We're going to start this episode about computer hacking with a little baseball.

That's from the first game of the 2014 National League Division series between the

St. Louis Cardinals and the LA Dodgers. The Cardinals eventually won the series, 10-9. They later lost

the league championship to San Francisco. Still, a pretty impressive season. But that same year in the

team's front office, something else was going on. You've got this guy working for the Cardinals,

Chris Kareya. That's Josephine Wolf. She teaches cybersecurity policy at Tufts University. She's also a

baseball fan. Chris Kareya, the Cardinals executive, was looking at scouting reports and putting together

lists of players the team might want to hire. And he has some former co-workers on the Cardinals. Some

folks who used to work there with him who leave and go to work for the Astros. And when they leave,

they turn over as you do your work computer and also the password, the account you used to access it.

And Kareya, who's still with the Cardinals after they leave, gets this idea that maybe the

passwords haven't changed that much in their new roles. Maybe they've set up their new accounts with

the Astros and used us the same or very similar password and he tries it out with one of his former

co-workers and it works. Kareya was able to get into the Houston Astros internal computer system.

He could see all their stats, what players they had their eyes on, all of it. And he did this more

than once. He continues to sort of access this through various people's accounts and use it to

pull down a lot of information and he's charged under the computer front and abuse act. This big

anti-hacking law that goes back to the 80s. The case was a huge deal, both for people like

Josephine, who study cyber security and for Major League Baseball. People are wondering

in the game exactly how far the commission is going to go. Is it going to take away an entire

year's worth of draft? Is he going to go harder than that? Is he going to issue a huge fine on

the Cardinals? Because look, it's industrial espionage. The League find the Cardinals two million

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