Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [159]
I felt Bonnie’s intuition: she was sure it would be just a matter of time before I got caught, and she was worried for me. But I just had to give it my best shot and deal with the consequences later. It was nice to see her again for the first time since I’d gone on the run, but given that my ex was living with my best hacking partner, a distance between us was only natural.
By the time I reached Vegas a week later, my mom and Gram had pretty much calmed down from their panic at my near arrest. When I saw them, I was washed in the full flood of their love and concern.
Desperately in need of a new identity, and knowing it would be dangerous to use any of the names from the South Dakota list since all that information was also on the unencrypted backup tapes that the cops had grabbed in the Seattle raid, I targeted the largest college in Oregon’s largest city, Portland State University.
After compromising the server for the Admissions Office, I called the database administrator. “I’m new in the Admissions Office,” I told him. “And I need to look at…,” and then I described the parameters of what I was looking for: people who had received undergraduate degrees between 1985 and 1992. He spent a good forty-five minutes on the phone with me, explaining how the records were organized and the commands I needed to extract all the student data for graduates in the years of interest. He was so helpful that he gave me even more than I was asking for.
When we were done, I had access to 13,595 student records, each one complete with a student’s full name, date of birth, degree, year of degree, Social Security number, and home address.
For the time being, I needed only one of the thousands. I would become Michael David Stanfill.
The heat was on. The Feds had probably figured out by now that I’d slipped through their fingers again. This time my Vegas trip would be short, just long enough to let me set up a new identity—two to three weeks. Then I needed to scat quickly in case the Feds got desperate enough to start following my mother, her boyfriend, or my grandmother.
I had to make headway on building my new identity as Michael Stanfill. For the driver’s license, after the familiar steps of getting a certified copy of the birth certificate and making a phony W-2, I applied for a learner’s permit, offering the lady at the DMV my familiar explanation that I needed a few lessons because I had been living in London where we drove on the other side of the road.
It had only been a couple of years since I had gotten my Eric Weiss driver’s license at the DMV in Las Vegas, so I felt a bit uneasy about going back—especially since I knew the Feds might now be on the alert for my trying to get a new identity. The closest DMV office outside of Las Vegas was in the desert town of Pahrump, which is famous for two things: the popular radio personality Art Bell lives there, and it’s also the home of the Chicken Ranch, the infamous legal brothel. Under Nevada law, prostitution is permitted in that part of the state.
I combed the Yellow Pages looking for a driving school in Pahrump. Finding none, I started calling places in Vegas (though of course carefully avoiding the one I had used a couple years back as Eric Weiss), asking if I could use one of their cars for my drive test in Pahrump. After being told several times, “Sorry, we don’t send our people out to Pahrump,” I finally found a school that would provide a car, give a one-hour lesson to a guy who was “just back from London and in need of a refresher for driving on the right side of the road,” and wait while I took the test—all for $200. Fine. Two hundred bucks was a cheap price for a new identity.
Gram drove me the hour