Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker

Poulsen!
” the guard screamed, much louder than necessary.
When Kevin came on the line, I said, “Kevin, act like you’re talking to
someone in R and D.”
“Yeah,” he said in a completely flat tone.
“This is Kevin,” I said. We had never met, but I knew him by reputation
and figured he’d know about me the same way. And I figured he’d know
there wasn’t any other Kevin who could be calling him in prison!
I told him, “Be at the Public Defender’s phone at exactly one o’clock.
Pick up the phone, but keep flashing the switch hook every fifteen seconds
until I connect.” (Since the ringer was turned all the way down, he wouldn’t
know the exact moment when I would be calling in.) “Now, give me your
home address so Agee hears it. I told him I was shipping your property
there.” After all the trouble Agee had caused me, it was sweet to have
tricked him into getting Poulsen on the line.
At exactly one o’clock, I called the Public Defender’s phone in Six
South. Because Poulsen hadn’t said much in the first call and I wasn’t
familiar with his voice, I wanted to be sure I was really talking to him when
I called back, so I tested him. “In C, give me a syntax for incrementing a
variable.”
He easily gave the correct answer, and we chatted at leisure, free from
any concerns about Federal agents listening to our conversation. I was
amused to think that as I was evading the Feds, I was also hacking into a
prison to speak to an inmate charged with espionage.

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On January 27, a lucky break provided Shimmy and his team with the first
strand of the net they would weave in the hope of closing in on me. The
Well had an automated “disk hog” program that would periodically send
emails to users who were using a lot of disk space. One of these messages
went to Bruce Koball, who had a role in staging an annual public-policy
event called the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference (CFP).
The email message noted that the conference’s account was taking up
more than 150 megabytes on the Well’s servers. Koball checked the account
and discovered that none of the files belonged to CFP. Looking at files that
contained emails, he saw that all were addressed to [e-mail].
That night Koball looked at his next-day edition of the 
New York Times
and saw a page-one story in the Business section by John Markoff, under
the headline “Taking a Computer Crime to Heart.” The story included this:
It was as if the thieves, to prove their prowess, had burglarized the
locksmith. Which was why Tsutomu Shimomura, the keeper of the
keys in this case, was taking the break-in as a personal affront—and
why he considers solving the crime a matter of honor.
Mr. Shimomura, one of the country’s most skilled computer
security experts, was the person who prompted a Government
computer agency to issue a chilling warning on Monday. Unknown
intruders, the agency warned, had used a sophisticated break-in
technique to steal files from Mr. Shimomura’s own well-guarded
computer in his home near San Diego.
The next day, Koball phoned Markoff, who put him in touch with
Shimmy. It didn’t take long to confirm that most of the mysterious files
stored in the CFP account were from the Christmas Day attack on
Shimmy’s computers. This was his first big break. Now he had a lead to
follow.
Around this same time, my cousin Mark Mitnick, whom I had become close
to, was going to be vacationing at Hilton Head, South Carolina, with his
father. Mark invited me to join them.
Mark was running a company in Sacramento called Ad Works, and had
offered to help me get set up on the East Coast using the same business
model. He provided businesses like major supermarkets with free cash-

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register tape, which was printed on the back with ads; Mark earned his
money by finding companies that would pay to have their ads on the back
of the tape. I needed a steady income, and the idea of having my cousin
Mark help me get started in my own business sounded very attractive, even
though it wasn’t computer-related.
We met in Raleigh and drove through several cities on our way to Hilton
Head so he could make a number of sales calls. He invited me along to
teach me the business. I liked the idea of always being on the move because
it would make me harder to find.
I would have enjoyed our trip more if it hadn’t been for an item that
turned up during one of my routine online checks for any indication that the
Feds were getting closer to me. There were stories all over the media about
a press release just issued by the U.S. Department of Justice. The title of
one story was, “U.S. Hunts Master Computer Cracker.” In part, it read:
WASHINGTON, DC, U.S.A., 1995 JAN 26 (NB)—The U.S. Marshals
Service is on the trail of a computer hacker who disappeared after
being convicted of one electronic crime and charged with another.
Authorities say they are trying to locate Kevin David Mitnick, 31,
originally from Sepulveda, California. Deputy U.S. Marshal Kathleen
Cunningham told Newsbytes the Marshals Service had a probation
violation warrant for Mitnick since November 1992, and almost caught
up with him in Seattle last October. Cunningham said Mitnick is a ham
radio enthusiast and is believed to use a scanner to keep track of police
in the area where he is hiding. “[Local police] didn’t use radio security
so as soon as his address was mentioned he was out of there. He just
left everything.” Mitnick is considered an expert at gaining control of
computers to monitor or use communications systems and knows how
to manufacture false identities using computers.
This hit me like a ton of bricks. I was surprised, shocked, and in near
panic. The Feds and the media had turned a supervised release violation
into a global manhunt. I couldn’t leave the country even if I’d wanted to—I
suspected that the Feds must have already asked Interpol to issue a “Red
Notice” launching a global watch for me. And my only passport, which I
had stashed away, unused, was in the Mitnick name.

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When Mark and his dad returned to the hotel from playing golf, I
showed them the news story. Both looked shocked. I was worried I had
done the wrong thing in showing it to them, afraid they would tell me I had
to leave because my presence could put them at risk. Fortunately, they never
mentioned the subject but my paranoia had been driven up a few notches.
The heat was being turned up on finding me. Did the Feds suspect I was the
one who had hacked Shimmy?
On January 29, Super Bowl Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers were
playing the San Diego Chargers. Mark and his dad were excited about
watching the game, but I couldn’t have cared less. I had a lot on my mind
and just wanted to relax. Rather than going back to the room for some more
online activities, I decided to take a walk on the beach to get a breath of
fresh air.
I decided to give Jon Littman a call. “I’m walking on the beach here and
relaxing,” I told him.
“On the beach? Are you really on the beach?”
“Yeah, I’ll let you go. I’m sure you’re getting ready to watch the game.”
Littman told me the game hadn’t started yet. He asked, “What do the
waves look like?”
Why would he ask me such a stupid question? I wasn’t going to tell him
the surf conditions and give him a clue to my current location.
I said, “I can’t tell you, but you can listen to them,” and held the cell
phone up in the air.
I asked if he’d heard about the U.S. Marshals’ UPI press release asking
for the public’s help in finding me. I complained that there was a lot of
bullshit in the article, including the same old Markoff myth that I had
hacked NORAD.
Littman asked if I’d read Markoff’s story of the previous day. When I
said I hadn’t, he read it to me over the phone, I suppose listening to gauge
my reaction. I pointed out that the U.S. Marshals’ plea for help had been
published the day after Markoff broke the story about Shimmy’s Christmas
Day attack. It didn’t feel like a coincidence to me. “It felt like part of a
planned strategy to leverage the public’s fears about cyberspace against
me,” I told him.
“Markoff has been asking questions about you,” Littman said. “And he
thinks he knows where you’re hiding.” I pressed him to tell me more, but he

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wouldn’t budge. I changed tactics and asked him to take his own guess
about where I might be.
“Are you living somewhere in the Midwest?”
Happily, he was way off. Yet it appeared that Markoff had some
information that was important to me, and I needed to think about finding
out how much he knew.
A few days later, it occurred to me that if the Feds were trying that hard to
track me down, they might have tapped my grandmother’s phone in Las
Vegas. That was what I would’ve done.
Centel’s Line Assignment Group had information about every phone
line in Las Vegas. I knew the number off the top of my head. Posing as a
technician in the field, I asked one of the clerks to pull up my
grandmother’s telephone number on her computer. I asked her to read me
the “cabling information,” and as I’d suspected, there was “special
equipment” recently connected to her line.
The clerk said the order had been placed a few days earlier by a Centel
security agent named Sal Luca. I felt like turning the tables on Luca by
tapping 
his
line, but I knew it wouldn’t yield any valuable information. My
next thought was to feed my pursuers disinformation by calling my
grandmother with some cock-and-bull story that I was in the Great White
North. But I didn’t want to put her under any more stress than she was
already dealing with.
While I was thinking over my next move, I had to continue building my
new identity. On February 2, I had an appointment to take the driving test to
upgrade my learner’s permit to a driver’s license under my G. Thomas Case
identity. To do that, though, I would need to find a car that didn’t have any
connection to any of my past names.
I hailed a cab. “Hey, you wanna make an easy hundred bucks?” I asked
the driver. He responded with a grin that revealed his missing teeth and
answered with something that sounded like “Teek, teekuh” followed by
“Sure, okay.” The foreign words turned out to be Hindi for more or less the
same thing. (Damn, I should have offered him fifty instead!) We agreed that
he would pick me up the next day, and he gave me his pager number.
At the DMV the following day, when the examiner realized I was going
to take the test in a cab, he tossed me a suspicious look. We got in and I put

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down the flag, telling him, “I’m going to have to charge you for the ride.”
The expression on his face was priceless. When he saw I was laughing, he
laughed, too, and we got off to a great start.

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