Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [182]
Once I was back in the general population of the prison, I spoke to John Yzurdiaga and Richard Steingard over the phone. There was a tension in John’s voice I’d never heard before. To my surprise, both men started grilling me about state secrets. “Exactly what kind of confidential information did you have access to? Have you hacked into any U.S. intelligence agencies?”
When I understood what they were getting at, I laughed out loud. “Right. Like I’m a spy, engaged in some sort of secret espionage!” I said.
Neither one of them laughed.
“Don’t lie to us, Kevin,” John said, sounding alarmingly earnest. “This is the time to come clean.”
I blinked in disbelief. “Come on, guys—you’re kidding, right?”
Then Richard dropped the bomb: “Assistant U.S. Attorney Schindler is demanding that you agree to a CIA debriefing.”
What the hell was going on? Sure, I’d hacked the world’s most popular cellular phone manufacturers, Bell operating companies, and operating-system development houses throughout the United States, but I’d never even attempted to go after any government targets. How could the Feds have made that leap? The accusation was completely unfounded.
“I don’t have anything to hide,” I said with a sigh. “I’ll participate in the debriefing so long as it’s understood that I won’t inform on anyone else.” I didn’t have any knowledge of anyone who had hacked into government or military systems, but even so, it was against my ethical and moral principles to become a snitch for the government.
In the end, nothing ever came of it. Maybe Schindler or the Justice Department was just on a fishing expedition. It made me think back to the time when Marty Stolz at Intermetrics secretly told me that the super-hacker the Feds were chasing had compromised the CIA. I chalked it up to one more instance of the myth getting out of hand.
In medieval times, the myths that built up around magicians used to cause them serious trouble. Sometimes these myths and superstitions even got them killed. A traveling performer would amaze the local villagers with tricks and sleights of hand. Because they had no idea how he was doing those tricks, they couldn’t guess at the extent of his abilities. He seemed to have the power to make things appear and disappear at will. That was the point. But if anything went wrong—some cows died, the crops failed, little Sarah got sick—it was all too easy to blame the magician.
If things had been different, I might secretly have enjoyed being called “the World’s Most Wanted Hacker” and laughed it off when people believed I was a super-genius who could hack into anything. But I had a bad feeling that it was going to cost me—and I was right. The “Myth of Kevin Mitnick” was about to make my life a whole lot harder.
Because I was such a high-profile inmate, I soon needed John Yzurdiaga to intervene again. The head jailer was opening all my mail, including the letters from my attorneys, which violated my attorney-client privilege. I told him to stop. He kept right on doing it. I warned him that my lawyer would get the court to order him to stop. He ignored me.
John got the court order. The jailer had to comply, but he was furious about it. So he called the U.S. Marshals Service and told them to move me to another jail, which they did. The Vance County Jail made Johnston look like a Holiday Inn.
When I was being moved, a deputy U.S. Marshal with a Southern accent so thick it sounded like he was doing a bad parody of a Good Ol’ Boy sheriff laughed and said, “You’re the only prisoner we ever had that got booted out of jail!”
After I’d been in jail for about five months, my court-appointed public defender in Raleigh, John Dusenbury, recommended that I agree to what is known as a “Rule 20.” This meant that I would plead guilty to a single count of possessing the mobile phone number and electronic serial number pairs that I used for cloning my cell phone in exchange for a recommended sentence of eight months, though I might still be facing