How music got free

CHAPTER 15

By the end of 2004 the future of the recording industry looked dire. Compact disc sales were down yet again. EMI, burdened with debt, was hurtling toward receivership. BMG and Sony were merging, making the Big Five the Big Four. And Time Warner, seeking to “rationalize” its business, had dropped Warner Music Group, the label that Morris had run before the Interscope debacle. It had been taken over by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the man who broke the Seagram’s empire, the man who used to be Morris’ boss.

Morris was now more powerful than Junior, and his market share at Universal was larger than it ever had been at Warner. Universal was selling one out of three albums in the United States, and one out of four in the world. But it wasn’t enough: even as the music industry’s number one supplier, Universal’s overall top-line revenues had gone down. The compact disc was going obsolete, and the revenue streams that Steve Jobs had promised him from iTunes were failing to materialize. Digital sales of music accounted for 1 percent of Universal’s revenues in 2005.

Morris had been forced to shut down entire divisions of his company. Since 2002 over 2,000 Universal employees had lost their jobs, in three successive waves of mass layoffs. There was a hiring freeze, and artists saw their advances dwindling. Promotional spending was slashed, and music video budgets had been reined in.

But this thrift did not extend to Morris himself. The Contract was still in force, and Vivendi’s corporate filings showed that in 2005, with the music industry in a death spiral, Morris earned more than 14 million euros—the equivalent of nearly 18 million bucks. During the corporate belt-tightening at Vivendi, he alone had remained untouched, and he was now by far the highest-paid person in the entire organization. He pulled in more than six times as much money as any other member of the management suite, including CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy, the man who was notionally his boss. Every day that passed, Doug Morris earned 50,000 dollars—the same amount that an honest packaging line employee earned in a year of work at the plant.

Morris’ income was a matter of public record and attracted criticism. How could a man presiding over the decline of an empire possibly be worth so much money? The answer was that The Contract assessed his performance not against his top-line revenue, but against his overall return on invested capital. It worked like this: At the beginning of each year Morris requested A, a certain amount of budgeted money from the corporate parent. At the end of each year Morris returned B, the amount he’d brought in from promoting his artists. As long as B was greater than A, Morris got paid. But how did you do that when B kept shrinking? Easy. You cut A by an even greater amount.

Morris’ message to Vivendi each year was simple: give me less. It was a difficult thing to say. Many—perhaps most—corporate executives would have stumbled here, and suffered as victims of their own overreach. But Morris was different. Though his public statements were forever optimistic, behind the closed doors of his office Morris was a clear-eyed pragmatist who lived and died by the Billboard charts. The first thing he did when he entered his office each morning was check the retail sales figures. He could see what was happening to the industry better than even its fiercest critics, and as a result he never, ever requested more capital than he could profitably deploy.

But slashing A meant letting people go. Morris did not enjoy doing this. He spoke often, with genuine affection and tenderness, of those who worked around him. Even in dark times he tried to cultivate an upbeat atmosphere in the office. He had a politician’s talent for remembering names, faces, and little details about people that made them feel cherished. And he talked often, unsolicited, of how much he valued loyalty.

“Loyalty” was a word you heard a lot in corporate boardrooms—usually right before somebody got stabbed in the back. But Morris really meant it, as his track record showed. In a volatile business, he had retained the same roster of artists and the same management team for nearly a dozen years. He’d championed executives like Jimmy Iovine and L.A. Reid and Sylvia Rhone for most of their careers. He’d stood up for 2 Live Crew and Tupac Shakur against deafening criticism. Going further back, at Atlantic in the 1980s, he had labored diligently under Ahmet Ertegun for a decade without complaining, even when most men with similar ambition would have sought opportunities elsewhere. And in the early 1960s, as a 23-year-old recruit stationed on an army base in France, he’d met the beautiful mademoiselle who would later become his wife. They’d had two sons together, and were now approaching fifty years of marriage.

But business was business. Although in 2005 compact discs still represented over 98 percent of the market for legal album sales, Morris had no loyalty to the format. In May of that year, Vivendi Universal announced it was spinning off its CD manufacturing and distribution business into a calcified corporate shell called the Entertainment Distribution Company. Included in EDC’s assets were several massive warehouses and two large-scale compact disc manufacturing plants: one in Hanover, Germany, and one in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Universal would still manufacture all its CDs at the plants, but now this would be an arms-length transaction that allowed them to watch the superannuation of optical media from a comfortable distance.

It was one of the oldest moves in the corporate finance playbook: divest yourself of underperforming assets while holding on to the good stuff. EDC was a classic “stub company,” a dogshit collection of low-growth, capital-intensive factory equipment that was rapidly going obsolete. In other words, EDC was a drag on A that added little to B. Let the investment bankers figure out who wanted it—Universal had gone digital, and the death rattle of the compact disc had grown loud enough for even Doug Morris to hear.

The CD was the past; the iPod was the future. People loved these stupid things. You could hardly go outside without getting run over by some dumb jogger rocking white headphones and a clip-on Shuffle. Apple stores were generating more sales per square foot than any business in the history of retail. The wrapped-up box with a sleek wafer-sized Nano inside was the most popular gift in the history of Christmas. Apple had created the most ubiquitous gadget in the history of stuff.

Since the introduction of the iPod, Apple’s stock price had septupled—the technology also-ran was now bigger than Universal itself. This was supposed to be good for Morris. When Sony had had its Walkman craze, the music industry had sold tens of millions of tapes. And alongside the Discman craze, the music industry had sold tens of millions of CDs. So, doing the math, the success of the mp3 player should have meant tens—no hundreds—of millions in sales of mp3s. In fact, ten million iPods sold in stores should have meant ten billion songs sold through iTunes. But that wasn’t happening. Digital sales were growing, but nowhere near quickly enough to recover the lost profits from the compact disc. And the legal precedent set by RIAA vs. Diamond had established that an iPod wasn’t a recording device like the Walkman or Discman; it was simply a glorified hard drive. As a result, those iPods out there were filled to capacity with pirated material. Morris, who himself signed off on the 99-cent agreement with Jobs two years earlier, now publicly vented against Apple, claiming he’d got the short end of the deal.

Morris often had petulant episodes like this. At Atlantic in the 1980s, he had been one of the first executives to embrace the potential of MTV, and pushed his artists to shoot promotional music videos for the channel. Soon, though, he was griping that they weren’t paying him enough to air the material. So too with radio, where Morris spent millions marketing his artists, then bitched about his percentages on airplay royalties. Complaining about the terms of deals he had himself signed off on was one of his habits, and—who knows?—perhaps it was a negotiating tactic. But to his critics in the digital era, his growing inconsistency made him look befuddled and out of touch.

Still, he must have known the real problem wasn’t Apple. Somebody had to make the mp3 player, and they could hardly be faulted for making an especially good one. The real problem was the public. Consumers were breaking the law. They forked over hundreds of dollars for iPods but wouldn’t give the record industry a dime. They still, somehow, didn’t seem to understand that file-sharing was illegal.

Stupid public. Seeking to guide and instruct, by the end of 2005 the RIAA had brought educational lawsuits against 16,837 people. Almost all of the defendants were average citizens with no connection to elite pirates like RNS or Oink. They were John and Jane Download, who got their music from Kazaa and woke up one day to a court summons. Project Hubcap clogged up the courts, and soon more than half of all intellectual property cases on the federal docket in the United States were RIAA lawsuits against individual consumers. The lawsuits weren’t popular, but, the way Morris saw it, the only way the music industry could survive was if the public understood the legal hazards of file-sharing.

But while the bedroom file-sharers could be rehabilitated, the dedicated pirate was beyond hope. The Scene crews and the torrenters had to be thrown in jail, and the RIAA continued cooperating with the FBI to make this happen. There was a lot of overlap between the different Scene groups, and the 2001 raids had netted them a guy named Mark Shumaker, a Florida-based software cracker who was also the head of Apocalypse Production Crew, the dedicated music piracy group.

Most conspiracy investigations started at the bottom. This one started at the top. With Shumaker’s cooperation, the FBI set up a new “honeypot” server, similar to the one it had used in Operation Buccaneer. This false topsite, nicknamed “Fatal Error,” ran for more than a year, ensnaring nearly every member of the group. In April 2004, the Bureau moved, arresting 18 members of APC in coordinated raids. The conspirators were mostly basement dwellers with limited inside access. The cases of Bruce Huckfeldt and Jacob Stahler were typical: two 22-year-old Iowa roommates whose hobbies were beer, cage fighting, and music piracy. Neither Huckfeldt nor Stahler had a college education, nor any connection to the music industry. What they had instead were friends in low places. They’d been obtaining the leaks by bribing their way into the storeroom at Wal-Mart, to arrange a little “inventory shrinkage.”

Stahler and Huckfeldt had no priors, but the two were charged with conspiracy and faced five years in federal prison with no possibility of parole. Like nearly everyone in APC, they pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in exchange for sentencing leniency. They were brought to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to meet with Jay Prabhu, the senior counsel for the Department of Justice’s Computer Crimes Section, who was handling the government’s case.

Getting busted for music piracy was a disorienting experience. Neither man considered himself a criminal—at least, not a serious one. While both Stahler and Huckfeldt understood their actions were theoretically illegal, they thought of themselves as pranksters, not felons. Both were surprised that APC was even a target, as there were many other more visible, more damaging groups.

Adding to their confusion was their arraignment in Virginia. No member of APC actually lived in that state, none of the leaked CDs had come from there, and the FBI’s honeypot had been hosted in Florida. Prabhu explained that this was because of the crime they’d been charged with: not larceny, nor fraud, but “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.” “Conspiracy” was the key word there. The law specified that if you robbed a bank in New York, you got charged in New York. If you robbed a bank in Montana, you got charged in Montana. But if you talked about robbing a bank in New York while you were actually located in Montana, you could be charged in either state. The legal statutes specified that, when it came to conspiracy, any location where the conspiracy was furthered could be used by prosecutors as jurisdiction.

Even so, Stahler and Huckfeldt were perplexed—it wasn’t as if they’d been traveling to Roanoke to discuss leaking CDs in Des Moines. Why, then, Virginia? Because Prabhu lived there. Because it was close to the Washington, D.C., field office where Peter Vu worked. Because its jury pool pulled largely from law-abiding federal employees, and because these juries tended to find defendants guilty with the highest frequency of any federal jurisdiction in the country. And because, once, years earlier, while chatting over AOL Instant Messenger, Stahler and Huckfeldt’s conversations had been routed through a fiber-optic pipe to an AOL server in Falls Church, Virginia, and this had triggered an electronic impulse that had lasted for a fraction of a millisecond. That momentary impulse was all it took to meet the legal definition of “furtherance.” When it came to a digital conspiracy, jurisdiction was anywhere the Department of Justice wanted it to be.

In Alexandria, Stahler and Huckfeldt were called to meet with Prabhu separately, but both recalled the same tableau. The DOJ senior counsel was an overweight South Asian who wore a goatee and orthopedic shoes. On one side of him was an American flag, and on the other a picture of President George W. Bush. Behind him, in the middle, was a whiteboard. On the whiteboard was diagrammed the chain of command for the true targets of Operation Fastlink: the Rabid Neurosis crew. At the top of the diagram, written in marker, was the name “Kali.”

Prabhu grilled Huckfeldt and Stahler about RNS. Did they know anyone in the group? No. Could they get access to any of their topsites? No. How were they getting their material? We don’t know, sir. They run a tight ship, sir. They don’t talk to us, sir. The only thing we really know about them is that, around 1999, they starting beating us with leaks, and we’ve never been able to catch up.

Prabhu was insistent. Each meeting lasted more than two hours, and he returned to the same questions again and again. But Huckfeldt and Stahler weren’t bluffing—they really didn’t know anything about RNS. Prabhu was undeterred. RNS might be good, but they couldn’t be flawless. If they didn’t know anything, there had to be someone who did.

For Universal, the APC bust was small consolation. These weren’t the main guys. These guys were small fry. They didn’t affect sales. And, meanwhile, the company was having legal troubles of its own. There was this hard-ass attorney general in New York State by the name of Eliot Spitzer who’d been threatening an investigation into the entire music business, citing evidence of record industry “payola.” Spitzer had produced a trove of embarrassing documents, leaked from inside, that he said showed a systematic program of bribery, with industry promoters paying cash to radio DJs to get their songs on the air.

Payola scandals were a chronic problem for the music industry. They recurred every time the promoters forgot there were penalties for it. Over at Warner, Junior had just signed off on a five-million-dollar settlement with Spitzer, and Morris knew he was probably next. In March 2006, Spitzer produced an archive of emails from inside Universal showing a series of cash bribes and gifts paid in exchange for the heavy rotation of Universal artists on drive time radio. The overall level of corruption was small. A few hundred bucks’ worth of high-demand merchandise was enough to tempt the average DJ. Some industry observers wondered if, in a period of declining importance for radio, the crime was even worth prosecuting. The music industry was collapsing, and Spitzer was coming after them for distributing $300 in Amex gift cards?

But radio still drove hits, and was an important component of Morris’ business strategy. Plus, payola was only part of the problem. Universal had also been “Astroturfing”—hiring mercenary phone banks to call in to radio stations to request “hit” songs, creating an artificial appearance of demand where none existed. The Astroturf campaigns were targeted toward specific audiences with specific demographics. In July 2004, for example, dozens of radio stations across the country were targeted by a series of fake calls from “Females 18–24, all Black.” Key markets like New York and Chicago were bombarded with phony requests for Ashanti’s struggling single “Rain on Me” up to forty times a week.

The stronger acts like Eminem and Fifty didn’t need this kind of support. They generated real demand by the quality of their music. So Universal’s fake hits tended to be associated with lesser artists: boy band castoff Nick Lachey, hip-hop head case DMX, and trainwreck vanity project Lindsay Lohan. Universal was contractually obligated to promote and support these musicians, even when their artistic output didn’t justify it. That’s where Astroturfing came in, the theory being, if you could make a song seem popular, maybe it could cross some invisible threshold and actually become popular.

And sometimes it worked. In June 2005, Lohan had starred in Herbie Fully Loaded, a reboot of Disney’s The Love Bug. The movie’s theme song was “First,” featuring a desperate Lohan pleading for the attention of a distracted boyfriend. There was little organic demand for this bland effluvia, and in the lead-up to the movie’s release “First” failed to chart. But then, following a tepid opening weekend, the MTV music video countdown show Total Request Live was inexplicably blitzed with requests for the song. The subject line from one of Spitzer’s subpoenaed emails hinted at the true source of the song’s popularity:

FYI: we are hiring a request company starting Monday to jack TRL for Lindsay.

The song climbed into the top ten on TRL and remained there in rotation for more than a month. And on the back of Universal’s shenanigans, Lindsay Lohan’s album Speak managed to go platinum. (Worse still, it appears some brainwashed unfortunates actually paid real money to see Herbie Fully Loaded.) Hits, it appeared, could be manufactured out of thin air—provided you had a phone bank full of low-paid mimics and a few hundred dollars in gift cards.

Morris wasn’t personally implicated in the documents. Universal settled the allegations out of court with a $12 million check and no admission of wrongdoing. It was a signature Spitzer “prosecution”: no one went to jail and, except for the money, there weren’t any real repercussions. But at least it was a signal to the industry to turn it down a notch. Maybe they could also produce some actual hits while they were at it?

But Morris knew that no matter how good a song was, you still had to market it. He had this process down to a science. First you wrote a great song. This was the hard part, but Morris knew a hit when he heard one. Second, you got that song played on the radio and television. Because the airwaves were strictly supervised government-regulated monopolies, you had to be a little careful in this step not to run afoul of the law. Fortunately, the radio stations needed you just as much as you needed them. Finally, you pressed and distributed your album, and after hearing that great hit song on the radio, people went out and bought the entire album on CD.

But now the last step was broken. You no longer had to buy the whole album. Even if you held on to some atavistic notion of paying for your music, you could just buy the mp3 single on iTunes. For years the industry had been selling songs that even their creators acknowledged were not very good. Now they were paying the price. In economic terms, album sales were an example of “forced bundling”—after being bamboozled by Total Request Live, the consumer now wanted to hear “First,” but she had to buy all of Speak to get it. Who needed 12 Lindsay Lohan songs? One was more than enough.

There had been a time, of course, when the musicians had embraced the album. They had written full-length suites that spanned four platters of vinyl. Those had been the Ertegun days, which Morris fondly remembered, when Led Zeppelin would write 12 songs spanning two full-length LPs as part of a holistic artistic vision. You sat at home next to your turntable with your headphones and your spliff and you spent two hours listening to the entirety of Physical Graffiti in sequence. But album-oriented rock had died in the ’80s, the victim of MTV and the Walkman, and for the last twenty years music had been a hits-first business.

Rappers in particular were totally driven by hits. Their singles were dynamite, but their albums were packed with filler: lazy rhymes over half-finished beats, throwaway songs from unheralded apprentices, unintelligible skits. It was more enjoyable to listen to “In Da Club” 16 times in a row than it was to listen to the entirety of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ once. Lying on the floor with your headphones was out; running through the park with your finger on the click-wheel was in. No one listened to a whole rap album, not even the artists themselves. The genre on which Universal had staked its future was the one most perfectly wrong for the hits-driving-album-sales approach.

Morris was familiar with the economics of this new business model—it was really an even older business model, abandoned long ago, and now, against all the odds, brought back to life. When he’d started working as a songwriter’s assistant for Bert Berns at Laurie Records in 1963, the album was still an extravagant rarity. Like most labels at the time, Laurie had instead primarily traded in seven-inch vinyl singles that had retailed for ten United States cents. Morris, who still remembered those days, could see how the new digital approach resembled the old one. Once you adjusted for inflation, the contemporary terms of sale were nearly identical. The album was vanishing. Morris had outlived it.

This—more than piracy, more than bootlegging, more than anything else—was what was really killing the music business. Morris had buried enough unsold inventory in his life to know that the previous system was not terribly efficient. Indeed, in a bad year it sometimes seemed easier to take the discs directly to the landfill, avoiding the cumbersome retail supply chain entirely. From a holistic perspective, then, the digital system produced far less waste and gave consumers what they wanted far more quickly. The only problem was that it didn’t make nearly as much money.

Some of Universal’s artists were also beginning to sense this shift in economics. Why pay some crooked DJ to play your song when you could just put it on the Internet? Why bother with a traditional album release cycle that was undermined by leaking at every step? In fact, why even put out an album at all? There was nothing sacred about 74 minutes of music. That wasn’t an aesthetic decision. It was just the storage limit of a compact disc. Why not just put out some songs?

At the avant-garde of this economic model was Cash Money Millionaire Lil Wayne. Both Wayne and his label had been struggling, and Spitzer’s payola investigation had shown that even Birdman’s Big Tymers were resorting to bribing radio stations for spins. Worse, many of the label’s original stars had defected after feuding with Birdman and Slim over royalties. 2004’s Tha Carter had been intended as Wayne’s comeback album, but somehow it had leaked from the Universal supply chain exactly two weeks early and failed to even go gold in its first year. “Go D.J.” had been a minor hit, but, outside of New Orleans, people didn’t talk about Wayne much anymore. He was in danger of flaming out, like his estranged buddy Juvenile. And the purgatory of forgotten “Lil” rappers awaited: Lil Romeo, Lil Bow Wow, Lil Caesar, Lil Keke. . . .

Wayne got weird. He grew out his dreads and covered his body with goonish tattoos. He smoked weed like it was his job and developed an addiction to codeine-based cough syrup. His voice became screwed up and froggy. His production turned psychedelic. In 2003, he’d been a skinny, unexceptional adolescent delivering basic-sounding rhymes over basic-sounding beats. By 2005, he had transformed himself into The Illustrated Man, and his auto-tuned music sounded like garbled transmissions from outer space.

He started dumping all of his output to the Internet for free. With no promotional budget and no radio play, and in addition to his normal album release cycle, Wayne started putting out two to three mixtapes a year. Traditionally, the mixtape was what you put on the streets as a demo, to get you signed to a label. But Wayne had been signed to a label since he was 12, and that wasn’t working for him. Musically, the mixtapes were great, much better than his albums. They were weird and fun and danceable, and full of layered, witty lyrics that rewarded multiple listens. They borrowed beats from other albums, songs from other rappers, and then improved on them, sometimes dramatically. There was 10,000 Bars, Da Drought, Da Drought 2, The Prefix, The Suffix, Blow . . . dozens of underground tracks, tracks he made no money from, tracks he couldn’t make money from, since they featured uncleared samples that would get him sued.

In late 2005, Wayne teamed up with DJ Drama, an unsigned producer from Atlanta, for a new mixtape called Dedication. Drama had some buzz about him; he had already released mixtapes for the up-and-coming Atlanta rappers T.I. and Young Jeezy. Dumped to the Internet in December, exclusively in mp3 format, Dedication was a surprise hit that ignited both artists’ careers. Its popularity came not through the radio, but through the blogosphere, where the hip-hop heads were astonished at how good Wayne had suddenly become. The “new” Lil Wayne started getting all sorts of press, from tastemaking websites like Pitchfork and Vice.

Five months later, Lil Wayne reunited with Drama for Dedication 2. The mixtape was smart, and funny, and strange, and profane, and weird in a fascinating way. It sampled everyone—Outkast, Biggie, Nancy Sinatra—and paid no one. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and even The New Yorker all called it one of 2006’s best releases—establishment accolades that would have been unthinkable for Wayne just two or three years earlier. By leaking his own stuff first, Wayne had rebooted his career. As Jay-Z and Eminem were complaining about the leakers, Wayne was embracing them. Better than any artist before him, he leveraged the Internet hype cycle to his own advantage. His boast of “best rapper alive” started to get taken seriously.

But the mp3 revolution was not yet complete: the 2005 model iPod, at $300 retail, was still a luxury good, and most of Wayne’s younger urban fan base couldn’t afford it. They were still in the compact disc era, and Drama was serving them by producing and distributing the mix CDs wholesale on dedicated burners in his Atlanta offices. The discs made their way to urban record stores, where owners reported the sales through SoundScan, with Billboard reporting the numbers straight. The mixtapes started to chart, even though they used unlicensed samples and weren’t technically albums at all.

The resurgence of the Cash Money imprint seemed to bewilder the Universal executives. Distribution rights for the label had been folded into Motown Records in 2004, and Morris had brought in Sylvia Rhone to manage it. Morris had hired Rhone before, years earlier, while at Time Warner. At Warner’s Elektra imprint she had excelled, particularly at managing committed fan bases for groups like Metallica and Phish. Morris admired her, and she was a proven operator. But at Motown, she didn’t understand what Wayne was doing. “The mixtapes were obviously very concerning to us as a label,” she would later tell Rolling Stone. “It really goes counter to what we would like our artists to do.”

This and dozens of similar quotes added to the general aura of cluelessness surrounding the music executives. This led to an embarrassing episode a year later, when local law officials, working with Brad Buckles at the RIAA, arrested DJ Drama on suspicion of bootlegging. Drama’s Atlanta studio was raided and thousands of his burned CD mixtapes were confiscated. Those CDs had been labeled “For Promotional Use Only,” but in practice they’d been sold for cash. And since these mixtapes technically contained unlicensed samples, this to the eyes of law enforcement looked like conspiracy.

Officers at the scene told Drama he was being arrested on a racketeering charge. The incident was a telling misstep. Drama had relaunched the career of Universal’s newest, most popular rapper, and the RIAA had responded by orchestrating a raid on his studio. For some time, confusion reigned, but in the end he was never formally charged with any crime.

At the federal level Special Agent Peter Vu was struggling too. After three years he’d made little progress on Operation Fastlink and the RNS case. It’s possible he might have missed a critical lead. In 2005, after a meeting with the RIAA, someone at the FBI had filed an internal memorandum that referenced the Kings Mountain plant as a potential source of leaks. But after the divestiture of Universal’s CD manufacturing assets, the agents had not followed up on this report.

Instead, they tried a more unorthodox approach. RNS’ leader, whom Vu now knew as “Kali,” seemed to communicate only with Scene members who had established a long track record of insider access and leaks. So what if the FBI created such a track record? What if, with the cooperation of the record industry, the FBI started leaking albums themselves? If Lil Wayne could do it, why not the Feds? It was the sort of undercover tactic that agents had used in the past to infiltrate narcotics trafficking groups and the Mob. But the idea went nowhere—the music industry had made it clear that under no circumstances would it ever permit the FBI to leak a prerelease album.

That left just one lead: the remaining pirates from APC. Once again, Prabhu and Vu canvassed those who had pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2004. They continued to shake the APC tree for quite some time, until finally in early 2006 someone finally cracked. His name was Jonathan Reyes, of College Station, Texas, and he was known online as “JDawg.” Reyes had established contact with a member of Rabid Neurosis, and, through a shared FTP server, thought he might be able to provide the suspect’s IP address. The FBI pursued this lead, and, finally, in late 2006, Vu reported to his superiors with the good news: he’d finally wiretapped the Internet connection of a member of RNS.