The computer savvy youths in the Milwaukee area Boy Scout Explorers group who called themselves the 414s, were an early manifestation of cyber activity that today ranges from irritant to criminal.
In 1983 and inspired by the movie “War Games,” about a young computer hacker who almost started World War III, the youths broke into countless computers including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and even the Milwaukee School of Engineering in a fledgling and innocent flexing of technological prowess that put them in the national spotlight.
“The 414s: The Original Teenage Hackers,” a 12-minute documentary of this forgotten bit of Milwaukee history, premieres Wednesday as part of CNNs Digital Shorts program. It was directed by Michael T. Vollman, the 2013 Milwaukee Film festival filmmaker in residence, and produced by previous filmmaker in residence Chris James Thompson, who directed “The Jeffrey Dahmer Files.”
Vollman edited Thompson’s short film “MECCA: The Floor that Made Milwaukee Famous” which was shown on Grandland.com. CNN picked up “The 414s” when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
The vintage news footage harkens back to the days of of green monochrome monitors housed inside khaki colored clamshell PCs and dial up phone modems the size of, well, phones. Not a lot of time is spent getting to know the youths – Neal Patrick, Gerald Wondra, and Timothy Winslow, who are interviewed as adults – or in learning how their interest developed or how they did what they did.
One of them compares this prehistoric hack to telecommuting. They made “a ‘War Games’ dialer” programmed it “to dial phone numbers one by one” to “try to find modems” and “the next day we’d wake up to see there were five different numbers it connected to. And you start testing passwords.”
The activities drew the attention of the FBI and local and national media. There are local news clips featuring Jerry Taff, Howard Gernette, Mike Miller and Melodie Wilson, and assorted Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel clips and bygone bylines. An ambient synthesized eight-bit video game sounding musical score is provided by Milwaukee musicians Didier Leplae and Joe Wong.
The twist in the case is that since at the time there were no laws against what they did Winslow and Wondra were charged with “making harassing phone calls.” But because Patrick was a minor he was immune from prosecution and appeared on news shows, magazine covers and testified before Congress, where his lawyer was Paul Piaskoski, father of the WDJT-TV (Channel 58) anchor.
That “Crossfire” anchor Pat Buchanan affectionately calls the hackers “A bunch of kids from Wisconsin … erasing a doctor’s bill” referring to the Sloan-Kettering hack, indicates how lightly the matter was taken at the time. What would he call them today? Domestic terrorists?
Today computer crimes are an everyday occurrence and taken a lot more seriously. This short, smartly edited film is an enlightening snapshot of how the road to how we got here ran through Milwaukee.
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