> CHAPTER 13

> THE CONGRESSMAN AND THE TROLLS

WHEN SHE LEFT the Cult of the Dead Cow mailing list in 2006, Carrie Campbell’s farewell note included a tribute to the man who had brought her into the tribe in the 1980s. “By the way, Psychedelic Warlord is moving up rapidly in politics in El Paso. I’m so proud of him. We seriously need to not claim him so his career can progress unhindered.” She included a link to the Wikipedia page about the Texan under his real name: Robert “Beto” O’Rourke.

Some newer members had not known his name, and most had never met him. Beto’s last outing with the group had been the reunion at the HOPE conference in 1997, the same year that Laird Brown floated a story to the audience about the Hong Kong Blondes. But everyone in cDc honored Carrie’s parting wish. His youthful participation in cDc remained secret as Beto’s profile rose in El Paso. He had gone to Columbia University after his Virginia boarding school, then worked at a New York internet service provider. He also played with a punk band, Foss, that Carrie housed when it came through Seattle. Back home, he started a modest web design business that moonlighted as an alternative news site. Then Beto followed his father into politics, winning a spot on the city council. El Paso was one of the poorest cities in America, and it sat across the river from the mass drug murders in Ciudad Juarez. Beto advocated for liberalized drug laws and wrote a slim book with a city council ally arguing that marijuana legalization would cut down on the gangster profits that were fueling so much bloodshed.

Beto had his eye on a seat in Congress, but party officials advised him to wait until the established Democratic incumbent retired. Instead, Beto took a calculated risk and challenged him in the primary. The veteran underestimated Beto, who outworked him, knocking on sixteen thousand doors. He showed voters the energy he could devote to their interests. He won the primary and the general election as well, joining Congress in 2013.

In 2016, while Beto and others were holding a sit-in at the House of Representatives to force a floor debate on gun control, the Republican House speaker called a recess. That invoked the congressional rule that C-SPAN can’t broadcast when the chamber is not in session. So Beto began broadcasting the event from his phone over Facebook, and the network aired it. The stunt drew wider attention to the majority party’s refusal to even deliberate on a vital issue, and it showed Beto’s willingness to think like a hacker to work around the established technological, political, and media procedures.

As a Democrat in majority-Republican Texas, Beto usually handled minority status with grace. After a blizzard canceled flights from Texas back to Washington in March 2017, he embarked on a twenty-nine-hour road trip with the Republican from the next district over, the equally pragmatic former CIA operative Will Hurd. As they drove back to Capitol Hill, they streamed live video as they chatted, answered questions from viewers, and listened to music. They talked about Russian interference in the election, the proposed border wall, and health-care legislation as they got to know each better. The video went viral, garnering millions of views.

After Trump’s election, Beto knew there wasn’t much he could get done from the House. Even if the Democrats won a majority, it would take many years for him to move up enough in seniority to lead a major committee. On the other hand, if he managed to pull an upset again, this time in a Senate race against Texas Republican Ted Cruz, he could help flip that body and start making a difference right away. Under the law, Beto would have to first surrender his House seat, since he could not run for both reelection to that office and election to the Senate. It would be all or nothing.

When Beto declared for Senate in early 2017, Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, Texas had not elected a Democrat in a statewide election in decades, and Cruz was among the best-funded members of the Senate. Cruz had added to his prominence by being the last plausible Republican standing in the 2016 primary before Trump beat him out. And Trump was off to a strong start in the White House, with James Comey still leading the FBI and no special counsel investigating possible collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign. Beto, meanwhile, was more liberal than the average Texas Democrat, making him an easy target for Cruz’s many taunts.

But Beto had advantages as well. Cruz had high negatives in polling alongside high positives. Trump’s support had slipped in public polls, which hurt all Republicans. Beto, meanwhile, had communication, community-building, and critical-thinking skills that dated to his days as a fledgling hacker. If he believed that a popular policy was wrong, he said so. Beto’s technological savvy, while not in the same league as Mudge’s or Christien Rioux’s, put him way ahead of the average member of Congress on the subject and helped him appeal to younger voters as well as those increasingly concerned about tech threatening privacy and traditional jobs while spreading falsehoods. Certainly, he was a sharp contrast to those members of Congress who questioned Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and stumbled over such basic concepts as its advertising-dependent business model and how Facebook differed from Twitter.

Beto’s familiarity with tech also helped him reach funders in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. cDc members quietly whispered about his history to a few of the most trustworthy and wealthy tech people they knew. A friend hosted an early fundraiser in Los Angeles, and Sam Anthony held his in Boston. Carrie had an emotional reunion with Beto at one in Seattle. Beto told everyone he had stayed in Carrie’s house as a punk-band bassist and had eaten all her Cheerios. As the event wound down and she thought of all Beto had accomplished in the years since she had last seen him, Carrie teared up with pride as she hugged her old friend goodbye.

It wasn’t just that politicians needed to think more about technology and its unique multidisciplinary role in the world. Those in technology needed to think a lot more about politics. Trump’s election sparked a desire in many to fight back against what they saw as domestic information warfare. Security experts felt a special twinge, because hacking into the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and John Podesta’s Gmail account had played a pivotal role in the election. Following the model that Jake Appelbaum had helped promote, the contents of those emails were spread by WikiLeaks, reported by the partisan and mainstream press, and circulated wildly over social media.

Over the course of 2017, as evidence emerged of the depth and sophistication of the efforts to promote division and Trump on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, a wider swath of the American public turned against tech companies. Inside the Silicon Valley giants, divisions crystallized. A minority were unapologetic Trump supporters, like Palantir cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, or took his ascendancy as an opportunity to speak out against what they saw as discrimination against straight white men, like a Google engineer who claimed he was fired for writing about internal bias.

But many more felt caught up in a moral crisis unlike any the Valley had ever faced. Some wanted to use the money that they had earned, their networks, and some of their tech skills to set things right. Start-up founder Maciej Ceglowski was watching as the president issued a ban on immigration from multiple Muslim-majority countries. Such policies grated especially on many in tech because an outsize number of founders and employees came from other countries. And some who had excused the expansion of tech surveillance under previous administrations now fretted that such powers were in the hands of an executive branch that was openly disdainful of judicial review.

Ceglowski began holding meetings of concerned employees under the banner of Tech Solidarity. One offshoot from those meetings, led by Slack engineer and Jake Appelbaum victim Leigh Honeywell, created a public “Never Again” pledge to oppose immoral conduct and go public if necessary, which has been signed by more than 2,800 employees. Among other things, the signatories promised to advocate against retaining data that could be used for ethnic or religious targeting and advocate for deploying end-to-end encryption.

The Solidarity meetings raised money for immigrants’ lawyers and coordinated volunteer coding projects. As the 2018 midterms approached, confronted with billionaires on the other end of the spectrum spending untraceable “dark money” to push right-wing candidates, Ceglowski fought back with what he called “dork money,” funding a slate of progressive candidates around the country in districts he thought he could flip. Among his small circle of coconspirators was Adam O’Donnell. They also advised dozens of campaigns on security, hoping to stave off a repeat of the devastating 2016 hacks.

cDc itself contained almost no Trump supporters. But because of its multifaceted legacy, it had protégés on both sides of the fight. They battled on Facebook’s pages and even inside that company’s executive ranks. On the right were some especially voluble members of cDc’s farm team and fan club, the cDc Ninja Strike Force.

Rob Beck, cDc’s friend from Microsoft and @stake, had been in charge of NSF for a while, and then others took it on. Membership got looser, group founder Sam Anthony said, and “one branch became this awful Gamergate, neo-Nazi and Russian intelligence nexus that is ruining the world.” Organized on 4chan and other sites, Gamergate’s organized trolls went after female gaming journalists with mob attacks on social media before eventually coalescing behind Trump. By 2012, the NSF mostly lived on as a Facebook group. Members posted links to security advisories, breaches in the news, and whatever else they found interesting. Some of the members, though, were 4chan veterans who wanted to provoke, and they resorted to posting racist cartoons and jokes. Several considered it harmless trolling and denied being racist. But many core cDc members were deeply offended. “All these people were influenced by cDc. But there was no structure or indoctrination or social vetting,” said Beck, who reconnected to NSF after years away and found it jarring. Beck began sending some of the more extreme posts to Sam, Luke Benfey, and Kevin Wheeler, just to make sure they were aware.

In June 2012, Luke wrote to the cDc email list with links to racist caricatures from the NSF Facebook page. “I think it is deeply, deeply shameful that this sort of thing is being associated with cDc,” Luke wrote. Paul Leonard, who had maintained relationships with some of the offenders, agreed that the drift in NSF had gone too far. “Some of the guys are right wing, some are just ‘edge lords’—they don’t have any particular ideology, they just like blowing things up.” Paul wrote to two of the offending posters: “I generally consider the NSF guys to be people I want to associate with, and [for] most of the NSF this really is the case. Now I have to question this relationship and it pisses me off. I don’t really care about your politics, I don’t even care about your racial beliefs whether they’re heart-felt or just trolling. It bothers me that you don’t seem to have any kind of internal editor that can differentiate between amusing offensiveness, and the kind of tedious, boring, lowest common denominator type of offensive material that shouldn’t even make the grade.”

Laird Brown wrote to Luke: “This is a painful thing to write. If this situation continues and nothing is done about it, I would be forced to withdraw from the cDc and take Hacktivismo with me. I can’t be associated with this bile.” They had limited options, since NSF hacker Colton Sumners had founded the Facebook group in 2007 and kept administrative control. “I gave all the misfit toys a voice,” Sumners said. Luke reported the NSF posts to Facebook as offensive. As the group contemplated more drastic action, Kevin reappeared and got caught up. Then he wrote to Sumners: “This is worse than I thought. I need admin access to the NSF group, and the racial stuff has to go. Bottom line, the stuff isn’t strategic and it’s causing problems for me. Thanks!” After a protracted struggle among the admins, the old cDc guard wrested control back.

Sumners, Xerobank Tor browser creator Steve Topletz, and a few others in NSF, including self-described black hat and white nationalist Timothy “Matlock” Noonan, had their own publication and social group, DSSK Corp. Speaking as Matlock, Noonan declined to discuss most of his activities with me. He did say he had grown up on cDc but that the crew had become stale and irrelevant and didn’t do much hacking. He admitted to one illegal hack on the record, a 2012 takedown of a pedophile site targeted by Anonymous. cDc legend Chris Tucker, known as Nightstalker, had recently died, and Noonan published a press release under the cDc and NSF banners claiming the attack was Nightstalker’s. Noonan and Topletz had also done favors for the US government, including turning over traffic they had found after hacking Iranian servers. Like the old cDc text files, DSSK chronicled various adventures. But the politics were very different. In 2015, a DSSK article reported on a trip by Noonan to Eastern Europe to see Andrew Auernheimer, known online as weev, perhaps the most famous troll of all time. Paul Leonard had known Auernheimer from childhood, back when he wasn’t racist. “He was mostly an irritating edge loser who played with racism for fun and lulz, up until he went to jail,” Paul said, echoing others. “When he got out, he was notably changed.”

By the time of the DSSK visit, Auernheimer had a swastika tattoo and was staying in countries that didn’t extradite people to the US. He lived in Ukraine for a time, and then a Russian breakaway republic in Moldova. He handled the technology behind the Daily Stormer, a Nazi and pro-Trump site run by Andrew Anglin, who spent enough time in Russia proper to send in an absentee ballot from there. Both men exhorted racist protestors to turn out in force at the Charlottesville, Virginia, march where a Stormer fan drove into and killed counterprotestor Heather Heyer. It is not yet clear what else Auernheimer got up to in helping Trump. But Auernheimer was suspected of hosting faked documents in the French election of 2017 to help the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.

The rot in NSF spurred cDc proper to go further to make up for the Frankenstein’s monster it had created.

While cDc and a transformed NSF battled on Facebook’s pages, a more momentous conflict was brewing behind the scenes at Facebook the company, arguably ground zero for the election misinformation battle. Beyond overt support from Thiel, who spoke for Trump at the Republican National Convention, Facebook’s collection of data on its users, as well as its lax policies about what apps could collect from whom, allowed a secretive network of companies including Cambridge Analytica to collect material on as many as 87 million Americans. The companies, funded by billionaire Republican donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, claimed they could tell from the psychological elements of that data which ads would be most effective to show to whom. Famously, the information went to help Trump. But before that, during the primaries, it was helping rival Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, the Texas senator Beto would face two years later.

Also inside Facebook was Alex Stamos, the former consultant at Mudge and Christien Rioux’s @stake. After Snowden had revealed that many tech companies worked closely with the NSA, then iSec Partners cofounder Stamos had given a talk at Def Con 2013, arguing that security experts had broader social responsibility and should consider quitting before harming the public. “I’m a corporate white-hat sellout,” Stamos admitted up front. “This talk is about how, if you decide to be a corporate white-hat sellout, you can do that as ethically as possible.” Stamos described how ordinary companies were now getting sucked into cyberwarfare, citing as an example an advanced cryptographic attack on Microsoft that allowed for the overseas installation of malware attributed to the US, as well as constant attacks by the Chinese on Google and other tech companies. As the grandson of poor immigrants, Stamos said that he was proud to be an American, but that his loyalty belonged more to the values of the country than to any temporary set of leaders. Like doctors, he said, technologists and especially security practitioners held critical roles that might require moral obligation. “Maybe this means all people deserve for their technology to be trustworthy,” he suggested, before posing a series of hypotheticals and asking for a show of hands to see who would do what.

In the first scenario Stamos gave, you discover a major flaw. Do you announce it, sell it to your government, sell it to the highest bidder, use it yourself, use it as leverage to get a consulting deal with the software maker, or work with the vendor to patch it and then disclose? Most picked the last option, the coordinated disclosure pioneered by the L0pht. In another case, what if national-security authorities want to have an informal chat? Do you accept the meeting, avoid it, or ask for an email to run by your company’s lawyer? About a quarter of the audience members said they would meet even after Snowden. Stamos said he had until recently felt the same way, and he had spent hours talking to the authorities a year ago at the same conference. Now, he said, he would involve a lawyer. What about finding a corporate back door collecting data from your customers, if your boss says forget about it? Do you ignore it, escalate it within the organization, quietly look for a job elsewhere, or publicly quit and break your nondisclosure agreement with the company by explaining why? Stamos said he was between the last two answers.

He closed by urging the older and more experienced professionals to share the tough decisions they had made with newer entrants, and all to think about scenarios to come so they wouldn’t be caught off guard. “Try to live an examined life,” he said. Later, in 2013, I revealed that security company RSA had taken $10 million to put an NSA back door in a tool kit it distributed for protecting websites. Stamos was one of ten speakers who as a result pulled out of the early 2014 RSA Conference, the only US security-industry gathering larger than Def Con, and one founded, ironically, to contest federal demands for control over encryption. Instead of staying home, Stamos organized a counterconference, TrustyCon, held at the same time as the RSA Conference but devoted to examining how to respond to improper government influence and other threats to security and privacy.

For all his outspokenness, Yahoo hired Stamos as chief information security officer later that year, partly in response to the government tricks exposed by Snowden. But Stamos quit Yahoo in 2015. He told his staff that he left because new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had not alerted him about or challenged an order from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret to approve wiretaps on suspected international spies. This order required Yahoo to install new software to scan every single email processed by its system for a certain digital signature, such as a cookie installed on a single user’s computer or an encryption key. After Stamos’s team found what seemed like a hacker’s rootkit installed on Yahoo’s email servers, they feared that Russian hackers who had bedeviled them in the past were back, and they alerted Stamos, who called everyone into the office at 5 a.m. on a Monday. When email engineers suggested he check with the legal department, Stamos did, learned that the tap had been authorized, went up the chain to Mayer, and quietly departed.

The US intelligence agencies’ target had been legitimate. But the means by which they sought the suspect’s correspondence, and the undisclosed complicity of Yahoo, made a mockery out of the annual transparency reports in which Yahoo estimated how many email accounts it had examined for the government. And if it would search every last email for one secret piece of information, what would stop it from doing it again for a phrase, like one expressing hostility against the current president, or the next one? This story led some to proclaim that Stamos had set himself up as a sort of human canary in the coal mine, and that if he ever left Facebook, users should take heed.

At Facebook, Stamos primarily protected the company itself. He also stood between users and organized criminals, sexual predators, and fraudsters. But during the 2016 election, he was on alert for activity by a group known as APT28 that was linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence. It was one of the groups that hacked the Democratic National Committee, and Stamos’s team found it was behind a Facebook page dedicated to DCLeaks, a short-lived spot for pushing out hacked Democratic emails. They ruled that DCLeaks was “inauthentic”—a politically neutral grounds for banning—in August 2016, but internal worries about appearing partisan delayed the ban until October. Stamos’s side won the fight only after DCLeaks posted phone numbers associated with financier and Russian nemesis George Soros, violating a Facebook policy on exposing personal information.

After the election and before Trump took office, US intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that Russia had interfered to help Trump win and that it had spread fake news on Facebook in the effort. An internal Facebook task force looked into it and found mainly money-driven spammers trying to get people to their pages with slanted stories. Bigger priorities at Facebook were the coming elections in Western Europe, where France and Germany pressed for help. Working with France’s defense-only cybersecurity agency, ANSI, Facebook experts found GRU reconnaissance of campaign workers and tens of thousands of fake French accounts connected to Russia that amplified divisive stories. Only after US intelligence officials told Time magazine that Russian propagandists bought Facebook ads did the company realize that ads were a vector, and one with lots more forensic data.

Stamos’s team dove in and found a massive cluster from the Saint Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency, and for the first time they saw that the fake activists were pushing far-left narratives and memes as well as far-right ones. A closed-door briefing to Special Counsel Mueller triggered legal requests for content that formed the basis of his 2018 indictments of thirteen Russians and three companies for interfering in the US election. The most important of those companies, Russia’s IRA, had bought thousands of ads stoking divisiveness on social media. One on Instagram showed black men attacking a police offer; the ad was shown to users who had expressed interest in either Fox News or Senator Ted Cruz. Cruz also got tweets of support from IRA accounts.

Stamos was trying to do the right thing, but it came at a great cost. Executives above him repeatedly minimized the Russian activity in his public reports. When he briefed Facebook’s board about what he had found in September 2017, the directors asked him if he had successfully rooted out all of the stealth accounts. He answered, truthfully, that he had not. The board members then grilled CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg about why they hadn’t told them how bad it was. Sandberg paid the tongue-lashing forward, yelling at Stamos: “You threw us under the bus!”

Stamos never controlled all of the security apparatus at the company, and the board flare-up cemented his reputation for being overly aggressive. In December, when Stamos suggested reporting to someone besides the general counsel, other executives in charge of Facebook’s main service and engineering stepped up and said they could handle security interpreted more broadly, now that it was a subject of global concern.

Stamos, who had increased his staff from 60 in 2015 to 120, was boxed out and left with three employees and a vague mandate to do something about election security, like advising on plans to fight propaganda. He pushed for wide collaboration in that, and he and Google’s Heather Adkins helped the Defending Digital Democracy project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which in turn advised campaigns and trained election officials from thirty-eight states.

In the scope of professional ethics he had laid out at Def Con in 2013, Stamos had followed through. But his control was smaller than many outside the company had understood, and he could have made that more widely known. Then again, he became chief security officer at Facebook before anyone knew that the most important battle was going to be propaganda, not electronic breaking and entering. Stamos negotiated to leave Facebook in August 2018 for a post at Stanford University, an attempt to set up a forum there for the big internet companies to thrash through tough issues on neutral ground, and a planned book on fighting information operations. “I’m not a big company guy,” Stamos said. “Above my level, it’s Game of Thrones.” In a farewell memo, he wrote that he accepted a share of blame for the election manipulation and urged those remaining to “deprioritize short-term growth” and “be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues.”

When the Guardian broke the news that secretive government and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had obtained the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users through a misleading quiz and that it had not been deleted when Facebook asked, Stamos couldn’t really be made to take the fall. Technically, it was not a breach: it was a failure of basic advertising processes, where Stamos had no control. Instead, CEO Zuckerberg had to go before Congress to apologize and promise to give users more control over their data. Meanwhile, former Facebook and Google executives began condemning their former employers for allowing disinformation to thrive. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, formed the Center for Humane Technology and warned that Facebook and YouTube had let some of the world’s most powerful instances of artificial intelligence figure out how to keep people watching, and that the answer had been to show outrage and extremism. Rank-and-file tech workers forced Google to drop a contract to provide artificial intelligence for analysis of Pentagon drone footage that could be used in automated targeting, and protests spread through Silicon Valley over tech employers’ contracts with border authorities who separated children from immigrant parents.

In 2017, Adam O’Donnell got hold of Stamos to talk about Beto. O’Donnell knew Stamos from the iSec days and admired his ethics and comfort with politics. He also knew that Stamos would honor cDc’s biggest secret, that Beto was one of them. Stamos was as delighted as he was shocked.

“I have to support this guy, someone who has been active in this world since he was a teenager,” Stamos said. “You can see people like Beto and Hurd working together.” Stamos told friends that Beto was a savvy nerd, leaving his cDc membership unmentioned. In November, Stamos joined in cohosting the Beto fundraiser at Adam’s house. At that event, Beto laid out his beliefs and approach. Not only did Beto share much of cDc’s and the broader Silicon Valley community’s feelings on tech policy, but the same was true for their feelings on legalizing soft drugs. Like Kroupa and the EFF’s founding libertarians, Beto saw the profits from illegal drugs fueling the murders that were ruining Mexico and reaching across the border. (Beto had also sided with Republicans in a number of votes to reduce regulations and taxes.) The easiest thing to tar him with, Beto said, was a pair of arrests from twenty years before, one for jumping a fence and the other for driving after drinking. Neither led to convictions. Beto said he spoke to others with worse records who couldn’t vote as a result, and he believed in second chances.

Relentlessly upbeat, Beto’s fortunes rose as Trump careened from crisis to crisis, continually intervening to help Russia even when his top aides had publicly promised retribution. Cruz followed Trump despite his earlier protests. “Cruz is a rare and precious gift. He’s so loathed that any passable Democrat with a picayune chance of tipping him was bound to draw more attention and inspire more hope than the political dynamics warranted,” Frank Bruni wrote in his Sunday New York Times column in April 2018, a month after Beto won his contested primary. “But Beto is more than passable. Many of his campaign events are mobbed. People line up for selfies and then insist on hugs.” Bruni noted that Beto was fluent in Spanish, classic punk rock, and contemporary country music, and that Vanity Fair had dubbed him Kennedyesque. Beto had taken in more money than Cruz by mid-2018, and polls put Beto closer and closer to Cruz, eventually within the margin of error, with his biggest handicaps being the lack of name recognition, which would sort itself out by the fall vote, and the history of low voter turnout, which he was trying to reverse. “People are coming out because they don’t want a wall,” Beto told National Public Radio. “People are coming out because they don’t think the press is the enemy of the people, they think they’re the best defense against tyranny.” Beto rejected consultants and big data as well as corporate PAC money, taking in small individual donations and going from town to town, running “in the most punk rock way I know.”

Beto didn’t say as much, of course, but it was also the most hacker way he knew. From speaking his mind in the underground newspaper of his era, the online bulletin boards, and then in the alternative news site in El Paso that got him launched into politics, Beto had learned to seek new ideas, to be comfortable in his own skin, and to speak his mind with humor, connecting honestly with those who differed rather than seeking to conform. He had stuck to that as greater numbers of people also began looking askance at the dominant political structure that Trump had taken to new and uncomfortable places. Cruz, by contrast, looked very much like an opportunist and a creature of that power structure, one who asked Trump, whom he had called a pathological liar, to come campaign for him in Texas.

Traveling to all 254 Texas counties, including those long written off as hopelessly Republican, without any polling or focus groups—that was hacking politics. With the biggest crowds yet coming to see Beto in September 2018 even in deep Republican territory, his small staff used iPhones and social media to share authentic moments that spread widely. In one, a man asked whether he shared his upset at football players kneeling during the national anthem. Trump had repeatedly raised the issue, calling the players, many of them black, unpatriotic “sons of bitches.” Beto, who had never been asked the question before, thanked the man for the question, and he thanked the veterans in attendance for their service. Then he gave a short, spirited, off-the-cuff history of peaceful protest over racist policies and violence and how it had helped change the Deep South. “I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights, anytime, anywhere, anyplace,” Beto said. The video was viewed more than 40 million times and won Beto national television coverage.

As the newspaper charts predicting control of the Senate kept shifting to the left, one showed that if all other races went as projected, control of the body would depend on whether Beto won. Even if he lost, it was hard to imagine Beto fading away. He seemed destined for the national political stage in some way. As the election neared with him still on Cruz’s heels, comparisons shifted to Obama’s first run, and pundits spoke of a future Beto run at the presidency. “O’Rourke offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era,” blared Vanity Fair. “He’s authentic, full of energy, and stripped of consultant-driven sterility. On what planet is Beto O’Rourke not a presidential contender, even if he loses?”

Though Beto had been obliged to discuss his 1990s arrests, nobody knew about his teenage hacking, let alone his long association with what was for many years the best-known group of technology-minded miscreants in the world, and understandably he did not volunteer the information. Yet when I told him I wanted to include his background in a post-election book, he was willing to talk. He was unabashed about how much being part of the Cult of the Dead Cow had meant to him.

“It’s cool to be connected with the people who were in cDc and people who were involved with early internet culture,” Beto told me. “I was really at the margins, but I very much wanted to be as cool as these people, as sophisticated and technologically proficient and aware and smart as they were. I never was, but it meant so much just being able to be a part of something with them.”

Born a couple of years after the cDc founders, Beto said he was like the other early members in some respects. “I had a really hard time fitting in and just finding a path along the conventional route,” he said. Beto’s father, a prominent local judge later killed in a bike accident, brought home an Apple IIe with a 300 baud modem while Beto was in middle school, and he went searching for bulletin boards. Beto found a few in Texas, including Kevin’s Demon Roach Underground in Lubbock. The long-distance boards required pilfered dialing codes “so I wouldn’t run up the phone bill,” Beto said. Part of the attraction was that boards were “a great way to get cracked games.” Later, he realized he had made poor choices on that matter.

But the games were not what made Beto keep coming back. “Being part of that, starting my own bulletin board, all of it was fundamentally just wanting to be part of a community,” he said. It was also about a search for culture apart from mainstream movies and the records on the radio, market-tested and inauthentic and boring, at least to Beto and other teens in search of their own identities. “This was the counterculture: Maximum Rock & Roll, buying records by catalog you couldn’t find at record stores. cDc was kind of a home for people who were interested in that part of the subculture.” Beto was searching for knowledge too, “in terms of understanding how the world worked—literally how it worked, how the phone system worked and how we were all connected to each other. They were all free-thinking people within cDc.”

Beto logged in the most during the late 1980s and very early 1990s, before starting at Columbia University in 1991. He checked in at times later, feeling closer to the cultural wing of cDc than the star technologists. Though not an accomplished programmer, after graduating from college Beto built websites and set up high-speed connections in New York. Then it was back to El Paso, and his own small software and services company, and the series of underdog political runs that began with an upset putting him on the city council. Among other unorthodox moves there, Beto sponsored a 2009 measure calling for a national discussion about legalizing marijuana.

Beto credited cDc with influencing his thinking in a number of ways that he had brought to bear already. Not least, he was fighting to restore net neutrality, which prevented internet connection providers from favoring some web content. “I understand the democratizing power of the internet, and how transformative it was for me personally, and how it leveraged the extraordinary intelligence of these people all over the country who were sharing ideas and techniques,” Beto said. “When you compromise the ability to treat all that equally, it runs counter to the ethics of the groups we were part of. And factually, you can just see that it will harm small business development and growth. It hampers the ability to share what you are creating, whether it is an essay, a song, a piece of art. And so that experience certainly informs what we’re doing here now.”

Beto said his history made him want to push a broader discussion about making the most out of gifted technologists and other thinkers with unconventional ideas, which can have more impact because they break with patterns and tradition. That was the same insight Mudge had brought to DARPA—that adding similar but more complicated defenses doesn’t help. “There’s just this profound value in being able to be apart from the system and look at it critically and have fun while you’re doing it,” Beto said. “I think of the Cult of the Dead Cow as a great example of that. In doing that, you make our overall society stronger, as with just the vulnerabilities technologically that people were able to uncover and point out and be part of fixing.”

“There was something really valuable about the counterculture and countersystem. Putting those talents to use, you make things better for everyone, and it should not lock you outside of security, or being productive, or taking a more conventional path. I’m an example of that, from starting a business with friends, to city council, Congress, and running for senator. Part of my success was being exposed to people who thought differently and explored how things work. There are alternate paths to service and success, and it’s important to be mindful of that.”

On Election Day 2018, Beto drew the votes of 4.02 million Texans to Cruz’s 4.24 million, losing by less than 3 percentage points. Turnout surged in Democratic areas, with a half-million more people voting in the Houston area alone than had in the previous midterm. That enthusiasm swept all Republicans out of power in the state’s biggest city, flipped two House seats, and took a larger chunk of the state legislature. University of Texas government professor James Henson declared it “the beginning of the end for one-party rule in Texas.”

It was part of a broader rebuke of Trump that won Democrats the House and their first meaningful check on the president’s power. While upset about Beto’s loss, Democratic leaders and activists were so thrilled with his performance in the state and on the wider national stage that the debate turned to whether he should run for Texas’s other Senate seat in 2020 or instead seek the presidency, since the country as a whole was significantly less conservative than Texas. On the front page of the New York Times’ first Sunday edition after the election, the paper’s political reporters wrote that Democrats were debating whether to run in 2020 as moderates or as liberals, and that “at the center of the dispute is Rep. Beto O’Rourke,” in the latter camp. A month later, as Beto looked increasingly likely to run for president, the paper wrote that he had realized a long track record mattered less in the age of Trump than grassroots enthusiasm. As Beto mulled his next step, the hidden hacking history he knew would be revealed in this book played a role.

As with his youthful arrests and brief punk rock career, Republicans would certainly use his teen writings and his associations to tar him as a cultural misfit and radical. But the legacy would also engender deeper loyalty from some Silicon Valley technologists who were already drawn to his appreciation of their issues, his liberal approach on some matters, and his libertarianism on others. Forced by the 2016 presidential election to consider their own role in society in a less flattering light, those technologists could see Beto as a powerful shot at redemption.

Beto finished his last term in Congress and spent most of January driving himself through several states talking to whomever he encountered, weighing what to do next. When he returned, he booked an interview on Oprah Winfrey’s show Super Soul Sunday and teased the political class and the public, saying he would decide soon. Just after the release of an upbeat documentary about his Senate run and a Vanity Fair cover story on his background, Beto declared his campaign for president on March 14. “This is a defining moment of truth for this country,” he began in his announcement video. “The interconnected crises in our economy, our democracy, and our climate have never been greater, and they will either consume us, or they will afford us the greatest opportunity to unleash the genius of the United States of America.”

The day after his announcement, with Beto immediately in the upper echelon of the race and our embargo on his youthful activity expired, Reuters released a long story based on this manuscript. The news shot around the country, making every major paper and website and creating more than 50 million impressions on social media. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson mocked the vulgar poem to a cow Beto had posted as a teen. On HBO, Democratic show host Bill Maher gave a different perspective in his opening monologue: “Some interesting parallels between Trump and Beto. As a teenager—this is true—Beto belonged to a computer hacking group called the Cult of the Dead Cow. And as an adult Trump belongs to a computer hacking group called Russia.”

The overall impact appeared modestly positive for his nascent campaign. Many younger voters who had been unimpressed by Beto before said it was the first thing that intrigued them, and technologists were positively giddy. “This is one of the most ‘holy shit’ things that has happened on my twitter feed that wasn’t bad… ever,” tweeted Robyn Greene, a Facebook privacy manager formerly at the ACLU. When asked about it, Beto said he was “mortified” at some of his early writing. Looking on nervously, the core of the cDc hoped they were right that the disclosure would nonetheless help him appeal to the young and disaffected without losing too many traditionalists. Beyond that, they hoped Beto would open up about his roots and, win or lose, show that a future run by hackers could be a great one.

Robert “Beto” O’Rourke / Psychedelic Warlord