The Loudmouth | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón.

Julio Ardita saw his first computer at the age of 12, in 1986. It was at his school in Jujuy, a province in northern Argentina, during a computer workshop. Fifteen kids in front of a single machine. Everyone watching while the teacher explained LOGO, an educational programming language that used figures and drawings to introduce children to that world. And although he was just watching, Julio was hooked from the first moment. 

[Julio Ardita]: What captivated me about computers? I think what I liked was the possibility it gave you to imagine something, develop it, and put it into practice.

[Daniel]: Julio liked to create. In Jujuy, when he was not going out on expeditions with his siblings to a river near his house, he spent hours assembling little race cars out of wood or building small tree houses.

[Julio]: The fun was in putting them together. Once it was built, we said, “Oh, well, it’s done,” and we went somewhere else to build another one.

[Daniel]: Two years later, he moved to Buenos Aires. His outdoor life was limited to a few outings to the park, and Julio began to spend more and more time on the only computer he had access to, in the computer lab at his new school. Somehow, programming was like going on an expedition. 

[Julio]: It allowed me, in a way, to take my outside world to a world where you could create, develop, think inside that virtual world. That’s how I started to get into the subject and became passionate about it.

[Daniel]: He begged his parents to buy him a computer. But computers were too expensive for a middle-class family trying to cope with the economic crisis that Argentina was going through in the late 1980s. That didn’t stop him. Even without a computer, programming began to take up more and more of his time. 

[Julio]: I could be, I don’t know, maybe having dinner with my parents, and I came up with a new function for a new routine. So I would say, “Hang on!” And I would run to my room, grab a piece of paper, the first one I could find, and write 10, 20, 30 sentences—the programming—and put it aside. 

[Daniel]: In a short time, he filled several notebooks and dozens of loose pieces of paper with lines of code. A few months later, he got a job at a video game and computer store. One day, his boss proposed a trade: If Julio traded in his game console and some money, in addition to his working hours, she would give him a used computer.

Julio asked his father for money and persuaded his siblings that the computer was much better than a console, and that he would even be able to create his own games. Anyway, it was useless for them to refuse. Once his mind was made up, it was difficult to convince him otherwise. So he got his first machine—a CZ1500. By then it was already an old model, but he didn’t care. It was a computer, and it was his own.

From that moment on, it became increasingly difficult to detach him from his desk. 

[Julio]: I got more and more into it. So now I was staying, let’s say, I wasn’t going to dinner anymore. It was difficult for them, they called me, they said, “Dinner is served.” Then they all sat down to eat. But I was like, “No, wait, the last small program needs to load, it needs to load…” so that’s when it started to become annoying for my parents. That’s where my nerdy side began.

[Daniel]: He became a disciplined, self-taught person. He read tutorials in magazines, asked questions of his computer science teacher, and even began visiting the Library of Congress, where there was a small computer science section. But it was impossible to keep up to date. Every day brought a new program, or a more modern, more powerful machine with more memory.

With some savings and the help of his parents, he upgraded his computer to a newer one, with DOS and a floppy drive. He loved that machine so much that he even took it with him on vacation. In January 1990, when he went with his family to Córdoba to visit his uncle, he filled almost the entire trunk of the car with it.

[Julio]: Part of what I carried was the screen, the computer, the keyboard, the mouse, the CPU, the charger, the power supply, the adapter. It was…it filled up a large part of the trunk.

[Daniel]: His uncle was surprised by Julio’s obsession. He had an electronics business, so he understood computers, and gave him a gift: a device the size of a toaster, with levers and buttons that allowed a computer to connect to the telephone network and thus to other computers—that is, a modem.

Each modem had a number that identified it. And to connect to another computer, you had to dial that number and wait for a noise to come out of the phone. If you were born between the 70s and the 2000s, you can no doubt identify this sound.

Everything was very precarious, so you had to try two or three times until you succeeded.

But the computer and the modem were not enough. You had to know where to connect. At the business where he worked, Julio found a list of phone numbers associated with BBS, or Bullet Board System, a software that connected computers to the telephone line to communicate with each other. He copied down some numbers and started calling. 

[Julio]: Once you logged in, you had different functions: you had a forum to watch news, you could upload programs, download programs, you could chat with the person on the other side. I mean, it was… it was like a data bank.

[Daniel]: BBS was born in the late 70s in the United States, but became more popular since the 80s. It was like a prehistoric version of social media. Prehistoric because the Internet as we know it did not yet exist, but also because the connections were unstable and each action, no matter how simple, took a long time. 

[Julio]: The goal of the BBS was to share information. So there were people who had their BBS where they shared, I don’t know, information about cooking recipes. There was another BBS that was just about programs. So by entering the BBS, you could upload and download programs about different things. And then there were a few other BBS for hacking.

[Daniel]: Hacking, that is, BBSs where what was shared were not cooking recipes or games, but programs, techniques and tricks to infiltrate other computers. That is how, at the age of 16, Julio entered the world of Argentinean hackers: the underground.

It was the beginning of the 90s, and the digital world was a territory in continuous transformation, without many rules, unknown to most, where the borders between what could and could not be done were still blurry. But that wouldn’t take long to change.

And Julio, together with his computer, would have a lot to do with that change.

We’ll be back with our story after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. This story was produced by Matías Avramow and Emilia Erbetta. Matías picks up the story.

[Matías Avramow]: There is a film that gives a very good portrayal of the times when Julio entered the world of hacking. It’s from 1983, and it’s called War Games.

(Archive Sound bite)

David Lightman was a master at computer games…

[Matías]: The main character is a 16-year-old boy who hacks a military system and unintentionally puts the world on the brink of a thermonuclear war that—sorry for the spoiler—only he can deactivate.

War Games was one of the first representations of hackers in popular culture, and the film immediately became a cult film. Thousands of kids, from their teenage bedrooms and while adults slept, began exploring this new electronic world that was unfolding as a territory of infinite possibilities. And that was the image of hackers that was cemented in people’s minds. Boys who could cause a lot of problems. 

It all started in the 60s, when someone in the United States discovered how to make international calls at local prices using the numbers that companies used to check the lines. The technique spread very quickly and phreaking was born—with ph—, the direct ancestor of hacking. The name comes from the combination of three words: freaks, phones and free.

It was the late 1970s when computers began to enter the homes of American families. There, many young people decided to try telephone phreaking techniques on them to intrude on other computers.

The hackers’ meeting point was the BBS. It was there that Julio first read about phreaking, but also about cracking and scanning, other techniques that hackers used to infiltrate computer systems.

[Julio]: The goal of hacking is always trying to access increasingly advanced systems. And being invisible, of course, remaining undetected, so that you can’t be seen, nothing.

There were few local hacking BBS, and Julio always visited the same five or six.

He remembers the name of one he used to visit often, Satanic Brain, which was involved in computer viruses. There he met other kids like him, and also older ones, and he would get together with them to eat at McDonald’s and exchange diskettes with programs and games. He felt that at last he had found others who spoke his same language.

In the underground, everyone had an alias, and Julio chose his: El Gritón. But in that cyber world, where he would lose himself for hours in a labyrinth of codes and commands, Julio still felt like an apprentice. He had a hard time seeing himself as a hacker.

[Julio]: When I started, I was obviously what is known as a newbie. You were new, so you were learning, so you observed like a sponge, you were learning information, until later, with certain… certain knowledge, you began to… or I began to acquire new information, to search and contribute in some way to the group.

In the underground, some hackers moved alone, but others grouped together in gangs and organized coordinated hacks. In Argentina, for example, there was the group Piratas Unidos Argentinos.

In the United States there were the Hackers of America, but there were also groups with more creative names, like the Legion of Doom, in honor of the enemies of the Justice League.

In Germany it was the Chaos Computer Club. They hacked banks and telephone companies. Even NASA. 

[Julio]: When a hacker discovers something, he learns it, he detects it, he shares it first with his group, and then that group might share it with another group, and that one with another group.

[Matías]: With his friends, Julio started going out some afternoons to do what is known as trashing, that is, going through companies’ trash bags looking for information to access their systems.

First they did some kind of basic intelligence to find out at what time companies took out their trash. It was not something they had thought up. Trashing had already been used by hackers since the 70s.

[Julio]: What information did you find? Network address information, username information, company information. The idea was to try to find out what possibility there was, or what usernames, networks, access would allow you to log in into the company.

[Matías]: By that time, around 1991, Julio had connected to the X25 network, a type of local network, prior to the Internet, that was beginning to grow in Argentina.

The majority of users were universities and companies such as airlines, credit cards, newspapers, mining companies, oil companies, etc., that used it to share files and send internal emails.

Julio had learned in the BBS that a lot of software came with a factory-set password and a user. For example, on computers with the IBM operating system, the default username and password were… IBM. In other systems, the password could be something as simple as 1234. 

[Julio]: Why didn’t people change passwords? Because there was obviously no security awareness. So the person who had sold the system came, installed it, and left it as it was.

[Matías]: So on the X25 network, he used hacking techniques that were almost analog, entering different options until he found the right one. Trial and error.

He had fun doing this, but it was all a bit… easy. The lack of concern for security meant that the challenge for Julio was not big enough. Because, aside from this, the last thing he was interested in was company data.

[Julio]: I wasn’t interested in information; I was interested in access. In fact, I had access. I would log in, “Oh, that’s great,” I would log in, and then I would leave, and that was all—on to the next one. 

[Matías]: What made it exciting for him was not so much the result as the process.

He could spend the entire night looking for that vulnerable spot on another computer, to sneak in there. And once he achieved it, he looked for a new challenge.

He had always been like that, since childhood when he could spend hours building a tree house only to finish it and then move on to the next.

By 1992, at the age of 18, Julio was moving like a fish in water in that hacker world. When he finished school, he enrolled in college to study Computer Science.

So he would go to classes in the mornings, and when the sun went down, he would lock himself up in his room, he would sit in front of the computer, and with Depeche Mode playing on his Walkman, he would look for ways in the X25 network to open doors that seemed closed.

Through that network, Julio managed to connect to QSD, one of the first chat channels, where he met hackers from all over the world. And there he heard about a new network for the first time.

They said it had the potential to be massive. It was faster, more powerful, and much less expensive than the X25 network. The big difference was that there was no central body that controlled it, and all the computers were connected to each other. All connected to all. It was called the Internet.

At that time, the Internet was a new and exclusive thing. Only large universities and government offices, such as the United States and some European countries, were connected. It seemed impossible to connect from Argentina, but Julio looked for a way. It was through the local X25 network, which he already knew like the back of his hand. He had to connect from his computer to another, then another, and then another. He jumped from Argentina to Spain and from there to a university in Switzerland, where he found a connection, a door between the old X25 and the new Internet— something that in the computer world is called a gateway.

[Julio]: Back then, the Internet was 6,000 connected computers in the world—that was all—and from there you could connect with all of them. There was no security mechanism as there is today.

[Matías]: A new network meant many things: new protocols, new systems, new programs. And also new security barriers to circumvent. For Julio, it was like having a shiny new toy, ready to go.

The Internet grew a lot—and fast. By 1994, Julio had abandoned the X25 and was moving only there.

But, although this new network seemed to open up infinite possibilities for him to continue growing as a hacker, he still got bored quickly.

[Julio]: The feeling when you are researching, searching, and you’ve spent two or three hours logging into a network, trying this and everything else, and you are missing the last step to get there or the last username to log in, until you do it, is also a search for adrenaline.

[Matías]: But after a while, it became routine, and that adrenaline faded faster and faster, so he decided to go a little further. He began looking for systems in Argentina and the rest of the world with security protocols that were more difficult to break.

He designed a sniffer, a program that captures computer actions, such as Internet traffic or machine failures. Julio’s program went into a computer and automatically recorded the first 256 characters that were typed.

And what is the first thing you type when you turn on a computer? The username and the password. So Julio inserted it into networks of companies, banks and universities, and then… he waited for his little program to compile all the information.

He no longer had to guess. He would simply go into an important site, leave his sniffer there, and go to bed. The next day, he had a list of usernames and passwords on his computer. It was just a matter of entering, accessing a new site and repeating. The sniffer was almost undetectable, so Julio went unnoticed.

[Julio]: And every time I checked, I found a list of 5000-6000 usernames and passwords to access any system that you can think of. Gradually, I began to realize, “So you can access any…” I could access any site I pleased.

[Matías]: Julio began to access increasingly difficult sites: foreign companies, international banks, and databases of governments around the world—Argentina, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, Brazil… So many that he can’t remember all of them. Either that or he didn’t want to tell us the complete list.

[Julio]: I started looking at military systems, especially United States government systems, etc., thinking it would be a new level of challenge or security, a higher one.

And I started finding, “Hey, there’s NASA, let’s try getting into NASA.” Why? Because it’s NASA.

[Matías]: NASA, but also the Department of Defense, the criminal investigations department of the US Navy. From his PC in Buenos Aires, Julio managed to enter the systems of these and other institutions and organizations of the US government.

But none of the content there really interested him. What he liked was the challenge of accessing. And as he progressed, he ran into some warnings.

[Julio]: “You are logging into a system. If you are obviously not a valid user, all this can have consequences.” That warning was in many systems.

[Matías]: It was as if he came to a closed fence with a large sign saying, “Do Not Enter.” But instead of stopping him, that motivated him to find a way to jump over the fence without setting off the alarms.

[Julio]: I was more reckless. I kept going and going without… without thinking about the future consequences it could bring.

[Matías]: But somehow, he had to imagine it. By the early 1990s, several hackers in the United States had been prosecuted for infiltrating government and company systems. Julio knew this. We asked him whether he wasn’t afraid.

[Julio]: For me, it was an activity that I had been doing for a long time, so I saw it more as a prank, to put it that way. I didn’t do any harm, either. I mean, I didn’t steal information, I didn’t delete anything. I didn’t do anything, so it was… it was like a game.

[Matías]: And at home no one asked too many questions about his games. Outside of the hacker world, Julio was still just another kid. He was about to turn 21, he lived with his parents and siblings, he went to college, he played soccer, he worked, he had a girlfriend, and he went out dancing on weekends.

He lived between those two identities. At home everyone knew about Julio, but no one knew about El Gritón. He had managed to make that part of him go unnoticed. And he saw no reason to stop. 

[Julio]: It was difficult for me at that moment to somehow be able to stop, to see the limit. Maybe I was trivializing it. I said, “Well, it’s nothing. It’s one more system, two more systems, one hundred more systems, one thousand more systems, ten thousand more systems, one hundred thousand more systems.” Until… well, at one point someone said, “That’s enough.”

[Matías]: El Gritón was no longer invisible. Someone on the other side of the world had detected him.

We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Emilia Erbetta picks up the story.

[Emilia Erbetta]: On the afternoon of December 28, 1995, Julio was not at home when the police knocked on the door of his apartment.

It was six o’clock, and only Julio’s three younger siblings were in the Ardita house: Sebastián, 18, who was studying for an exam, and his younger sisters, María and Luciana, ages 13 and 14.

Sebastián opened the door and a group of police officers entered the apartment. They were accompanied by a man and a woman. Later, they would find out that these were a prosecutor and a judge. Sebastián explained that there were no adults in the house, so they asked him to call his father.

When he got to the apartment, the father—who is also called Julio—found the place invaded by more than 20 police officers who were checking the drawers, opening the closets, and asking questions about his eldest son. Julio’s father did not understand what was happening.

And the police didn’t seem to know much else, either. They told him only that his son had accessed computer systems in the United States, but they did not give him any more information.

Still, he remained calm. He was sure that Julio would be able to explain. This is his father:

[Julio’s Father]: There was nothing, there was absolutely nothing to worry about. I mean, I had no reason to think that there could be any crime or any circumstance that would lead me to think that I had to worry. 

[Emilia]: The operation lasted about five hours. When it was over, shortly before midnight, Julio had not yet returned. He came in around two-thirty in the morning. Before opening the apartment door, something caught his attention. 

[Julio]: There was a hallway in my building, and when I get off the elevator, I see a whole lot of cigarette butts in the hallway. I mean a lot. I say, “How strange.” Very strange. And when I get closer, I open the door, I go inside, and my mother and father were sitting on the couch, like this, with a look like, “What’s going on?”

[Emilia]: His parents told him that the officers had taken almost everything they found—computers, floppy disks, papers… It was clear that the operation had to do with the things he did as El Gritón, but they had no more details. In any case, his parents were waiting for an explanation. 

[Julio]: And the question was, “Did you do something wrong? Well, where did you get into?” That’s when they started asking me, “Yes, I accessed some systems, some systems in the United States, some systems in other countries…”

[Emilia]: They looked at him, trying to understand.

[Julio]: They were… um… I would say perplexed, I don’t know if scared, because they weren’t scared. Yes, maybe concerned, but they didn’t know what was coming, they didn’t know what I had done or what impact what I had done could have. 

[Emilia]: It was three-thirty in the morning by then, so his father suggested they go to bed, and they would surely have more information the next day. But when Julio went into his room and saw his empty desk, that calmness that was so typical of him began to shatter.

[Julio]: I did go to sleep worried, anxious because I didn’t know what was happening or what was coming.

[Emilia]: He slept little and poorly, and was awakened by the sound of the radio that a neighbor turned on. Through the window, the voice of a journalist was heard bringing the news of the day. 

[Julio]: At around 6:30 in the morning, I heard, “There is the news of an Argentinean hacker who got into NASA, in the Pentagon.” The fact that this was being mentioned on the radio was a shock to me.

[Emilia]: In another room, his father heard the same thing…

[Julio’s Father]: “Computer hacker entered from an apartment on Santa Fe Avenue…” That caught my attention. “Stop, what is this?”

[Emilia]: They turned on the radio and TV to see what the news was saying. Everyone was talking about the raid, which also appeared that day on the front page of the newspaper Clarín, the most widely read in the country. It said, “Dangerous computer sabotage stopped. An Argentinean violated the military security of the United States.” 

Julio’s name spread very quickly among the press. Journalists started ringing the doorbell early and continued to do so for three more days. The calls didn’t stop, either. Reading about it in all the newspapers, family and friends also wanted to know what had happened.

They called a lawyer who recommended they not speak to anyone until they had news from the court. So the whole family spent New Year’s Eve locked up in the house.

Down on the street, journalists waited for every neighbor who came out to ask them about Julio Ardita. Who he was, what he looked like, whether he was talkative or withdrawn. They even offered to pay the building manager to give them some information. But he didn’t tell them anything.

[Julio]: The good thing about all this is that, since I never showed myself, there was no Instagram, there was nothing, nobody had a picture of me. So no one knew what I looked like. 

[Emilia]: And that even allowed him to have a little fun. 

[Julio]: I went out, came back, and there was a journalist guarding the door with a camera. Then they asked me, “Hey, do you know Julio?” “Yes, sure, he is a good kid, he lives here in the building, but the truth is that he is locked up. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

[Emilia]: With the new year, the media pressure on Julio let up, and gradually the Arditas returned to normal life while they waited for news from the court to find out how the case was going. They had no news for a month, because the Argentinean Judiciary goes on summer recess in January.

During that month, without a computer, without his files, and not knowing what was going to happen, Julio managed to remain calm, but a feeling of uncertainty was slowly growing in him. For distraction, he went on vacation with his family. And in February, when the judicial recess ended, he visited the court with his father and his lawyer, before being summoned.

He was eager to know what would come next. 

[Julio]: Just picture that my family had never had anything to do with the law. Nothing. We had never seen a court, a judge, a lawyer, ever. So it was all new.

[Emilia]: He was expecting something more formal. But when they arrived, the judge invited them in and offered them coffee. 

[Julio]: Then she looked at me and said, “Well, what we want is for you to tell us what happened.” I said, “Sure, but with respect to what?”

[Emilia]: With such a broad question, Julio realized that the judge was not at all clear about what he had done. In 1996, computer security was not easy to understand. Much less in Argentina, a country where the Internet was just starting. So at the beginning of the talk, Julio collaborated very little. He didn’t want to give information if they didn’t ask him. Previous conversations with his lawyer had served as training.

The case was handled by then-Deputy Director of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Stephen P. Heymann. We spoke with him by video call. Heymann is no longer a prosecutor, and he agreed to give us the interview on one condition: that we explain that he does not speak on behalf of the U. S. government, and that he can refer only to information that is already public knowledge.

Heymann told us that the investigation began when they discovered that there was an intruder in the systems of some military bases on the West Coast.

[Stephen P. Heymann]: We didn’t know who it was at first. We just knew that he was accessing sensitive information. 

[Emilia]: At first, he told us, they didn’t know who he was, but they did ascertain that he had accessed sensitive information, which can be dangerous in the wrong hands. And once they saw there was an intruder, they needed to know who it was. 

[Heymann]: Here is a big question of who’s… not just who the human being is, but why it’s being done. Is it a hacker? Is it somebody who’s just sort of curious and trying to play out their expertise? Is it somebody who has a bad intent?  

[Emilia]: Not only who is behind it but why, with what purpose. Is he a hacker? Is it someone curious who simply wants to test his abilities? Or is it someone with bad intentions?

They discovered that the infiltration began at Harvard University, so they used a high-speed computer to search through the more than 60,000 emails that arrived each day, looking for any sign of the intruder.

It was the first time that a judge in the United States ordered the access of a computer network. Like a wiretap, but on the Internet.

[Heymann]: We identified certain telltale… certain things that were true about what he was doing. The tools he was using, the accounts he was using, the places he was going, things that were sort of unique markers. And then search through all those, all that traffic for those kind of things.

[Emilia]: This is how they identified some of Julio’s online behavior: the accounts he used to infiltrate the systems, the programs he used, the sites he entered. Those were traces that he left and that the investigators followed.

[Heymann]: My memory is that two of the things that popped out were one, that they were… that the connections were coming from Argentina. And that the… the… the nickname, Gritón, appeared. 

[Emilia]: So they detected that the connections came from Argentina and found the nickname, Gritón. Julio had left his mark. 

[Heymann]: So that… that gives us a hint of who’s going into those West Coast… We’ve now got a nickname. And then, from there, it was an investigative set of searches to find out who used that name.

[Emilia]: The nickname was a first clue. And from there they began to investigate who in the underground used it. That’s how they got to him.

But the United States did not have an extradition agreement with Argentina for this type of computer crime, so, even if they knew who the intruder was, they could not detain him or force him to travel.

For this reason, they asked the Argentinean justice system for help, and that is why, in February 1996, Julio was there, sitting in front of the judge, who recommended that he collaborate with the investigation. His lawyer agreed.

He took a few hours to think about what to do. He discussed it with his parents and his lawyer and decided that he would testify. He wanted to show that he had nothing to hide. So the next day, he returned to court.

[Julio]: I think it took us, I don’t know, about five or six hours, because they asked a lot of questions, because they didn’t understand access, they didn’t understand the Internet. We finished, and we were like,  “Well, now where does it go?” And the last question the judge asked me was, “Did you sell information?” she asked me directly. I tell them, “No, no.” “Did you steal, did you destroy?” “No,” I said. “No, nothing.”

[Emilia]: Julio was calm, but at times the whole scene seemed unreal.

[Julio]: I looked at it like, “Hey, this is happening to someone else.” I didn’t… I didn’t  understand that it was happening to me.

[Emilia]: The violation of foreign cyber secrets was not a crime in Argentina. And the figure of “cybercrime” did not even exist yet in the country. So the Argentinean justice system did not have much against him.

[Julio]: And three days later, they declared what is called a lack of merit. Lack of merit is when there are no reasons to proceed and, well, it stopped there.

[Emilia]: It stopped there—in Argentina. But in the United States there was another, more serious case open against him. What he didn’t know was how or when it would continue, but he was certain that the situation was not resolved. He even realized that he was being watched.

[Julio]: Often during that time when everything was quiet, I saw photographers with long lenses from the balcony. I was seeing the follow-up I had at that moment. I didn’t give it a lot of importance, but it happened.

[Emilia]: The fact that he didn’t attach importance to something like that caught our attention, so we asked him how it was possible that it didn’t bother him, at least a little. 

[Julio]: I come from a… I came from a very peaceful world, very… No, you don’t live with that paranoia of, “Oops, what is this?” It wasn’t my thing, I didn’t see it as something critical, since there was no crime behind it…

[Emilia]: That’s what he always told himself to reassure himself: He had never meant to do anything wrong.

It remained to be seen whether he could convince the American courts of that.

Several months later, a man dressed in a suit and tie arrived at the Arditas’ door. He rang the bell and announced himself to Julio over the intercom. It was William Godoy, the person in charge of Latin America at the FBI.

The FBI. The mere mention alerted Julio. Until then, everything had been more like a procedural thing. But this was different.

[Julio]: That was the first time I was really worried. I mean, I kind of got scared. Because until then, I had only been involved with the Argentinean court system.

[Emilia]: We wanted to speak with Godoy for this story, but he did not agree to give us an interview. But Julio described him to us as a calm, kind man, who asked him to talk for a while.

He asked his father to join the talk, so the three of them sat in the living room. Godoy told them that he was there to extend an invitation. He wanted Julio to go to the U.S. Embassy for an official conversation.

They listened to him without saying too much. However, the invitation made them uneasy. Although talking sounded like a peaceful thing, doing it at the embassy meant entering U.S. territory.

The next day, he showed up with his father and his lawyer at the Embassy. They expected to find only Godoy, but when they arrived, there were about 20 people sitting around a long table. All dressed in suits and ties and with a serious, distant attitude. They were the representatives of the organizations and agencies that Julio had hacked.

After a brief introduction, he was read his rights and his situation was explained. In the United States, he faced charges for 30 federal crimes and had to pay a fine of 750 thousand dollars. In addition, a judge had ordered his arrest. 

[Julio]: And basically, what he tells me is, “Look, you have two options: either you collaborate or you collaborate. That’s basically the issue. Either you collaborate or, since there is no extradition treaty, you will never be able to leave your country again. Now… If you collaborate, you won’t have a problem. We can reach an agreement, and we will see.”

[Emilia]: Collaborating, they explained, meant undergoing meticulous interviews where he would have to tell them everything he had done, how he had achieved it, and what he had obtained from the hacks. If he did this, the FBI promised to intercede on his behalf in the trial that he would have to face in the United States.

[Julio]: The truth is that the meeting was very tense. In fact, the tensest meeting I had in my entire life. I left that meeting kind of worried because I said, “Uh, well, this is not a joke.”

[Emilia]: Finally, Julio understood the magnitude of what was happening. At 21 years of age, the United States government put him between a rock and a hard place. If he wanted to travel in the world, to live the life that he hoped, he had to cooperate. He could no longer pretend that nothing serious was happening.

When he entered the Embassy, he was a hacker. When he left, he was a collaborator of the U.S. government.

He was summoned four days later to the Interpol headquarters in Argentina, in a luxury hotel in the south of the city. When he arrived, accompanied by his father and his lawyer, they told him he had to go in alone. If he did not accept that first condition, the agreement would fall apart.

The FBI representative who had gone to his house, and other officials, were waiting for him at Interpol. There was also the agent who had discovered his hacking over a year ago.

[Julio]: They started to ask me, “Well, what did you do? And why? And how? And what technique did you use?” So I spent practically two weeks with them working on that issue to explain to them what had happened.

[Emilia]: The first days, Julio felt that the meetings were as tense as the one he had had at the Embassy. He realized that they did not trust him, they treated him with suspicion. But that began to change as the days went by.

[Julio]: Later, there were some agents who were more technical. So I always say that we technical people somehow understand one other. Once you start talking, you start to have points in common. And that’s how they somehow began to realize that there was nothing, there was nothing behind it. That I didn’t have a bank account; I hadn’t stolen anything.

[Emilia]: After fifteen days working with them, reviewing every file, every program, sharing all the access codes, he was finally able to convince them that the only thing that had motivated him was the search for adventure, the adrenaline he felt facing these types of challenges.

His part of the agreement was fulfilled: he had shared with the U.S. justice system every last byte of information. Now it was their turn to do the same.

Not much else happened for a few months, but one day in early 1998, the phone rang. On the other end was Godoy, the FBI representative. He brought news.

Godoy explained that, through his collaboration, they had managed to reduce those 30 charges against him to three: computer crime, interception of communications, and destruction of systems. And instead of a $750,000 fine, he had to pay $50,000.

In addition, he would have to do 36 months of community service working with the U. S. government’s IT team. He was to provide training on hacking, analyze information, and prepare documents.

We asked former prosecutor Heymann about these types of agreements. He would not talk to us specifically about Julio’s, but he did explain why they were proposed by the Attorney General’s Office. 

[Heymann]: These weren’t drug dealers. These weren’t people who carried guns. These were often 16- to 21-year-olds with no criminal record. So that put them in a different category than our experience was with most prosecutions. 

[Emilia]: He told us that these hackers were not drug traffickers nor did they have weapons. Often they were just kids between 16 and 21 years of age with no criminal record. That put them in a different category from other defendants.

The new terms were good news for Julio, of course, but neither he nor his family had that kind of money.

[Julio]: I tell him, “Look, I don’t have $50,000.” I remember him asking me, “Well, how much do you have?” That was the question. “I have $5,000.”  He says, “So we’ll put $5,000.”

[Emilia]: They ended up negotiating that he would plead guilty to two charges—computer crime and interception of communications—, pay the fine, and do community service. 

[Julio]: They saw it as, “OK, it was like a prank. We have to close this,” because it’s not in their best interest to leave it open. So by agreeing, I was helping them close their cycle so that it’s nice and neat.

[Emilia]: The case had not gone unnoticed in the United States press. Newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and Wired magazine covered the news about Julio for months.

Journalist and writer Michael Stutz still has the 1997 email in which his editor asked him to stop what he was doing to take on this case. 

[Michael Stutz]: In the 1990s, the late 90s, my beat was really hackers and hacking, and a lot of technology.

[Emilia]: Michael was an editor at Wired, and his topics were technology and hacking. So he covered Julio’s story just like many others, because in the late ’90s, hackers were in the news every month.

Michael knew the underground from the inside. He had grown up in it, connected at night while his parents slept, excited by the sensation of having a window to the world open on a rudimentary computer in Ohio.  

[Stutz]: For the youth in the 90s, the Internet was very exciting because we felt like, you know, in the 50s there were the beatniks, in the 60s you had hippies, in the 70s you had punks, and we thought, “Well, we’re Generation X, what do we have?” Well, we’ve got the Internet, you know, and we’re going to build it and turn it into something big.

[Emilia]: Michael still remembers how exciting the Internet was for young people like him in the 90s. Just as the 50s had the beatniks, the 60s had the hippies, and the 70s had punk, Generation X had the Internet, and they planned to do big things with it.

And in the underground, before switching from hacking to journalism, Michael had met a lot of guys like Julio. 

[Stutz]: All these hackers and phreakers. They were really between 12 and 15 or 16 years old. Can you really even say were they good or bad? They were just having fun trying to learn these computers.

[Emilia]: Hackers and phreakers who, for the most part, were teenagers. Can you say they were good or bad? According to Michael, they just wanted to have fun trying to learn more about their computers.

But the rest of society didn’t exactly think of kids playing when they heard the word hacker.

[Stutz]: At the time, looking back, there was a conception that, “Oh, hackers are going to break into your bank account and steal all your money.”

[Emilia]: The concept was that hackers were going to break into your bank account to steal all your money. 

[Stutz]: People didn’t really know that the term hacker… it was really a term of honor. That’s… that’s like a high compliment. 

[Emilia]: And people didn’t know that the term hacker was the opposite—a term of honor. One of the highest praises. In any case, beyond the different views on hackers, it was clear that they were the expression of a totally new world. 

[Stutz]: But sort of what Julio did going on to Harvard’s system and then going on to military systems and all that—that was unique for that time.

[Emilia]: But what Julio had done was unique and shocking.

[Stutz]: It was shocking. You know, people hear what? Some Argentine hacker broke into all these systems in the USA? What in the world is going on? 

[Emilia]: When people heard that a hacker from Argentina had gotten into all these systems in the United States, they wondered what was happening. And, although Michael can’t say for sure, he does feel that the U.S. government and others didn’t know how to deal with cases like these.

In that sense, Julio’s case also served as a test.  

[Stutz]: Julio’s case definitely gave a path forward for how to pursue this. It set a precedent for how they can approach this in the future and deal with other hackers.

[Emilia]: Michael believes that Julio’s case showed the U.S. government a way forward with hackers and set a precedent for what measures to take in the future in similar cases.

One of the most important was the way they managed to access Harvard’s computer networks to monitor Julio’s activity without compromising the privacy of other users.

Even the Attorney General at the time, Janet Reno, spoke out on the matter. She said Julio’s case showed a new way to combat these new crimes without compromising constitutional rights.

She wanted to discourage other hackers. Cybercrime, she said, could turn the Internet into the Wild West of the 21st century. And the Justice Department would pursue cybercriminals in the United States and abroad.

Julio Ardita, a 21-year-old hacker who lived more than 8 thousand kilometers to the south, was proof of that.

In May 1998, Julio went with his father and his lawyer to the United States to attend the trial against him. In the weeks before the trip, while he waited for the Department of Justice to send him the agreement that he was to sign, he became more and more nervous. In Buenos Aires he felt safe. But over there, he felt that anything could happen. 

[Julio]: “What happens when we get there, what happens when…? I mean, are they going to let me in? No, I’ll get there, they’ll arrest me, they’ll throw me in jail, I’ll never came back.”

[Emilia]: Because his hacking had begun at Harvard, the case would be handled in Boston. So after landing in New York, they took a flight there.

[Julio]: Once on the domestic flight I took, I realized there were two people following us. I said, “Well, these two are obviously following us.” I went to the restroom and there was one at the door. It was very rude that they were following us to, I don’t know, check that we were there.

[Emilia]: Once again he had that feeling he had experienced before.

[Julio]: As time went by, I started seeing it somehow as if it were a movie happening to someone else.

[Emilia]: But the main character of that film was himself. And now only the last scene remained, similar to one he had seen so many times in the movies, with a judge at the bench and with his lawyer next to him, pleading not guilty or accepting his guilt.

Beyond his fantasies, the process was much faster than he expected. Since the deal was already closed and signed, there wasn’t much to discuss. Julio pleaded guilty to both crimes and paid the fine.

In addition, he signed a confidentiality agreement for 15 years. During that time, he could not talk about the case with anyone. And that was all. The movie was now over.

[Emilia]: He returned to Buenos Aires a few days later… but he could no longer return to the underground. So he set up his own cybersecurity company with a friend. He could no longer hack for fun, but he could hack for money. He began offering a “penetration test” service. Companies hired him to try to hack their own computer systems and tell them about its vulnerabilities.

So he became a kind of hacker for hire. We asked him whether he didn’t see a contradiction in that, and he told us he didn’t. It was the way he found to not lose the excitement of those teenage early mornings when he spent hours hacking some of the most secure systems in the world. 

[Julio]: The challenge is the same. The same techniques, the same dynamics, the same procedures that I applied were applied in the same way, only to protect organizations, so that others out there with bad intentions do not do it and exploit, take advantage, steal information or commit fraud. 

[Emilia]: During those years, the world of computing was changing radically. By the end of the 20th century it was clear that the Internet, that Wild Wild West without clear rules or defined borders, was no longer that place that people like Julio or Michael Stutz had imagined as a terrain of exploration and adventure.

Suddenly there was too much at stake. And where there is a lot at stake, rules, surveillance, and businesses are born. And in that context, where there are people willing to steal, scam or cause harm, being a hacker for fun is treading a very thin line where you can lose more than you are willing to give.

Julio was not the first hacker to cross sides. Nor would he be the last.

[Daniel]: This story was produced by Matías Avramow and Emilia Erbetta. Matías is a journalist, born in Mexico and now working in Argentina. Emilia is a producer for Radio Ambulante. They both live in Buenos Aires.

This episode was edited by Camila Segura and Luis Fernando Vargas. Bruno Scelza did the fact checking. The sound design and music are by Andrés Azpiri.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Lisette Arévalo, Pablo Argüelles, Lucía Auerbach, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Rémy Lozano, Selene Mazón, Juan David Naranjo, Ana Pais, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, Barbara Sawhill, David Trujillo, Ana Tuirán, Elsa Liliana Ulloa and Desirée Yépez.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program. 

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.