from the january issue of Wired
exile.com
Five years behind bars for hacking wasn't punishment enough. Meet the
Amazing Modemless Man.
By Kevin Poulsen
It's Tuesday, June 4, 1996, and I'm heading toward a minimall with a
battered army backpack dangling from my hand, straps trailing on the
asphalt. The cheap canvas shoes I'm wearing tear against the rocky
surface of the parking lot, and I'm squinting in the harsh afternoon
light. But I'm happy. The honking horns from the freeway, the fumes
from a gas station, the children screaming as their mother drags them
from the back of a station wagon - these are the most beautiful things
in the world.
Luck is on my side today: The minimall is blessed with a church thrift
store. A bell hanging from the doorknob jingles as I walk in, and a
kind-looking woman smiles from behind the counter. I smile back
meekly, drop the backpack by the door, and look around the tiny shop.
In a few minutes I've found some ragged jeans, undersized Reeboks, and
a book bag from a Pacific Bell technical conference. I change in the
dressing room. The woman smiles again, perhaps knowingly, as I pay her
from a manila envelope.
I briefly consider donating the backpack and my old khaki pants but
decide to throw them away outside instead. I swagger out into the
parking lot to wait for my ride, secure in my normalcy. I don't think
anyone noticed me get out of the government-issue pickup truck by the
side of the road an hour ago. Aside from my overly pale complexion,
there's nothing to set me apart now. No one could tell I've just been
released from federal prison in Dublin, California.
I light up a smoke and pace while I wait for Mark to pick me up. I
know Mark from the '80s, when we shared a condo near the Silicon
Valley defense contractor where we both worked. But I'm not thinking
about the past, or the future. I'm in the moment - I catch myself
standing with my arms outstretched, unconsciously reaching out to the
open space around me.
Then I notice it: a billboard along the freeway embankment. I'm not
even aware of what it's advertising. All I see is the cryptic string
of letters at the bottom, beginning with "http://" and ending with
".com." I stare at it, gaping. I know what an Internet domain looks
like, and I've seen plenty of billboards in my life, but together they
pose an incongruity that I can't wrap my mind around. I had heard
things on the inside, of course. I knew the world had changed - it's
been five years, after all. But I'm totally unprepared for this visual
evidence. As I stare, the cigarette burns down to my fingers.
Prehistory is seldom exciting; you rarely know that the events of a
particular time and place will someday be the stuff of legend. People
who went to high school with Bill Gates didn't know he would become so
important in their memories of adolescence that they would repeat
endlessly, "I went to high school with Bill Gates."
So it was with the Internet in the '80s. It was insular and
cloistered, a little weird. It was an email system, a research tool, a
taxpayer-funded computer geek's toy. It dealt in telnet, FTP, TCP/IP,
ICMP, packet switching, and gateways. An Internet address on your
business card was de rigueur in the defense world, but it was strange
to outsiders - the hallmark of a reclusive drone who spent too much
time staring into a computer. The Net was your amusing but nerdy
friend who would never amount to anything much.
That was the Internet I left behind when I went to prison in 1991,
convicted of phone hacking (while being cleared of several more
serious charges involving national-security violations). When I walked
out five years later, the Net had evolved into a thriving parallel
universe so unprecedented that the populace had drawn from science
fiction to christen it "cyberspace."
"The Web really isn't that amazing," Mark explained as we drove south
toward San Jose and my flight home to Los Angeles. "It's built on a
protocol called HTTP, which is really just a file transfer system like
FTP."
"And it's mostly used for advertising, right?" I said, remembering the
billboard.
Mark quit trying to explain and offered to show me. After a two-hour
drive into the Valley, he turned into a quiet cul-de-sac where shade
trees and perfect lawns garnished a ring of ranch-style homes. Pulling
his new sports car to the curb, he told me to wait while he made a
quick pit stop, then dashed into the House the Internet Built.
In the half decade I was away, Mark had parlayed his networking
expertise into a successful business, something called a "Web hosting"
service. The largest of his house's seven rooms was going to be
devoted to his computers, but because he'd just moved in, the
equipment was still set up at our old condo.
We zipped over to the condo and slipped into the computer room - the
space was neat, quiet, well organized, enveloped in the white noise of
cooling fans. Mark sidled up to a Sun workstation and tapped a few
keystrokes, and the screen filled with text and graphics. "This," he
explained, "is a Web site."
In my absence, the Internet evolved from a geeky cloister into a
thriving parallel universe.
"This'll be fun," he said, typing again.
The page changed. The word "AltaVista" appeared. Then Mark did
something very scary: He typed in my name. After a few seconds, the
page filled with brief excerpts, some of them in French and German,
from what I assumed were other Web sites. The total number of search
matches appeared at the bottom. It was a four-digit number.
Mark grinned at my stunned expression and clicked on one of the
excerpts. The screen went black, then reassembled itself beneath the
headline "A Crime by Any Other Name":
He may have seen himself as above the law, a computer hacker who used
his talents strictly for juvenile fun and the pursuit of knowledge.
But Kevin Poulsen's actions turned into the first-ever espionage case
against a hacker... He is being held pending trial in San Francisco
for theft of classified information.
The ersatz news article was copyrighted by the Church of Scientology.
Scientologists?
On this vast new medium, which had become so ubiquitous that
advertisers could put Web addresses on billboards with no further
explanation, people were talking about me. The Web clearly was much
more than just advertising.
And for the duration of the next three years, I would be excluded from
the whole thing.
It was straightforward enough. I was released from prison as the first
American to be banned from the Internet. Much as securities swindlers
are typically barred from the stock market, my computer-crime
convictions dictated that I should, for an extended period, be kept
offline for the good of society.
On the most practical level, this forecast a kind of internal exile
for me. Back home in LA, I set myself to the banal tasks of reentering
society: replacing my lost driver's license and Social Security card,
finding a place to live - and getting a job that didn't require
computer access. Everything was the same, but completely different. I
felt certain every home now had a PC and a modem - the phone lines
snaking down the street were no longer just conduits for phone calls,
but rather part of a shadow nation beyond my reach. I needed a
diplomatic presence. I needed a Web site.
I wanted to compose a one-way message to the citizens of cyberspace,
but I knew nothing about their language and customs. I approached my
mission with a new appreciation for the anxieties NASA scientists must
have felt in the 1970s when they inscribed a message to alien
civilizations on the Voyager deep-space probes. I culled some legal
documents about my case (you can never go wrong with raw data), banged
out some explanatory text, and snail-mailed it all to Lile, a Northern
California abstract painter who had mastered Web design while creating
art.net, an online gallery for other artists. She had offered to
cobble together a Web page for me - an online presence was permissible
through a third party - so my fingers need never touch a forbidden
keyboard.
I dropped a photo of myself into the package; whatever else it might
be, I gathered that the new Internet was a multimedia thing.
Lile worked fast, and I received my first trickle of feedback a week
later. "Your page is getting a hundred hits a day," she announced over
the phone. One hundred people, every day, taking the trouble to find
my page out of untold thousands, learning my story.
"That's good, right?"
"Not particularly."
Now my parents complain about slow modems, and offering URL is as
natural as breathing.
It's a few months after my release, and I'm having dinner with my
parents. And they're talking about computers: the speed of their
modem, the slowness of their ISP, "spam." My dad, it seems, has just
got in his first flame war on some kind of automotive forum. Flame
wars are an artifact of the Internet I knew. But my dad ... in a flame
war. It's a difficult concept - I might as well have run into him at a
rave.
My father, a retired auto mechanic, and my mother, a retired
schoolteacher, had never had much use for computers. But the Internet
boom, coupled with the hype surrounding Windows 95, gave them a reason
to buy their first. Now they surf the Web from the same room where I,
as a teenager, used a TRS-80 and a 300-baud modem to go online. Now
they understand.
By this summer of 1996, Mom and Dad have become fonts of knowledge on
everything from obscure business news to information about distant
branches of the family tree. Dad credits the Internet with much of his
success in playing the stock market. He's addicted to instant quotes
and online business news. And he's always ready with a new joke -
something impossibly topical, as though he has a personal gag writer
standing by with a copy of tomorrow's newspaper. The quips are always
funny, but whenever I try retelling one to a friend, I don't get far.
"Heard it," they interrupt. "That's an old one."
I see other Net influences every day now. Everyone, it seems, has
voicemail - or their answering machines are perpetually on so they can
screen their calls. The telephone network has become vacant and
inhuman; people have abandoned spontaneous voice communication in
their rush online; businesses force me through five layers of a
multiple-choice, prerecorded hierarchy before allowing me even to
leave a message. And if I somehow succeed in getting a flesh-and-blood
human on the other end of the line, I know what to expect: "What's
your email address?"
"I'm, uh, not on the Internet."
This is invariably followed by a moment of awkward silence. Most
netizens, it seems, regard offliners with the same mixture of pity and
contempt they reserve for panhandlers. Odd, since the vast majority of
American households get along fine without Internet access. But the
reaction, at least in the circles I travel in, is that there must be
something wrong with you.
People rarely have the courage to ask me why I'm not online, though -
it's as if just hearing the answer might condemn them to a similar
fate. When someone does ask, I offer the nutshell version, and the
nature of the sympathy I receive is still surprising: "Five years in
prison? Well, you did commit a crime. But being barred from the
Internet? That's inhumane!"
Even people who know sometimes forget. This evening, at my parents',
my mother says, "There's an article for you on the refrigerator." It's
a clipping that not-so-subtly reflects Mom and Dad's concern over the
nicotine habit I picked up in the Big House: "Web Helps Smokers Kick
the Habit." A series of Web addresses is included. Though my parents
know that using the Internet would be as harmful to my liberty as
smoking is to my health, I don't blame them; I've grown accustomed to
such forgetfulness. Offering URL seems to have become as natural as
breathing.
Constantly, gently, I was trying to persuade my probation officer to
let me online. After my first year of freedom, he permitted me to use
a computer at home for wordprocessing - provided it was modem-free. I
had to submit a copy of my phone bill each month so he could inspect
it for computer dialups. One month, I circled the URL www.gte.com at
the bottom of the bill and impulsively scribbled a note: "Ever notice
how ubiquitous these things are?"
We talked about this issue at length nearly every time we met, and he
was neither reactionary nor dogmatic, reasoning intelligently and
listening willingly. Maybe it's just Stockholm syndrome, but I almost
came to think of him as a friend.
Still, he dealt with drug addicts on a daily basis, and he'd spotted
the same demonic gleam in my eye. Computers can be addictive, he
explained, the Internet even more so, and he was responsible not only
for encouraging my rehabilitation, but for protecting society from a
known bit junkie.
Though I didn't have a modem, I eventually left my minimum-wage job as
a political canvasser and went to work "on" the Net. With the Internet
becoming indispensable to millions of Americans, I began making the
media rounds as the Amazing Modemless Man. The interviews I gave about
life as an information have-not led to a surprising offer - as a
wordsmith on the World Wide Web.
ZDTV, the broadcast division of Ziff-Davis, was launching Your
Computer Channel, a 24-hour cable TV network dedicated to computers
and the Internet. I was offered a job as a columnist for the companion
ZDTV Web site, an online brand extension of the cable channel. My
editor would fax me reader mail and send along Web-site printouts and
online searches for phone numbers (directory-assistance operators, as
if sensing their impending obsolescence, no longer bothered to give
accurate information).
"Could I use WebTV to hack the Pentagon and launch nukes?" I asked
the salesman. "No," he laughed uneasily. "Unless you were really
good."
The irony wasn't lost on me. Writing for the Web put me in the unusual
position of reporting and opining to an audience that had far greater
access to raw data than I did (not to mention having direct access to
my columns). My phone bill crawled into the hundreds of dollars as I
reached out to netizens through the path of greatest resistance.
Eighteen months after my release, with one year of probation
remaining, my probation officer was ready to let me loose on the Net.
But the proposal came with a caveat: I had to find an Internet service
provider that would agree to monitor my actions and give my PO access
to the traffic reports on demand.
Yes! I was in. I now knew enough about the Net from the mainstream
media to suppose that it was as rife with surveillance and snooping as
with hardcore porn and illegal gambling. I thought it would be a
breeze.
I hit the phones, starting with a small ISP in Los Angeles.
"You want us to what?"
I explained my situation, and a dubious technician said he'd ask
around. Two days later he called back: "We just don't have the
facilities to monitor you. Sorry."
I moved up to the big ones: AOL, MSN, Prodigy, CompuServe. The poor
service reps on the other end of the phone didn't quite know what to
make of my request - they seemed to think it was a trick of some sort.
"You want us to monitor you? We don't do that, sir. We respect our
customers' privacy."
There was a glimmer of hope when I called EarthLink, where Dan Farmer,
a well-known hacker and author of the famous Unix-cracking tool Satan,
runs the security department. If anyone could keep tabs on me, it was
him. Dan thought about it, clicked through the possibilities in his
mind, and gave up after a few seconds. "I really couldn't set up
anything that you couldn't get around," he said. I think it was meant
as a compliment.
But Dan suggested an alternative: WebTV - a set-top technological
solution that, while it wouldn't provide the monitoring my PO wanted,
was so limited in functionality as to pose little risk of my bypassing
firewalls and hacking Web sites to feed my bandwidth habit.
This proposal culminated in the bizarre spectacle of my PO and me
walking into an outlet of the Good Guys!, the consumer-electronics
chain, to check out the WebTV system. The salesman fired up the unit,
demonstrated the wireless keyboard, then handed it to my PO, who soon
was completely engrossed in some baseball statistics he found at a
sports site. The addictive potential of the Net in action.
While he surfed, I started interrogating the salesman. "If I really
wanted to, could I use this system to break in to a Pentagon computer
and launch nuclear missiles?"
The salesman laughed uneasily. "No, not at all," he said, adding,
"unless you were really good."
My PO grinned and handed me the keyboard, and I quickly typed in a URL
to check out my column on the ZDTV site. It looked pretty good,
although the picture of me sucked.
As we left the store, he acknowledged that I couldn't do any harm with
WebTV. His concern shifted to my attitude. At his request, I'd been
giving him hard copies of my ZDTV columns, and he explained that he
found some of my opinions disquieting. In one piece, I had argued that
a 1997 Web-site hack directed at the Indonesian government to protest
the occupation of East Timor constituted a legitimate form of direct
political action. With ideas like that kicking around inside my head,
my PO decided it was premature to let me go online.
It was late spring 1998, and I'd nearly ended my second year as an
offliner in a connected world. I was in my apartment - pathetically
trying to simulate the Internet experience by reading the paper,
listening to NPR, and watching Headline News all at the same time -
when the phone rang. It was my new Internet liaison, a subversive Web
designer who answers only to the name Rotten. I paid for Rotten's ISP
account, and, in exchange, he maintained my Web site and collected
email from its growing readership. A sample:
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: hi
Date: Thu, 21 May 1998 08:49:16 +0300
hi i'm khalil one of the arab who would like to be the best in all.. i
don't think that you understand what i mean but i really want to be
the best. and i'll be be be be be be be be be be be be be be that. i
just wanted to contect you and to make kind of friendship with you. i
know that you are busy and you are not given any face to some ones
just like me, but i really want to be a good friend if you just sind
me a letter to conferm me that you are ready to be a friend or just to
say hi or any thing you like. i'm 18 and i'm in bahrain in the arabian
gulf. in the end i hope you more hack and good bye. i'm waiting on a
fire for the replay.
Rotten also kept me posted on breaking news. In mid-May, he said,
"Hey, did you hear? Mitnick lost his appeal."
Of course, I hadn't heard. Kevin Mitnick was the subject of Takedown,
the book by computer-security expert Tsutomu Shimomura and New York
Times reporter John Markoff, which painstakingly documented the
electronic pursuit and capture of "America's Most Wanted Computer
Outlaw." At the time of the Takedown bust in 1995, Mitnick was already
on supervised release for having hacked into a DEC computer system a
few years earlier. And with a prior conviction on his record, he
wasn't likely to receive any form of leniency.
Rotten faxed me the three-page ruling, which was emblazoned "Not for
Publication." The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that banishing
Mitnick from the online world was "no more restrictive than
necessary": Whenever he's ultimately released from prison, he'll be
barred from using computers, the Internet, and cell phones, and from
offering advice to computer users - absent the written approval of his
probation officer. And unlike me, Mitnick will be specifically
forbidden to interact with computers through a third party - a
restriction that means he may not be allowed any Net presence, not
even a Web site. (Mitnick's criminal trial is set for January 19,
1999.)
Meanwhile, the Internet invasion continued. There were terminals in
libraries and airports, and URL-saturated TV commercials and print
advertisements everywhere. I noticed many dropped the "http://" about
a year ago, and some were starting to omit the "www" as well. Domain
names like amazon.com and etrade had become household words. The radio
constantly asked, "Do you Yahoo!?" Somewhere along the line I missed
that "yahoo" had become a verb.
But I was adjusting, learning to blend. My fax machine had become my
lifeline. My desk was covered with curled, yellowing scrolls of
thermal paper - tiny rivulets from the ocean of information beyond my
horizon. I had people I could call to explain the mysterious new
jargon that was constantly washing ashore from the Net. I now screened
my calls.
The accursed question "What's your email address?" came up even more
than ever before. Now, without shame, I responded, "I'm not on the
Internet." When they asked "Why?" or "How is that possible?" I didn't
bother to explain. I just smiled and said, "Check out my Web site."
Epilogue: My PO has decided to end my electronic exile. With my
probation scheduled to expire in June, he reasons that my first
tentative steps onto the Net should take place under his supervision -
not later, when my debt to society is fully paid off. Until then,
however, one thing hasn't changed - he'll still be reviewing my phone
bills to ensure that I dial in only to a major ISP and not some
telephone company's switching-control center.
To my surprise, I feel a rush of anxiety upon first hearing the news.
After finally growing comfortable with my offliner status, I have no
idea what my first untethered day on the Internet might bring -
there's so much catching up to do, and so many possible places to
start. Just like that day more than two years ago when I stood outside
the suburban minimall, I'm poised at the gates of freedom. And once
again, I find myself wondering, Where do I go from here?
_________________________________________________________________
Kevin Poulsen recently purchased a plain-paper fax machine. He wrote
about Y2K survivalists in Wired 6.08.
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