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us!
You gotta get the computer out right away—
please!
”
He agrees but sounds really pissed.
My next call is to Lewis, with the same message: “We gotta go into
cleanup mode.” We agree we’ll each stash our notes and floppy disks in
places where no one will be able to find them.
Let the government try to prosecute: no evidence, no case.
I arrived at my mom’s place in Las Vegas with my nerves shot. I kept
obsessively playing over and over in my mind all the conversations they
might have intercepted.
What if they’d heard me discussing SAS with Lewis? What if they had
heard me social-engineering internal Pacific Bell departments? Just
imagining either of those possibilities was giving me heartburn. I was half
expecting the U.S. Marshals and my Probation Officer to show up at my
door and arrest me.
I needed to know when that intercept had been installed on my dad’s
line.
Maybe if I knew who had ordered the taps, I could find a way to
discover whether they had picked up anything I should worry about.
The phone companies had been getting so many phone phreaks and PIs
calling in lately that they had started requiring verification. So I called
Dispatch, the office at Pacific Bell that handed out assignments to the techs
in the field, and said, “I’ve got an arson situation here, I need to page some
other techs. Who’s on call tonight?”
The operator gave me four names and pager numbers. I paged each of
them to call the internal Pacific Bell number I had set up, then once again
reprogrammed the call forwarding to go to the number that my cell phone
was currently cloned to. When each tech responded to my page, I launched
into my “setting up a database” routine.
Why? Because I was asking them for very sensitive information, and
they weren’t going to give that out to just anybody. So my pretext was, “I’m
setting up a database of people on call to handle mission-critical problems.”
One by one, I’d first ask a series of innocuous questions—“May I get your
name, please?” “You work out of which Dispatch Center?” “Who’s your
manager?” Once they’d established a pattern of answering my questions,
I’d ask for what I really wanted: “What’s your UUID? And your tech
code?”
I got what I needed every time, as each tech rattled off his two pieces of
verification (UUID, or “universally unique identifier,” and tech code), his
manager’s name, and his callback number. A walk in the park.
With these credentials, I could now get back into the Line Assignment
Office, the department I next needed information from.
Once my credentials had been verified, my request went like this: “I
have an internal number here out of Calabasas—it’s one of ours. Can you
find out the CBR number of the person who placed the order?”
“CBR” is telco-speak for “can be reached.” In effect, I was asking for
the phone number where I could reach the person who’d issued the order to
set up the line—in this case, the line for the thousand-cycle tone on the box
tapping one of my dad’s phones.
The lady went off to do her research, then came back and told me, “The
order was placed by Pacific Bell Security; the contact name is Lilly
Creeks.” She gave me a phone number that began with the San Francisco
area code.
I was going to enjoy this part: social-engineering the phone company’s
Security Department.
Turning on the TV, I found a show with background conversation that I set
at low volume, to sound like the occasional voices of typical office
background noise. I needed to influence my target’s perception that I was in
a building with other people.
Then I dialed the number.
“Lilly Creeks,” she answered.
“Hi, Lilly,” I said. “This is Tom from the Calabasas frame. We have a
few of your boxes over here, and we need to disconnect them. We’re
moving in some heavy equipment, and they’re in the way.”
“You can’t disconnect our boxes,” she answered in a voice verging on a
screech.
“Listen, there’s no way around it, but I can hook them back up
tomorrow afternoon.”
“No,” she insisted. “We really need to keep those boxes connected.”
I gave an audible sigh that I hoped sounded exasperated and annoyed.
“We have a lot of equipment being swapped out today. I hope this is really
important,” I said. “But let me see what I can do.”
I muted my cell phone and waited. After listening to her breathe into the
handset for something like five minutes, I got back on the phone with her.
“How about this? You stay on the line, I’ll disconnect your boxes, we’ll
move the equipment into place, and then I’ll reconnect them for you. It’s the
best I can do—okay?”
She reluctantly agreed. I told her it would take a few minutes.
I muted the call again. Using another cell phone, I called the Calabasas
frame, explained to the guy who answered that I was with Pacific Bell
Security, and gave all three numbers and their associated office equipment.
He still had to look up the number in COSMOS to find out the frame
location, based on the “OE.” Once he found each number on the frame, he
was able to lift the jumper off for each line, which dropped the connection.
Ms. Creeks, sitting at her desk, would be able to tell when each
connection was dropped.
While waiting for the frame tech to come back on the line and confirm
that the jumpers had been pulled, I went to my fridge and got a Snapple to
enjoy while picturing Lilly anxiously sitting in her office with her telephone
to her ear.
Then came the part that the whole operation up to now had been just a
lead-in for. Back on the line with Lilly, I said, “I’m done here. Do you want
your boxes reconnected?”
She sounded annoyed. “Of course.”
“I’ll need the connection information for each line going into the three
boxes.” She probably thought I must be a little slow-witted if I didn’t even
know where the jumpers belonged that I had pulled just a few minutes
earlier, but the request seemed credible because she had seen the
connections drop: clearly she really was talking to the frame tech at the CO.
She gave me the information. I said, “Okay, I’ll be right back.”
I put the phone on mute again, then called back the tech in the Calabasas
CO and asked him to reconnect the cables to “our security boxes.”
When he was finished, I thanked him and got back on the other phone.
“Hey, Lilly,” I said, “I’ve hooked everything back up. Are they all three
working?”
She sounded relieved. “Everything is coming back up now. It all seems
to be working.”
“Fine. Just to double-check, what phone numbers should be connected
to these boxes? I’ll do a line verification to make sure everything is
connected properly.”
She gave me the numbers.
Shit! They weren’t wiretapping just one of my dad’s lines, they were
wiretapping
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