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they picked it: 'What else could we have called ourselves?' he answered. 'The Legion of Flower Pickers?'

The LoD's origins go back to the summer of 1984, when a hacker called Lex Luthor set up one of the first specialist hacker bulletin boards, based in Florida. It was an élite, invitation-only board, with detailed files on hacking and related crafts like social engineering and dumpster diving.

The first Legion of Doom had nine members, with handles like Karl Marx, Agrajag the Prolonged and King Blotto. The gang has been reformed three times since. It went into decline when five of the original Legionnaires were busted, but bounced back in 1986 and again in 1988. The latest reformation took place in late 1990. It was never a large group, and although the original LoD board had more than 150 users, admission to the BBS was not the same as gang membership.³ The LoD was the élite of the élite, a sort of inner circle. The real LoD generally hovered between nine and eleven members; it has never had more than twelve at any one time. Between 1984 and January 1992 there were only forty confirmed LoD members in total.

The LoD was eulogized by the hacker bulletin, PHRACK, after one of its periodic demises: 'LoD members may have entered into systems numbering in the tens of thousands, they may have peeped into credit histories, they may have snooped into files and buffered [stolen] interesting text, they may still have entire control over entire computer networks, but what damage have they done?' The answer was 'none' — well, almost. There were still the inevitable exceptions: 'unpaid use of CPU [Central Processing Unit] time and network access charges'.

'What personal gains have any members gained?' Again, the answer 'none' — apart from 'three instances of credit fraud that were instigated by three separate greedy individuals without group knowledge'. The bulletin concluded: 'The Legion of Doom will long be remembered as an innovative and pioneering force . . .'

The LoD was not the only group on the electronic block: it had rivals, other high-tech street gangs that contested LoD's claims to be the meanest and toughest hackers in Cyberspace. One of these other gangs was MoD, which, depending on who you ask and what time

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