Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla Page B

in a few hours. There are so many places to go, so many things to learn. Is it possible to listen in on ongoing phone conversations? Is there a way to get into the phone company's automated message accounting, which contains billing information and lists the phone numbers that a certain customer calls?
    By the time the night ends, all three know one thing: They can't wait to get together again.
    There's a big street map of Queens on one wall in Eli's room. From the East River to Long Island, the map details the hundreds and hundreds of crisscrossing streets and avenues and boulevards and highways that cut up the borough. It identifies the parks, the airports, and the jail at Rikers Island.
    Stand in front of the map, and trace the grid with a finger, and you could see how Eli's house was the natural hub. It was smack in the center of all of Queens, with Mark's redbrick house at the end of a spoke on the northwest and Paul's frame house at the end of another spoke that stretches southeast. Not only is Eli's house positioned perfectly for a command center, but his Commodore 128 was more powerful than the computers that Mark and Paul owned. Mark never went to Paul's house, except once to drop him off, and then he certainly never set foot inside. Paul sometimes went to Mark's house, but there was usually nothing good to eat. Mark wasn't interested in snacks, so he didn't offer any. One time Paul and Hac brought their own dinner, lasagna in foil, and they ate on Mark's front stoop. Just to make a point.
    A lot of times, the guys got together at the Queens Mall, where Paul liked his coffee sweet, and Mark liked to get mashed potatoes from the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. He was queasy a lot, stuck to bland food, and rarely ate before the afternoon. It was just part of who he is. The problem with real mashed potatoes is that people make them lumpy, but he could eat several portions of those reconstituted, processed starchy ones at the mall. Go figure.
    But how often could you go to the mall? There was no computer there.
    So Eli's house, Eli's bedroom, that was the place. It was the closest thing to a clubhouse that they'd ever have. Four or five guys could hang out comfortably in that room, on the bed, on the chair, on the floor, on the computer, drinking caffeine in any of its splendid forms, running the modem off one phone line while keeping the second line free for voice calls.
    They were learning a lot about the phone system. From the inside. If Eli called it "The Mission, " Mark thought of it as "The Project. " And Paul? He just wanted to know more. Even when they were at home, hacking on their respective computers, they kept in contact, phoning two or three times a day, updating each other on what they were finding in phone company computers. What does this command do? What does this acronym mean? Often, though, they ended up working together, at least by evening.
    They knew so much now, collectively, so much more than they did on their own. But nobody knew they knew. It was frustrating being so omnipotent. Imagine being able to fly. Imagine being invisible, and now imagine not being able to tell anyone about it.
    Then one night, about eight o'clock, they got an idea. The three of them were hanging in Eli's room, looking at the map of Queens on the wall, and realized there was at least one place in the borough that the three of them could fly to.
    It was called Anarchy.
    It was a virtual neighborhood, actually, this computer bulletin board called Anarchy. Some kid ran it from his bedroom in
    "Outer Queens, " as Mark calls it.

    The boys in Eli's room had some unfinished business with Anarchy.
    Paul had discovered the phone number for the Anarchy board once when he was on a different board. Just for the fun of it, Paul had even signed up as a user on the board, which had a special section for posting philes specific to hacking and phreaking (hacking the phone system). And one time when Paul was at Eli's they had all logged in