In the spring of 2004, Mark Zuckerberg used data from his successful new web site, TheFacebook.com, to hack into the email accounts of two Harvard Crimson journalists.

This is the story of how, in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg hacked into the email accounts of two Harvard Crimson reporters using data obtained from TheFacebook.com's logs. The details are drawn from a broader investigation of the origins of Facebook, the sourcing of which is described here.

Facebook CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg now runs a site that 400 million people visit each month.

But back in May 2004, he was a 19-year-old finishing up his sophomore year at Harvard.

He was also the acclaimed founder and creator of an increasingly popular Web site called TheFacebook.com, which had launched in February 2004.

As we've reported in detail in a separate story, the launch of TheFacebook.com was not without controversy. Just six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Mark of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.

After Mark launched TheFacebook.com, Cameron, Tyler and Divya hired a series of developers to build HarvardConnection -- the site Mark Zuckerberg had told them he would build but did not. By mid-May, the trio had a site ready for launch. By then the site's name had changed from HarvardConnection to ConnectU.

Sometime during the 14 days leading up to May 28 -- the editors at Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, received an email in the their "tips" inbox from Cameron Winklevoss, one of the founders of ConnectU.

This email presented the argument Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divvya Narenda had already brought to Harvard's Administration Board and to Mark Zuckerberg -- that TheFacebook.com was the product of Mark Zuckerberg's fraud against the ConnectU team.

Since the Winklevoss brothers were best known at Harvard for being exceptional rowers, the story was assigned to Crimson sports writer Tim McGinn. After a phone call, Tim hosted Tyler, Cameron, and Divya in his office at the Crimson. The four of them went over emails between Cameron and Mark.

After the ConnectU team left, the Crimson invited Mark into its offices to defend himself.

When Mark arrived at the Crimson, he asked Tim and Elisabeth Theodore, an editor helping with the story, to sign a non-disclosure agreement so that he could show them the work he'd done on HarvardConnection. Per Crimson policy, Tim and Elisabeth refused to sign the NDA.

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Mark lingered around the office, evidently hoping they would change their mind. Finally, Mark agreed to forgo the NDA.

On a Crimson computer, Mark brought up what he described as the work he did on HarvardConnection. He gave Tim and Elisabeth a guided tour of the site. Mark's goal seemed to have been to show Tim and Elizabeth, the Crimson reporter and editor, that, other than the ways in which social networks are all the same, there were no features or designs in the work he did on HarvardConnection.com that ended up in theFacebook.com.

Mark's demonstration was successful: After he left, the Crimson decided not to run a story. Tim emailed Tyler, Cameron, and Divya to tell them that the story would not run. He contacted Mark to say the the same thing.

But then, perhaps a day or so later, the Winklevoss brothers reached out to Tim McGinn again, this time to tell him that another Harvard rower -- one named John Thomson -- had told them that Mark had stolen something for TheFacebook from him, too. They told Tim that John's claim was that Mark Zuckerberg stole from him the idea for a TheFacebook feature called "Visualize Your Buddy."

With a new accusation at hand, the Crimson decided to re-open its investigation. Tim McGinn called Mark and told him about about John's claim and gave him a chance to deny it. Mark denied the claim and got very upset -- apparently because he felt he had been promised there would be no story.