Dave Buchwald

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Dave Buchwald (born September 4, 1970) is a filmmaker and former phone phreak, hacker, and leader of the Legion of Doom in the mid-1980s, known online as Bill From RNOC.

As a teenager in the late 1980s, he used social engineering to trick phone company workers into giving him access to systems. He hacked Bell and AT&T networks (COSMOS, SCCS, LMOS), gaining access to many phone lines and the ability to monitor conversations. He also led the PENIX suite of hacking tools.

In 1995 he moved into film, serving as a technical consultant on the movie Hackers, helping edit the screenplay and coaching actors. In 1997 he co-founded Crossbar Security with Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) and Andrew Brown. Crossbar provided information security services to large companies but shut down in 2002 during the dot-com bust.

Today he works as a film editor, freelance photographer, and graphic designer in New York City. Since 2000 he has created cover art for 2600: The Hacker Quarterly under the name Dabu Ch’wald. His first feature film, Urchin, came out in 2006. He has produced and edited other independent films, including Love Simple, and is in pre-production on Kuru, the second film from the production company The Enemy. A short he edited, Floating Sunflowers, won the Gold Remi award for Best Comedy Short at WorldFest-Houston in 2014.

In 2018 he and collaborator Michael Lee Nirenberg presented sample scenes from a documentary series, Reverse Engineering, at DEF CON in Las Vegas. He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York.