How music got free

CHAPTER 20

The day after his house was raided, Glover returned to work. What else was he supposed to do? He had a shift scheduled, and he hadn’t been formally charged with a crime. Pulling up to the guardhouse in his Ford, he cleared the vehicle whitelist and found a parking spot. As he emerged from the car, he was met outside the factory by Robert Buchanan, his boss.

Buchanan had worked as a supervisor at the plant for years. He had always liked Glover, whom he found to be a capable and diligent employee. He had promoted him off the packaging line, and they had played paintball together. Now, though, it was clear that something was wrong. The FBI hadn’t contacted Buchanan, but the incident with the sheriffs had happened during a shift change, with hundreds of employees watching.

Dell, said Buchanan, don’t come in here. You and me are friends, but you’re under investigation. I think you better go home.

It was the last time Glover would ever set foot on the plant’s grounds. He was fired within a week. Dockery would also be fired, and within a few weeks Karen Barrett was let go. Glover’s DVD business was shut down. The FBI confiscated his computers, his duplicating towers, his hard drives, and his PlayStation. They left him the duffel bag full of compact discs—those were worthless, even as evidence.

The conversation with Special Agent Peter Vu had been difficult. Glover had admitted to leaking the CDs, and admitted to ripping them and sending them to Kali. Vu had pressed him for information on Kali, and Glover had told him the scattered details he had picked up over the years. But Vu wanted a name, and, although he’d talked on the phone with Kali hundreds of times, Glover didn’t have one.

Then, later that same day, Kali himself had called. His voice was agitated and nervous.

It’s me, said Kali. Listen, I think the Feds might be on to us.

Vu had anticipated the possibility of such a call and had instructed Glover to act on the phone as if nothing had happened. Glover now had a choice to make. He could play dumb, pull Kali in, entrap him, and seek leniency from the FBI in exchange for cooperation. Or he could warn Kali off.

The two had a tortured history. For years they had been locked in a private, anonymous tryst away from the rest of the Scene. There had been times when they had relied on each other, times that Glover had looked forward to speaking with Kali, times he’d even thought they might be friends. But there were other times that Glover felt Kali was manipulating him and isolating him in order to maintain control. For his part, Glover had repeatedly endangered Kali’s group through his DVD bootlegging, and had betrayed him on the Graduation leak. Their complex relationship had now come down to this conversation.

Kali, Glover said, You’re too late. They hit me yesterday. Shut it down.

OK, I got you, Kali said. Then he said, I appreciate it. Then he hung up.

Over the next few months the FBI would make six more raids. In addition to Glover and Dockery, they hit Patrick Saunders and Simon Tai, both in New York. They picked up Edward Mohan, 44, a radio DJ from Baltimore who had been in RNS for years. They hit Matthew Chow, 26, of Missouri City, Texas, who had worked as a low-level Tuesday ripper and designed the ASCII-art marijuana leaf on the group’s old NFOs. They hit Richard Montejano, also known as “RickOne,” the head of Old Skool Classics, to whom Glover had leaked Graduation. And they hit the man they believed to be Kali, the man who had personally cost the music industry tens of millions of dollars and transformed RNS into the most sophisticated piracy operation in history: Adil R. Cassim, a 29-year-old Indian-American IT administrator who smoked a lot of weed, listened to rap music, and lived at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles with his mom.

The FBI’s investigative strategy had worked. Shaking down “J-Dawg” from APC had led Vu to an IP address for one Patrick Saunders, known to Reyes only as “Da_Live_One.” In November 2006, the FBI set up a wiretap on Saunders’ Internet traffic in Troy, New York. The wiretap originally provided nothing, as, following Kali’s orders, Saunders had encrypted all chat traffic to his box using a popular cipher called Blowfish. Vu’s team had requested counterencryption support to crack the code, but was advised by the division of the FBI that handled such things that this was impossible. Still, Vu sat on the wire for the next three months, and finally Saunders got lazy.

In New York City for a weekend of clubbing, Saunders still felt obligated to keep up with his responsibilities to RNS. He had logged into his computer remotely using a virtual client, and chatted with a few members of the group to schedule an upcoming leak. While the outbound traffic from his computer was covered by Blowfish, inbound traffic was not, and in late 2006, after a five-year investigation, Vu could see inside the RNS chat channel for the first time.

His victory was short-lived. Within a month Kali had shut the group down. Kali’s timing in this regard was almost perfect. Vu had gathered enough information to implicate Saunders, but not anyone else. The culture of anonymity on the chat network hadn’t given Vu much to work with. In fact, he still didn’t even know Glover existed. There was only one thing left to do: shake down Saunders. The FBI raided his Troy apartment in early February 2007. In interviews, Saunders initially denied knowing anything about the group. But the warrant permitted the Feds to seize his computer and send it to Quantico for forensic analysis. Soon the technicians found something interesting—a transcript of the #RNS chat channel from the group’s final day. Saunders, sentimental, had kept a log of it.

Vu used this to go to work on Saunders, and with a five-year sentence looming, he soon flipped. He had been one of the most ideological members of the group, a free-software advocate who thought the copyright was an outdated legal concept from the early eighteenth century. But, as with so much self-congratulatory Internet rhetoric, this attitude disintegrated the moment it came into contact with the real world.

Terrified of prison, Saunders proved as useful an asset to the FBI as he had once been to RNS. On March 5, having signed an agreement to cooperate in exchange for sentencing leniency, Saunders spent the day reviewing the chat channel logs from RNS’ final day with Vu. Forty-two screen handles had appeared in the chat session that day, and Saunders described everything he knew about each one. Often, this wasn’t much—maybe a general sense of location, or age, or a smattering of biographical details. Indeed, it was a point of pride for Saunders that, though he’d spent thousands of hours online with them, he didn’t know the real name of a single member of the group. Dockery’s clowning—repeatedly changing his screen handle to imitate past members of the group—made things even more confused. Still, Vu had something to work with. He advised Saunders to inform him if anyone from RNS now tried to contact him again, and sure enough, in April, Glover had messaged Saunders directly, seeking to find a way into another group.

Saunders, looking at that message, had faced a decision as well. For the first time, he was talking to the group’s best asset, a guy kept under such deep cover that he hadn’t even been referenced in the final chat session. He knew that once Vu had this IP address, the entire network would be exposed. Every activity on his computer was being logged now, but for a minute Saunders considered somehow terminating the conversation, either by logging out immediately or perhaps kicking the cord from his computer, giving a coded message to the man he knew only as “ADEG” to stay away.

But he didn’t. Instead, he gave the IP address to the FBI, and from that day forward IRC was for Saunders a medium of betrayal. Vu subpoenaed Time Warner’s subscriber records and soon found himself looking at the name of Bennie Lydell Glover for the first time. From there it was easy—but, had Glover walked away, as he’d intended to in January, it’s possible he might never have been caught.

Kali, too, had proved too greedy. The nameless release group he’d started in the wake of RNS was limited to a circle of his most trusted confidants, but that circle included Glover, whose seized computer contained login credentials for Kali’s home server. That gave Vu a second Time Warner IP address, and his subpoenas soon led him to a residential account in Granada Hills, California, registered to a subscriber under the name of Bilkish Cassim—Adil’s mom.

Finally, Vu picked up Edward Mohan, Matthew Chow, and Simon Tai. These were easy collars, as the three hadn’t taken even rudimentary steps to hide their identities. Chow in particular had been open about his involvement, and in his (admittedly unqualified) legal opinion, RNS wasn’t even breaking any laws. Vu had found him through his email address, which he’d shared with every member of the group: chow@mattchow.com.

But the overall damage was compartmentalized. APC had lost 18 people; RNS only lost six. Kali’s emphasis on anonymity had proven prescient, and his decision to spike the group had come just in the nick of time. He hadn’t saved himself, perhaps, but he’d saved the rank and file: the Tuesday rippers, the Japanese export-hunters, the British journalists, the Italian brothers “Incuboy,” the Swedish topsite operator “Tank,” the Okie farmer “KOSDK,” the Hawaiian aquarium keeper “Fish,” “Al_Capone,” “Havoc,” “Crash,” “Yeschat,” “Srilanka” . . . none of them were ever found.

The Justice Department’s statement of facts in Glover’s case made reference to the scope of the conspiracy. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Prabhu explained his position that RNS was a criminal organization, one that operated for the benefit of its members. He explained how the topsite economy provided members with in-kind benefits for sustained and deliberate copyright infringement—an arrangement that provided material rewards for breaking the law. He emphasized the way in which RNS was indeed a criminal conspiracy:

Rather than operating as a group of friends interested in music, it operated as a business, and, rather than money, that business was designed to get access for its members of every copyrighted work that ever existed.

In the sentencing guidelines, he made his point even more clearly:

RNS was the most pervasive and infamous Internet piracy group in history.

It sounded like flattery, but the numbers backed it up. RNS had leaked over 20,000 albums over the course of 11 years, numbers independently sourced to the FBI’s investigation, the RIAA’s internal tracking database, and the group’s own NFOs. During most of this reign of terror the group’s key asset was Glover, another point the FBI now well understood. His leaks had made their way through topsites across the globe, and from there to private trackers like Oink, and from there to public sources like the Pirate Bay and LimeWire and Kazaa. He was the primary source of contact for hundreds of millions of duplicated mp3 files—perhaps even billions—and, given Universal’s predominant position during this period, there was scarcely a person under the age of 30 who couldn’t trace music on their iPod back to him. He was the scourge of the industry, the hero to the underground, and the king of the Scene. He was the greatest music pirate of all time.

He got a job at Wal-Mart. Working in the distribution center wasn’t glamorous, and the company was stingy with benefits, but as always he volunteered himself for every available overtime shift. Things began to look bleak in the months before his arraignment. He had a mortgage. He had credit card debt. Karen was pregnant again. The economy was tanking in spectacular fashion.

But at least he had a job. In February 2009, the inevitable arrived, and the Entertainment Distribution Company declared bankruptcy. The Kings Mountain plant was shut down, hundreds of employees were laid off, and the compact disc production line was sold to buyers in Latin America. The workers filed for unemployment and faced an uncertain future amidst the worst economic crisis in modern American history. Glover, barred from interacting with his former colleagues, could only learn about the plant’s closing secondhand.

On September 9, 2009, Glover surrendered himself to the Feds at a courthouse in eastern Virginia and was indicted on a single felony count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. A month later he pleaded guilty. The decision to plead was a difficult one, but Glover thought his chances of acquittal were poor. Fourteen years after he’d signed it, Glover’s “No Theft Tolerated” agreement from PolyGram was now admitted as federal evidence. Dockery, who loved to talk, had told Vu everything. Glover’s computers and hard drives contained volumes of incriminating evidence. And so far the FBI’s conviction rate in Operation Fastlink was 100 percent. Hundreds of convictions had been obtained, mostly through plea bargains, and the maximum penalty for copyright infringement was five years in prison. The few who had tried to fight the charges had lost.

At his indictment in Virginia, Glover saw Adil Cassim for the first time. From the moment he lay eyes upon him, Glover was certain that this man was Kali. An unassuming presence, Cassim was clean shaven and wore his hair cropped short. He was dressed in a tasteful suit jacket and a quiet tie. He was stocky, and he packed a noticeable paunch. His skin was nearly as dark as Glover’s own.

Wal-Mart found out about the conviction and promptly fired Glover for cause. He was now a black unemployed convicted felon cut loose in the worst economy in seventy years. For the first time in his life he began to have serious financial worries. Money for Glover had always been a transitory asset, one you traded quickly for something with actual utility, like a hood scoop. Now jobless and facing a pile of legal bills, he began to rethink this profligacy. He needed cash badly, and although he knew that prison time was inevitable, he suspected he could minimize his term through cooperation. Facing a desperate situation, he agreed to testify against Cassim.

The FBI needed the help. Sure, Cassim fit Glover’s preexisting mental profile of what Kali should look like. He was South Asian. He smoked weed. He lived in California with his mom. Patrick Saunders independently corroborated these details, and noted further that he and Kali had celebrated several birthdays together online and were almost exactly the same age. Sure enough, the records showed that Cassim and Saunders had been born less than two weeks apart. Like many influential members of the Scene, both Saunders and Cassim belonged to the same matriculating class of 1997. (So did I.)

But all of this evidence was circumstantial. There were hundreds of people who might fit this description. The Granada Hills raid in 2007 had ended with both Cassim and his mother in handcuffs, but the evidence obtained from the search warrant was not overwhelming. The only computer the Feds had found was a laptop, with nothing incriminating on it. They had found a bong, too, and marijuana, but nothing that would make a charge stick. In his audience with Vu, Cassim had said little, and, alone among those hit in the RNS raids, he did not admit to being a participant in the group.

Glover suspected that Cassim had dumped the evidence in the wake of their final phone call. But if so, it seemed he had not managed to do so completely. On a burned compact disc from his bedroom, the FBI found a copy of Cassim’s résumé, and there, in the “Properties” tab, Microsoft Word had automatically included the name of the document’s author: “Kali.” Plus, his subscriber records showed he had called Dell Glover hundreds of times, and, sure enough, his mobile phone contained Glover’s cell number. The contact’s name was listed only as “D.”

Cassim maintained his innocence. While he provided no explanation for the phone calls to Glover, his lawyer would later contest that the CD alone was not enough to tie the ethereal screen name “Kali” to the actual human being Adil Cassim. And although Glover’s FTP logs showed that someone at his mother’s IP address had been uploading pirated material, that didn’t mean Cassim was responsible. It could have been anyone. After all, when the Feds took his wireless router, it wasn’t even password protected. Cassim was using the “unsecured wireless” defense—the same one Glover had talked about on the phone with Kali.

Matthew Chow was fighting the case too. Even the Feds conceded that his involvement in RNS was minimal. He hadn’t been an active participant in the group for years, and the CDs he had ripped had been purchased legally from stores. Chow’s main contribution to RNS had been his design of the ASCII marijuana leaf on the group’s old NFOs—not exactly evidence of active participation in a criminal conspiracy to defraud. But the case against him was strong. In his first interview with the FBI, he had signed an affidavit confessing that he was a member of the group.

The two would be tried together. Cassim was represented by Domingo Rivera, a self-described “Internet Lawyer” who specialized in defending hackers. For an attorney, Rivera had an unusual amount of technical expertise: he had served in the U.S. Navy as a computer engineer and later worked as a cybersecurity expert for the Department of Homeland Security. He had used the unsecured wireless defense several times before, and had an impressive track record of acquittals.

Chow had his own lawyers, a pair of Houston locals by the names of George Murphy and Terry Yates. In the Texas criminal defense scene, Murphy and Yates were local legends, revered as much for their charisma as their unorthodox legal approach. Yates in particular was great with juries, a lifelong Houstonian with a thousand-lumen smile and a pleasant Texas drawl. Immediately, Yates and Murphy focused on changing the case’s jurisdiction from Virginia. They weren’t impressed by the FBI’s assertion that a single microsecond electronic impulse was enough to establish jurisdiction. A federal judge agreed, and the case was moved to Houston. Although the two did not know how to program computers, and this was their first intellectual property case, they were now playing on home turf.

During jury selection, the prosecution struck down any jurors who had ever downloaded music online, even legally. Rivera, Murphy, and Yates did the same, and everyone under the age of 40 was recused from the jury pool. The most important music piracy case in the history of American criminal justice would be decided by a rarefied group of middle-aged Texans still stranded in the compact disc era.

The trial began on March 15, 2010, at a federal courthouse in Houston. When Glover was called to testify he performed poorly. Although he believed Kali and Cassim to be the same person, when cross-examined by Rivera he was forced to admit that he had no concrete evidence to show this was true. If Cassim were to talk in court, Glover could maybe identify his voice. But Cassim didn’t have to talk; the Fifth Amendment guaranteed his protection against self-incrimination, and Rivera could invoke it on his behalf. Amazingly, the FBI did not present recordings of Cassim’s voice as evidence, and, in five days of trial, Cassim never said a word.

Saunders went next. He performed poorly as well—he knew even less than Glover. He couldn’t tie Kali to Cassim, and they had never even talked on the phone. During testimony, Rivera presented the “unsecured wireless” argument, which Saunders found preposterous. The two got into a heated geek-off about how IP addresses were assigned, until the judge told them to cool it.

After this inauspicious beginning, Glover was unsettled. He was still sure that Kali and Cassim were the same person, but now he was beginning to wonder if a jury could be convinced. Could Cassim actually beat this thing? If so, could Glover have beaten the case too? He began to have second thoughts about his own irrevocable decision to plead guilty, and his decision to testify.

The trial continued for four more days. DOJ trial attorney Tyler Newby, one of Jay Prabhu’s deputies, called a dozen more witnesses, including Peter Vu. He entered many pages of server logs into evidence. He presented a paper trail of leaked compact discs. He presented the phone records showing that Glover had called Cassim’s cell phone hundreds of times, the same cell phone Cassim had had on him when he was arrested. Rivera repeatedly disputed this evidence, but for some things—like why Adil Cassim had for several years felt the need to carry on a long-distance relationship with a CD packaging plant employee—he didn’t seem to have good answers.

The trial concluded on March 19. After five hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict. Cassim was not guilty. Out of the hundreds of cases brought in Operation Fastlink, it was the first nonconviction. Glover couldn’t believe it. He was going to jail and Cassim was going free, based on an argument over wireless routers. Glover became angry—not with Cassim, but with himself. He never should have signed the deal. He never should have talked to the Feds. He should have gotten a better lawyer. He should have taken the risk. The “unsecured wireless” defense had worked.

Or had it? After all, it wasn’t just Cassim on trial. Matthew Chow had been found innocent as well, even after admitting to being a member of the group. And if Chow wasn’t guilty, the jury must have had something besides router security on their minds. Even as Rivera and Saunders were arguing the finer points of IP address assignment, Yates and Murphy had tried a different approach. Not wanting to bore the jury with technobabble, they instead had focused on the legal definition of the word “conspiracy.” Typically, a conspiracy benefited the conspirators in some obvious way, but in Chow’s case that didn’t seem to have been true. There was no evidence to show that Chow had ever made any money off his participation in RNS. In fact, it seemed he was losing money, spending a portion of his paycheck buying CDs in exchange for—what, exactly? Pirated movies that were in most cases already freely available elsewhere? Yates explained to the jury that Chow wasn’t engaged in a conspiracy. He was just hanging out online with friends.

This argument proved effective. In conversations after the trial, several jurors had said that, while they understood the defendants were probably guilty, they didn’t agree with the severity of the potential punishment, so they had instead decided on acquittals. The legal term for this was “nullification.” It referred to an unusual feature of the American legal system, one that prosecutors and judges tried to keep quiet. Nullification was the prerogative of juries, while accepting a preponderance of evidence, to override laws they saw as unjust. This was the real reason for Chow’s not guilty verdict, and probably Cassim’s too.

For more than a decade Rabid Neurosis had burrowed its way into the music industry’s supply chain. They had scoured eBay for early CDs; they had bribed radio DJs and record store employees; they had sourced moles inside warehouses, and television stations, and music studios; they had even made their way into the factories themselves. They had leaked 3,000 albums a year across every genre. Across the globe they had built a network of infiltration and dissemination. In the shadows of the Internet they had stashed their secret troves of pirated material and kept them locked under uncrackable encryption. A team of expert FBI agents and a small army of private detectives had tried, and failed, to work their way into the group for more than five years. The economic damage they had caused to the recording industry was measurable and real, and ran to millions and millions of dollars.

But on March 19, 2010, a Texas jury, specifically selected for its technological unsophistication, found that the laws that prohibited these activities did not have to be obeyed.