# Alex Kasper

> Official site of Alex Kasper — social engineering and deception research, with a long-running connection to Kevin Mitnick and the early hacking/phone-phreaking scene.

Alex Kasper writes and speaks about social engineering, deception, and the human side of security. The site includes his biography, a news/media archive (press coverage, historical primary sources, and research), project pages, and event listings.

## Key sections

- [About](/about/): Biography and background.
- [News](/news/): Archive of press coverage, historical documents, and research notes. Mixed content — some entries are third-party press coverage, others (like the TAP archive) are primary-source historical documents hosted directly.
- [Projects](/projects/): Standing reference pages, each collecting everything on the site related to one subject or body of work.
- [Events](/events/): Speaking engagements and appearances.
- [Contact](/contact/) and [mailing list](/mailing-list/).

## TAP Archive

- [TAP Archive](/projects/p000008/tap-archive/): The complete run of *TAP* (originally *YIPL*), the 1971-1984 phone-phreaking/hacking newsletter that predated *2600* and *Phrack* — 91 numbered issues plus 7 "Classified TAP" ad-sheet inserts, each with a scanned PDF, searchable text, and citation metadata.
- **[Structured JSON index](/projects/p000008/tap-archive/archive.json)**: every issue's id, issue number, series, title, date, summary, tags/topics, people, scan quality, page URL, PDF URL, and a `transcript_url` pointing to the issue's plain-text OCR transcript — fetch this instead of crawling the individual issue pages.

## Other notable project archives

- [Kevin Mitnick News Archive](/projects/p000007/kevin-mitnick-news-archive/): Every article, interview, and press mention referencing Kevin Mitnick collected in one place, spanning decades of coverage.
- [Return Fire Archive](/projects/p000003/return-fire-archive/): Reviews, interviews, and retrospectives on *Return Fire*, the 1995 3DO game Alex Kasper produced and scored.

## Notes for automated access

- Every news and project entry has a stable `id` in its front matter (e.g. `n000121`, `p000008`) that never changes even if the URL slug does.
- `/id-map.json` is a flat, site-wide map of every content item's `id` to its current URL.
- Most project pages (not just TAP) collect every article that names them in an in-page table, oldest to newest — the project page itself is the fastest way to get everything published about a given topic. TAP Archive is the only one with a separate structured JSON index (above); for others, fetch the project page's HTML directly.
- Historical documents on this site (e.g. the TAP archive) are reproduced for research and archival purposes; see each entry's linked disclaimer for context.