Early Exposure...
In my last post I briefly mentioned spending time on IRC and being involved in hacking groups, and I felt it might be worth expanding on that since it's relevant to who I am today.
I started playing with computers when I was around 10 or so. We got our first modem when I was around 12 and I immediately began connecting to various BBS ('Bulletin Board Systems') in my area. That transitioned into AOL (puke), which gave me some access to the actual internet.
It didn't take too long paying $3.50/hr, or whatever it was, to find an internet provider and gain unfettered access to the whole internet that didn't come with a dollar-per-hour charge.
I quickly discovered IRC, which then led to an interest in hacking. I was part of a few very well-known groups—one of which you can still find articles about, as well as related indictments listed in the DOJ archives.
We hacked anything and everything, from NASA, to CNN, to... NASA again, a bunch of times, to the DoJ, Whitehouse, FBI, China... in one evening we managed to take all of China off-line. According to the indictments and what I was told by the friendly DoD/FBI officers that arrested me, we “nearly started WWIII” because, apparently, China thought we were NSA hackers that were targeting them.
Silly China. The US didn't have a clue enough to know that they needed hackers at that time.
Anyway. As I mentioned, I did eventually get busted for hacking a big no-no site that the government takes extremely seriously due to it's top-secret nature. I'll let you use your imagination as to which one it was.
I was 17 ½ when I was busted, and thankfully had some friends in the FBI, and one very special friend (we'll call her Em) who worked at this pseudo-NGO-thing-that-was-actually-a-front-for-the-NSA. I had absolutely no idea at the time that she was an agent, or that the organization she was working for had anything to do with the government, but she was aware of my upcoming arrest, so when I was taken into custody she contacted the field officer that was responsible for my case and I was made an offer.
This was extremely common back then, as it was the only way the government was able to 'hire' hackers, but Em knew that I was absolutely never going to narc on my friends, and she also knew that my motivation behind hacking the no-no site wasn't entirely malicious (I mean, at least not malicious towards the government), so she proposed a different idea.
Em wanted me to help her catch pedophiles and those trading and dealing in CSAM (“Child Sexual Abuse Material” – that's what it's referred to now, it used to just be called “kiddie porn”).
Obviously I immediately jumped at this opportunity, since it meant that I wouldn't go to jail, wouldn't do the trial shit, wouldn't have a record, -and- I got to basically hack with a “Get out of Jail Free” card, so long as I was only targeting those that they wanted targeted.
So, they dropped whatever official charges they had planned to charge me with, gave me a codename, and started feeding me intel that I would then act on. Obviously it was a bit tricky for them to use the information I was providing, considering that it was totally obtained illegally, but they never seemed to struggle too badly.
I'd turn over information, hear nothing for awhile, and then they would randomly show up someplace they knew I was, I'd get in the back of their car, and we'd shoot the shit for a few, and they'd hand me an envelope with cash in it and I'd get out and go about my day. I learned to connect the dots. Envelope of cash = the intel that I provided returned results... typically in the form of an arrest.
A lot of what I was doing was tracking down website/data hosting locations. Pedophiles would set up hosting in countries that were difficult, or impossible, to extradite from or work with, and the back end data was stored somewhere else – typically on a server in the US, or, at least that was always the FBI's hope. Due to bandwidth limitations of the time, it kind of had to work this way in order for a site to be usable. If the data were hosted overseas, the time it would take to load a single picture would have been painful and the site unusable.
It was fairly easy. For as dumb as the government was at that time when it came to technology and the internet, pedophiles were only slightly less inept and they knew very little about Operational Security. Some were better than others, but once I was given a target, I don't believe I ever once failed to find the person's identity that was responsible for the site.
*But, what this meant, was that I was exposed to a lot of seriously terrible shit at a pretty impressionable age.*
I have autism, which is probably the only thing that reduced the impact of all of this on me. At least emotionally. I never had the emotional response to it that others did. It really took a toll on some of the agents that I worked with, though. There were always stories of agents in the FBI (and other agencies) who wound up in therapy, or abused alcohol or drugs, or had domestic/marital issues, or ate a bullet because of the shit they were exposed to while doing this.
But, I would be lying if I said that it didn't affect my fantasy life. No, I'm not a pedophile, but there's no way to be exposed to that type of shit at that age and not have your fantasy life get super fucked up. Or, in my case, more fucked up.
This type of work is done differently nowadays because of the toll it's taken on those who have worked in this and similar fields. Now CSAM is identified by file hashes and AI. There are still human reviewers, and I'm sure they deal with the same issues the rest of us have, but as far as I know, they try to limit human exposure to it as much as possible now.
— Mr. B.
You can reach me anonymously & securely on Session: 05286837660ea8cb0b8dd22741fa01a9b2459de0be25f4f717fc67caaf5755b620