4.6 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2021
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In the 1980s, computers, now more powerful and more affordable, become a bigger part of people’s work and life. And that makes hackers a greater threat. America’s laws are slow to keep up with this new form of break-in. Then, an incorrigible teenager with a talent for computers gets caught in the country’s shifting views of hacking, and becomes the most wanted cyber criminal in the United States.
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0:00.0 | Hey, prime members, you can listen to American innovations, add free on Amazon music, download |
0:06.0 | the app today. |
0:16.2 | It's Memorial Day weekend, 1981, a little before one in the morning. |
0:22.0 | 17-year-old Kevin Mittnik is way steep and a dumpster outside a phone company facility |
0:27.6 | in downtown Los Angeles. |
0:29.9 | Mittnik's dropped out of high school, earned his GED, and now spends his nights hacking |
0:35.1 | the phone lines, an activity known as phone freaking. |
0:38.6 | It began as a hobby, but now it's a full time obsession, occupying close to 16 hours |
0:44.8 | a day, and sometimes it requires getting your hands dirty. |
0:49.8 | Literally. |
0:50.8 | Mittnik sifts through Styrofoam cups, coffee grounds, and used clean access. |
0:55.5 | There's nothing here. |
0:58.3 | It calls out to his friend in the next dumpster. |
1:00.8 | Where'd you find? |
1:01.8 | His friend, who goes only by the name Roscoe, is a few years older than Mittnik, and a student |
1:07.5 | at the University of Southern California. |
1:09.4 | He's also one of the few people Mittnik knows whose phone freaking skills can keep up with |
1:14.0 | his. |
1:15.0 | Roscoe pokes his head out of the dumpster, didly squat, and bets some other freaks got |
1:19.6 | here earlier and picked a clean. |
1:21.9 | This particular phone facility houses Cosmos, the mainframe computer storing the phone |
1:27.3 | company's maintenance and signal records. |
... |
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