The 414s

The object

The 414s were a loose group of teenagers and young men from Milwaukee, named for the city's area code, who, in 1982 and 1983, used home computers and modems to break into more than sixty computer systems. Their targets were not trivial: the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and a bank among them. Most were curious rather than malicious, dialing into systems still protected by default passwords or none at all.

The kids on the cover

When the FBI arrived in the summer of 1983, the story went national; one member, Neal Patrick, appeared on the cover of Newsweek. The timing was uncanny: the film WarGames, in which a teenager nearly starts a nuclear war from his bedroom, was in theaters that same season. Suddenly the "teenage hacker" was a figure the whole country recognized, and feared. Congress held hearings, and the case became a key prod toward the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, the law that still defines computer crime in the United States.

Why it matters

The 414s mark the moment hacking stopped being an inside word and became a public anxiety. They exposed a real and embarrassing truth, that critical systems were wide open, but the response criminalized the curiosity along with the harm. Much of the legal landscape that later artifacts in this museum had to fight, from the prosecution of Phrack to the case against Aaron Swartz, traces back to the panic these teenagers set off.

The lesson it set loose

When a culture cannot tell curiosity from attack, it writes laws against both. The 414s did little real damage, but they taught the public to imagine the hacker as a threat, and taught hackers that exploring a system they did not own had become, almost overnight, a federal crime.