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I was constantly on my guard. I could never forget how dangerous Las Vegas was for me. When I was in prison, it seemed like every guy in there who hadn’t been ratted out by a girlfriend or wife had instead been caught when he paid a visit to his wife, his mother, or some other family member or close friend. But I couldn’t be in town and not hang out with my mother and Gram—they were my whole reason for coming to Vegas, despite the constant danger.

I was packing my usual early-warning system, a ham radio that was easily modified so I could transmit and receive on all the frequencies being used by the various Federal agencies.

It annoyed the hell out of me that traffic of those agencies was all encrypted. Sure, I’d know whenever one of their agents was somewhere nearby, but I never had any idea whether the transmissions were about me or somebody else. I tried calling the local Motorola office, pretending I was an FBI agent, and fishing for some clue that would let me obtain the encryption key. No good: the Motorola guy said there wasn’t anything he was able to do for me over the phone, “But if you come by with your key loader…”

Yeah, right—I’m going to walk into the local Motorola and say I’m FBI and… what? “I forgot to bring my credentials with me.” Not quite.

But how was I going to crack the FBI crypto? After thinking it over for a while, I came up with a Plan B.

To enable its agents to communicate over greater distances, the government had installed “repeaters” at high elevations to relay the signals. The agents’ radios transmitted on one frequency and received on another; the repeaters had an input frequency to receive the agents’ transmissions, and an output frequency that the agents listened on. When I wanted to know if an agent was nearby, I simply monitored the signal strength on the repeater’s input frequency.

That setup enabled me to play a little game. Whenever I heard any hiss of communication, I’d hold down my Transmit button. That would send out a radio signal on the same exact frequency, which would jam the signal.

Then the second agent wouldn’t be able to hear the first agent’s transmission. After two or three tries back and forth, the agents would get frustrated with the radio. I could imagine one of them saying something like, “Something’s wrong with the radio. Let’s go in the clear.”

They’d throw a switch on their radios to take them out of encryption mode, and I’d be able to hear both sides of the conversation! Even today I’m amused to remember how easy it was to work around that encryption without even cracking the code.

If I had ever heard somebody saying “Mitnick” or any radio traffic that suggested I was the target of ongoing surveillance, I would have vanished in a hurry. But that never happened.

I used this little trick every time I was in Las Vegas. You can imagine how much it increased my comfort level. And the Feds never caught on. I could picture them griping to each other about that lousy encryption feature on their radios always crapping out on them. Sorry, Motorola—they were probably blaming you.

The whole time I was in Las Vegas, I kept asking myself, Where to next? I wanted to go someplace where technology jobs were plentiful, but Silicon Valley was out of the question, because for me, returning to California would be inviting disaster.

My research indicated that while it rained a lot in Seattle, the rare sunny days there were beautiful, especially around Lake Washington. And to top it off, the city offered an abundance of Thai restaurants and coffee shops. That might seem like an odd factor to weigh in making a decision like this, but I was especially fond of Thai food and coffee then, and I still am today.

And of course, with the Microsoft campus in adjacent Redmond, Seattle had long been a hotbed of technology. Everything considered, it seemed like the town that would best meet my needs. Seattle it would be.

I bought a one-way Amtrak ticket, hugged my mother and grandmother