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

particular Hughes Market, so they kept dropping by and showing his photo
to the staff. When Poulsen came in one day, Eric said, a couple of the shelf
stackers recognized him. They tackled him and held him until the cops
arrived.
Lewis, who had a need to show how smart he was, pulled out his
Novatel PTR-825 cell phone and did a big spiel about how he’d “changed
the ESN on this phone.” So Eric boasted about having done the same with
his Oki 900, which wasn’t really such a big deal because by that time there
was already software available online for that. Then he talked about a ham
radio repeater on frequency 147.435, the one I thought of as the “animal
house.” Uh-oh, I wouldn’t have thought he’d know about that, and from
now on I’d have to be careful not to say anything over the repeater that I
wouldn’t want Eric to hear from me.
And then we got on to the major subject of interest: hacking into Pacific
Bell. Eric was obviously trying to establish that we should trust him
because he had access to every Pacific Bell system.
Okay, I had thought there were very few phreakers—hardly any—who
knew as much about Pacific Bell systems as Lewis and I did. Yet Eric
seemed to have a knowledge that was at our level. Very impressive.
This one floored me: he claimed Poulsen had broken into the office of
Terry Atchley, of Pacific Bell Security, and light-fingered the file on
himself… and the one on me. And he said Poulsen had made a copy of my
entire file that he had given to him as a gift.
“You have a copy of my file?”
“Yeah.”

---

Even though the file was supposedly lifted from Terry Atchley’s office
several years ago, I said, “Hey, man, I really wanna see a copy of it.”
“I’m not sure where it is. I’ll have to look for it.”
“Well, at least give me some idea of what’s in it. How much do they
know about what I was doing back then?”
He suddenly became noncommittal, talking around my question instead
of answering it. Either he had never had the file or he was holding out on
me for some reason. I was annoyed that he wouldn’t tell me anything about
what was in it. Yet I didn’t want to push too hard, especially at our first
meeting.
The conversation went on, but Eric always came back to asking us what
we had going—meaning what hacking we were doing. Uncool. Lewis and I
both gave him different variations of “You tell us some of what you know,
we’ll tell you some of what 
we
know.”
Now it was time for Lewis and me to shock our new wannabe
companion right out of his socks. Lewis was playing his role to the fullest.
Sounding arrogant as hell, he said, “Eric, we have a present for you.” He
took out a floppy disk, reached across the table, and in a typical De Payne
in-your-face gesture, shoved it into the drive of Eric’s laptop.
After a few moments of whirring, a display popped up on the screen: a
listing of all the protocols for SAS, items like a command such as “;ijbe”
that would tell the SAS unit to perform some function like “Report current
status.” These were hidden commands, buried within the SAS controller,
never known to the phone company test technicians or needed by them, but
granting far more control over SAS than even those techs had.
Eric understood enough about SAS to recognize that this list was
authentic and something he himself had never had access to.
He looked both shocked and angry that Lewis and I had been able to get
hold of something he didn’t have. In a lowered voice, he growled, “How the
fuck
did you get this?” I thought that was odd—why should he be angry?
Maybe it was really envy that he was feeling, annoyance that he had only
read the users’ manual while we had developer’s documents that revealed
many more secrets and powers.
Eric started paging through the document on-screen and could see that it
also had all the functional specifications and requirements. He saw it was a
rich source of information that would grant any phone phreaker powers he
could only dream of.

---

This was something like a month after he had first mentioned SAS to me
in a phone conversation. Even more perplexing, what we were showing him
wasn’t a photocopy but an electronic file. I could see the wheels turning: he
could not have had any idea of how to do what I had done—getting hold of
the developer’s design notes, and, no less, an electronic version of them,
which probably didn’t exist anywhere within PacBell.
He demanded again, “How… the… 
fuck
… did you get this?”
I told him what we had already said several times: “When you start
sharing stuff with us, we’ll start sharing stuff with you.” As I said that,
Lewis reached over, ejected the disk from the computer, and pocketed it.
Eric warned us, “The FBI knows about SAS because they know Poulsen
was using it. They’re watching it real closely. They probably have traps on
all the numbers.”
In a tone that was almost hostile, he said, “Stay away from it. You’ll get
caught if you use it.” If that was just a friendly warning, why so much
emotion?
At this point, Eric said he had to take a leak, got up, and headed for the
men’s room. It was standard operating procedure for any hacker worthy of
the name to possess all kinds of files and passwords on his computer that
could get him thrown into jail. If he went out somewhere carrying his
laptop, he would never let it out of his sight, not even when leaving the
table for a minute or two to hit the men’s. Yet here was Eric, casually
walking away and leaving his laptop not only sitting on the table but turned
on, like an invitation to check out what we could find while he was gone.
Lewis whipped out his frequency counter and waved it slowly back and
forth, searching for transmissions. Nothing. The computer was not radioing
our conversation to any team of flatfoots or Feds lurking nearby, ready to
pounce on us.
I leaned over the laptop and announced to Lewis, “Man, that guy really
knows his shit!” What a laugh—I only said it because I was sure there was
some kind of tiny recorder planted in it, recording every word. Otherwise
he would 
never
have left it on the table. Here was a guy so paranoid that for
weeks he wouldn’t give us his pager number, and now all of a sudden he
was trusting us with his laptop? No way.

---

I figured he probably had some confederate at another table, watching us
to make sure we didn’t just snatch the thing and run. Otherwise he wouldn’t
have dared leaving a computer with a ton of information on it that could
incriminate him under the control of a pair of guys he was only just meeting
for the first time.
When we were finished with dinner and starting to leave, Eric asked, “If
you’ve got a car, can you drop me off? It’s not very far.” Sure, I said, why
not?
He started out friendly, telling me about the time not long before when
he was tooling along Sunset Boulevard on his motorcycle and a car turned
left directly across his path. The impact sent him flying over the car; he hit
the ground so hard that his leg broke halfway between knee and ankle, with
the lower part bent backward at a ninety-degree angle. The doctors and
therapists worked on restoring his leg for five months, until finally Eric told
them to go ahead and amputate it. But the prosthesis was so good that after
physical therapy in rehab, he was able to walk without a noticeable limp.
The story was probably meant to put me in a sympathetic mood. Now he
shifted gears and said, “I’m angry about your getting into SAS. After four
weeks, you’ve got more information than I do about it.”
I used this to needle him: “We know a lot more than you think, Eric.”
But I was still being cautious, so I told him, “Lewis and I aren’t actively
hacking; we just want to trade information.”
As he left the car to go into a jazz club on Sunset Boulevard, I thought
to myself that this guy seemed to possess a keen intellect and a quick wit.
Despite my suspicions, I still believed Lewis and I might be able to trade
information with him at some point down the road.

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