Brandenburg and Grill were in some ways the fathers of the Pirate Party. Their decision to release the mp3 encoder for free on the Web had catalyzed a golden age of copyright infringement that had decimated the music industry even as it made them wealthy. But that decision had also catalyzed a political movement that now threatened their own livelihoods. No software revenues meant no mp3 licensing income. No mp3 licensing income meant the German state would be out hundreds of millions, and Brandenburg’s white-on-white Ilmenau campus would still be a cow pasture.
Both Brandenburg and Grill knew that, without the incentives of software patent revenue on the horizon, they never would have spent the better part of a decade conducting those listening tests. Brandenburg would likely have stayed in academia and sought a professorship. Grill might still be playing the trumpet. Listening to “Tom’s Diner” 2,000 times in a row was work, and the mp3 team would not have done that work without the incentive of future payoff. And that was their ultimate rebuke to the Pirates: without patent protection on software, the mp3 would never have existed.
CHAPTER 20
The day after his house was raided, Glover returned to work. What else was he supposed to do? He had a shift scheduled, and he hadn’t been formally charged with a crime. Pulling up to the guardhouse in his Ford, he cleared the vehicle whitelist and found a parking spot. As he emerged from the car, he was met outside the factory by Robert Buchanan, his boss.
Buchanan had worked as a supervisor at the plant for years. He had always liked Glover, whom he found to be a capable and diligent employee. He had promoted him off the packaging line, and they had played paintball together. Now, though, it was clear that something was wrong. The FBI hadn’t contacted Buchanan, but the incident with the sheriffs had happened during a shift change, with hundreds of employees watching.
Dell, said Buchanan, don’t come in here. You and me are friends, but you’re under investigation. I think you better go home.
It was the last time Glover would ever set foot on the plant’s grounds. He was fired within a week. Dockery would also be fired, and within a few weeks Karen Barrett was let go. Glover’s DVD business was shut down. The FBI confiscated his computers, his duplicating towers, his hard drives, and his PlayStation. They left him the duffel bag full of compact discs—those were worthless, even as evidence.
The conversation with Special Agent Peter Vu had been difficult. Glover had admitted to leaking the CDs, and admitted to ripping them and sending them to Kali. Vu had pressed him for information on Kali, and Glover had told him the scattered details he had picked up over the years. But Vu wanted a name, and, although he’d talked on the phone with Kali hundreds of times, Glover didn’t have one.
Then, later that same day, Kali himself had called. His voice was agitated and nervous.
It’s me, said Kali. Listen, I think the Feds might be on to us.
Vu had anticipated the possibility of such a call and had instructed Glover to act on the phone as if nothing had happened. Glover now had a choice to make. He could play dumb, pull Kali in, entrap him, and seek leniency from the FBI in exchange for cooperation. Or he could warn Kali off.
The two had a tortured history. For years they had been locked in a private, anonymous tryst away from the rest of the Scene. There had been times when they had relied on each other, times that Glover had looked forward to speaking with Kali, times he’d even thought they might be friends. But there were other times that Glover felt Kali was manipulating him and isolating him in order to maintain control. For his part, Glover had repeatedly endangered Kali’s group through his DVD bootlegging, and had betrayed him on the Graduation leak. Their complex relationship had now come down to this conversation.
Kali, Glover said, You’re too late. They hit me yesterday. Shut it down.
OK, I got you, Kali said. Then he said, I appreciate it. Then he hung up.
Over the next few months the FBI would make six more raids. In addition to Glover and Dockery, they hit Patrick Saunders and Simon Tai, both in New York. They picked up Edward Mohan, 44, a radio DJ from Baltimore who had been in RNS for years. They hit Matthew Chow, 26, of Missouri City, Texas, who had worked as a low-level Tuesday ripper and designed the ASCII-art marijuana leaf on the group’s old NFOs. They hit Richard Montejano, also known as “RickOne,” the head of Old Skool Classics, to whom Glover had leaked Graduation. And they hit the man they believed to be Kali, the man who had personally cost the music industry tens of millions of dollars and transformed RNS into the most sophisticated piracy operation in history: Adil R. Cassim, a 29-year-old Indian-American IT administrator who smoked a lot of weed, listened to rap music, and lived at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles with his mom.
The FBI’s investigative strategy had worked. Shaking down “J-Dawg” from APC had led Vu to an IP address for one Patrick Saunders, known to Reyes only as “Da_Live_One.” In November 2006, the FBI set up a wiretap on Saunders’ Internet traffic in Troy, New York. The wiretap originally provided nothing, as, following Kali’s orders, Saunders had encrypted all chat traffic to his box using a popular cipher called Blowfish. Vu’s team had requested counterencryption support to crack the code, but was advised by the division of the FBI that handled such things that this was impossible. Still, Vu sat on the wire for the next three months, and finally Saunders got lazy.
In New York City for a weekend of clubbing, Saunders still felt obligated to keep up with his responsibilities to RNS. He had logged into his computer remotely using a virtual client, and chatted with a few members of the group to schedule an upcoming leak. While the outbound traffic from his computer was covered by Blowfish, inbound traffic was not, and in late 2006, after a five-year investigation, Vu could see inside the RNS chat channel for the first time.
His victory was short-lived. Within a month Kali had shut the group down. Kali’s timing in this regard was almost perfect. Vu had gathered enough information to implicate Saunders, but not anyone else. The culture of anonymity on the chat network hadn’t given Vu much to work with. In fact, he still didn’t even know Glover existed. There was only one thing left to do: shake down Saunders. The FBI raided his Troy apartment in early February 2007. In interviews, Saunders initially denied knowing anything about the group. But the warrant permitted the Feds to seize his computer and send it to Quantico for forensic analysis. Soon the technicians found something interesting—a transcript of the #RNS chat channel from the group’s final day. Saunders, sentimental, had kept a log of it.
Vu used this to go to work on Saunders, and with a five-year sentence looming, he soon flipped. He had been one of the most ideological members of the group, a free-software advocate who thought the copyright was an outdated legal concept from the early eighteenth century. But, as with so much self-congratulatory Internet rhetoric, this attitude disintegrated the moment it came into contact with the real world.
Terrified of prison, Saunders proved as useful an asset to the FBI as he had once been to RNS. On March 5, having signed an agreement to cooperate in exchange for sentencing leniency, Saunders spent the day reviewing the chat channel logs from RNS’ final day with Vu. Forty-two screen handles had appeared in the chat session that day, and Saunders described everything he knew about each one. Often, this wasn’t much—maybe a general sense of location, or age, or a smattering of biographical details. Indeed, it was a point of pride for Saunders that, though he’d spent thousands of hours online with them, he didn’t know the real name of a single member of the group. Dockery’s clowning—repeatedly changing his screen handle to imitate past members of the group—made things even more confused. Still, Vu had something to work with. He advised Saunders to inform him if anyone from RNS now tried to contact him again, and sure enough, in April, Glover had messaged Saunders directly, seeking to find a way into another group.