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

THIRTEEN

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The Wiretapper
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Ehoo?
E
ven paranoids sometimes have real enemies. One day I had a gut feeling
that someone was watching me—or rather, listening to my phone
conversations.
The idea had me really fretting. I was panicked about getting a call from
my Probation Officer, telling me to come in for one of those visits that
would mean I was about to be taken into custody again and shipped back to
Federal detention, maybe even put back in solitary confinement. Scary as
hell.
Our home phone service was served out of a PacBell central office in
Calabasas, which covered a small territory, so if there were any intercepts, I
figured I’d likely be the target. I called the CO and got a tech on the line.
“Hi,” I said. “This is Terry Atchley, in Security. I think we have some of our
equipment over there. We’re short on monitoring equipment, and we need
some of our boxes back for another case. Could you walk around the frame
and see if you have any of them?” The frame tech asked me what they
looked like. Hmm—I didn’t know. I stumbled a bit and said, “It depends on
the model that’s being used over there. It’s probably a small box with a
miniature printer attached that’s recording the digits dialed.”
He went to look. I was nervous as hell, pacing as I waited for him to
come back to the phone. I was praying he wouldn’t find anything.
Finally he came back on the line. “Yeah,” he said. My heart started
beating faster, adrenaline pumping through my veins.
“I found three of your boxes. They’re small gray boxes, but as far as I
could see, they don’t have printers,” the tech said.

---

Three boxes—probably one for each of the phone lines at the apartment
I was sharing with my dad. Fuck! This was not good.
“Okay,” I told him. “If we don’t still need them there, somebody’ll come
by and pick them up tomorrow. I need you to trace out the connections.”
“On which one?”
“Let’s try the first one.”
The tech asked me which side to trace. Another uh-oh—again I didn’t
know how to answer. He told me the box had two connections. “Let’s trace
out both and see where they go,” I said.
After several anxious minutes of waiting, I heard him come back on the
line. “I had to trace this thing across the frame,” he said. I recognized that
for what it was: an annoyed complaint that I had made him chase wires a
considerable distance through a complicated maze running along the main
distribution frame. He also told me, “On one side, I just hear a thousand-
cycle tone.” That was weird. “On the other, I get a dial tone.”
But I wouldn’t be able to understand how these boxes worked until I
knew what they were connected to. I asked him to disconnect the cables
from the frame and do an LV—a line verification—to find out what phone
numbers were connected to each side of the box. “Okay, give me a few
minutes,” he said.
Doing line verifications was a routine task. The tech would simply lift
each cable pair one at a time, clip his lineman’s handset to the pair, and dial
the code to determine each phone number.
The thousand-cycle tone didn’t make sense. Intriguing. I had no idea
what it meant but didn’t have time to dwell on the question. My heart was
racing, I was sweating with fear, knowing he was going to read me one of
my dad’s phone numbers.
He finally came back on the line and gave me the two phone numbers
connected to one of the boxes. Neither of them belonging to Dad.
I let out a silent sigh. I could finally breathe again. It was as if a ton of
bricks had been lifted off my chest.
But what about the other two boxes? The tech sounded just a bit
annoyed when I told him I needed the other two traced, as well. Still, he
wasn’t going to make trouble for himself by complaining out loud. Though
the wait this time was much longer, he finally came back and gave me the
numbers that were connected to the other two boxes. Again, none were for
any of my dad’s lines.

---

No one was checking up on me.
I could hardly wait for the next step: calling both numbers assigned to
each box.
First I tried one of the thousand-cycle numbers. It rang three times and then
answered with a 
beep-beep-beep
. I tried again. And again. No matter what
time I called, always the same thing. What could this be? Maybe it was
waiting for some type of code. Whatever the explanation, it was obvious to
me that it wasn’t the line being wiretapped.
I was going to enjoy exploring and finding out this number’s secret.
The other number connected to the first box was answered with just a
“Hello”—which had to be the person being intercepted. Just out of
curiosity, I called the Mechanized Loop Assignment Center to learn who
the unfortunate victim of the intercept was.
It wasn’t a Mr. or Mrs. Somebody; it was a company called Teltec
Investigations. I tried the lines on the second box, and then the third. All
three were for the same company, Teltec Investigations.
That evening over dinner I mentioned to my dad that I had checked to see if
our phone lines were being wiretapped. He rolled his eyes. I could imagine
what he was thinking: 
My son must be living in a James Bond fantasy world
to think anybody would bother wiretapping him. That’s the kind of stuff that
only happens in spy movies
.
I tried to convince him it was a serious possibility though there was no
need to worry. There really were wiretaps in the neighborhood, but they
were on some company called Teltec Investigations, not on us.
I smiled to let him know there was nothing to be concerned about. He
looked at me in surprise. “Teltec?!”
I nodded.
In another of those small-world coincidences, my dad knew about
Teltec, which, he explained, was a PI firm—a company employing private
investigators and skip tracers who tracked down the assets of business