Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [79]
“I don’t know.”
Lewis pushed: “Just say yes, so he’ll quit asking.”
Eric said, “I would think no. I think it’s just the phone company.”
“Well, if they’re going to monitor all the lines at the place I work, they’re going to have to listen to thousands of calls a month,” Lewis answered.
The next day, with me listening over speakerphone, Eric called Lewis, who started by asking, “Are you calling from a secure line?”
Eric answered, “Yes, I’m calling from a pay phone,” and then launched into another of his “You’ve got to respect my privacy” complaints.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, he asked Lewis, “Have you installed any of the CLASS features at work?”
He was referring to “custom local area signaling services” such as caller ID, selective call forwarding, return call, and other features that weren’t available to the general public. If Lewis said yes, he would be confessing to an illegal act.
Before Lewis had a chance to deny it, we heard a call waiting signal on Eric’s end.
I said to Lewis, “Since when do pay phones have call waiting!?”
Eric muttered that he had to get off the line for a minute. When he came back on, I challenged him about whether he was calling from a pay phone. Eric changed his story, now saying he was calling from a girlfriend’s.
While Lewis continued the conversation, I called Eric’s apartment. A man answered. I tried again, in case I had misdialed. Same man. I told Lewis to press him about it.
Lewis said, “Some guy is answering your home phone. What the hell is this all about, Eric?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
But Lewis kept pressing. “Who’s in your apartment, Eric?”
“Well, I don’t know what’s going on. No one’s supposed to be in my apartment. I’m going to go check it out,” he answered. “With all the stuff that’s happening, I’m going into secure mode. Keep me posted.” And he hung up.
So many lies about little things that didn’t matter.
Eric was becoming a mystery to solve, equal to the mystery of the intercept boxes. So far, all I had on that was three numbers originating from somewhere in Oakland that were connected to the boxes.
Where, physically, were the monitor calls originating from? Not very difficult to find out. I simply called MLAC, the Mechanized Loop Assignment Center, provided one of the phone numbers, and was given the physical address where the telephone line was located: 2150 Webster Street, Oakland, the offices of Pacific Bell’s Security Department. They had previously been located in San Francisco but had since moved across the bay.
Great. But that was just one of the numbers. I wanted to know all of the numbers Pacific Bell Security was using to connect to its secret monitoring boxes. I asked the MLAC lady to look up the original service order that had established the one phone number I had already discovered. As I expected, the order showed that multiple other phone numbers—about thirty of them—had been set up at the same time. And they were originating from what I thought of as the “wiretapping room,” where they were recording the intercepts. (Actually, I would find out much later that there was no dedicated wiretapping room; when a call started on any of the lines being monitored, it would be captured on a voice-activated recorder on the desk of whichever security investigator was handling that case, to be listened to whenever he or she had the opportunity.)
Now that I had the monitor numbers, I needed to figure out where each one was calling out to. First I called each of the numbers, knowing that any of them that didn’t give me a busy signal must not be actively in use for wiretapping; those, I ignored.
For all the others, the ones that were currently in use for intercepts, I called the Oakland SCC and social-engineered a switch tech into performing a query call memory (QCM) command on the DMS-100 switch serving that number (a QCM gives the last phone number called from that phone). With this new information, I now had a list of dial-up monitor numbers for each active Pacific Bell