As a child, I had what some might call an unhealthy fascination with the telephone. I spent hours picking apart how rotary telephones worked. Early on, I developed a natural talent for winning things on call-in radio shows: tickets, records, backstage visits, you name it. This addiction accelerated in college: my roommates and I would get an old dial telephone from a second-hand shop, go to the local junction box, pry it open, twist some wires and hack the switchboard right there on the street. We learned how to do this on bulletin board systems. On bulletin boards, we learned how to call internationally, and we also learned about Russian hackers and how they were super smart.
Most times, we reached numbers that rang and rang, or we encountered irate operators. But we were actually "up to good” instead of no-good: we just wanted to talk. We called and called all around the globe, exploring the euphoric freedom of simple conversation. We could jump into a call with a woman chatting with her mother and eavesdrop on a nervous young man asking a girl to a movie. After a late night of calling Poland to talk about music, we’d slap some electrical tape on the wires and go get pizza. We possessed the rare gift of connecting with the world. Circumventing the phone companies’ exorbitant rates was the only way we could ever hope to meet these far-away strangers. Intercepting and making calls was an extension of the pen-pal habit I developed in childhood, wanting always to know what life was like in Egypt, France, Germany — anywhere but here.
We were not alone: Phone phreaking had been going on for years, with the likes of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs selling blue boxes for phone interception out of their college dorm room in the 1970s. After the phone, we started to sift through online data, and we became “phrackers.” We thought we were just like the spies in movies — at least, that’s how we felt. After all, it was the Golden Age of spy stories, all involving Russia and the Cold War, international espionage aplenty with really cool devices.
And speaking of the Cold War and spies, we have to address hacking. The Russians have always been there, living inside our modern machines. They invented essential contemporary hacking techniques. Back in the 1980s, Soviet spies devised an electric “bug” for typewriters; according to a U.S. National Security Agency report from 2012, the bug would transmit short burst radio signals of keystroke information from the IBM Selectric, the typewriter on which I learned to type; to think that my love letters were intercepted by the KGB was thrilling. The bug was an analog version of keylogging, capturing what someone is typing through a well-hid virus.
Then came 1984, a pivotal, dystopian, party-kind of year, when the “Ma Bell” phone monopoly was broken apart, when George Orwell thought Western culture would finally eat itself. The Macintosh computer was released to great Orwellian fanfare, with a famous ad depicting a legion of monotone workers resembling prisoners waiting to be rescued by the glorious machine. The CIA discovered 17 more Soviet bugs in embassy typewriters. In 1984, the President-actor’s radio check was leaked: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” This joke chilled the Cold War into a monumental glacier, an infamous session that disturbed a generation and amplified the arms race. Mushroom clouds filled our TV screens, and even the musician Sting wrote a pretty bad post-warhead song called “Russians” a year later.
I carried around a survival kit with food rations and matches, convinced that though we and the Russians shared the same biology (if not ideology), we were goners. But I continued my love affair with telephones and computers. While I was poking around with online Multi-User Dungeons and text adventure games, a local hacker clique down the street, who called themselves the 414s, hacked into Los Alamos National Laboratory just for kicks.
1984 was also the year that Tetris sprang from the gorgeous code of Alexey Pajitnov. Pajitnov’s tile matching game was the first Soviet-developed computer software to be sold in the US. Pajitnov worked for the Dorodnitsyn Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. It was the mothership for hackers. Hacking, tapping and digging up intelligence is one and the same with Russia, spying and nuclear war.
My friends and I were hacking this network and that, finding things from library book record numbers to alternate identities. We’d pretend-password ourselves into bulletin boards. We’d guess default to forums. Then, we developed personae. "Caitlin Ingraham," for example, was a member of several book and record clubs as well as an investor in auctions at Sotheby’s. At one point, she had a credit card and nearly owned a Scottish castle.
I guess we were hackers, but we were two-bit hackers, through really slow modems. The “real deal” hackers were from elsewhere. To be more precise, they were from Russia. The Russians knew everything about our computers, now and then.
In 1989, a German hacker/spy ring sold data to the KGB from the data banks of the Pentagon, NASA Space Center, the nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos, the European Nuclear Research Center and CERN, among others. It was only a matter of time before the KGB owned the world. Then, there was VLAD: by 1994 we had ourselves a verifiable guru in our midst, Vladimir Levin, a Russian systems administrator who hacked into Citibank and stole $10 million dollars. Vlad was the first net-based bank robber, extradited to the U.S. because Russia had no laws about hacking. Vlad was detained for three years, and all but $200,000 was recovered by the bank. But our fantasy of the Robin Hood hacker was too good to be true: later, the hacking collective ArachnoiD, who had installed games on Citibank’s severs for fun, revealed they had sold Vlad account access instructions for $100.
Still, Russians ruled. Alexey Ivanov and Vasiliy Gorshkov were able to crack Western Union and PayPal payment systems, though they were later caught in a 2002 sting. Evgeniy Bogachev and his collective, through the bank of computers called Gameover ZeuS, stole $100 million from American consumers and banks. They are still at large. But the best part about the Russians? The lady hackers, increasingly discovered within Russia’s “illegals” programs: characteristically hot, while being terrifically cool. Anna Chapman, aka Anna Vasil'yevna, a UK citizen, founded a faux real estate business and was living on Wall Street when she was deported in 2010 after being outed as a Russian intelligence agent who moved between fashion modeling and hacking. Kristina Svechinskaya, a Russian money mule hacker and former NYU student, defrauded several British and U.S. banks of sizeable sums using the “Zeus” Trojan horse and is said to have stolen $3 million in just a few months. She now has her own TV series, because somehow people think that watching a smart woman who codes will lead to enlightenment.
Then there is Natasha Grigori, whose handle sounded Russian, though we’ll never really know the truth. She was a hacker in the 1980s before starting antichildporn.org, an organization of hackers who track down child pornographers on the net. I could be biased, but I don’t think it was these lady hackers who were involved in the Russian government’s attempts to use hackers to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. They tend to go after criminals. Indeed, Russian hackers have been involved in U.S. politics since the 1990s — and vice versa, when the 1996 re-election campaign of Boris Yeltsin was distantly orchestrated by American political consultants. There’s even a movie about this circus, aptly titled "Spinning Boris," starring Jeff Goldblum.
The 2016 hack of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the leak where Russian hackers stole opposition research on the now-President, are only the most recent incidents in a long string of campaign interference that goes back decades. Russian intelligence has long relied on broadcasts, websites, false advertising, fake news and downright hacking to press Americans’ hot buttons — after all, the issues are easy to see. Former FBI agent Clinton Watts once said, “Russia targets specific audiences inside electorates amenable to their messages and resulting influence — in particular ‘alt-right’ audiences incensed over immigration, refugees and economic hardship.”
While Russia’s governmental body has denied participation in America’s most recent Presidential election, and the current U.S. President has denied collusion with Russia, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has confirmed the connection. So did the fired CIA director James Comey and others. Fake Russian accounts bought $100,000 in political Facebook ads for the current U.S. regime, taking conservative stances on divisive social issues such as race, gay rights, gun control and immigration. The list goes on.
It seems the Russians are embedded in our computers and social networks — there are Russians inside us, like DNA. Suffice it to say, we are more Russian than we think.
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Mary Flanagan will read a version of this piece on November 12th at “What have the Russians Ever Done For Us?” at KGB Bar in New York City.
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