When Solomon made his first appearance online, a splash was caused that reverberated around the world. On the 23rd of July 1997, a hacker broke into the computer systems of MI6, the British governments top national security agency, and rooted through top secret files in the system for five hours before being discovered and shut out. Days later, over 4000 pages of logs of the files that were accessed and explored were mailed to the offices of the BBC from the sender I AM SOLOMON. After the story broke, the vulnerability of the world's most sensitive information that Solomon had revealed made him a celebrity sensation in the burgeoning hacking community and public enemy number one to the national security complex. In the days after the story broke, current and former national security officials made hourly appearances on all major news networks castigating Solomon as an irresponsible child who had no regard for the dangers he was exposing the world to by treating information used to protect people as if it was his own personal plaything. The coordinated propaganda campaign against Solomon, orchestrated and carried out by government insiders, served only to enhance Solomon's notoriety and his celebrity as a fearless crusader for truth. Following the release of the MI6 logs, Solomon disappeared from the cyber sphere for an extended period of time, a smart move, his supporters thought, given the bull's-eye that the world's governments had put on his back. He surfaced again in 1999, after an earthquake in Bogota, Colombia that killed 450 people and injured thousands. A website appeared shortly after the tragedy, Solomon.com, where he posted e-mails from the national meteorological center warning the mayor of Bogota about troubling seismic activity that had been detected, e-mails that the mayor chose not to act on out of fear that investment in the city would be curtailed if the prospect of an imminent earthquake was out there in the public domain. The mayor's particular concern was regarding an investment by The Kleinmann Group, a US capital consortium, to build a hotel and leisure complex that would be the flagship project of the city's economic boom that he'd promised to bring about during his election campaign. The e-mails published on Solomon.com revealed not only the mayor's dangerous cover up of the possibility of an earthquake but also the bribes and kickbacks that the mayor and members of his cabinet had taken from The Kleinmann Group in exchange for fast tracking the project. And it wasn't only The Kleinmann Group, Solomon exposed a vast network of the corruption at the center of which was the mayor. The revelations, which were verified and covered by the news media, produced mass protests in the city which forced the mayor to resign and flee to Venezuela to avoid prosecution.

Unlike the release of MI6 logs, the release of the Bogota e-mails didn't cause any consternation, in fact international governments that praised the protests and the resulting political change were placed in the uncomfortable position of having to grudgingly admit that none of it would have been possible without Solomon shining a light on the corruption in Bogota. In the wake of the positive response to the Bogota leaks, Solomon started consistently posting stolen information on his website that exposed untoward behavior on the part of the rich and powerful without the political blowback that he'd gotten from leaking national security information. This strategic shift in Solomon's approach to leaking was the result of the rooster advising the owl that if Solomon wanted the information that he disseminated to have the desired effect then he needed to avoid leaking irresponsibly so as not to have what he was trying to accomplish being undermined by smear campaigns against him. Following the Bogota leak, there was a leak about a Belgian pharmaceutical company using a clinic in Congo to test drugs on poor people whom they were paying 5 Euros a day, that was followed by a leak about an oil company using pipes made from substandard steel to construct an underwater pipeline which subsequently burst, and that was followed by the leaking of texts from a prominent CEO's cell phone that led to the breaking up of an underage sex trafficking ring. At this point opinions about Solomon were universally positive, and the owl, which had been so disgusted by the sight of religious extremists burning the Library of Alexandria, was delighting in seeing some of the worst of humanity having a spotlight shone on them.