U.S. presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke acknowledged he belonged to the Cult of the Dead Cow as a teenager.
Some things you might know about Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who just entered the race for president:
There is no indication that O'Rourke ever engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity, such as breaking into computers or writing code that enabled others to do so. But his membership in the group could explain his approach to politics better than anything on his resume. His background in hacking circles has repeatedly informed his strategy as he explored and subverted established procedures in technology, the media and government.
O'Rourke was a misfit teen in El Paso, Texas, in the 1980s when he decided to seek out bulletin board systems – the online discussion forums that at the time were the best electronic means for connecting people outside the local school, church and neighborhood. Like O'Rourke, Wheeler said, he was hunting for video games that had been"cracked," or stripped from digital rights protections, so that he could play them for free on his Apple. Also like O'Rourke, Wheeler wanted to find other teens who enjoyed the same things, and to write and share funny and profane stories that their parents and conservative neighbors wouldn't appreciate.
Under Texas law, stealing long-distance service worth less than $1,500 is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine. More than that is a felony, and could result in jail time. It is unclear whether O'Rourke topped that threshold. In any event, the state bars prosecution of the offense for those under 17, as O'Rourke was for most of his active time in the group, and the statute of limitations is five years.
When he was a teen, O'Rourke also frequented sites that offered cracked software. The bulletin boards were"a great way to get cracked games," O'Rourke said, adding that he later realized his habit wasn't morally defensible and stopped. A CDC member who joined in the early 1990s had previously used real instructions for making a pipe bomb to joke about shedding pounds by losing limbs. Three teenagers in Montreal found the file, and one lost two fingers after he tried to follow the formula, prompting outrage.
But the political balance allows him to appeal to both main strands of political thought in Silicon Valley – a key source of campaign money and cultural influence. "I understand the democratizing power of the internet, and how transformative it was for me personally, and how it leveraged the extraordinary intelligence of these people all over the country who were sharing ideas and techniques," O'Rourke said.
During last year's Senate campaign, O'Rourke's staff took videos of him interacting with voters all over the state, editing several that went viral on social media. That helped O'Rourke raise more money than any Senate candidate in history despite refusing donations from political action committees. While losing his race by less than three percentage points, he drew in new voters and helped flip House seats and other races down the ticket.
One article he wrote as a teen mused how the world would work without money. After changing the system, including the government, O'Rourke foresaw the end of starvation and class distinctions. In another piece, he took on a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi who maintained that Hitler was misunderstood and didn't personally want Jews killed. O'Rourke and a Jewish friend questioned the man about his theories and let him ramble about Jews and African Americans, an attempt to let him hang himself with his own words.O'Rourke added that if readers wanted to learn more about the subject's Aryan church, they could write to the man's post office box in El Paso.
During O'Rourke's active period,"we weren't deliberately looking for hacking chops," Wheeler said."It was very much about personality and writing, really. For a long time, the 'test,' or evaluation, was to write t-files. Everyone was expected to write things. If we were stoked to have more hacker-oriented people, it was because we'd be excited to have a broader range in our t-files.
"I was really at the margins, but I very much wanted to be as cool as these people, as sophisticated and technologically proficient and aware and smart as they were," he said in the interview."I never was, but it meant so much just being able to be a part of something with them…understanding how the world worked – literally how it worked, how the phone system worked and how we were all connected to each other.
They did so, and a few stepped up in late 2017 and early 2018 to hold some of O'Rourke's earliest out-of-state fundraisers for the Senate race. The first in San Francisco was co-hosted by CDC member Adam O'Donnell, an entrepreneur and a security engineer at Cisco, and Alex Stamos, then the chief security officer at Facebook, who had worked under CDC members at a security provider in the previous decade.
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