2600 Meeting, December 1999
Friday, December 3rd, 1999: 2600 Meeting. It started out like any other ordinary meeting, then THEY arrived. A group of about 10 to 15 guys came over and one very hyperactive one (too much kool-aid) went on and on about freeing Kevin, hacking the planet and talked about all kinds of interesting hacker themes. It was hilarious at first but quickly got boring when he ran out of good material and they finally got loud enough to bring security over who suggested that they leave. Their best bit was when they screamed at everyone in the food court to hide their digital watches because we were hackers.
A little while later the same security guard decided to take his lunch break at the table next to ours and got a little peeved that we had two police scanners going that were listening to the mall’s security frequencies. Well, I’ll let Pyrotech tell the rest of the story…
“as we were sitting at the meeting talking about whatever and listening to scanner after the ‘2599’ had abanadoned us after the first security incident, a mall cop came and sat at the table behind me. he said scanners werent allowed in the mall and we had to turn it off and put it away. so we did as he said and all was well. a while later he asked what we were talking about. most likely he heard the word radio and thought we were going to get them back out once he had left. he said that he was off duty after his shift and told us about how he was actually a university city cop working as a fill in for the galleria. he asked if i would like to know why we cant use scanners in the mall. i said sure and he radioed to his friends.
after about 5 mins 4 officers came over and asked who had the scanners and the problem. there were 2 city cops in blue and 2 rent a cop mall fools.he said follow me, so me and blacksun did as he said thinking that he was going to tell us to get rid of them or something measely. instead him and the other cops took us behind the closed doors to a sort of emergency hall. the main cop then used intimidation. (heres where it gets good), first he demanded to see my identification even though i said i didnt have a scanner. he wrote some shit down from my license and asked where im from, how old i am, how i got here, and who i was with. i replied im from highland il, im 16, i drove a car, and i was with friends. he then proceeded to try and act as if he knew me. he told us that he was a north county cop and wouldnt take any shit from smartasses from HIGHLAND ILLINOIS. he then acted as if he knew us from when we used to live in north county st louis 17 yrs ago. he said oh i see that you have moved now, and i replied yes i have, he wanted to know if i was from overland. im pretty sure overland is nowhere near to where we lived which was bellefontaine on jamestown rd.
while he was questioning me he had my id and was writing down some infos as a sort of way to try and intimidate me. he said that we dont fuck around with little smartasses here and dont take crap from anyone. he said that the galleria is private property and so is the radio freqs which they are using. he also said that we dont need to be scanning the freqs because we dont need to know whats going on with “topsecret” police orders. he then proceeded to repeat himself using diffferent words. after that load , he said that he thought it was time for us to “move on to a different mall somewhere down the road”. he returned blacksun’s scanner and my id and then told us where the exit to the mall was (what a nice guy).
this is what happened. he was yelling most of the time and frequently swore at me as a sort of intimidation factor. he was probably thinking something like, hey too little kids from illinois who dont know anything and are smartasses. the excess numbers of police were for pure fright purposes alone. he knew that he could fuck us and we couldnt do anything..he did what was in his power(taking id and kicking us) so we left as illustrated.”