Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (56 page)

At the time of Markoff’s original July 4 story, I was wanted only for violation of my supervised release, yet the story left readers with the impression that I was a supervillain, a threat to every American. His account of my arrest now ignited a fire under the rest of the media. The item was picked up on
Dateline, Good Morning America
, and God only knows how many other major shows. My capture was all over the news for three days straight.

Typical of the tone of the coverage was a piece published in the February 27, 1995, issue of
Time
. The subhead began:

AMERICA’S MOST WANTED HACKER HAS BEEN ARRESTED

The news from my court-appointed attorney in Raleigh wasn’t good. I was indicted on twenty-three counts of access device fraud. Of these, twenty-one were related to calls made when my phone was cloned to someone else’s number. The other two counts were for possessing information, specifically the mobile phone number and electronic serial number pairs that could be used for cloning. The maximum sentence was twenty years for each free phone call.
Twenty years for each call!
I was facing a worst-case scenario of 460 years.

It did look bad for me—460 years was no walk in the park. I didn’t relish the idea of being locked away in prison for the rest of my life, unable to live a happy and productive life, and especially not being able to spend quality time with my mom and grandmother. They had me, hands down, for cloning cell phone numbers (the ESN’s were considered unauthorized access devices under Federal law). It was also true that I’d violated the terms of my 1989 supervised release by hacking into the voicemail of Pacific Bell Security Investigator Darrell Santos to gain information on the Teltec case, and also by associating with “computer hackers.” But 460 years for these “evil” crimes? Were there no war criminals left?

Of course, the Feds had also found Netcom’s customer database that contained more than 20,000 credit card numbers on my computer, but I had never attempted to use any of them; no prosecutor would ever be able to make a case against me on that score. I have to admit, I had liked the idea that I
could
use a different credit card every day for the rest of my life without ever running out. But I’d never had any intention of running up charges on them, and never did. That would be wrong. My trophy was a copy of Netcom’s customer database. Why is that so hard to understand? Hackers and gamers get it instinctively. Anyone who loves to play chess knows that it’s enough to defeat your opponent. You don’t have to loot his kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile.

It always seemed strange to me that my captors had such trouble grasping the deep satisfaction that could be derived from a game of skill. Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe my motives seemed incomprehensible to them because they themselves would have found the temptation of all those credit cards impossible to resist.

Even Markoff, in his
New York Times
article, admitted that I was clearly not interested in the prospect of financial gain. The scale of what I’d passed up was brought home to readers by Kent Walker’s assertion that I “allegedly had access to corporate trade secrets worth billions of dollars.” But since I was never going to use or sell that information, what it was worth didn’t matter to me. So what was the nature of my crime? That I’d “allegedly had access”?

Now that I’d finally been caught, prosecutors in several Federal jurisdictions were frantically compiling long wish lists of counts and accusations against me, but I still had reason for hope. Despite the evidence, the government’s case was not airtight. There were legal conflicts that had to be resolved first. Shimmy, for instance, had been secretly working as a de facto government agent, and was intercepting my communications without a warrant, which smacked of gross government misconduct. My attorney had also filed a motion claiming that the government’s search warrant was flawed. If the court ruled in my favor, all the evidence seized in North Carolina would be inadmissible, not only in Raleigh but everywhere else.

To John Bowler, the young, up-and-coming Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to my case, this must have seemed like a golden opportunity. If
he could get convictions on all counts and convince the judge to slap me with a massive punitive sentence, the media attention alone would be enough to launch his career. But the reality was that Federal sentencing guidelines would ordinarily require the judge to base my sentence on the minimal losses to the cell phone companies when I made those free phone calls.

After my first court appearance, when I was transported to the Johnston County Jail in Smithfield, North Carolina, the U.S. Marshals ordered my jailers to put me in the one place I feared most: “the hole.”

I couldn’t believe it was happening. Shuffling toward that door in leg irons and shackles, I resisted every step. Time itself seemed to slow down. I knew then that the main thing that had kept me on the run for the past three years was my fear of this place. I didn’t think I could take being in there again. Now here the guards were, leading me right back into my nightmare, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

The last time, in 1988, they’d put me in solitary confinement for more than eight months to get me to do what they wanted: as soon as I signed their plea agreement, they put me in with the general population. And this time, the government wasn’t shoving me into this hellhole to protect the public from me, or me from other inmates. It was coercion, pure and simple. The message was clear: all I had to do was agree to the prosecutor’s demands and waive certain rights, and agree to only call my immediate family and legal counsel, and they’d be more than happy to let me out of solitary, into the general population.

I wish I could describe the sinking feeling I had as I stepped inside. After living in dread of “the hole” for so many years, it took everything I had not to totally lose it when they locked the door behind me. I would rather have shared a cell with a tattooed, whacked-out drug dealer than find myself locked up alone like this again.

The rap about computer geeks is that we spend countless hours in small, dark rooms, crouched over the glowing screens of our laptops, not even knowing whether it’s day or night. To a nine-to-fiver, that might seem like solitary, but it’s not.

There’s a huge difference between spending time alone and being thrown into a disgusting, dirty coffin that is your home today, tomorrow, next month, with no light at the end of the tunnel, controlled by people who are doing their best to make you miserable. No matter how hard you try to
reframe it in your head, being in the hole is grim and depressing twenty-four/seven. Solitary confinement is widely condemned as torture. Even now, the United Nations is working to have its use declared inhumane.

Many experts say that extended solitary confinement is far worse than water boarding or other forms of physical torture. In the hole, prisoners commonly suffer from lethargy, despair, rage, and severe depression, and other forms of mental illness. The isolation, idleness, and lack of structure can easily start to unravel your mind. Without anyone else to interact with, you have no way to rein in your thoughts or keep your perspective. It’s far more of a nightmare than you can even imagine.

That’s why every study of solitary confinement of more than sixty days has shown damaging psychological effects. Sometimes they’re permanent. I was afraid of that. It had been over six years since I had been in solitary, and it still haunted me. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.

A week after I was thrown into solitary, the Federal prosecutors offered a deal to move me into the general population if I would waive my rights and agree to:

• no bail hearing
  

• no preliminary hearing
  

• no phone calls, except to my legal counsel and a few family members.
  

Sign the agreement, they said, and I could get out of solitary. I signed.

My Los Angeles attorney John Yzurdiaga and his partner Richard Steingard helped me make the deal. Since I had been arrested in Raleigh, both attorneys graciously donated their time to work on my case. John had volunteered to represent me pro bono ever since the time in late 1992 when FBI agents searched my Calabasas apartment.

Once I was back in the general population of the prison, I spoke to John Yzurdiaga and Richard Steingard over the phone. There was a tension in John’s voice I’d never heard before. To my surprise, both men started grilling me about state secrets. “Exactly what kind of confidential information did you have access to? Have you hacked into any U.S. intelligence agencies?”

When I understood what they were getting at, I laughed out loud. “Right. Like I’m a spy, engaged in some sort of secret espionage!” I said.

Neither one of them laughed.

“Don’t lie to us, Kevin,” John said, sounding alarmingly earnest. “This is the time to come clean.”

I blinked in disbelief. “Come on, guys—you’re kidding, right?”

Then Richard dropped the bomb: “Assistant U.S. Attorney Schindler is demanding that you agree to a CIA debriefing.”

What the hell was going on? Sure, I’d hacked the world’s most popular cellular phone manufacturers, Bell operating companies, and operating-system development houses throughout the United States, but I’d never even attempted to go after
any
government targets. How could the Feds have made that leap? The accusation was completely unfounded.

“I don’t have anything to hide,” I said with a sigh. “I’ll participate in the debriefing so long as it’s understood that I won’t inform on anyone else.” I didn’t have any knowledge of anyone who had hacked into government or military systems, but even so, it was against my ethical and moral principles to become a snitch for the government.

In the end, nothing ever came of it. Maybe Schindler or the Justice Department was just on a fishing expedition. It made me think back to the time when Marty Stolz at Intermetrics secretly told me that the super-hacker the Feds were chasing had compromised the CIA. I chalked it up to one more instance of the myth getting out of hand.

In medieval times, the myths that built up around magicians used to cause them serious trouble. Sometimes these myths and superstitions even got them killed. A traveling performer would amaze the local villagers with tricks and sleights of hand. Because they had no idea how he was doing those tricks, they couldn’t guess at the extent of his abilities. He seemed to have the power to make things appear and disappear at will. That was the point. But if anything went wrong—some cows died, the crops failed, little Sarah got sick—it was all too easy to blame the magician.

If things had been different, I might secretly have enjoyed being called “the World’s Most Wanted Hacker” and laughed it off when people believed I was a super-genius who could hack into anything. But I had a bad feeling that it was going to cost me—and I was right. The “Myth of Kevin Mitnick” was about to make my life a whole lot harder.

Because I was such a high-profile inmate, I soon needed John Yzurdiaga to intervene again. The head jailer was opening all my mail, including the letters from my attorneys, which violated my attorney-client privilege. I told him to stop. He kept right on doing it. I warned him that my lawyer would get the court to order him to stop. He ignored me.

John got the court order. The jailer had to comply, but he was furious about it. So he called the U.S. Marshals Service and told them to move me to another jail, which they did. The Vance County Jail made Johnston look like a Holiday Inn.

When I was being moved, a deputy U.S. Marshal with a Southern accent so thick it sounded like he was doing a bad parody of a Good Ol’ Boy sheriff laughed and said, “You’re the only prisoner we ever had that got booted out of jail!”

After I’d been in jail for about five months, my court-appointed public defender in Raleigh, John Dusenbury, recommended that I agree to what is known as a “Rule 20.” This meant that I would plead guilty to a single count of possessing the mobile phone number and electronic serial number pairs that I used for cloning my cell phone in exchange for a recommended sentence of eight months, though I might still be facing up to twenty years if the judge decided not to go along with the prosecutor’s recommendation. Judge Terrence Boyle approved the deal, though. Even better: my case was now transferred to Los Angeles for sentencing and to resolve the pending violation of supervised release, which meant I would be transferred, as well.

My move to Los Angeles from Raleigh was surprisingly awful. Federal prisons are notorious for a form of punishment known as “diesel therapy.” It’s so bad that prisoners often consider it among the cruelest aspects of being incarcerated. What ought to be a simple drive is deliberately and maliciously extended for days or even weeks. Along the way, prisoners are subjected to as much pure misery as their sadistic guards can heap on.

After being woken up at 3:30 a.m., any prisoners who are due to be transported are put in a large room and strip-searched. A chain around each prisoner’s waist connects tightly to his handcuffs at stomach level, so he can barely move his arms. His feet are shackled too, so he can barely walk or move. Then he and his fellow inmates are loaded onto a
bus and driven for eight hours each day, with random stops in towns along the route where everyone disembarks, spends the night in another cell, and is woken up again the next morning to go through the whole process again. Eventually, you arrive at your destination feeling completely exhausted.