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

ERIC WEISS
Private Investigator
Below those lines were a fake Nevada PI license number, a phony Vegas
address, and an office number that went to another live answering service,
in case someone decided to check up on me. The monthly thirty-dollar fee
was a cheap way to create believability. Which I was going to need.
With the cards in my wallet, I threw a couple of suits and some other
clothes and my toilet kit into a bag, boarded a plane for Sioux Falls, and,
once there, rented a car to drive to the capital city of Pierre (or “Peer,” as
they pronounce it there). The four-hour drive was mostly on autopilot due
west into the late-afternoon sun, along flat Interstate 90, with small towns
I’d never heard of scattered along the way. Much too rural for this city boy:
I was glad I was just passing through.
Here comes the “ballsy” part. The next morning, dressed in the suit I had
worn for my law-firm interview, I found my way to the offices of the State
Registrar for Vital Statistics, where I asked to speak with someone in
charge. Within minutes the Registrar herself walked up to the counter—
something I couldn’t quite picture happening in a state like New York or
Texas or Florida, where the top official would no doubt be too busy or feel
too self-important to meet with anyone lacking important connections.
I introduced myself and handed her my business card, explaining that I
was a private investigator from Las Vegas working on a case. My mind
flashed back to one of my favorite television shows, 
The Rockford Files
. I
smiled as she looked at my card because the quality was about the same as
the ones Rockford created using that business-card printer he kept in his car.

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In fact, the Registrar wasn’t just willing to see me, she was happy to
assist a private investigator in carrying out his research task, which I told
her was a confidential investigation into deaths.
“Which person?” she asked, wanting to be helpful. “We’ll look it up for
you.”
Umm. Not at all what I wanted.
“We’re looking for people who died from certain causes of death,” I
ventured. “So I need to look through all the records for the years of
interest.”
Though I was afraid the request sounded a bit strange, South Dakota
was a be-friendly-to-your-neighbor kind of place. She didn’t have any
reason to be suspicious, and I was ready to accept all the help she was
willing to give.
The very friendly Registrar asked me to come around the counter, and I
followed her to a separate, windowless room that held the old certificates on
microfiche. I emphasized that I had a significant amount of research to do
and that it might take me several days. She just smiled and said I might be
interrupted if a staff member needed to use the fiche, but otherwise it
shouldn’t be a problem. She had one of her assistants show me how to use
the microfiche and where to find the films for particular ranges of years. I
would be working in the microfiche room, unsupervised, with access to all
the birth and death records going as far back as the state had been keeping
them. I was looking for infants who had passed away between 1965 and
1975, at an age between one and three. Why would I want a birth year that
would make me so much younger than my actual age? Because I could pass
for that much younger, and if the Feds ever used age criteria when
searching recently issued driver’s licenses in a state where they thought I
might be living, they would—I hoped—skip right over me.
I was also looking for a white baby boy with an easily pronounced,
Anglo-sounding surname. Trying to pass for Indian, Latino, or black would
obviously not work unless I intended to have a good makeup artist follow
me around everywhere I went.
Some states were starting to cross-reference birth and death records,
probably in an effort to prevent illegal aliens and others from using a birth
certificate of a deceased person. When they received a request for a birth
certificate, they would first check to make certain no death certificate was

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on file for that person; if there was, they would stamp deceased, in big bold
letters, on the copy of the certified birth certificate that they sent out.
So I needed to find deceased infants that met all my other criteria