Evil Mog
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
But we had this one spot that was basically all hooked up to a tower because of the way this one extension went. And so we had an outage. Someone drove a piece of equipment through the cables. And so I had to go up and resplice all this outdoor cable. And I'm up on this tower and all of a sudden it's a sandstorm. And I'm like, oh, no.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
I can't work on this cable with gloves on because it doesn't... You ever tried twisting and terminating cable with gloves? It just doesn't work. So I'm getting blasted by sand in this whiteout condition trying to terminate because I'm not going to try and climb down the tower. It's just not going to happen. I'm hooked in there, ready to rock.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
I got 30, 40 cables done before the sandstorm ended and then finished off the rest of the job. One of the things we did, in addition to making sure people call their families back home, is we ran a video teleconference unit. And so people could see their families back home. We found out one of the guys coming out of a FOB, his convoy got bumped.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Now, bumped is a polite word for saying hit by an IED. Thankfully, in this case, nobody died. Thankfully. Whatever data you believe in. But it really shook this guy up. It shook him up seriously fierce.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Well, the worst thing we had to do is every time somebody died, we had to kill all of the communications in theater, including all the forward operating bases and the super fob. It was known as a calm lockout procedure. We had a cell phone on. The second somebody got confirmed casualty, I got the phone call, I hit the buttons, and then I got to release it once they notified the families.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
So why is there a lockout? It's so that people don't put things on social media or get out to the news articles before they can notify the families. Hmm. It was one of the worst things ever. Because being on that phone call, you're like, shit. You feel all sorts of terrible feelings. And then you have to go act like a professional, cut the comms off.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
And then when people are like, hey, the internet's not working. You've got to give this nonchalant comms lockout, but still be sympathetic about it. And when you say comms lockout, everyone in theater knew what you were talking about. But it was one of those... It was a weird, solemn duty I had to do, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, you weren't the one telling the families.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Nope, but I was killing the comms and telling all the soldiers, hey, why can't I call family back home? Like, sorry, man, comms are offline due to a comm lockout.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Yeah, and then my answer is like, I have no idea, man, I just work here.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
He wasn't injured. He was just shocked, really badly shocked, getting hit by an IED. even if nobody gets injured in the process, is enough to send someone to spirals. Because you get that whole mental, oh my God, what if this had been me? What about the possible guilt? All that kind of thing. And the guy was in really rough shape mentally.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
So they originally asked, could you give us some extra phone minutes and phone time? That's how the request came in. And us being us, we've got, yeah, here's a couple hundred minutes to go hard. And we're like, hey, is there anything else we can do? And his guy's like, well, he's doing pretty rough.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
And I'm like, dude, we got to do something for this guy. So thankfully, they had people on the ground in Toronto. And I'm like, hey, can you go spring over to CFB Trent and go grab one of our spare video teleconference units? and get it out to the hospital. I'll do whatever it takes to requisition bandwidth. Just get me the stuff out there. I figured out we had some spare bandwidth available.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
So I slowed down everybody's video teleconference and voice services and their Wi-Fi a bit and opened up an entirely new channel. Because all we had was six megabits for a thousand people. Almost no bandwidth whatsoever. And so I was like, hey, you know, line this up. I'm going to reserve you bandwidth for like the next... four or five days.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
And so then we had to go contact their visitor unit and say, hey, do you guys have enough bandwidth for us to go get you video teleconference? And thankfully, they had a really decent tech there. He's like, well, actually, we can make some things happen. What do you guys got for equipment?
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Yeah. Wow, okay. Trying to coordinate this from halfway across the world is kind of interesting. Exactly, yeah.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Exactly, right? So they were running on Tanberg, we were running on Tanberg, and we made the gear all work out. I popped onto the load balancers on our side, and...
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
No, it was a TV on a cart with a Tandberg video teleconference unit.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Yeah. Yeah. He just threw this on the thing. They wheeled her in. They plugged her right in next to the woman's bed there. We swiveled the webcam over. He managed to get us a public IP so we could do remote control of it. And then, yeah, we just set up the communication channels and off we went. It was actually running rather well.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Yep. I talked to Steve. Steve called the guy's unit commander. Unit commander called the section leader. They pulled him out, said, look, you're to report to building 026 Bravo on Kandahar Airfield. Show up here. We're like, hey, man, we got a surprise for you. Wheel him back out there, plop him down in one of our spare rooms that we had.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
rigged up into this 40-foot sea container, plopped down a chair, made it comfortable, said, here's our little care package, here's some Kleenex, call us if you need anything.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
We weren't even looking, we gave him his privacy. Yeah. I remember how he was afterwards, though. After he saw his wife, he walked in, he was all doom and gloom. This is going to sound stereotypical, but that thousand-yard stare, like, you've seen some shit.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
And then the guy, right afterward, I saw life in his eyes. Yeah. So that's how I knew we did a good thing.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
I mean, from what I've been told, the actions taken the first couple of days after a major incident are the most critical. And I think by giving him that level of support immediately, I think I changed the guy's life way for the better. I mean, they were talking originally about having to discharge the guy.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
From what I heard, he'd stuck around another five, six years before he finally released and went off and doing something. I can't even remember what he's doing now. But I think I've changed the life for the better, so... I'm good with that.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Exactly. I like to think we saved a life there. And no matter what I do in life, I think that's the coolest thing I've ever done.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
All right, so it was funny. I'm a glider pilot. And so the first aircraft I ever flew was CF or CG Mog. But it also happened to be a Final Fantasy character. The problem was I had that as my gamer handle for years. And then I met Matthew O'Gorman at DerbyCon, and he had the same initials. And so we decided to deconfliction. And because he had the name, I figured I'd change mine to be Polite.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
And so I became Evil Mog, and that was my IRC handle from thenceforth.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Yeah, so I was kind of stupid and was doing a fair bit of online piracy, freaking, a little bit of other various things. And back then, it was fairly easy to trace people because young, dumb, and stupid. And so I get this kind of stern knock on the door.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
And they're like, we know everything you've been doing. You have a choice. You either stop now and play good, or we either put you in juvie, but Canada's prisons are kind of crap for kids. Or we can just get a technology ban on you that'll last until you're 30 and you'll never get a job in technology. I'm like, yes, sir. I'll be good, sir. Here we are, sir. And, you know, kind of off we went.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
I might have done a little bit more than that. Um... Just a little bit. See, remember back when the early credit card numbers had a specific way of validating that they were legit? I was publishing bogus credit card number generators that only sort of worked half the time on local BBS systems.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
They wouldn't work for authorization, but they'd work for input validation on websites to like, you know, hey, let's go pop on to, let's say, the early porn sites, for example. They'd get you enough to get your free trial, and then they'd mysteriously error out.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
There's that whole LUNS check, right? There's some math behind it. I looked it up because I didn't have the generator quite right. Some of the check sums didn't match, but most of them kind of did. It was enough to get past a cheap regex, but that's about it.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
I was a cadet back when I was younger, from 12 to 19. I got my glider license before I learned how to drive a car.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
So I had an option to go back to school, went back to SAIT as a network engineer. Did six months of CCNA, MCSA, Linux LPI 1, Level 2, Level 3, that kind of stuff. And that's what kind of restarted my career when I was in my early 20s.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
So basically, I got the phone call from my friend to go over to Afghanistan. And he said, there's this company called Network Innovations. And basically, what they do is they run the morale voice and internet services for the Canadian forces. So what that means is you have soldiers calling their families back home from the big super fobs or the small little remote outposts.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
And so he's like, hey, do you want to go over for six months? And I'd already released from the reserves at this point. I said, yeah, sure, let's go over. I had nothing else to do, and I wanted some money, and it was all tax-free, so I deployed over.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
It was, yeah. It was totally. Regional Command South in 2008 was hot, to say the least. I wanted to go do something useful. I always kind of did, and my parents were like, you're not going over. I'm like, sorry, I'm going over. I want to pay off some debts, and I want to go do something good with...
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
You know, for the folks that are over there, you know, did a little bit of pre-deployment training, nothing much. Just here's how to wear a gas mask. Here's how to put on a bulletproof vest. And then here's a whole whack load of vaccinations. Then all of a sudden, there's some kid from the sticks out in the middle of the active war zone.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
There's satellite, there's microwave. Basically, these people need to be able to contact family or else they're going to go nuts. I mean, it's like being stuck out in the middle of the bush for six months. So my world was just morale voice. The Canadian forces handled all the tactical and all the operational. My entire mission was making sure people could call their families.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Oh, I'd set it up as well. Like, say, for example, we'd have a new site and they're like, hey, we need to get, you know, fob whatever the heck back online. They'd send me out in the back of a convoy with a little Pelican case with, say, here's a tiny little BGAN terminal, which is a small mini satellite.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Or in the case of a larger fob, here's a bunch of Pelican cases with an auto-acquire satellite dish. You'd go roll out, set up the SATCOM dish, hook it into a couple of laptops and a router and a switch. a little tiny PBX system, et cetera, and then do a couple phone call tests to make sure everything works. That was all she wrote.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
I roll it on site. I'm in the middle of doing a repair. All you hear is the siren. And then this crappy British voice they used, because they all had the same recording. Rocket attack, rocket attack. And that's all you're hearing.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
You know, you bunker down in between a set of HESCO barriers, which are basically just a bunch of gravel, some concrete, a bunch of chicken wire all around, enough to give you a bit. You just, you know, hunker down in place and you sit there, chill out, wait till the shelling stops. You get up, see if there's any damage and get back to repairing the equipment.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Thankfully, it missed us, but one landed in the poop pond. That was terrible. One landed and took out a recreational facility.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
One of the rockets landed. It took out the satellite dish. It took out one of the comm trailers, and it took out a bunch of the cabling. These guys were down for about a week.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
I get out there and thankfully I was smart and I pre-sent all the gear I needed on a convoy ahead of me. There's this broken down, destroyed crater effectively where the old piece was. I come up and there's guys, basically giant bulldozers and heavy equipment moving the old gear out. The gear inside is just completely toast.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Meet up with the local sergeant who's like, hey, we're putting your new gear down right where the old one was, dropping this new sea container in. What do you want to do with this old thing? I'm like, take it back, salvage it, destroy it. We don't really care. Use it for training. You wire up the new SATCOM. You are calling on to your folks out of the UK going, hey, do you see my bird?
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
Yeah, we're locked on. Here's the activation. Boom, new terminals are online. You've deactivated the old accounts. You do a couple plugins, test the new laptops, and then there's already a lineup around the block of folks who have gotten their email in like a week and a half, right? And so all of a sudden, you start running them all in. They're all nice and happy. You run down to the chow hall.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
You munch whatever warm food they've got. You stick around for a day or two for troubleshooting, and then you –
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
call your boss on the defense service network hey can you guys get me a helicopter out they're like sorry man all the birds are tasked so finally you head yourself down to the talk the tactical operations center you introduce yourself like hey when's your next convoy out if you're lucky they send you out on a combat patrol which are way faster and less annoying than a convoy because it's you know one or two vehicles and
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
It's a little more comfortable. If you're not lucky, you're crammed into the back of this armored personnel carrier that's hot as balls wearing body armor in the heat, and yet take your eight hours to go 100 kilometers to get back home.
Darknet Diaries
149: Mini-Stories: Vol 3
I mean, that kind of has happened. Not nearly as extreme, but have you ever tried to repair 200 pairs of Cat 5 in a sandstorm from 100 feet up in the air? 100 feet in the air? What's up there anyway? Yeah. I was a comm tower. I had to go through this one bridge spot because most of the stuff at CAF was all underground.