indeed, a common story. i get the feeling the fbi did a lot of before-school visits to teenagers dicking around on irc in the mid 90s.

they showed up to my place once. the guy said to contact him after i graduated if i was looking for work, lol.

for what it's worth, they had binders and binders full of efnet logs.

I keep hearing this and it makes me realize I wasn't as cool as I thought I was in the 90s :P

The FBI visited once, my dad freaked out and told me before he answered the door.

Turns out someone was exposing themselves to kids on Halloween.

You don't still do that do you?

I wasn't the one exposing myself if that's what you mean.

(I believe that was the joke)

I got dinged as well. Similar story on efnet logs. No charges but they announced their presence with authority. Left me a business card too.

Yep, myself and a friend and they had logs from one of our Undernet channels. Interesting to hear that it was somewhat commonplace. I hadn't heard any similar stories until the mid 00s and ours happened around 97 or 98.

Yeah mine while I was in high school and it was 1998. I think there was a lot of FBI trolling the usual channels in the late 90's when the 2600-related movements were really getting underway.

Strange how different - and how similar! - the scene is today. Good memories, except that law enforcement back then was a lot less scary...

Would .. you .. like .. to .. play .. a .. game?

Hah! Sounds like my story, except mine involved the main newspaper in the next big city over from my hometown. Totally uninteresting.

NandO?

Several states away, if you mean the N&O that Google offers up.

Ah, yep. N&O was called nando.net back then – local newspaper and also large local ISP.

Most of the people I know who got busted back then were into telco systems so they ended up with a fine, usually around 1-2k.

I'm guessing the navy wasn't so kind :/

I used to work at British telecom with a guy who had been a phreak and got caught hacking Prestel - one day one of BT's security (SD Directorate) guys who had busted him bumped into him at work and was not pleased.

I also worked for the Systems administrator who was in charge of the machine in the Prince Philip hack.

They were real dicks for sure. Fortunately I was 15 and it was pre-9/11 (by about 7 months). I'm not so sure things would have gone as well for me today.

Heh, 18 years ago today I had a loud knock on my door. (The story isn't that interesting but the timing is -- to me.)