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

and
had been born in a 
different state
. In addition, being super-cautious about
this, I had my eye on the future, anticipating that surrounding states might
at some point start reporting deaths to each other if the deceased was born
in a neighboring state. This could be a major problem—if, for example, I
applied for a passport in the future under my new identity. When verifying a
passport application, the Department of State checks the validity of the
applicant’s birth certificate, and could uncover the fraud if a cross-
referencing program were developed in the future. Because I had to avoid
such risks, I would only use identities of infants who were born several
states away.
I spent an entire week searching with the microfiche. When I found a
potential candidate, I would hit the Copy button, and a printer would come
to life and churn out a copy of the death certificate. Why did I bother
getting as many as I could find? Just for backup, in case I ever found myself
needing to change my identity again.
Everyone else in the office was just as warm and friendly as the
Registrar. One day, a clerk came up to me and said, “I have a relative in Las
Vegas I’ve lost track of. You’re a private investigator, so I wondered if
maybe you could help me find him.”
She gave me as many details as she had. That night, in my hotel room, I
ran a people search using an information-broker database service to find her
relative’s address, and then called line assignment at the local phone
company to obtain the unlisted phone number. No big deal. I felt good
about helping this lady because everybody had been so kind and helpful to
me. I felt I was just repaying them for the favor.
When I handed her the information the following morning, she was so
ecstatic that she rewarded me with a big hug, making far more of a fuss
over me than I felt I deserved for so little effort. From that moment on, her
fellow clerks became even friendlier, inviting me to share their doughnuts
and telling me anecdotes about their lives.
Each day as I worked, the nearby printers would be drumming away,
printing out certificates that people had requested. The din was annoying.
On my third day, getting up to stretch my legs after several hours of sitting,
I walked by the printers to take a closer look, and I noticed a pile of boxes

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sitting by them. When I saw what was in the boxes, my jaw dropped:
hundreds of blank birth certificates. I felt as if I had just stumbled on a
pirate’s treasure chest as I watched the certificates roll out of the printer.
And yet another treasure: the device for embossing the certificates with
the official state seal of South Dakota was kept outside the microfiche
room, sitting on a long wooden table. Each clerk would just walk up to the
table and emboss a certificate before sending it out.
The next morning the weather turned bitter, with snow flurries and
freezing temperatures. Luckily I had thought to bring along a heavy jacket
that I put on before going to the State Registrar. I worked through the
morning, waiting for the lunch hour. When most of the staff was either out
of the office or busy eating and chatting, I draped the jacket over my arm
and strolled to the restroom, nonchalantly scoping out where all of the
remaining employees were and how distracted or attentive they seemed to
be. On my way back to the microfiche room, I walked by the table where
the embosser was kept. In a single smooth gesture, without slowing down, I
grabbed it, holding it so it was hidden under my jacket, and continued back
to the fiche room. Once inside, I glanced out the door: no one was paying
any attention.
With the embosser now resting on a table next to a stack of blank birth
certificates, I began to emboss the state seal onto them, trying to work
quickly but quietly. I was struggling to hold my fear in check. If anyone
were to walk in and see what I was doing, I knew I would probably be
arrested and carted away.
Within about five minutes, I had a stack of some fifty embossed blank
certificates. I headed back to the restroom, on the way returning the
embosser to the exact position it had been in before I “borrowed” it.
Mission accomplished. I had gotten away with a dangerous task.
At the end of the day, I stuck the embossed certificates into my notebook
and walked out the door.
By the close of the workweek, I had the information I needed for
numerous identities. Later, I would only need to write the Bureau of Vital
Statistics in the state where the child was born and request a certified copy
of the deceased’s birth certificate. With it, I would become the new me. I
also had fifty blank birth certificates, each neatly embossed with the South
Dakota state seal. (Several years later, when the Feds were returning
property that had been seized from me, they accidentally gave back the

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embossed South Dakota birth certificates as well. Alex Kasperavicius, who
was picking the stuff up for me, thoughtfully pointed out that they probably
didn’t really want to do that.)
The State Registrar employees were sorry to see me go: I had made such
a good impression that a couple of the ladies even hugged me as I said
good-bye.
That weekend I drove back to Sioux Falls and treated myself to my very
first skiing lesson. It was glorious. I can still hear the instructor shouting at
me, “Snowplow! Snowplow!” I enjoyed the sport so much that I soon took
it up as one of my regular weekend activities. There aren’t many big cities
in the United States like Denver, with ski slopes within such easy driving
distance.
Not many parents get Social Security cards for their infants. But it’s
suspicious for a guy in his twenties to walk into a Social Security office, ask
to be issued a card, and say that he has never had one before. So I had my
fingers crossed that some of the names I had dug out of the South Dakota
files were for deceased tykes whose parents had obtained Social Security
numbers for them. As soon as I was back in my new apartment in Denver, I
called my buddy Ann at the Social Security Administration and had her
check a few of the names with their associated dates of birth to see if a
Social had already been issued. The third name, Brian Merrill, was a hit:
baby Brian had had a Social Security number. Fantastic. I had found my
permanent identity!
There was one more thing I needed to do. I had uncovered a lot of
information about the FBI’s operation, yet the key to unlocking the central
puzzle had eluded me: who 
was
the guy I knew as “Eric Heinz”? What was
his real name?
I’m not even vaguely in his category, but just as Sherlock Holmes’s
work was about solving puzzles as much as it was about catching criminals
and miscreants, my hacking, too, was always concerned in some way with
unraveling mysteries and meeting challenges.
Finally I thought of an avenue I had never explored. Eric had
encyclopedic knowledge about the Poulsen case. He claimed to have

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accompanied Kevin Poulsen on several PacBell break-ins and boasted that
the two of them had found SAS together.
Hours and hours online, scouring databases like Westlaw and
LexisNexis for newspaper and magazine articles that made any mention of
Eric, had yielded nothing. If he had really done the things with Poulsen that
he said he had, maybe I could work backward by searching for the names of
Poulsen’s other known cohorts.
Eureka! In no time at all, I found an article on LexisNexis that named
two Poulsen codefendants, Robert Gilligan and Mark Lottor. Maybe one of
these
guys was the phony Eric Heinz. I got on the phone immediately,
hiding my excitement as I called the law enforcement telephone number at
the California DMV and ran both codefendants’ driver’s licenses.
Dead end. One guy was too short to be Eric, the other too heavy.
I kept at it. And then one day, on Westlaw, I found an article that had
just been published. A small newspaper, the