Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [175]
My pursuers were getting too close. How much had they figured out?
I needed to know whether the trap had been in place long enough to capture any of my calls.
General Telephone has a Network Operations Center in Texas that handles switch surveillance outside of regular working hours. I call and pretend to be from GTE Security. I ask to be transferred to the person handling the Durham Parkwood switch in Raleigh. A lady comes on the line.
“Listen, I’m working on a suicide case,” I tell her. “The phone number is 558-8900. What time did the trap go up?”
She says she’ll find out. I wait. And wait. And wait some more, meanwhile getting more alarmed. Finally, after about five minutes, the call is picked up again—not by the same lady, but by a man.
I ask, “Did we get any information yet?”
He starts asking a series of questions: What’s my callback number? Who do I work for? I’ve done my homework and feed him appropriate answers.
“Have your manager call me,” he says.
“He won’t be in till morning,” I say. “I’ll leave a message for him to call you.”
Now I’m extremely suspicious: they’ve been warned that somebody might call. This has all the earmarks of a national security investigation. Is someone getting close to pinpointing my location?
As a precaution, I immediately clone my cell phone to a different cellular phone provider—Cellular One—just in case someone really has been tracking me.
As soon as Shimmy arrived in Raleigh, he was picked up by a Sprint technician, who drove him to the cell site. At the cell site, the techs had a Cellscope 2000 for radio direction finding, the same type of unit that the investigators in Seattle had used to track my location. Technicians at Cellular One had been alerted to watch for any strange activity coming from their network. When I placed a cellular call to Netcom, Cellular One identified a data call in progress and informed the posse. They jumped into a vehicle and started driving around, following clues from the Cellscope 2000 to hunt down the origin of my cellular radio signal. Within minutes, Shimmy and other team members were driving around the Players Club looking for any apartments with their lights still on at this early-morning hour.
A while later they got a lucky break. The Sprint technician running the surveillance equipment picked up a conversation. John Markoff, who had just arrived in Raleigh to join the chase, recognized one of the voices. It was the well-known founder of the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, Eric Corley (though he preferred going by his chosen handle, Emmanuel Goldstein, after a character in the novel 1984). Moments later, above the hiss and static and intermittent reception, they heard the voice on the other end of the conversation. Markoff recognized that one, too.
“It’s him,” Markoff shouted. “It’s Mitnick!”
THIRTY-SIX
An FBI Valentine
Lsar JSA cryoi ergiu lq wipz tnrs dq dccfunaqi zf oj
uqpctkiel dpzpgp I jstcgo cu dy hgq?
February 14, Valentine’s Day. I wrote up some more résumés and cover letters, then, later in the evening, started poking around again in the accounts of all the system administrators at the Well. I was looking for any evidence that I was being watched or that my stash of software had been discovered. I didn’t find anything that set off alarm bells.
Feeling like taking a break, at about 9 p.m., I headed for the gym and spent an hour on the StairMaster and then another hour lifting weights. After a long, relaxing shower, I went to grab some dinner at a twenty-four-hour restaurant. I was a vegetarian at the time, so the menu wasn’t all that appealing to me, but it was the only place open so late.
A little after midnight, I rolled into the parking lot at the Players Club. The lights were off in most of the apartments. I was oblivious to the surveillance net the Feds had set up while I was out.
I logged on to the Well to take a look around. As I changed the passwords on several new dormant accounts just for insurance, again