Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker Read Free Page A

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    E ven many Jewish families that aren’t very religious want their sons to have a bar mitzvah, and I fell into that category. This includes standing up in front of the congregation and reading a passage from the Torah scroll—in Hebrew. Of course, Hebrew uses a completely different alphabet, with,,, and the like, so mastering the Torah portion can take months of study.
    I was signed up at a Hebrew school in Sherman Oaks but got booted for goofing off. Mom found a cantor to teach me one-on-one, so I couldn’t get away with reading a technology book under the table. I managed to learn enough to get through the service and read my Torah passage aloud to the congregation with no more than the usual amount of stumbling, and without embarrassing myself.
    Afterward my parents chided me for mimicking the accent and gestures of the rabbi. But it was subconscious. I’d later learn that this is a very effective technique because people are attracted to others who are like themselves. So at a very early age, all unaware, I was already practicing what would come to be called “social engineering”—the casual or calculated manipulation of people to influence them to do things they would not ordinarily do. And convincing them without raising the least hint of suspicion.
    The typical shower of presents from relatives and from people who attended the reception after the bar mitzvah at the Odyssey Restaurantleft me with gifts that included a number of U.S. Treasury bonds that came to a surprisingly handsome sum.
    I was an avid reader, with a particular focus that led me to a place called the Survival Bookstore in North Hollywood. It was small and in a seedy neighborhood and was run by a middle-aged, friendly blond lady who said I could call her by her first name. The place was like finding a pirate’s treasure chest. My idols in those days were Bruce Lee, Houdini, and Jim Rockford, the cool private detective played by James Garner in
The Rockford Files
, who could pick locks, manipulate people, and assume a false identity in a matter of moments. I wanted to be able to do all the neat things Rockford could.
    The Survival Bookstore carried books describing how to do all those nifty Rockford things, and lots more besides. Starting at age thirteen, I spent many of my weekends there, all day long, studying one book after another—books like
The Paper Trip
by Barry Reid, on how to create a new identity by using a birth certificate of someone who had passed away.
    A book called
The Big Brother Game
, by Scott French, became my Bible because it was crammed with details on how to get hold of driving records, property records, credit reports, banking information, unlisted numbers, and even how to get information from police departments. (Much later, when French was writing a follow-up volume, he called to ask me if I would do a chapter on techniques for social-engineering the phone companies. At the time, my coauthor and I were writing our second book,
The Art of Intrusion
, and I was too busy for French’s project, though amused by the coincidence, and flattered to be asked.)
    That bookstore was crammed with “underground” books that taught you things you weren’t supposed to know—very appealing to me since I had always had this urge to take a bite of knowledge from the forbidden apple. I was soaking up the knowledge that would turn out to be invaluable almost two decades later, when I was on the run.
    The other item that interested me at the store besides their books was the lockpicking tools they offered for sale. I bought several different kinds. Remember the old joke that goes, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice”? That’s what I did to master the art of lockpicking, sometimes going down to the area of tenant storage lockers in the garage of our apartment building, where I’d pick open some ofthe