Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [16]
But this guy was a Fed, and there still weren’t any federal laws covering the kind of computer break-ins I was doing. He said, “You can get twenty-five years if you continue messing with the phone company.” I knew he was powerless, just trying to scare me.
It didn’t work. As soon as he left, I went right back online. I didn’t even burn the printouts. Yes, it was stupid. I was already incorrigible.
If the agent’s visit didn’t give me any chills, my mother’s reaction was not what you might expect. To her, the whole thing was like a dumb joke: What harm could a boy come to just from playing with a computer at home? She had no concept of what I was up to.
The thrill and satisfaction of doing things I wasn’t supposed to do were just too great. I was consumed by a fascination with the technology of phones and computers. I felt like an explorer, traveling cyberspace without limitations, sneaking into systems for the pure thrill and satisfaction, outsmarting engineers with years of experience, figuring out how to bypass security obstacles, learning how things worked.
It wasn’t long before I began experiencing some turbulence from the authorities. Micah had left shortly after for a trip to Paris. The Air France flight had been in the air for a couple of hours when an announcement came over the PA system: “Mr. Micah Hirschman, please turn on your stewardess call button.” When he did, a stewardess came to him and said, “The pilot wants to speak with you in the cockpit.” You can just imagine his surprise.
He was led to the cockpit. The copilot spoke into the radio to say Micah was present, then handed him a microphone. A voice over the radio said, “This is FBI Special Agent Robin Brown. The Bureau has learned that you have left the country, headed for France. Why are you going to France?”
The whole situation made no sense. Micah gave his answer, and the agent grilled him for a few minutes. It turned out the Feds thought that Micah and I were pulling off some Stanley Rifkin–style big computer hack, maybe setting up a phony transfer of millions from a U.S. bank to some other bank in Europe.
It was like a scene from a caper movie, and I loved the thrill of it.
After getting a taste of that kind of excitement, I was hooked—and I hungered for more. In high school my brain was so occupied with hacking and phreaking that I had little attention or motivation left for the classroom. Happily, I discovered a solution that was one big step better than becoming a dropout or waiting for the Los Angeles School District to show its displeasure by kicking me out.
Passing the GED exam would give me the equivalent of a high school diploma without wasting any more of my time or my teachers’ time. I signed up for the exam, which turned out to be way easier than I had expected—about an eighth-grade level, I thought.
What could be better than becoming a college student studying computers, working toward a degree while feeding my insatiable thirst for computer knowledge? In the summer of 1981, at the age of seventeen, I enrolled at Pierce College, a two-year school in nearby Woodland Hills.
The school’s computer-room manager, Gary Levi, recognized my passion. He took me under his wing, giving me special status by allowing me to have a “privileged account”—on the RSTS/E system.
His gift had an expiration date. He left the school; not long after, the Computer Science chair, one Chuck Alvarez, noticed I was logged in to a privileged account and told me to sign off immediately. I explained that Levi had given me permission, but it didn’t wash; he booted me from the computer lab. My dad went in with me for a meeting with Alvarez, who offered as an excuse, “Your son already knows so much about computers that there is nothing