Hacker History: MDT or "The Mass Depopulation Trio"
by Doc Slow
Back in 1998, under a pseudonym, I wrote an article called "Y2K and the New Industry of Hysteria."
One of my colleagues rightfully proclaimed that the "Industry of Hysteria" was nothing "new," and she was correct in thinking so.
So correct, in fact, that her disparagement of my use of the word "new" in the title of the article forced my proposal to her. We were quickly married, and shortly thereafter, quickly divorced. It is of little consequence regarding the forthcoming story.
In 1983, I was introduced to the personal computer.
I had just started my second year in the armed forces, and one day after payday while wandering around the Post Exchange (PX) on base (the post exchanges sell consumer goods and services to authorized military personnel), I came across a store display featuring the new "TI-99/4A" personal computer. It was priced around $350, so I grabbed a box off of the top of the display and just bought it. When I got the computer home, I proceeded to dive right in and start programming. My subject for the first program I would create? The Tarot! Yes, the very first computer program I wrote was a Tarot card reading application. My grandmother had introduced me to the Tarot when I was a teen, so I had a pretty good understanding of what this divinatory oracle was about.
My knowledge of how to create a program with the graphics necessary to make it an interactive experience was nonexistent, but after reading the documentation, I was able to portray a rudimentary graphic representation of what is referred to as the "Celtic Cross" reading.
That was actually the hard part. The easy part was creating the data, or the "meanings" of the cards to be selected at random from the usage of the built-in Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) that I programmed into the Tarot application.
After 36 hours of continuous coding, my first program was finished. It was a very poor portrayal of the esoteric fortune-telling card game, but it worked as advertised. I even submitted the program to Texas Instruments for inclusion in their gaming offerings, but naturally, they declined.
Later in the 1980s, I would try my hand at creating new algorithms for graphic fractal generation, and I went on to create some simple data encryption programs.
At first, I wrote some basic substitution ciphers, and then I returned to using a pseudo-random number generator in the algorithms. But pseudo-randomness was not good enough for me - being pseudo-random was not true randomness, and keys generated with PRNG could conceivably be cracked by present technology.
I had read of a more secure method of encryption, and decided I'd try my hand at doing a "one-time pad" (OTP). In cryptography, the one-time pad is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a one-time pre-shared key - the same size, or longer, as the message being sent.
In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a random secret key. Then, each bit or character of the plaintext is encrypted by combining it with the corresponding bit or character from the pad using modular addition. If the key is truly random, is at least as long as the plaintext, is never reused in whole or in part, and is kept completely secret, the resulting ciphertext will be impossible to decrypt or break. I would then go on to write the first functional OTP encryption program for the DOS operating system.
In 1989, I got into creating computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
A BBS was a dial-up connected computer server running software that allowed users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once connected and logged in, the user could perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through email, public message boards, and sometimes via direct chatting.
I ran several BBSes from 1989 to 1994 - the content of them would include all manner of science and technology topics, and several were all about computer programming and hacking. One of the BBSes I ran was referred to in the book The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (1992).
The relevance of this brief history of my early involvement in the personal computer movement is only important to the story in that it would later be a catalyst for writing about Y2K.
The Y2K article I wrote in 1998 focused on all the hype surrounding the "The Year 2000," and how computers and everything else with some kind of digital control system would cease to function. The article got published in an arcane, but well-distributed science newsletter, and the response to it was less than gratifying.
Computer experts came out of their digital caves in droves to disparage the dispatch I had meaningfully crafted to calm the public fear - fear that was being inflamed by writers, journalists, and talk radio hosts who had little understanding of basic computer functions and hardware. These disparagements were easily shrugged off as typical of the derision received on many occasions regarding much of the material the journal published.
But there was something else.
Other publishers, looking for an alternative viewpoint on Y2K, were asking permission to republish the article in their own magazines. And, because I wanted to get my viewpoint out there, I gave these publications carte blanche to do so.
The article was republished in no less than 12 different magazines - many of which would eventually publish a retraction of the article - stating they were misinformed by the writer. Their published retractions would appear in editions of their magazines long before the bell tolled midnight on January 1st in the year 2000.
Apparently, they had received so many negative letters about my article, and many from so-called "credentialed experts" that they all felt it necessary to print a retraction, in most cases stating they were misled by what I wrote, and that my information on Y2K was completely wrong. It turned out it was spot on, but very few listened or believed it.
It was around this time that I discovered late-night talk radio programs - specifically Coast to Coast AM hosted by Art Bell, and Sightings hosted by Jeff Rense.
These talk shows and their hosts truly embraced the worlds of alternative science, and the guests they interviewed were a direct reflection of late-night talk radio kookiness.
Guests such as Richard Hoagland (the "Face on Mars" discoverer), David Oates ("Reverse Speech" pioneer), Gary North (Y2K doom-and-gloomer), and Ed Dames ("Remote Viewing") were regulars on the show, and it was a great source of late-night entertainment.
But something about these shows really started to bug me. Here we were nearing the end of the millennium, and the advertising on commercial breaks was all about surviving the coming apocalypse. Ads for wind-up radios and a year's supply of food went along perfectly with the doom-and-gloom ideology the guests were offering in their lyrical mantras over the AM airwaves.
If you were a listener in the late-1990s, it was a time of wild conspiracy theories and fabricated prophecies offered to listeners with very few solutions save buying something that they advertised. It was enough of a catalyst to engender a willful response from my distaste for the subject matter, and respond I did.
Around the same time, I fell in favor with a couple of online miscreants, and we would later be dubbed the "Mass Depopulation Trio."
MDT was a loose group of hacker-types that had taken over the alt-fan-art-bell IRC chat room. This Internet chat room consisted of fans of Art Bell and a group of characters who absolutely hated him. After looking at what people were saying in the chat room, I rather quickly fell into the latter group. And then, well, I was hooked.
The Mass Depopulation Trio organically grew from the roots of the IRC chatroom, and then they developed a website: disinfotainment.com
"Disinfotainment" was an Internet BBS forum and so much more.
MDT started putting together audio mash-ups of talk radio show host's dialogs and mixing them with certain sound effects and snippets of songs. Some of the music was actually composed and recorded by real musicians for these so-called "spams."
MDT initially consisted of three pseudonymous characters: "MickeyX," "Johnny Pate," and "Dr. HD Slow," all of whom had a devilish ability on the Internet to make a mockery of, and virtually destroy, any and all resident kooks who were steadfast champions of the radio show and its host. These frustrated kooks were always threatening to call the FBI on MDT, and I'm sure many of them did so.
While MDT was an "all for one, and one for all" trio, they did a lot of their works independently of one another and became involved in several shenanigans that would later become legend.
Of the greatest achievements of MDT, "Mel's Hole" would win hands down.
Mel's Hole is, according to an urban legend, an allegedly "bottomless pit" near Ellensburg, Washington.
Claims about it were first made on Art Bell's radio show, Coast to Coast AM, by a guest calling himself "Mel Waters." Later investigation revealed no such person was listed as residing in that area, and there was no credible evidence that the hole ever existed.
From the Wikipedia site on Mel's Hole:
"The legend of the mythical bottomless hole started on February 21, 1997, when a man identified as Mel Waters appeared as a call-in guest on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Waters claimed that he formerly owned rural property nine miles west of Ellensburg in Kittitas County that contained a mysterious hole. According to Bell's interviews with Waters, the hole had infinite depth and the ability to restore dead animals to life. Waters claimed to have measured the hole's depth to be more than 15 miles (24 kilometers) by using fishing line and a weight. According to Waters, the hole's magical properties prompted U.S. 'federal agents' to seize the land and fund his relocation to Australia."
...
"Waters made guest appearances on Bell's show in 1997, 2000, and 2002. Rebroadcasts of those appearances have helped create what's been described as a 'modern, rural myth.' The exact location of the hole was unspecified, yet several people claimed to have seen it, such as Gerald R. Osborne, who used the ceremonial name Red Elk, who described himself as an 'inter-tribal medicine man... half-breed Native American / White,' and who told reporters in 2012 he visited the hole many times since 1961 and claimed the U.S. government maintained a top secret base there where 'alien activity' occurs. But in 2002, Osborne was unable to find the hole on an expedition of 30 people he was leading."
...
"Local news reporters who investigated the claims found no public records of anyone named Mel Waters ever residing in, or owning property in Kittitas County. According to State Department of Natural Resources geologist Jack Powell, the hole does not exist and is geologically impossible. A hole of the depth claimed 'would collapse into itself under the tremendous pressure and heat from the surrounding strata,' said Powell. Powell said an ordinary old mine shaft on private property was probably the inspiration for the stories, and commented that Mel's Hole had established itself as a legend 'based on no evidence at all.'"
For the first time, I can tell you that Mel's Hole was actually a complete fabrication created by the members of MDT, with a certain member acting out the part of "Mel" as a guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio show. In later years, several more "hoaxes" would be fabricated and presented on the show by MDT.
Not one of the listeners of the radio talk show ever had a clue that many of the stories were completely fabricated by MDT.
The Mass Depopulation Trio virtually disbanded shortly after the Y2K disaster never materialized.
Their work was done, and so was the sordid credibility of late-night talk radio kookdom.