The Kids Who Hacked The CIA

it's October 2015 a chilly day in Autumn John Brennan receives a weird phone call it seems to be coming from a stranger he hesitates a second then picks up hello John Brennan who is this you're a lucer if John Brennan hadn't been John Brennan this might have looked like an ordinary prank call but John Brennan happens to be one of the most powerful men on Earth the head of the CIA who is this how did you get this number it was so easy bro you're such a d what do you want I don't want anything

I already own you how much do you want we want $5 trillion the US government will classify this call as part of a larger conspiracy of identity theft harassment of government officials and cyber terrorism the caller will pay a heavy price for this moment of trollish Glory why you doing this we want you to stop bombing the middle least across the Atlantic and a house in the West Midlands of England a 15-year-old kid in his room the phone still in his hand he can't believe what he just did he calls himself craer and he loves

to smoke weed in fact he's high right now he's also the leader of krakas with Attitude he and his companions terrorized and embarrassed the US security apparatus to a near incomparable degree they leaked the personal data of police officers FBI agents and doj officials they hand delivered top secret documents to Julian Assange some of the most publicized activism attributed to Anonymous they call themselves Anonymous yeah it was actually them in part for the laws and this is their story this was political teenager Cyber attack hijacked the computers of several us intelligence andity colletive called crackers

with attitude 2008 in Virginia a different kid who only calls himself default he is a pretty typical American Teenager he loves soccer video games and his dog he often clashes with his father who works in the government at some point default starts cheating in his video games this gives him the first taste of using computers to do things that you're not supposed to exciting powerful things he starts learning all that he can about how computers work and how to get them to bend to your will 2008 was an exciting time to get into hacking a

decentralized activist group Anonymous was in its Heyday if you manag to get into their secret chats you got a front seat view of their actions Anonymous is one of the biggest online vigilante group members hack into companies and government now a worldwide and widely recognized hacking group hackers with a group Anonymous citizens of the world we have seen the erosion of VI process a cyber War anonymous anonymous anonymous has struck again young default is is fascinated Anonymous embodies an exciting Spirit of Freedom through chaos they showed how you could force the whole world to pay

attention without you having to leave your bedroom some Anonymous actions are political some are just trolling and default after tasting this very new kind of power is Keen to learn everything he can about hacking he starts to hack random websites just for the challenge of it just to see if he can but after hanging around anonymous's chats for a while he starts to find the group well cringe for one thing it's crawling with FEDS people are getting arrested and it's tough to know who to trust Anonymous has become so big that vetting people becomes difficult

there's tons of infighting and doxing since it's the only activist group most media Outlets know about Anonymous keeps getting credited for the work of other often more sophisticated hackers it's a mess so default gets involved with offshoot hacker groups one of them called Anon sec the group positions itself as anti- Anonymous but similar to Anonymous Anon SE performs operations hacking initiatives that sometimes have a political purpose and sometimes are just as one might say in 2008 for the ls I hated recording that Anon SE is quite Advanced and default gets better and better at the

game the group controls a botn net a botn net is essentially a large pack of infected computers under someone's control you can use those computers to further spread malware across the internet to make the botn net larger and larger or you could for example attack a server with it in order to overload it default is tapping around Anon sex botnet and gets curious about what computers they've actually gotten under their control he finds that one is a server of the Canadian Medical School Windsor University suddenly default finds himself with direct access to the University's finances

he pulls up records of students who owe the school money it all adds up to 9 4 million and at the bottom of the list something very tempting a delete all button how could he not push it these people might you know really enjoy having their slate wiped clean as it were um if you look some of them ohe a substantial amount of money you know like 70,000 I think some people owed like upwards of like over 100 ,000 it's a lot of money you know what I'm saying it's just like Perpetual debt that sometimes

it just lasts for decades so um just deleted everything I went into the PHP shell and just like sent everything to devnull just like shredded it so whatever I sent there is just not coming back this is from the podcast darket Diaries they have a fantastic episode with default of course course this story poses some questions we tried asking the university if the dead stay deleted they did not answer but usually student loans have multiple on and offline and offside backups there should be hard copies of the student signed loan agreements however default feels like

he's really doing something at the time there is a certain rush to committing a crime when it feels like doing the right thing other hackers might have used the sensitive student information to make a profit there's actually a shadow industry worth billions surrounding our most sensitive data so-called data Brokers gather all the info available about us on the internet your contact information browsing history and online transactions this data is often bundled into Shadow profiles which are then being sold you might receive a tailored mail or a robo call based on your Shadow profile in the

worst case someone might try to steal your identity incog helps you remove your data from the numerous lists of data Brokers the only thing you have to do is create an account and allow incog to act on your behalf afterwards you can easily track the status of all the requests in the dashboard check out inc.com fertv for an exclusive 60% discount on a one-year plan using the code Fern TV additionally benefit from a 30-day money back guarantee despite incog efforts some of your data might still linger online always remain cautious when sharing personal information anywhere

by trying out in cogni you're actively supporting our Channel more and more of default hacks are motivated by altruism rather than just curiosity as recently as 2014 beastiality was legal in Denmark other European countries Germany the UK Sweden had recently banned it what this meant for Denmark was an increase in animal sex tourism for years Danish animal rights activists tried to bring attention to this they called them dog brothel so sick it's so crazy and I had a dog so that really pissed me off just thinking about the fact what if someone took my dog

and that happened to my dog I would freak out so as default describes it he and other Anon hackers lend their technical skills to the animal rights movement so we I think we took down the official Denmark Government website and then we actually um defaced it you know and said did you know that your government allows beastiality and there's beastiality dens where people can go and pay money to do these things to animals and most of them are like people's pets they shut down beastiality websites via dos attacks and tweet evidence of sexually mistreated animals

the information reverberates around the world and is widely condemned Anonymous gets credit for Anon sex actions which deeply annoys default but it works in part due to the hacks more people know about Danish dog brothel they talk about them online protest them until the case winds up in Parliament in April 2015 Denmark finally bans beastiality while default is leveling up as a hacker he also becomes an early adopter of crypto he accumulates a significant amount of Bitcoin more than 1,000 this would amount to a lot of money today somewhere around $40 million he keeps these

Bitcoins on a hard drive in his room he also knows he's making powerful enemies so he gets a bit paranoid a bit fanatical with his opsac he never logs into his own Wi-Fi for one he uses a satellite dish to log into a free Dairy Queen Wi-Fi half a mile away he's always connecting through a tour note every time he turns off his devices he makes sure they're encrypted when he turns them back on he has to wait 30 minutes for them to decrypt for the most part he never tells anybody what he is doing

he knows he has a lot to lose ultim Ely it won't be enough back in May 2013 a 29-year-old us intelligence contractor also has a lot to lose he has his own home in Honolulu a loving girlfriend and a salary of over $200,000 per year but he's discovered a huge secret and it's too big to keep the US government has the ability to spy on pretty much any man woman child on Earth who has coming into contact with a computer and this contractor unwittingly has helped make that technology possible he's haunted by this information and

horrified that his government is violating its public civil rights so egregiously he knows that revealing this information to anyone a lawyer a judge or even Congress would be committing felonies so severe that he would spend a lifetime in prison he's worried he'll never see his family again and he doesn't know what consequences they'll encounter if he Blows the Whistle but he has to do it he's been quietly collecting evidence of this secret for a while and he's just downloaded the last documents he tells his employer the US government that he needs a couple of weeks

off to manage his epilepsy this buys him a bit of time to leave the country without arousing suspicion he chooses Hong Kong because he views it as a Bastion of free speech he believes it's one of the few places in the world that could and would protect him from the Wrath of the US government there he meets journalists Laura pyros and Glenn Greenwald and delivers evidence of what used to be waved off as a conspiracy theory and so Edward Snowden becomes one of the most important whistleblowers of our modern time snowden's Revelations scandalize the world

and Spark a long overdue debate about individual privacy versus National Security he inspires many Young Americans like default to take a good hard look at how their government functions default doesn't want to sit around and let surveillance happen to him he wants high-ranking intelligence officials to know what it feels like to be spied upon to have their private information stored and distributed and to have it used against them this is when he teams up with the krakas with Attitude founded by kraka the kid who's always high leerer England 2015 in a housing estate on the

outskirts of a sleepy former mining town there's not a lot to do except get high or go online in the case of 15-year-old kraka he spends his time doing both he's angry about corruption about surveillance but in particular about the US's involvement in the Middle East he becomes especially focused on Palestine and sees the us as directly responsible for death and suffering in Gaza he decides to do something about it this was political we heard he was really angry about US foreign policy so he started a collective called crackers with attitude and then he hacked

into sensitive documents online one of his first victims is James Clapper then the national director of intelligence of the Obama Administration Clapper one of the highest ranking members of the intelligence Community had his phone number and address waiting to be found with just one Google search this provides kraker with enough information to hack into his email he posts proof of it on Twitter which catches defaults attention Kracker then gets the phone calls to clapper's house phone rerouted to the free Palestine movement default tweets his respect to kraka and the two start chatting Edward Snowden himself

has given James Clapper a very special shout out in an interview with the German broadcaster Ard unfortunately that interview was blocked from us and German television networks apparently the video is immediately taken down every time it's posted on YouTube so we'll only show the quotes visually I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper directly lie under oath to Congress what we do not do is spy unlawfully on Americans or for that matter spy indiscriminately on the citizens of any country we only spy for valid foreign intelligence

purposes as authorized by law with multiple layers of oversight to ensure we don't abuse our authorities kraa and default are livid kraka and other hackers Loosely connected with CWA team up to Target more high-ranking members of the intelligence Community they want to embarrass them and to show them that they aren't as powerful as they think they are at the top of their list is John Brennan head of the CIA Brennan like Clapper has enough information online that he basically doxes himself kraa looks up his publicly posted phone number and finds out it's a Verizon number

he calls up Verizon's internal tech support and pretends to be an on-site technician who's having trouble helping a customer onsite tech support asks cracker for his employee code and he just makes one up on the spot it works the support technician provides KRA with access and suddenly he has has the account number the pin and John Brennan's private email address if you have just enough information on someone pieced together from different sources say their address and last four digits of their social security number you can easily change the passwords on all kinds of accounts and

take it over and that's exactly what kraka does with Brennan's AOL account once he's in the email account kraka gets Brennan's private cell number and shares it with default and so they start spam calling the director of the CIA relentlessly calling him and his family I told him he was a piece of sh basically like y are awful people like really like you're not doing any net positive things for the world you're just not John Brennan is freaked out sure the calls are a little more than a prank but how could he know that at

the time nobody knew who was behind the calls or what their intentions were Brennan has to lay low for a while in hiding with extra security details for himself and his family at the same time kraa's breach into Brennan's email gives him access to sensitive documents kraka first post screenshots on Twitter but then egged on by default and may be asking himself what would Snowden do he decides to hit up Wikileaks Julian Assange himself takes interest he publishes the documents in October 2015 they include Brennan's 47 page sf86 application a sensitive form required for obtaining

top secret government security clearance the form Reveals His criminal history psychological Rec records past drug abuse and other details nobody would want about themselves online not only that from Brennan's emails Wikileaks publishes Bush era recommendations for how the presidency should operate in the Middle East there's also an internal Congressional correspondence from the Senate select committee on intelligence that offered suggestions on how to make future interrogation methods also known as torture compliant and legal the breach cost the agency $1.5 million in Damages and relocation costs as several operatives went into hiding but before they knew that

there was basically no Threat Level above all it was widely embarrassing hacking into Brennan's email was laughably easy this is true and it's true that you guys have actually broken into his private email account how difficult would you say it is uh you mean out of 10 sure out of 10 one one it's a lot of I guess private information really pretty stupid really he's he's supposed to be so high in the government like head of CIA he should be more clever can you give us any indication of your background I mean how old you

are you in theed United States I mean anything you can tell me about yourself yeah um I'm Bel the age of 20 years old um I smoke pop and I live in America and and you smoke pot every day we wonder what John Brennan must have thought while undoubtedly watching this in his relocation house what Fury must have built up inside him the CWA aren't done they they release more and more information with control over clappers and other operatives accounts it's even easier to get people to give up information to inter access further accounts and

databases they gain access to FBI's deputy director Mark Giuliano's account there they discover a database with personal information of 9,000 Department of Justice officials and 20,000 FBI agents they post it they then get access to the Justice Department's joint automated booking system which has records on all us prisoners they check out the records of fellow hackers like Jeremy Hammond and post those online as well they wreck havoc and embarrass one institution after another did these kids really think that they were going to get away with it at the time I really didn't care I just

like that was towards the end of the run and was just like all bets are off you know had gone all the way down the rabbit hole I just become very disillusioned with people's complacency and their lack of care for what was going on so it's like we're going to bring attention to this with like chaos in [Music] Mayhem kraka knows his actions have poked a very big bear he knows there will be consequences he just doesn't know what they'll exactly be I'm going to go to Russia and with Snowden cuz I know that the

government are pretty mad about this I'm probably going to get tortur I'm actually a pretty fast runner default is paranoid the whole time constantly worried about his obsc but he let his guard down default became involved with an ex-girlfriend of one of his friends according to him he asked his friend in advance if it's okay with him the friend says sure go for it he's way over it but he isn't default and his friend are hanging out one night drinking and chatting over Xbox Live I slip up for the first time ever being arrogant and

cocky it comes on the news CI director hack blah blah blah all this stuff and I'm like yeah that was us blah blah I was like drunk talking and just totally like gave myself away he never thought his friend would do anything with that information hell he didn't even think his friend would necessarily believe him but today default is pretty sure this friend turned him in when the FBI raids you they don't knock politely FBI agents entered a false room just just as his computer finishes decrypting they're pointing assault rifles in his face they drag

him out of his room flash copy his hard drive before it re-encrypts and sees all of his equipment default knows he's finished but the worst part watching the agents carry off his hard drive the hard drive with nearly 1,000 Bitcoin he blacks out kraka too gets raided by the British police forces and his computers are confiscated this team clear that go one other CWA member gets arrested in the US and three more in the UK since krco was underage and in the United Kingdom he got a lenient sentence he spent two years in a juvenile

detention center he was the first minor in the UK to be imprisoned for hacking today he's keeping his head down and is done with crime he just wants to make a career in cyber security and move on with his life he did not want to give us an interview default even though he was less involved paid a much higher price he went straight to federal prison with a 5-year sentence he had to pay $145,000 and restitution and due to co regulations spent a significant amount of that time in solitary confinement while pleading in court he

said I thought what I was doing was right in terms of political justice but 2 years later I realized I was completely wrong Snowden 2 didn't have a relaxed time fighting asylum in Russia shortly after his leak intelligent officials publicly fantasized about killing him whether you're principled whistleblower who truly understands the significance of what you're leaking or stone teen furious at the world's injustices messing with the US government will change the course of your life forever so make sure it's worth it in December 2023 the Biden Administration renewed a very controversial surveillance program the ACT

allows the administration to spy on anyone in the world without warrant including its own citizens it includes a a vast database of electronic communications it's supposed to be accessed only when there's a legitimate reason to believe it will assist intelligence operations but a US Court ruling in 2023 found that the FBI has already misused this database 278,000 times unlawful searches were particularly rampant between 2016 and 2020 they've snooped in the private Communications of donors to various congressional candidates they've been watching suspected January 6 riers and they've also been surveilling black lives matter protesters maybe they're

even surveilling us