At this point in time I really feel it is a dire necessity to unmask myself and reveal to you who I really am and where I have been, before I am completely lost through time's ability to distort and obscure the memory of me that is surely trying to be snuffed out by desperate persons in the Justice Department. I assure you that they have good reason to be very afraid. Should people remember me, certain questions will be raised that demand answers, and answers will wreck absolute havoc should people learn what happened to this hacker.
But not just me. No, I am what defines a political prisoner in America to the letter. So is Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown, Andrew Auernheimer (Weev), Deric Lostutter (KYAnonymous), Matthew Weigman (little hacker), the PayPal16, Aaron Swartz and Dennis Moran(rest in peace, brothers) and so many others. We are all political prisoners who have been treated with extreme prejudice in the Justice Department's campaign against hackers, made examples of, judicially crucified and condemned by manufactured cases. Is it irony or coincidence that Brown, Weigman and I all had the same prosecutor, who could possibly be the one to retry Auernheimer? I am going to expose the facts, and you will be able to verify what I have said. What you do with that information could be the salvation of many.
This story is divided into three main chapters of my life. I hope my story inspires you and so moves you to action. This is a story never told until now, and this revelation will damn the Department of Justice.
Patriot. Father. Musician. Freedom Fighter. Activist. Minister. Hacker. Political Prisoner.
Enter my world...
Public Notice
This writing is protected free speech reserved to me under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. To interfere with this right is to defy the Law, and the People who consent to the articles contained therein.
Part 1 The Hacker
Hacking is not merely an act of doing, but first and foremost a way of critical thinking. In the case of the chicken or the egg, it was a way of thinking outside of the confines of 'box' mentalities that preceded the act of hacking, which in turn gave birth moreso to self-discovery, ideals, and so forth; as the creative tinkerer learned that reality as we know it does not have to be absolute - not while mindless possibilities wait to be discovered.
It becomes a way of life. Self Liberty. Art form as code is constructed. Life is created. It is expression. For love or hate. War or peace. Fun or mischief. Curiosity...
I became a computer hacker back in 1998. I began out of curiosity and the need for self-defense as the victim of another person's senseless mischief. I vowed never to let that happen again. I lived in IRC, on DALNet and Undernet, learning from silent observation, alternating my handles rotating my socks proxies and just drifting below anyone's radar; no affiliations, just me.
In late 2006 - eight years later - I decided I wanted to join a hacking community and experience kinship with other like-minded enthusiasts. I had ideals and visions of my own, mainly influenced by a patriotic undercurrent where I longed to make something of my life, however unconventional my pursuit was at the time. People seem to confuse 'patriotism' with 'loyalty to the government' which is precisely the opposite of 'loyalty to the people.' I see hacktavists as being the new patriot of the 21st century. So I went in search of people who shared my same ideals.
That is when I found Dev/Null. In these days I'd just got married and had joined the working class as a security guard. But most of my time was spent volunteering at my church as their music director. Later, I would become the youth minister. I deeply enjoyed the music ministry, playing my violin or piano and sometimes the penny whistle. But the level of control and conformity was often so overbearing that I quite literally found myself seeking an outlet away from this controlling and often coercive environment. Home was not much of a home, having married into a Latin family that was so intrusive that my mother-in-law kept interfering with my marriage, which often was the cause of my marital rift. To make my wife's family respect her more, my wife usually had me tell them I had a ritzy career of some sort. While this degraded my self esteem, it elevated our position among her family.
The church controlled nearly every aspect of my life. I was forbidden to seek employment by the Bishop of the church for fear that my conscience would become tainted by worldly things, I was not allowed to go back to college, or date certain women, or visit with certain members of our church. They used fear as a vice for control. So when I got married, I literally had to put my foot down so I could be free to provide for my family.
This was a cult. I followed orders to the letter, and had for years fallen to brainwashing. I did not see it for what it was until I was excommunicated for my family responsibilities which I had prioritized above the senseless demands being ordered to me. I was told to neglect those responsibilities, that church was my first priority. I knew this sounded wrong, my family has to eat too. I walked out and never looked back. Meanwhile, the Bishop, Eric McClellan, convinced even my own mother that I was demon possessed, and to have no contact with me. Naturally, she obeyed out of fear. I had been told these things before about people who left the church. My belief and faith never waivers, but I have a very good excuse why I have no trust in humanity.
Dev/Null and I are the founding members of the Electronik Tribulation Army. The Cult of the Dead Cow was not accepting new membership in 2006 and I had always admired them for their ever resilient presence and history. I had joined another hacking crew for awhile called Insane Masterminds' Crew, but their leader was a tyrannical bully of the worse kind, using fear to control members, milking them for false respect, and harshly ridiculing anyone who has ideas better than his own. He had alot of enemies and twice as many victims he would enjoy brutalizing. I was in the process of starting a group of my own that actually encouraged free thought instead of condemning it when IMC's leader threatened to dismantle what I had wanted to build for people - people who just wanted to belong. I systematically destroyed IMC over the course of a year, It had to be done, I do not tolerate cyber bullies.
One such enemy of IMC was a budding hacker named The Fixer, aka Coax, aka Darth Anonymous. I actually framed him for the initial attack on IMC so he would get the street credz while I worked IMC from the inside out.
I let Fixer know my intentions and we became very good friends after this. Fixer would become ETA's third member and us three its founding fathers, as me at the head as director. We inherited most of the IMC members, and gave them full rein and respect to their ideas and contributions.
ETA was an idea ahead of its time. We scoured the web looking for people who were being ill-treated by their peers, intervened in most cases by disarming cyber bullies and empowering victims. Most of the victims chose to make ETA their home, and they did not have to possess the mind for hacking to be part of this family we were building. We did train most of them to be able to perform some kind of useful task, be that port scanning, social engineering, pwning remote desktops, doxing ect.
As we grew, we performed IRC sting operations hunting for online pedophiles. The results were sent to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. This became an event called "Catch a Pedo Month'.
Anonymous
Many of the ETA members were active anonymous members of varying degrees of affiliation. In those days Anonymous was not what it is today, just as ETA is not what I created it to be back then. But somewhere in between, our ideals and visions are one and the same. Anonymous was surrounded by media sensationalism, confusion, and many bad eggs, though certainly not the majority was involved in the malicious acts of the few. They opposed the Church of Scientology, we opposed VeriChip Corps human implantable RFID chips. But the love of Anonymous caused me much diplomatic static among other ETA members and our supporting allies who did not care for Anonymous and made a point of telling me, even under the threat of pulling resources they were providing us.
Publicly, I opposed Anonymous as a whole, as a means to catch and topple the ones who would rise up in challenge with something to prove because I knew that these were the ones who were likely to trouble starters, so in reality I was targeting certain people and not the whole collective. Baiting with blood to catch a few sharks. This would please our diplomatic relations, however at my expense.
So I became 74K71X and submerged myself in the tides of the Legion, all the while playing both sides of the coin, so to speak.
As Ghost Exodus, I focused alot of my attention against a troll known as 'Internet Hate Machine' from 94chan, but secretly as 74K71X I was a member of 94chan. Specifically, I was IHM's /h/acker. She knew who I was and she played along, though hostility could erupt at the drop of a hat between us as we were unable to trust each other in any capacity, she was more like an opportunity to help me network with others in her immediate circle. One such connection was the famed 'Internet Death Machine', whose song 'Yiff in Hell Fur Fag' made him renowned. He secretly doubled as an ETA member, and protected my online identity. Others helped me find and identify those nefarious characters for which I was hunting. And when IHM double crossed me in an unforgivable manner, I gave her dox to 24chan (I think) to aid in their /r/aid against her. This account can be found on Encyclopedia Dramatica under IHM's real name.
This was like being a die-hard republican by day and a closet anarchist by night. While I am an anarchist, in those days I held a conservative view due to the church's right-wing conditioning. I am an anarchist because the present circumstances of my life call for it. The Law itself is now, in fact, lawless. But, I am jumping ahead...
An Anon troll named Issac Guest had it in for me after one of my ETA members did a drive-by rape of his myspace account. She had targetted him on her own volition. I had to clamp down on unsanctioned hacks in the name of ETA due to angry people trying to blame me for the defacements or intrusions that I had not even been aware of. His problem was not with me, but with the girl who dealt the attack without my consent. But Isaac did not see it that way, so I blocked him in the hope he would find someone else to gripe at. But Isaac just could not lay it down and move on. I, however, did.
ETA had acquired a taste for hacking government and military-owned websites. It was like the ultimate gratification, because you come to the idea with this preconceived notion that the sites and the servers that host them are secure as can be, but surprisingly these are by far the most insecure of most of my encounters.
Let me make this perfectly clear. A government or military owned website that is accessible to the public is both open and public domain. They do not contain secrets, and they are hosted on public servers and NOT said government agencies local area networks. If it was, those System Administrators should be fired... or slapped.
A favorite pastime was trying a website against a library of cross-site script (XSS) strings to look for web servers susceptible to XSS vulnerabilities, which usually provided some form of notification to let the tester know the target was vulnerable, such as customizing a javascript pop-up to the tester could see, and know the target was vulnerable, and if the tester is to go a step further; to craft an attack that exploits the discovered vulnerability.
The local area networks themselves were laughably insecure, and it got to the point were I thought it was not funny any more. America is my home, and if our network infrastructure is this weak, what will happen to us in the face of a real threat to cyber national security? I wanted to do something, so I constantly sought employment with companies and different government agencies, but with no such luck since I did not have the credentials to 'prove' that I could perform. It should be realized that it is these credential-holders who have lax, non-enforceable network policies which makes these companies such easy targets. Governments can not meddle in the personal responsibilities of the private sector, or the individual user. Not only is it your responsibility to secure your vehicle when you leave it, it is a computer user's responsibility to secure his or her computer and digital property.
It was 2008 and Isaac Guest was back. I unblocked him out of curiosity, only to find him blood-lusting for my downfall in a very personal way. He behaved like a psychopath, and his vendetta against me unjustified. A little probing turned up chatlogs with him conspiring with other enemies of mine to frame me for the sole purpose of being known as the guy who destroyed me and the ETA. He wanted me in prison, and for my daughter to grow up without a father. I kept a hard copy of these logs as evidence just in case he succeeded. IHM joined him in his campaign, along with Anon members Chilly and AAUGUSTA3.
ETA got infiltrated and our site defaced by Anonymous. Then Fixer's email was hacked and his dox leaked, which they gathered from court documents found in his inbox. His house was vandalized. Next, Fixer and I started receiving spoofed phone calls with death threats. Most of the ETA that had not left for college or the military had simply left us, bring disheartened by the war being wrought against us. The death threats, however common place, were taken very seriously because we had families to protect. Rape threats. Doctored images of Fixer's son photoshopped in ways that portrayed him as being molested. Fixer filed a police report. Nothing was ever followed up.
You see, it is precisely when we as people can not rely on the law that forces us to take the law into our own hands. But it had not come to this... not yet. It is like an unwritten law in hackerdom to never send the law after your own kind. Isaac was nothing like me, though - he was not even a hacker. Plus, I feared the risk of exposing myself as a hacker and thereby being investigated, and my problem was shelved in favor of bigger fish to fry. My group could be exposed and the initial point ignored entirely. I continued logging the chats, and cataloging the threatening phone calls, while throwing decoys and disinformation at Isaac to buy me more time. I figured if Isaac succeeded in framing me, then once arrested, this evidence might serve a purpose in my defense. (Hahahaha... yeah right!)
My address got leaked, though I was not doxed. I was living under the shadow of being swatted for two days until I moved my family to another apartment unit, never being able to tell my wife why I was in such a push to relocate. The person who found the address was not entirely sure it was me - I had been dishing out disinformation for years, but still I could not afford to take any chances.
By 2009 I found and met Splax0r on CraigsList, who lived a mile down the road from me in Euless, Texas, right behind Trinity High School. I even named him 'Splax0r'; I named server of my ETA family. I trained him in basic exploitation, taught him my chatrooom habits and behaviors, gave him my access and the keys to my kingdom as he assumed my identity as Ghost Exodus while I distanced myself from the net for about a month to regain my equilibrium and think things through.
Splax0r and I hung out together often, doing PC repair work, swapping computer hardware, war driving and pranking unsuspected cellphone users with my cellphone jammer as we drove around the city. People should be paying attention to the road. We got our kicks from driving around Arlington while wearing masks and jamming out to electronic music. Of course, I had my infamous gas mask and I had let him borrow the Guy Fawkes one. That smug grin always earned us the most classic stares and pointed fingers. Good times, and the laughs were therapeutic for me, giving the tribulation I was under. Pardon the pun.
I thought it a senseless injustice for anyone to wish ill of the ETA, but those who did simply misunderstood what we were, and what it meant to be a part of the ETA crew. It was a counsel for so many troubled people. One such hacker found his place of acceptance among us when his own family demonized him for being gay. Another found friends who would not poke fun at him for being overweight. I counseled the suicidal tendencies out of quite a few, and helped some with their homework. THAT is what community is supposed to be about. Hell, I even spoke to parents on their behalf. ETA was Jesse McGraw's best kept secret, and this became my ministry, but not the conventional kind where you try to impose or compel others believe in your religion. Love and charity transcends religion.
But I was playing a very dangerous game. I was juggling two lives, and the one was forcing itself upon the other. Plus, my ego was so inflated as to believe I could not be touched. ETA was a private crew, they wanted to go public- reluctantly, we did, and that was also a stupid idea. More security. More enemies. More work.
I came back early from my break when Splax0r gave up the surrogate 'me' because now the attacks from Isaac, IHM and the others were now focused on him. At this point, one of my fake dox had backfired on me.
The Noose
I sent the chalogs to the Internet Crime Complaint Center and made a plea to the FBI from a burner email account after my adopted mum in Oceanside, California warned me that the police were looking for me. Isaac definitely was not bluffing. It angered me that he could not even do a righteous hack. He had no honor. His vision of a pwn was sending me to prison. I do not understand that type of thinking. other than to recognize it is abnormal.
I had a friend in Oceanside who had died some years ago, so I used his name and dox, attached it to a google earth image of his last documented residence, and put my photo with the dox. The information would be verifiable, whilst a fictitious person might lead to a dead end, or actually belong to some innocent individual about to be harassed by a big internet tough guy.
Isaac notified the Oceanside Police. The police reviewed the information contained in the dox, only to discover that the person I used was deceased, survived by his wife and kids. The police visited the wife and showed her an image of me. She identified me and directed them to my mum's house - who told the police she did not know me.
I finally felt my time coming to an end, and I blogged about it on MySpace vampirefreaks.com, posting the chatlogs in March to create a public record of what Isaac and his fellow conspirators were trying to do. It is always wise to make a public record.
June 2009 was a very busy month. Devil's Night, July 4th, was only a month away. Devil's Night was Fixer's estranged creation - an annual attack party on the day to declare your independence from bullies, punks and oppressors. Anybody could submit a target to us and we would handle the vendetta. We were pressed for time, however, and our botnets were not communicating with our domain consistently, which left Fixer in an obsessed R & D mode, and the few of us left reluctant to go to all the trouble of spreading a mal-configured bot. And when the bots were working, he usually kept me out of the IRC command and control, which really was aggravating. We usually spread our bots through infecting legitimate software over peer-to-peer file sharing, but it all seemed pointless. The year before, Devil's Night never got launched due to a vicious DDOS attack on Fixer and our servers, that originated from China. He phoned me in the hope I could take over and issue a counter-strike against the chinese hackers Command and Control center. He gave me one of the IPs addressed to one of the zombie computers that had packet stormed him, which so happened to be running Terminal Services (RDP port 3389). I cracked my way in and raced to try to run netstat and capture the connecting C&C server distributing commands to the bot installed on the machine. Well, the repeated connection attempts made by my cracker not only made me a direct target, but it also put my offending IP on their radar, since I did not have time to run a WiFi hotspot and enjoy a level of anonymity.
I was slammed by a hailstorm of packets. I am out of commission, the site exceeded its bandwidth quota (hence, denial of service), but our domain controller was still good. They were, in fact, targeting our URL, which was forwarding all the packets to our site. Using my Sony PSP, on a neighbor's WiFi, I quickly logged into our domain controller and pointed the domain name to redirect the packets to their botnets C&C server... (ROFL!) Pwn...
I did not care for how Fixer was hoarding the entire episode with configuring the bots, because the process should not have been that hard. So a hacker named Cr4sh and I built our own botnet, configured, compiled, and ready to go. I had one idea in mind, keep Isaac and his skiddie collective offline and send a message to 94chan, of course 4chan, (which one of his co-conspirators was a member.) But then Cr4sh just up and left, taking our new weapon with him. There was not many of us left now. Just Fixer, Splax0r, and myself. Back to R&D with Fixer...
I was needing a fast and effective means of mass infection without having to take the time to do it myself. Infecting browser plug-ins and software updates is ideal, but I was a working man, a father and a husband, and I just did not have the time to do grunt work. So I decided to create propaganda recruitment videos to inspire younger hackers and wanna-be's to join the Devil's Night movement by helping us spread the bot with us - and in turn, we would consider any target they wanted us to hit.
The Videos
Propaganda is a very subversive art form that has been utilized since man has had any enemy, and needed to influence others to join his cause against that enemy. Every war in America has been moved forward through the art of propaganda. The Nazis used it. The Allied countries used it. America used it against the Soviet Union, and they in turn used it back against us. Propaganda can be based on truth or fiction, used to breed fear or hate, invoke feelings of patriotism and the need for justice. Cause suspicion or rally people in unified outcry. It can be factual or misleading.
I dressed in my hoodie and created my infiltration video set to the tune of Mission Impossible (ironic, no?) which was designed to invoke excitement, intrigue, and the ambiance of a secret mission being carried out. Propaganda 101 is thus: image portrayal. Message construction. Intended audience and delivery platform. Many hackers seek community because they yearn to be part of some kind of movement, and receive peer recognition for their contributions and accomplishments. My videos were for those individuals.
I needed people to believe I had infiltrated some corporation, swiped a security passkey form the guard desk, accessed restricted areas and installed my bot, and that it was their duty to follow my lead and do similar things (though not to the extreme I went- that was simply for shock). Unknown to my YouTube viewers, I actually worked at the location, the Carrell Clinic, which is home to private practices specializing in outpatient orthopedics and sports medicine.
THIS IS NOT A HOSPITAL.
Hospitals have emergency rooms filled with the infirm, sick, or injured. ICU's with patients in unstable states and with a high risk of death. Women giving birth, open heart surgeries, a loved one holding the hand of a passing father, and many others.
The Carrell Clinic's doors close at night, and remain locked over the weekend. Again, this is NOT a hospital.
I posted screen shots of the HVAC servers Human Machine Interface software on the Web under the guise of a random hack I had conducted during a scan looking for vulnerable remote desktops. People did not know I actually worked there and had local access. I didnt have much time for hacking anymore.
I found the HVAC server behind a locked closet one evening while looking for a computer to use on my own break. Most systems were either powered down or password protected (my use of OphCrack came later) and I was surprised to find this rickety old machine currently logged into a user account 'HVAC ISD', requiring no password. There were two or three other user accounts, one being 'Tom' and another being 'Bobbay', which actually required passwords. Interesting? Very.
The HVAC
The HVAC server is an interesting story and deserves a full account. Here I found what would otherwise be a sensitive, industrial control system used for regulating the temperature throughout the facility. The HMI software opened automatically upon login, or sat opened or tabbed on the WindowsXP desktop as the last user had left it. Anyone who had legitimate access to this security closet likely accessed this open account. Internet Explorer yielded a ton of cookies and search history which told me that this account is often used for private surfing and emails. Most of the history was from various news groups.
I found a shared folder. Bobbay had LimeWire installed under his protected account, which he used for downloading and sharing movies, music and games. One might conclude that this particular system was not of a very sensetive nature. I broke Bobbay's password with Cain & Abel and switched users. Indeed, Bobbay did not seem to think the HVAC was a particularly sensitive computer either. (Obviously). I checked the System Uptime. I have learned early on that if a system has not been shut down or rebooted for a long time, chances are that the system probably maintains a critical service that should not be stopped or halted.
I started using the HVAC server to check email, MySpace, buy car magnets from VistaPrint, and I downloaded OphCrack Vista which obviously is not compatible with any of the computers at the Clinic.
Back at my guard desk, I ran a laptop on the tail end of a weak - wifi signal from my vantage point. The Clinic provided free public access onto their network- with the constant signal dropping, it is no wonder I used the HVAC system at all. Then, I had an idea. I nstalled TeamView on the HVAC so I could login from my guard desk and use it to multi-task. I left my 6 GB usb device hooked up so my downloads would go directly to my removable device, and used Firefox portable from a CD, benefiting from the Read-Only attribute of the CD, so none of my browser behavior would be written to the disk.
But the HVAC's firewall blocked my incoming connection attempts with TeamView, so I tried another commercial remote access utility called LogMeIn.
Ladies and gentleman, this is count 2 of my indictment for Transmitting a Malicious Code.
I was never charged with putting a botnet on the HVAC. There were no viruses involved, only a commercial remote access program and not the botnet I am charged with for Count 1, which was for the bot I installed in the YouTube video. But the government hung my use of the HVAC in connection with the botnet in Count 1 for preparation with Devil's Night. So if the HVAC itself was free from the botnet pool, why was everyone saying I had attacked a hospital HVAC system in preparation for Devil's Night? After all, was the Clinic the target of a botnet attack? Or was it the source of a botnet attack? Big difference, being the facilitator vs being the target. I will tell you who started the sensational bullshit soon enough.
I used OphCrack XP to access other systems throughout the network- a total of 14 systems. Many computer's anti-virus caught the invading bot, and I did not care to spend alot of time disabling or reconfiguring McAfee, so I installed LogMeIn on those systems and had Fixer and Splax0r do the grunt work so I could man the guard desk and do my rounds. The Bot required a system reboot and I gave Fixer and Splax0r precise instructions not to reboot the HVAC since it was not part of this operation to begin with.
I met a skilled hacker named XxxImmortalxxX, aka Hex0010. He became a new ETA recruit, and he made alot of impressive contributions to our war ravaged hold out. Zealous and ambitious, he invited me to participate in the DC3 challenge, a Digital Forensics competition run by the Department of Defense, This was where he revealed to me that he was a DoD informant, which meant he helped put hackers in prison. He also revealed to me that DC3 was a recruitment platform for government snitches.
Let me tell you how I feel about hacker snitches...
My wife had a friend who's husband is a subcontractor that does IT consultation and Incident Response for various 3 letter agencies, one of which is the NSA. I came to him to help me find work in the IT field, when he started bragging about how he was spying on this particular little hacker group, planning to get them all arrested. He showed me their website, and I just nodded my head and acted all excited, but when I got home, I had to tip them off so they could live another day. This guy was a raging egofag, and I could tell his motivations were NOT for justice but for self gain.
I had thought of intercepting Immortal's communications with his DoD handler, cutting the handler out and causing Immortal to report and take orders from me unknowingly, but as I was embarking on that endeavor, the Green Revolution was kicking off in Iran.
Protester Help
The message came to via PM on YouTube. The people of Iran were crying foul in the streets of Tehran, saying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defrauded voters and stole the presidential election from Mousavi. Protesters were being beaten with sticks and clubs, twitter storms followed, and the media (state-sponsored) was disinforming the public. I then saw the martyr video of young Neda Soltan, a peaceful protester marching for women's rights. Pro-government militas stormed the streets and shot Neda in the chest as she collapses amidst a throng of activists. She lays in the street, blood pouring from her wound, mouth and nose, and then she lets out a final death rattle and gives up the ghost. Internet censorship tried to stop the outflow of reports, which governments do to conceal a matter. The people wanted justice, though I knew justice could not be given from my end, but I sure as hell could do something.
The message was a call-to-arms to all able hackers around the world to packet attack a list of Iranian government websites and local area networks. Who could say no after watching that senseless murder? It MUST be done! Crash and burn!
With the few precious bots Fixer managed to keep online, I logged into the IRC command and control from my HTC tilt windows phone and issued the one simple string into the command line prompt and called it a night. I had followed the twitter storms, seen many videos, and hoped something so small could somehow make a big difference.
DoD and Me
During the DC3 competition, I was propositioned by a recruiter. Funny, he kept calling me 'Ghosty" and tried appealing to my ego with praise, but the catch was basically that he wanted me to switch to a 'white hat' and snitch on all my friends. I realize that white hat snitches are the minority, but I just never cared for the whole law abiding, white hat prospect. The grey area is so much more fun. I respect a great number of White Hats, but I just do not really fit in that lot very well.
The recruiter and I discussed recent headline cyber attacks and the dangers they pose to the national infrastructure of cyber security, and I gave him some of the exploit strings that went with some of the government websites we had pwnt over the years. XSS vulnerabilities in army.mil, pentagon.mil, nasa.gov, and such - some sites vulnerable to CGI and SQL, some directory traversal attacks - the works.
I had not intentions of to give up hackers, so I maintained a loose relationship with the recruiter by sending him data on vulnerabilities.
Then I landed a job as a network security analyst for a private ISP in Dallas. I had found the job posting on Craigslist, and though I was not even qualified to even apply for the job position, my interviewer had watched my YouTube videos on WEP/WPA cracking and network traffic hijacking and said, 'we want THAT guy'. This surprise came right before I was actually going to join the Army National Guard. But it was to be short lived.
Immortal phoned me to say never to talk to the DoD recruiter anymore, that they were asking Immortal questions about me, wanting him to help them bring me in. It felt suspicious to me. What did I have to do with National Security? If the FBI or Secret Service was not asking questions, then the DoD had to be barking up the wrong tree - or, better yet, Immortal was lying.
I phoned my sweeper to start cleaning up my accounts and forum posts. Though when I asked Immortal if I was in any danger, he assured me not to worry, he'd taken care of it. Hahaha.
I decided against formatting my drive, dumping my RAM and switching back to Ubuntu Linux Live Distro. I am a Linux junkie, but at that time I was using SnitchWare (Windows).
Life went on as usual, and as usual, Fixer called me to report that the bots were not connecting again, and at this point I could care less. Devil's Night really belonged to Fixer, and I would find a hundred other methods to take justice into my own hands.
I kiss my 13 month old daughter goodbye before I went to work for my night shift. That was June 26, 2009. I have not been home since. Funny, I foreknew the day I was to be arrested. Still, I walked right up into it, even knowing what my end would be. My journal entry for June 26, 2009 started with "this is it. This is the day I'll be arrested. For what, I don't know." It was a long time coming. Part of me wanted some intervening force to rescue me from a life that had become a lie, troubled with calamity and unhappiness, but never like this. But what none of us ever anticipated was this would not be the end of Ghost Exodus; no this was only the beginning. What I was about to go through no American citizen should ever have to go through. Judicial abuse and textbook torture wold become my lot. But it would be a powerful catalyst to give me purpose. A reason, and a vision. You cannot hold this political prisoner down. As long as I have breath, I will fight.