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9780684818627

Cyberpunk Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Revised

by
  • ISBN13:

    9780684818627

  • ISBN10:

    0684818620

  • Format: Paperback
  • Copyright: 1995-11-01
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Supplemental Materials

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Summary

Using the exploits of three international hackers,Cyberpunkprovides a fascinating tour of a bizarre subculture populated by outlaws who penetrate even the most sensitive computer networks and wreak havoc on the information they find -- everything from bank accounts to military secrets. In a book filled with as much adventure as any Ludlum novel, the authors show what motivates these young hackers to access systems, how they learn to break in, and how little can be done to stop them.

Author Biography

Katie Hafner is a contributing editor at Newsweek, where she covers technology. She has also written for Business Week, The New Republic, The New York Times, and Wired. She is currently working on a history of the Internet.

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What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

PART ONE

Kevin: The Dark-Side Hacker

The Roscoe Gang

It was partnership, if not exactly friendship, that kept the group together. Each member possessed a special strength considered essential for what needed to be done. Roscoe was the best computer programmer and a natural leader. Susan Thunder prided herself on her knowledge of military computers and a remarkable ability to manipulate people, especially men. Steven Rhoades was especially good with telephone equipment. And aside from his sheer persistence, Kevin Mitnick had an extraordinary talent for talking his way into anything. For a while, during its early days in 1980, the group was untouchable.

Susan was infatuated with Roscoe, but she never cared much for his constant companion, Kevin Mitnick. For his part, Kevin barely gave Susan the time of day. They learned to tolerate one another because of Roscoe. But for all their mutual hostility, Susan and Kevin shared a fascination with telephones and the telephone network; it was a fascination that came to dominate their lives. Susan, Kevin, Roscoe and Steven were "phone phreaks." By their own definition, phreaks were telephone hobbyists more expert at understanding the workings of the Bell System than most Bell employees.

The illegality of exploring the nooks and crannies of the phone system added a sense of adventure to phreaking. But the mechanical components of telephone networks were rapidly being replaced by computers that switched calls electronically, opening a new and far more captivating world for the telephone underground. By 1980, the members of this high-tech Los Angeles gang weren't just phone phreaks who talked to each other on party lines and made free telephone calls. Kevin and Roscoe, in particular, were taking phone phreaking into the growing realm of computers. By the time they had learned how to manipulate the very computers that controlled the phone system, they were calling themselves computer hackers.

Kevin was the only one of the original group to go even deeper, to take an adolescent diversion to the point of obsession. Susan, Roscoe and Steve liked the control and the thrill, and they enjoyed seeing their pranks replayed for them in the newspapers. But almost a decade later it would be Kevin, the one who hid from publicity, who would come to personify the public's nightmare vision of the malevolent computer hacker.

Born in Altona, Illinois, in 1959, Susan was still an infant when her parents, struggling with an unhappy marriage, moved to Tujunga, California, northeast of the San Fernando Valley. Even after the move to paradise, with the implicit promise of a chance to start afresh, Susan's family continued to unravel. Susan was a gawky, buck-toothed little girl. Rejected and abused, at age eight she found solace in the telephone, a place where perfect strangers seemed happy to offer a kind word or two. She made friends with operators, and began calling random numbers in the telephone book, striking up a conversation with whomever she happened to catch. Sometimes she called radio disc jockeys.

After her parents divorced, Susan dropped out of the eighth grade, ran away to the streets of Hollywood and adopted the name Susy Thunder. Susan didn't make many friends, but she did know how to feed herself. Before long, she was walking Sunset Boulevard, looking for men in cars who would pay her for sex. She cut a conspicuous figure next to some of the more diminutive women on the street. Barely out of puberty, Susan was already approaching six feet.

When she wasn't walking the streets, she was living in a hazy, drug-filtered world as a hanger-on in the L.A. music scene, a rock-star groupie. Susan was a bruised child developing into a bruised adult. Quaalude was her medium of choice for spiriting her away from reality, and when Quaalude was scarce, she switched to alcohol and heroin. Her mother finally put her into a nine-month rehabilitation program; she was abruptly thrown out midcourse. Conflicting stories of Susan's ouster were in keeping with the blurry line between fact and myth that described her life. As Susan was to tell it, the adulation of power she developed as a groupie compelled her to single out the most powerful male staff member at the treatment center and seduce him. Another story, circulated by Susan's detractors, is that the male staff member for whom she left the program "sold" her services to a brothel.

Susan found an apartment in Van Nuys and retreated once again to the telephone, taking comfort in knowing that with the telephone she could gain access to a world of her own conjuring and shut it out whenever she chose. She began calling the telephone conference lines that were springing up all over Los Angeles in the late 1970s. By dialing a conference-line number, Susan could connect herself to what sounded like cross talk, except that she was heard by the others and could join in the conversation. Some conference-line callers were teenagers who dialed up after school; others were housewives who stayed on all day, tuning in and out between household chores but never actually hanging up the phone. By nightfall, many of the conference lines turned into telephonic sex parlors, the talk switching from undirected chitchat to explicit propositions.

One day in early 1980 Susan discovered HOBO-UFO, one of the first "legitimate" conference lines in Los Angeles in that its owners used their own conferencing equipment instead of piggybacking on the phone company's facilities. Drawing hundreds of people every day, HOBO-UFO was run from the Hollywood apartment of a young college student who called himself Roscoe. A friend of Roscoe's named Barney financed the setup, putting up the money for the multiple phone lines and other equipment while Roscoe provided the technical wherewithal. Susan decided she couldn't rest until she had met Roscoe, the power behind it all. But to achieve that goal, Susan knew she would have to abandon her disembodied telephone persona. She liked describing herself to men over the telephone. She knew from experience that all she had to do was mention that she was a six-foot-two blond and she wouldn't have to wait long for a knock at the door. She was right. No sooner did she deliver the description than Roscoe came calling.

The woman who greeted Roscoe was exactly as she had described herself. Susan had dressed up and made her face up carefully for the big date. But she could not conceal certain physical oddities. Her long face displayed a set of teeth so protrusive as to produce a slight speech impediment. And there was something incongruous about her large frame: her upper torso was narrow and delicate, but it descended to a disproportionate outcropping of hips and heavy thighs. Roscoe, for his part, was thin and pale. His brown-framed glasses met Susan's chin. But if either Susan or Roscoe was disappointed in the other's looks, neither showed it. They went to dinner, and when Roscoe asked Susan about her line of work she told him she was a therapist and then quickly changed the subject.

A business student at the University of Southern California, Roscoe was one of the best-known phone phreaks around Los Angeles. When a reporter from a local newspaper began researching a story about conference lines, he told a few HOBO-UFO regulars that he wanted to meet Roscoe. The next day a caller greeted him by reeling off the billing name on his unlisted phone number, his home address, the year and make of his car, and his driver's license number. Then the caller announced himself: "This is Roscoe."

When Susan and Roscoe met in 1980, phone phreaking was by no means a new phenomenon. Phone phreaks had been cheating the American Telephone and Telegraph Company for years. They started out with "blue boxes" as their primary tool. Named for the color of the original device, blue boxes were rectangular gadgets that came in a variety of sizes. Sometimes they were built by electronic hobbyists, at other times by underground entrepreneurs. Occasionally they were even used by the Mafia. One of Silicon Valley's legendary companies even has its roots in blue box manufacturing. Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs, who co-founded Apple Computer in 1976, got their start in the consumer electronics business several years earlier, peddling blue boxes in college dormitories.

A blue box was universally useful because it could exploit a quirk in the design of the nation's long-distance telephone system. The device emitted a high-pitched squeal, the 2600-hertz tone that, in the heyday of the blue boxers, controlled the AT&T long-distance switching system. When phone company equipment detected the tone, it readied itself for a new call. A series of special tones from the box allowed the blue box user to dial anywhere in the world. Using these clever devices, phone phreaks navigated through the Bell System from the palms of their hands. Tales abounded of blue boxers who routed calls to nearby pay phones through the long-distance lines of as many as fifteen countries, just for the satisfaction of hearing the long series of clicks and kerchunks made by numerous phone companies releasing their circuits. Blue boxes were soon joined by succeeding generations of boxes in all colors, each serving a separate function, but all designed to skirt the computerized record-keeping and switching equipment that the phone company uses for billing calls.

The phone phreaking movement reached its zenith in the early 1970s. One folk hero among phreaks was John Draper, whose alias, "Captain Crunch," derived from a happy coincidence: he discovered that the toy whistle buried in the Cap'n Crunch cereal box matched the phone company's 2600-hertz tone perfectly.

Tending to be as socially maladroit as they were technically proficient, phone phreaks were a bizarre group, driven by a compulsive need to learn all they could about the object of their obsession. One famous blind phreak named Joe Engressia discovered the telephone as a small child; at age eight he could whistle in perfect pitch, easily imitating the 2600-hertz AT&T signal. Joe's lips were his blue box. After graduating from college, in tireless pursuit of knowledge about the phone company, Joe crisscrossed the country by bus, visiting local phone company offices for guided tours. As he was escorted around, he would touch the equipment and learn new aspects of the phone system. Joe's ambition was not to steal revenue from the telephone company but to get a job there. But he had made a name for himself as a phreak, and despite his vast store of knowledge, the phone company could not be moved to hire him. Eventually, Mountain Bell in Denver did give him a job as a troubleshooter in its network service center and his whistling stopped. All that he had wanted was to be part of the system.

The Bell System needed people like Joe on its side. By the mid-1970s, AT&T estimated it was losing $30 million a year to telephone fraud. A good percentage of the illegal calls, it turned out, were being placed by professional white-collar criminals, and even by small businesses trying to cut their long-distance phone bills. But unable to redesign its entire signaling scheme overnight, AT&T decided to ferret out the bandits. Using monitoring equipment in various fraud "hot spots" throughout the telephone network, AT&T spent years scanning tens of millions of toll calls. By the early 1980s automated scanning had become routine and Bell Laboratories, AT&T's research arm, had devised computer programs that could detect and locate blue box calls. Relying on increasingly sophisticated scanning equipment, detection programs embedded in its electronic switches and a growing network of informants, AT&T caught hundreds of blue boxers.

In 1971, phone phreaking ventured briefly into the sphere of politics. The activist Abbie Hoffman, joined by a phone phreak who called himself Al Bell, started a newsletter calledYouth International Party Line-- orYIPLfor short. With its office at the Yippie headquarters on Bleecker Street in New York City's Greenwich Village,YIPLwas meant to be the technical offshoot of the Yippies. Hoffman's theory was that communications were the nerve center of any revolution; liberating communications would be the most important phase of a mass revolt. But Al Bell's outlook was at odds with Hoffman's; Al saw no place for politics in what was essentially a technical journal. In 1973, Al abandonedYIPLand Hoffman and moved uptown to set up shop asTAP,theTechnological Assistance Program.

Much of the information contained inTAPwas culled from AT&T's various in-house technical journals. It was information that AT&T would rather have kept to itself. And that was the point. Whereas the original phreaks like Captain Crunch got their kicks making free phone calls,TAP'sleaders, while steering clear of a hard political line, believed that the newsletter's mission was to disseminate as much information about Ma Bell as it could. By 1975, more than thirteen hundred people around the world subscribed to the four-page leaflet. For the most part, they were loners by their own admission, steeped in private technical worlds.TAPwas their ultimate handbook. Written in relentlessly technical language,TAPcontained tips on such topics as lock picking, the manipulation of vending machines, do-it-yourself pay phone slugs and free electricity.TAProutinely published obscure telephone numbers; those of the White House and Buckingham Palace were especially popular. And in 1979, during the hostage crisis in Iran,TAPpublished the phone number of the American embassy in Tehran. Every Friday evening, a dozen or soTAPpeople held a meeting at a Manhattan restaurant, many still cloaked in the ties and jackets that betrayed daytime lives spent toiling away at white-collar jobs. After work, and inside the pages ofTAP,they adopted such names as The Professor, The Wizard and Dr. Atomic.

In the late 1970s, a phone phreak who called himself Tom Edison took overTAP,bringing in another telephone network enthusiast, Cheshire Catalyst, a self-styled "techie-loner-weirdo science fiction fanatic," as one ofTAP'sprimary contributors. Tall and dark with the concave, hollow-cheeked look of someone rarely exposed to sunlight, Cheshire had been phreaking since the sixties. He discovered the telephone at age twelve, and learned to clip the speaker leads of the family stereo onto a telephone plug so that he could put the handset to his ear and listen to the radio while doing his homework. If his mother entered the room, he just had to hang up the receiver. By the time he was nineteen, Cheshire had become a telex maven, having programmed his home computer to simulate a telex machine. Before long he was sending telex pen-pal messages around the world. In his twenties, already a veteranTAPreader, Cheshire moved to Manhattan, got a job at a bank in computer support and joined theTAPinner circle.

TAPwasn't exactly a movement. It was an attitude, perhaps best described as playful contempt for the Bell System. One elderly woman from the Midwest sent her subscription check along with a letter to Tom Edison saying that although she would never do any of the things described inTAP,she wanted to support those people who were getting back at the phone company.

As one responsible for keepingTAPunassailable, Cheshire didn't sully his hands with blue boxes, and he paid his telephone bills scrupulously. Out of corporate garb, he and his friends stayed busy irking Ma Bell through their constant wanderings inside the phone system. As Cheshire and his friends would explain to outsiders, they loved the telephone network -- it was the bureaucracy behind it they hated.

People like Cheshire lived not so much to defraud corporate behemoths as to home in on their most vulnerable flaws and take full playful advantage of them. Beating the system was a way of life. Flying from New York to St. Louis, for instance, was not a simple matter of seeking an inexpensive fare; it meant hours of research to find the cheapest route, even if it meant taking advantage of a special promotional flight from New York to Los Angeles and disembarking when the flight made a stop in St. Louis. And getting the best of AT&T, the most blindly bureaucratic monopoly of all, embodied a strike against everything worth detesting in a large corporation.

As private computer networks proliferated in the late 1970s, there came a generation of increasingly computer literate young phreaks like Roscoe and Kevin Mitnick. If the global telephone network could hold a phone phreak entranced, imagine the fascination presented by the proliferating networks that began to link the computers of the largest corporations. Using a modem, a device that converts a computer's digital data into audible tones that can be transmitted over phone lines, any clever interloper could hook into a computer network. The first requirement was a valid user identification -- the name of an authorized user of the network. The next step was to produce a corresponding password. And in the early days, anyone could root out one valid password or another.

The rising computer consciousness of the phone phreaks was inevitable as technology advanced. Electromechanical telephone switches were rapidly giving way to computerized equivalents all over the world, suddenly transforming the ground rules for riding the telephone networks. The arrival of computerized telephone switches dramatically increased the risks and the sense of danger, as well as the potential payoff. The phone company's automatic surveillance powers grew by orders of magnitude, served by silent digital sentinels that sensed the telltale signals of the electronic phone phreaks' microelectronic armory. As the peril grew, so did the sense of adventure. Whenever an outsider gained control of a central office switch or its associated billing and maintenance computers, by evading often inadequate security barriers, the control was absolute. Thus the new generation of phone phreaks could go far beyond placing free telephone calls. Anything was possible: eavesdropping, altering telephone bills, turning off an unsuspecting victim's phone service, or even changing the class of service. In one legendary hack a phone phreak had the computer reclassify someone's home phone as a pay phone. When the victim picked up the telephone, he was startled to hear a computerized voice asking him to deposit ten cents. For phone phreaks, the temptation to step up from the simpler technology of the telephone to the more complicated and powerful technology of computers was irresistible.

In 1983, just asTAPwas coming to symbolize the unification of computers and telephones, the journal came to an untimely end. Tom Edison's two-story condominium in suburban New Jersey went up in flames, the object of simultaneous burglary and arson. The burglary was professional: Tom's computer and disks -- all the tools for publishingTAP-- were taken. But the arson job was downright amateurish. Gasoline was poured haphazardly and the arsonist failed to open the windows to feed the fire. For years, Tom and Cheshire speculated that the phone company had engineered the fire, but proving it was another matter. Tom had a real-world name, a respectable job and a reputation to maintain. Cheshire rented a truck and hauled what remained of the operation -- including hundreds of back issues ofTAP,all of which escaped unsinged -- over to his place in Manhattan. But in the end,TAPdidn't survive the blow. A few months after the fire, Cheshire printed its final issue.

Meanwhile, the Southern California phreaks had been holding their equivalent ofTAPmeetings. Once a month or so, a group of phreaks, including Roscoe and occasionally Kevin, would get together informally at a Shakey's Pizza Parlor in Hollywood to talk and exchange information. But the L.A. phreaks weren't a particularly sociable bunch to begin with, and their meetings were far less organized than those on the East Coast, with fewer political overtones.

Though an avidTAPreader, Roscoe shunned blue boxes and most of the other electronic crutches of phone phreaking. They were just too easy to trace, he thought. Roscoe preferred to exploit flukes, or holes, that he and his friends found in the newly computerized telephone system. Modesty was not one of Roscoe's virtues. He claimed that he had acquired as much knowledge about the telephone system and the computers that controlled it as anyone else in the country. He kept notebooks filled with the numbers of private lines to corporations like Exxon and Ralston Purina, along with access codes to scores of computers operated by everything from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to major airlines. He boasted that he could order prepaid airline tickets, search car registrations and even get access to the Department of Motor of Vehicles' computer system to enter or delete police warrants. Whereas most pure phreaks viewed their art as a clever means of bypassing the phone company, Roscoe saw it as a potential weapon. With access to phone company computers, he could change numbers, disconnect phones or send someone a bill for thousands of dollars. Most of the numbers in his extensive log came from hours of patient exploration on a computer terminal at school. And many of the special tricks he learned from Kevin Mitnick.

Roscoe met Kevin in 1978, over the amateur radio network. When Roscoe was tuned in one day, he was startled to hear a nasty fight in progress between two hams. The control operator of the machine was accusing a fellow ham named Kevin Mitnick of making illegal long-distance telephone calls over the radio using stolen MCI codes. At the time, Roscoe knew nothing of telephones or computers. But given the vituperative tone of the angry ham, either Kevin Mitnick had done something truly terrible or he was being unjustly accused. Suspecting the latter, Roscoe switched on his tape recorder and recorded the invectives as they flew through the air. Then he got on the radio to tell Kevin that he had a tape recording of the accusations if Kevin wanted it. Sensing a potential ally, Kevin gave Roscoe a telephone number to call so that they could speak privately. As Roscoe was to find out later, Kevin had given him the number of a telephone company loop line, a number hidden in the electronic crevices of the telephone network and reserved for maintenance workers in the field who are testing circuits. Roscoe was immediately taken with this teenager, a good three years his junior, who evidently knew so much about telephones. He drove out to the San Fernando Valley to meet Kevin, gave him the tape and cemented a new friendship. Sometimes Kevin called Roscoe directly at his home in Hollywood, a toll call from the San Fernando Valley, and they talked for hours. When Roscoe asked him how a high schooler could afford it, Kevin just laughed.

When Susan met Roscoe in 1980, he had been phreaking for about a year. She fell in love with him almost at once. He was the first man she had met who displayed some intelligence and whose life didn't revolve around drugs and the drug scene. She found Roscoe's interest in computers charming, even fascinating. Roscoe was taking phone phreaking to a new level, combining his knowledge of the phone system with his growing knowledge of computers. Susan saw this as a brilliant next step for someone with a phone obsession. What was more, they were both talented at employing their voices to desired ends. They shared a faith in how much could be accomplished with a simple phone call. As a teenager, Susan had employed the technique she called psychological subversion, otherwise known as social engineering, to talk her way into backstage passes at dozens of concerts. Posing as a secretary in the office of the head of the concert production company, she could get her name added to any guest list. Susan prided herself on those skills. If she and Roscoe had anything in common, both lacked the mechanism that compels most people to tell the truth.

Roscoe and Susan started to date each other. Roscoe was attending the University of Southern California and his schedule there, he told her, let him see her only on certain nights. But that was fine with Susan, as she was holding down two jobs. One was as a switchboard operator at a telephone answering service. The more lucrative job was something she knew how to make a lot of money at: she worked for a small bordello in Van Nuys. Her counselor story didn't last long. Roscoe made it his business to learn all he could about people, and Susan was no exception. When the truth emerged about Susan's profession, Roscoe found it more amusing than scandalous.

In her head, Susan was living out a romance of her own quirky invention. In fact, the relationship between Susan and Roscoe was oddly businesslike, hardly distracted by passion. Often their dates consisted of an excursion to the USC computer center, where Roscoe would set Susan up with a computer terminal and keep her occupied with computer games while he "worked." Susan soon realized that he was using accounts at the university's computer center to log on to different computers around the country. Susan lost interest in the games and turned her attention to what Roscoe was doing. Before long, she became his protegée.

Susan developed her own talent for finessing her way into forbidden computer systems. She began to specialize in military computer systems. The information that resides in the nation's military computers isn't just any data. It represents the nation's premier power base -- the Pentagon. And in digging for military data, as Susan saw it, she, a high school dropout and teenage runaway, was just a silo away from the sort of control that truly mattered. Still, she was a beginner, far short of mastering the Defense Department's complex of computers and communications networks. What she couldn't supply in technical knowledge she compensated for with other skills. One of her methods was to go out to a military base and hang around in the officers' club, or, if she was asked to leave, in bars near the base. She would get friendly with a high-ranking officer, then act flirtatiously with him. Deploying her womanly charms, and implying that sexual favors might be granted, she persuaded these men to give her access to their systems. She would report each new success to Roscoe, who praised her profusely while making careful note of the specifics.

From her job at the bordello, Susan was taking home about $1,200 a week, and all of it came in handy. She invested every spare cent in computer and phone equipment. She installed a phone line for data transmission, and an "opinion line" she named "instant relay." Whoever dialed the "instant relay" number got Susan's commentary on topics of her own choosing. At the same time, she taught herself to use RSTS, Resource Sharing Time Sharing, the standard operating system for Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 minicomputers. (Operating systems are programs that control a computer's tasks the way an orchestra conductor controls musicians. Operating systems start and stop programs and find and store files.) For computer intruders the fascination with a computer's operating system is obvious: it is not only the master controller but also the computer's gatekeeper, regulating access and limiting the capabilities of users.

Roscoe often employed Susan's Van Nuys apartment as a base of operations. He was usually accompanied by his younger cohort, the plump and bespectacled Kevin Mitnick. Kevin was the kind of kid who would be picked last for a school team. His oversize plaid shirts were seldom tucked in, and his pear-shaped body was so irregular that any blue jeans would be an imperfect fit. His seventeen years hadn't been easy. When Kevin was three, his parents separated. His mother, Shelly, got a job as a waitress at a local delicatessen and embarked on a series of new relationships. Every time Kevin started to get close to a new father, the man disappeared. Kevin's real father was seldom in touch; he remarried and had another son, athletic and good-looking. During Kevin's junior high school years, just as he was getting settled into a new school, the family moved. It wasn't surprising that Kevin looked to the telephone for solace.

Susan and Kevin didn't get along from the start. Kevin had no use for Susan, and Susan saw him as a hulking menace with none of Roscoe's charm. What was more, he seemed to have a malicious streak that she didn't see in Roscoe. This curiously oafish friend of Roscoe's always seemed to be busy carrying out revenge of one sort or another, cutting off someone's phone service or harassing people over the amateur radio. At the same time, Kevin was a master of the soothing voice who aimed at inspiring trust, then cooperation. Kevin used his silken entreaties to win over even the most skeptical keepers of passwords. And he seemed to know even more about the phone system than Roscoe. Kevin's most striking talent was his photographic memory. Presented with a long list of computer passwords for a minute or two, an hour later Kevin could recite the list verbatim.

Roscoe and Kevin prided themselves on their social engineering skills; they assumed respect would come if they sounded knowledgeable and authoritative, even in subject areas they knew nothing about. Roscoe or Kevin would call the telecommunications department of a company and pose as an angry superior, demanding brusquely to know why a number for dialing out wasn't working properly. Sufficiently cowed, the recipient of the call would be more than glad to explain how to use the number in question.

While Kevin's approach was more improvisational, Roscoe made something of a science out of his talent for talking to people. He kept a separate notebook in which he listed the names and workplaces of various telephone operators and their supervisors. He noted whether they were new or experienced, well informed or ignorant, friendly and cooperative or slow and unhelpful. He kept an exhaustive list of personal information obtained from hours of chatting: their hobbies, their children's names, their ages and favorite sports and where they had just vacationed.

Roscoe and Kevin didn't phreak or break into computers for money. Secret information, anything at all that was hidden, was what they prized most highly. They seldom if ever tried to sell the information they obtained. Yet some of what they had was eminently marketable. Roscoe's notebooks, filled with computer logins and passwords, would have fetched a tidy sum from any industrial spy. But phreaking to them was a form of high art that money would only cheapen. Roscoe especially thrived on the sense of power he derived from his phreaking. Presenting a stranger with a litany of personal facts and watching him or her come unhinged gave Roscoe his greatest pleasure.

Another frequent visitor to Susan's apartment was Steve Rhoades, a puckish fifteen-year-old from Pasadena with straight brown hair that cascaded down to the middle of his back. His timid intelligence and easy manner had a way of catching people off guard. He was an expert phreak who had earned a grudging respect from the Pacific Bell security force -- the very people he loved to taunt. So adept was he at manipulating his telephone service from the terminal box on the telephone pole outside his house that the phone company re


Excerpted from Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier by Katie Hafner, John Markoff
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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