I. THE FOOTBALL

Before Robert Boback got into the field of cybersecurity, he was a practicing chiropractor in the town of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, twelve miles northwest of Pittsburgh. He was also selling used cars on eBay and flipping houses purchased at police auctions. The decision to branch out into computers came in 2003, after he watched a “60 Minutes” report by Lesley Stahl about pirated movies. For years, while digital piracy was devastating the music industry, Hollywood had largely been spared; limitations on bandwidth curtailed the online trade in movies. But this was changing, Stahl noted: “The people running America’s movie studios know that if they don’t do something, fast, they could be in the same boat as the record companies.”

Boback was thirty-two years old, with a Norman Rockwell haircut and a quick, smooth, entrepreneurial manner. Growing up amid the collapsing steel industry, he had dreamed of making it big, hanging posters of high-priced cars—a Lamborghini, a Porsche—on his bedroom wall and telling himself that they would one day be his. After high school, he trained to be a commercial pilot, imagining a secure, even glamorous, life style—but then the airline industry began laying off pilots, and he switched to chiropractic, inspired by a well-off practitioner his family knew.

Watching “60 Minutes,” Boback saw a remarkable new business angle. Here was a multibillion-dollar industry with a near-existential problem and no clear solution. He did not know it then, but, as he turned the opportunity over in his mind, he was setting in motion a sequence of events that would earn him millions of dollars, friendships with business élites, prime-time media attention, and respect in Congress. It would also place him at the center of one of the strangest stories in the brief history of cybersecurity; he would be mired in lawsuits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits, which would gather into a vortex of litigation so ominous that one friend compared it to the Bermuda Triangle. He would be accused of fraud, of extortion, and of manipulating the federal government into harming companies that did not do business with him. Congress would investigate him. So would the F.B.I.

But as Boback was watching “60 Minutes” all he saw was a horizon of possibility. Stahl pointed out that pirated music and movies were spreading primarily on peer-to-peer networks—an obscure precinct of the Internet that was sometimes called the Deep Web. The networks were made up of hundreds of thousands of decentralized connections, in which one computer was linked to no more than five others, and then through those five computers to many more, expanding exponentially like the branches of a large tree. These connections were invisible to search engines like Google. Even the software that allowed users to browse them had only a limited field of vision—glimpsing just random fragments of the tree at a time. Boback wondered if it was possible to design a system that could scan the whole tree at once, then block people from sharing files on it. Certainly, this capability would be worth a lot.

Boback had no idea how to build such a thing, but he knew someone who might: a patient of his, Sam Hopkins, whose girlfriend had persuaded him to pursue chiropractic treatment after a car crash. Hopkins was in his thirties, too. He was soft-spoken, with a childlike disposition, a wispy physique, and a goatee. He had grown up in inner-city Pittsburgh, in a home where money was scarce. As a boy, he had taught himself how to program on a Commodore 64 that was on display at Sears. Bored with school, he dropped out, and built an Internet-service provider, which was sold to a local telecom company. By the time of his car accident, he was designing high-speed computer networks for Marconi Communications.

When Hopkins came in for treatment, Boback explained his idea, and after some thought Hopkins said that it could be done. At that time, the most popular peer-to-peer software was a free application called LimeWire. When a user searched for a file—say, an MP3 of “Hey Ya!”—LimeWire sent a query to other users asking for it. If the file turned up, this meant that someone had designated it for sharing. The main peer-to-peer network limited the number of computers a person could search. But Hopkins told Boback that the limitation could be overcome with a system that scattered virtual users, or “nodes,” throughout the network—in effect emulating many, many copies of LimeWire running simultaneously. With enough nodes, the whole network could be seen.

That Christmas holiday, Hopkins locked himself in a room to program, and in a couple of weeks built a rough prototype. Even though it could maintain only a small number of nodes, data flowed through it in a torrent. The system could track the search terms that thousands of users were entering—offering unique insight into what was in demand, half clandestinely, on the Deep Web. The terms filled the screen so rapidly that Hopkins had to program a “decelerator” to slow them down. Watching the words race by, the two men began to suspect that they had genuinely struck it big.

By the end of the year, Boback and Hopkins were sitting in the well-appointed offices of a Pittsburgh law firm that specialized in intellectual property. The attorneys were optimistic. Rather than charge billable hours, they offered to work for ten per cent of the proceeds when the system sold. One said that the deal could be worth fifty million dollars. With the firm’s help, Boback and Hopkins formed a corporation. Hopkins came up with its name, Tiversa, a portmanteau of “time” and “universe.” It was also an anagram of veritas: Latin for “truth,” but scrambled.

Boback is a storyteller. Words pour out of him in cascades that, depending on the listener, can register as beguiling, slick, questionable, or bullshit. One colleague described him as “very confident, sometimes bordering on cocky.” Another told me, “He was a master manipulator. Watching him was like watching van Gogh use oils.”

As Boback began marketing his system, he landed a big meeting with lawyers representing the Recording Industry Association of America, but the lawyers said they already had a strategy to combat file sharing: sue the problem into oblivion. Undeterred, he and Hopkins flew to Los Angeles, where they met with Darcy Antonellis, the head of anti-piracy efforts at Warner Bros. The studio was gearing up to release a summer blockbuster, “Troy,” an epic in the mold of “Ben Hur,” rumored to have cost almost two hundred million dollars. A screener had already leaked, and, during the meeting, Boback strove to convey how much money Warner Bros. was losing: in his hotel room beforehand, Hopkins had added to the software a digital counter that appeared to track downloads of “Troy,” tabulating a fifteen-dollar loss with each one. Boback explained that the system, which he was calling Media Spy, could be designed to jam the activity. Antonellis listened patiently, and then said that it seemed too good to be true. She meant it literally. Such an intrusion would require Warner Bros. to block people from posting files at the point of their computers, which she suspected was legally impossible.