Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [144]
I had planned to burn the Eric Weiss identity documents but in the end decided to keep them as a backup, in case I ever needed to quickly abandon the Brian Merrill persona for some reason. I stuffed them in a sock, which I stowed at the bottom of my suitcase.
Denver had been good to me except for that bad last chapter. The last chapter in Seattle would trump it in spades.
THIRTY-ONE
Eyes in the Sky
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On my very first day in Seattle, my pager goes off at 6:00 a.m., scaring the shit out of me: nobody but De Payne and my mother have my pager number, and Lewis knows better than to wake me this early. Whatever it is, it can’t be good news.
Bleary-eyed, I reach over to the bedside table, grab the pager, and look at the screen. “3859123-3,” it reads. The first string of digits I know by heart: the phone number of the Showboat Hotel and Casino.
The final “3” means code 3: EMERGENCY.
Grabbing my cell phone, programmed as always to a new cloned number that can’t be traced back to me, I call the hotel and ask the operator to page “Mary Schultz.” My mother must be standing by the hotel phones waiting for the page, because she comes on the line in less than a minute.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Kevin, go get a copy of the New York Times right now. You’ve got to go right now.”
“What’s going on?”
“You’re on the front page!”
“Shit! Is there a photograph?”
“Yes, but it’s an old picture—it doesn’t look like you at all.”
Not as bad as it might have been, I decide.
I go back to sleep, thinking, This makes no sense. I haven’t stolen millions from a bank electronically, like Stanley Rifkin. I haven’t crippled the computers of any company or government agency. I haven’t stolen credit card data and run up bills on other people’s cards. I’m not on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Why would the country’s most prestigious newspaper be running a story about me?
At about 9:00 a.m., I wake up again and go out to find someplace that carries the New York Times—not so easy in the part of Seattle of my by-the-week motel room.
When I finally see the paper, I’m stunned. The headline jumps off the page at me:
Cyberspace’s Most Wanted: Hacker Eludes F.B.I. Pursuit
I start reading the article and can’t believe my eyes. Only the first phrase of the story is pleasing to me, crediting me with “technical wizardry.” From there, John Markoff, the Times reporter who has written the article, goes on to say that “law-enforcement officials cannot seem to catch up with him,” which is sure to burn Agent Ken McGuire and company and embarrass the hell out of them with their superiors—and make them all the more focused on finding me.
This false and defamatory article then claims that I wiretapped the FBI—I didn’t. And that, foreshadowing the 1983 movie War Games, I broke into a North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) computer—not only something I never, ever did but also a near impossible proposition for anyone, given that the agency’s mission-critical computers are not connected to the outside world, and thus immune from being hacked by an outsider.
Markoff has labeled me “cyberspace’s most wanted” and “one of the nation’s most wanted computer criminals.”
And all of this on Independence Day, when red-blooded Americans feel greater national fervor than on any other day of the year. How people’s fear of computing and technology must have been brought to the boil as they ate their sunny-side-ups or their oatmeal and read about this kid who was a threat to the safety and security of every American.
I would find out later that one source of these and other blatant lies was a highly unreliable phone phreaker, Steve Rhoades, who had once been a friend of mine.
I remember being