Here in D.C., the transition from summer to fall actually brought with it a welcome change in the weather. Temperatures are hovering around a perfect 75 degrees, there’s a gentle breeze, leaves are beginning to change colors, and October happens Saturday. Things are going to start getting spooky. So let’s begin. Here’s a chilling story—all the more so because it’s true—about the jungles of cyberworld, the deep dark net where enemies lurk, and one of the people brave enough, and smart enough, to wander around. “Welcome,” writes Vanity Fair contributor William Langewiesche, “to the Dark Net, a wilderness where wars are fought and hackers roam.”
THE DARK WORLD
Langewiesche’s guide into the cyberworld is one of those people they make movies about. To protect the informant’s identity, Langewiesche calls him Opsec, which is a little ironic because Opsec is the one who could violate your OPSEC with little effort. But he’s the same guy who can defend it, too. And that’s what he’s about these days. Those who inhabit this world of the Dark Net are, in many case, petty criminals involved in what are little more than a conventional black market activities. But there are those, like Opsec, the terribly brilliant, who navigate the dark web, recognize threats by way of practically imperceptible incongruities in codes most will never understand. These people grew up with it.
From the earliest age, only six years old as Opsec tells it, he had a knack with computers, then with gaming in its earliest stages, and then with computer programming. Little by little he wandered from the conventional path and into another world. “By the sixth grade,” Langewiesche writes, “Opsec had started hacking into universities and phone companies. His parents saw him sitting hour after hour at the keyboard, but were so unaware of his activities that they bought him a laptop for schoolwork because his handwriting was bad.” Bad move.
FROM BLACK TO WHITE
Opsec spent his adolescence in cyberspace. He joined hacker gangs. He broke Federal hacking laws even as they were evolving. And he found himself in and out of juvenile detention, then in and out of jail. Preferring being out of jail, Opsec traded his hacker black hat for white, and in many ways, that’s when his story gets really interesting. “This turned out to be tricky,” Langewiesche writes, “because the expertise he offers and the systems he puts in place are classic dual-use weapons that can be used to rob and oppress just as easily as to defend people’s lives and property.”
Opsec was apparently courted by and worked for both the CIA and NSA to track targets, gather information, and turn that information over to his government handlers. He made a living out of hacking into companies to show them their cybersecurity vulnerabilities. He traveled to the Middle East and contracted himself out to what he believed was some dark arm of the US government. “The job,” Langewiesche writes, “was to set up a national network-security operations center, an emergency-response group, and a hacking school to teach offensive and defensive cyber-warfare techniques.” What Opsec discovered, however, was that the organization to which he’d contracted himself out was up to no good, so he quit and came home.
THE AGENCY
Opsec came face-to-face with the dirty reality of the cyberworld he inhabited. There were bad people, and they would do very bad things to those who interfered. “He settled down with a few good clients, the best of which was the Company, 20 miles from home,” Langewiesche tells us. Depending on exactly where Opsec lives in the D.C. area, that company, of course, is either the CIA or the NSA. There, Opsec saw the cyberworld and the cyberwar in a way he’d never seen it, raging in a way even he’d not imagined. And so the story goes.
There’s much more to it. Many of us enjoy blissful ignorance about the extent to which our security—national and personal—is at risk, every day. And people like Opsec are the very special, strange, “gifted” people we may sometimes see sitting quietly in the corners of coffee shops guarding their laptops who are in a completely new kind of fight.
