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The fact that the two Sprint people were ashen-faced as they rushed out of the room made the situation clear enough: Sprint was probably still using the same CALRS devices, programmed with the identical Seed List, and Pongracz and her colleague must have recognized that I could hack into CALRS anytime I liked and gain the power to wiretap any phone in Las Vegas.

Though I was vindicated, Eddie didn’t fare as well. Proving that Sprint could be hacked wasn’t the same as proving that the Mob or anybody else had actually done any hacking to reroute Eddie’s flow of calls and steal business from him. Eddie was left empty-handed.

In the fall of 2001, a whole new chapter started in my life when I was introduced to literary agent David Fugate. David thought my story was extraordinary. He quickly contacted John Wiley & Sons and proposed that I author a book on social engineering to help businesses and consumers alike protect themselves against the kinds of attacks I had been so successful at carrying out. Wiley showed enthusiasm for the deal, and David recommended a seasoned coauthor named Bill Simon to work with me in developing the book, which came to be called The Art of Deception.

For most people, landing an agent, a credited coauthor, and a legitimate publishing deal is the most difficult part of getting a book published. For me, the question was: how could I write a book without a computer?

I looked at the stand-alone word processors everybody used before the introduction of personal computers. Since they weren’t even able to communicate with other computers, I thought I had a pretty solid argument. So I presented it to my Probation Officer.

His answer was completely unexpected.

He dismissed the word-processor idea and told me I could use a laptop computer, so long as I didn’t access the Internet and promised to keep it secret from the media!

While Bill and I were writing our book, Eric Corley released Freedom Downtime, the documentary about the “Free Kevin” movement. It went a long way toward counteracting the gross inaccuracies of Takedown. It even contained footage in which John Markoff admitted that his single source for claiming I’d hacked into NORAD was a convicted phone phreak known for spreading false rumors.

When it came out, The Art of Deception quickly became an international bestseller, published in eighteen foreign editions. Even today, years later, it’s still one of Amazon’s most popular hacking books, and is on the required reading list in computer courses at a number of universities.

Around February 2003, I was unexpectedly invited to Poland to promote the book. At my first stop in Warsaw, my host offered four security guys in suits with Secret Service–type headsets to handle security. I laughed, thinking it was ridiculous. Surely I didn’t need security.

They escorted me through the back of the building into a huge shopping mall. The chatter got louder and louder until we walked out into the mall, where hundreds of fans were pressed up against a rope. When they saw me, they tried to push forward, and the security staff had to hold them back.

Thinking they must have mistaken me for some international celebrity, I started looking around for the star myself. But amazingly enough, the crowd really was there for me.

My book had become the number-one bestselling book in the entire country, even beating out a new book by Pope John Paul II. One local offered an explanation: in ex-Communist Poland, if you beat the system, you were considered a hero!

After a lifetime of hacking, always working either alone or with one partner, with the main goals of learning more about how computer systems and telecommunication systems worked and being successful at hacking into anything, I was being mobbed like a rock star. It was the last thing I’d ever expected.

One of the most personally meaningful memories of this time, however, was when the book tour took me to New York and I finally got to meet the 2600 supporters