Cheating at video games was a hobby early on. “I remember in particular there was a ‘Star Wars’ game, X-Wing, where you shoot down Imperial spaceships,” he recalled in an e-mail message. “Only one of my computer-controlled wingmen was any good. My very first hack at age 9 was noticing there was a file for each pilot, and I simply copied the pilot file for the good wingman 20 times, giving me a plentiful supply of the best wingmen from then on.”

Beating X-Wing must have been supernaturally gratifying because, then and there, Griffith seemed to have devoted himself to finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in systems of all kinds. As he wrote to me: “I love the ingenuity that goes into trying to think of the most perverse things you can do within the game that the designers would have never intended or foreseen someone trying. You step back and look at the entire interacting, breathing system and pick out the counterintuitive, unbalanced, seldom-explored parts and look for a way for these parts to interact such that they play off each other, synergistically amplifying their power to influence everything else, potentially spiraling out of control.”

This cast of mind, Griffith wrote, “gave me a knack for computer security.” During his freshman year in college, at the University of Alabama, he read an article in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly that revealed potential flaws in the Blackboard Transaction System, which administers the multipurpose campus ID card used at many American colleges and universities. Griffith approached Billy Hoffman, the author of the article and a student at Georgia Tech, about collaborating on the problem. The pair worked for months on a demonstration of the weaknesses of Blackboard technology. In April 2003, they were hours away from presenting their findings at a security conference in Atlanta when Blackboard hit them with a restraining order. The company then sued Griffith and Hoffman for something considerably less than trying to overthrow the government (so much for the rumors). In fact, they were charged with violating the Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act, among other things. The parties settled out of court later that year. (The terms of the settlement are sealed.)

Griffith says he likes to think of himself as a superhero of online anarchy: a “disruptive technologist.” But there’s another side to the mischief maker from Tuscaloosa — a more contemplative side. In 2002, Griffith, like many other scientifically inclined young people, fell under the spell of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 best seller, “Gödel, Escher, Bach.” It was a revelation. In downtime from his life as an Internet poltergeist, Griffith started to explore quieter, more ethically defensible intellectual pleasures.

“I wrestled with materialism,” he explained, referring to the vexing fact that the miracle of consciousness somehow inheres in three pounds of quivery human flesh. Why couldn’t a smart guy like himself make a computational device with the self-awareness of a human mind?