Later, Lewis and I, for kicks, wanted to listen in on some of the other
phones that Pacific Bell was tapping.
There was a hitch: for added security, the boxes wouldn’t start
monitoring
a line until a valid PIN, or “personal identification number,” was
entered. I had an idea: it was a long shot, with almost no chance of working,
but I tried it anyway.
First I had to be able to call in to the monitor box at the CO. So I’d call
the CO and tell the frame tech who answered the phone, “I
need you to drop
that line because we’re testing.” He’d do it, and Pacific Bell Security’s
connection would then be dropped from the intercept.
I dialed in to the box and began guessing the passwords that might have
been set up by the manufacturer: “1 2 3 4”… nothing. “1 2 3 4 5”…
nothing. All the way up to the last one I figured was worth trying: “1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8.”
Bingo! Incredibly, the people at Pacific Bell Security had never changed
the manufacturer’s default PIN on these boxes.
With that password, I now had a complete technique that would let me
listen in on any of Pacific Bell’s intercepts anywhere in California. If I
found out the Security Department had one of its boxes at the Kester CO,
say, or the Webster CO, I’d get a frame tech to drop the line Pacific Bell
was using to call the monitor box, and then I’d call in to the box myself and
enter the default PIN, which was the same on every box. Then Lewis and I
would listen in and try to figure out who was being intercepted.
We’d do this just for fun, just because we could, sometimes twice or
three times in a week. After we identified the target’s phone number, we’d
call Pacific Bell’s Customer Name and Location (CNL) Bureau,
give the
phone number, and get the name of the person being monitored. Once we
were told the phone was listed to the Honorable Somebody-or-Other. A
little research gave me the rest of it: the intercept was on the phone of a
Federal judge.
For Lewis and me, listening to wiretaps was a game, a lark. For Pacific Bell
Security investigators, it was part of the job. But one of the investigators,
Darrell Santos, was in for a surprise. He came in to work one morning, went
to have a listen to what had transpired on the intercepts he had placed on
my dad’s lines, and discovered that all of the Pacific Bell’s electronic
surveillance had stopped in its tracks. There were no audio intercepts;
everything was dead. Santos called
the Calabasas frame and asked, “Are
our boxes still working there?”
“Oh, no,” he was told. “Security from Los Angeles called and told us to
disconnect them.”
Santos told the technician, “We don’t do any electronic surveillance out
of Southern California: we do it all out of Northern California. So there’s no
such thing as Los Angeles Security.”
That night Santos flew from his home base in San Francisco to Los
Angeles and reattached all the surveillance boxes himself. To make sure
nobody could be conned into disconnecting them again, he hid the boxes in
the rafters above the racks of switching equipment.
Much later, in an interview for this book, Santos would recall, “This was
a real big deal for us because now it hit home, it was personal. Kevin was
listening to
our
calls, when we were in the business of trying to listen to
his
calls. Then he has our intercepts taken down. So it made us really change
how we spoke on the phone and the messages we left. And we had to create
some new ways to cover our tracks because we also had to protect the
integrity of what law enforcement was doing with us,
all of their court-
ordered stuff.”
Maybe it was just as well that I didn’t know at the time what headaches I
was causing them—otherwise I might not have been able to squeeze my big
head through a doorway.
And maybe I would have been flattered to know, back then, that
whenever anything like this happened at Pacific Bell, I immediately became
the prime suspect. According to Santos, Kevin
Poulsen had been number
one on their internal most wanted list. Once Poulsen was behind bars, the
revised list had a new name at the top: mine. The file they had on me going
all the way back to my juvenile days was as thick as a big-city phone
directory.
Santos said, “There were other hackers out there doing a lot of other
things, but my opinion was that Kevin was the one who everyone was
trying to emulate. I thought Kevin was the mouse and I was the cat, but
sometimes it was the other way around.”
He added, “There were many leads we’d
get from corporate security
guys in other companies saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this case, this guy’s
