efforts and antiestablishment attitude, that deep alliance meant experimental social structure, early technological adoption, and, as Mann put it, “better living through chemistry.” Even before the Dead had their name, they were a part of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the eclectic and idealistic group that drove through America to have fun messing with people and to spread the good news about LSD. Another Prankster, visionary writer and marketer Stewart Brand, would also help spread the good news about the coming age of computing. Brand’s outlets included the ecology-oriented magazine Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL, the pioneering West Coast online community. Among Mann’s friends was Dead lyricist and future WELL regular John Perry Barlow. As a Wesleyan college student, Barlow had begun visiting acid guru Timothy Leary, and he introduced the Dead to Leary in 1967. Later, he wrote songs for the Dead, including “Cassidy,” a tribute to a child that weaves in the history of Beat icon Neal Cassady, still another Prankster. The Dead attended and sometimes performed at Kesey’s “Acid Test” parties, and they became technology enthusiasts as well, encouraging the taping of live shows. The swapping of those tapes deepened the Dead’s connections with fans and foreshadowed music-sharing services like Napster.

Jesse’s unorthodox heritage prepared him well to bring a major innovation to cDc and the broader hacking scene: the modern hacking conference. And it was one of the reasons that Jesse helped turn cDc into a 1990s successor to the Merry Pranksters, as Barlow saw it. Like the Pranksters, the group would exude idealistic joy at tweaking the establishment and describing the rapidly evolving world they saw and that the grown-ups were somehow missing. “Humor is one of the great binding things in the world,” Barlow said, and something that cDc shared with the Pranksters was using humor to question the legitimacy of power. As with hackers, Barlow said, “the thing about acidheads is, they think authority is funny.”

Though his parents gave Jesse Dryden an amazing start in many ways—intellectual, social, and artistic—stability was another matter. Mann left Dryden and returned with Jesse to Texas from California but spent a brief time in jail. As a twelve-year-old, Jesse talked his way onto the metal band Dokken’s tour bus and disappeared for days. Later, he faked going to school for four months. Jesse’s computer helped him manage the tension between his shyness and his need for self-expression. “He found some degree of popularity, and he was able to morph that into being out in public and with groups,” Mann said. He was a regular at rock clubs, and Jesse also developed an early entrepreneurial flair. He brought in skateboard gear from California and sold it in local parks, then sold rare concert footage. Some of that aspiration took a bad turn, and he was accused of being involved in credit card hacking. “Nothing ever came of it, but they took Jesse’s really cool Mac,” Mann said.

As the teenaged Jesse’s relationship with his mother frayed, he befriended the manager of a local music store, Vince Gutierrez, and lived with him and his daughter off and on. He talked about the Cult of the Dead Cow a lot and introduced friends to Gutierrez by false names or their online handles. Jesse’s own came from his description of an LA metal band that he referred to as “drunk fucks.” Gradually he became known as Drunkfux or dFx—heavily stylized, with a practiced coolness, and opaque to outsiders. “He has issues of self-esteem,” Gutierrez said. “He doesn’t feel like he fits in to a certain type of people. cDc was sort of like Jefferson Airplane for him: these cats were just extremely underground. Not in the sense of criminal, but in the sense you didn’t know what that world’s about unless you’re one of them. It’s elaborate, like a fraternity.”

In 1990, at age nineteen, Jesse strategically leaked word on the boards that the “first annual” XmasCon, soon to be known more lyrically as HoHoCon, would convene for three days over Christmas break at a La Quinta Inn near the Houston airport, where single rooms cost $44 a night. The anonymous announcement was short, but it was an apotheosis of Jesse’s own style and that of the nascent cDc. It claimed that XmasCon had been planned as a private event before a journalist spilled the beans. Strictly to counter that, he said, XmasCon would be open to the public. And it took several knowing swipes at previous hacking conferences that had been private and that Jesse had enjoyed attending—a three-year-old series known as SummerCon. The first SummerCons were held in St. Louis by the editors of Phrack, an online magazine begun in 1985 with a name that merged the words phreak and hack into something like a curse word. Jesse’s announcement ran in an unauthorized revamp of Phrack in November 1990.

“We plan on having the biggest gathering of Hackers & Feds since SummerCon ’88!,” Jesse wrote, inviting “All Hackers, Journalists and Federal Agents.” The joke was that while this would be the first hacker conference with feds invited to attend, it was not the first with them present. SummerCon ’88 had mainly been about drinking, bragging, and hanging out in real life with people one knew online. But the Secret Service, whose antihacking duties developed from its responsibility to fight counterfeit currency, had shown up and spied on the festivities that year. Nothing all that nefarious was uncovered, but arrests followed anyway. It was part of the buildup to what would be the first law enforcement roundup of hackers across the country, in 1990.

cDc survived those sweeps because it was more of a social space, a refuge for hackers blowing off steam, than a place to plot actual hacks that ran afoul of the law. It also survived the other, related momentous hacking event of that era, the first great battle between two groups, the Legion of Doom and the Masters of Deception. But both developments shaped cDc and ensured its survival. The arrests were a sharp reminder to be cautious where the law was concerned. They also gave rise to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, still the preeminent legal defense group for hackers and researchers, which would intertwine with cDc and its causes. As for the duel between groups, it reinforced cDc’s commitment to the pursuit of peace among hacking tribes. In fact, it would have the unusual distinction of admitting members from both LoD and MoD.

LoD began even before cDc, spawned in the early 1980s by a Florida man with the handle Lex Luthor, after the Superman villain. Organization was slipshod, membership was fluid, and regional branches sometimes had little to do with one another. Intriguingly, there was significant overlap between LoD’s most impressive hacking adventures and stories in Phrack, which grew out of a bulletin board specializing in tales of underground activity. Phrack stories circulated on outside bulletin boards the same way cDc files did, but the content included security trade secrets. Unlike the other big hacking publication, 2600, Phrack was online, which left it more vulnerable to prosecution at a time when courts had not explicitly extended freedom of the press to the digital realm. The consequences of the overlap between LoD and Phrack would prove important and teach cDc how to stay safe. For Phrack consisted of hackers with a publication attached to them, while cDc’s file trove would remain a publication first, with hackers attached to it.

HoHoCon’s main predecessor was a conference that was smaller and closer to the criminal world. SummerCon gathered just a few dozen Phrack contributors and readers to meet in private. The man in charge of the 1988 edition was Phrack cofounder Craig Neidorf, who had friends in the Legion of Doom. Attendee Dale Drew of Arizona helped the Secret Service videotape drinking sessions through the wall of his room. That spying was part of a broad effort that culminated in the 1990 arrests of suspects including Neidorf himself. In 1989, Neidorf had published a version of BellSouth’s Enhanced 911 manual, an internal document explaining some of how the revamped emergency call system worked. It had been provided by a member of the Atlanta LoD, who was also arrested and pleaded guilty. Neidorf was charged with being part of a scheme to defraud AT&T. By the time of his July 1990 trial, Neidorf was majoring in political science in college and disinclined to settle. Neidorf knew the manual had been stolen, but he hadn’t broken into machines himself and had not profited from the theft—Phrack was free to readers.

Neidorf’s trial became a pivotal moment for hackers and their defenders, in large part because of Jesse Dryden’s family friend, John Perry Barlow, the freewheeling Grateful Dead lyricist and early fan of online communities who would be a major influence on cDc. Barlow’s fellow acid-taking Deadhead Stewart Brand had spawned the online community the WELL in 1985, and Barlow was a prolific and eloquent contributor. For those with primitive online access via modems, university networks, or other means, it was a mega bulletin board, broken up by topic. Barlow appreciated the dialogue and the chance to connect with interesting people even from his Wyoming ranch.

Barlow’s introduction to the rougher side of the internet came in late 1989, when he participated in a WELL group chat about the nature of hacking that was curated by Harper’s magazine, which printed excerpts. Among those typing in facts and opinions over the course of a week were open-source software crusader Richard Stallman, 2600 editor Eric Corley (under his post-indictment handle, Emmanuel Goldstein), and Cliff Stoll, the Berkeley astronomer who had traced hackers working for Russia and chronicled the work in his book The Cuckoo’s Egg. Most of the drama came from two brash young New York hackers identifying themselves as Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik.

After Stoll complained that hackers should not be free to enter networks to obtain financial histories from the big credit bureaus, Barlow said he was far more bothered that unaccountable corporations had gathered such data in the first place, which he equated with thievery: “Anybody who wants to inhibit that theft with electronic mischief has my complete support.” But after Barlow called Acid a “punk” for lacking vision, Phiber obtained Barlow’s credit report and dumped it into the online conversation. “Everyone gets back at someone when he’s pissed; so do we,” he typed. Barlow later wrote: “I’ve been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls, police custody while on acid, and Harlem after midnight, but no one had ever put the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment.”

Even so, Barlow continued to say he was more worried about the government restricting or monitoring computers than he was about the punks. He met the two hackers for Chinese food, reaffirming his belief that they were not the main enemy. Then he convinced Boston software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, inventor of the modern electronic spreadsheet, and libertarian engineer John Gilmore to join him in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Gilmore would soon host the Cypherpunks mailing list, which would be home to the most public-spirited cryptographers of the next two decades, along with hackers, assorted freethinkers, and the probable inventor of Bitcoin.) The trio’s long-term goal was to extend the freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and as many other rights as possible to the digital realm. The short-term goal was to defend hackers who were merely exploring from the full consequences of zealous prosecution, starting with Neidorf.

Until Neidorf’s trial, most press coverage of hacking had been full of hand waving and misunderstanding. Reporters were echoing big companies, which preferred to blame their misfortunes on evil geniuses instead of their own poor engineering choices. Reporters were also following the lead of the FBI and Secret Service, where many nontechnical agents and supervisors looking for glory saw greater threats to the world than really existed. But this time, Neidorf had good lawyers, and they showed the court, the press, and the public the major flaws in the case, eventually including the devastating fact that the same information in the manual that BellSouth valued at $79,000 could be openly bought for $13. The government dropped the case, and the EFF was on course to play an outsize role in the debates of the next three decades.

Acid and Phiber were actually named Elias Ladopoulos and Mark Abene. Ladopoulos was the first of what grew to more than a dozen members of Masters of Deception, and Abene joined from LoD later. Both were top-notch hackers with a special interest in phone-company computers. At the time that MoD began hacking under its own name, Chris Goggans, a Texan friend of LoD member Scott Chasin, claimed leadership of LoD. (Both Chasin and Goggans would take a turn editing Phrack.) MoD taunted the older LoD, and both sides attacked each other in the first big hacker war. It escalated until MoD broke into Tymnet, a system companies used for net connections, to spy on LoD’s Goggans and Chasin.

As Jesse started holding HoHoCons, they were natural turf for the Texans in the Legion of Doom, including Jesse’s friends, the embattled Goggans and Chasin. As the others at the conference took drugs, drank, and swapped stories, those two hunkered down and plotted. They decided the only way to beat the Masters of Deception was to turn pro. They formed a company, ComSec, and soon convinced Tymnet that its programs were being hacked and that it needed their company’s help. Armed with that special access, the pair spied on MoD members and then crossed a red line: they called in the FBI. Ladopoulos and Abene were arrested and prosecuted, each serving a year. But ComSec failed too, in part because the founders’ hacking background was too much for the press and customers to ignore. “We were basically blacklisted by the security community,” Goggans complained. At one HoHoCon, Goggans told an audience with many admirers that he was angry at how hard it had been. “I’m really pissed. Dealing with presidents of corporations one day, and then you’re stuck in a lowlife grunt position trying to scramble for money to feed yourself.”

That attitude changed as more companies realized that hackers had knowledge they needed. Chasin went on to found three companies that were acquired by major firms in the security industry and served as a senior executive at number two antivirus company McAfee. Many of their friends gave the LoD men a hard time for going straight and especially for calling the cops. But of those, a large number ended up going straight themselves. “Anybody that could have made a career out of it, did make a career out of it,” said Jesse’s 1980s housemate Michael Bednarczyk, known online in those days as Arch Angel. “You can start out as ‘fuck the man,’ but then you become the man, and you start to see things in a different light.” Many of the best and brightest in cDc would go straight later, when it was easier. But in general they would avoid the blowback from friends and other hackers that came from working with police and the FBI, going instead to intelligence agencies and the Pentagon.

For all the tension over career paths, gang alliances, and views on law enforcement, HoHoCon was a blast for most people who attended, and it was a major step toward realizing the community that cDc and others had been trying to foster. With informants everywhere, it was hard to build trust, especially online. In person, it was easier. “There were a lot of drugs, a lot of people on acid, but you bond through that,” Bednarczyk said. “Now you have someone you’ve met and trust, and that builds relationships that are pretty strong.” In those relationships, people gave information and received it. Everyone learned more about what was doable and how to do it.

Despite the close relationships with LoD leaders, neither Jesse nor cDc took a side in the war with MoD, which ended in the demise of both groups. Among the lessons they took: there was nothing to be gained from battling with peers and breaking the law, and calling in the FBI wasn’t wise either. They had the foresight to understand that doing any of these things would hurt you if you ever wanted to do something constructive for the world.

Jesse decided that HoHoCon should be even further above the fray than cDc. He invited not only all manner of hackers but also early professional defenders and even cops, even after a few arrests at the con. “The reason I put on HoHoCon is because I feel it’s fairly important to bring everyone from all walks of the computer industry and telecommunications together, both the hackers and phreakers and people from the telco and computer security business,” Jesse said. “They can meet each other face-to-face and get good discussions going.”

It was easy for cDc to stay neutral because it wasn’t a crime board but a place for criminals and everyone else to relax. Not getting involved with crime was a philosophical choice of the founders and early members, informed by the experiences of Neidorf and the rival hacker gangs. But it was also sheer luck: the most technically adept of the three founders had been Brandon Brewer, and he and his older brother Ty happened to have an Atari computer with no hard disk, meaning they could store nothing of any great size—only text files, not programs in any quantity. In any case, the Brewers departed the scene just after it started, leaving cDc in the hands of comparative doves Kevin Wheeler and Bill Brown. “We were like a sperm donor,” Ty Brewer said. “We strongly influenced the operation in the beginning and then left. It was our DNA, but that’s about it.”

Another future member of cDc was in LoD, and he was both more of an accomplished criminal and more of a visionary than most who came before. Patrick Kroupa had been in some of the earliest Apple piracy groups before ending up in LoD. In 1991, he founded the pioneering internet service provider MindVox, which was for New York what the WELL was for the San Francisco Bay Area—an early online outpost for people who thought. By Patrick’s count, it was only the third place to offer real-time commercial internet connections to the American public. Before then, it had already organized bulletin board–style topics, like the WELL.

Patrick knew Kevin from the 1980s, when Patrick was called Lord Digital and dedicated himself to phreaking to escape his crappy life in Spanish Harlem. He was in it for the challenge of breaking protection around games and then the feeling of control it gave him to dictate to machines around the world. To socialize, from the age of fourteen he went to TAP meetings, where mysterious buyers gave him hundred-dollar bills in exchange for hacked information they wanted on various people. Patrick also got on heroin as a teenager, and he stayed hooked through age thirty. He got clean with the aid of a hallucinogen called ibogaine, and he later helped a hundred or so other junkies through the same process, including many fellow hackers.

The Patrick of 1992, still on the hard stuff, amazed people who were coming from vastly different perspectives. He explained MindVox that year in an epic text file that ran in truncated form in Wired. In it, he thanked cDc, among others, and gave a personal history of cyberspace to that point that included a frank assessment of many hackers’ egotism and criminality, along with admissions of his own opiate binges and unspecified addictions. Patrick said he had eventually realized that the only thing worth doing was helping people. After that realization, he wrote, he reunited with fellow survivors of the busted-up hacker underground who felt the same way.

In 1992, four years before Barlow would pen what would become one of the most famous political documents in the internet’s history, his “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” Patrick wrote something very similar, an ecumenical and idealistic manifesto. “Cyberspace allows everyone the freedom to coexist without harming anyone else’s world-view or belief system,” Patrick wrote. He said MindVox would allow users to intersect with pioneers in computer science, the arts, and politics. “Our main priority is to create and continuously evolve an environment that fosters an atmosphere of dynamic creativity, coupled with access to information and ideas, that present you with a far greater spectrum of possibility.”

The essay brought articles from New York media, and Patrick gave free MindVox accounts to musicians and artists, marketing the service as a cool one. MindVox remained popular if chaotic for several years, until the Netscape web browser and bare-bones access providers made it hard to charge for sophisticated packages of connections and content. The dawning of the easy-to-use web in 1995 would also be the end of the vast majority of bulletin boards.

In the meantime, Patrick inspired the rest of cDc and helped it stay together. A conference or two a year weren’t enough to keep the group whole, and not everyone could get on the group’s #cdc Internet Relay Chat channel to keep up with the conversation there. Patrick doled out free email accounts to all in cDc, and Paul Leonard and Carrie Campbell set up an email list to keep everyone in touch.

With each passing year, HoHoCon got more prominent speakers, along with more attendees. The second year had one hundred people over three days at Houston’s airport Hilton. After a hangover-delayed start to the official proceedings on Saturday, Jesse introduced keynoter Bruce Sterling, the science fiction author whose book on the hacking arrests of 1990 was coming out soon. He plugged the new Austin chapter of Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation. The next speakers were LoD hackers-gone-pro Goggans and Chasin, who bragged that five MoD members had been raided earlier in the month. The general debauchery included strippers who gave lap dances to fourteen-year-old boys in the ballroom and turned tricks in the rooms. The hotel managers repeatedly threatened to expel everyone.

At least five from cDc were there, including founder Kevin Wheeler and Matt Kelly, all of whom gathered to live-write some of what would be cDc’s two hundredth text file overnight. After slick homages to Phrack, teen girl magazine Tiger Beat, and the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries for kids, the file described the gogo dancers, drugs, and mayhem of the event, as well as telling an absurdist origin story for the cult that involved monster trucks. Not much of that part made sense, yet file #200 would prove the most popular among cDc’s own members.

Other spontaneous meetings helped shape the future of online security. Bednarczyk was walking down the second-floor corridor when a skinny teenager ran toward him. The kid said someone had kicked a plastic beer ball into Sterling’s face and the police were on the way, could he duck into Bednarczyk’s room to hide? Bednarczyk agreed, and the teen introduced himself as Jeff Moss, the Dark Tangent. Other hackers were already hanging out in the room, and they introduced themselves by handles that were already legendary to Moss. One of them controlled switches at a major phone company. Another had the attack programs called “exploits” that could break into mainframe computers. Moss felt like a mouse in the corner with enormous eyes. “These five people could take over the world if they wanted,” he thought. Moss soon would use what he saw, the bonding and the talks and the T-shirts, and found Def Con, the volunteer-powered Las Vegas hacker conference that would become the biggest on the planet.

As HoHoCon grew to hundreds of participants, more new cDc members and future members showed up to meet people they had admired from afar. One newcomer was a talented Boston hacker with the handle White Knight, really named Dan MacMillan. He came to learn and to have fun with old friends and new ones, and like many in cDc, he didn’t care who had more underground prestige in the hacking hierarchy. Dan was a pivotal addition to cDc because he brought in more technical people. “We weren’t deliberately looking for hacking chops,” Kevin said. “It was very much about personality and writing, really. For a long time, the ‘test’ or evaluation was to write t-files. Everyone was expected to write things. If we were stoked to have more hacker-oriented people, it was because we’d be excited to have a broader range in our t-files.” Dan sponsored Bostonian Misha Kubecka, and they would be joined by fellow New Englanders John Lester and Luke Benfey.

As the conferences got bigger, it meant more work and less fun for Jesse. He had Phrack or cDc cosponsor the event to share the burden, and then he finally stopped after HoHoCon 5, at the end of 1994. By then, Moss’s Def Con had taken what Jesse had started and grown it. Vegas had all the illicit distractions young hackers could want, and the unruly attendees or the con itself could be banned from any one hotel and have plenty of others to choose from. If one left drugs sitting out in the room, cDc learned, the maid would arrange them tidily. Moss gave cDc free passes and a regular platform, and it would provide some of the conference’s most spectacular moments, drawing more attention and bigger crowds. A quarter century later, Def Con and its more expensive spin-off for professionals, Black Hat, would be the dominant hacker gatherings in the world, attracting the head of the National Security Agency as a keynote speaker and drawing more than twenty-five thousand attendees to the midsummer desert.

Jesse never seemed to find his place. He did some contract programming and cared for his famed musician father near San Francisco, nursing him through a terminal illness for a year. And he had a series of misfortunes, including a fire that destroyed most of his dad’s memorabilia and a flood that wrecked his stepfather’s recording studio. Jesse took to vanishing for long stretches, leaving his mother and longtime friends in cDc puzzling over where he was. Whatever the problem was, it was not alcohol or drugs: given his parents’ problems, he never touched either.

If Jesse was unraveling, it might have been because his stories were no longer holding together. In a young life defined by trauma, he had found refuge online and with friends who thought he was smart, cool, and funny, which he was. But he had learned that if the stories were better, people would think he was even cooler. He told many of his friends that he played in rock touring bands, with L.A. Guns and others, yet never sent so much as a cassette to his friend with an indie record label. He told others he played professional soccer, which struck some of them as odd given his small stature. He told people a lot of things, and many of them were not true.

Some of this was about defense—psychological defense, for someone raised in the shadow of famous and successful people, and also physical defense. Many of Jesse’s hacker friends were informants. Telling different stories to different people and mixing the truth with lies kept people from knowing enough to betray him. “At any time, your cyberfriend could become your cyberenemy,” Bednarczyk said. “You want to keep your personas separate.”

But it was about offense as well. Jesse was a consummate networker, like his mother. He impressed and charmed people and got them to tell him things, and that’s how he learned more about hacking, enough to found a critical early series of conferences. Jesse was rude and eloquent, with a rock-star air that made people listen. “He could predict what you were thinking before you said it, then turn a conversation around in seconds,” said Angela Dormido, a friend who ran a bulletin board. Hackers have a phrase for the technique: social engineering. It’s what made famed hacker Kevin Mitnick so successful, along with many others less well-known. You play a role, you spin lies, and you get people to do what you want. Misha called Jesse on one story that didn’t hold up, and Jesse never spoke to him again.

Jesse’s mother, two people he lived with at different times, and talented latter-day cDc hackers with resources and connections hunted at length for Jesse after his last sighting in 2009. None admit to knowing where he is, and some who were close to him believe he is dead. They could be right. But in mid-2018, a database showed that he had a valid Texas driver’s license, which must be renewed every six years. More plausible is that Jesse used his virtuoso social-engineering skills to fall off the map. Though he might have an excess of that talent, it made Jesse a key part of hacking’s development. Like text files, old-school social engineering shrank in importance as technical proficiency grew. As Jesse’s time in the spotlight came to an end, the center of gravity in cDc was shifting to Boston, and the group was beginning to move toward bigger things.