To Catch A Hacker

The real world of crime is less likely to be in our neighborhoods but on the internet. It moves at speeds faster than any getaway car or smash and grab. It is millions of break-in attempts in a minute. It is the same brick that is thrown through thousands of windows with a single click. And largely, we are unprepared to do anything about it. Coming January 5th 2021.

On Sunday, January 12, 2017, an officer of the Metropolitan Police Department, the law enforcement agency of Washington, DC, made an urgent phone call to the U.S. Secret Service. The MPD officer had discovered that some of the public surveillance cameras used by MPD had been compromised and were no longer feeding surveillance video to the Command Center. This is the story of the hack of Donald Trump's Inauguration.

Just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, the Metropolitan Police Department’s own headquarters has been turned into a crime scene. The 2017 presidential inauguration was just hacked and is being held for ransom. It has all markings of a nation state actor attempting a decapitation strike. But was it?

The true culprits behind the hacking of the 2017 presidential inauguration have been identified by authorities, but they won’t know that until nearly a year later. For years, these criminals allegedly stole money here and there from people who never noticed, cared, or reported it. Now, they've poked the bear that's going to strike back. In 2018, they arrive at the international airport in Bucharest, Romania to catch a flight to London...but they never make it onto the plane.

From Goat Rodeo, Long Lead, & Garrett Graff:Many Americans watched the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 unfold right before our eyes. What happened on 9/11 and how it changed our world is the most important story of the modern age. It’s the hinge on which so much changed. But in the years since the history we've come to tell of that day is incomplete—and sometimes wrong.Hosted by journalist Garrett Graff, author of the bestselling book THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY: AN ORAL HISTORY OF 9/11, "Long Shadow" examines the questions that linger two decades later and the enduring mysteries that still surround 9/11, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. This is a different history of September 11th than you likely remember. But it’s one that will help you make sense of the world the attacks left behind.

This season, we’re telling the story behind the largest financial seizure ever in history. $3.6 billion dollars’ worth of laundered Bitcoin.  This is the story about the crime, and the people behind it. It’s also a love story. A cringe rap music video. And, a map to the unregulated gray space of a new type of money.

Federal agents arrived at 75 Wall Street, New York City on a cold Wednesday morning in January, a four-minute walk from the heart of Wall Street. Inside one of the luxury units, Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein live with their Bengal cat, Clarissa. Soon they would hear an unexpected knock at their door...

Amid the speculation and ongoing development of this story, one point is clear: when crypto users become victims of theft, their recovery is dependent on the very exchange that failed them.