When Going Online Will Send You To Prison
On this week's episode of Reply All: What happens when a former hacker becomes legally forbidden from using the Internet as a condition of his parole.
Higinio Ochoa is a 33-year-old programmer. He lives in Austin with his wife, Kylie, and his son, Brody. He wakes up every morning at about 6 a.m., and shuffles into his "lab," an office festooned with computers, a server, virtual machines. He pulls himself up to the desk and begins to program. There's just one thing that makes him different from not only every programmer in the world, but every computer user in the world.
"I'm not to touch any computer, smartphone or device that has Internet connectivity," Ochoa says. "That would be against my rules."
When I visited Ochoa's apartment in Austin, it didn't look different than, say, my house. His electronics weren't locked away, there wasn't a login for his TV or anything like that. In fact, Ochoa is a programmer with several computers in a spare, barely furnished room he calls his "lab." But there is a standing rule around the house — if it connects to the Internet, he can't touch it. If he uses it, it must be completely disconnected.
Sometimes, as part of their parole, people who are convicted of computer-related crimes are allowed to return to the Internet with official police monitoring software installed on their computers. Other times, they are simply prohibited from using the computer entirely. Often this is a punishment applied to sex offenders — people caught in possession of child pornography, sexual predators, pedophiles — but it's also applied to hackers.
Higinio Ochoa is a hacker. And as part of his punishment, he's not allowed to use a computer, a tablet, not even a Fitbit. Anything connected to the Internet is prohibited. Which, as you can imagine, makes life difficult.
Before The Ban
Higinio Ochoa got his first computer when he was 10. "At the time my grandmother worked for NASA," he says, "She was an EEG technician and did EEGs on the astronauts, so very early on she got this thing that people are calling a personal computer. Plugged that in, played with it, and I was hooked."
"Back then, we wanted to learn these systems and they weren't going to give us access."
He quickly found his way onto AOL, which he describes as a poorly secured wild west town, and he quickly had the run of the place. He learned how to run "punters," programs that would kick other people offline, and from there he was using brute force password programs to break into administrator accounts, which essentially gave him the run of the place. He could delete other users' accounts and kick them off. Basically, he ruled the roost. He took the name w0rmer, and old-school word for "hacker."
It wasn't long before he graduated from AOL to programming, breaking wireless encryption and hacking any unsecured computer he could find. "Back then I did it, they did it, we did it for knowledge," he says. "We did it because we wanted to learn these systems and they weren't going to give us access. They're not going to give a […] 13-year-old kid access to a multi-million dollar Unix server because he wants to learn to program. They will use shitty passwords and let me break into it. But that's on them."
That's how things went for a long time. He was a hacker whose primary interest was seeing what he could break into, both to sharpen his skills and for bragging rights. But all of that changed in 2011 when the Occupy movement caught his attention. "Cops were doing really shady things at this time," says Higinio. "Covering their badges. Turning off cameras. Harassing protesters. I grew up trusting my government wouldn't do these things. It was ingrained in my head they wouldn't do these things and then they did and here on American soil these people were being pepper sprayed. They were being beaten with batons."
If the cops were trying to obscure their identities, he would retaliate by publicizing their identities.
Suddenly, he had a new application for the skills he had been cultivating for the past 15 years. He was simultaneously politically motivated and really, really pissed off. So he hooked up with some hackers who were loosely affiliated with Anonymous calling themselves The Cabin Crew and began to hack the cops. He hacked the West Virginia Chiefs of Police website. He hacked the Mobile, Alabama Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety. He hacked website of Houston County, Alabama.
"That unfortunately sucked me in and it was extremely easy," says Higinio. "There are so many bad, badly designed websites and badly designed info systems out there. I mean if you look at simply the timelines I would take less than an hour and a half to break into a site and the hardest part and the longest part of it was downloading the data."
The data that he was downloading included the names, addresses and phone numbers of police officers. Information he then posted to the Internet. The way he saw it, if the cops were trying to obscure their identities, he would retaliate by publicizing their identities.
Throughout all of this, he was getting bolder. He was taunting the authorities on his Twitter feed, saying things like "wat u got?" and "come at me bro."
When w0rmer posted the information he got from one of his hacks, he didn't just post a wall of text. He wanted it to look nice. "All of my hacks have a pretty general layout to 'em," he says. "I had done web design for a while so that kind of shows in the fact that I like themes. I like to use ASCII text. I like to have header images. I like to have something taunting. I like to have a music video at the end."
YouTube: SovietTrall
One of the things he was including in his hacks was a picture of a woman in a bikini. That woman is Higinio's wife, Kylie. At the time, Kylie was living in Australia, working for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. She found herself curious about Anonymous and one day just kind of stumbled into a chat room where Higinio was hanging out.
"A friend of mine came in with someone named Oz girl and he had been trying to help her fix her computer," Higinio says. "And who better to ask than a chatroom full of hackers who were trying to actually change the world. We're not fucking IT. We're not the tech support."
So Higinio responded with the joke every infantile denizen of the Internet makes when a woman enters a chat room.
"Tits or GTFO."
Surprisingly, that didn't deter Kylie. In fact, she responded by posting a picture of herself in a bikini. "So we started talking," says Higinio. "And from there it was just love. We skyped, chit-chatted, just stupid Internet kid love, just stupid online love that eventually just became more."
So, in January 2012, Hinigio's life was in fifth gear. He and Kylie were falling head over heels, engaged within weeks. The Occupy movement was exploding and Hinigio spent his days hacking government databases all over the country. At the same time, he was taunting the authorities on Twitter, and generally being a smartass. Then one day in February of that same year, he hacked into the Alabama Department of Public Safety website, and while poking around, and found an unsecured connection to the National Crime Information Center database.
Higinio was about to be tripped up by his own sloppiness.
The NCIC is an information sharing database that is maintained by the FBI. It's an information sharing tool for local law enforcement agencies and includes information on sex offenders, gun registrations and gang affiliations. Even if I were a hacker targeting state agencies, I feel as though I would be terrified if I suddenly found my way into an FBI database. But Higinio told me that "data is data," and more than anything he was just embarrassed for authorities because of how poorly secured the connection was between Alabama DPS and NCIC.
But for someone who was embarrassed by the sloppiness of the Alabama DPS and NCIC, he was about to be tripped up by his own sloppiness. Like the hacks that had come before it, Higinio released the information in a web page which contained some ASCII art, a video, and a picture of Kylie from the neck down holding a sign that said "PwNd by wOrmer & CabinCr3w <3 u BiTch's!" The picture was taken with Kylie's iPhone and she had location services turned on. This meant that location data was embedded in every picture she took. Higinio meant to scrub the image of metadata, but he must have uploaded the wrong image, because soon people were contacting him to say "Hey bro, this has metadata on it."
Higinio tried to calm himself down — convince himself that he was in the clear. "I thought, 'It's one little piece. It's one breadcrumb that slipped out of my basket,'" he says. "What are the chances that they're even paying attention to me?"
But a of couple weeks later, he was awoken by a pounding on his door. When he looked through the keyhole, he saw FBI agents pointing guns at the entrance to his house. "I seriously for about two seconds thought I'm just going to keep the door locked," says Higinio. "I'm going to take my laptop and I'm going to stick it in the oven. But it just it was like no, it's at this point, game over, I'm caught."
They took him out of the house at gunpoint, threw him in an SUV, and brought him into an interrogation room. And his Twitter feed, the one that detailed all of his exploits while simultaneously taunting the cops, came back to haunt him. The Twitter feed suddenly became evidence of all the hacks he had committed that authorities were using against him.
Higinio was facing jail time, charged with a felony. Plenty of people in Kylie's position — engaged to a man halfway across the world whom she had never met — would probably have bailed in that situation. But Kylie quit her job, moved to the United States and married Higinio. I asked her why she stuck around, and the answer she gave me was equal parts totally frustrating and totally satisfying. "You know, look, I was I think 33 or 34 at the time so not some sort of teenager," said Kylie. "They say if you know you know, so I knew I wanted to be with him. I mean I had a great career with the department of immigration. I was working for the government and my life was pretty good but I wanted to be with him."
Higinio Ochoa took a plea deal and was sentenced to 27 months in prison. He went to prison in November of 2012 and served 18 months. A few weeks before he was scheduled to be released in September of 2014, his judge modified the terms of his release so that instead of having access to monitored Internet, he would have no Internet at all.
After The Ban
It's a testament to Higinio's talent that he has a job right now. In spite of his inability to access the Internet, Higinio is still programming. His employer (who made him sign an NDA, as it's better for him if the world doesn't know he's employing a convicted felon) has to make considerable concessions to make his job possible. So, how does Higinio do it?
"I have a transfer USB," he says. "It's over there. Little blue one. I plug it in, throw the code on there, zip it up and toss it to the wife." From there, Kylie emails it to his boss. Since Higinio's parole officer doesn't want Kylie acting as a middle-man between Higinio and the Internet, for larger batches of code he is forced to actually print the code out and mail it to his boss, who then has someone else type it up.
And that's just the way it affects his work. Since they don't have cable, the couple uses Netflix and Hulu through a Chromecast which Kylie controls through her phone, but since that connects to the Internet, it's totally off limits for Higinio. "I'll have to go through my phone and have a look at the shows and say, 'Well, what about this show?'" says Kylie. "If it's a show that we've never heard of I have to explain what this show's about to him before we can actually choose one. It's kind of a tedious experience when you've never seen a show before and you want to see what a new one's like."
Even though he's not on the Internet, occasionally he dreams about it.
Higinio has to exploit particular quirks of technology that most of us never think about. Take, for instance, the autoplay function for Netflix on Chromecast. "Netflix is good because it has that constant playing whereas Hulu after each video it stops," says Higinio. "So if I know she's going to go take a nap or I know that she's busy, so I'm going to have a whole series I can watch I'll have her run Netflix. That way I don't have to touch it again."
"It's so inconvenient," says Kylie. "I mean it's only little things, but it can be a real pain in the ass when I'm in the middle of something and then the bills need to be paid and I'm the one that has to do it. You know trying to put something on to keep Brody calm. If I'm in another room it just has to wait until I'm out here. It is a giant pain in the butt."
Even though he's not on the Internet, occasionally he dreams about it. In his dreams, he's going from site to site, and then he suddenly realizes what he's doing — he's violating his parole, putting his future and his family at risk.
"[That] usually what wakes me up, you know?" says Higinio. "That and knocks at doors. It happened this morning actually and it was probably just the mail guy dropping off the check but I heard that knock and immediately jumped right out of bed. Right away come out here put my pants on. It could be my [parole officer]. It could be a squad of cop cars. It could be… who knows who the fuck it could be, but yeah every time I hear a knock my heart has to stop."
Next month will be six months since Higinio was released from prison and he's hopeful that his parole officer will let him back online with some kind of official police monitoring. But when I asked him what he would do if he could get back online, I was surprised that his response was not to connect with his supporters via Twitter or catch up with long-lost hacker pals via Facebook. "As nerdy as it sounds, update all my shit," he says. "I like to keep up on the latest tools being used, latest news. I would like to start working with people in the industry and doing it more for a profession than just to piss off police officers. That's what I would do. I would probably immediately buy a bunch of domains and get an email address, yeah. Probably listen to some music on Pandora radio too."
Higinio's world has shrunk. He went from being a politically active voice online to rarely communicating with anyone outside of his apartment. And it seems like he's happier for it. I asked him if he slept better now, without all of the distraction of the Internet. Without Google K-holes and Wikipedia and eBay window shopping. He told me that when he lost the Internet, he immediately got new things to dwell on. "What keeps me awake most nights are my sons well being and my wife's well being," he says. "They took the place of the Internet, and I can't say that's a bad replacement at all."
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