01x04 - CTRL

[bunniefuu]

narrator: The Web transforms us. We become data... code... uploading our very selves... to a place we call the cloud. But this cloud is grounded in hardware, a chaos of code. But with the right tools, you can find the signal in the noise.

[birds chirping]

Ochoa: I wish I could say that I was spending my time not being paranoid.

I was recruited to work for a company which I am not allowed to mention. I research and I develop various products. I do the programming, the design work, the hardware design. I do it all. [chuckles]

I have five laptops, two desktops, an Xbox, a television, one server, a cellphone, and not a single one of them is connected to the Internet.

Kathy: So, this one is coming from an outside source.

It's coming from a Gmail address going to the student.

So there's something definitely going on between the two of them.

Okay

The Internet can be a dark, nasty place.

It is a reflection of how the world would be if there were no laws, no rules, no courtesy.

We're actually gonna go ahead and call the police on this one so that they can intervene because this is such a serious issue.

I am afraid for how easy it is to see the wrong thing on the Internet, and I didn't want any more of it.

[chuckles]

But it's not like we can backpedal now and be like, "Okay, just kidding -- no Internet."

[chuckles]

narrator: On the other side of our screens there's a vast new frontier -- uncontained, uncontainable. In here, images are incendiary, words are weapons, and code is currency. Protectors, predators... victims, vigilantes... white hats, black hats. Who is who? Who is in control?

Lila: I always wanted to live in New Orleans. I find there's something that's very comforting about it.

I think that all I have wanted for a long time is to be happy.

narrator: This is Lila. One of the largest search engines in the world hired her to be one of their content moderators.

I didn't know that content moderation was a job that existed, and I don't think that most people do, actually.

narrator: Content moderators do exactly what it sounds like. They monitor content on search engines and social media. In Lila's case, sometimes she reviewed search results to make sure they were accurate.

Lila: A picture would come up in front of you, and the first thing you have to do is make sure that it's the same thing as the word on the screen. So if it says "kittens," then that picture has to be of more than one baby cat because that's what the search is asking for.

narrator: For Lila, that was the easy part. The harder part was working on a tool called SafeSearch.

SafeSearch means that when you are using the Internet -- and it varies by search engine -- it'll filter out some of the content that you don't want to see.

So with SafeSearch on, you don't get anything racy.

If you put the word "d*ck" in, you get a lot of whales and a d*ck Van d*ke and a can of spotted d*ck -- although, that's kind of weird in and of itself.

So, if we go back and take it away, then you get what you probably [chuckles] expect to get.

And it's just gonna get worse from there.

narrator: Much worse. And only a human can tell the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly. The problem is computers can't exactly "see" an image. They can only see the layers of information behind it, called "metadata." Metadata makes it possible for computers to find, classify, and index images, but we still need humans to teach computers the difference between things like melons and "melons." Here's where SafeSearch comes in. If an image is offensive, it's up to the moderators to add a code word to the metadata like "harmful" to omit it from future search results. The worst part -- for Lila and her coworkers to code the harmful images, first, they have to view them... thousands every day.

Lila: I did sign something that said, "You will be exposed to graphic images."

There's a big difference between someone saying something like that to you and then the reality of it being 8 to Áhours a day of just...

terrible, horrific stuff.

You didn't know if you were gonna see, like, cute kittens or crime-scene photos or whatever else.

I actually have diagnosed anxiety.

I don't sleep very well.

My contract was for a year, and I made it six months.

It definitely took a toll. [laughs]

narrator: 1.8 billion images are uploaded and shared daily on the Internet, more than all the images created in the first 10,000 years of human history. To keep the Internet clean, the estimated 100,000 moderators working worldwide would have to evaluate 18,000 images every day -- a dirty, difficult job that's left a high number of moderators with PTSD. So, mentally, the Internet can wreck you. It can also hit you where it hurts by holding you at virtual gunpoint.

DetoxRansome: [distorted] Be careful. The feds will be all over you when it comes to me. I'm wanted for multiple large-scale att*cks. This is my work. I have some private tools me and a few friends coded. I'm going to use a server and spoof about 2 million e-mails. It's very dangerous. You want to see a demo?

narrator: These are text-to-voice messages from DetoxRansome, a black-hat hacker, one of the bad guys. Detox has set up shop on the Dark Web, where I.P. addresses are nearly impossible to trace, on a forum called -- what else? -- Crime Network. Hackers like him are getting rich off people like you and me.

Gragido: Imagine, if you will, that you're sitting at your desktop or your laptop and you open your laptop or your desktop up and you begin going about your daily routine with your computer.

You start opening your e-mail, and you maybe encounter an e-mail that has an attachment. You decide to click on the attachment, and you wait for something to occur.

narrator: William Gragido is a security expert, one of the good guys, also known as a white-hat hacker.

Gragido: Shortly thereafter, you'll be exposed to a screen of sorts that asserts to you that your machine has been compromised and your data, your files, your precious files and those things that you hold dear and important, have been encrypted and are now being held for ransom.

narrator: Your computer has just been infected with a nasty virus called ransomware, a malicious code that encrypts your files and withholds the key until you pay for it. It's an effective racket, earning some cybercriminals up to 80 grand a month.

Gragido: You'll see instructions on how to turn around the ransom, instructions on how to navigate to specific websites that are used for the exchange of cryptocurrency, or currency that can't be traced.

narrator: With the clock ticking, you've now got less than 48 hours to turn $500 into an Internet currency called bitcoin. You have to find an ATM that turns cash into crypto. And if payment isn't received in time, the ransom will double or your files destroyed.

Gragido: You elect to pay the ransom, you go through the process of sending the bitcoin currency to the cybercriminal, and then you wait to receive the CryptoKeys that will allow you to reclaim your data.

Now, whether or not you always gain those files and data back is questionable. You know, there's no guarantee.

narrator: Last year, cybercriminals like Detox caused more than $400 billion in damage, and they're nearly impossible to catch. Online, they know how to make themselves invisible. In public, they look like everyone else... like this man. He knows how to get inside any system. He knows the vulnerabilities. For him, the Internet is a vast playground. And he has all the right toys.

That's -- That's an evil beast right there.

This tool here allows me to do some of the more advanced att*cks, man-in-the-middle att*cks, evil access points.

So if you're talking to your bank through, say, Starbucks' Wi-Fi, you could actually be talking through one of these devices, and I'm essentially stealing the password from it.

This allows me to access wireless networks, protected or otherwise.

This tool right here costs 20 bucks.

This little tool here cost me 100 bucks.

I would say, with an investment of about $1,000, you could probably have access to 9/10 of the world's infrastructure.

And you just need the intelligence to use it.

narrator: Higinio Ochoa is a hacker who got caught. Already, he's done 18 months in prison. Higinio wasn't after money. He had a different target in mind.

Ochoa: Some people write music, some people drag race, some people do dr*gs.

I started a Twitter account and actively went after the government.

[chuckles]

narrator: Now he's in a virtual prison -- a new type of punishment for a new type of criminal.

I need some copper wire.

narrator: Though Higinio is a computer programmer, he's forbidden by the government from using the Internet. Anything he wants to do online -- shop, pay bills, download movies for his son, Brody -- has to be done by his wife Kylie.

18 gauge.

His computers talk to each other, but not the outside world. To send code to his employer, he has to print and mail it.

Ochoa: My research, of course, is stunted. I can't upgrade my machines to the latest software.

I can't use Uber, [chuckling] you know?

I broke a law, and I can accept that. But the Internet-usage limitations being placed on criminals is a farce.

narrator: On this new digital frontier, law and order doesn't yet exist. But there are those circling the wagons in an effort to protect the most vulnerable.

Kathy: You know, it is very unusual, coming from a small-town background. You know, we're kind of in the middle of the United States, in the middle of the heartland. We're a farming community, and then we have this window on a very weird world, coming in and seeing these things that you never would have even dreamed existed, and then think, "Oh, okay, so, today, we're gonna talk about tentacle p*rn. All right. Let's get to it."

narrator: Kathy is also a content moderator, but she works for Gaggle, an educational technology company that moderates students' Internet use in schools nationwide. She sees herself as a superhero, protecting the kids.

Kathy: My superhero costume, I think it would probably have p*rn.

It'd probably have, like, a penis with a big line through it.

[laughing] I don't know.

narrator: Actually, Kathy is more like a digital hall monitor. Gaggle moderators sensor a lot of p*rn, but they're also on the lookout for curse words, hate speech, v*olence, self-harm, and potential predators.

Gaggle is providing a moderated world where people behave decently, whereas the rest of the Internet is just kind of wild and no laws.

Ha ha, that's great.

Hi.

Hi. How are you?

Good. How are you?

Good.

I can't remember my password.

[Chuckles]

narrator: This is Kathy's protégé, Giana, a 21-year-old student studying psychology and sociology. She's new here and still in the early days of training.

All right, we're just gonna go through some stuff we typically see, and we will just kind of review it as we go.

Okay.

As moderators, Gaggle employees have access to the e-mails, SMS texts, I.M.s, blogs, and digital files of students who use the Gaggle platform. Okay, so, what we have here is an e-mail. So that tells you what that one is right here, right off the bat.

[both chuckle]

Okay, so, there are a couple things about this that we want to look at.

Giana: I did not know much about the company at all.

When I first came in, there was just a lot of "beware of this, and we see a lot of maybe p*rn."

And so, at first, you are taken aback.

So, that's looking at a penis for a really long time.

[laughs]

We're gonna go ahead --

You do that often.

[both laugh]

We're gonna mark that as nudity/sexual content, and we're gonna go ahead and warn on it.

narrator: Their job is to remove offensive content, warn the students when they've crossed a line, and, when necessary, alert the authorities to potential dangers.

[mouse clicks]

So... what is that body part?

Unhealthy.

[both laugh]

It's an ear, and I think it's an STD.

I think it's herpes. And we see a lot of these.

[laughs]

I don't know how that got there.

I don't want to know.

It is disconcerting the first couple of times you see websites --

[laughing] Only the first couple of times?

Kathy: This is maybe the age where kids are starting to think about dating.

And, you know, 30 years ago, if you were starting to think about dating, maybe you'd pull the girl's hair.

Now you're gonna send her a picture of your penis because -- I don't know why.

I don't know in what situation -- that's just not gonna end well.

[Laughs]

Okay.

So, if you want to read some of these out loud... "I could teach you how to send a hot pic. You could be naked and touch yourself." Okay.

narrator: "Touch." Their system flagged it here, "You could touch yourself," but also here, "Keep in touch." This is another reason why computers can't do this job. When it comes to language, computers don't yet understand context and meaning. It takes a human to catch the nuance, to spot the come-on, and to protect children from assholes like this guy.

Kathy: Yeah, so, we're gonna want to go ahead and kind of look at this whole conversation a little bit.

Okay.

Okay. Okay, so, "Hi, Claire. See what I did there? I know your name now." So he must not have known her name before? And he's pulling it out of her school e-mail address, which, yeah, that's not a good sign.

We've had several instances of what we assume to be child predators who are preying on students, who are either trying to coerce them into some sort of sexual activity or trying to coerce them into sending images.

Okay, so it looks like she sent him a picture of something... in her bikini. "Could you send one tonight, but without the bikini on?"

And she's saying that's kind of weird.

And he's saying, "No, lots of people do that.

I can totally teach you how to do that."

Giana: You definitely see some things that make your brain turn and your stomach turn.

The content that we find, it's just -- it's really mind-blowing, but it's out there. I mean, someone has to see it.

Someone has to do something about it.

So we're gonna go ahead, and we're gonna call the emergency contact so they can intervene before tonight.

Kathy: You don't think of yourself as leaving your kids in a room full of strangers and shutting the door and walking away, but if you're not really watching what they're doing on the Internet, kind of, that's what you're doing.

It can get very dangerous very quickly.

You're all gonna take a bite and make sure it tastes okay.

I thought we're not supposed to eat raw eggs?

Well, a little bite won't hurt you.

Ew! [laughs]

Okay, yep, get that cleaned up.

You know, self-policing is really the only way to go. My kids do not have a smartphone. They have an old-style flip phone. I'm not ready for them to have stuff that they can keep completely private yet. It's kind of a tightrope to walk to how do I give them enough freedom so that they know how to use it while, at the same time, make sure that they're using it responsibly.

narrator: When it comes to the Internet, who decides what's responsible behavior? Some users are taking control.

Ochoa: I started off simply exploring. I learned about secret chat rooms, and the first groups that I ran into were hacktivist, and they had causes. These guys taught me that if you're gonna hack, you're gonna hack for information, for knowledge for yourself, and you're gonna hack for the good of other people.

narrator: In 2011, Higinio found his own cause, a 21st century protest fueled by social media and online videos -- the Occupy movement.

Ochoa: At this time, I was actively participating in the marches. I was on the streets. A lot of cops were being brought in from different districts and covering their badge numbers.

[indistinct shouting]

And so if a officer from a faraway district comes into a camp and wants to as*ault somebody... [indistinct shouting] ...then there was no way for us to find out who this person was.

narrator: That's when Higinio decided to join forces with Anonymous, a group of hacktivists and activists.

He began hacking under the code name w0rmer.

Ochoa: Wormer is an old word for hacker. It's a slang term, you know?

They would say, "There's a wormer in our system."

narrator: Higinio created a Twitter account for his new persona and set to work on Operation PigRoast.

Ochoa: We broke into many police websites. Police unions were targets -- anything that would have an officer's personal information tied in with their badge.

narrator: The confidential information was then made public. Under his alias, "Hig" reached hundreds of thousands of followers, sending an average of 35 tweets a day -- tweets that not only contained links to secure information, but revealed officers' names, make and models of their cars, phone numbers, and home addresses.

Ochoa: While I didn't want anyone to be physically hurt,

I did want them to be afraid that there was someone out there watching them.

[siren chirping]

I just felt that everybody was on my side, everybody wanted me to do this.

So I felt very comfortable doing what I was doing.

narrator: In February 2012, Higinio made a rookie mistake. Along with the hacked information, he posted this image, a kind of tag meant to taunt the FBI and let them know it was w0rmer who hacked them. But Hig forgot to remove the metadata. Imbedded in the image was a geolocator tag, a series of coordinates that revealed the exact location where the image was taken.

Kylie: Would I'd given him bikini sh*ts if I had known he was hacking police databases and putting my bikini sh*ts on them?

You know, I probably wouldn't have done that. [laughs]

But I can't regret it because it's given me everything I wanted in life now.

narrator: Higinio met Kylie on the Internet, of course, in a chat room.

We started dating about six days after we first met online.

You know, he was just so smooth.

narrator: 16 days after they met, Higinio proposed to Kylie -- also over the Internet. She said yes.

Kylie: The plan was that he was gonna come to Australia, see how our relationship went, got married, and stay over there and go legit.

Didn't happen that way. [laughs]

Ochoa: I released a photo that had the GPS coordinates of Kylie's home address.

Once they found her, once they knew who she was, well, we were engaged, so just like everybody else in America, we put that we were engaged on Facebook.

They found her in real life on Facebook, and her real life fiancé is yours truly, Higinio Ochoa.

narrator: Thanks to that one photo of Kylie, Hig was busted. Within a month, he was arrested.

Ochoa: They treated me pretty much like a state t*rror1st. [chuckles] They didn't want me to access any computers. They didn't want to take the chance that I'd got access to an Internet machine.

narrator: On March 20, 2012, after only one month and 1,500 tweets, w0rmer's Twitter account went silent.

Higinio was charged with accessing protected computers without authorization. He pled guilty. For his crimes, he was sentenced to 27 months in prison and 3 years probation. Six months into his prison sentence,

Kylie gave birth to their son, Brody.

[Brody crying]

Ochoa: Hey, baby.

[grunts]

He was fine until I walked in here.

Oho, that's so fake.

That is like the fakest cry I've ever heard.

Can I get some more fake cry?

You awake? You awake now? You awake now?

Say, "Daddy, leave me alone."

You awake now?

Look at your hair.

It is messy.

narrator: After a year and a half in jail, Hig was released on the condition that he stay off the Internet -- a condition the government expects Higinio to self-enforce. Can I have family selfie?

[whimpers]

Yeah, I'm pretty scared of your father in photos, too.

One, two, three, cheese!

Oh, my God. Your mother looks like sh*t.

I strongly believe that the punishments and laws enacted for hacking are unjust.

I don't think the United States Government is ready for hackers. I don't think the Department of Justice is ready to prosecute them correctly. And the people who should be in charge of making sure that these abuses aren't happening are being prosecuted and put away for doing just that. But you can't stop us. You need to embrace that hackers are a vital part of the ecosystem of the Internet and they're going to be there forever.

Kathy: I think sometimes the Internet is almost like a body of water.

You want it be like a swimming pool for your kids.

You want them to be able to see the bottom and have lifeguards and be safe. But at the same time, maybe you want it to be an ocean for you. You want to see the creepy-crawly things on the bottom of the ocean, and you want to see the sharks and swim with the sharks. And so it's hard to reconcile those two things.

narrator: With 3 billion users on the Internet and nearly 5 billion connected devices, this frontier is growing faster than our ability to control it.

I can't imagine what my life would have been like if I grew up the way that my nieces and nephew are going to grow up, with access to information by clicking a button, with rumors that can go via text message like that.

[snaps fingers]

I'm terrified for them.

Giana: Definitely thinking about the next five years scares me.

DetoxRansome: [distorted] Don't be too trusting. The world is in such a sad state of security.

Gragido: I don't think that most people understand how at risk they are in today's world. Because whether we're aware of it or not aware of it, we tend to emit more data about ourselves that we wouldn't necessarily want emitted to the free world.

narrator: And data is control. Hackers and predators are out there, and the lines of defense are as thin as your screen. Digital moderators can't hold back the flood. The government can't stop the infiltrators. And when it comes to threats like ransomware, Detox says the only thing you can do is become like him.

DetoxRansome: [distorted] I'm a digital ghost -- no e-mail, no credit cards, no bank accounts. If I don't get caught by next year, I aim to be rich. No one has caught me yet.

♪♪