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Surprisingly enough, Eric was more than willing to meet us for dinner. We settled on a few days later at a Hamburger Hamlet near West Los Angeles. Lewis and I were both antsy enough about the meeting that he said he would bring along some special equipment designed to ease our paranoia.
We met in the parking lot about half an hour early. When I joined him in his car, he was intently listening to a radio scanner. I didn’t have to ask what he was listening to: the scanner was programmed to pick up all of the frequencies used by the FBI, Secret Service, and U.S. Marshals. And more besides, because when the Feds were dealing with somebody they thought might be wise about technology, they often got tricky and decided to use the frequency of some other agency, like the Bureau of Prisons, or the Drug Enforcement Agency, or even the Postal Inspection Service, among others. So Lewis had those frequencies programmed as well.
The scanner wouldn’t pick up distant signals, only those strong enough to be coming from someplace close. In that era, almost all Federal law enforcement agencies were already sophisticated enough to encrypt their traffic. But we wouldn’t need to know what they were saying, just whether they were saying it nearby. If the law enforcement frequencies started buzzing, we’d get the hell out of there in a hurry.
For now, all was quiet, but just in case, Lewis slipped a couple of interesting electronic devices into his pocket as we got out of the car.
We had agreed on this restaurant because the location was convenient. The Hamburger Hamlet turned out to have a passé decor of mirrors, brass, and tile, which had the side effect of turning conversations in the supercrowded place into a noisy buzz. Perfect, since we wanted to be sure we wouldn’t be overheard by anyone at a neighboring table.
Eric had told us to look for a guy with shoulder-length blond hair and a laptop. Even among all the Hollywood types chomping into thick burgers, we had no trouble spotting him. Thin, wearing a silk shirt left open to show his chest, he looked like a rock musician—or maybe more like a guy decked out to get the standard reaction of “I know that face, but I can’t remember which band he’s with.”
We said hello, introduced ourselves, sat down, and let him know clearly, right up front, that we had no reason to think we could trust him. Lewis and I had each brought along a RadioShack Pro-43 handheld scanner, and we put them on the table in plain sight. Lewis had also brought an Optoelectronics RF Detector—a device designed to detect signals transmitted from a body mike—which he openly waved around over Eric’s body. It picked up nothing.
The whole time we were there, Eric seemed to be intensely preoccupied with scouting the horizon for female companionship, while he told nonstop stories about the fullness of his dating calendar and the details of his sexual escapades. Lewis seemed inclined to put up with and even encourage this braggart litany, but I never have trusted guys who feel the need to paint themselves to other men as ultimate Romeos. It made me wonder if any of the information Eric might give us about the phone companies—our mission’s sole purpose—could be believed, even if we could draw it out of him.
Still, at one point—at last—he dropped a tidbit into the conversation that truly got my attention. He claimed he had a master key that gave him access to every phone company central office, left over from the days when he and Kevin Poulsen were making nighttime visits to COs all over Los Angeles.
I was mostly just listening. Because I wasn’t supposed to have any interaction with other hackers, I had told Lewis to do most of the talking for us. Eric bragged about having been a sound engineer on the road, but he didn’t name any of the bands he’d worked for, which I guessed meant they were ones nobody had ever heard of. Then he tried to impress us with things he had that he was sure we didn’t: besides the master keys or door codes for all the central offices, he claimed he also had a master key for all the “B-boxes”—the phone company boxes scattered along the streets of every city, which field techs go to when they need to wire up phone lines to houses and businesses. It sounded as if he was hoping to tempt us, trying to get us to plead with him, “Could we come along on one of your break-ins?”
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 odd—why should he be angry? Maybe it was really envy that he was feeling, annoyance that he had only read the users’ manual while we had developer’s documents that revealed many more secrets and powers.
Eric started paging through the document on-screen and could see that it also had all the functional specifications and requirements. He saw it was a rich source of information that would grant any phone phreaker powers he could only dream of.
This was something like a month after he had first mentioned SAS to me in a phone conversation. Even more perplexing, what we were showing him wasn’t a photocopy but an electronic file. I could see the wheels turning: he could not have had any idea of how to do what I had done—getting hold of the developer’s design notes, and, no less, an electronic version of them, which probably didn’t exist anywhere within PacBell.
He demanded again, “How… the… fuck… did you get this?”
I told him what we had already said several times: “When you start sharing stuff with us, we’ll start sharing stuff with you.” As I said that, Lewis reached over, ejected the disk from the computer, and pocketed it.
Eric warned us, “The FBI knows about SAS because they know Poulsen was using it. They’re watching it real closely. They probably have traps on all the numbers.”
In a tone that was almost hostile, he said, “Stay away from it. You’ll get caught if you use it.” If that was just a friendly warning, why so much emotion?
At this point, Eric said he had to take a leak, got up, and headed for the men’s room. It was standard operating procedure for any hacker worthy of the name to possess all kinds of files and passwords on his computer that could get him thrown into jail. If he went out somewhere carrying his laptop, he would never let it out of his sight, not even when leaving the table for a minute or two to hit the men’s. Yet here was Eric, casually walking away and leaving his laptop not only sitting on the table but turned on, like an invitation to check out what we could find while he was gone. Lewis whipped out his frequency counter and waved it slowly back and forth, searching for transmissions. Nothing. The computer was not radioing our conversation to any team of flatfoots or Feds lurking nearby, ready to pounce on us.
I leaned over the laptop and announced to Lewis, “Man, that guy really knows his shit!” What a laugh—I only said it because I was sure there was some kind of tiny recorder planted in it, recording every word. Otherwise he would never have left it on the table. Here was a guy so paranoid that for weeks he wouldn’t give us his pager number, and now all of a sudden he was trusting us with his laptop? No way.
I figured he probably had some confederate at another table, watching us to make sure we didn’t just snatch the thing and run. Otherwise he wouldn’t have dared leaving a computer with a ton of information on it that could incriminate him under the control of a pair of guys he was only just meeting for the first time.
When we were finished with dinner and starting to leave, Eric asked, “If you’ve got a car, can you drop me off? It’s not very far.” Sure, I said, why not?
He started out friendly, telling me about the time not long before when he was tooling along Sunset Boulevard on his motorcycle and a car turned left directly across his path. The impact sent him flying over the car; he hit the ground so hard that his leg broke halfway between knee and ankle, with the lower part bent backward at a ninety-degree angle. The doctors and therapists worked on restoring his leg for five months, until finally Eric told them to go ahead and amputate it. But the prosthesis was so good that after physical therapy in rehab, he was able to walk without a noticeable limp.
The story was probably meant to put me in a sympathetic mood. Now he shifted gears and said, “I’m angry about your getting into SAS. After four weeks, you’ve got more information than I do about it.”
I used this to needle him: “We know a lot more than you think, Eric.”
But I was still being cautious, so I told him, “Lewis and I aren’t actively hacking; we just want to trade information.”
As he left the car to go into a jazz club on Sunset Boulevard, I thought to myself that this guy seemed to possess a keen intellect and a quick wit. Despite my suspicions, I still believed Lewis and I might be able to trade information with him at some point down the road.