Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [64]
When you know the lingo and terminology, it establishes credibility—you’re legit, a coworker slogging in the trenches just like your targets, and they almost never question your authority. At least, they didn’t back then.
Why was the lady in Line Assignment so willing to answer all my questions? Simply because I gave her one right answer and asked the right questions, using the right lingo. So don’t go thinking that the Pacific Bell clerk who gave me Eric’s address was foolish or slow-witted. People in offices ordinarily give others the benefit of the doubt when the request appears to be authentic.
People, as I had learned at a very young age, are just too trusting.
Maybe my venture back into hacking was excusable, or at least understandable, justified by my need to solve the riddle of my half-brother’s death. Yet I suddenly realized I had been beyond stupid: I had been using one of the three phone lines in my dad’s apartment to make all kinds of social-engineering calls to Pacific Bell, to follow leads in my Adam investigation, and to talk with Lewis.
These were all clear violations of my conditions of my supervised release. What if the Feds were monitoring my dad’s phone lines and had heard those conversations?
I needed to find out what they knew.
THIRTEEN
The Wiretapper
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Even paranoids sometimes have real enemies. One day I had a gut feeling that someone was watching me—or rather, listening to my phone conversations.
The idea had me really fretting. I was panicked about getting a call from my Probation Officer, telling me to come in for one of those visits that would mean I was about to be taken into custody again and shipped back to Federal detention, maybe even put back in solitary confinement. Scary as hell.
Our home phone service was served out of a PacBell central office in Calabasas, which covered a small territory, so if there were any intercepts, I figured I’d likely be the target. I called the CO and got a tech on the line. “Hi,” I said. “This is Terry Atchley, in Security. I think we have some of our equipment over there. We’re short on monitoring equipment, and we need some of our boxes back for another case. Could you walk around the frame and see if you have any of them?” The frame tech asked me what they looked like. Hmm—I didn’t know. I stumbled a bit and said, “It depends on the model that’s being used over there. It’s probably a small box with a miniature printer attached that’s recording the digits dialed.”
He went to look. I was nervous as hell, pacing as I waited for him to come back to the phone. I was praying he wouldn’t find anything.
Finally he came back on the line. “Yeah,” he said. My heart started beating faster, adrenaline pumping through my veins.
“I found three of your boxes. They’re small gray boxes, but as far as I could see, they don’t have printers,” the tech said.
Three boxes—probably one for each of the phone lines at the apartment I was sharing with my dad. Fuck! This was not good.
“Okay,” I told him. “If we don’t still need them there, somebody’ll come by and pick them up tomorrow. I need you to trace out the connections.”
“On which one?”
“Let’s try the first one.”
The tech asked me which side to trace. Another uh-oh—again I didn’t know how to answer. He told me the box had two connections. “Let’s trace out both and see where they go,” I said.
After several anxious minutes of waiting, I heard him come back on the line. “I had to trace this thing across the frame,” he said. I recognized that for what it was: an annoyed complaint that I had made him chase wires a considerable distance through a complicated maze running along the main distribution frame. He also told me, “On one side, I just hear a thousand-cycle tone.” That was weird. “On the other, I get a dial tone.”
But I wouldn’t be able to understand how these boxes worked until I knew what they were connected to. I asked him to disconnect