I'm a hacker who was jailed for a decade for heading up a cybercriminal organization - I started the group to fight back against bullies but got hooked on the power

A hacker who spent a decade in prison after heading up one of the first cyber- criminal groups in America has spoken out for the first time in a documentary.

Jesse William McGraw, 39, was a contract security guard for United Protection Services when he first appeared on the FBI's radar in 2009.

He was known to authorities by his online alias GhostExodus and the founder of the hacking group Electronik Tribulation Army (ETA), an anarchistic group who terrorized people and organizations for pleasure rather than monetary gain.

'Knowing that you have the power to make someone's life better or to destroy them, not to be a cliché, but it feels like God,' he said in the documentary made by CyberNews. 

Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, McGraw didn't have an 'emotional connection' with his heroin-addicted father and his mother who worked as a dancer.

He said he was born to 'irresponsible parents,' forcing him to raise himself and embrace survival skills like eating, drinking, and using the bathroom outside.

The experience left him ill-equipped to connect with his peers, he said, calling them nasty 'sociopaths' who tried 'to find new ways to humiliate you.' 

It was then that he was drawn to hacking as an escape hatch, saying it started when he read the Hacker Manifesto, a document considered a cornerstone of hacker culture.

The Manifesto promotes the notion that hacking can allegedly adhere to a person's moral code and doesn't need to exploit people or supersede selfish desires. 

'It perfectly encapsulated the mentality of the spirit of hackers,' McGraw said, adding that it's something that still resonates with him and he still quotes to this day.

'You call us criminals. You build atomic bombs. You wage wars. You murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. 

'My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think and not by what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something you will never forgive,' he quoted.

During his childhood, McGraw was moved from home to home and eventually was reunited with his mom who moved on from dancing and was an evangelist married to a pastor.

McGraw wasn't spiritual but immersed himself in the church as a youth pastor and music director but wanted to create his own family.

He searched for some semblance of control, leading him to create the ETA which at first had good intentions, but ultimately became what they sought to destroy. 

'The ETA was combatting cyber bullying, pedo hunting, and dismantling problematic hacking groups,' but as the ETA grew, it because less about the victim and more about our infamy,' he said in the documentary.

McGraw was sentenced to nine years and two months in prison in 2011, was ordered to pay $31,881 in restitution fees, and serve three years of supervised release after his prison term ended.

He was found guilty of installing malware on more than 14 computers at the North Central Medical Plaza in Dallas on Feb. 12, 2009.

He was already working as a security guard at the hospital when he decided to use his physical access to internal systems to weaponize them and attack enemy hacking groups like Anonymous.

The decision stemmed from an alleged cyberattack by Anonymous on one of ETA's members. 

McGraw claimed the hacking group accessed the member's court records, including his social security number and other personal information and inappropriately photoshopped images of his child.

He said he came to the conclusion that the only way to combat the problem was to use the systems he already had access to 'in order to weaponize them and attack these actors.'

McGraw installed malicious codes, or bots, that allowed him or anyone with his account name and password to access the computer's data from a remote location.

The FBI raided the homes of three ETA members in July 2010 who were accused of intimidating a witness in the aftermath of McGraw's arrest. R. Wesley McGrew, of McGrew Security flagged McGraw's video to the FBI after he discovered screenshots of GhostExodus accessing the HVAC computer.

The ETA members, known only by their ETA names 'Fixer,' 'dev//null' and 'Xon' reportedly harassed McGrew, who claimed he received threatening emails and phone calls and his website was targeted with DDoS attacks.

'They set up website in my name to pose as me, and put up embarrassing content or things they thought would embarrass me, including a call-to-action to buy sex toys, and fake pornographic images,' McGrew told Wired at the time.

'They harvested e-mail addresses from the university I work at and e-mailed it out to those.'

In the documentary, McGraw recalled pulling up to the hospital at around midnight on June 26, 2009, and believed a dark van parked in the lot belonged to the cleaning crew.

But when he exited his vehicle in front of the glass doors, three FBI agents and two senior police officers surrounded him, waving guns and yelling for him to freeze where he stood. 

'My first thought is that this is a prank … I am being punked by Ashton Kutcher,' McGraw said, referencing the popular MTV reality show Punk'd.

McGraw was arrested at the scene and charged with two counts of transmitting malicious code in July 2009 and pleaded guilty to both indictment charges nearly a year later. 

U.S. District Judge Jane J. Boyle sentenced McGraw to 110 months in prison for each charge, to be served concurrently. 

While reflecting on his time infiltrating the hospital's computer systems, the former ETA hacker compared the experience to something akin to acting as a higher power.

'Knowing that you have the power to make someone's life better or to destroy them, not to be a cliché, but it feels like God.'

But looking back, McGraw said if he could give any advice to his younger self, '... It would literally be these words: 'Give up hacking.'

In the documentary, McGraw described himself as 'the first person in recent U.S. history who was ever convicted for corrupting industrial control systems,' adding that his sentence 'set a precedent of what would happen next to whoever did something like this.'