My First FBI File
I was wardialing and found a modem that greeted me with a ASCII art rendering of the US (well, the lower 48) with “FBINET” superimposed, followed by a username prompt. I thought it must be a spy-themed BBS so set my scripts to brute-forcing ofer a few nights and they got in within a week.
So I poked around a simple file interface for an hour (I vaguely recall lists of cases, didn’t download anything). By the time I got worried, someone called me on my parent’s phone line and used my surname to warn me to stop.
It was a decade later before I met a friend-of-a-friend who was in the agency and looked up whether my name was on any lists. They confirm that I indeed “had a file” but that it wasn’t anything I should worry about.