And yet somehow a quiet trade in smuggled discs continued. Glover didn’t know the exact methods, but certain temporary employees were still able to get the discs past Van Buren’s security regime. One of them had even managed to sneak out an entire manufacturing spindle of 300 discs, and was selling these piecemeal for five bucks a pop. This trade was a closed circuit, and only select employees were admitted into the cabal. Most were temps, with little to lose, and some had criminal backgrounds. They were not, as a rule, familiar with computers. Glover was different from them—a permanent employee with a virgin rap sheet and a penchant for technology. But he also had a reputation as a roughrider, and he was close to the codes of the street. He knew how to keep his mouth shut, and he was welcomed as a customer.

Dockery was not. Perhaps he was seen as too talkative, or maybe simply too square. Whatever the case, he now had to rely on Glover for access. In return, he offered to cut Glover in on the mysterious current of prerelease Internet media he had somehow tapped. But the terms of this relationship were uneven, and as Dockery began to pester him for more and more titles, Glover became annoyed. Finally, one day in late 1999, he confronted his friend.

Look, I’m tired of sticking my neck out for you, said Glover. What is this all about? Why do you want this stuff so badly? And where are you getting all these movies from?

Come over to my house tonight, said Dockery. I’ll explain.

In front of the computer that evening, Dockery outlined the basics of the #warez underworld. For the past year or so, he said, he’d been uploading prerelease leaks from the plant to a shadowy network of online enthusiasts. Although chat channels like #mp3 and #warez looked chaotic, they actually relied on a high-level of structure that was kept hidden from public view. This was the Scene, and Dockery, on IRC, had joined one of its most elite groups: Rabid Neurosis.

They called it RNS for short. The group had formed a few weeks after Compress ’Da Audio, the pioneering mp3 releasing group. Within months they had eclipsed the originals, and quickly competed them out of existence. Instead of pirating individual songs, RNS was pirating whole albums, and bringing the same elite “zero-day” mentality from software to music. The goal was to beat the official release date wherever possible, and that meant a campaign of infiltration against the music majors.

The founders of RNS had gone by the handles “NOFX” and “Bonethug,” although Dockery never interacted with these two. They dated back to the distant mists of 1996, as might be inferred by the musical acts their screen names referred to. By the time Dockery had joined, in 1998, under the handle “StJames,” leadership had passed to a figure named “Havoc.”

Havoc was a legend in Scene circles. He worked at a commercial radio station somewhere in Canada. He had access. Although he never revealed his real name, he would sometimes share backstage pictures of himself at concerts, his arms draped around the shoulders of famous musicians. For a while he had been the group’s best asset, sourcing dozens of leaks, often directly from the unsuspecting hands of the artists themselves. But then, in early 1999, Havoc abruptly stepped away. He never gave a reason why.

After some discussion, leadership passed to another member, who went by the name of “Al_Capone.” Capone had discovered the Scene at the age of thirteen, after being banned from AOL for trolling. He’d established himself in RNS by making online friends in Europe, then arbitraging offset transatlantic launch dates to source prerelease albums. But his reign at the top was short. Capone was undisciplined, and under his leadership, the group ballooned in membership to more than a hundred members, violating basic principles of Scene security. After a few tumultuous months, Capone gave up his duties, claiming that he was “too busy” to lead the group. (In reality, he’d just turned seventeen, and was moving out of his parents’ house.)

The mantle finally passed to a permanent presence. This was “Kali,” who was selected through what amounted to an executive search committee. Kali had not previously been an especially visible member of the group. Unlike Havoc, he did not have insider access. But, unlike Capone, he never claimed to. What he did have was Scene cred. For years Kali had been a member of another Scene group, a games-cracking crew named Fairlight, and his exploits there were celebrated. Also, he was old enough to vote.

Kali’s leadership brought a kind of military discipline to the group. He was a natural spymaster, a master of surveillance and infiltration, the Karla of music piracy. He read Billboard like a racing form, and used it to untangle the confusing web of corporate acquisitions and pressing agreements that determined what CDs would be manufactured, where, and when. Once this map of the distribution channels was charted, he began an aggressive campaign of recruitment, patiently building a network of moles that would over the next eight years manage to burrow into the supply chains of every major music label.

Dockery—known to him only as St. James—was his first big break. They’d been in a chat channel together and Dockery had started bragging about an unreleased CD. Kali, skeptical, had asked him for proof, so Dockery had sent him a track. Kali, recognizing the importance of what he’d found, immediately recruited him into the group. At first a peripheral player, following the Universal merger Dockery had become RNS’ single best source. But now, thanks to the new security regime, his access had dried up, and he was proposing to pass the responsibilities on to Glover.

Dell was in an unusual position. With his street cred and his technical expertise, he was one of the few people in the world capable of securing the trust of both low-level physical smugglers and top-level online pirates. RNS invites were handed out rarely, and typically on a probationary basis, but, if Glover wanted, Dockery could arrange to have Kali fast-track him into the group this same day.

Glover hesitated: what was in it for him?

Dockery explained: Glover needed Kali just as much as Kali needed Glover. As head of RNS, Kali was the gatekeeper to the distributed archive of secret “topsite” servers that formed the backbone of the Scene. These ultra-fast servers contained terabytes of pirated media of every form. Movies, games, TV shows, books, pornography, software, fonts—pretty much anything with a copyright was there for download. The encrypted Scene servers were well hidden, access was password protected, and logons were permitted only from a whitelist of preapproved Internet addresses. All logging software on them was disabled so as not to leave a trail. The Scene controlled its own inventory as well as Universal did—maybe better.

Access to this topsite “darknet” was granted exclusively on a quid pro quo basis. To get in, you had to contribute pirated material of your own. And not just some old Shania Twain CD you found lying in your sock drawer; it had to be something new, something in high demand. The lure of the darknet—the promise of the digital library—was enough to corrupt. Somewhere out there were Glover’s counterparts: guys in the movie business, guys who worked for game companies, guys who worked in software design. (They were almost all guys.) Somewhere out there were software testers, DVD screeners, and warehouse workers. Somewhere out there, in every supply chain, someone like Glover was leaking too. The media on the topsite servers was available weeks before it could be found in stores, or even elsewhere on the Internet. The spread of files from these servers was carefully monitored and controlled; leaking to the Scene was rewarded, but leaking from the Scene was taboo. The files took a long time to migrate to the chat channels and the Web. Sometimes they never left the closed economy of the Scene at all.