Hacking L.A.: Exploring Los Angeles Digital Underground Douglas Thomas

Hacking L.A.: Exploring Los Angeles Digital Underground Douglas Thomas Annenberg School for Communication University of Southern California (213) 740-3937 douglast@usc.edu September, 1998 1

Introduction Los Angeles stands at the cutting edge of technological innovation, change, and consumption. As a site of active reception for new technology, Los Angeles is also the site of an active hacker community which comprises a large digital underground. As with many other trends, Los Angeles, is a bellwether for the computer underground. The area, consequently, has spawned some of the most innovative techniques and some of the most notorious, high-profile hackers to date. Among them are Kevin Lee Poulsen and Kevin Mitnick, each of whom led the FBI on nationwide manhunts and, subsequently, served prison sentences for their hacking. One of the most important aspects of the cases of these Southern California hackers has to do with the manner in which local media had branded them as criminals. In LA media stories, Poulsen was charged with threatening national security and Mitnick was branded a dark-side hacker, a moniker which would stick with him for nearly 20 years. Both these descriptions would prove to have legs, leaving LA as print stories, traveling nationwide, and returning as broadcast stories-poulsen, finding himself on America s Most Wanted and Mitnick the subject of a Hollywood film. Both Poulsen and Mitnick grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and each developed phenomenal hacking skills at a very early age. What makes them different from the majority of hackers nationwide is that both Mitnick and Poulsen worked in near isolation, working with only a few close friends to develop their skills, and that neither sough any kind of publicity or exhibited a desire to make a reputation in the computer underground. Ironically, the two highest profile hackers in the nation, and perhaps the world, uncharacteristically never sought the fame (or more properly infamy) they achieved. It is not a coincidence that both Mitnick and Poulsen hail from Los Angeles. As one of the centers of technological growth, change, and development, Los Angeles offer hacker unparalleled opportunities to develop and exploit their hacking skills. Los Angeles also offered these hacker an electronic, networked playground well before most parts of the country had access to technology at all. Poulsen began his network antics on the computers of UCLA, while Mitnick utilized the computers at USC and Cal State Northridge. These networks offered the latest in technology, coupled with a low level of security and an equally low risk of getting caught. Hackers, for the most part, rely on pre-existing networks of communication, taking a basic service such as the telephone and hacking the system to gain increasing degrees of control over the system. Accordingly, hacking depends less on the hacker s personal access to technology than it does on his or her access to networks of communication that may be exploited. For example, hackers might discover ways to make free phone calls, free long distance calls, or even to manipulate the phone company computer to provide free service or features such as call waiting to themselves or friends. The same holds true for computer networks and information systems: The more dense the distribution of networks, the more opportunities the hacker has to exploit. The sheer density of information systems in Los Angeles, then, provided both opportunity and access to hacker like Mitnick and Poulsen, offering LA as a virtual electronic playground. For hackers like Mitnick and Poulsen, however, computer networks in LA, served as a gateway to a larger national and even global information infrastructure. In many ways, these hackers represent the nexus of global and local activity in a number of ways. While computers networks have served to globalize communication in a myriad 2

of ways, hacking has remained a local activity. In that sense, hacking is firmly tied to a sense of place. Because they rely on local points of access to engage in the practice of hacking, hackers concentrate on exploiting local conditions (such as rummaging through a corporation s trash, a practice known as dumpster diving ). Hackers often identify themselves by area code and it is not uncommon for hackers or hacker groups to identify themselves with a pseudonym (such as Phantom312) composed of both a name (e.g., Phantom ) and a number which represents an area (e.g., 312 for Chicago s area code). In Mitnick and Poulsen s cases, Los Angeles figured prominently in their hacking, as elements of access were often functions of locally available material, either salvaged or pilfered from local telephone company offices or through the use of local computer terminals positioned in stores or university computer labs. Historical Considerations Los Angeles hacker culture has had a sizable and significant online presence since the early 1980s. That culture developed around systems of electronic bulletin boards or BBS. The BBS was a private computer system, usually run from a hacker s home, which would function as community center or public meeting area, which allowed hackers to anonymously post and receive messages and download programs and files. Usually, these systems catered to local hacker communities, providing information such as local phone numbers for hacking and numbers and passwords for other hacker systems in the area (or area code). The BBS was the perfect medium for an underground culture to develop and flourish, allowing anybody with a computer, modem, software, and a phone line [to] start a board. With second-hand equipment and publicdomain free software, the price of a board might be quite small less than it would take to publish a magazine or even a decent pamphlet. 1 Such systems were also ideal for passing along illicit information. Because of the difficulty in regulating them (or even knowing about their existence) and their ability to offer complete anonymity to their users, the BBS provides the ideal safe space for hackers to congregate, share information, learn from one another and build their reputations. Even with the evolution of the Internet, the BBS still flourishes as an electronic meeting place for hackers, one which has remained both private and attuned to local conditions. As such, these BBS systems have provided a means for LA hackers in particular to build a community in a dense, yet segmented, communication network. Such BBS systems exist, often times in rivalry with each other, in each of the Los Angeles area codes (213, 310, 818, 562, and 626). I what follows, I trace out the cases of Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen in an effort to understand how hackers in Los Angeles behave and the manner in which the space of Los Angeles function both to facilitate and problematize hacking. First, I will examine the historical developments that have both enabled and problematized underground community in Los Angeles. The focus of this section is on issues of communication density, segmentation, and how technology is used to negotiate issues of space in the LA digital underground. Second, following that, and taking up Mike Davis contention that the Police in LA function, fundamen- 3

tally as space police, I examine how hackers, as underground, are dealt with by LA law enforcement. In particular, I examine two cases. One of Kevin Lee Poulsen, a Los Angeles hacker who gained notoriety by (among other things) manipulating phone lines in order to win 2 Porsches, a trip to Hawaii and $50,000 cash from Rick Dees at KIIS- FM. Poulsen was apprehended after an episode of Unsolved Mysteries aired, which featured him as a threat to national security (imagine Robert Stack in a trenchcoat and darkened warehouse) charges that would later be dropped. But his apprehension would not be immediate. Initially, when the episode aired, Poulsen considered cutting power to the transmitter for the Los Angeles station broadcasting the show, but figured that would only lead to a reappearance on the show. Instead, immediately after the episode aired, Poulsen disabled the 1-800 number for the show, causing all the studio lines to go dead, making callers unable to call in tips. The second case, that of Kevin Mitnick, is equally interesting. Mitnick, who has been a hacking legend since the early 1980s is currently in jail (as a pretrial detainee) on hacking charges. Mitnick is charged with copying proprietary software and if convicted, could face 200 years in federal prison (because he is being charged with wire fraud, rather than computer fraud, is accused of causing $80 million of damage by looking at proprietary software, even though he never sold or distributed it and because he hacked across state lines, making it a federal charge). One of the most intriguing aspects of these two cases occurred March 30 th. During a hearing regarding Mitnick s use of a computer to review evidence against him, Poulsen showed up to the courtroom. This time as a reporter, rather than a hacker. (Poulsen writes for Ziff Davis s online journal). I was sitting across the aisle from Mitnick and managed to ask him (before a rather large bailiff asked me to stop) if he knew Poulsen. He told me he saw him (he recognized him from pictures) in the back of the room, but the two had never met. A fact which Poulsen later confirmed. I found this to be extraordinary. Two of the most infamous hackers in the US, both from the San Fernando Valley, roughly the same age, hacking for 15 years had never even met one another. It is, perhaps, most interesting to not that the culture of the underground has really formed as a reaction to, rather than as a result of, the evolution of the Internet. It has only been the last 6 years in which conventions have started to form and hackers are beginning to meet face to face. Indeed, as more online venues become available, hacker are finding increasingly low-tech ways to gather (including face-to-face) (example TACD s No Hope, which meets for a weekend at a campsite and at which computers are frowned upon ). Most hackers won t be caught dead on IRC anymore and many have no interest whatsoever in looking at, writing, or owning a web page (though many do). Hacking Los Angeles: The Formulation of the Techno-Nomad Before the rise of the Internet, the main purpose of hacking was access. Computers, particularly network computers, were hard to find, too expensive to own, and often times restricted in terms of access. Even a basic PC, commonplace in the late 1990s, was a rare commodity in the 1980s. As a result, hackers needed to find ways to access machines which they couldn t afford to own. One popular technique was to find computers that were already 4

networked and take advantage of them. The discovery of local Radio Shacks in the San Fernando Valley was one such possibility. Each store had a demonstration model of a personal computer called the TRS-80. Because the computers were also used to send inventory updates each evening to Radio Shack s Fort Worth headquarters, they were equipped with modem as well. 2 Using their knowledge of the phone networks and long distance codes, local Radio Shacks would serve as a base for their hacking exploits. Hackers skilled at the art of social engineering (essentially conning people out of useful information such as passwords, codes, or access) would find their way onto these machines, calling all over the country for hours at a time. Because there was a wealth of Radio Shack stores throughout the LA area, when a manager go irked enough by their constant presence to ask them to take their hobby elsewhere, they simply combed the Yellow Pages for new possibilities. The became techno-nomads. 3 Once these hackers mastered the TRS-80, they turned their attention to more serious work-university computer centers. Again, Los Angeles comprised one of the densest computer networks in the early 1980s of anywhere in the nation, and probably the world. Computers at USC, UCLA and several Cal State campuses were completely networked, and, moreover, virtually unmonitored. Anyone who could pass as a student was able to come and go almost unnoticed. When hackers were caught in such a situation, the result was generally minor. The standard policy at most universities was that young hackers were counseled and released, which made little impression on them and often encouraged them to return to the same place to continue their hacking. 4 Being a techno-nomad achieves a number of functions. First, it exposes a hacker to a wide range of technologies, opportunities, and situations. Each new encounter, while relatively risk-free in terms of legal implications provides new challenges. Computer systems are different, people are different, access conditions change, and as a result, hacker learn to adapt to their surroundings. Additionally, there are little or no traces of the hacker s identity, so hackers can explore with relative impunity. Kevin Mitnick February 15, 1995. At 2:00 a.m. federal agents knocked on the door of apartment 202 of the Players Court apartment complex in Raleigh, North Carolina apartment complex. When Kevin D. Mitnick answered the door he was taken into custody, ending a three-year search for one of the most wanted computer criminals and what U.S. States attorney Ken Walker called a very big threat. 5 Enter the paranoiac machine. Mitnick s reputation as an überhacker is legendary and gives insight into the constitution of the hacker as a desiring machine. Beginning with his ability to manipulate phone switching systems in the early 1980s., Mitnick s talents allowed him to engage in a wide range of exploits, from annoying nuisances (such as changing peoples telephones to pay phones, making them unable to dial without first depositing money) to truly inspired pranks (such as intercepting 411 [directory assistance] calls and prompting the caller for information: Is Mr. Jones white or black? he would ask, We have different directories, you know ) to grand larceny (stealing the entire DEC VMS operating system while security experts at Digital simply watched millions of lines of their code being downloaded off their machine, unable to do anything about it). 6 It was the latter that would get Mitnick arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for the first time in 1989. Mitnick s phreaking abilities were always the bedrock of his hacks. Calls 5

he made were always untraceable as he had either manipulated the phone company software to hide his tracks or had simply found a way to bounce the call from one phone system to another, making it appear to each that the call had originated from the other. In the early 1990s, would run into trouble with the law again. The hack that made him a fugitive for a second time was a wiretap that he had installed to allow him to listen in and gain the access codes of FBI agents as they called into the California Department of Motor Vehicles. 7 These codes allowed Mitnick access to the entire drivers license database for California. This, and Mitnick s reported parole violation (he was not allowed to touch computers or a modem while on parole), led him to drop out of sight and prompted the three-year search that would ultimately lead to his arrest. Mitnick s arrest was the result (in perhaps a very small part) of the work, and technical expertise of computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura. On Christmas day, 1994, Mitnick had hacked Shimomura s system and downloaded Internet security programs as well as programs designed to hack cellular telephone equipment. Shimomura s investigation (as well as several prank phone calls from Mitnick himself) revealed Mitnick s identity. From that point on, Shimomura began his own personal manhunt (with the help of the FBI, local telephone companies, long distance service providers, colleagues from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and independent computer consultants) which led them to first to The Well, a Sausalito-based Internet service provider, where Mitnick had stashed the files he had downloaded from Shimomura s machine. From there, the trail led to Netcom, the San Jose provider who had recently had their 20,000+ credit card numbers lifted by someone who they had assumed to be Mitnick. At this point Federal Investigators had pinned down Mitnick s location. They were certain he was operating from somewhere in Colorado (almost 2000 miles away from his actual center of operations). Shimomura was able to identify two other points of operation Minneapolis and Raleigh, each of which had Netcom dial-in numbers. As telephone records were searched, investigators were able to narrow the search to Raleigh, North Carolina, where calls were being made with a cellular modem. Calls were moving through a local switching office operated by GTE Corp. But GTE s records showed that the calls looped through a nearby cellular phone switch operated by Sprint Neither company had a record identifying the cellular phone. 8 By using cellular tracking equipment, investigators (primarily Sprint technicians) were able to locate the building, and eventually the apartment from which Mitnick was operating: On Tuesday evening, the agents had an address Apartment 202 and at 8:3- p.m. a federal judge in Raleigh issued the warrant from his home. At 2:00 a.m. Wednesday, while a cold rain fell in Raleigh, FBI agents knocked on the door of Apartment 202. It took Mitnick more than five minutes to open it. When he did, he said he was on the phone with his lawyer. But when an agent took the receiver, the line went dead. 9 Subsequently, Mitnick has been charged with two federal crimes: illegal use of a telephone access device, punishable by up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine and computer fraud, [which] carries penalties of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. 10 The story of Mitnick s capture and arrest has been chronicled in a host of newspaper articles and magazine stories, and recently in two books, Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw By The Man Who Did It by Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff and Jonathan Littman s The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick. 6

The manner in which Mitnick s arrest was chronicled reveals a great deal about popular perceptions of hackers Of the various hackers who have been hunted by law enforcement, Mitnick is by far the clearest example of the metaphor s enactment. Mitnick, however, was not the usual criminal, he wasn t even the usual cybercriminal. Shimomura, the security expert who would eventually find Mitnick. As Jonathan Littman reports, because Shimomura was considered a civilian by law enforcement personnel, they wanted to exclude him from the final search of Mitnick s apartment. 11 The enactment of the hunt metaphor was literally a hunt for a body, Mitnick s body, and manner in which that hunt would be accomplished would be a battle of skills between Mitnick and Shimomura. In Shimomura and Markoff s telling of the incident, the contest between the tow men was a battle of values, where Shimomura represented the honorable samurai and Mitnick the evil genius. But the hunt itself was also a game or contest. The two would not meet fact-to-face until after Mitnick s arrest. Shimomura describes the encounter this way: Halfway into the room he recognized us and paused for a moment. He appeared stunned, and his eyes went wide. You re Tsutomu! he said, with surprise in his voice, and then he looked at the reporter sitting next to me. And you re Markoff. Both of us nodded. 12 It was the intervention of the law into this contest or game which would radically transform it for both the hunter and the hunted. Once the contest was rendered corporeal, the stakes were immediately changed. As Shimomura realized, It had become clear to both Mitnick and me that this was no longer a game. I had thought that of the chase and the capture as sport, but it was now apparent that it was quite real and had real consequences. 13 Although Mitnick had never profited from any of his hacks and even though he had never deprived anyone of data, information, or service, he was charged with telecommunications fraud and computer fraud each of which carried a possible sentence of fifteen years, charges only made possible by the connection of Mitnick to computer intrusion by physical evidence. Where Shimomura had seen only a contest in virtual space between himself and a hacker, law enforcement had seen criminality. Even as Shimomura considered Mitnick to be petty and vindictive, guilty of invasion of other people s privacy and pursuit of their intellectual property, he still remained ambivalent about Mitnick s arrest Strangely, he writes, I felt neither good or bad about seeing him on his way to jail, just vaguely unsatisfied. It wasn t an elegant solution not because I bought some people s claim that Mitnick was someone innocently exploring cyberspace, without even the white-collar criminal s profit motive, but because he seemed to be a special case in so many ways. 14 In many ways, Shimomura s analysis details precisely the crime of which Mitnick was guilty a crime of identity, the crime of being Kevin Mitnick. The threat that Mitnick posed was also the thing that made him so difficult to track down and capture. It was a case of fraud in which no one was defrauded, nothing of value was taken or destroyed, and which would have been entirely legal had Mitnick, in fact, been someone else. 7

Creating Kevin: The Darkside Hacker and the Southern California Media (From LA to New York and Back Again) Remember, I didn t make up the term dark-side hacker that was an invention of the Southern California press. John Markoff 15 Mitnick s story has been told, it seems, by just about everyone but Mitnick himself. The story, which began as a local interest story on the pages of San Fernando Valley s Daily News, eventually went national (eventually featured as a page one story for the New York Times) and has now returned to Hollywood as the subject of a Miramax film. The first portrayals of Mitnick were inventions of local, Los Angeles media which by turns portrayed him as a dangerous criminal, able to perform miraculous feats with phones and computers. After his initial apprehension, the Daily News wrote several stories essentially retracting many of the claims they had made about Mitnick earlier, but those stories were not picked up by the national press. The one label that did stick was that of the darkside hacker. Mitnick, who had never profited from his hacking, nor done any damage to computer systems, files, or code, was branded as darkside hacker by the local media. In 1989, the L.A. Times set the tone for how Mitnick s story would be covered. The story, which ran January 8 th, displayed the headline Dark Side Hacker Seen as Electronic Terrorist, a headline which played upon a range of cultural anxieties and played upon cultural icons made popular by the file trilogy Star Wars. In response to local media attention, USA Today, ran a front page story about Mitnick which included an image of Kevin Mitnick s head, morphed with Darth Vader s mask and body, graphically illustrating Mitnick s conversion to the forces of evil. The second, and perhaps most important, portrayal of Mitnick occurred in a book by Katie Hafner and John Markoff, titled Cyberpunk, in which Mitnick was portrayed as a darkside hacker for the first time. The same label which had led USA Today to publish a picture of Mitnick s face superimposed over an image of Darth Vader, also proved a powerful hood for drawing the reader s attention into the Mitnick story. Hafner, who was primarily responsible for the characterization of Mitnick as a darkside hacker, admitted to Charles Platt for his 1995 review of Takedown that it might have been a mistake to call him a darkside hacker. Hafner, in fact, has come to regret the characterization and what has followed from it, There are malicious characters our there, she told Platt, but Kevin is not of them He has been turned into this bankable commodity. Leave the guy alone! He s had a really tragic life. 16 That mistake has had a profound and lasting effect on Mitnick s life. Unlike hackers who seek publicity and visibility, Mitnick has always sought to maintain a low profile, even refusing to talk with Hafner and Markoff while they were writing Cyberpunk. As a result, Hafner and Markoff relied extensively on sources who portrayed Mitnick as a malicious, petty, and evil person who tampered with celebrity s telephone lines, altered credit reports, and accessed and changed police files, accusations which Mitnick denies. Two of the main sources for Hafner and Markoff s account were Susan and Roscoe, two of Mitnick s fellow hackers who, as Hafner and Markoff write cooperated with us in the understanding that their true names would not be revealed. In a final touch of irony, they end the book with the line We respect their right to privacy. One of the two, Roscoe, would later claim 8

that much of the information he provided to Hafner and Markoff was intended to deceive them. The most damning accusations against Mitnick were not his hacking exploits. What colored perception of Mitnick most thoroughly were the little things, most of which, Mitnick claims, were untrue and used for the purpose spin and to assign motive to his actions. The one that seems to bother him most is the claim that he stole money from his mother s purse to further his hacking exploits, an incident that he refers to as absolute fiction. What has damned Mitnick in the eyes of both the public and law enforcement is not his hacking, but his personality. That characterization of Mitnick is built almost entirely on second-hand accounts from people who had either served as informants against him or had an investment in vilifying him to suit their own agendas. Turning Mitnick into the archetypal dark-side computer hacker is a move that has suited a number of agendas, most recently Shimomura and Markoff s. Since Cyberpunk, Markoff has kept the Mitnick story alive in the pages of the New York Times, referring to Mitnick as Cyberspace s Most Wanted, a computer programmer run amok and the Prince of Hackers. Markoff also covered the break-in of Shimomura s system which spurred the manhunt that would ultimately lead to Mitnick s arrest. Initially, the two stories were unrelated, the first describing how Mitnick was eluding the F.B.I. manhunt (July 4, 1994), and the second detailing how Shimomura s computer system had been breached (January 25, 1995). Two weeks after reporting the break-in, Markoff was reporting that Federal authorities had suspected that the 31-year-old computer outlaw Kevin D. Mitnick is the person behind a recent spree of break-ins to hundreds of corporate, university and personal computers on the global Internet (February 16, 1995). From that point on, Markoff began telling the tale of the noble samurai warrior, Shimomura, versus the dark-side hacker, Mitnick, a true battle of good versus evil with an ending that seemed made-for-hollywood. As Markoff concluded in his February 19 th article for the New York Times, Mr. Mitnick is not a hacker in the original sense of the word. Mr. Shimomura is. And their worlds collided, it was obvious which one of them had to win. The story, which gained considerable attention through Markoff s reporting, turned Mitnick s manhunt into a national event. It also resulted in the publication of three books about Mitnick and, ultimately, a feature film, completing the cycle. The story that left LA in print, returns on the silver screen. In the film version, Kevin Mitnick is offered up for sacrifice in a tale of good and evil which promises to further enrich both Markoff and Shimomura (they were reportedly paid $750,000 for their book deal, and one can only assume the movie option pushes them well over the $1,000,000 mark) and to completely demonize Kevin Mitnick in the public s eyes. In July of 1998 Miramax announced that Skeet Ulrich will play the part of Kevin Mitnick in the film version of John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura s book Takedown. The book, which chronicles the tracking and arrest of Kevin Mitnick, is the latest in a series of portrayals of Mitnick, over which he has no control. It is also, according to Mitnick himself, wildly inaccurate and libelous. The most recent portrayal is, however, just the latest 9

in a series of public renderings of Mitnick which has colored the public perception of him and made him a clear target for law enforcement. Scenes from the upcoming film include Mitnick whistling touch tones into a phone receiver in order to make free phone calls (a technical and physical impossibility) and, most unbelievably, a scene in which Mitnick physically assaults Shimomura with a metal garbage can, leaving him dazed, [with] blood flowing freely from a gash above his ear. The only difficulty with that part of the narrative is that Shimomura and Mitnick had never met, much less had a physical altercation, at that point in time. Mitnick remains a LA story, imprisoned in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, he has been held as a pre-trial detainee for the past three and a half years awaiting trial. The stories that have circulated about Mitnick have raised concerns so grave, that Judge Marianne Pfaelzer has gone as far as to deny him the right to a bail hearing. For the past three and a half years, Mitnick has been held in a maximum security facility, permitted visits from his attorney and his immediate family. His only contact with the outside world has been on the telephone. Government attorney not provided discovery of the evidence to be used against him, citing its proprietary nature and Mitnick s attorney (a court appointed panel attorney) was denied his fees (billed at the rate of $60.00 per hour) by the court over the summer of 1997, because the judge ruled them excessive. Pfaelzer told attorney Dan Randolph, You are spending too much time on this case. In an earlier case, Pfaelzer had prohibited Mitnick from unsupervised access to telephones while awaiting trial. The Office of Prisons found that the only way they could comply with the judge s order was to keep Mitnick separated from the general population. As a result, Mitnick spent eight months awaiting trial in solitary confinement. Mitnick is scheduled to go to trial in January of 1999. Kevin Lee Poulsen A second characterization, which carries the most extreme suggestion, is that hackers are by the very act of hacking violating national security. In these narrative constructions, hackers are seen as notorious, as rogues, as Most-Wanted, invaders and intruders and, even as computer terrorists. In contrast to depictions of hackers as master criminals or even gang members, these constructions are, perhaps, the most serious and the most exaggerated of the three. In many ways the most interesting narrative of the pursuit and capture of a hacker is that of Kevin Poulsen. Poulsen, who used the handle Dark Dante and was accused of, among other things, intercepting Pacific Bell security conversations and embezzlement of government information, including stealing a computer printout which contained cable/pair assignments and telephone numbers of Ferdinand Marcos and others. 17 A number of his discoveries, it would turn out, were the target of a confidential investigation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation 10

and, as a result, Poulsen would be charged, ultimately, with espionage. 18 Although most of the more serious charges (including espionage and most of the wiretap charges) were dismissed, Poulsen was still convicted of a host of charges and sentenced to five years in jail. Like most hackers, Poulsen s interest in computer networks started as a matter of curiosity, but quickly turned into something more. My intrusion, he explains, particularly physical ones, were more than just ways of gaining knowledge. I think, in a way, part of me saw the network as something mystical and arcane. Exploring a telephone switching center, immersed in the sights and sounds of rooms full of equipment, was kind of transcendence for me. A chance to become something greater than myself. 19 As a consequence of his hacking, Poulsen was fired from his job in Northern California and moved back to Los Angeles in 1988. Unemployed, he continued hacking as a means to generate income, even developing an elaborate scam to utilize disconnected escort service phone numbers to supply Los Angeles pimps with a steady supply of customers. When escort services would go out of business (usually as a result of police raids) their numbers would be disconnected. What Poulsen figured out was that their advertising, particularly in the Yellow Pages, meant that customers were still calling. It was merely a matter of reconnecting and redirecting the calls for services that were already advertised and marketed. Some of Pouslen s exploits had received attention of Federal Investigators, however. After discovering he was under federal investigation, Poulsen hacked into the FBI s system and discovered a maze of wiretaps and federal surveillance programs which were monitoring everyone from the restaurant across the street from him to (allegedly) Ferdinand Marcos. As Poulsen explains it himself, I became concerned that I, my friends, or my family, might be subject to surveillance by either Pacific Bell s security department of the FBI. This concern prompted me to actively research the physical and electronic surveillance methods used by these agencies. It was while conducting this research that I stumbled (via my computer) across the FBI s wiretap of a local restaurant. 20 The crimes that Poulsen was convicted of centered on what happened after his return to Los Angeles. Specifically, as Poulsen describes it, On a more practical level, the knowledge I gained of the phone network, and my access to Pacific Bell s computers, allowed me to increase my odds of winning radio stations phone-in contests substantially. I played these contests in part because it was a challenge and it allowed me to engage in the sort of complex, coordinated effort that I missed since the loss of my career. I also saw it, at the time, as a victimless way of making money with my access. 21 After all was said and done, Poulsen has won two Porsches, a trip to Hawaii, and tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. But these crimes were not the one s that led to Poulsen s arrest. April 11, 1991, Kevin Poulsen was leaving Hugh s Market in Van Nuys, California near midnight when he was apprehended by a zealot bag boy, his resolve boosted by an episode of Unsolved Mysteries that had featured the criminal jumped then-24-year-old Poulsen, wrestled the 18-month-long fugitive to the ground, and then told the agents waiting outside for him that they could have their suspect now. 22 The Unsolved Mysteries episode, which was in large part for Poulsen s apprehension, focused primarily on the claims that Poulsen broke into secret government computers and posed a serious threat to national security (one of the charges against him, which was later dismissed was for Gathering of Defense Information which had been 11

classified Secret. ) 23 What is most intriguing about Poulsen s case is the sense in which he is characterized as perverted and dangerous. At Littman s book title testifies, Poulsen is regarded as twisted and as a serial hacker. 24 To law enforcement, however, what makes Poulsen dangerous is not the secrets that he know, but rather the kinds of secrets that he knows. In many ways, the information that Poulsen uncovered in his surveillance of the FBI was incidental. The disturbing thing about Poulsen was the knowledge he had gained about the kinds of people that were under surveillance. What Poulsen exposed was not the secret per se, but the secret which guards all secrets. In a panoptical environment, the power of the gaze is defined by its possibility, by the fact that it is always possible that at any given time one could be seen. Pouslen s discovery, and therefore his threat, was the ability to know, at any given moment, who was and was not being watched. Poulsen s threat was not to any particular secret, but to the very structure of the secrecy itself. The need to brand Poulsen as a threat to national security, was based, at least in part, on his ability to elide surveillance and what the ability reveals is the degree to which surveillance defines the state of national security in the digital age. Ironically, the government turned to Unsolved Mysteries revealing the manner in which such shows are complicit with strategies of government surveillance. Poulsen s response to the show demonstrated sophisticated understanding of the manner in which surveillance functions. Tempted initially to knock out Channel Four, by cutting cables at the transmitter tower to block the airing of the show in LA, Poulsen reconsidered, realizing that it would guarantee a repeat appearance on every segmentofunsolvedmysteries. 25 Instead, Poulsen s response was more creative: On schedule, NBC plays the show s eerie them music followed by a quick preview of that night s episodes Then, in a matter of seconds, everything changes. I m dead! calls out an operator, peeling off her headset. Me, too! another cries, and then like an angry flock of blue jays the voices squawk. I m dead! I m dead! I m dead! Rajter looks at his watch: 5:10 p.m. Every phone line in the thirty-operator telecommunications center is dead. 26 Poulsen would nonetheless be characterized on the show as engaging in espionage and it would be that broadcast which would ultimately lead to his arrest. In this case, the stakes had been raised significantly. Even though the charges of espionage were dropped, Poulsen (and hackers everywhere by extension) had been branded as a threat to national security, playing on the worst technophobic fears and anxieties of contemporary culture. Again in the case of Poulsen, we can discern the manner in which local is transformed and, ultimately, returns as something larger than itself. Poulsen s case, born in LA and launched by the Los Angeles media, ultimately made its way back to Hollywood, this time on national television. 12

Conclusions While it may be an exaggeration to say that Los Angeles made Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen what they are, it is not an exaggeration to say that Los Angeles provided the opportunities for exploration that made much of what they had done possible. Mitnick and Poulsen were both Southern California inventions, both in their activities, but, perhaps, more importantly, in the manner in which they were represented. Their stories, which began in the local media, took on lives of their own, each returning to Los Angeles in a heightened and intensified form. Hackers like Mitnick and Poulsen reveal to us a great deal about how we think of ourselves and how we think about technology. Their representations were made possible by Los Angeles both as a city and as a center of media representations and their stories are a fascinating example of how technology functions in and around Los Angeles digital underground. 13

Notes 1 Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, New York: Bantam, 1992. P. 65. 2 Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk, p. 64. 3 Cyberpunk, p. 65. 4 Cyberpunk, p. 65. 5 John Markoff, A Most-Wanted Cyberthief is Caught in His Own Web, New York Times, 15 Feb. 1995. 6 For a detailed account of Mitnick s deeds and misdeeds, see Katie Hafner and John Markoff s Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, pp. 13-138. Hafner and Markoff chronicle Mitnick s life as a dark-side hacker, which has been considered by some (in particular Emmanuel Goldstein and Lewis DePayned) to be a misnomer. Advocates for Mitnick are quick to note that Mitnick s hacks while occasionally malicious were never intended to cause actual harm to the victims or produce any financial gain for Mitnick. 7 John Markoff, A Most Wanted Cyberthief. 8 John Markoff, A Most Wanted Cyberthief. 9 John Markoff, A Most Wanted Cyberthief. 10 John Markoff, A Most Wanted Cyberthief. 11 Jonathan Littman, The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick. 12 Tsutomu Shimomura, Takedown, p. 308. 13 Shimomura, p. 309. 14 Shimomura, p. 310. 15 John Markoff, interview, September 14, 1998. 16 Charles Pratt, Anarchy Online: Net Crime. New York: Blacksheep Books, 1996. 17 Northern California indictment. 18 Northern California indictment. 19 Kevin Poulsen, Letter to Judge Manuel L. Real, February 9, 1995. 20 Kevin Poulsen, Letter to Judge Manuel L. Real, February 9, 1995. 21 Kevin Poulsen, Letter to Judge Manuel L. Real, February 9, 1995. 22 Fine, Why is Kevin Lee Poulsen Really in Jail? 23 Northern California indictment. 24 Jonathan Littman, The Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen. 25 Littman, p. 244. 26 Littman, p. 246. 14