Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (8 page)

The Juvenile Court judge sent me to the California Youth Authority (CYA) reception facility in Norwalk, California, for a ninety-day psychological evaluation to determine whether I was suited for incarceration in that agency’s facilities. I’ve never been so intimidated. The other kids were there for crimes like assault, rape, murder, and gang hits. These were juveniles, sure, but they were even more violent and dangerous because they felt invincible.

We each had our own room and were kept locked up in it, let out in small groups for only three hours each day.

I wrote a daily letter home, beginning each with “Kevin Mitnick held hostage–Day 1,” “Day 2,” “Day 3.” Even though Norwalk is actually in LA County, it was an hour and a half drive for my mom and her mother, my “Gram.” Loyal beyond my deserving, they came every weekend, bringing food; they would always leave their homes early enough to be the first in line.

My eighteenth birthday came and went while I was being held in Norwalk. Though the California Youth Authority would still have custody of me for some time, I was no longer a juvenile. I knew that for any further offenses, I would be charged as an adult and could, if convicted, be sent to prison.

At the end of my ninety days, the California Youth Authority recommended that I be released to go home on probation, and the judge accepted the recommendation.

My assigned Probation Officer was an extraordinarily obese lady named Mary Ridgeway, who I thought found pleasure only in eating and in lashing out at the kids in her charge. Her phone stopped working one day; months later, I learned that after the phone company fixed her line, they told her they didn’t know why it had gone dead. She figured it must have been me and put a notation in my record that would become accepted as fact and used against me. Too many times in those days, unexplained failures in technology anywhere would be attributed to me.

Along with probation came psychological counseling. I was sent to a clinic that treated sex offenders and other hardcore addicts. My counselor was a doctoral intern from Great Britain named Roy Eskapa. When I explained that I was on probation for phone phreaking, his eyes
lit up. “Have you heard about ITT?”(The initials stood for International Telephone and Telegraph.)

“Of course,” I said.

“Do you know where I can get any codes?”

He was asking me about ITT access codes. Once you had a code, you could simply dial a local ITT access number and punch in the access code, followed by the long-distance number you wanted to call. If you used someone else’s code, your call would be billed to that poor subscriber, and you wouldn’t have to pay a cent.

I smiled. Roy and I were going to get along just fine.

During my court-ordered counseling sessions in 1981 and 1982, we basically just chatted and became good friends. Roy told me that what I had been doing was exceedingly tame compared to the crimes of his other patients. Years later, in 1988, when I got into trouble again, he wrote a letter to the judge, explaining that I was driven to hack not by malicious or criminal motives, but by a compulsive disorder. I was, he said, “addicted” to hacking.

As far as my attorney and I have been able to determine, this was the first time that hacking had ever been labeled that way and placed on par with a drug, alcohol, gambling, or sex addiction. When the judge heard the diagnosis of addiction and realized that I suffered from an ailment, she accepted our plea agreement.

On December 22, 1982, three days before Christmas, nearly midnight, I was in the computer room in Salvatori Hall on the campus of USC, the University of Southern California, near downtown LA, with my hacking buddy Lenny DiCicco, a lanky, athletic six-footer who was to become a close, trusted hacking partner… and future double-crosser.

We had been hacking into the USC systems over dial-up modems but were frustrated with their slow speeds. A little exploring had turned up the tempting fact that a building called Salvatori Hall had a group of DEC TOPS-20 mainframes that were connected to the Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet. Being on campus would give us much faster access to systems on campus.

Using a newly discovered vulnerability that Lenny had managed to pickpocket from Dave Kompel at a DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society) conference we attended a week earlier, we had already gained full system (or “wheel”) privileges on all of the student
DEC 20’s. But we wanted to get as many passwords as possible. Even though we had system administrator privileges, the system was configured to encrypt all passwords.

No sweat. I started searching through the email accounts of staff members who had wheel privileges. Hunting around inside the system led me to the mail of the accounting department, which was responsible for issuing usernames and passwords. When I searched that account’s email, it was chock-full of messages handing out usernames and passwords in
plain text
. Jackpot!

Knowing it was risky, I sent the entire email file to the printer. About fifteen minutes after I gave the Print command, an operator dropped a thick printout into the student bin. In a roomful of students at computer terminals, how do you check that you’re not being watched, but do it in a way that doesn’t make you look suspicious? Doing my best, I picked up the printout and carried it back to where Lenny and I were working.

A while later, two campus cops charged into the room and rushed directly toward Lenny and me, shouting,
“Freeze!”

Apparently I had become notorious. They knew which of us was their real target, and they knew my name. Later, I learned that one of the administrators, Jon Solomon, had been at the same DECUS convention that Lenny and I had attended days earlier. Jon saw me in the computer lab and recognized me. He called Dave Kompel, who had been part of the group that challenged me to break into DEC’s RSTS/E Development system when I was a student at Monroe High School. Kompel told him to call the campus police and have me arrested.

They grabbed the stack of printouts with all those passwords. Because I was already on probation, I knew this meant serious trouble. The cops hustled Lenny and me to their on-campus headquarters and handcuffed us to a bench, then disappeared into their offices, leaving us sitting alone next to the exit. After a little squirming, Lenny showed me his hands—free of the cuffs. He routinely carried a handcuff key in his wallet and had managed to retrieve it and free himself.

He unlocked mine and said, “You’ve got more to lose, just take off.” But how could I get away? The cops had taken my car keys, and besides, they knew who I was.

One of the cops came back in. Behind my back, I snapped my cuff
closed again, but the cop heard the sound and came over to take a closer look. “Hey, we’ve got Houdini here,” he called out in the direction of the offices, while Lenny, unobserved, managed to drop the key onto the floor and kick it a few feet, where it became hidden beneath a car tire that for some odd reason had been left propped against the wall.

Pissed, the cops demanded, “Where’s the key?” They took each of us to the bathroom for a strip search and were mystified when they couldn’t find it.

Cops from the LAPD Bunko and Forgery Squad showed up and hustled me away. I was booked into jail at Parker Center, the LAPD headquarters. This time I was tossed into a holding cell with a couple of pay phones inside. My first call was to my mom to tell her what had happened, and the next was to Aunt Chickie, pleading that she come bail me out as quickly as possible—urgent because I wanted to get to my car before the cops did, since it was, just as before, loaded with even more incriminating notes and disks. A colleague of hers got me out a few hours later, about 5:00 a.m.

My much-put-upon but ever-reliable mom was there to pick me up and drive me to the campus to retrieve my car. She was relieved that I was okay and hadn’t been held. Whatever I might have deserved in the way of anger or scolding, that wasn’t my mom’s style. Instead, she was worried for me, worried about what would become of me.

I was out on bail, but my freedom didn’t last long. As I drove in to work that evening, I phoned up my mom at Fromin’s Deli, where we were both then working, to ask if anyone had shown up looking for me. “Not exactly,” she responded. Ignoring her cryptic response, I walked into work. My Juvenile Probation Officer, Mary Ridgeway, was waiting with two detectives. When she saw me, she announced that I was under arrest for probation violation, and the detectives gave me a ride to the Juvenile Detention Center in Sylmar.

Actually, going to Sylmar was a great relief. I was over eighteen now, an adult in the eyes of the law, but since I was still on probation from Juvenile Court, I was still under its jurisdiction. I was handled the same way I would’ve been if I were still a juvenile.

The distinction was lost on my mom. I was under arrest again, locked up. It was becoming a pattern. What was going to become of her
dear son? Was I going to spend my life in and out of prison? She visited me and broke down in tears. She had done so much for me, and this was how I was repaying her—with misery and worry. It broke my heart to see her cry. How many times had I promised her I’d give up hacking, really, truly meaning it but no more able to stick to my word than the alcoholic who keeps falling off the wagon?

It turned out that the hacking that had landed me back inside was to have an even longer-lasting impact than I could have realized at the time. One of the accounts I had logged on to from the campus computer room was for someone who had a university account but in fact worked at the Pentagon. When the police discovered that, they fed the story to the media, and the newspapers ran overblown articles mangling the facts, claiming I had hacked into the Department of Defense. Totally untrue, but a claim that still follows me today.

I admitted to the charge of violating my probation and was sentenced to the custody of the juvenile authorities for three years and eight months, the maximum term I could be given.

But I was hooked—locked up and still looking for ways to beat the system.

A
fter sentencing, I was transferred once again to the facility in Norwalk, for classification. I took refuge in the library and then realized it had a very good collection of law books. They became my new focus.

A number of the kids in custody there wanted to file appeals or find out what rights they had, and I began lending a hand by doing research for them. At least I was doing some little good for others, and I found satisfaction in that.

The library’s collection turned out to include the procedural manuals governing the California Youth Authority.
How convenient
, I thought.
They’re going to let me find out how they’re supposed to be doing things, so I can look for flaws and loopholes
. I dived in.

I was assigned to a counselor who talked to me a few times and then drew up the recommendation that I be sent to Preston, the juvenile equivalent of San Quentin, a place full of the most dangerous, most violent kids in California’s juvenile prison system. Why? I must’ve been one of the few “white-collar” criminals the juvenile system had ever handled.

He even told me he picked the place partly because it was so far away—a seven- or eight-hour drive, meaning my mom and Gram would be able to visit only once in a while. Maybe he figured this middle-class kid had had all the opportunities that the tough guys from the inner city had never had, and instead of getting a college degree and a
steady, well-paying job, I kept landing myself in trouble… and if he sent me to a dangerous, hard-core place, it might be enough to scare me into “going straight.” Or maybe he was just a malicious SOB, misusing his authority.

But whaddaya know? In the CYA procedural manuals, I found a list of the factors that must be taken into consideration in deciding which facility a youth should be sent to. He should be close to his family. If he was a high school graduate or had received a GED, he should be at a facility that offered college programs—which Preston certainly did not. The facility should be chosen based on his propensity for violence and whether he was likely to try to escape. I had never even been in a fist fight, and had never attempted an escape. Underlying it all, according to the manual, the goal was rehabilitation. Great.

I made copies of these pages.

The grievance process also made for an interesting read: an inmate could ask for a series of hearings, ending with one at which an outside arbitrator came to listen to the facts and render an impartial, binding decision.

I went through the stages of hearings. When the impartial arbitrator was brought in, members of the Youth Authority staff—
five
of them—presented their side of my case, complete with copied pages from their procedural manual to support their decision.

A clever move, except they were using what I knew was an out-of-date copy of the manual, with provisions not nearly as favorable to me.

When it came my turn to speak, I said, “Let me show you the
current
revision of the manual that these folks have not turned over to you.” And I made a fervent appeal that I wanted to rehabilitate myself.

The arbitrator looked at the dates on the pages that the counselor had submitted, and looked at the dates on the pages from me.

And he actually winked at me.