Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (17 page)

Par didn’t hear much from Electron after that day. The Australian still visited Altos, but he seemed more withdrawn, at least whenever Par was around. After that day, Par ran into him once, on a phone bridge with a bunch of Australian hackers.

Phoenix said on the bridge, ‘Hey, Electron. Par’s on the bridge.’

Electron paused. ‘Oh, really,’ he answered coolly. Then he went silent.

Par let Electron keep his distance. After all, Par had what really counted--the girl.

Par called Theorem almost every day. Soon they began to make plans for her to fly to California so they could meet in person. Par tried not to expect too much, but he found it difficult to stop savouring the thought of finally seeing Theorem face to face. It gave him butterflies.

Yeah, Par thought, things are really looking up.

The beauty of Altos was that, like Pacific Island or any other local BBS, a hacker could take on any identity he wanted. And he could do it on an international scale. Visiting Altos was like attending a glittering masquerade ball. Anyone could recreate himself. A socially inept hacker could pose as a character of romance and adventure. And a security official could pose as a hacker.

Which is exactly what Telenet security officer Steve Mathews did on 27

October 1988. Par happened to be on-line, chatting away with his friends and hacker colleagues. At any given moment, there were always a few strays on Altos, a few people who weren’t regulars. Naturally, Mathews didn’t announce himself as being a Telenet guy. He just slipped quietly onto Altos looking like any other hacker. He might engage a hacker in conversation, but he let the hacker do most of the talking. He was there to listen.

On that fateful day, Par happened to be in one of his magnanimous moods. Par had never had much money growing up, but he was always very generous with what he did have. He talked for a little while with the unknown hacker on Altos, and then gave him one of the debit cards taken from his visits to the CitiSaudi computer. Why not? On Altos, it was a bit like handing out your business card. ‘The Parmaster--Parameters Par Excellence’.

Par had got his full name--The Parmaster--in his earliest hacking days. Back then, he belonged to a group of teenagers involved in breaking the copy protections on software programs for Apple IIes, particularly games. Par had a special gift for working out the copy protection parameters, which was a first step in bypassing the manufacturers’ protection schemes. The ringleader of the group began calling him ‘the master of parameters’--The Parmaster--Par, for short.

As he moved into serious hacking and developed his expertise in X.25

networks, he kept the name because it fitted nicely in his new environment. ‘Par?’ was a common command on an X.25 pad, the modem gateway to an X.25 network.

‘I’ve got lots more where that come from,’ Par told the stranger on Altos. ‘I’ve got like 4000 cards from a Citibank system.’

Not long after that, Steve Mathews was monitoring Altos again, when Par showed up handing out cards to people once more.

‘I’ve got an inside contact,’ Par confided. ‘He’s gonna make up a whole mess of new, plastic cards with all these valid numbers from the Citibank machine. Only the really big accounts, though. Nothing with a balance under $25000.’

Was Par just making idle conversation, talking big on Altos? Or would he really have gone through with committing such a major fraud?

Citibank, Telenet and the US Secret Service would never know, because their security guys began closing the net around Par before he had a chance to take his idea any further.

Mathews contacted Larry Wallace, fraud investigator with Citibank in San Mateo, California. Wallace checked out the cards. They were valid all right. They belonged to the Saudi-American Bank in Saudi Arabia and were held on a Citibank database in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Wallace determined that, with its affiliation to the Middle Eastern bank, Citibank had a custodial responsibility for the accounts. That meant he could open a major investigation.

On 7 November, Wallace brought in the US Secret Service. Four days later, Wallace and Special Agent Thomas Holman got their first major lead when they interviewed Gerry Lyons of Pacific Bell’s security office in San Francisco.

Yes, Lyons told the investigators, she had some information they might find valuable. She knew all about hackers and phreakers. In fact, the San Jose Police had just busted two guys trying to phreak at a pay phone. The phreakers seemed to know something about a Citibank system.

When the agents showed up at the San Jose Police Department for their appointment with Sergeant Dave Flory, they received another pleasant surprise. The sergeant had a book filled with hackers’ names and numbers seized during the arrest of the two pay-phone phreakers. He also happened to be in possession of a tape recording of the phreakers talking to Par from a prison phone.

The cheeky phreakers had used the prison pay phone to call up a telephone bridge located at the University of Virginia. Par, the Australian hackers and other assorted American phreakers and hackers visited the bridge frequently. At any one moment, there might be eight to ten people from the underground sitting on the bridge. The phreakers found Par hanging out there, as usual, and they warned him.

His name and number were inside the book seized by police when they were busted.

Par didn’t seem worried at all.

‘Hey, don’t worry. It’s cool,’ he reassured them. ‘I have just disconnected my phone number today--with no forwarding details.’

Which wasn’t quite true. His room-mate, Scott, had indeed disconnected the phone which was in his name because he had been getting prank calls. However, Scott opened a new telephone account at the same address with the same name on the same day--all of which made the job of tracking down the mysterious hacker named Par much easier for the law enforcement agencies.

In the meantime, Larry Wallace had been ringing around his contacts in the security business and had come up with another lead. Wanda Gamble, supervisor for the Southeastern Region of MCI Investigations, in Atlanta, had a wealth of information on the hacker who called himself Par. She was well connected when it came to hackers, having acquired a collection of reliable informants during her investigations of hacker-related incidents. She gave the Citibank investigator two mailbox numbers for Par. She also handed them what she believed was his home phone number.

The number checked out and on 25 November, the day after Thanksgiving, the Secret Service raided Par’s house. The raid was terrifying. At least four law enforcement officers burst through the door with guns drawn and pointed. One of them had a shotgun. As is often the case in the US, investigators from private, commercial organisations--in this case Citibank and Pacific Bell--also took part in the raid.

The agents tore the place apart looking for evidence. They dragged down the food from the kitchen cupboards. They emptied the box of cornflakes into the sink looking for hidden computer disks. They looked everywhere, even finding a ceiling cavity at the back of a closet which no-one even knew existed.

They confiscated Par’s Apple IIe, printer and modem. But, just to be sure, they also took the Yellow Pages, along with the telephone and the new Nintendo game paddles Scott had just bought. They scooped up the very large number of papers which had been piled under the coffee table, including the spiral notebook with Scott’s airline bookings from his job as a travel agent. They even took the garbage.

It wasn’t long before they found the red shoebox full of disks peeping out from under the fish tank next to Par’s computer.

They found lots of evidence. What they didn’t find was Par.

Instead, they found Scott and Ed, two friends of Par. They were pretty shaken up by the raid. Not knowing Par’s real identity, the Secret Service agents accused Scott of being Par. The phone was in his name, and Special Agent Holman had even conducted some surveillance more than a week before the raid, running the plates on Scott’s 1965 black Ford Mustang parked in front of the house. The Secret Service was sure it had its man, and Scott had a hell of a time convincing them otherwise.

Both Scott and Ed swore up and down that they weren’t hackers or phreakers, and they certainly weren’t Par. But they knew who Par was, and they told the agents his real name. After considerable pressure from the Secret Service, Scott and Ed agreed to make statements down at the police station.

In Chicago, more than 2700 kilometres away from the crisis unfolding in northern California, Par and his mother watched his aunt walk down the aisle in her white gown.

Par telephoned home once, to Scott, to say ‘hi’ from the Midwest. The call came after the raid.

‘So,’ a relaxed Par asked his room-mate, ‘How are things going at home?’

‘Fine,’ Scott replied. ‘Nothing much happening here.’

Par looked down at the red bag he was carrying with a momentary expression of horror. He realised he stood out in the San Jose bus terminal like a peacock among the pigeons ...

Blissfully ignorant of the raid which had occurred three days before, Par and his mother had flown into San Jose airport. They had gone to the bus terminal to pick up a Greyhound home to the Monterey area.

While waiting for the bus, Par called his friend Tammi to say he was back in California.

Any casual bystander waiting to use the pay phones at that moment would have seen a remarkable transformation in the brown-haired boy at the row of phones. The smiling face suddenly dropped in a spasm of shock. His skin turned ash white as the blood fled south. His deep-set chocolate brown eyes, with their long, graceful lashes curving upward and their soft, shy expression, seemed impossibly large.

For at that moment Tammi told Par that his house had been raided by the Secret Service. That Scott and Ed had been pretty upset about having guns shoved in their faces, and had made statements about him to the police. That they thought their phone was tapped. That the Secret Service guys were still hunting for Par, they knew his real name, and she thought there was an all points bulletin out for him.

Scott had told the Secret Service about Par’s red bag, the one with all his hacking notes that he always carried around. The one with the print-out of all the Citibank credit card numbers.

And so it was that Par came to gaze down at his bag with a look of alarm. He realised instantly that the Secret Service would be looking for that red bag. If they didn’t know what he looked like, they would simply watch for the bag.

That bag was not something Par could hide easily. The Citibank print-out was the size of a phone book. He also had dozens of disks loaded with the cards and other sensitive hacking information.

Par had used the cards to make a few free calls, but he hadn’t been charging up any jet skis. He fought temptation valiantly, and in the end he had won, but others might not have been so victorious in the same battle. Par figured that some less scrupulous hackers had probably been charging up a storm. He was right. Someone had, for example, tried to send a $367 bouquet of flowers to a woman in El Paso using one of the stolen cards. The carder had unwittingly chosen a debit card belonging to a senior Saudi bank executive who happened to be in his office at the time the flower order was placed. Citibank investigator Larry Wallace added notes on that incident to his growing file.

Par figured that Citibank would probably try to pin every single attempt at carding on him. Why not? What kind of credibility would a seventeen-year-old hacker have in denying those sorts of allegations?

Zero. Par made a snap decision. He sidled up to a trash bin in a dark corner. Scanning the scene warily, Par casually reached into the red bag, pulled out the thick wad of Citibank card print-outs and stuffed it into the bin. He fluffed a few stray pieces of garbage over the top.

He worried about the computer disks with all his other valuable hacking information. They represented thousands of hours of work and he couldn’t bring himself to throw it all away. The 10 megabyte trophy. More than 4000 cards. 130000 different transactions. In the end, he decided to hold on to the disks, regardless of the risk. At least, without the print-out, he could crumple the bag up a bit and make it a little less conspicuous. As Par slowly moved away from the bin, he glanced back to check how nondescript the burial site appeared from a distance. It looked like a pile of garbage. Trash worth millions of dollars, headed for the dump.

As he boarded the bus to Salinas with his mother, Par’s mind was instantly flooded with images of a homeless person fishing the print-out from the bin and asking someone about it. He tried to push the idea from his head.

During the bus ride, Par attempted to figure out what he was going to do. He didn’t tell his mother anything. She couldn’t even begin to comprehend his world of computers and networks, let alone his current predicament. Further, Par and his mother had suffered from a somewhat strained relationship since he ran away from home not long after his seventeenth birthday. He had been kicked out of school for non-attendance, but had found a job tutoring students in computers at the local college. Before the trip to Chicago, he had seen her just once in six months. No, he couldn’t turn to her for help.

The bus rolled toward the Salinas station. En route, it travelled down the street where Par lived. He saw a jogger, a thin black man wearing a walkman. What the hell is a jogger doing here, Par thought. No-one jogged in the semi-industrial neighbourhood. Par’s house was about the only residence amid all the light-industrial buildings. As soon as the jogger was out of sight of the house, he suddenly broke away from his path, turned off to one side and hit the ground. As he lay on his stomach on some grass, facing the house, he seemed to begin talking into the walkman.

Sitting watching this on the bus, Par flipped out. They were out to get him, no doubt about it. When the bus finally arrived at the depot and his mother began sorting out their luggage, Par tucked the red bag under his arm and disappeared. He found a pay phone and called Scott to find out the status of things. Scott handed the phone to Chris, another friend who lived in the house. Chris had been away at his parents’ home during the Thanksgiving raid.