always won in the
long run. This didn't matter to the hacker Doomsters--"Legion of Doom"
was not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not meant to
be taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came from funny-books and was
supposed to be funny.

"Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring to it, though. It
sounded really cool. Other groups, such as the "Farmers of Doom,"
closely allied to LoD, recognized this grandiloquent quality, and made
fun of it. There was even a hacker group called "Justice League of
America," named after Superman's club of true-blue crimefighting
superheros.

But they didn't last; the Legion did.

The original Legion of Doom, hanging out on Quasi Moto's Plovernet
board, were phone phreaks. They weren't much into computers. "Lex
Luthor" himself (who was under eighteen when he formed the Legion) was
a COSMOS expert, COSMOS being the "Central System for Mainframe
Operations," a telco internal computer network. Lex would eventually
become quite a dab hand at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although
everyone liked Lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered a
truly accomplished computer intruder. Nor was he the "mastermind" of
the Legion of Doom--LoD were never big on formal leadership. As a
regular on Plovernet and sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS," Lex was the
Legion's cheerleader and recruiting officer.

Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier phreak group, The
Knights of Shadow. Later, LoD was to subsume the personnel of the
hacker group "Tribunal of Knowledge." People came and went constantly
in LoD; groups split up or formed offshoots.

Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few computer-intrusion
enthusiasts, who became the associated "Legion of Hackers." Then the
two groups conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers," or LoD/H. When
the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "Compu-Phreak" and "Phucked Agent
04," found other matters to occupy their time, the extra "/H" slowly
atrophied out of the name; but by this time the phreak wing, Messrs.
Lex Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven," "Kerrang Khan," "Master of
Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder," and "The Videosmith," had picked
up a plethora of intrusion expertise and had become a force to be
reckoned with.

LoD members seemed to have an instinctive understanding that the way to
real power in the underground lay through covert publicity. LoD were
flagrant. Not only was it one of the earliest gro