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

partner and I valued his skill set, I hacked with him only when I had a
failsafe—when we both stood to lose if he tried to turn me in.

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Under these new conditions, Lewis and I had resumed our hacking
together and created a new version of our old friendship that had changed
forever.
Now, in our booth in the Peppermill, I thought Lewis’s eyes were going
to pop out of his head when he saw those chips. He sat down without
fanfare and started disassembling my phone, carefully arranging its parts on
the table and jotting the details on a notepad so he’d know where each
belonged when he was ready to put them all back together.
In less than five minutes, Lewis had the phone taken apart, down to the
circuit board, revealing the chip held in place by a ZIF (“zero insertion
force”) socket. I handed him one of the new chips. He slipped it into place
and began his careful reassembly. I didn’t want to say anything that would
throw him off, but I was growing antsy, wishing he’d work just a little faster
so I could find out if we had hit a goldmine or not.
As soon as it was completely together, I snatched the phone from him
and punched in the function code that Kumamoto-san had given me. For
this test, I programmed the ESN and changed the phone number to match
the ones for Lewis’s phone.
The phone turned itself off and rebooted. I could feel my every heartbeat
at the front of my scalp. All three of our heads were bent over the table,
focused on the phone’s little screen.
The display lit with the start-up screen. I punched in the function to
display the phone’s ESN. The numbers that appeared were the ones for the
ESN I had entered.
The three of us sent up a cheer, not caring that other customers were
turning to stare.
It worked! It really worked!
Back then, some phone companies had a number you could call to get
the accurate time. I punched in 213 853-1212 and put the phone down on
the table. All three of us heard it together, that recorded lady’s voice saying,
“At the tone the time will be…” My phone was now successfully making
outgoing calls as a clone of Lewis’s—and the cell phone company would
record these calls as having been made not by me but by Lewis from his
own phone.
I had social-engineered Novatel and gained huge power. I could make
phone calls that couldn’t be traced back to me.

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But had I just fallen off the wagon for this one hack… or was I back into
hacking all over again? At that moment, I could not have said for sure.
What I did know, though, was that I had achieved invisibility.

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