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

part of Los Angeles. He had moved 
again
.
Hanging up, I had a smile on my face. Eric would know a hang-up had
to be me. Probably before he had finished unpacking, I had already found
out he had moved.
PacBell’s line-assignment center would be the place to get Eric’s new
address.
It was 2270 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which turned out to be in a
pricey neighborhood about a mile north of Hollywood Boulevard, in the
Hollywood Hills, halfway up toward Mulholland Drive.
His fourth address in the several months I had known him. The reason
wasn’t hard to figure: the Bureau was trying to protect him. Each time I
found his new address, the Feds would move him. I had now found his
address three times, and they had moved him each time.
You would think they might have figured out by then that his location
was a secret they were not going to be able to keep from me.
In front of a computer in a safe location hacking by night, in front of a
computer “investigating” for Teltec by day. The Teltec work mostly
involved projects like figuring out where the husband in a divorce case was
hiding his assets, helping an attorney decide whether or not to file a lawsuit
by finding out whether the potential defendant had enough of a bankroll to
make it worthwhile, and tracking down deadbeats. A few cases were
gratifying, like locating a parent who had abducted his or her own child and
fled to Canada, Europe, or wherever; the satisfaction I got from succeeding
in those cases was enormous and left me feeling I was doing a small bit of
good in the world.
But doing good deeds for society wasn’t going to earn me any Brownie
points with law enforcement. I figured out how to set up an early-warning
system to sound an alarm if the Feds were hanging around waiting to follow
me when I left work. I bought a RadioShack scanner that had the cellular
band unblocked (the FCC had started cracking down on scanner
manufacturers to prevent the interception of cell phone traffic). I also

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bought a device called a “digital-data interpreter,” or DDI—a special box
that could decode the signaling information on the cellular network. The
scanner signals fed into the DDI, which was connected to my computer.
A cell phone registers with the nearest cell tower and establishes
communications with it, so that when a call comes in for you, the system
knows which cell tower to relay the call to on its way to your handset.
Without this arrangement, the cell phone company would have no way of
getting a call routed to you. I programmed the scanner to monitor the
frequency of the cell tower nearest to Teltec, so it would pick up
information from the tower identifying the phone number of every cell
phone in or even just passing through the area.
My scanner fed this constant flow of data to the DDI, which converted
the information into separate pieces, like this:
618-1000 (213) Registration
610-2902 (714) Paging
400-8172 (818) Paging
701-1223 (310) Registration
Each line shows the status of a cell phone currently in the area served by
this cell site; the first set of digits on the line is the phone number of one
cell phone. “Paging” signifies that the site is receiving a call for that cell
phone and is signaling the phone to establish a connection. “Registration”
indicates that the phone is in the area of this cell tower and ready to make or
receive calls.
I configured the DDI software package on my computer to play an alarm
tone if the DDI detected any phone number that I programmed into the
software: the cell phone numbers of all the FBI agents I had identified as
being in communication with Eric. The software continually scanned the
phone numbers being fed to it in the chain of cell site, to scanner, to DDI, to
computer. If any of the agents’ cell phones showed up in the Teltec area, my
setup would sound the alert.
I had created a trap for the FBI, putting me one step ahead. If the Feds
came looking for me, I’d be forewarned.

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