#innercircle — Public Fediverse posts

#innercircle × #peterandre

https://youtube.com/shorts/pLDnlc721l0

#mashup #mix #music #fyp #edit #viral #followme #hardgruv #mysteriousgirl #sweat #lalalalalong

Mar de gente - Inner Circle transforma praia do Paraná na Jamaica; veja fotos: Pioneiros na criação do gênero musical do reggae, o Inner Circle, da Jamaica, fez show gratuito e apoteótico em Matinhos, no litoral do Paraná, neste https://www.bemparana.com.br/cultura/mar-de-gente-inner-circle-transforma-praia-do-parana-na-jamaica-veja-fotos/ #InnerCircle #Reggae

Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth’s War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2) – Vanity Fair

DAY 289
November 4, 2025

The day I met Wiles at the White House was a watershed for Trump: Voters would choose governors in New Jersey and Virginia and a new mayor in New York City; they would also vote on Proposition 50, California governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to counter a brazen Republican gerrymander in Texas. Collectively, the contests were a referendum on Trump’s second presidency.

Click here read Part 1 of 2 from Vanity Fair’s portfolio of Trump’s inner circle.

Over lunch in her West Wing corner office, Wiles recounted the morning. Escorting Trump from the White House residence to the Oval Office, she gave the president her election predictions: “I’m on the hook because he thinks I’m a clairvoyant.” Wiles thought the GOP had a chance of electing the governor in New Jersey, but she knew they were in for a tough night. (It would prove to be a Republican disaster, with Democrats running the table on the marquee races, passing Proposition 50, and winning downballot elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Mississippi.)

Given voters’ anxiety about the cost of living, Wiles told me she thought Trump should pivot more often from world affairs to kitchen-table issues. “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for,” said Wiles. “They like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.”

Not far from where we sat was a gaping hole where the East Wing had been until just days before. I asked her about the fierce criticism that followed its demolition to make way for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom. “Were you surprised by it?”

“No,” Wiles replied. “Oh, no. And I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”

Was she saying that Trump was planning more, as yet undisclosed renovations?

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“I’m not telling.”

T-MINUS 232 DAYS
June 2, 2024

“Would you declassify the Epstein files?” —Fox News’s Rachel Campos-Duffy
“Yeah….I think I would.” —Trump

For many of Trump’s followers, it’s an article of faith that the US government has long been run by an elite cabal of pedophiles. Less conspiratorially but no less seriously, others question whether politicians and powerful people either participated in or knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women, from his posh Manhattan town house to his private Caribbean islands. Perhaps most critical to Trump followers, though, is the fact that Trump indicated a willingness to release the files—and didn’t. As this article went to press, grand jury material from the Epstein records was due to be released in December.

What about accusing Letitia James of mortgage fraud?

“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Susie Wiles replied.

Wiles told me she underestimated the potency of the scandal: “Whether he was an American CIA asset, a Mossad asset, whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls,” she said, “I mean, I kind of knew it, but it’s never anything I paid a bit of attention to.”

In February, Bondi gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House, including Liz Wheeler, Jessica Reed Kraus, Rogan O’Handley, and Chaya Raichik. The binders turned out to contain nothing but old information. “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”

As Noah Shachtman reported in Vanity Fair, “dozens and dozens” of FBI agents at the New York field office were tasked with combing through the Epstein files. Many observers assumed they were looking for (and possibly redacting) Trump’s name. “I don’t know how many agents looked through things, but it was a lot,” said Wiles. “They were looking for 25 things, not one thing.”

Wiles told me she’d read what she calls “the Epstein file.” And, she said, “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Wiles said that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.” (Trump started dating Melania Knauss, whom he married in 2005, sometime in 1998. Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent accuser, who died by suicide earlier this year, first met Epstein while she was a Mar-a-Lago spa worker in 2000. Trump and Epstein reportedly had a falling out in 2004.)

Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St. James, “supposedly 28 times.” “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”

The people that really appreciated what a big deal this is are Kash [Patel] and [FBI deputy director] Dan Bongino,” she said. “Because they lived in that world. And the vice president, who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade…. For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”

In July, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former lawyer, traveled to a Tallahassee, Florida, courthouse to interview Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Convicted on sex trafficking charges in 2021, she received a 20-year prison sentence. “It’s not typical, is it,” I asked Wiles, “to send the number two guy in the DOJ and the president’s former defense lawyer to interview a convicted sex trafficker?” According to Wiles, “It was [Blanche’s] suggestion.”

Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked,” according to Wiles. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” But, she said, “if that’s an important point, I can find out.” (At press time, Wiles said she still had not found out.)

“Sometimes he laments, ‘You know, gosh, I feel like we’re doing really well. I wish I could run again.’” Wiles said of Trump. “And then he immediately says, ‘Not really.”

What about the birthday greeting featuring a sketch of a nude woman, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, bore Trump’s name and was sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday? “That letter is not his,” Wiles said. “And nothing about it rings true to me, nor does it to people that have known the president a lot longer than I have. I can’t explain The Wall Street Journal, but we’re going to get some discovery because we sued them. So we’re going to find out.” Trump’s lawyers filed a $20 billion defamation lawsuit against Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which the defendants have asked a federal judge in Florida to dismiss.

So will the president sit for a deposition in that process?

“I mean, if he had to,” she said.

The Epstein files debacle poses a dire political threat to Trump and the future of the GOP. “The people that are inordinately interested in Epstein are the new members of the Trump coalition, the people that I think about all the time—because I want to make sure that they are not Trump voters, they’re Republican voters,” Wiles said. “It’s the Joe Rogan listeners. It’s the people that are sort of new to our world. It’s not the MAGA base.”

A senior White House official described the mindset of an overlapping bloc of voters who are angered by both Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and the war in Gaza. It’s as much as 5 percent of the vote and includes “union members, the podcast crowd, the young people, the young Black males. They are interested in Epstein. And they are the people that are disturbed that we are as cozy with Israel as we are.”

Vance keeps his eye on the voters. “It’s Epstein, Gaza, and the coziness with Israel,” said this White House source. “If you dive deeply into the internet, you’ll find things that say, ‘Well, why don’t we just put Bibi at the Resolute Desk?’ ” the source said, referring to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Across our year of conversations, Wiles wanted to put an end to what she believes is a persistent myth, that Trump is a warmonger. To the contrary, Wiles says, the president genuinely cares about ending wars and saving human lives. “I cannot overstate how much his ongoing motivation is to stop the killing, which is not, I don’t think, where he was in his last term,” she said. “Not that he wanted to kill people necessarily, but stopping the killing wasn’t his first thought. It’s his first and last thought now.” Whether that thought is genuine or driven by his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize is, of course, open to debate.

DAY 213
August 20, 2025

“Israel says it has taken first steps of military operation in Gaza City.” —Reuters

In early October, Trump announced that his envoys had brokered a deal with mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to end two years of bloodshed in Gaza. The 20-point plan, calling for the disarmament of Hamas and the administering of Gaza by a multinational force, was far from a sure thing. But the ceasefire and the release of almost all the hostages (the remains of one are still missing) was a considerable achievement. During his triumphant appearance at Israel’s Knesset, Trump struck a bellicose tone, praising Netanyahu and the Israeli armed forces with no mention of the Palestinian civilian casualties. Trump had previously lauded Bibi’s efforts in another action by calling him a “war hero”—a remark partially aimed at Israelis. Talking about it then, Wiles winced. “I’m not sure he fully realizes,” she said, “that there’s an audience here that doesn’t love it.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth’s War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2) | Vanity Fair

Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2) – Vanity Fair

On the morning of November 4, 2025, an off-year Election Day, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was meeting in the Oval Office with the president and his top advisers, men she calls her “core team”: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff. The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. As she related it later, President Donald Trump was holding forth on the filibuster when Wiles stood up and started for the door. Trump eyed her. “Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?” he demanded. It was nothing of the sort—but Wiles left Trump guessing. She replied: “It’s an emergency. It doesn’t involve you.” With that, according to Wiles, she departed the Oval.

Click here to read Part 2 of 2 from Vanity Fair’s portfolio of Trump’s inner circle.

Wiles, wearing dark pants and a plain black leather top, met me in her office with a smile and a handshake. Over sandwiches from the White House Mess, we talked about the challenges Trump faces. Throughout the past year, Wiles and I have spoken regularly about almost everything: the contents, and consequences, of the Epstein files; ICE’s brutal mass deportations; Elon Musk’s evisceration of USAID; the controversial deployment of the National Guard to US cities; the demolition of the East Wing; the lethal strikes on boats allegedly being piloted by drug smugglers—acts many have called war crimes; Trump’s physical and mental health; and whether he will defy the 22nd Amendment and try to stay on for a third term.

“I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch,” said Susie Wiles. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”

Most senior White House officials parse their words and speak only on background. But over many on-the-record conversations, Wiles answered almost every question I put to her.

We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)

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Wiles is the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself; unlike any chief of staff before her, she is a woman.

“So many decisions of great consequence are being made on the whim of the president. And as far as I can tell, the only force that can direct or channel that whim is Susie,” a former Republican chief told me. “In most White Houses, the chief of staff is first among a bunch of equals. She may be first with no equals.”

“I don’t think there’s anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” Rubio told me. He called her bond with Trump “an earned trust.” Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”

It’s been a busy year. Trump and his team have expanded the limits of presidential power, unilaterally declared war on drug cartels, imposed tariffs according to whim, sealed the southern border, achieved a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza, and pressured NATO allies into increasing their defense spending.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2) | Vanity Fair

The Inner Circle viewers make the same 'complaint' about Amanda Holden's new BBC show

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.mirror.co.uk/features/topic-desking/tv/inner-circle-viewers-make-same-36023386

Must-watch TV this week: Frauds, Celebrity Traitors and Countryfile's Ramble

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/must-watch-frauds-traitors-countryfile-35997426

Painting on paper, 20 x 30 cm: Ambiguous impulses for your mental cinema!
#contemporaryArt #mentalCinema #rubberStamp #reliefPrinting #saveBioDiversity #climateActionNow #systemChange #endFossilFuels #makeArtNotWar #noAFD #NoRacism #NoFascism #humanRights #Нетвойны #skull #death #mementoMori #vanitas #fragilitas #finiteness #mortality #carpeDiem #seizeTheDay #astronaut #spaceSuit #outerSpace #innerSpace #circle #sphere #underPressure #atmosphere #circles #bubbles #innerCircle #greenFields

Painting on paper: Ambiguous impulses for mental cinema!
#contemporaryArt #mentalCinema #analogArt #painting #rubberStamp #reliefPrinting #saveBioDiversity #climateActionNow #systemChange #endFossilFuels #makeArtNotWar #noAFD #NoRacism #NoFascism #humanRights #humanDignity #Нетвойны #astronaut #dancing #spaceSuit #spaceTravel #outerSpace #circles #innerCircle #innerLife #introspection #circling #rolling #rotating #rotation #skull #death #mementomori #vanitas #fragilitas #finiteness #mortality

Painting on paper, 20 x 30 cm: Ambiguous impulses for your mental cinema!
#kunst #contemporaryArt #mentalCinema #analogArt #painting #rubberStamp #reliefPrinting #saveBioDiversity #climateActionNow #systemChange #endFossilFuels #makeArtNotWar #noAFD #NoRacism #NoFascism #humanRights #humanDignity #Нетвойны #astronaut #dancing #spaceSuit #spaceTravel #outerSpace #heart #anatomy #organ #heartbeat #emotions #feelings #innerSpace #astronautics #innerCircle #innerLife #introspection

Painting on paper, 20 x 30 cm: Ambiguous impulses for your mental cinema!
#kunst #contemporaryArt #mentalCinema #analogArt #painting #rubberStamp #reliefPrinting #saveBioDiversity #climateActionNow #systemChange #endFossilFuels #makeArtNotWar #noAFD #NoRacism #NoFascism #humanRights #humanDignity #Нетвойны #astronaut #dancing #marching #spaceSuit #spaceTravel #outerSpace #innerSpace #astronautics #circles #innerCircle #innerLife #introspection

Painting on paper, 30 x 20 cm: Ambiguous impulses for your mental cinema!
#kunst #contemporaryArt #mentalCinema #analogArt #painting #rubberStamp #reliefPrinting #saveBioDiversity #climateActionNow #systemChange #endFossilFuels #makeArtNotWar #noAFD #NoRacism #NoFascism #humanRights #humanDignity #Нетвойны #astronaut #dancing #spaceSuit #spaceTravel #outerSpace #innerSpace #astronautics #circles #innerCircle #innerLife #introspection

Inner Circle @ Sun Splash Reggae Festival 2025, The Netherlands #innercircle #reggaeville #reggae https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pk26DZXlJMQ?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #music #reggae #dancehall

"Everything is great" - Inner Circle

Debut for the Jamaican group, and reggae purists cherish their work from this era.

We saw them again on #TOTP in 1993 with the summer smash "Sweat (a la la la long)".

Why a Friday night TOTP ? The Beeb wanted to hold "A Song for Europe" on Thursday, selecting the best* song to represent the BBC at Eurovision.

A strike meant the contest only went out on radio, won by "Mary Ann" by Black Lace. Yeah, the "Agadoo" guys.

#InnerCircle

Bad Boys Bad Boys, what you gonna do.... US Department of Justice 737-800 N28252 as DOJ33 aka Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System (JPATS) aka Con Air departing Travis AFB, October 2024. #conair #JPATS #DOJ #travis #badboys #badboys #innercircle #avgeek #b737 #aviationphotography #planespotting #AvGeek #spotter #photography #Nikon #aircraft #nikonphotgraphy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd68AthoNIw

The image at the top of this blog is, from what I can find, the first stock image photo of a hacker in a ski mask that ever appeared in print, carrying on a visual association between hackers and bank robbers or safe crackers that has continued since 1969.

How tropes and stereotypes originated and became perpetuated in the media is one of the main focuses of the realhackhistory project.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Before I try to define what this website and the associated YouTube and Mastodon accounts are all about I want to discuss what they aren’t.

This history research, documentation and analysis project is not about trying to dox hackers from the past, reveal secrets that could get people into legal peril or fuel hacking scene gossip. I’m not interested in when Java was invented or the anniversary of the first web browser being created here either though, we are talking about hackers. The ‘darkside’.

This project is about documenting the history of people like Neal Patrick in the video below, who became the face of hacking in 1983 after being raided by the authorities, along with his hacking group the 414s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA3NuQdhu5U

Behind the blogs, the YouTube videos, FOIA documents, clips of funny hacker related TV shows or movies and the memes, realhackhistory is a genuine desire to keep the knowledge and stories of hackers of the past alive and provide some lessons that can still help people interested in hacking today.

I envision realhackhistory as a trail of breadcrumbs to help get you started on your way to understanding the past, and hopefully the present, of hacking better. Think of this as digital archaeology, if it makes it all sound cooler.

Information on the Internet is frequently wrong

If we start with some basic questions such as “what was the first computer virus?” or “when was the first denial of service attack?” and plug them into your search engine of choice you’ll start to notice something.

It isn’t that there are conflicting answers, some of these questions hinge on a subjective understanding of details such as what defines a computer virus, what operating system did it function on, what language was it coded in, etc. No, you start to notice how many answers that are clearly wrong are stated emphatically as fact.

We need an example, right? Let’s analyse this text below, from the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica:

The first documented DoS-style attack occurred during the week of February 7, 2000, when “mafiaboy,” a 15-year-old Canadian hacker, orchestrated a series of DoS attacks against several e-commerce sites, including Amazon and eBay.

Encyclopedia Britannica, “denial of service attack” entry

Let’s unpack this. While it is true that mafiaboy carried out a widely reported on campaign of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against high profile websites in 2000. This was not the first distributed denial of service attack and definitely not the first denial of service attack either.

Distributed denial of service attacks, called “Net Strikes” by participants, were organised by hacktivists in the mid 90’s against French government websites which involved getting people to manually refresh those websites at a set time. There was also a huge DDoS attack against Manhattan based ISP Panix in September of 1996.

The first denial of service attack over a computer network is widely believed to have been in 1974, when someone discovered a way to use a newly introduced feature in TUTOR to lock up other PLATO terminals remotely at CERL, the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

It doesn’t necessarily matter that there may have been other denial of service attacks before 1974, what matters I think is that the first denial of service attack was definitely not in 2000 and that this is incorrect information being presented as fact.

How did this clearly wrong history sneak into an encyclopedia? I would suspect the loop of incorrect information that begins to be circulated online and eventually becomes, through copying, regurgitation and repetition, accepted fact. Nobody bothers to go back to original sources, lazy journalism becomes grist for a slew of blogs which eventually becomes part of a reference book and then accepted fact.

Incorporating AI into search engines will only make this problem worse, if the average of all the information about the history of hacking is a bunch of copypasta in infosec marketing or lazy journalism then that is what the AI search function will regurgitate. Garbage in, garbage out.

Tracing attitudes to hackers in pop culture

Hackers were not always demonised, hacking was not always a part of pop culture and the word “hacker” itself was not widely used to describe anything other than a bad golfer until mid 1983. I’ve written a whole blog on the topic.

We can look at how journalists wrote about hacking and hackers in the past and how hackers evolved as character archetypes and hacking became a trope in movies and television.

We can chart the way hackers are viewed, from novelty or curiosity through to menace and then back to heroic anti-heroes before lately becoming a facet of shadowy criminal gangs, as the view of hackers as professionalised “cybercriminals” takes hold in the public imagination.

The 90’s saw an explosion of hacker and hacking related movies as people became unable to ignore the rise of the internet and computers became a part of every day life. I made a YouTube video about one such movie, The Net.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug3-h7nYV0Q

Hacker related documentaries, news segments and TV specials created by non-hackers provide a fascinating snapshot of the attitudes towards hackers and how hacking touched on current events at the time the documentary was filmed. I’ve put as many as I can find from over the years up on my YouTube channel.

Preserving & promoting hacker culture

While a lot of people have heard of 2600 Magazine, or the phrack e-zine, there is a lot more hacker culture created by hackers themselves out there waiting to be discovered.

Take published books about hacking written by hackers for instance, in the UK there was various editions of Hugo Cornwall’s book “The Hacker’s Handbook”, originally published in 1985. There was also infamous subversive publisher Loompanic’s book “The Computer Underground: Computer Hacking, Crashing, Pirating, and Phreaking” by M. Harry, which was also published in 1985.

• “The Hacker’s Handbook”, original 1985 edition, by Hugo Cornwall
• “The Computer Underground: Computer Hacking, Crashing, Pirating, and Phreaking” by M. Harry, Loompanics, 1985

Reading these books not only give us a snapshot of the scene at the time through the author’s eyes, but also a chance to read how hackers themselves defined a hacker.

This book uses the word in a more restricted sense: hacking is a recreational and educational sport. It consists of attempting to make unauthorised entry into computers and to explore what is there. The sport’s aims and purposes have been widely misunderstood; most hackers are not interested in perpetrating massive frauds, modifying their personal banking, taxation and employee records, or inducing one world super-power into inadvertently commencing Armageddon in the mistaken belief that another super-power is about to attack it.

Every hacker I have ever come across has been quite clear about where the fun lies: it is in developing an understanding of a system and finally producing the skills and tools to defeat it. In the vast majority of cases, the process of ‘getting in’ is much more satisfying than what is discovered in the protected computer files.

“The Hacker’s Handbook” – Introduction, Hugo Cornwall, 1985

Documentaries about hackers by hackers or people affiliated with the hacking scene are a more vivid look at some of the personalities who shaped scene history, or notable events that took place. Annaliza Savage’s “Unauthorized Access” released in 1994 is required viewing, as is “Hackers 95” by Phon-E and R.F. Burns, released in 1995 (of course), you can see a short clip of below.

https://youtu.be/7abDgYYXhks?si=8upHxOHKs8wB6jX2

Over at textfiles.com you can find an incredible resource in the form of archived hacker scene text files, from the BBS years up to the era of the world wide web. Among the files archived is a great many hacker e-zines, or electronic magazines, text and text ASCII art documents that were published on a regular or semi-regular schedule.

The most famous hacker e-zine is undeniably phrack magazine.

Basically, we are a group of phile writers
who have combined our philes and are distributing them in a group. This newsletter-type project is home-based at Metal Shop… These philes may include articles on telcom (phreaking/hacking), anarchy (guns and death & destruction) or kracking. Other topics will be allowed also to an certain extent.

phrack issue #1, Taran King, November 17th, 1985

Hacker media is also in print though, with magazines like the now defunct Technological American Party Magazine of the 1970s or Blacklisted! 411 back in the nineties or 2600, which is still going strong.

2600 Magazine began in January of 1984 with an article discussing a criminal case that contributors to the magazine had been involved in the year before the first issue came out. It was a series of raids on young hackers across the U.S. that the FBI called “Operation Mainframe”. I created a video on one of the groups caught up in the FBI investigation, the Inner Circle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppbx2POxxZU

2600 staff continued to be involved in hacking related incidents in the years after, as we can see from the article from 1985 below that notes that the editor of 2600 had his BBS seized by New Jersey police.

You can find scanned issues of publications like Blacklisted! 411 over at archive.org and you can subscribe to 2600 over at their website.

Freedom of Information Act requests

Locked away in dusty archives is a wealth of information on the history of hacking, specific hackers and hacking groups, held by government bodies and law enforcement agencies.

To paraphrase NatSecGeek, if you are willing to take five minutes to write a FOIA request and then to wait potentially years for that request to be fulfilled you can eventually find yourself with documents that can rewrite our understanding of events in the history of hacking. My inspiration for pursuing FOIA requests as part of realhackhistory has been the aforementioned NatSecGeek as well as hexadecim8 and their Hacking History project.

You can find the documents they have retrieved from various archives here, and you can find my uploads of responsive records over at archive.org.

If requesting FOIA documents can be a bit boring and laborious, receiving them makes me feel like a little kid on Christmas morning.

FOIA archive requests can turn up completely different versions of events that had long been considered to be definitively settled. Records can show us scans or photocopies of newspaper or magazine articles since lost to time, printouts of webpages that are no longer online and the chance to see how government agencies or law enforcement have viewed the computer underground over the years.

In requesting documents I have primarily focused on records relating to hacking incidents between 1980 and 2005, with a particular interest in records from the early to mid 1980’s as records can degrade or get lost over time.

Because of FOIA requests we can see that in 1983 some people were so upset about the FBI raiding high-school age hackers linked to the Inner Circle hacking group that they wrote their Senator in California.

Or we can see the actual photocopies of notes of targeted systems seized by the FBI from those same hackers.

The text files, e-zine and magazine articles written by hackers provide one part of the story, the newspaper articles and TV segments on hacking incidents provide another and FOIA documents are the last piece of the puzzle that we as hacker history enthusiasts can hope to get our hands on in terms of records.

I plan future blog entries on how to file FOIA requests, how to decide what to FOIA and some dead ends I have reached in relation to past hacker events and incidents that someone else might want to pick up the threads from.

In conclusion

So that’s it, an explanation as to why realhackhistory exists, long since overdue and the start of a call to action for others who are interested, to see what they can add to the public knowledge of the roots of the hacking scene.

If I can outline a roadmap for the future of the project, I want to expand my understanding of the history of hacking outside of the English speaking world, start finding countries outside of the U.S, the U.K. and Australia to FOIA and pursue freeing more media from closed archives.

I’d also like to take this time to thank the people who have inspired me along the way, in particular Gabriella Coleman, Emma Best and Emily Crose, for encouragement and guidance on this great journey.

If we don’t preserve our history, nobody else will.

https://realhackhistory.org/2024/10/22/muddled-history-of-the-digital-underground-why-realhackhistory-exists/

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1983 was the year that popular culture in the US caught on to the existence of hackers, hacker culture and first set foot on the path to total hacker hysteria. When I say “hackers” here I mean the “computer underground”, “blackhats” or the “dark side” of computing enthusiasts, not model railroad builders or programming hobbyists.

The year 1983 started with journalists using awkward phrases like “data diddlers” to describe hackers and ended with demands in newspaper opinion pieces for federal laws to criminalise and exact punishment for people caught hacking.

There are five or six books I would write about the history of hacking if I had the time and energy, the story of how 1983 forever changed how hackers are viewed is one of them.

The word “hacker” in relation to computer crimes had been used before 1983 in the US but it was not commonplace, it had not entered into every day usage, by the end of 1983 it was well and truly lodged in the American public’s lexicon.

Then it happened, the movie War Games was released and mass numbers of sixth grade to all ages flocked to see it. The problem wasn’t that the movie was bad, it was that now EVERYONE wanted to be a hacker/phreak. Novices came out in such mass numbers, that bulletin boards started to be busy 24 hours a day. To this day, they still have not recovered. Other problems started to occur, novices guessed easy passwords on large government computers and started to play around… Well it wasn’t long before they were caught, I think that many people remember the 414-hackers.

“A Short History of Phreaking courtesy of the Jolly Roger”

There are four events that took place during 1983 that brought American hackers out of their computer cubbyholes, emerging blinking into a harsh media spotlight. Two of these events were pop culture related, the release of WarGames in cinemas and Whiz Kids on TV, and two were related to the arrests of actual hacker groups in the United States and the headlines those arrests generated.

There had been hacker groups busted before 1983, there was the so called “Dalton Gang”, four 13 year old high-schoolers who were apprehended, but not charged, by the FBI in 1980. There was also the group of “computer phreaks” (as the few reporters in California who were paying attention labelled them at the time) that Kevin Mitnick belonged to who also fell afoul of the law in 1981 and may have been called the “System Crashers” back then.

Below are excerpts from coverage of Kevin Mitnick and Lewis DePayne’s antics, “Computer Crime Spreads in U.S.” from the Daily News on the 14th December 1981 which goes into some details around dumpster diving, login and password guessing, social engineering, BBS culture and the fact that hacking and phreaking is “very addictive. Sometimes it’s better than sex.”

Those previous cases just did not capture the public imagination though and I think that is in large part because a movie like WarGames hadn’t created a space for hackers to occupy in people’s imagination yet. Estimates are that in 1983 there were two million personal computers in the US, if computers themselves were a curiosity most people had little contact with then hackers were not even on the radar of the average person.

WarGames – May 1983

WarGames premiers in American cinemas on May 7th of 1983. The word “hacker” is never uttered by any of the characters, but the movie is essentially about a teenage hacker named David Lightman who uses a war-dialler to hunt for modem numbers to connect to and alters his high-school grades after gaining access to his school’s computers.

Things escalate rapidly when Lightman stumbles upon a system while war-dialling that he believes belongs to a video game company and discovers a listing of games that include “Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare” and “Global Thermonuclear War”. Little does David suspect that he has in fact connected to a US military NORAD supercomputer known as WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), setting in motion a potentially catastrophic sequence of events.

David initiates a game of ‘Global Thermonuclear War’, playing as the Soviet Union and targeting American cities. WOPR then initiates a simulation that briefly convinces NORAD military personnel that actual Soviet nuclear missiles are inbound. The computer continuously feeds simulated data about Soviet bomber incursions and submarine deployments to NORAD, pushing them to increase the DEFCON level toward a potential real world retaliation that would trigger World War III.

Based on this we could expect a backlash against hackers in newspaper columns after the movie is released, right?

Above we can see an article from the Free Lance-Star published on the 10th of May 1983, “How real is the horror of ‘War Games’?”. “Launching under attack could increase the possibility of war by accident since the president might be certain that an attack had actually taken place.. Can any technology be absolutely reliable when it comes to making close to instantaneous decisions on the survival of the world?” asks the Free Lance-Star.

Looking back at articles written around the release of WarGames the same themes come through over and over again, fear of potential nuclear war with suspicion of computers generally coming a very distant second. The antics of teenage hackers barely enter into the media discourse at all despite how central they were to the plot of the movie, but that was about to change.

You can watch a very grainy trailer for WarGames from 1983 that specifically touches on computer security below.

414s – August 1983

In August of 1983 the story of Milwaukee hacker group the 414s breaks in the media. The 414s had been hacking into dozens upon dozens of systems across America via the commercial Telenet network. Members are primarily called “computer raiders”, “home-computer pranksters”, “young computer wizards”, “computer hobbyists”, “electronic invaders” and “computer phreaks” by the press.

The word “hacker” does appear on the cover of Newsweek alongside a photo of 414s member Neal Patrick posing with a computer. Many of the hacking history narratives you’ll find repeated on the web will pin this as the first time “hacker” is “used by mainstream media”, I don’t buy that but it is one of the first times it is used as prominently as the front cover of a popular publication like Newsweek.

The story of these hackers is linked to WarGames in article after article, the fact that the 414s had hacked systems at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, described in the reporting from the time as “a nuclear weapons laboratory” made this a media sensation.

“The movie ‘War Games’ glamorized what the 414s were doing, each of them saw the film at least once” writes Jackie Hyman for the Associated Press, despite also admitting that the 414s had already “accessed a number of computers in the spring” of 1983, well before WarGames was in cinemas. In fact as we will see below the 414s were not a group of kids who met in a Scout troop and became hackers after watching a movie, they were hackers who met on hacker BBSes and joined a Scout troop to spend more time hanging out in real life.

A lot of the coverage of the 414s from around the time of the FBI raids was very similar, written by journalists who didn’t really seem to understand the tech angle or the hacker subculture and were essentially writing very similar, shallow articles. One that stands out though in terms of depth of coverage and quality of prose is by Timothy Harper, writing for the Associated Press, I quote some of the article below.

The seven young Milwaukeeans first met “on the boards,” corresponding by electronic messages. Their keyboards struck responsive chords in each other as they shared tips on hardware, software, what movies to see and what magazines to read. Mostly, though, they shared an unspoken dedication to this technology that allowed them, without leaving their bedrooms or dens, intercourse with a challenging new world.

A few months ago, the seven agreed to meet face to face. They began gathering every couple weeks or so at homes or in pizza joints where they could exchange unlisted corporate telephone numbers and secret passwords over sausage and mushrooms.

They began calling themselves “the 414s” after Milwaukee’s area code, a joking reference to the Milwaukee youth gangs that take their names from the streets in their neighborhoods. The gang on 27th Street, for instance, is known as the “Two-Sevens.”

Neal, president of an Explorer Scout post sponsored by IBM and specializing in computers, asked the other 414s to join the scouts. They all did. Their Explorer meetings became another place to ex- a change information, although they emphasize that neither the adult leader, an IBM manager, nor any of the dozen other scouts knew about the accessing.

“Computer Raiders I: Was It Really a Game?”, Timothy Harper (AP), The Lewiston Daily, Sunday 29th August, 1983

So there you have it, the myth of the 414s as Explorer Scouts who somehow became corrupted by hackers as shown in the media or were left unsupervised around computers too long and somehow spontaneously became hackers can be put to bed.

The quote in the introduction to this blog from Jolly Roger about the post-WarGames explosion in novice hackers getting in trouble that he included the 414s in? The 414s were already hacking before the movie came out, though the movie may also have fired up their youthful imaginations.

You can watch a short, free documentary on the 414s below, it shows the level of media and public interest in their case.

Whiz Kids – October 1983

Whiz Kids premiered on CBS on October 5th of 1983. The show revolved around teenage computing genius Richie Adler, who calls himself a “hacker”, and his friends who solve crimes and thwart evil schemes with the help of what was essentially hacktivism. Richie hacks computers to reveal corrupt corporations, the machinations of mafia gangsters and plots by Soviet spies, this show really did have it all.

Whiz Kids marketing explicitly made an appeal to 80’s nerd culture, D&D, video games, this show made connections between different strands of nerd culture in the U.S. at the time that I don’t see anywhere else at that time. I am planning a blog about the fact that, in my mind, Whiz Kids is the best 80’s hacker media, I’ve also made a YouTube video about the show.

Backlash against the show began before it was ever released, and only got worse once it actually aired on TV.

In June, four months, before the first episode hit TV screens, TV critics like Barbara Holsopple above were deeply concerned about the themes within Whiz Kids and that was before the 414s were revealed in the media. Whiz Kids producer Philip DeGuere described the show as “intelligent human beings using their resources to to bring about the triumph of good over evil” but TV critics were not convinced.

On the books, snooping in other people’s computers is illegal. DeGuere isn’t so sure it ought to be.

“We are going through tremendous technological changes in our society, the impact of which we do not know,” the producer says. “I do not know the computer laws. I do not know if what these kids do is illegal. These questions have not yet come up in court. But I’m not sure anybody has the right to establish databases and keep information away from anybody else.”

This show, DeGuere says, will be a factor in developing how people deal with these issues.

“CBS’s ‘Whiz Kids’ Could Get Straight A’s In Crime”. Barbara Holsopple, Pittsburgh Press, June 15th, 1983

You can watch one of the first videos I ever made on the history of hacking below, all about Whiz Kids.

Inner Circle & the Phalsers – October 1983

On October 11th the FBI raids against the Inner Circle, the Phalsers and other hackers begin. Telenet had been a playground for hackers since at least the Dalton Gang back in 1980, but the publicity around the 414s, I think, had increased security oversight of the network. When a member of the Inner Circle began wiping systems and locking out user accounts as part of an internal feud the FBI were notified by Telenet and began ‘Operation Mainframe’ to apprehend the hackers involved. Journalists actually use the words “hacker” and “hackers” from the outset of coverage of these arrests.

Looking at the articles written about the Inner Circle raids it is pretty obvious that, for the most part, the novelty of WarGames and hackers as a curiosity was already wearing off, there seems to be a lot less sympathy or curiosity and a lot more unease. I imagine that parents were becoming concerned that their quiet, studious teenage computer addicts could become embroiled in a national security nightmare or nationwide FBI investigation and journalists had a harder time finding a Neal Patrick to put a friendly face on this new hacker case.

The four kids that initially made the news in relation to the Inner Circle were not members of the hacking group itself and appear to have been kids who were in the friends circle, possibly in real life, of one of the actual Inner Circle members. From what I can gather from the way media coverage developed one or more of their parents hit on what has become a tried and true method of insulating young hackers from criminal prosecution, getting out in front of any potential charges and throwing themselves at the mercy of the press.

Lots of photos of the kids looking sad and, eventually, an attempt to portray an Inner Circle member the Cracker as a ringleader who had entrapped the kids into breaking the law inadvertently. The Cracker was the original Kevin Mitnick, demonized in the newspapers of the time as the archetypal sinister hacker.

The raids of the Inner Circle also helped increase the media profile of one of the most infamous and hated characters in 80’s US hacker lore, John Maxfield, aka Cable Pair, who was to become an FBI asset, anti-hacker hacktivist and talking head on the menace of hacking.

You can watch part one of a planned two parter video series on the Inner Circle that I created below.

Conclusion

The year 1983 began with journalists discussing “electronic vandals”, “data tappers” and “computer raiders” and ended with a newspaper publishing a “what is a real hacker anyway” type think piece.

One way to gauge how pivotal a year 1983 was is to look at what happened the year after. In 1984 the Phalsers would get 2600 Magazine up and running and the Legion of Doom and Cult of the Dead Cow would be formed, hacker BBS culture continued to flourish and grow across the US.

In 1984 journalists would go from observing hackers from a safe distance to becoming part of the story themselves. Newsweek writer Richard Sandoza found himself victimized by hackers and subjected to a “teletrial” on a hacker BBS, accused of crimes against hackerdom after joining hacker BBSes posing as a hacker called “Montana Wildhack” to research an article.

I plan a future article or video on the phenomenon of “teletrials” as I think they are a riveting part of hacker history that continued as a strand of community revenge into the 90s.

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https://realhackhistory.org/2023/09/29/1983-the-year-pop-culture-caught-up-with-hackers/

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De todas las historias increíbles que hay en la música, esta es de las que más.

Una historia con asesinatos, suicidios, satanismo y paganismo, iglesias ardiendo, caras pintadas, investigaciones policiales y metal.

Black metal.

Hoy, en #LaHistorietaMusical, el Inner Circle.

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~ Inner Circle ~
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