Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by William L. Simon, Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak

were essentially worthless for what I wanted to do.
    No sweat. On the wall of the computer room was a single telephone with no dial: it was for incoming calls only. Just as I had in Mr. Christ’s computer lab in high school, I would pick up the handset and flick the switch hook, which had the same effect as dialing. Flashing nine times in quick succession, equivalent to dialing the number “9,” would get me a dial tone for an outside line. Then I would flash ten times, equivalent to dialing “0,” for an operator.
    When the operator came on the line, I’d ask her to call me back at the phone number for the modem at the computer terminal I was using. The computer terminals in the lab at that time did not have internal modems. Instead, to make a modem connection, you had to place the telephone handset into an adjacent acoustic coupler, which sent signals from the modem into the telephone handset and out over the phone lines. When the operator called back on the modem telephone, I’d answer the call and ask her to dial a phone number for me.
    I used this method to dial in to numerous businesses that used DEC PDP-11’s running RSTS/E. I was able to social-engineer their dial-upsand system credentials using the DEC Field Support ruse. Since I didn’t have a computer of my own, I was like a drifter moving from one college campus to another to get the dose of computer access that I so desperately wanted. I felt such an adrenaline rush driving to a college campus to get online. I would drive, over the speed limit, for forty-five minutes even if it meant only fifteen minutes of computer time.
    I guess it just never occurred to me that a student at one of these computer labs might overhear what I was doing and blow the whistle on me.
    Not until the evening when I was sitting at a terminal in a lab at UCLA. I heard a clamor, looked up, and saw a swarm of campus cops rushing in and heading straight for me. I was trying hard to appear concerned but confident, a kid who didn’t know what the fuss was all about.
    They pulled me up out of the chair and clamped on a pair of handcuffs, closing them much too tightly.
    Yes, California now had a law that criminalized hacking. But I was still a juvenile, so I wasn’t facing prison time.
    Yet I was panicked, scared to death. The duffel bag in my car was crammed with printouts revealing all the companies I had been breaking into. If they searched my car and found the treasure trove of printouts and understood what it was, I’d be facing a lot worse than any punishment they might hand out for using the school’s computers when I wasn’t a student.
    One of the campus cops located my car after seizing my car keys and found the bag of hacking contraband.
    From there, they hustled me to a police station on campus, which was like being under arrest, and told me I was being detained for “trespassing.” They called my mom to come get me.
    In the end, UCLA didn’t find anybody who could make sense of my printouts. The university never filed any charges. No action at all beyond referring my case to the county Probation Department, which could have petitioned Juvenile Court to hear the case… but didn’t.
    Perhaps I was untouchable. Perhaps I could keep on with what I was doing, facing a shake-up now and then but never really having to worry. Though it had scared the hell out of me, once again I had dodged a bullet.

Escape Artist
     
    Flle ujw esc wexp mo xsp kjr hsm hiwwcm, “Wplpll
stq lec qma e wzerg mzkk!”?
     
    O ver Memorial Day Weekend, 1981, Lewis De Payne and I joined a bunch of phone phreakers who were gathering for a “party.” The quotation marks are because who besides a six-year-old having a birthday or a bunch of geeks would choose a Shakey’s pizza parlor as a place to gather and frolic?
    Something like two dozen people showed up, each one almost as much of a nerd as the worst of the ham radio enthusiasts. But some of them had good technical know-how, which made me