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Then he started talking about those nighttime break-ins into phone company offices with Kevin Poulsen and another hacker, Ron Austin, to collect information and gain access to internal Pacific Bell systems. And about how he had taken part in that radio-contest phone hack, when Poulsen scored his jackpot win of the two Porsches. And, Eric said, two Hawaii vacations.

Eric said he had gotten a Porsche from that hack as well.

One thing did seem to have the ring of truth: he told us how the Feds had caught Poulsen. They found out he did his grocery shopping at a particular Hughes Market, so they kept dropping by and showing his photo to the staff. When Poulsen came in one day, Eric said, a couple of the shelf stackers recognized him. They tackled him and held him until the cops arrived.

Lewis, who had a need to show how smart he was, pulled out his Novatel PTR-825 cell phone and did a big spiel about how he’d “changed the ESN on this phone.” So Eric boasted about having done the same with his Oki 900, which wasn’t really such a big deal because by that time there was already software available online for that. Then he talked about a ham radio repeater on frequency 147.435, the one I thought of as the “animal house.” Uh-oh, I wouldn’t have thought he’d know about that, and from now on I’d have to be careful not to say anything over the repeater that I wouldn’t want Eric to hear from me.

And then we got on to the major subject of interest: hacking into Pacific Bell. Eric was obviously trying to establish that we should trust him because he had access to every Pacific Bell system.

Okay, I had thought there were very few phreakers—hardly any—who knew as much about Pacific Bell systems as Lewis and I did. Yet Eric seemed to have a knowledge that was at our level. Very impressive.

This one floored me: he claimed Poulsen had broken into the office of Terry Atchley, of Pacific Bell Security, and light-fingered the file on himself… and the one on me. And he said Poulsen had made a copy of my entire file that he had given to him as a gift.

“You have a copy of my file?”

“Yeah.”

Even though the file was supposedly lifted from Terry Atchley’s office several years ago, I said, “Hey, man, I really wanna see a copy of it.”

“I’m not sure where it is. I’ll have to look for it.”

“Well, at least give me some idea of what’s in it. How much do they know about what I was doing back then?”

He suddenly became noncommittal, talking around my question instead of answering it. Either he had never had the file or he was holding out on me for some reason. I was annoyed that he wouldn’t tell me anything about what was in it. Yet I didn’t want to push too hard, especially at our first meeting.

The conversation went on, but Eric always came back to asking us what we had going—meaning what hacking we were doing. Uncool. Lewis and I both gave him different variations of “You tell us some of what you know, we’ll tell you some of what we know.”

Now it was time for Lewis and me to shock our new wannabe companion right out of his socks. Lewis was playing his role to the fullest. Sounding arrogant as hell, he said, “Eric, we have a present for you.” He took out a floppy disk, reached across the table, and in a typical De Payne in-your-face gesture, shoved it into the drive of Eric’s laptop.

After a few moments of whirring, a display popped up on the screen: a listing of all the protocols for SAS, items like a command such as “;ijbe” that would tell the SAS unit to perform some function like “Report current status.” These were hidden commands, buried within the SAS controller, never known to the phone company test technicians or needed by them, but granting far more control over SAS than even those techs had.

Eric understood enough about SAS to recognize that this list was authentic and something he himself had never had access to.

He looked both shocked and angry that Lewis and I had been able to get hold of something he didn’t have. In a lowered voice, he growled, “How the fuck did you get this?” I thought that was