I need to sort through my file areas and find the safe house t-filez. After watching War Games too many times we imagined black vans following us from the 7-11 and agents with lip mikes and mirror shades arresting
us for jumping on a conference bridge.
It would be an interesting thing to consider: if the government really was interested in every hacker, pirate, and miscreant on the Internet - how many government staff would it take to monitor all of those people?
I had a similar stash on both of my boards - in the 80s, most of what I carried on my C=64 board was about incendiary devices, explosives, revenge, pranks...dirty deeds, erm, done dirt cheap and stuff. A few years later when I was in my first apartment in college, my board then was heavy on the hacking stuff following a single regrettable afternoon years before making "homemade napalm" from a text file that did not end well (not actually the fault of the "napalm" but idiotic experimentation with pure kerosene).
I remember trying to assess the risk to myself for carrying this stuff. And I recall this war in my head between what I thought was actually likely (and what the government was capable of), and this sense of "I am a boring and fairly milquetoast human being and the government just wouldn't be interested in me, regardless."
The one thing which did edge me toward paranoia was stealing phone calls in the 80s, usually via those 950 numbers which worked like calling cards - dial the local number, enter a code, then dial long distance, and it got billed to whoever had that account.
One time, I received a call from someone at a phone company inquiring about whether or not a certain person was calling *me* using some sort of illicit method. That pretty much scared me off doing that. This was after years of doing it, too. I can't recall if it was boxing or the calling card method, but for the most part I carried what I wanted on my board under the assumption the First Amendment would protect it.
As you point out, the paranoid tone of some of these files is hilarious. I'm 13, I made lockpicks out of bailing strips: I AM DANGER MAN.
The irony of getting older is there aren't many ways I actually *want* to break the law. I'm having trouble thinking of many things I'd actually want to say or do, which are illegal. The surface Web by itself is raunchy, dangerous, and grotesque in ways my adolescent mind could only dream of.
You still find this paranoia in tor forums. You notice though, that aside from occasional busts of people downloading child pornography, nearly all the risk to users of illicit services on that network are on the side of server admins and the occasional dope seller.
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