It was back in 1998 that I was working with a local affiliate of the Cult of the Dead Cow, the CypherPunks in Mountain View, CA. The CDC had become aware of a hyper-RightWing cabal planning a silent takeover of the government in the next election, and we'd been tasked with electronic surveillance of one of their front companies, the so-called "SDAI Labs", run by one redacted, out of the badlands of Arizona.

After running a traffic analysis on their Internet connection for a couple of months, we'd pinned down the IP address redacted as being the computer used by the group's leader, redacted, a.k.a. "Tech1". We began the second phase of the operation with a little spoof run by our operative redacted redacted out of Florida. She engaged Tech1 on an Internet BBS and eventually began a private email correspondence. We noted with amusement that Tech1 at one point tried to infect redacted's computer with a virus, just a day after we had managed to infiltrate our private-label virus, Omnivore3™.

With Omnivore3™ providing the beachhead into his PC, we were then able to harvest Tech1's adminstrative passwords for, among other things, the email server @sdai.com. We proceeded to log into their email server and hacked the special code they used to authenticate senders, and we picked up the private half of their RSA encryption key.

After that, it was child's play to forge email purportedly from the North Korean government that stood up to their security checks. We'd pretty much hoovered Tech1's computer, and had a wealth of source material out of which to craft a disinformation campaign that created the impression of a leak in the Clinton White House. There was no leak, of course, beyond what SDAI Labs itself had gathered for the secret RightWing cabal, but the op was so successful that SDAI's shadowy parent organization began awarding most of their information security business to SDAI Labs, and Tech1's personal star rose like a rocket.

Since then, while we haven't quite been able to prevent an out-and-out RightWing takeover of the US Government, we have had measurable success, through manipulation of SDAI Labs, in blunting the most egregious of their ambitions. Looking back at it, I'd say that the op paid off most handsomely just a few weeks back, when we picked up the full dossier on Mark Foley from Tech1's hard-drive, and were able to leak it to ABC News. Not all of it, of course--we held back the correspondence between Hastert and Tech1, in which Tech1 issues orders to Hastert to "keep your goddam mouth shut about this, or else!". I expect we'll have a use for that sooner rather than later...

So, now you know, the rest of the story.