Part 3
The Raid
I am driving to work around 10:30pm, grateful it is my last night I will ever have to work contract security ever again. Tomorrow, I will be working full-time as a network security analyst for an ISP. I have my Sony PSP hooked up to my tape deck, Playlist 'Attack Beats' song : Voodoo People Remix by Pendulum - the bass from the speakers rattling my Cutlass. Fixer is blowing up my phone with texts. Bots working. Bots not working. No Devil's Night. Who cares. I scrapped the idea, but there is no scrapping Fixer's fixation when he is in the zone, wired in. I really do not care anyway. With my new job I was telling my wife we should buy a house in Dallas and really establish ourselves, get away from the in-laws. I will deal with Isaac and his cronies on MY terms, on a battlefield I control.
I rolled up to the Clinic, cirlcing around the building as is my usual route. Black van by the back entrance. Must be a cleaning crew, I think to myself. I pull up to the front, and meet the new guy Im supposed to be training to take over my shift. He is brand new, right out of training. We go through the sliding glass doors and I greet the second shift guard we are relieving.
"FREEZE!!"
The Arrest
Three FBI agents, two state police and a senior police officer stormed my flanks with guns raised at me - each barking different commands at once. At first I found myself smiling, thrown into the Twilight Zone and not really sure if I was awake or dreaming. This had to be a prank. They were not really FBI agents, right? If they were, then for which crime have they come to take me away? A million questions rolled through my mind. Yeah, this was really happening.
"Where is the gun?" they shouted.
"What gun?" I shouted back, my hands spread on the granite guard desk.
"Where is the gun?" they shouted again.
"What gun? This is a non-commissioned post!" I shouted back.
"The gun from the video!" Special Agent Lynd shouted.
"Which video?" Yeah, I had alot of videos....
"The one from Myspace!" he yelled.
"Which Myspace?" Specifics would help.
Special Agent Lynd clarified the video in question, looking at his smartphone at a list of notes. "Oh, THAT video," I explained, "That was a toy gun."
They holstered their weapons and cuffed me, sitting me in a chair, since I could hardly stand on my own legs. The trainee was free to leave, and the second shift guard phoned my supervisor.
I could not think. My thoughts were a raging torrent of colliding chaos.
"Is this about Ghost Exodus? Or about the DoD?" I asked. The only coherent rational idea I could muster was that Immortal had been telling me the truth. Obviously asking questions is very VERY self incriminating. Now I wish I had kept my mouth shut, but I knew no better then. I thought these were the good guys... I had wanted to work cyber crimes in an FBI task force, so they were doing what I had envisioned myself doing. But as time went on I would loathe myself for being so naive.
My wife was raided, and I was praying that they did not kick in my front door because that was right where my daughter liked to play. My supervisor had arrived on the scene in a rage storm, but he was not raging at me (thankfully).
"How dare you humiliate one of my officers like this?" he demanded, marching toward the agents. he rest of the shock troopers had been dismissed. They were only there as backup and extra fire power. Six shooters just to overwhelm little ol' me. The agents kept my supervisor back. I requested the agents help me remove my uniform shirt and badge. I felt like a dirty cop, sitting there in my uniform in a chair with my hands cuffed behind me.
"Is this about the DoD?" I asked again.
"Why don't you tell us what this is about." They answered. Self incrimination leads to open and closed cases. Just shut up, do not try to be helpful. Just STFU.
I didn't, though. I figured I would be helpful and I could just go home quicker. We can work this out. Hahaha. Kidding.
In the black van headed for the country jail, SA Lynd gave me 'the speech.'
"Don't talk, just listen," Lynd began while he steered the van into the night. Special Agent Ajeet Singh and Special Agent Howard sat on either side of me in the back seat. "You can either tell us to fuck off and refuse to comply and get eleven years like the last guy did, or you can be compliant so we can get this over with as quickly as possible."
Does that mean I can go home? Was I being baited? Who just got eleven years?
I asked him about the unfortunate fellow. A blind phone phreaker. A legend. Matthew Weigman, aka 'little hacker'. Did I mention he is a legend. Yeah, I did. I would be meeting up with little hacker soon enough. Eleven years, and only 19 years old... greatest phone phreaker alive.
At the station I was photographed and then digitally fingerprinted into a computer running Windows NT, the login scribbled on a sticky note, pinned to the side of the old monitor. Heh, my narcissism was creeping up on me. Typical '.gov.'
Into the Interrogation Room I went.
Interrogation
There was irony in the good cop bad cop choreography, and that is with Lynd being the bad cop and Singh, who was, in fact, an honest and 'good' cop. You can not group them all together by implying that just because they work for the same system they all share the same ideals and code of conduct. You have to be able to see past the badges and the masks, as it were - but also do not be naive, as they do have a job to perform and its not a pretty one.
I was juiced on ego and desperate to get home to my wife and child.
"We know what you did. The sooner you confess to what you did, the sooner we can move on."
Tactical interrogation: we know everything, so confess everything.
Logical conclusion: If that is the case, why do you have to ask to begin with?
Why? Self incrimination. Self confession. Open and closed case.
Yeah, and I fell for it because I still thought they were the good guys. I told them my life story. No, I do not need an attorney, I am doing the right thing, I am complying. See? Can I go home now?
Yea, right. Hahahaha.
My cellphone lay vibrating on the the wooden table between us. What I would give to be able to call my sweeper and declare myself to be 'Defcon Black', and ID security challenge code word for 'busted'. It was Fixer, blowing up my phone, probably telling me 'botnet down", "botnet up", "botnet down", ect, ect. STFU fapping bastard...
The ringing phone brought up the question concerning all the hackers I know. Ha. All their names were in haxor right there, in my address book. They would retrieve it from me either way, so I made a list.
"Tell us about the botnet video and the HVAC computer."
THAT is what this was all about? Why didn't you say so? Of course, more self incrimination.
"Who acted with you on the Carrell Clinic intrusions?"
No, that was the one thing I would not do. I would not give up my men. They were family. I thought of Fixer and Splax0r sitting in prison, torn from their families and everyone they loved or knew. I would be free, but a snitch, and everyone would know it. Death before dishonor.
"I acted alone," I said. They bought it.
They had the leader of the Electronic Tribulation Army. A smile played about Lynd's lips. He knew me from somewhere. Small world, really...
Back in 2008 one of my members named Punizzle was busted hacking into his high school - an unsanctioned intrustion. He was young and did not get any time. e knew he would be arrested, but is AOL Instant Messenger was still online from his cellphone, which was in the hands of the FBI, and I felt they were trying to engage us to entrap or pull us into what Punizzle had done, pretending to be him. This is a a common practice of the FBI, Lynd told me that much. So I made a YouTube video "ETA Member Arrested: in which I told the FBI that I did not condone their use of Punizzle's cellphone and that I was going to send an SMS flood (text message bomb) to his cellphone and knock it off the network, but even though it will not erase forensic evidence, it would lock up the phone and force them to pull out the battery to unfreeze it, And I did.
"Remember Punizzle?" Lynd asked with a smirk. "That was me you were talking to."
Oh.
Singh then asked me "What can you tell us about Anonymous?"
An interesting turn. I suspected an ongoing agenda here.
"Can you tell us if they are planning anything I should know about?"
It seemed they wanted alot more than just me.
"Nothing you don't already know," I told them.
I thought of Isaac Guest. Of IHM. My friends in the collective. The FBI and I already mentioned briefly the death threats, but I did not give them any names because I did not know how it all would play out. The raid team already lifted the chat logs from my apartment. That could not be helped. My hands were clean. Let me take the fall. Non one else need go down with me. I had hoped Fixer and Splax0r would choose to use their freedom gratefully. I had just sacrificed my life for them.
Lynd then said "I have an idea. If you write the Judge a letter, explaining everything you did on the Carrell Clinic systems, there is a chance he will go easy on you."
More self-incrimination. My own statements against myself would soon bury me so deep in the system that I would likely never see the light of day. But I wrote it. I was so naive.
"This has to be the best letter I have ever seen!" Lynd exclaimed with enthusiasm.
Next, I was stripped of my clothing in front of other people and led to a small, cramped tank that smelled of piss and vomit, other inmates coming down from drugs, reeking of body stench and alcohol, and all I can think is, "Am I going to get raped?" Prison rape is so bad in America that it has become a kind of cliche or a sick joke that people who have never been to prison love to laugh about. I am not timid, and I know how to fight. It is the Prison system that creates these hostile environments, charged with deprivation and years to be isolated from the affections of the opposite sex.
The first thing I did was search and establish a friendship. But by the time I made that connection, I was extracted and led through a concrete labyrinth with many twists and turns and placed in solitary confinement in a Federal hold.
Solitary Confinement
I spent the next 48 hours in solitary confinement in the county jail. I fell into some semblance of sleep on a concrete slab for a bed. The cell was filthy and musty, with a grimy shower in one dark corner and mold streaking the walls and ceiling. There was no window.
Was it day or night? I could not tell. You could only tell the time of day by the meager, disgusting meals served three times a day. Food was so scarce I would save it all to eat at dinner.
Nightmares, confused with reality. Am I in this cell? Or is this just a bad dream? I see myself at home, playing with my daughter - then I wake up in a cold sweat. Confused. I was just home, how did I wake up here? I lost all sense of reality at night. I would cry myself to sleep over and over again.
Arraignment Hearing
U.S. Marshalls came and took me to the Dallas Court House. This was to be a preliminary bond and detention hearing before Magistrate Sanderson. I met my federal public defender John M. Nicholson and the hearing commenced. The things that Special Agent Lynd was telling the Magistrate barely made any sense to me.
"... compromised computers belonging to the NASA and computers at Lovefield Airport used for the Dallas Police Department's Aviation Unit." My screenshots were displayed on a projector for all to see. The was patently false testimony. He was displaying a screen capture of my XSS test on NASA.gov, but interpreting it as an actual intrusion. And the DPD remote desktop image - also a misrepresentation.
"That's not true," I whispered to my attorney. But, unfortunately, none of these Court room jesters knew how to interpret what they were seeing, so they just went along with it, uncontested. Little did I know that I would never even once have a chance to contest or counter it.
"... a fake ID document manufacturing kit was taken from his residence..."
I have never owned such a thing before. But the FBI agent was being very specific. But with all this so called evidence they were bringing out of the wood works, some things they only verified with oral testimony alone. And this was admissible - I did not even know what a fake ID kit looked like, let alone owned one.
I was all over the media. NBC. MSNBC. ABC. You name it. "Hospital Hacker." "Devil's Night." "...threatened to attack a hospital..." "...could have modified temperature controls..." "... adversely affecting the climate controls during Texas summer heat..." "... risk of death..."
WTF??
It all switched over from what I had actually done to the wild theories they came up with that could have happened in a worse case scenario. Though they never showed any proof of malicious intent. This had become a thought crime - problem being that I never had any intentions of modifying temperature controls, so why was everyone crucifying me for something I had not done, and had no intention of doing, and there was no evidence that I wanted to?? Moreso, who was feeding all this information to the FBI, the courts, then releasing this slander to the media? Hell, I did not even work at the hospital!
The answer revealed itself. Why did this confidential witness feel the need to unmask his role in this case? He would then go on to conduct interviews with various media platforms, podcast interviews, and would lecture about his role in helping the FBI crucify me at the Mississippi State University. Either he was misinforming the FBI as to the true content of these images, or he simply did not know what a cross site script vulnerability test does. Of course, being accused of hacking NASA and Dallas Police Department carried alot of weight to keep me locked up, and Wesley had to know that deviations from the truth was causing things to get out of hand, since it was his job to be informed of such distinctions in his 'research' capacity - or perhaps he was milking this for the glory, basking in the spotlight at my expense. His actions tell us much about his motivations. Was his enthusiasm really for justice and concern for public safety? Or was this more about self gain and to further his career?
You decide.
The media was telling a slew of contradicting stories, all bent on sensationalism and downright yellow journalism to boost ratings.
"Federal prosecutors charged McGraw with planning a massive Denial of Service attack on the HVAC system..."
"... installing malicious software on a couple of systems at a hospital in Texas..."
"... it would not be uncommon for temperatures to exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit..."
"... the malicious software... was a botnet and the hacker was planning a massive attack from all his controlled machines...
"Jesse McGraw faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and a fine of $500,000..."
Twenty years just for a plan to do something, regardless of whether I had retracted my intentions or not. It was Wesley McGrew who helped emphasize an image of me attacking the hospitals HVAC. And with this image in mind, even my own members bought into the idea that I had attacked a hospital. And yet, all one really had to do was read my indictment.
I was never charged with putting a botnet on a hospital's HVAC system. let alone the HVAC system at the Carrell Clinic...
Let that truth, the facts, sink in...
"FBI arrests hacker for posing as a security guard who infiltrated Texas hospital days before Devil's Night attack..."
And so the brainwashing did sway the masses and the jury. Even I had believed the hype. But then again, I had forgotten that i had never installed a bot on the HVAC. It was not until I pulled my mind away from the propaganda that I understood WHY the Justice Department kept running with these falsehoods.
John Nicholson gave me the evidence. I analyzed the HVAC's various logs and the page file. No botnet.
Oh yea... funny how that fact was forgotten. I had pwnt so many boxes in my lifetime it was hard to recall any specific events, let alone the details of what I did.
Now the FBI admitted that the HVAC had been compromised before a time I had ever been contracted to work at the Clinic. NASA also reported to the FBI handling my case that no breach had occurred. Dallas PD had a documented attempted intrusion on one of its computers - but this had occurred locally, not remotely, and it did not fit with the FBI's speculations.
Whoever said that the Media is interested in reporting the facts? I should sue. It was plaguing my mind at the time. Exposed to international public ridicule and contempt is not easy to deal with.
In connection with that prior breach was a keylogger that had captured everything I ever did on the HVAC. The log is several inches thick. What it reveals is that I was using the HVAC for personal use, and the connection between the HVAC and the botnet pool is nonexistent.
It was all a hoax, an elaborate fabrication.
There is a sucker born every minute.
Not your media. THEIR media.
Court room choreography.
Candina Heath was pressuring John Nicholson into advising me to take a deal that was on the table. John is a good attoney, granted, he is not perfect. I wanted to go to trial, but Candina wanted me to become a snitch and hang Fixer and Splax0r out to dry. They suspected their involvement, but they did not know how to cement it without my testimony as evidence. I am facing 20 years max, scared to death; but I am not ready to go home early - in a body bag. Forfeit all my gear, snitch them out, and in turn I would get an 8 year cap; meaning Judge Boyle would not sentence me above 8 years.
Hahahaha... ORLY?
"I can get eight years on my own," I told John. "Tell Candina she can shove it."
No deal. Death Before Dishonor.
"You know what I think? Fixer framed you," says the Cheif Forensics Investigator of the Public Defender's Office, Dan James. That was a suspicious thing for him to say. Candina must be working him, I thought. Fixer is not made out of that kind of stuff. I knew Dan was playing me.
Dan James was a very strange addition to my legal team. Being the Chief Forensic Investigator, he certainly didnt know shyt about forensics, or investigating for that matter.
"There is no such thing as Certified Ethical Hacking, Mr McGraw. I have been doing this for twelve years..."
"There is no such thing as a dos program called TS-Grinder. No dos-prompt is going to say 'cracking successful'. I think you photoshopped that image..."
"Once you install Windows, you can't go back and change the computer name to NSA.probe, Mr McGraw, you just can't..."
"I did exactly what you did in the botnet video like forty times, and you can't uninstall McAfee in the amount of time you did. You faked it, didn't you..."
"This log here shows a connection from NSA.probe listening to your computer.."
I had finally had enough!! I exploded. "Where in the HELL did you get your credentials? A damn cracker jack box or something? The NSA.probe is MY computer! Got that? ME! I don't know where you are getting your ideas from, but there is a BIG difference between you and me. You spent twelve years listening to lectures on hacking... I spent eleven years actually doing the hacking, the exploring!"
We both had egos to fight against. But he really did seem like a misguided amateur, and I felt that such a performance would only sabotage my case, especially in open court.
He was amusing with a few of his incorrect assumptions.
"Do you own the domain, mcgrewsecurity.com?"
He had found IHM's dox in some of my notes and he called her, identifying who he was. She did not believe him. He told me how she threatened to rape and kill him. rofl. A common response from a troll. "Do you know who I am?" he had said. "My name is on the Department of Justice's website, you dumbass!" He told me she straightened up rather quickly then but tried to change the direction of the conversation by declaring she wanted to sue me - for what she did not say. Quickly after that telephone interview, 94chan closed its doors and vanished.
Protests
Jail life is nothing glamorous. I lived through a riot between rival gangs and under the threat that all the white inmates where going to be stabbed. I wrote my daughter a letter telling her how much I loved her and that I really was a good person. I have been jumped twice, boxed in, cornered, and attacked. I really do look harmless, and its better that people do not know what I am capable of, or else they would want to challenge me more. The two times I was attacked, I walked away the winner. I was nicknamed 'the most dangerous man in Seagonville' and 'Hannibal', because I bit the living day lights out of the man who assaulted me. Now I am just called 'Dangerous'.
But it is the prison guards who pose the biggest threat as they operate with immunity due to the 'blue wall of silence', meaning they can do whatever they want and still keep their jobs.
On Martin Luther King holiday, 2010, an Officer Mkneely and Officer Greenshaw decided to refuse dinner trays to five white inmates, one of them being a diabetic who was suffering from low blood sugar. We had been on a 24/7 lock down status for 4 days as a corporal punishment, and that meant we had not showered, exercised, or anything for ninety-six hours. Greenshaw hated all inmates and would treat them all with unbridled hostility. He was an ice cold redneck and very much one to antagonize the inmates without excuse. Mkneely was a racist, and he and Greenshaw took out their indifference on us by refusing to feed five white inmates, and I was one of them. While Martin Luther King advocated equality, not indifference, during the heated verbal debate with Mkeely he told me he was not feeding me on account of the holiday, and that if I did not keep my mouth shut he would come in and beat me in the face - I sat on the floor with my hands behind my back and offered my face in exchange for him being fired. "C'mon, big man," I would tease, hoping he would do it so I would never have to see him again. Instead he came back later with a tray of food and said "what if I told you I spit in it?"
"Its all I got to eat," I replied, and ate it anyway.
The lock downs were getting so out of hand, I felt that someone had to do something. I had already led a protest against the 2010 census, and another for an old man that the medical staff had kept refusing to see, so I guess I became 'that' guy. But Seagonville prison guards did not know it was me, or else they would be reading me the Riot Act.
Lock down in a two man cell is miserable. No showers, no recreation, no phones... I antagonized the guards for days, projecting my voice and using different accents. Finally I led a food strike, which ended in several people flooding the unit by plugging up the toilet with their towels. as water poured like a waterfall from the top tier... They let us out immediately after that, and even apologized to us for the guard's misbehavior and for keeping us locked down and all. We have the right to be treated with respect and in a humane way. But they wont ever do this unless you fight for it. We are not animals- hell, people treat their animals better than they treated us.
Witness Intimidation
It was all over the news. Even Kevin Poulsin from Wired.com wrote a piece on it, although he did not seem to be interested in anyone else's side of the story except that of the Justice Department's version of events, and Wesley McGrew's account. Here is how this whole mess got started...
When I was arrested there was only four of us ETA members left now. There had been a massive increase in the site traffic, however, due to the attention we had received from the story on my bust. The overly eager and zealous of all went out in protest, trying to show their loyalty, though I had no clue who these people were, and they sure did not know me. From my understanding, none of these affiliations actually conducted any sort of cyber attack against Wesley, and if they had no evidence was given to support it. Wesley had visited the ETA website and forum regularly, even though their Terms of Service Agreement expressly stated that Wesley McGrew was not welcome there. However, acting in good faith, ETA decided to look past that and allow him to join the forum and IRC.
It is also my understanding that ETA conducted a live interview with Wesley, who consented to it - his participation with anything to do with ETA was both willing and voluntary. But even during this time the FBI was watching. even monitoring their emails, which bore no evidence of any kind what so ever against Wesley. I read the emails which the FBI had in evidence, as well as the hundreds of publicly available forum threads sent to me by my sister Jessica from both Wesley's security blog (public) and the ETA forum (also public viewing). So I had a pretty informed view regarding who said what and when it was said. Strangely enough, the evidence was proof of Free Speech and not worthy of any intimidation, which is consequently why Candina and my sentencing lawyer Todd Durden withheld such conflicting evidence. and relied solely upon oral testimony to brand me the guilty party.
Wesley mirrored threats from the ETA forums regularly, as if he was indirectly trying to provoke them by subjecting them to constant ridicule, criticism, and humiliation. In an earlier post from 2009, XxxImmortalxxX accused Wesley of persistently stalking him as if Wesley was trying to find some dirt on him and others, yet none of this went beyond the scope of the first amendment.
DevNull would write me letters, telling me how some of the core members of ETA were bothering Wesley, and how things were reaching a breaking point. He would rely messages to Fixer for me, and those messages were to leave Wesley McGrew alone, because I was being threatened with Witness Intimidation over things I had absolutely no control over. ETA and its affiliates were now acting completely on their own, and the more I warned Fixer the more he called me a conspiracy theorist, and how he had a right to freely express himself, that he was committing no crime. The latter was true, but the Feds have the first and final say on what people can and cannot do, first amendment or not, regardless of the Constitution,. The longer I stayed in the system, the louder I screamed "I have rights!" and the more it seemed they only laughed and shake their heads and say "orly?'
So Fixer ignored me, and I lived under a new threat of getting an even longer prison sentence because Fixer would not keep his mouth shut. His rights versus my freedom.
Dev's letters had great evidential value, and that value only increased when I talked about those letters on the phone with him and Jessica, predating the FBI raids on them that were about to commence...