Cold Open
25-year-old hacker Kevin Poulsen had been on the run for the last 18 months and evading the FBI was turning out to be exhausting work. When he wasn't anxiously looking over his shoulder, Poulsen was hijacking telephone lines and hacking into the U.S. government's military databases.
Poulsen spent years breaking into telephone companies and wiretapping mobsters and politicians. He hacked his way into foreign and domestic politicians' private documents. The hacker had even found details of the U.S. trying to meddle in the Filipino election.
But on April 13th, 1991, nearing midnight Kevin Poulsen took a serious risk as he pulled his hood up and walked into Hughes market.
Earlier that evening, Poulsen had visited the computer store just around the corner from Hughes to grab a new part for his computer. And grab was quite literal; he had stolen the external memory device. Poulsen didn't enjoy stealing, but it was part of his life on the run.
His risk tonight was coming to Hughes to get something to eat. It seemed silly, but part of him worried that cops would be staking out the place looking for the thief of the missing computer part.
But with the computer store locked up for the night and no police cars in site, Poulsen bravely entered the late-night market looking for sustenance.
Hackers need to eat too, and the market was conveniently down the street from his place. But as Kevin walked the aisles, he wondered if he had made the right choice.
Being on the run had made Kevin increasingly paranoid that someone was always listening- possibly even watching him.
A few young guys grabbed a case of beer and took it to the front. The rest of the store was quiet.
Poulsen grabbed a bag of chips off the shelf and a loaf of white bread. The sound of shoes scuffing the linoleum made him peer over his shoulder as he rounded the aisle, but no one was there.
Steady as he goes.
Kevin grabbed sliced cheese and made his way to the front of the store, where only one register was open. Two men hovered around the register in Hughes uniforms.
Almost home free.
Poulsen dumped the arm full of groceries onto the counter. His pulse raced as he nodded a greeting. One man grabbed the items to scan them, and the other opened an empty paper bag.
Was the cashier staring at him?
The two employees moved in slow motion, scanning each item and deliberately passing it one at a time. Finally, the cashier scanned the cheese but didn't hand it over.
Poulsen shifted his weight. Everything okay?
Before there was an answer, the bag boy lunged at Poulsen and tackled him to the ground.
Poulsen hit the floor, and the air knocked out of him. Before he could find his breath, the cashier was on top of him too. Poulsen tried to wriggle free, but it was useless— he was pinned.
Heavy boots stomped toward the scuffle. "Get off him," a gruff voice barked. Poulsen gulped for air as handcuffs clinked around his wrists.
It was a security guard that had cuffed Kevin. Not the police or the FBI. Kevin tried to formulate words, but all he could do was wheeze.
The officer led Poulsen to a back room and gestured at him to sit.
What's going on? Poulsen finally gasped.
The officer laughed. What's going on is you're going away. All the blood drained from Poulsen's face. Didn't think you could run forever, did you? He sneered.
Kevin was left in the back room alone. It didn't matter how he got caught, only that he did. And now, he needed to rely on his backup plan to escape. Whether Poulsen had the time to carry it out, well, that was another story.
Fuck it, Poulsen mumbled. He needed to try. Kevin had a key of his own— all he had to do was access it.
On this episode: free Porsche’s, doxing pedophiles and the hacking king of Pasadena. I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.
Introduction
You're listening to Modem Mischief. In this series we explore the darkest reaches of the internet. We'll take you into the minds of the world's most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We'll also show you places you won't find on Google and what goes on down there. This is the story of Kevin Poulsen aka, and this is funny to me everytime I say it: Dark Dante.
ACT 1
In 1981, Kevin Poulsen was gifted a new computer for his 16th birthday. Poulsen, whose anonymous computer handle was Dark Dante, had already fallen into a crowd of phone phreakers— teenagers who hacked into phone lines— for a couple of years when he was introduced to online hacking.
Young Poulsen spent every waking hour online honing his hacking abilities. People who knew Kevin as a teen dubbed him the best hacker in his Pasadena town. What Kevin needed was a challenge to prove his superiority. A year later, Kevin got his chance.
While browsing various bulletin board forums, Poulsen stumbled upon the telephone number for ARPANET. Arpanet, also known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was a vast Defense Department computer web of military and research center.
After Poulsen connected his computer to the ARPANET, he could access the basic research conducted by UC Berkley, a local school that utilized the program. At first glance, there wasn't much in the way of military secrets until he ran into a password-protected area of the program.
Bingo.
After two failed password attempts, Poulsen typed 'UCB' into the blank space and hit enter. To his amazement, he found himself inside the top-secret program. Once inside, Poulsen uncovered troves of secret military intelligence, research done on Soviet Russia, and all kinds of government espionage secrets.
Being a 17-year-old meant that Poulsen had to brag to his hacker friends about his score. Shortly after, he and his friends started crashing ARPANET regularly. Kevin and his friend Austin took the group's hacker-wars to new heights.
Armed only with modems and cheap computers, the two teens invaded the network's giant computers, taunting one another by leaving hostile, cryptic electronic notes and clues in the bowels of the machines.
Things were hopping on ARPANET, and the criminal activity on the site began to garner the attention of law enforcement.
As the police began looking for details regarding the intruders, Poulsen slipped up. Instead of using his anonymous handle to log onto the ARPANET site one day, he used his real name.
On the morning of September 22nd, 1983, three months after Kevin first infiltrated ARPANET, Austin was arrested. A fleet of sedans pulled up outside Poulsen's home on the same day. The local DA confiscated Poulsen's computer and left the young hacker with a warning; if he were caught hacking again, there would be serious criminal charges to pay.
The reprimand only served to push Poulsen further underground. Instead of curbing Kevin's hacking, the confrontation with the DA only made him more aloof and exponentially more careful.
Poulsen needed to get out of his California town to keep away from prying eyes. After taking the GED exam to graduate high school early, Kevin moved out of his childhood home and up to Northern California.
Poulsen got his first job as a computer technician during the day and surfed the hacker bulletin boards at night. The man spent 24/7 on a computer looking for the next big hack.
After nearly a year without much hacktion (I'm sorry: we just had to), Poulsen determined that he couldn't wait for a cool hack to simply fall into his lap like it had before; he needed to go out and find it.
To start getting in front of the hacking trends, Poulsen needed more. More information, more technology, and more computing power. To get it, he would need to get off the computer for once and start taking his hacks into the real world.
Poulsen spent the following few months getting ready for the next phase of his plan. He stole gear from a telephone technician's trunk and kept it in a spare room until it was time. Using his computer skills, Kevin created a fake name tag adorned with a fake name and the logo of a local repair company.
On Sunday, March 18th, 1984, Poulsen pulled on the uniform. He made sure to park his Oldsmobile down the block from Pacific Telesis, one of the largest telephone providers in California.
Poulsen shouldered a plain black duffle bag and approached the back entrance of the building. He quickly and silently used a screwdriver and a thin crowbar to pop the back door out of place.
When Poulsen entered the building, the ground floor of the building was mostly quiet. It was a Sunday, and only one long man paced the warehouse area with a clipboard, taking notes on the status of the different machines.
The man looked startled when Poulsen approached him. Can I help you? He asked, pushing up his glasses that sat on the bridge of his nose.
Here for repairs. Poulsen said. He wanted to keep the conversation short. Operating room?
The guy gave Kevin a once-over, his eyes lingering on the fake badge strapped to Kevin's chest. Up the stairs, third door on the right.
Kevin hurried past him and made his way to the operating room. Inside, there were a few switchboards and loads of machinery lying around.
Poulsen grabbed a test set, a type-writer-looking device that would allow him to secretly intercept and record telephone conversations. The test set could give him the insider information he was looking for to bust into newer computer programs. It could also give him the personal details needed to hack passwords.
While inside, Kevin also stocked up on cords and newer computer equipment he could use to help him hack into the more secure government programs.
Once he gathered everything he came for, waited a seemingly appropriate amount of time for a repairman, and quietly made his way out of the building without running into another person.
Poulsen's heist on Pacific Telesis was a success. He had been able to get his hands on mostly everything he needed to take his hacks to the next level. The problem was that Kevin was never satisfied. He was always on the hunt for the next big hack, the next big steal.
Over the next several years, Poulsen continued his hacking sprees and his telephone company heists. It felt like a game to young Poulsen, a game without consequences. Even though he felt untouchable as a hacker, by other hackers, or by the police, he was always prepared with a plan in case things went awry.
On December 18th, 1988, the manager of a storage locker facility and another worker went to storage unit 1457 to cut the lock. Not in a malicious way, but the rent hadn't been paid, and they were finally authorized to crack it open and auction the contents.
When the lock was cut and fell away, the men opened the door what they found shocked and surprised them.
Inside, there were piles of old telephone equipment. Big, clunky machines decorated the interior perimeter, and stacks of boxes were scattered throughout, piled up high and spilling over.
The manager reached inside one of the closest boxes and skimmed the paperwork. The first thing he noticed was a large U.S. government emblem printed on the upper left-hand corner of the stack. The memo contained information on Russian intelligence from what the manager could gather.
What do you think it is? The worker asked.
The manager dropped the papers back into the box. I think it's all stolen. The manager said, taking a step backward. We need to call the police.
It was almost 30 minutes later when the police finally arrived. They determined that all the equipment in the storage unit had, in fact, been stolen. The telephone equipment was all old technology, taken from various telephone companies. The paperwork, however, had been more alarming.
The information contained in the boxes appeared to originate exclusively from government-sponsored computer programs and research.
Who could be behind this? What was this person after?
When the police asked the manager who rented the unit. The police went to look it up, but the name came back as a fake. Luckily for the police, some of the documentation in the boxes had a different name on them— a name already familiar to police.
The name was Kevin Poulsen. The officers who responded to the storage unit were immediately interested in the young hacker and wanted to know precisely what the 23-year-old was up to with all the stolen goods.
All they needed to do was find him.
ACT 2
WANTED flashed across the television screen to the accompaniment of eerie theme music. Robert Stack, the host of "Unsolved Mysteries," strode through a large computer facility, and an image of young Kevin Poulsen's face was plastered to the screen.
The FBI was hunting Kevin Poulsen, and they needed all the help they could get. The more they dug into the young hacker's documents and belongings, the more alarmed they became.
Poulsen had wiretapped the intimate phone calls of a Hollywood starlet, allegedly conspired to steal classified military orders, and reportedly uncovered unpublished telephone numbers for the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco.
Evidence was emerging that the hacker also had the capacity to compromise every undercover wiretap in the state of California and front businesses of the FBI itself.
After giving FBI agents the slip, Kevin phoned the G-men to taunt them for his escape. Kevin seemed to love the power that came with being the smartest and most prepared man in the room.
When the FBI traced the call and were left dismayed. The number was traced to a circuit buried deep within Pacific Bell instead of a home phone or a phone booth.
Poulsen went underground and knew of only one way to get by.
KIIS-FM called it "Win a Porsche by Friday": eight Porsches--about $400,000 worth of steel, leather, and status--given away, one a week.
Today is the day! Squealed disc jockey Rick Dees. Caller number 102, after the song 'Kiss' by Prince, will be the winner of a brand new $50,000 Porsche!
Everyone in the city of Los Angeles was hoping to be the lucky caller. One of America's most-wanted hackers wasn't going to take any chances.
First, Janet Jackson took over the airwaves, followed by the B-52's. Finally, Prince came on, and the song Kiss started playing on radios all across Los Angeles.
The phones at the radio station started lighting up as workers counted each and every call. The station's promotional director, Karen Tobin, marked each call on a giant whiteboard in the middle of the room. But Tobin and her people weren't the only ones counting.
At the precise moment Prince's "Kiss" hit the air, Poulsen and his hacker buddies started watching the phone lines, only to seize control of the station's 25 phone lines as the callers hit number 100. Taking control of the line meant that Poulsen blocked out all calls but his own. Poulsen let one call through, and then the man, who identified himself as Michael B. Peters, calmly dialed the 102nd call and won a Porsche 944 S2.
Poulsen wasn't dumb enough to try and pick up the prize himself. Instead, a friend of Kevin and a fellow hacker went to the radio station with a fake ID and scooped the car without incident.
Winning the Porche jackpot wasn't Poulsen's first rodeo. In the time that Kevin had been on the run, he had won a second Porche, $20,000 in cash, and at least two trips to Hawaii.
What Poulsen and his friends didn't sell for cash, they kept for themselves.
In the late 1980's term hacking was synonymous with joyriding on a computer or phone system out of curiosity. Kevin Poulsen had given the term a makeover. After Poulsen's government and phone hacks, assaulting the hidden secrets of computing in a new age, the term hacker had taken a darker turn.
In November 1989, a San Jose federal grand jury unsealed an indictment against Poulsen on charges of penetrating military and phone company computer systems. The hunt was officially taken public and the media dubbed Poulsen “The Hannibal Lecter of Computer Crimes.”
The federal grand jury listed all of Poulsen's stolen tools and his alleged co-conspirators. Several burglary highlights were listed on the indictment, complete with Poulsen's own photographic evidence to support the charges. Then, there were the hacks of Pacific Bell, the United States Army, and Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos. There were also the FBI wiretaps Poulsen uncovered and potential mobsters that could have been tipped off to the government's tactics.
What did it all mean, and what was next for the young hacker? Thrashing around in FBI investigations of mobsters, snatching secret Soviet numbers? It seemed as if Poulsen's powers were growing, and his expanding abilities demanded new challenges.
As serious as the charges were against Poulsen, he was operating more like a smart-assed kid than a dangerous spy.
Sometime in 1987, Poulsen established Pacific Bell phone lines in the names of Walter Kovacs and Jon Osterman— fictional anti-heroes of the television show Watchmen. The Watchmen series is revered for the complexity of its characters and the darkness of its vision.
Regardless of Poulsen's intentions, the cyber-punk hacker needed to be stopped before compromising national security. The feds were forced to treat Kevin like the wanted fugitive he was; dangerous and unpredictable. No one knew what Kevin was planning or who his next target would be.
After the episode of Unsolved Mysteries aired featuring Kevin Poulsen, the FBI lucked out with a hot lead.
Poulsen had recently been seen walking past Hughes market, but by the time agents arrived, Kevin Poulsen was gone.
A Pacific Bell investigator working the case, Terry Atchley, had a hunch that Poulsen might be back. Atchley left pictures of Poulsen at the store, and, sure enough, Poulsen returned.
A night manager at the store had recognized Poulsen from the images left by FBI and immediately called investigators. This time, Hughes market employees weren't going to leave anything to chance. When Poulsen went to checkout with his food, two clerks grabbed him and wrestled him to the ground.
The FBI showed up at the market and found Poulsen crying in a back storage room. He asked if he could take out his contact lenses and get his glasses from a black bag in his car. FBI agent Richard Beasley agreed but said he wanted to search the bag first. Hidden in the glasses' case was a handcuff key.
Poulsen had given the FBI the slip once, and the agents weren't going to let it happen again.
On April 21st, 1991, almost exactly two years after Poulsen was captured, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles delivered a 19-count indictment. Charged with conspiracy, fraud in connection with access devices, interception of wire or electronic communications, and money laundering, Kevin Poulsen faced a maximum of 100 years in prison, heaped on top of the potential 37 in the San Jose case, and fines of nearly $5 million.
Kevin was reluctant to give up information but received a 51-month sentence. Poulsen was the first-ever hacker to be charged with espionage. After serving four and a half years in jail, Poulsen was released and prohibited from using the internet without supervision.
Kevin sat around and didn't do much of anything for nearly five years. For him, there wasn't much to do besides sitting on the internet, poking for information. When the time finally came that Kevin could re-access the internet, he swore to use the privilege for good and vowed to turn over a new leaf.
In early 2000, Poulsen got a job with Security Focus, an online security and research firm where he began covering security and hacking news as a journalist. He used his knowledge of tech and computers to insert himself as a significant technology contributor.
Poulsen's writing for the site ended up catapulting Security Focus to the forefront of cyber news and national security. After growing the online platform for four years, Poulsen grew interested in pursuing different and increasingly independent writing projects.
In 2006, amid Poulsen's flurry of freelance writing endeavors, speaking appearances, and book deal, Poulsen created a code to catch convicted sex offenders trawling MySpace for underaged victims.
In the early 2000s, law enforcement relied on bait profiles registered to fake underage teens to catch online predators.
What once seemed like a great turned out to be a hit-or-miss kind of deal. Proactively scouring MySpace pages were nothing but a waste of department resources. The smarter sexual predators stuck to private messages and diligently prune their public comments of any posts from young friends that hint at what's happening behind the scenes.
Poulsen's code, called a Perl script, compared MySpace profiles with a database of registered sex offenders. He claims his analysis of a third of MySpace profiles confirmed 744 offenders with profiles, and almost 500 of them pedophiles.
While there's nothing inherently illegal with a registered sex offender having a MySpace profile, it gave law enforcement the inside edge into who the people really were behind the profiles, and an ability to move quickly should criminal activity occur.
Low and behold, New York State police monitoring a registered sex offender's profile got a hit.
One of the phony profiles that Poulsen had flagged for law enforcement reached out to a young girl, soliciting her for photographs. The New York State Police didn't waste any time; having flagged the fake profile, they immediately dispatched officers to the last known address for the offender associated with the profile.
Finally, on the other side of the law, it seemed like Kevin was changing for the better. Here he was, finally doing some with his skills and talents.
The deeper Kevin got into his journalism career; however, the more his hacker past came back to haunt him. The public couldn't help but speculate about the authenticity of his sources and whether they were willing participants or targets.
ACT 3
On June 10th, 2010, Wired.com broke one of the largest whistleblower stories that the American government had ever seen.
The opening line read: Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video, and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
The breaking-news article was written by none other than ex-black-hat-hacker Kevin Poulsen.
The story reported that 22-year-old Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) had been colluding with convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo and founder of Wikileaks Julian Assange to share hundreds and thousands of classified State Department records.
The government's main concern seemed to be the infamous Apache video, a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter airstrike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent American civilians.
The Wired story claimed that Manning was turned in to the government by a former computer hacker whom Manning had been communicating with online. That hacker turned out to be Lamo.
The news was startling, to say the least, for the American public and the federal government. Especially since the Feds had hoped to keep Manning's case as quiet as possible while a Pentagon-funded manhunt continued for Julian Assange.
The strange piece that neither the public nor government could seem to fit into place was how Wired got hold of Manning's story.
Poulsen wouldn't reveal his source, but journalist Glen Greenwald of Salon discovered and disclosed a possible link. According to Greenwald, in the years leading up to Chelsea Manning's arrest, Poulsen had served as Lamo's personal media voice.
Lamo was notorious in the world of hacking for being a low-level, inconsequential hacker with an insatiable need for self-promotion and media attention. For the past decade, Poulsen’s media connection has satisfied Lamo's need for attention.
After the Salon article, speculation around Poulsen serged. Both WikiLeaks and avid hackers have wondered whether Poulsen violated journalistic ethical rules by being complicit with Lamo in informing on Manning.
Nothing ended up happening to Poulsen or Lamo, but Manning was crucified in the media and faced 22 counts against a grand jury. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison though she’s largely considered a whistleblower.
By the time Manning's case made it to the court, Poulsen was already scouring sources for his next big journalistic break.
Years went by until May 2019, when a viral video was posted online of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This clip had been altered to slow Pelosi down without lowering the pitch of her voice. The effect made it sound as though Pelosi was slurring her words drunkenly while criticizing Donald Trump.
Like most politically fueled videos posted to the internet, the tampered video of Pelosi started slingshotting around the globe to taint the speaker's public reputation. Youtube worked quickly to remove the uploaded video, but Facebook did not.
Backlash erupted over the video, and people around the globe started commenting on the speaker's video with outrage and dismay.
Republicans were quick to call Pelosi unfit and a danger to democracy. Democrats, on the other hand, jumped to Pelosi's defense. By the time the video was scrutinized and professionals deemed that the audio had been tampered with, the public opinion had taken over the facts of the case.
Who better to clear the air than the man who tampered with and posted the video himself? For most of the public, the idea of tracking down and exposing the man who edited the video was only a dream. But not for Kevin Poulsen.
On June 2nd, 2019, Poulsen broke a story as a freelance writer on The Daily Beast titled, We Found the Guy Behind the Viral 'Drunk Pelosi' Video. In it, Poulsen delivered the video curator on a silver platter for the public to feast on.
Shawn Brooks was his name, a sports blogger, and Donald Trump fan was the one who altered and posted the doctored video clip of Nancy Pelosi. According to Poulsen, the video appeared on Brooks's personal Facebook page before it appeared on various right-wing news outlets and other social media pages.
Poulsen's article held back zero punches, even sharing that Brooks was a 34-year-old day laborer living in the Bronx who was currently on probation after pleading guilty to domestic battery charges earlier in the year.
Competing news outlets reported a mixed bag of feelings in the wake of the Daily Beast article. Poulsen defended the article, stating that his story was evidence of a more significant dis-information problem.
But not long being posted, the article drove tons of critics—including many associated with the alt-right—to speak out. The story, they claimed, was a shameful attempt by the media to identify or "dox" a previously anonymous citizen for the harmless crime of posting a video.
While most of the world was fixated on the video hoax and the state of America's democracy, a small sub-set of hackers raised speculation on Poulsen's sources and his integrity as a journalist.
The ex-hacker, known for his love of powerful information back in his prime hacking days, refutes any wrongdoing as a person and a journalist. Poulsen claimed that he identified Brooks through a donation link attached to one of the political Facebook pages that posted the manipulated video.
Poulsen contacted Brooks about the video and Brooks denied being the one to post it, claiming that it must have been of of the sites other six administrators. For most journalists, the story stops there. Without public attribution to a particular administrator, there was no way to tell who posted the video.
But Poulsen had an inside source at Facebook. In his article he sites a Facebook official told Poulsen that it was, indeed Brooks that posted the video from his account. Poulsen’s sources came into question but media outlet were only left to speculate about the source and their intention.
Brooks publicly denied creating the video, stating that he only shared it to his personal Facebook page after it was made public by one of the other administrators. He quickly started a GoFundMe account so that he could hire a lawyer to sue The Daily Beast for, what he called, an inaccurate trash article.
Supporters came to Brooks side, blasting Poulsen and The Daily Beast for posting all of Shawn Brooks information all over a silly video. Other commenters wondered whether the alleged “source” at Facebook existed at all.
As a result of the story, Kevin was back on top and in the public eye. He relished the frenzy that came with being the center of attention and the man of the hour. Kevin was never criminally charged for anything relating to the article.
Hackers and techies around the globe still don't entirely buy it.
ACT 4
Poulsen started his hacking career looking up to people like Steven Levy, the author of the 1984 book titled Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution.
The hacker's profiled in Levy’s book were brilliant engineers who taught themselves to pick locks so that they could fiddle with university's giant computers. Other hackers turned themselves into innovators who launched the tech industry out of a love of the machines.
Clearly, Poulsen modeled his early hacking career off the tech pioneers who came before him. Between his own lock-picking and underground hacking, what started as an innocent computer past time quickly became a power trip that fueled Poulsen 24 hours a day.
Before his arrest, Kevin used his abilities to stay one step ahead of the government that was desperately searching for him. From wiretaps across the country to the depths of our government's military research. Like his predecessors, Kevin regularly bent the limits imposed by the G-men and the laws they imposed on the limits of cyber-space.
Somewhere along the way, Kevin became too powerful and skilled for the government to contain. It wasn't about poking and prodding the computers to test their limits; it was all about information and the power people had when possessing it.
Even after serving his jail time, Poulsen still pushed the envelope for free information. He relished being the one to break a big story, the first to unearth global truths, and the gatekeeper of information that could unravel democracy; now that is true power.
Information was his newest currency and Poulsen continues to use his knowledge of computers and high-level hacking skills to leverage a unique vantage point as a mainstream journalist. Through whatever means necessary, Kevin remains one step ahead of the rest.
Born in a time when hacking was an innocent rite of boyhood, Poulsen's evasive and criminal antics changed the meaning of the word 'hacker' from a computer lover to someone who can expose the greatest government in the world with the click of a mouse.
Credits
Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the follow button in your favorite podcast app right now so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. Tell your friends, your enemies, mention it at your next family gathering when they start talking politics. And another way to support us is on Patreon. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus monthly bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by Lauren Minkoff. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard and ladies: He’s vaxxed, he’s waxed and he’s ready to chillax. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!