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

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L
ITTLE
, B
ROWN AND
C
OMPANY
New York Boston London

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Begin Reading
Table of Contents
Photo Inserts
Copyright Page

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For my mother and grandmother
—
K.D.M
.
For Arynne, Victoria, and David,
Sheldon, Vincent, and Elena Rose
and especially for Charlotte
—
W.L.S
.

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FOREWORD
I
met Kevin Mitnick for the first time in 2001, during the filming of a
Discovery Channel documentary called 
The History of Hacking
, and we
continued the contact. Two years later, I flew to Pittsburgh to introduce him
for a talk he was giving at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was
dumbfounded to hear his hacking history. He broke into corporate
computers but didn’t destroy files, and he didn’t use or sell credit card
numbers he had access to. He took software but never sold any of it. He was
hacking just for the fun of it, just for the challenge.
In his speech, Kevin spelled out in detail the incredible story of how he
had cracked the case of the FBI operation against him. Kevin penetrated the
whole operation, discovering that a new hacker “friend” was really an FBI
snitch, learning the names and home addresses of the entire FBI team
working his case, even listening in on the phone calls and voicemails of
people trying to gather evidence against him. An alarm system he had set
up alerted him when the FBI was preparing to raid him.
When the producers of the TV show 
Screen Savers
invited Kevin and
me to host an episode, they asked me to demonstrate a new electronic
device that was just then coming onto the consumer market: the GPS. I was
supposed to drive around while they tracked my car. On the air, they
displayed a map of the seemingly random route I had driven. It spelled out a
message: