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Three days later, the certified birth certificate I had requested arrived in my newly rented mailbox. I went to the DMV and walked out with my new North Carolina learner’s permit, but I still had a lot of work ahead of me to secure the other forms of ID I would need.

The day after getting my learner’s permit, I found a studio apartment in a complex called the Players Club, which was suitable but nowhere near as appealing as my previous place. It was small but cozy; I didn’t have the luxury of being picky. The rent was $510 a month, meaning I had six months before my money would run out. Provided I didn’t have too much trouble finding a job, it was an acceptable risk.

Around the same time, the newspapers were carrying new stories about hacker Kevin Poulsen. He had been transferred from custody in Northern California and was being held in a place all too familiar to me: the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. He was being charged with hacking offenses and gathering national defense information, an espionage-related offense.

I was determined to talk to him—an ambition in keeping with my lifelong penchant for scheming to accomplish the impossible. I liked nothing better than to set myself a challenge that I didn’t think could be done, then see if I could do it.

Visiting Poulsen was obviously out of the question. For me, the Metropolitan Detention Center was like the Hotel California in the old Eagles song: I could check out anytime I wanted, but I could never leave.

My conversations with him would have to be by phone. But inmates couldn’t receive calls, and besides, all inmate calls are monitored or recorded. Given the charges Poulsen was facing, the prison staff had likely flagged him as high risk and were keeping him closely monitored.

Still, I told myself, there’s always a way.

Each housing unit at the MDC had a “Public Defender’s phone,” a telephone with what the phone companies call “direct-connect” service: when an inmate picked up the handset, he would be connected directly to the Federal Public Defender’s Office. I knew these were the only phones available to prisoners that weren’t subject to monitoring—because of attorney-client privilege. But they were also programmed at the phone company switch so that they couldn’t be used for incoming calls (“deny terminate,” in telco lingo), and couldn’t connect to any numbers other than the main telephone number at the Public Defender’s Office. I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

First I needed to get the numbers. It took me only twenty minutes to social-engineer Pacific Bell and learn the ten direct-connect service numbers working in the prison.

Next I called the Recent Change Memory Authorization Center (“RCMAC”). I said I was calling from Pacific Bell’s business office and requested that “deny terminate” be immediately removed from those ten numbers. The RCMAC clerk gladly complied.

Then, taking a deep breath, I called the Receiving and Discharge Office at the prison itself.

“This is Unit Manager Taylor at Terminal Island,” I said, trying to sound like a bored, frustrated prison drone. Using the name of the Bureau of Prisons’ main computer system along with Poulsen’s inmate registration number, I went on. “Sentry is down here. Can you look up reg number 95596-012 for me?”

When the guy at the prison looked up Poulsen’s number, I asked what housing unit he was in. “Six South,” he said.

That narrowed it down, but I still didn’t know which of the ten phone numbers was located on Six South.

On my microcassette player, I recorded a minute or so of the ringing sound that you hear on the phone when you call someone. This would only work if an inmate picked up the phone to call his public defender during those two or three minutes when I was calling into the phone. I would have to try many, many times before someone picked up. Another of those times when it helped to be patient and doggedly determined.

When I hit it just right and an inmate picked up the receiver, I’d let him hear a few rings