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

now
.
I had to get a new identity 
now
.
I had to get the hell out of my apartment 
now!
I’d never even had a chance to attend one of those all-residents’ parties
or managed to meet a cute girl.
Finding a job had of course been one of my first priorities. I’d mailed
out job résumés and cover letters as Michael Stanfill to more than twenty
places—most of the potential employers in the area. Now, with my phone
disconnected, none of these prospective employers would be able to reach
me! Worse, it would be too risky to try the same places again under a
different name. This put me at an extreme disadvantage.
I’d signed a six-month lease, so I told the round-faced lady in the rental
office, “I really like this place, but I’ve had a family medical emergency and
have to leave.”
She said, “If it’s an emergency, the company will let you out of the
lease. But they aren’t going to refund you anything on this month’s rent.” I

---

felt like saying, “Forget the refund, consider it a payoff, and if the Feds
show up asking questions, I was never here.”
The next day, I took a new place across town at the Friendship Inn to live in
while I searched for a new apartment. Even with my relatively few
possessions, it took me several frustrating, nerve-racking trips in my
compact rental car to move everything to my new temporary digs. The
pressure of having to find a new job and build a new identity was weighing
on me.
Little did I know that I had bigger things to worry about. I couldn’t
begin to imagine how the net was beginning to close around me.
After settling in at the Friendship Inn, using my Portland State University
file, I chose another temporary name: Glenn Thomas Case. Since he, like
Stanfill, was a living person and so riskier to borrow an identity from, I
decided to go by “G. Thomas Case” to change things up a bit.
Three days later, the certified birth certificate I had requested arrived in
my newly rented mailbox. I went to the DMV and walked out with my new
North Carolina learner’s permit, but I still had a lot of work ahead of me to
secure the other forms of ID I would need.
The day after getting my learner’s permit, I found a studio apartment in
a complex called the Players Club, which was suitable but nowhere near as
appealing as my previous place. It was small but cozy; I didn’t have the
luxury of being picky. The rent was $510 a month, meaning I had six
months before my money would run out. Provided I didn’t have too much
trouble finding a job, it was an acceptable risk.
Around the same time, the newspapers were carrying new stories about
hacker Kevin Poulsen. He had been transferred from custody in Northern
California and was being held in a place all too familiar to me: the
Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. He was being charged with
hacking offenses and gathering national defense information, an espionage-
related offense.
I was determined to talk to him—an ambition in keeping with my
lifelong penchant for scheming to accomplish the impossible. I liked
nothing better than to set myself a challenge that I didn’t think could be
done, then see if I could do it.

---

Visiting Poulsen was obviously out of the question. For me, the
Metropolitan Detention Center was like the Hotel California in the old
Eagles song: I could check out anytime I wanted, but I could never leave.
My conversations with him would have to be by phone. But inmates
couldn’t receive calls, and besides, all inmate calls are monitored or
recorded. Given the charges Poulsen was facing, the prison staff had likely
flagged him as high risk and were keeping him closely monitored.