You could ask me about dogs, you could ask me about music, you could ask me whatever
you want.
I'm not promising I will answer your question, however, but if you want to bid on a seat
for dinner with Delphine, that's me, you go to wbaioction.org.
That's wbaioction.org.
And I know it's summertime and it's no time for deadlines, but there is a deadline, so
do this by the 31st of July.
Bon Appetit.
It's time once again for an extended edition of Off the Hook.
One, two, three, four.
Bon Appetit.
And good evening, everyone.
The program is Off the Hook.
Manuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening for an extended two-hour program,
special fundraising edition, joined tonight by Mike Dotrette, Rob T. Firefly, Voltaire,
down in Philadelphia, Bernie S.
Greetings.
And we're going to have Kevin Mitnick joining us.
In fact, we're going to try to Skype again.
We're going to see if this works.
If it doesn't work, we're going to go by telephonic communications.
I understand we're having some trouble with that as well.
Kevin's in Spain.
I don't know what he's doing in Spain, but he's in Spain right now.
And that's why we have to track him down.
Apparently, he's talking on the phone in Spain is what he's doing.
Oh, because he's on the phone right now.
Not to us.
He was giving an interview.
Kevin's in demand.
And Kevin's going to be in even more demand next month when this new book comes out.
He has...
It's incredible.
I have a preview copy of it, a galley copy.
It's called Ghost in the Wires.
And it's simply an incredible story.
It's the story that the Feds did not want him to tell.
Is that a proper phrasing, Bernie?
Well, I don't know if those are the phrases they used.
But they prohibited him from profiting from any telling of the story for, I think, a whole decade.
Or then some.
And he's not under that restriction anymore.
So this was an effort, I think, to prevent this book from being written.
Right.
Well, it's written now.
And it's about to come out.
And I've been reading.
I've gotten about halfway through it.
And I only did that in a few days.
It's really riveting.
And I think there's a movie in here.
And I think there's all kinds of incredible stories.
A lot of things you might have heard in the past through different eyes.
For instance, the quote-unquote movie Takedown.
Which I don't have enough to say about that garbage that came out.
And Grant Markoff.
There were all kinds of people who took advantage of Kevin's story.
But never Kevin.
And now Kevin can finally speak his mind.
And say what happened.
How it happened.
And it's really an interesting accounting.
Because there really is not as much bitterness as you might think.
Because of all the things that happened.
All the bad things that happened to him.
He takes responsibility for a lot of his own actions.
It kind of paints a picture.
You see how the world...
It might be very familiar to a lot of our listeners.
You see a very unfair way that hackers are characterized.
And how certain assumptions are made.
Are we going to try this?
Skype's all set up?
Allegedly he's connected right now.
Really?
So all I have to do is bring this up.
Wait, which one?
It's the one over here.
So is Kevin on the line?
Yeah, can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear us.
Yeah, and I hear myself.
Okay, well that's not so bad.
We might go to the phone if this proves to be annoying.
But for the moment I think it's okay.
Welcome to Off The Hook, Kevin.
Oh, thank you.
It's great to be here.
I'm in Barcelona, Spain right now.
So it's a little bit late.
But I keep hackers hours.
So I'm wide awake.
And I look forward to being on your show.
Okay, well, is your phone ringing?
That's definitely not my phone.
Wait, whose phone is that?
I think that's your phone.
We don't have...
Wait, is it coming up in the same pot?
The phones in the tally room and the Skype connection?
Or is that a call coming in to us?
Is that how they're set up?
Okay, we're still learning.
We're learning how this whole process works.
I don't know where that phone call came from.
You can call me on the backup phone number
that you guys have.
Well, we've been trying to call you on that.
And it says that there is no phone line available
from the lobby to your room.
I don't know what that means.
It sounds like they're messing with you again.
That sounds really weird.
I'll call the reception and go,
like, what the hell is going on?
Because I don't know why they're not placing...
I mean, let me pick up the phone.
Well, I mean, you sound good now.
I mean, if this sounds good, this works.
Let's try this until...
Well, there's five of us in the room now.
When three of us vote to change to a phone,
we will change to a phone.
Right now, how do we feel?
We feel this is a good connection?
I say it is a good connection.
Well, I'm the one who dialed the phone before
and that was a total failure,
so this is much better.
Well, it's easier for you.
I know that.
No, forget about easier.
All I could talk to was the receptionist.
Okay, well, for now,
you think this connection is good?
It's better than the receptionist.
Okay, so Kevin,
tell us how this book came about.
How long have you been planning on writing this?
I mean, it's been coming about
for what feels like a lifetime.
As you probably already know,
when I settled my case
with the government back in 1999,
I had to agree
that I wouldn't profit
from telling my story
for seven years
and that was part of the deal
with the federal government.
Initially, what the federal government
wanted is for me never
to be able to tell my story
and try to impose a lifetime ban
like they did on Kevin Poulsen.
I believe Kevin Poulsen cannot
write a story,
so they wanted me to accept
these same terms and conditions
and I flatly refused
and said we're going to take the case to trial
and then I'll have no conditions
and we've settled on the seven years.
So that seven years actually
from when I was released from custody
in January of 2000,
which you were there if you remember.
I do.
So that brought us up to 2007
and
what had happened is
I think
there was like a year wait after 2007
and then finally
my agent, David Fuge,
at Launchbooks, decided he was going to
try to shop around the story to see if he can get interest
and surprisingly enough
it was really hard to sell the book
because they said we already know the story
there's already been
a few books written about you
so what else is there to tell?
That's interesting Kevin because I know
John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura
had no trouble at all selling the story
a mere months after you were captured
and making a million bucks from it?
I think it was nearly
a million bucks
and that's what I heard
I don't know for absolutely certain
John Markoff was able to
pen articles
which ended up on the front page of the New York Times
so that was like a huge
selling point
if I can pen my own article
and it's going to be on the front page of the New York Times
I'm sure I can sell my book too
Well all you have to do is hack the New York Times website
and then you can put your stories on the front page
Oh yeah
I'm sure that's a brilliant idea
Maybe I just have to stay here in Spain
Well there's enough stories like that in the book
but continue telling us how the book
actually came to be
So anyway, finally
Little Brown, a publisher
in New York
was interested in the project
and after a lot of negotiation back and forth
they finally commissioned
the book and I decided to
work with Bill Simon
who worked with me on the last two books
The Art of Deception and The Art of Intrusion
and so we worked on this project
together for two years
and now mind you, Bill is a lot older than me
he's like
quite
he's from a different generation
and so
he has much different working habits than I
he's the type of guy that's up at 6am
eats breakfast at 7
starts to work in front of his computer at 8
and 8 o'clock is when I'm going to sleep
so
it was a real
interesting process
to work together on this project
because we just had different working hours
like I was on European time zone
and he was on California time zone
and finally after two years
we
finished the project
and again it was difficult
because I was working with Bill
who wasn't really knowledgeable
in computer hacking vernacular
and some of the stuff I wanted to put
in there of a technical nature
so
it required a lot of going back and forth
over the manuscript
multiple times
until we were able to get it just right
and I was of the mind
unless it was
pretty much spot on
I didn't want it to be published
so we were actually late
with the manuscript
but the publisher liked it so much
that they forgave us
and continued on with the project
so I'm really excited that on August 15
is the first publication date
and the book will be pre-released
well I believe it will be
at the DEF CON bookstore
and I have a book signing on my birthday August 6
so that will be really exciting
on my birthday
the book is coming out
so that's an awesome birthday present
It really is
and it's great that
I'm actually going to see you there
I might as well tell people this now
for the first time in 11 years I'm going to be going to DEF CON
on the first weekend of August
and for those of you
all the people that have been emailing us
and wanting to know how they can get the Hacker Calendar
which we were offering last week
well guess what we're not going to be offering it this week
because we said we weren't going to
we said we were only offering it for one week at a time
but that will be available at the DEF CON conference
it will be debut there in fact
you can see it for yourself
and you can see Kevin as well
Kevin will be there
and it's going to be a whole lot of fun
if you're not going down there
or if you are going down there
and you want to get a special edition of the book
a special autographed copy
and support the radio station at the same time
then we suggest you give a call now
to 212-209-2950
let me tell you what you will get
for your phone call
for a pledge of $75
you'll get an autographed copy
of Ghost in the Wires
by Kevin Mitnick
you will also get a copy
that documents the story of Kevin Mitnick
while he was still in prison
and what's interesting about that
is it kind of
conflicts with a lot of the news accounts of the time
but it runs in very
nice parallel to the story
as it's told in this book
and you'll see how certain things
were mentioned there that weren't mentioned anywhere else
that turned out to be the truth
and it's an incredible way
to see how history is made
so for a pledge of $75 you get those two things
and you also get
a free Kevin bumper sticker
we found a stash of these things
that we never put on vehicles or police cars
no we didn't do that
other people did though
and you'll get one of those for a pledge of $75
212-209-2950
now if you want a little bit more
for a pledge of $125 you get all of that
you get the book, you get the movie, you get the bumper sticker
but in addition you get about a dozen DVDs
from the HOPE conferences
over the years
that somehow involved Kevin Mitnick
whether it be in the year 1997
now Kevin you were in prison
in 1997
but we still had a Kevin Mitnick panel
your lawyer was on
the telephone
and we talked to him and grilled him
asked him all kinds of questions
and it was really the first opportunity to actually dispel a lot of the myths
so that was a very significant thing back then
of course you gave the keynote address
at the 5th HOPE
in 2004
you were at the last HOPE, you were at the next HOPE
on the informants panel
we have all of that and more
for a pledge of $125
so it's a great Mitnick package
two Mitnick packages we have tonight
and tonight is Kevin Mitnick night
as far as WBAI is concerned
212-209-2950
let's see those phones light up
with all kinds of people in the hacker world
that are interested in the story
I'd like to read, if I may, the first paragraph
of the book
yeah, go ahead
it's the start of an amazing story
and you get one of those stickers when you pledge?
you get one of those stickers
if you pledge $125 you get two of those stickers
and there's probably no other way to get one
unless you peel one off a car or something
you know, there are cars
that still have those stickers
in fact there are signs
I'm not going to say where, but there are signs all around the area
that have free Kevin stickers still on them
and we went to a really good place
they last forever
and you have to literally chisel them off
people to this day ask who's Kevin and why isn't he free
well Kevin is free now
in fact some people slice their stickers in half
and reverse the words to say Kevin Free
after he was released
back in 2000
so if you get two stickers you can do that with one of them
and keep the other pristine
that's right, but I have seen stickers that have been up since 1998
and are still up and still look pretty good
so these are quality stickers
and if your name is Kevin then it's even better
I've had policemen stop me
to ask who Kevin is because their name was Kevin
and they wanted a sticker for themselves
just as kind of a goof for their co-employees
it's incredible how that
movement sort of
I guess
took off and really became
a part of the American culture
people seem to recognize the phrase Free Kevin
when's the first time you actually
I think you were in the Metropolitan Detention Center
in Los Angeles Kevin
when you heard about
the Free Kevin stickers
oh yeah
you and several people
from I believe 2600
showed up on my 35th birthday
and that was when I was able
when I had a Free Kevin bumper sticker
that somebody mailed me
in the post that the prison authorities
I think missed
and I was able to go down to the law library
on the third floor of the detention center
and press the sticker to the window
when somebody was across the street
photographing me
and I think that ended up on your cover
yeah and it's also
it's in Freedom Downtime as well
and you can see us
basically we were waving across the street
at this monolithic building
horrible architecture
with just little slots for windows
and that was your eye into the world
and we couldn't find you
we couldn't figure out where you were
we had arranged to be across the street
at the mobile station at a particular time
and we couldn't
we were looking at every single one of those little slots
and we heard a tapping noise
and we knew that was you
we were just trying to figure out
where the tapping noise was coming from
and eventually we found the window
we saw your face
and we were able to wave
and everybody was really happy
but then I understand
what happened afterwards
in the actual prison
there was all kinds of mayhem
as a result of this
yeah what they did
they tried to tap Morse code
on the window
and that's what you guys heard
across the street at the mobile station
and it took a while
and then eventually
I only wanted to do that for a short period of time
because I knew
that the prison staff would call up to that floor
I believe I was on the sixth floor
and they would have
asked where I was
to see if I was instigating this protest
and then try to find a reason
I was pretty quick on doing it
and I got out of there
and was caught pretty much in plain sight
so when they got the call
I looked at the guard
and the guard looked directly at me
and I could see his lips move
saying no he's right in front of me
no he's not doing anything
so otherwise I would probably
be put into solitary confinement again
so anyway
with the free Kevin bumper stickers
I actually was doing a speech
and I had about 10 or 15 of those stickers at home
and I brought them and I signed them
and I gave them away
but I ran out so if you have any extras
I could take some and give them out as well
well you could pledge
if you pledge Kevin $75 or $125
you can get one or two of those stickers
well then I'd have to make a lot of pledges
to get more stickers
well you know we'll see what we can work out for you
by the way I need to apologize to listeners
for some reason every time somebody calls in
some bozo hooked it up
and we're trying to figure out how to separate them
every time somebody calls in
we get a loud ring over that channel
so we're trying to figure that out
we've got our best people on it right now
but again the phone number to call
which it's good that people are calling
I'm not berating people for calling
please continue to call
this is a one time offer
you're not going to see this any place else
and it's an incredible book
for a pledge of $75 you get the autographed copy
of Kevin Mitnick's new book
In The Wires
and you also get a copy of Freedom Downtime
the documentary, the independent documentary
that we put out to counter
all the nonsense that was being spread around
back then in the late 90's
about the Kevin Mitnick story and how he was
capable of starting World War 3
from a touch tone phone just by whistling into it
all kinds of amazing stories
that were just completely made up
and believed by everybody
from the mass media to federal judges
so you'll get that and you'll get a free
book for a pledge of $75
for $125 you'll get all that plus
about a dozen DVDs from various
Hope Conferences over the years
you know what I'd like to play an excerpt from one of those right now
this is from 1997
yeah
the Beyond Hope Conference
we're going to listen to a little bit of Kevin Mitnick's
lawyer Donald Randolph
as he was talking to
the Hope Conference back in 1997
about Kevin's case which back then
very few people knew the facts about
the film had not yet even been started
and Kevin was basically
languishing in prison without much
of a chance of getting out
1997 Beyond Hope
please give us a call 212-209-2950
we had some information before
which has since changed
Kevin has been in communication
with us
and we were going
to have him speak
just say hello, he really can't say anything
anything he says will be used against him
in one way or another
but after talking with his lawyer and after talking with him
we all kind of reached the conclusion
that it wouldn't be
in his best interest
to actually talk
directly to the conference
he did however convey that he wants
to say he's sorry
that he can't say something directly
he has received all of your mail
he would like to be able to reply
however everything he says
is subject to be read
and to be misinterpreted
in all kinds of manners
by the authorities
so we do have his lawyer
with us on the line
actually let's make sure we have
him on the line with us
Don Randolph are you there?
well I'm here but I can't hear you very well
ok well
actually that doesn't really matter because
I'm going to read this press release and then we'll give you a chance
to make a statement
and we'll relay some questions
from the audience and whatever press
people are still awake
that may want to get the other side
of the story for a change
because I don't think we've ever actually heard anything
other than what people like John Markoff
have to say about Kevin Mitnick
before I begin
I will be playing this for Kevin
over the phone sometime this week
and the first thing I would like for him to hear
would be a good round of applause from everybody
applause
applause
applause
applause
applause
applause
applause
applause
applause
how'd I get here?
this is one of the
most incredible cases
I think we've ever seen
and a real indication of the sickness
of some of the people
in charge of prosecutions
I'd like to read this press release
then turn it over to Don Randolph
to give us a statement
and take some questions
yes we're not going to have the part where I
read the press release
we're going to go straight to Don Randolph
to tell us obviously but
questions concerning what has already
happened I'm sure would be welcome
first question go ahead
what specifically are the alleged events that led to
Kevin's arrest?
well the
there have been a number of books written about
the subject
and the
Kevin has advised me that the
that the facts in those books
there's a lot of poetic
license that's been taken
in order to when he was finally arrested
in North Carolina
all I can tell you is that it occurred in February
of 1995
and
the
the Jonathan Lippman book
was probably the closest to the mark
in terms of the events which occurred
so
rather than make
to make a long story short
I think that that book is probably the one
anything that's out
in the media now that's the one that
probably explains the details
most succinctly
I'd like to ask
what Kevin's mood has been
in the beginning of this
has he experienced
I guess a lot of
depression from being in prison for two and a half
years and
what kinds
of things make him feel better
what can we do
I know one thing that
would make him feel better is if we are able to
be successful
in the bail motion that we're putting
together right now
there is nothing glamorous
about being an inmate
in custody and I
think it doesn't make any difference whether it's
federal or state custody
it is for a hundred
different reasons obviously
intellectually those
we can appreciate but
personally until one has experienced
it I think that
it's impossible to understand
what the deprivation of rights is
and being thrust
into a community where you're
completely at the behest
of prison
guards
people who are bureaucrats in the system
to whom you
are a number so having
said that let me talk to you in a couple
of ways first his mood
I've been representing Kevin since last
October and
he
was in difficult straits
when I started to represent him because he felt
as if the negotiations
had bogged down
at that point in time in terms
of trying to
allow him to resolve his difficulties
with the government in a reasonable fashion
and what
Kevin at that time considered and what I
also consider unreasonable
is a sentence in the
10 year plus range for
what he has allegedly done
we both consider that to be unreasonable
and so he was
obviously depressed by that
prospect and by the fact that
that's what the government that seemed
to be their position at the time
since then the Kevin that I've gotten
to know is a
obviously
a young man who's
intellectually active
and but has a good sense
of humor and if there's one
thing that has saved him
I think allowed him to
keep his marbles throughout this
process is that he has a good sense of humor
and so we
try to find
those instances
regardless of the fact
that he's in custody we try to
never lose that
three
questions maybe the third
maybe doesn't really need an answer but
let's have some fun with some of this
the first thing that struck me
as they talked about taking away Kevin
Mitnick's right to a computer
is that he is among other things a writer
for a computer magazine
beloved by almost everyone in this hall
and so I'm wondering what are the
first amendment consequences
of talking about a
magazine writer saying
that he can't access what is now an
basic tool of his trade
a computer and that seems
profound well
first the answer is
if you ask me the answer is yes
but I'm not the one
to make the rules let me
give you just take a second and tell you
because this is also
another aspect of this case
which may spawn
some circuit court
opinions when it came down
we had sentencing a couple weeks ago
in the two
smaller cases as I mentioned
and if
and when we get him
when we get Kevin out
of custody in this case
then he will have to be on supervised
release from that case
at a minimum for a period of three years
so the judge had to address the issue of what
conditions
she was going to place on it
supervised release is the federal court's
fancy word for conditions
of probation
the court first came
forth with her proposed conditions of
probation and let me just
I happen to have some handy here
so
I'll just
pick out a couple
the defendant shall not possess or use for
any purpose
portable laptop computers
and derivatives
any other electronic equipment
presently available or new technology
that becomes available
that can be converted to or has
as its function a computer related
capability
it seems to me that pretty much covers everything
that we have now and everything
that we'll be using in our daily lives
in the next ten years
let's see here
the defendant shall not access
computers or other forms of wireless communications
via third parties
and shall not act as a consultant to individuals
or groups engaged in any computer related
activity
the government came forward with their own
series of
proposed
conditions of special release
and they included
the following
defendant shall not participate
in any conference, meeting, seminar
class or discussion relating
to computer hacking
the unauthorized access of telecommunication
systems, computer systems or
computer networks or security issues
with respect to such systems
he shall not communicate to
or receive from any person or person
any instructions or information
relating to the access, programming or use
of computer systems, computer
networks or telecommunications systems or
devices
when we got these proposed
conditions from the court
we argued that we thought they were
a tad over restrictive
and in order
to comply with them
really the only safe place for my
client would be in a cabin
deep in the woods without electricity
or running water
writing his memoirs by candlelight
and
we hesitated to point out to the
court, look what happened to Ted
Kaczynski under those circumstances
yes, okay
Don Randolph had a real way with words
that's Kevin Mitnick's lawyer back in
1997 talking on the phone
with the Beyond Hope conference
this has never before been made available
and it's part of the $125
package with all things Mitnick
where you'll get every single talk that Kevin has
given as well as talks about Kevin that
have happened at the various Hope conferences
those are Hackers on Planet Earth conferences
that have taken place here in New York, in addition
you get the brand new Kevin Mitnick book
Ghost in the Wires
autographed which is coming out next month
you'll get the two hour
movie plus at least
an extra features
DVD that we put out back
in 2001 called Freedom Downtime
you'll get a couple of Kevin Mitnick
free Kevin bumper stickers
that's for a pledge of $125
212-209-2950
if you just want the book and the movie
a pledge of $75 will get you that and you'll get
one bumper sticker too, free Kevin bumper sticker
you can put anywhere you want
212-209-2950, we've had a bunch of
calls so far, we want to get some
more people calling in to take advantage of this
one time offer that we're offering tonight
we're on for two hours tonight
because Kevin is our very special guest talking to us
all the way from Spain
on a Skype connection
Kevin are you still there?
Oh dear. I can hear you loud and clear
Oh ok, I had the wrong thing up
I'm sorry, it was my fault
were you able to hear Donald Randolph?
Oh yeah
it reminds me of the old days
Yeah, you know
there was a rumor, maybe you can clarify
this rumor now, back in 1997
the Beyond Hope conference, there was a rumor that you
were listening in on the phone throughout the whole
thing, is that true?
No, that's not true at all
Ok, that rumor has now been dispelled
No, I mean I had a lot of
restricted access to the telephone when I was
in custody, I mean, they were pretty afraid
of me so
we didn't get to use the phone all that much
Well I'd like to talk about that actually
because first of all, for those of you who
don't know, and I've been told there are people who don't
know who Kevin Mitnick is, Kevin Mitnick
in the 1990s and
beyond, was labeled
by the mass media in this country as the
most dangerous hacker in
the world, was that the moniker you
had to wear?
Yeah, I remember
a quote from Time Magazine, it said
something like, you know, handing a
telephone to Mitnick was like handing a machine
gun to a hitman, and that was pretty
scary, because
you know, the guards in the detention
center in Los Angeles kept
passing that all around, you know, and then
it made them even more concerned
about what I can do with a telephone
they were like, scared, it was like
a mysterious, magical thing
that they had no idea how I could
manipulate. Well, that's
amazing because, speaking of what
you can do with a telephone, the
story of what
Judge Feltzer
Feltzer? Feltzer, Mariana
Feltzer. Yeah, she had some notion
as to what you could do
with a phone, and I believe she
imposed some rather severe restrictions
on you at some point?
Oh yeah, I mean, at one point
a prosecutor had
stood up in federal court
and had claimed that I could whistle
the launch, I could first dial
NORAD and somehow communicate
with a modem and whistle into the modem
and cause a nuclear strike.
And of course, when he said this in court
I kind of laughed, figuring
that the judge, he would lose
all credibility with the judge because only
a moron would believe anything like that.
And of course, the judge
appeared to believe it
and then made a special order that
I wasn't to be anywhere near a telephone
and they set up this high security
method of allowing
me to make phone calls, which by the way I defeated
that's in the book, and
because I was at the bottom of the bucket
I had nothing to lose. And
because of that I was held in the hole, which
was a solitary confinement for nearly a year
based on this myth
that I could whistle the codes. Now I've been
practicing, Eric, over time and I
think I got the whistle down
where I could actually do it.
Okay, hold on a second.
If you want to hear it, I'll let Tony do it.
Wait, Tony, is this okay?
We've got to check with management to see if
we can whistle those.
Is this to start a nuclear war
or to continue one?
I don't know if you can hear it, but let me try.
Wait, I've got to
make sure we can do this. Mike, are we alright
to put the nuclear whistles over the air?
What if NORAD is listening?
We just have to make sure our listeners do not
put their telephone near the radio, which would be
okay. If you're listening to this
do not put your phone anywhere near the radio
speaker because what could happen,
we're using Skype, so it's not using the phone lines,
but if you were to get a phone line involved
in this, then it could open up
those doors somewhere in Idaho
and nuclear missiles could start being launched.
Is that my understanding?
Bernie, do you know anything about this?
I'm afraid that could be true
if you believe what the government was saying.
Why would you believe what the government says?
He's on the phone right now. This entire conversation
is going over a phone line.
Bernie, hit the mute button. For God's sake, hit the mute button.
Alright, Kevin, whistle the things.
I assume our listeners are not holding the phone
up to the speaker now.
You risk the nation being destroyed.
Sorry I didn't get it right, but here it goes.
Alright, here we go.
Hopefully it will work.
Hopefully it will work.
That's here.
That's happening right here.
Oh dear.
Alright, we're sorry.
We didn't mean to end civilization.
You said that clearly, but I think
something just blew up.
Yeah, well, things have to blow up, don't they?
Kevin, I didn't realize how dangerous you were
until today, and I'm sorry.
I didn't realize how dangerous you were
until today, and I'm sorry.
I didn't realize how dangerous you were
until today, and I'm sorry.
I didn't realize how dangerous you were until today,
and I see what the government had in mind.
But you mentioned something. You said this is in the book,
and okay, I guess we won't reveal the secret
tonight, but let's just say that
you were in the situation where
you were being watched
by a guard. You could only dial
a couple of numbers. You were not allowed
to touch the phone physically,
yet somehow
you were able to evade
security and bypass it.
Is that correct?
It's a wonderful story. I mean, it's only one story
in the book, and there's so many stories
that tell one story out of... I mean,
do we have time?
Go nuts.
Okay, awesome.
So I was in solitary confinement,
so imagine when I had to make a phone call.
They had a special log,
and the officer took me out of my cell
and handcuffed me and actually shackled
my legs, because you're in the hole, so you're
in the highest security possible.
It's the same security as if I killed a prison guard.
So then they would escort me
to this room that had, like,
three payphones on the wall.
You know, three typical-looking payphones
from Pacific Bell. Then they take
the shackles off, the handcuffs off,
and then the guard had a logbook,
and I think there was five
authorized numbers I was allowed to call.
It was my mom, my dad,
my aunt, my lawyer, and my
wife at the time.
And
my wife at the time worked for
General Telephone, and
during the day she was at work, she wasn't at home,
and the only number on the list
was the home number.
So, you know,
and this happened, you know, a little bit
after I was in the hole for a while.
It wasn't, like, instantaneously I decided
to do this, but I figured I'm already
at the bottom of the bucket,
so what did I have to lose? I'm in solitary confinement
in a federal prison, you know,
where the government says I could launch nuclear weapons
by whistling into a telephone. I had
nothing to lose. So what I
started doing is pacing back and forth because
the cord of the handset was, you know, longer
than typical, and I
would be scratching my back, you know, with
the other hand. I'd be constantly, like,
you know, like I had a rash or something, which
I didn't have, but I'd pretend.
And then I would actually rub my back against
the payphone. So during
a phone call, like, for example, to
my father, I'd,
you know, have a conversation, and after the conversation
ended, I'd continue
as if I was talking to him,
and then I would, like, rub my back against the payphone.
Then I'd put my hand behind my back
as I'm leaning against the payphone
and hold down the switch hook for a second.
And then immediately I'd put my
hand in front of me because, as you know,
once you hit the switch
hook, you have about 18 seconds
before the phone's going to go
into reorder. And during this whole time,
the guard is sitting in a
chair four to five feet
in front of me watching my every move.
So then I would pace, like,
one more time, and then I'd lean
against the phone again, and then I was pretty
adept at using a touchpad after
having, you know, a decade of phone-freaking
under me. So I'd simply
just dial 0 plus the number behind the back,
which it was easy to do because
the number I'd general telephone at the time was
805-371-6000.
So it's not a difficult number to dial.
And so I would still be
in mid-conversation, pretending
to have a conversation, and the next thing that was going to
happen was the operator
was going to come up on the line and ask,
you know, who the clock calls from. So what I
had to do is, oh, yeah, well, you know,
tell Uncle Jerry that Kevin
says hello. And at the point
I said, Kevin, is when the operator
says, well, who's the clock call from?
So I'd continue in conversation,
and eventually the call, you know, would be
and the person would accept the call,
and then they'd be talking to the new person.
And I started doing this constantly
right under their eye.
I mean, they're sitting there watching me.
So after about three and a half weeks,
around 6 a.m. one morning,
my cell door opens, and it's
the executives of the prison.
And they shackled me, you know,
again, handcuffs, leg irons.
They moved me to the attorney conference
room on the eighth floor of the Metropolitan Detention
Center, and they take off the
handcuffs, and they say, Mitnick!
You know, how are you doing it?
And I go, how am I doing what?
They go, you're redialing the number. You're somehow
redialing the phone.
And I
kind of had, like, a look on my face, like, what?
I said, how can I be redialing
the phone? Well, Mr. Mitnick, you know,
we monitor all
prison inmates' phone calls
down in our room, and we
know you're redialing
the phone, even when our officer is
not taking his eyes off you. How are
you doing it? And then I
simply smiled, and I sat back and
smiled and said, hey, I'm not David Copperfield.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Well, they got kind of pissed off. They shackled
me back up, threw me back in my cell.
Then two days later, I
hear, like, some drilling outside
the cell, and it's actually
Pacific Belt technicians installing
a phone jack. And I'm
thinking to myself, are these idiots
actually going to install a phone in my
cell and try to restrict the numbers that
I can call? You know, because a lot
was passing through my mind, like, what could
they be doing? Well, the very next time
I had to make a phone call, I figured it out.
The officer brings
a phone, a regular, like, home phone, plugs
it into the jack, and he dials
the number I want to call,
and then he puts the handset
on a long 25-foot cord
through the trap door
in the cell door,
where they give you food and stuff.
And that way, I couldn't
reach the touchtone pad. So I
kind of thought,
wow, this is like Hannibal
Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.
So that's how I was able to
pretty much call anybody I
wanted, even though I was in solitary confinement
and under a court-ordered fund restriction.
Wow. That is
unreal. And just the fact that
you had that sense of
rebellion in you, that even under
these horrendous conditions, and by horrendous conditions,
you were in solitary confinement.
Your cell was, what, 8x10?
That or smaller. I mean,
geez, I
don't recall the actual measurements,
but something like 8x10,
it had a bunk, it had a toilet.
I mean, it was very restrictive,
because you're in a high-security unit.
Like, my neighbors were
guys from the Mexican mafia.
I think there was a guy
that was a DEA agent that became
a criminal. And so
these guys were in high
security. So it definitely
wasn't the highlight of my life.
It really sucked.
I can't imagine the people
that are in Supermax in Colorado,
like Theodore Kaczynski, that my attorney
brought up as the Unabomber, because
these guys experienced that forever.
And I
was going bonkers, like, after a week.
I'm probably
a little bit crazy today from it.
The thing is, and what you bring up in the
book, imagine,
you say this to the readers, imagine
just living inside a closet
for months at a time.
You get out one hour a day
to walk around in a slightly bigger space
and breathe actual air.
But imagine just having that
as your room where you're fed
through that little slot in the door
and your contact with the
outside world is extremely limiting, and
just how insane that will drive
you. And it's hard for any of us, I think,
to imagine what it is that
motivated you to keep trying to beat the system
and succeeding in beating the system
so many times, and just to
keep that spirit. It's an
incredible thing, regardless of your
background, just to have that spirit.
Yeah, I mean,
yeah, even when I was a fugitive,
I remember
I needed a new identity.
And at the time,
at first, I
used an identity of somebody else,
but that wasn't going to be permanent,
because that's how you get caught.
So back in those days, when I was
like 11, 12 years
old, I used to frequent
this bookstore in North Hollywood, California, called
The Survival Bookstore, and they have all
the books on subjects
you weren't supposed to know about.
And my favorite book was called The Paper Trip
by a guy named Barry Reid, and it
described how to
create yourself a new identity and disappear
forever. And what
it described is basically
hijacking the birth
and death records, and
basically when an infant passed
away at a very young age
and had no other records in the
infant's name, how you could basically take
over that
deceased person's identity and
become them. So
I did some research and found out
that there was about
14 states that had open birth
and death records, and
I wanted to find a state
that was kind of a place where people
were born. And so I
went to South Dakota.
And so I remember, before I went to
South Dakota, I did a little bit of prep work.
I went to a
supermarket, and they
had a business card printing machine.
So you put in five bucks, and
you press in your name
and your address and who you want to be,
and within three minutes out
pops the business cards. So I
had a flashback of the old TV series The Rockford
Files, where James Rockford
had a business card
that said the name I was using at the time,
which was Eric Weiss, paying tribute
to Harry Houdini because
that was his real name. I had these cards
printed up that said, Eric Weiss, private investigator,
an address in Las Vegas, and a PI
number.
And armed with those business cards
and a nice suit,
I went to the Bureau of Vital
Statistics in South Dakota, went
in the front door.
I told them that I was a private
investigator doing
an ongoing investigation,
and I needed access to the death
records.
Then I was introduced to the
actual person that was the head of
the Bureau of Vital Statistics for all of South
Dakota, and I told her
the same story. And she goes,
no problem, Mr. Weiss. What we'll
do is just tell us the names of the people
you want, and we'll just print out the death certificates
for you, and we'll be happy to do it, and
this is what it will cost. I said, no,
what I don't understand
is I'm doing a research project
or an investigation on
the causes of death in
certain years, about 20 to 30
years ago, so I need to go ahead
and I need to be able to browse the death
certificates. So what
they did is
the head lady
told one of her employees
to go ahead and train me on the microfiche.
So they trained me on the fiche. They showed
me to access all the films for the year,
and they put me in this back room,
and
basically for a whole week
I was in the back room researching
people that died around one
or two years of age,
and they were born in a different
state, and a year that I could
pass for, and obviously a Caucasian
with the color
of the eyes and all that sort of
thing, so everything matched up.
And the very next day,
one of the staff in the
statistics says, hey, I heard you're a
private investigator. I go, yeah.
She goes, I have an uncle. I think
he's in Las Vegas, and I haven't
spoken to him in years. Do you think you can help
me find him? I go, I'll give it
a shot. So I went back to
my hotel that evening, and
of course, with
LexisNexis and Westlaw, I was able to find
the uncle in about two minutes.
I was able to use social engineering skills
to get the phone number because it was a non-published number.
I go back to the Bureau
of Statistics the next day. I give this
lady the information, and literally
she's hugging me. I can't believe
that now she can call
her uncle, and
for the next week I'm in there,
she's bringing me donuts
and coffee.
And I'm sitting there doing all this
research, and then
I get annoyed. And why did I
get annoyed? Because in this room,
they had all these printers going.
And it was annoying because I needed
some quiet because I'm trying to
quickly go through 10 years
of death certificates
as quickly as possible.
So I walk
over to the printers, and
my jaw drops because
what was in the box
was blank birth certificates
for the state of South Dakota.
And I go, oh my god, to me,
being a fugitive from the FBI,
that was like hitting a jackpot, right?
So I look at
the other boxes that weren't obviously
fed into the printer, and they were just blank birth certificate
stock. So of course I rip
myself, I took about 50
certificates. And then the problem was
is those certificates aren't
worth the paper they're printed on
unless they're embossed with the state's seal.
Right.
So outside this room of where I was,
they basically have the embosser,
and any time an employee would have to
emboss a death certificate, a marriage certificate, or birth
certificate, they'd walk over to this table
and emboss it, then walk back to their
desk. So
the very next day, it was kind of like
snow flurries in South Dakota.
So I brought my ski jacket
into the office there.
And you know how government employees are
when it's lunchtime? It's lunchtime.
They don't do any work.
So knowing this, around 1230 sharp,
I walk to the restroom, I take
my ski jacket, and on the way back,
I basically take the embosser
and put it under my jacket, walk into the room,
which is five feet away.
And then my heart's beating like crazy because
if I get caught, you know, the jig
is up, right? Not only am I going to
get in trouble for, you know, embossing
my own birth certificates,
you know, I'm going to get in trouble for everything else.
So my heart's pounding
as I'm embossing 50 of these certificates.
And, of course,
nothing ever happens. I'm able
to put the embosser back where it was,
and I walk out the door with 50
blank birth certificates to become
the 50 new people that I wanted to be.
So that's kind of a crazy
story because I think it takes a lot of
chutzpah. Because when I look back at it
today, I'm thinking,
damn, I was crazy.
Because, you know,
I was nuts.
I would never do anything like that today.
But back then, you know, I had a lot of chutzpah.
Well, you're also being hunted and
trying to live
on your own and figure out
ways to survive. And yeah, this is
what you have to do. But you sort of invented
identity theft there, I think, back then.
That was incredible.
And you just have so many stories like
this, where you've ingratiated yourself with
people that
you think would be the last people that
would take you in. For instance, if you need
a password, you just pretty much waltz
up to the person that has the password and
ask them for it and present the scenario in such a
way that they feel they have to give it to you.
And it's just story after
story about how you did this. It's quite
emotional, both in learning
how to do this and just as an individual
trying to stay
free. And reading the
book, you get a sense as to why you had
to do that, based on the background.
You start off very
early in your life, in your childhood,
and you see how things
developed and how
you basically got to where you were
at that particular time in your life.
I should point out that we are
almost at the $1,000 mark. We need to be further
up, though. This is part of a special two-hour
program that we have tonight featuring
Kevin Mitnick, who we're speaking to from
Spain over a Skype connection.
And basically
Kevin is putting out a brand new book
called Ghost in the Wires. It's coming out
next month, but you can get
a signed
copy by pledging tonight.
212-209-2950.
$75, you'll get
a copy of the book. You'll get
a copy of Freedom Downtime,
a two-hour, two-DVD documentary
filled with all kinds of extra bits in addition
to the two hours. It tells the story
about Kevin's life and
his run from
law enforcement. A lot of things you can learn
from this whole battle, as far as
how someone's name can get
completely tarnished with a bunch
of lies, as well as how to
stay one step ahead
of the authorities when
push comes to shove. 212-
209-2950.
And you also get, for a pledge of $75,
a free Kevin bumper sticker. These
adorned cars and stop signs
and all kinds of other things
in the late 1990s as the Free Kevin movement
was in full swing. For a pledge
of $125, you get all of that, plus an additional
bumper sticker and a whole bunch of
DVDs from the Hope Conferences featuring Kevin.
We're going to play an excerpt from another one of those
in just a couple of moments.
It's a great deal. Our pledge
people at
212-209-2950 will be more than happy
to explain it in further detail to you.
But right now, we have to get those phones
ringing. Okay, we've gone over the 1,000
mark. We have one call on the
line. I'd like to see that turn into
what, six, seven? I don't think that's being
too
unrealistic. I don't think so
at all. And you mentioned the whole
Free Kevin movement in the 90s.
Some of us were there. I was there. You were there.
And we
knew that there was a sort
of sense about everything, that
this wasn't just another
hacker that got busted. This wasn't just another
case. We sort of knew that
however this case went was going to affect everything
that happened afterward in the hacker world.
And even when we were around back then,
there was not all that much information about
what was going on behind
the scenes. I mean, we had people like you,
Emanuel, who had limited contact with Kevin
and were updating the rest of us.
But so far as the complete
story, we all had sort of these incomplete
bits and pieces. And now that this book can finally
come out, I think those of us who were there
will learn a whole lot about what was
fully going on with this whole case.
The thing is, we told the story through Freedom
Downtime. We told our version of it.
There were other versions that were, I
think, a lot less accurate, such as what
happened in the New York Times and also the movie
Takedown. But now,
for the first time, you get to see what Kevin
has to say. You get to read all
these pages, fill the stories.
I mean, Kevin, you can talk for hours
and hours about all these things. There are so many stories,
throughout the course of your life, to this day
that you've been involved in, things I'm learning
that I didn't know about. And
it's just, it's fascinating. It's incredible.
I've told you privately that I really think there's
a movie in this book
and an interesting one, as opposed
to the one, the fictionalized one
that was put out about your life. I think this is one that
really will be inspirational
and exciting
and educational at the same time.
No, I just want to mention
historical interests
aside, all the stuff in here is pretty
darn interesting. Anyone who's ever
heard Kevin talking about
any of his past experiences, it's riveting.
The kinds of things that happened
and the scenarios and
how it all progresses,
you very rarely come
across something like that. Yeah. Bernie, I know
you served your time in
the federal pen and state pens and things
like that for equally crazy
reasons. And you have
the same spirit of individuality
and sort of rebelling against
the system and outsmarting it.
What do you think it is that drives people like you
and Kevin? You actually have to
maintain your sanity and your mental
health. You actually have to have that
attitude. You have to be able to laugh
at the situation as being
beyond ludicrous.
You have to be able to see your
keepers,
those who have restricted your freedom,
who have restricted your freedom. You have to see
them for who they are.
You have to keep your chin up. Otherwise,
they will get the best of you.
I commend Kevin for
having done that for about five
years. I only had to for
more or less a year and a half.
But he shared something that I shared,
which was the not knowing
when the light would be at the
end of the tunnel.
I would envy
fellow prisoners
who would have a release date
to look forward to, as I'm sure Kevin
did as well. He had no idea
as I did
when he's going to be getting
out.
That's really tough when you're there
for month after month, year after year, not
knowing when
this nightmare is going to be over.
That's worse than serving a
longer sentence and at least having a release
date. Keeping your sanity, Kevin
managing to keep his sanity under those conditions
is pretty amazing.
I want to encourage our listeners
to take that to heart
and read his
story. I haven't read it yet, but
I've spoken to Kevin on many occasions.
I'm really impressed with how he kept
his sanity during
that half decade
of just ridiculous
oppressive conditions.
Listeners, call 212-209-2950.
You're going to get
from the horse's mouth, from Kevin himself,
which
may be one of the more
objective, probably the most
subjective and factual revision
of his story. A DVD
called Freedom Downtime,
which the 2600 folks
I was slightly involved with that
put this out
during when this was going on.
And you tell your story in that movie as well.
Yes, and other hackers as well.
It was really an amazing time
when the government
didn't really know how to handle hackers.
They couldn't quite wrap their mind of what
you're capable of.
That's true.
What I mean is they have a much better grasp of...
They're still going to misrepresent things,
but before they were far more
naive and actually believed
their own BS.
Now I think they're just
just
far more...
They're more disingenuous now
in that they know that they're
just spouting nonsense
and blowing smoke, whereas
before, they really believed some of this stuff
that they were saying that
hackers could do.
They just didn't have the handle.
They had very little technical training.
We have two calls on the line. Let's make that five.
212-209-2950.
Again, we're offering the brand new
Kevin Mitnick book, Ghost in the Wires.
It's coming out
next month.
It tells all and then some.
It's an incredible
series of stories.
The thing is, a lot of people, and this was true
back in the 90s as well, a lot of people
would come up to us and say, but he's a criminal.
He deserves to be punished
and all that kind of a thing.
This is something that, if you read the book,
even Kevin does not hide
behind anything. He admits what it is
exactly that he did. He even says
that he should be punished to some degree,
but the amount
of punishment and the sheer
irrationality of it, that is the
story. That is what makes this fascinating.
Just the fear that people
in authority positions have
of somebody who's using technology
in a way that they don't understand
and the incredible restrictions and
mistruths that follow somebody around
for the rest of their lives. This is something,
Kevin's story is something that every
single one of us who is an individual
can identify with to some degree.
Whether or not you believe somebody is a criminal or not,
if you are an individual in
any way, this is something that speaks to you.
212-209-2950.
Join the four calls
on the line now and
get the Kevin Mitnick book, get the
bumper sticker, get the movie, get the DVD
series. It's just an incredible
document of our
time. Keep in mind,
most of this, except for Kevin's release
and subsequent rehabilitation
into society, most of this happened
before 9-11. Imagine
a person like Kevin Mitnick walking around
and challenging
authority and outsmarting
authority and technology. Imagine
that happening in a post-9-11
world in America and how he would be treated
then. Kevin, do you ever think about that?
I think it's quite
scary, but
it's kind of interesting because
how I got started
in all of this was primarily from
phone phreaking because I was involved in the hobby of
phone phreaking after a student
at my high school introduced me to it and I
was just taken aback and
it was just amazing to me
learning about the telecommunications
network. But I remember when
I was in high school,
I wanted to go to computer science class
because another student recommended it.
I kind of poo-pooed it at first
and then when I found out the phone company
was moving to electronic switching
systems, I wanted to learn more about computers
because I think it would give me a little bit of
an edge over the phone company, or at least
understanding what's going on.
And I remember the teacher
told me, oh, I'm sorry, Kevin,
you don't have the prerequisites to get into computer
class, you have to have calculus.
Because back in this time, you had to be
a senior with calculus to get into computer
class and I think I only had like trig or something.
And I started showing
the teacher, a guy named
Mr. Christ, I started showing him all
the tricks I could do with the telephone.
Using loop arounds,
calling into, remember Roto-Rooter?
Calling in and having
it play back your touch tones.
And he thought it was quite
interesting. He waved the prerequisites, let me
in the class, and then the first
programming assignment in Fortran
was to write a
program that would find the first 100
Fibonacci numbers.
And to me, that was the most boring
assignment in the world.
So I decided on a new assignment to write
a login simulator that
would simulate the login prompt
to log into the school's
RISC-C system
and it would steal the password and then
put the person into the account. I thought that
was a more interesting and practical program.
So I wrote that program instead
and then I got into trouble because
I ran it on all the terminals
in the computer room and got everybody's
password. But
in any event, I told the instructor, I told
Mr. Christ, I said, listen, I didn't have time
to write this Fibonacci exercise
but I have my password stealer.
Can you at least give me credit for that?
So I got an A. So he said,
yeah, I did a good job.
You're really clever.
You used a little bit more ingenuity.
And he gave me an A,
a bunch of attaboys.
So the ethics taught to me when I was in
school was it was cool
and fun and
you were considered a whiz kid and it was
behavior that you
were awarded for.
In today's world, if I did that today
and was still in high school, I'd
probably be called to the principal's office
and be picked up by the police.
That's an unfortunate reality.
And it's not like that everywhere
in the world, fortunately. And maybe
it can be shifted in this country
as well if we simply educate people.
Getting this book is maybe the
first step towards educating people
on that level.
And I hope a lot of people call in now.
212-209-2950. Pledge for the book.
Kevin Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires.
Coming out next month. Autographed
copy. And
get the movie as well. Get the DVDs.
Get the bumper stickers. Get the whole package.
Learn as much as you possibly can.
We're going to have more about poor Mr. Chris later on.
Kevin's teacher. Quite a
beleaguered guy that endured
a lot. And
we learned a lot through him as well. We have to take a station
break though. We're on for an extra hour tonight.
And Personal Computer Show
will be back next week. Please give a
call. 212-209-2950.
And let's fill
those phone lines up. Remember,
we're doing this for the station. So the station
remains here. And so that we
have a voice to present stories like this
in the future. 212-209-2950.
We'll be right back.
But I won't
back down
No I'll stand
my ground
Won't be turned
around
And I'll keep this
world from dragging me
down Gonna stand
my ground
And I
won't back down
I won't back down
Hey baby
There ain't
no easy way out
Hey
I
will stand
my ground
And I
won't back
down
Well I know
what's right
I got just
one life
In a world that
keeps on pushing me
around But I'll stand
my ground
And I
won't back down
I won't back down
Hey baby
There ain't
no easy way out
I won't back down
Hey
I
will stand my
ground
And I won't back
down
I won't back down
Hey baby
There ain't no easy way out
I won't back down
Hey
I
won't back
down
I won't back down
Hey baby
And of course that's the voice of Tom Petty
Won't Back Down. Kevin, I happen to know this is a song
that kind of was in your head a lot of the time
when you were involved in various
escapades, correct?
Yeah, in fact, when you were starting to play that
on the commercial break, I started laughing
because that was exactly the song
that was running through my head as I was in custody
and where the government was trying to get me to agree
to spend a decade behind bars
based on causing fictitious losses.
Because don't forget what my case was about later,
was stealing source code
so I could learn about the vulnerabilities
and create invisibility for myself
and what the government tried to get these companies to do
is saying that their losses were their R&D cost
in developing these products
like the Motorola Microtech Ultralight phone
when in reality it would have been the value
of a source code license.
So I had this rebellious type of attitude
exactly like Tom Petty,
you could stand me up at the gates of hell
but I won't back down
and I sat in prison for four and a half years
because I wouldn't back down.
The government at first tried to get me
to cooperate against others, which I wouldn't do
because I have more integrity than to become an informant
and then they tried to get me to fall on the sword
basically to do what they wanted me to do
and I wouldn't do that either
and the case was drawn out for a long four and a half years
as you know, where I wasn't allowed to see evidence
and crazy stuff about the laptop and in custody
so my attorney could understand what the case was about
and all these crazy things happened
but one thing, I don't know if you know this,
in the book, I don't know if you have this in the galley copy
but in the final copy of the book,
I'm running kind of a, what I call a non contest
because I'm not making a promise
but what the game is, is in and on each chapter
I have a cipher text
and there's cipher text for each of the chapters
and if you solve the cipher text,
there will be 20 questions
and if you read the book,
you'll be able to answer those 20 questions
and what I wanna do is I have a whole bunch of evidence
that the FBI had returned to me after the case
and it's still in FBI evidence bags
with FBI fingerprint dust
so I still have these items
and what I wanna do is maybe put into a large bin
the people that answer these questions correctly
is dump it into like a big bin
and choose 10 names
and with those 10 names,
they get like a piece of evidence memorabilia.
I'm trying to figure out how to do this
because I can't make a promise
because then it becomes a legal contest
and I'm not gonna have to deal with the headache
of running a contest
so I'm not gonna make a promise to give out any prizes
but just so I feel inclined
to give out some gifts
if people are able to solve the puzzle
and they're randomly chosen
as somebody I wanna give a gift to
so that's a cool thing
that nobody knows about in the book
because there's been no publicity about it.
Actually, yeah, in the version I have,
it just says code to come
so I don't think that part was put in yet
but it sounds like an amazing thing
to really devote even more time to
when you're reading this book.
It's really something that will exercise your mind
and teach you so much
but I gotta say, we're up to 1600 now.
We really needed to be about 400 above that
on the top of the hour
and that was 13 minutes ago
so we're running a bit behind.
We need our listeners to do their bit,
call in, support the radio station.
Remember, the radio station was vital
throughout the whole Kevin Mitnick ordeal
back in the late 90s and beyond
and also for Bernie S's case
and for Fiber Optics' case
and for all the other cases that have happened
in the many years that we've been on the air
and for the cases that will happen in the years ahead,
you need a voice, an independent voice
to be able to say things as they are,
to not be beholden to commercial interests.
Now, Kevin, you refer to it as a commercial break
and that is what you call it in radio
but we don't have commercials here on this radio station.
We have listeners.
That's all we have.
We don't break for any kind of corporate sponsorship
or anything like that
and what that gives us in the middle of the FM dial,
it gives us the freedom to speak our minds,
to have our listeners speak their minds,
to say things that would lose us sponsors
because we'd be annoying Microsoft,
we'd be annoying Verizon,
we'd be annoying all the major corporations out there
by telling things like they are.
Kevin, you could not tell your story
on a commercial radio station, right?
No, yeah.
No, I could only be interviewed for a maximum of an hour
because I, but to be able to tell us your whole story
on a commercial radio station is not possible
but you know what I'm gonna throw in?
For anyone that decides to contribute to the cause for WBAI,
what I'll also do is throw in my lockpick business card
which is kind of cool.
So what I'll do is I'll,
when you tell me who's participated,
I will send you the whatever number of business cards
you need and then you could include those in the package.
So you're saying everybody who calls in
and pledges tonight in addition
will get one of your lockpicking business cards.
Exactly. Wow.
I'll send them to you of course
and you can work out the logistics
and get into them.
Yeah, and now it's not illegal to have one of these,
is it?
I guess you'll find out.
Well, I mean, it's a business card
but it's also a lockpick.
So wow, it's actually.
Maybe Bernie knows the answer to that one.
I don't know.
In my state, Philadelphia, Kevin,
it's Pennsylvania rather,
it is not a criminal offense to have it.
You know, it's the whole possession of tools of crime thing.
It's all in the context of the situation
you're possessing them in.
So in this case, you know,
just to show that there was intent to use them
in some illegal way would be a real stretch.
So I highly doubt any of our listeners
are gonna get into trouble
for possessing your business card,
which is really neat.
It's a whole lockpick set, which you can break apart.
But if it's in your wallet
and you have a whole set of lockpicks at your disposal.
Okay, so everybody who has called in so far
and pledged, you're also getting that.
You don't have to call back.
And everybody who calls in from this point on,
in addition to the movie and the book
and the bumper sticker,
you're now getting a lockpicking set
in the form of a business card.
And for those of you who pledged 125,
in addition to that,
you're getting a whole bunch of DVDs,
a dozen DVDs from the various Hope Conferences
involving Kevin Mitnick.
212-209-2950.
If that doesn't bring a whole bunch of calls in,
I don't know what we can possibly do
to convince you that this is a worthy cause.
This is something that people need to step up
and be counted.
212-209-2950.
We have three calls on the line.
That's great.
We should have seven calls on the line.
There are a lot of people out there.
A lot of people are listening to this.
A lot of people are benefiting from the knowledge.
And this kind of thing needs to be supported
and encouraged so that we can tell things like this
in the future.
Rob.
I should point out,
for people who've never seen Kevin's business card,
that it's a business card.
If you break it apart in a certain way,
then it becomes lockpicks.
So what we're sending you is a business card.
It's up to you if you want to make it into lockpicks.
I see.
Okay, so that's what we're ducking behind.
Okay, good.
Fine, that works.
It's a creative business card, though.
I have one myself and I'm still free.
So yeah, obviously you won't get in trouble
just for having it.
But be careful what you do with it.
Yeah, everyone really should.
Anyone who hasn't called in at all during this fundraiser
or maybe has thought in the past,
you know, maybe next time, next time, you know,
there may not be a next time.
There is no next time.
Exactly.
I mean, we're just doing this tonight.
Kevin, we only have about another 40 minutes
and then Kevin's going to sleep.
He's over there in Spain where it's, what,
three o'clock in the morning over there, Kevin?
It's ridiculous.
2.17 a.m.
It's, yeah, it's way late.
But of course, that's normal for you.
You stay up all night usually, right?
Oh, oh, definitely, you know.
And, you know, you guys don't want me
to have to create content
for the second version of the book, do you?
So let's keep it just one book, please.
Well, I think you have unending supply of stories
and you certainly prove it
with the 400 or so pages of this book.
Again, Pledge of $75 gets you
the brand new Kevin Mitnick book coming out next month,
the story of his life and all the things
that he wasn't allowed to tell you before.
You'll get the two-hour documentary
plus about three hours of extras, Freedom Downtime.
You'll get a bumper sticker.
You'll get the lockpicking business card.
That's all for a Pledge of $75.
What a great deal, 212-209-2950.
For a Pledge of 125, you get all of that
plus the DVD set of Hope Talks involving Kevin,
including his keynote address,
including the informants panel,
including his lawyer in 1997, all kinds of things.
Kevin has been sort of a theme of the Hope Conference.
It was back in 1994 when we first started
that you were actually on the run
because of that July 4th, 1994 story
by John Markoff on the front page of the New York Times.
You couldn't go to the first Hope Conference
but you were calling in occasionally
and talking to us on various phones
and we didn't know where you were.
And you're still a part of it to this day
and will be in the future
as long as we continue having conferences.
But your story just is so compelling
and something I think we can all identify with.
Four calls on the line, 212-209-2950.
That's the phone number.
I would like to play another excerpt.
This comes from The Last Hope.
Is it The Last Hope?
No, I'm sorry.
It's The Fifth Hope back in 2004.
The story of some of what Kevin did
in early parts of his life
and things that were a bit inspirational.
I would love to see a flurry of phone calls come in
while we're playing this excerpt.
It's very important that we hear from you.
That's why we're here tonight, because of our listeners.
The station has existed since 1960.
In fact, if you go through the FM dial,
you will find every single frequency in this city
has changed formats, changed ownership,
done different things, has not found its niche yet.
WBAI, we've been doing this since 1960.
We've had thousands of different radio programs on
in that period of time.
Imagine the communities that have been served.
Imagine the communities that have been strengthened
as a result of that.
And in all that time, not one single commercial,
because you, our listeners, are the sponsors.
212-209-2950.
Now, everyone, you should remember,
in a world like this,
people vote with their pockets.
If you don't donate to the station,
it might not be there in the future.
If you don't donate during the show that you might like,
it might not be on next week.
Or future fundraisers, you might have automated
just recordings going on.
Instead of hearing very interesting,
informative stories from people
that you'd never hear on commercial radio.
We take credit cards, we do the monthly billing thing,
all kinds of options.
So if you can afford a Big Mac or going to movies
or things like that,
why not consider making WBAI as important,
at least to you, to preserve that, to keep that going?
Because it really doesn't cost very much more
than what people do in normal day-to-day life.
And WBAI should be a part
of everyone's normal day-to-day life, I think.
212-209-2950.
We have five calls on the line.
Great response so far.
Let's please keep those calls coming in.
Let's go back to 2004
and listen to what Kevin had to say
at the fifth HOPE Conference.
And we have so much more to come.
We have the Off the Hook show later tonight.
We have Steve Wozniak tomorrow.
Joe will be out for Sunday.
But now, for today,
we have something that we have never been able to have before
because back in the first HOPE, back in 1994,
Kevin was in prison.
And after that, actually, no, 1994, he was on the run.
1997, he was in prison.
And then there was always a reason
for Kevin not to be here.
But there's no more reason for him not to be here.
So he is here finally.
This is the culmination.
And it's the reason we started the HOPE Conference
in the first place, to get Kevin Mitnick to New York.
And, well, we did it.
I also just want to intro a couple of really special people.
Kevin's mother and grandmother are here.
I think it's...
And...
And...
And...
And...
And...
And...
And...
Throughout the entire ordeal
of Kevin's imprisonment and prosecution,
they have been the strength behind everything.
As far as Kevin standing up for his rights,
just knowing that there are people out here supporting him,
they have always been there.
And they've been a real inspiration to me, too.
Just people who really understand what's going on,
what he is accused of, what he did, what's unfair about it.
And it's just, I think that makes all the difference
when you have people who give a damn,
who are standing behind you.
So I just want to thank you two for being there
and for being here.
And...
And...
And...
And...
And...
And...
And...
And we can also say Kevin is the only hacker
to bring his mom and grandmother to a conference.
All right.
And with that, the words I've been wanting to speak
All right.
And with that, the words I've been wanting to speak
for 10 years, ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Mitnick.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Wow.
It's finally good to be home.
Well, first of all,
I want to thank everyone for showing up for my talk.
It's a great to be back home again.
for all their support they've given me over the years.
And today, my talk is gonna be a little bit different.
I usually talk for companies and conventions
and stuff like that, but I'm gonna talk about me
and the stuff that I've been through
and where I'm going and some entertaining stories
I think everyone will relate to and enjoy.
And I guess I am the only first hacker
to bring my mom and grandmother to a conference, so.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
It's kind of interesting.
Anyway, I think I was born, oh by the way,
my talk is gonna last for about probably an hour,
15 minutes to an hour and a half,
and I'm gonna have a 30 minute Q and A,
just so everyone's aware of the time constraints here.
I think I was born as a hacker because at 10 years old,
I was fascinated with magic, I love illusions,
and I would hang out at the corner magic store
for hours and hours just to find out
the secret to a magic trick.
I always wanted a bite of the forbidden fruit,
the forbidden apple, and I always was in pursuit
of information that should be secret, but for entertainment.
I loved doing illusions, I loved pulling pranks
on friends and family.
So about two years later, the first system I hacked
wasn't a computer, wasn't a telephone,
but was the Los Angeles RTD.
You know what RTD is?
The Rapid Transit District.
So as a young kid, my hobby was riding buses.
I used to ride buses all the way through Los Angeles
and San Bernardino, my mom worked long hours
as a single mother supporting me,
so Kevin had to find something entertaining to do.
So one day I'm sitting at the back of the bus,
and I'm looking at the transfer,
you know how you could pay a certain fee
and you can buy a transfer to transfer on a different line?
I'm looking at it and it has a special punch
and it's punched with a date and the direction you're going,
and you can use this as a ticket to get on the next bus.
So I'm thinking to myself, about 11, 11 1⁄2 years old,
this is kind of interesting.
So I go up to the bus driver as I'm about to get off the bus
and I go, hey sir, where do you get these punches?
I'm doing a special project for school,
and I like the kind of shapes these are,
these are really cool shapes,
where can I buy one of these punches?
And he told me the name of the store
in downtown Los Angeles.
I get that was the first time I did social engineering,
11 years old.
So I go to the store in downtown LA
and I buy myself a nice shiny punch,
and I go, wow, this is cool, I can punch my own transfers.
Problem was, is I didn't have any transfers.
So I was thinking, my grandmother lived about
two miles away from the RTD bus depot,
and I was thinking, you know, human nature, people are lazy.
So I think these bus drivers,
probably after a long day of riding that bus,
they take these transfers, they haven't used them,
they just throw it in the trash.
So Kevin, at 11 and a half, became a dumpster diver.
And I went into the RTD trash
and fished out all these blank transfers.
And I used to punch my own transfers
and ride the bus system.
Bus drivers knew what I was doing
because they'd see me boarding the bus
and I'd have the outline of the punch, right?
And I'd be so bold sometimes to punch another transfer
on the bus for somebody else.
And the driver thought it was cute, right?
Everyone thought it was cute.
No one told me I was defrauding RTD, right?
And I guess I have a little bit of a photographic memory
because I actually ended up memorizing the entire schedule
for every bus in Los Angeles County.
So if I knew I had to go from point A to point B,
I knew what time to be at what place
without referencing any type of schedule.
So that was kind of interesting.
One day I was riding the bus and I met this other guy
who was a ham radio operator.
And this bus driver says,
hey, hey kid, I found this radio on the back of a bus.
Do you know what it is?
And he held up an HT, Motorola HT.
And I go, oh, that's a police radio, I'm thinking.
Well, that's cool, I'd like to listen to police.
And he goes, no, this is a ham radio.
So he introduced me to the hobby of amateur radio.
And I was so intrigued, not with the radio,
but of the auto-patch capability.
That's making phone calls over radio.
I thought the auto-patch was cool.
I could have this little HT handheld,
this was like 20 years ago,
and I could dial any phone number.
And I thought that was, wow,
I want to be able to do that, right?
So I won't go into my auto-patch stories,
that'll be for the next talk.
But the most fun I had with radio,
before I get into phones and computers,
was the drive-up windows at McDonald's.
Because you could clip a wire in some sort of,
certain radios like the Olinco radio
and you can go out of band
and transmit on any frequency.
So we used to have fun at McDonald's.
So the customer would drive up to the drive-up window
and we now become the McDonald's employee,
because we have more power.
Can I take your order, sir?
Yes, I'd like a Big Mac, large fry, large Coke.
Oh, I'm sorry, we have changed our menu
and now we offer Super Taco, burritos,
and we don't offer any sodas anymore, it's only juices.
We drive customers crazy.
We drive one McDonald's so crazy
that the manager came out,
we're like a block away doing this, right?
Manager comes out, he's looking in the parking lot,
he sees no one, right?
And he's looking around and he's scratching his head
and he walks up to the speaker, right?
And he has his face on the speaker and I go,
what the F are you looking at?
This guy, this guy drove back 30 feet.
Don't tell the FCC on me, they already don't like me.
So let's fast forward a little bit to high school.
I'm a ham radio buff, I'm really into radio,
I'm into playing with the auto patch,
and I meet this other kid whose dad's a ham radio operator
and he was what they called a phone freak.
So he wanted to borrow my radio in exchange
for showing me stuff about phones
and I could really care less at the time.
But then he started showing me some neat stuff,
how he can call the secret number in the phone company
and he can give the phone number
and the operator would immediately give the name
and address without asking any questions,
it was called the CNA Bureau.
How he was able, he'd say, give me the name
of a family member that has an unlisted telephone
and he would call a bureau called the Num Pub Bureau
and he'd be able to sweet talk them
out of getting an unlisted telephone number
of a family member.
Then the really thing that intrigued me
is he said, I have the secret test number,
you call this test number, you hear a tone
and you put in five digits
and you can call anywhere in the world for free.
Later on, I found out that was Sprint
and it wasn't calling for someone for free,
somebody was paying the bill,
but I'm a high school kid, I didn't know.
So when I started in phones,
it was really learning about the telephone network,
I had a passion for technology,
it was fascinating and the people I read about
like John Draper, Captain Crunch,
who I know is here, and Steve Wozniak,
I read about their experiments with the phone system
and it kind of intrigued me
and I wanted to learn more, more and more.
So the route I took was a very risky route.
And this is where I first learned about social engineering
because to learn about the phone company
wasn't like you can go down and get a manual.
I did read the Bell Technical Journals at UCLA Library,
that was pretty cool,
but a lot of it was about pretending to be another employee,
calling up another department within the phone company
and sweet-talking them of how to do something.
Like I have this customer,
his phone was disconnected by mistake,
how do I reconnect it?
And then learning about their internal operations,
that's where I first learned about social engineering
back in the late 70s.
But then I got a little bit more bold in that,
I was really wanting to learn about the equipment,
how it worked.
So a late one night, around one in the morning,
I guess it's an action I still regret today,
is a friend of mine who was also a phone freaker at the time
decided we're gonna take a self-guided tour
of the Hollywood Gower Central Office
in Hollywood, California.
So we acquired the door code.
So we're in the central office,
and we're walking around, it's a nine-story building,
and when I get to the fifth floor,
this big, bulky security guard says,
son, yes?
He goes, who are you?
Oh, this is Adam, I'm the security guard.
I'm with the Cosmos Center in San Diego.
I'm just taking my friend here
on a little tour of a phone company.
He's kind of interested.
My friend looked 15 years old.
He says, do you have a badge?
I go, yeah, sure, no problem.
He goes, my wallet?
I go, oh man, I just left it in my car.
I'll go get it, I'll be right back.
He goes, no, no, you come with me.
Brings me up to the ninth floor,
and then there's other people there.
And they go, who are you?
Who do you work for?
The 20 questions.
And I'm calm as can be, work in the Cosmos Center,
here's the address, who's your supervisor?
Give him the name of a supervisor,
because I already had memorized
this information from before.
So he goes, well, I'm gonna call your supervisor right now.
I go, well, it's two in the morning.
She's gonna get pretty pissed off.
He goes, well, you don't have any ID.
We don't know who you are.
Okay, call the supervisor.
He gets on the phone, he gets the supervisor's
home phone number, calls her at home,
wakes her up, and says, yeah,
I have one of your employees here named Adam,
and he's giving me a tour at two in the morning?
What's going on with this?
And she somehow thought, she goes,
oh, yeah, I do have an Adam working for me.
And then I said to the gentleman, the security guy,
I said, well, can I talk to my boss?
So he goes, sure, and he hands me the phone.
And I go, oh, hi, and we're talking.
She's going, who are you?
And I say, yeah, I'm sorry that he interrupted your sleep,
and I will have that report Tuesday morning,
and how'd your vacation go?
And she goes, who are you?
What's your name, who are you?
And I'm having a calm, and I'm pressing it to my ear
so they can't hear her side, right?
And I said, great, well, I'll see you Monday.
Have a good day.
And I hang up the phone.
And I know I have 10 minutes to get out of there.
So I calmly go, I see, I told you who I was.
I'm really sorry you didn't have my badge.
Can you just, I'll just be another half hour.
Can I show my friend around the building?
And, okay, go ahead.
So we go, and instead of going on a self-guided tour,
I decided to make a beeline right out of that building.
Go to the elevator, down, out.
My friend and I sit in a car across the street,
and we're just watching the door.
About 15 minutes later, that same guy bursts out of the door
and he's looking all around.
Crazy stuff.
I mean, I caused so much, I guess,
such a pain in the ass to the phone company
that they eventually had to take out our telephone.
I was at home living with my mom as a teenager,
and the phone company actually removed our phone.
Can you imagine that?
They said, no phone for Mitnick.
And I was thinking, I go, this is not fair.
So I lived in unit 13,
and they actually had it blocked off at line assignment,
which is a special division of the phone company, no phone.
Okay.
So I call up their facilities department,
and I tell them, there's a new unit being installed, 12B.
Okay.
So someone might move into 12B shortly,
so you just should allocate it if they need service,
you know, a customer might install a phone there.
I wait about three days.
I go to the hardware store, go get 12B.
Take off 13, put on 12B.
Phone company was not happy.
About three months later, they figured it out.
They yanked out that phone again.
I think anyone in that apartment building,
they'd have to go through security
before they could get a phone line.
I don't know why these guys don't have a sense of humor.
Yeah.
Sense of humor is so important in this world,
and Kevin, you certainly have demonstrated a sense of humor.
In fact, to extend that story a little bit,
according to the book,
when you made up that new address
so you could get your phone back,
you also changed your name.
And do you remember the name that you changed to?
Well, at first, when I was talking to the business office
at General Telephone, I identified myself as Jim Bond.
And then I asked her, I go,
I'd like to get a special number if possible.
And I don't remember at the time if they charged for that
or if they did it for free.
And I said, I'd like a number that ends in 007.
So she found that the phone number 895-5007 was available.
I said, yeah, I'd like that number.
I'd like that number.
So she's about to complete the service order.
I said, oh, by the way,
maybe we should use my full legal name for billing purposes
because I send the bills to my accountant.
My first name is James.
And she didn't bat an eyelash.
So I had the phone installed as James Bond,
ending in 007.
So of course, you know,
telco security agents were livid
when they figured this all out.
Yeah, livid is definitely the word that describes,
and they certainly took it out on you in years to come.
And we'll get more into that in just a moment.
But I want to thank people who have been calling in.
We're within reach of $3,000.
So if we get a couple more calls,
we're going to move past that.
We have to keep going though.
We have to keep these calls coming in.
We're offering some incredible premiums tonight.
Kevin Mitnick's brand new book,
Ghost in the Wires,
and it's coming out next month.
It's full of all kinds of stories
of Kevin's life and adventures,
evading authority and hacking systems
and outsmarting bureaucrats
and all kinds of things that we can really learn a lot from
and be inspired by.
But a lot of really good life lessons
to be learned as well.
Again, a pledge of $75.
You get an autographed copy of this brand new book,
plus the two-hour documentary
plus three hours of extras called Freedom Downtime.
You'll get a Kevin Mitnick bumper sticker,
free Kevin bumper sticker,
an authentic one left over from the late 1990s.
You also get Kevin's lockpicking business card.
It's a business card that turns into a lockpick
for those of you so inclined to have to use one.
For a pledge of 125,
add in about a dozen DVD talks
from the various Hope Conferences
involving Kevin Mitnick in one way or another.
And you have some really interesting material here,
things you will not see anywhere else,
and you won't even see it on this station after tonight.
So please give a call to 212-209-2950.
We have one call on the line now.
We have room for about, I think, 10.
And the most important thing to remember, though,
is that WBAI continues to broadcast
off the Empire State Building to four states
and to the entire world on the internet
because of your support.
And it's been like that since 1960.
Well, we didn't have the internet back then,
but we certainly had a dedicated audience
and a lot of things to say.
And the people that have walked through these doors
over the decades,
it's simply an incredible, incredible variety,
and so much has been accomplished as a result of that.
Basically, it's an investment in the future
by supporting the radio station.
So while we're talking about all these interesting things
and offering all these amazing items,
the real reason for you to be calling
is because we're speaking to you.
You're hearing the message,
and you want to participate in this,
and you want to make sure that future generations
are able to hear this kind of thing over the radio,
not just about hacking, not just about computers,
but alternative thought of all sorts.
212-209-2950, you know, you might be calling
from a place that doesn't have a radio station like WBAI.
All the more reason to support this one
so that you can continue to listen
from wherever you are in the world.
Almost any place doesn't have a radio station like WBAI
except New York.
That's true, and New York does not have
another place like this, so please keep this one going.
212-209-2950.
Mike, you lost a call.
We had one call on the line.
Now we have zero.
How do I do that?
I don't know how you did that, but we got a-
Well, maybe we can replace that call.
212-209-2950 is the number to call to replace it.
You can pledge $75, and we will send you
an autographed copy of Kevin's new book.
We'll send you a DVD copy of Freedom Downtime.
We'll send you a bumper sticker.
If you pledge $125, we'll send you all that.
We'll also send you a dozen DVDs
from the Hope Conferences of talks related to Kevin Mitnick.
You can pledge more than that if you have it.
You can pledge less than that if you can't.
Is there a reason you left out
the lockpicking business card?
Because it's not written down on my piece of paper
is the reason.
We just added that, but yeah, all kinds of cool.
Okay, we've got one call on the line.
Bernie-
212-209-2950.
Bernie, I know you can bring in another two calls.
Well, I'm gonna try a manual.
All right, let's kind of let you go.
Our listeners must know that WBAI
is almost certainly the only radio station
that's gonna bring you-
Okay, you got one already.
In-depth coverage of this fascinating,
epic hacker saga about Kevin Mitnick.
And on top of that-
There's the other one.
How do you do it?
You didn't give out the phone number.
Incredible.
Well, keep going.
212-209-2950.
There's another one.
Besides this being a fascinating,
epic hacker saga that we're hearing about tonight,
this book by Kevin,
which you can get by calling that number,
is provide you with a historical context
of how all that fits in with what's going on today.
And in addition to getting one of the first copies
signed personally by Kevin Mitnick,
you're getting some historical perspective
by the two-hour film documentary,
Freedom Downtime, which you produced,
and did a fantastic job documenting
what was going on at the time during Kevin's case,
and probably the most appropriate possible bookmark
for this book is a historical Kevin Mitnick,
or free Kevin bumper sticker,
which, you know, it's a piece of history.
And of course, a set of Kevin Mitnick lockpicks
in the form of a business card.
Please call 212-209-2950.
Get all of that for a pledge of $75 at WBAI.
If you pledge $125, you get all of that,
plus a dozen Hope DVDs that are all, in some way,
connected with Kevin.
Some talk or panel discussion connected with Kevin.
So this is really a thematic package
to give you as a gift for supporting WBAI,
212-209-2950.
We've had eight Hope conferences,
and nearly every one of them has had Kevin's presence
in some way, either with his non-presence
or with his actual participation.
It's been an important part, a theme, if you will,
of the hacker world for the last couple of decades.
Join the four calls on the line right now.
I know we have enough people down there
to handle twice that.
So give a call, 212-209-2950,
and show your support for the radio station,
and show your support for Off the Hook,
and just for alternative thought, rebelliousness,
individuality, all that kind of thing.
This is your chance to vote for that.
And for all you mischievous hackers out there,
just flood that tally room with as many calls as possible,
just so they'll be running around like chickens without heads.
No, no, no, no, you have to actually pledge
if you're gonna call.
Yeah, or you pledge, you know, you don't have to,
oh, all right, fine, then you don't have to.
And you have to pay your pledge, too,
and you have to use your credit card.
Yeah, no shenanigans here.
WBAI doesn't benefit from your games.
No, no, they don't.
212-209-2950, we have some people to thank.
Mike, you wanna start?
Sure, let's start by thanking Nick, who's from Toronto.
All right.
We have Daniel from Oklahoma.
We have got David from Ontario.
Wait, when did we stop naming cities?
We're naming states and provinces.
Don't these people live in cities or towns or?
Well, they live in cities,
but I'm sure not everyone knows where Tulsa is.
Really?
Well, I think we might've heard of Tulsa, yeah.
David is in Etobicoke, Ontario.
Now that we never heard of, I'm certain of that.
Voltaire.
Wait, hang on, your mic's not on for some reason.
Try now.
Kenneth from...
No, your mic has quit working.
You're gonna have to use something else.
Kenneth from Brin Castle, Virginia.
Okay, Redhack, welcome.
Hello, I've been down in the tally room.
Yeah, keeping things under control.
Trying to.
All right.
I'd like to thank Ray from Phoenix, Arizona.
All right, I wanna thank Jason.
He's calling from Sehung in South Korea.
Yeah, beat that.
All right, we've got people from South Korea listening.
Represent there.
212-209-2950, and country code one,
for those of you calling from outside the area,
in case you didn't know,
the United States was country code number one.
212-209-2950.
Thanks, everybody, for calling in.
We have more people to thank.
We wanna thank Kaven from New York.
New York City.
New York City.
I'm being inclusive here.
Yeah, and to add in another thanks
for probably the only other person from New York
we've been thanking so far is Rita from Manhattan.
Okay.
And Nathan from Olympia, Washington.
Thank you, Nathan.
Christina from Beckley, West Virginia.
West Virginia, thank you.
Okay.
Brendan from Brooklyn, New York.
Thank you, Brendan.
And we wanna thank Adam, who's from Holmdale, New Jersey.
All right.
Do I have the last one?
Yes.
Thomas from Briarwood, New York.
All right, and there are more people calling in right now,
and we wanna keep those calls coming in.
We have-
And we wanna thank them as well,
although we probably won't have time to do so by name.
Well, if you call now and make your pledge,
maybe we'll have time to thank you.
We only have about 15 minutes left,
so we have a lot of material to cover in that time.
And Kevin, there's something I wanted to bring up with you.
We were talking about a sense of humor
and maybe also a mutual respect.
There's a part of your book where you're talking
about a Bell security investigator named Daryl Santos,
and this is the part of the book
that I found very interesting.
You say much later in an interview for this book,
Santos would recall, this was a real big deal for us
because now it hit home, it was personal.
Kevin was listening to our calls
when we were in the business of trying
to listen to his calls.
Then he has our intercepts on his lines taken down,
so it made us really change how we spoke on the phone
and the messages we left,
and we had to create some new ways to cover our tracks
because we also had to protect the integrity
of what law enforcement was doing with us,
all of their court-ordered stuff.
It sounds like this guy, in the end,
wound up respecting your skills and your abilities
and sort of seeing you as a worthy adversary,
but it also speaks to how you were simply trying
to find out what the authorities were doing to you.
Yeah, and what had happened is I started associating
with this guy named Eric Hines who contacted me
through a family members,
through my stepbrother's girlfriend,
and what Eric turned out to be is he was working
for the government,
but I didn't figure it out for several weeks,
and I had to do a lot of phone tricks
and a lot of investigation to figure out what was going on,
and then it hit home as I was thinking,
geez, if this guy is an FBI agent or informant,
maybe they're monitoring the telephones
at my dad's apartment,
because I was actually at my dad's in Los Angeles
at the time because my half-brother had just passed away,
and so I decided I would call,
now, my dad had three lines at the house,
so I decided I'd call the central office in Calabasas,
which was a 5E SS office and try to find out
if there were any security monitoring boxes in use,
so I called the frame technician
posing as security in Los Angeles,
and eventually I found out that they indeed had three boxes
that were monitoring some subscriber in Calabasas,
so immediately I thought, oh my God,
those are on my dad's lines,
I'm gonna get my supervised release violated,
I'm on my way back to prison,
I gotta figure out what's going on,
and then I had the frame tech trace out the connection,
there's actually two connections to the monitor box,
one was an incoming connection
where Pac-Bell security was calling into,
and the other connection was to the target line,
and I had the technician trace out all the connections
to these monitoring devices,
and it turned out that they weren't on my dad's lines,
they were on a PI,
a company that did private investigation known as Teltec,
and I remember going home that night and telling my dad,
oh, I'm so happy, I thought we were being wiretapped,
but it turned out they were on this company called Teltec,
and my dad rolls his eyes thinking,
you know, I'm living in some fantasy world
that I could actually check to see
if our lines were being wiretapped,
but back then you couldn't,
because they had to make physical connections
on the frame to the subscriber lines,
and today it's like Kaliya, it's done in a different way,
so I told my dad the story,
and he goes, wait a second, Teltec?
He goes, I know one of the managers that works there,
and he called the manager over,
and I told him the story,
and he was like flabbergasted.
First of all, he looked at me thinking,
what does this kid know, what's he talking about,
and I demoed some of my phone tricks to him,
and he became a true believer,
and then a week later or so,
I had found out that they actually moved the wiretap,
and the details are in the book,
Ghost in the Wires, of how I figured this out,
and they actually moved the wiretap over to my dad's lines,
and I remember I was kind of irritated
with the phone company.
They were actually wiretapping my dad,
so I decided to actually take the intercepts down,
so I did actually have them just removed from my dad's lines.
I actually had them put on just innocent subscriber lines,
actually had them moved to somebody else,
and it took them a while to figure out
that the taps were actually moved,
and they started investigating it.
The person at the frame told security,
oh, somebody from security in Los Angeles called
and had us move the taps,
but then it hit home,
because the people in Los Angeles
never called to do any type of wiretaps,
because that was all done from Northern California,
so they were pretty surprised
that not only did I figure out
that our lines were being tapped,
but I actually moved them.
That's chutzpah, definitely.
There's no question about that.
Now, I know a lot of people would look at your exploits
and say, wow, you deserve to go away for a long time,
because you're messing with law enforcement
and investigations,
but really, you were simply looking
into your own investigations against you
and sort of playing a battle of wits with these people,
but never actually causing damage or profiting in any way.
I mean, you listened in on the NSA at some point,
when very few people even knew of their existence.
That's true, right?
Let me check and make sure
the statute of limitations is expired.
Hold on one second.
No, I was talking to Bernie.
Bernie, yeah, that's true, right?
Yeah.
No, okay.
It's in the book.
It's in the book.
All kinds of stories like that.
But yeah, that's true.
I was actually able to intercept an in-progress NSA phone call
by manipulating the switch in Laurel, Maryland.
But as a result of all this,
and please continue calling 212-209-2950.
We had five calls on the line a moment ago,
and now we're down to two,
so please give a call now
and get this autographed copy of Kevin's new book,
212-209-2950.
But as a result of all these abilities that you had
and ways that you just pretty much walked right up
to the person you at least expected to walk right up to
and challenged them and outsmarted them
and got information from them,
this resulted in you achieving almost superhuman status
in the media,
and people would basically blame anything
that happened to technology adversely on you.
I was wondering if maybe you could think
of a few Mitnick myths that were out there
where you basically got blamed
for completely incredible things.
Well, being able to whistle the launch codes
for NORAD comes to mind.
I got accused of planting a false news wire
about Security Pacific Bank losing 400 million.
I got accused of hacking into Xerox.
I got accused of actually wiretapping the conversations
of the FBI, which never really happened.
Jeez, I mean, there's just so much.
Even that phone company security agent
that was interviewed in the book
actually said that any company that had an intrusion,
they immediately thought I had done it
without any evidence whatsoever.
No, it had to be Mitnick.
So pretty much I was the guy that got blamed initially
until probably they investigated it
and found out that indeed was not me.
Something else I want to touch upon.
Again, 212-209-2950 is our phone number.
Please call in and pledge.
You had, I'm sorry.
We have just seven minutes left.
Seven minutes left.
So please, it's an urgent appeal at this point.
Reading the book, I learned that you actually
have some ties, and this is sort of apropos
because we have the German hacker camp coming up
in just two weeks or so.
The Chaos Computer Club, you had some ties
to them back in the 1980s?
Yeah, in fact, they developed a stealth patch
to the BMS operating system.
They modified two system programs.
One was called Login Out and one was called Show.
And what they, it was pretty much a Trojan,
kind of a Trojan and a clever backdoor
into the BMS operating system
if you could replace these two programs.
And I was actually, and it was done very cleverly.
Even Digital Equipment Corporation was actually
complimentary about the sophistication
of this type of work.
And we're dealing, we're talking about 1985.
Today it would be, it wouldn't be anything special.
It wasn't Stuxnet.
And what had happened is I thought,
well, how I found these patches was
when I hacked into Digital Equipment Corporation's
BMS engineering groups systems,
I got into Andy Goldstein's email.
And Andy was one of the leading gurus of BMS.
And I was looking in his email
just for security related stuff
and came across an analysis of the Computer Chaos Club's
patch to Login Out and Show.
And I was impressed with it.
And then I decided, hey,
I'm going to try to contact the CCC myself
and see if I could find out the author of these patches.
And I actually tracked down one of the guys
who was in a hospital dying of cancer at the time.
And I don't recall the gentleman's name,
but he was actually surprised that
here Kevin Mitnick was calling from America
to congratulate him on work well done.
And then he said, well, he had a whole bunch of other stuff
that he would like to share with me,
but didn't have a computer at the hospital.
So actually snail mailed me a whole bunch of stuff
that they were doing with the BMS operating system,
which was quite cool.
Wow.
It just goes to show how these worlds just merge together
and how all the hackers of the world
eventually find each other and share information
and move society in one direction or another.
It's an incredible story.
And it's one that you've told so brilliantly
in Ghost in the Wires.
Again, Kevin Mitnick's new book coming out next month.
Please give us a call now.
It's the last five minutes of the program,
your last opportunity to get this autographed copy
of the brand new book by pledging $75 for this
and the movie Freedom Downtime
and the lock picking business card
and the bumper sticker.
Pledge of 125, add a dozen DVDs
of Kevin Mitnick talks to that.
212-209-2950.
We have one call on the line.
Let's have a last minute flurry and get a dozen calls.
It would be great.
It would put us right over where we need to be.
212-209-2950.
Kevin has been speaking to us for two hours
from Barcelona, Spain over Skype.
And it's simply been an incredible night.
We can go for another two hours.
I'd love to.
All kinds of things we can talk about.
But imagine you have this book,
you're able to read this for hours and hours on end
and the stories never stop.
It's an incredible thing.
212-209-2950.
Take advantage of this.
It's a one-time offer.
Now folks, it happens every week.
And so don't be one of these people left behind like this.
We always get emails saying,
oh, this is amazing premium.
This is it.
Can you make an exception for me?
Yeah.
And no, we can't.
We can't because this kind of a thing,
if we were to offer this all the time,
we'd all go broke because this is a great deal.
212-209-2950.
You have to call in the next four minutes
or it's all over.
That's really the way it is.
The unfortunate reality, right?
Yeah.
And this is such a seminal chapter in hacker history.
Whether you're a hacker or whether you're not,
this is pretty much the best reference material
that there is available to learn more
about this period in our history.
So you've got just a few minutes now.
Three calls on the line.
Get hold of this.
212-209-2950.
Bernie, can you bring in a couple more?
You guys said it best.
This is an amazing package.
You're supporting a fantastic radio station.
It's the only station probably in the United States
that's gonna cover this kind of material in such depth
and with such analysis.
So please call 212-209-2950.
Support WBAI and get an amazing gift package.
And this is just one show on this amazing radio station.
We're usually on for one hour a week.
And just think of all the different hours there are
in a week and how every single one of them
is something else, something different.
Incredible diversity and significance to our culture,
to our history, and to the world
because the entire world can now tune into WBAI.
And a lot of people have found this radio station
through off the hook.
And a lot of young people are getting involved.
And that's an amazing thing
because that's what's gonna propel us
well ahead into the 21st century.
212-209-2950.
We have four calls on the line, five calls on the line.
212-209-2950.
Let's bring us over 4,000.
It would be amazing.
And you won't regret it.
You won't regret having this book to read.
I know I haven't, having the Galley copy to look at.
And of course, many hours to watch Freedom Downtime,
see the movie we made 10 years ago.
And the DVDs for Pledge of 125,
the dozen Kevin Mitnick talks.
And of course, the lock picking business card
and the bumper sticker.
Just an incredible package here.
212-209-2950.
And of course, you won't regret still having the station
and off the hook.
That's right.
To listen to every week.
Kevin, I wanna thank you so much
for spending a late night in Barcelona
to talk to us tonight.
And I look forward to seeing you in Vegas.
Yeah, I look forward to seeing you at DEF CON.
And it's been wonderful.
I hope you're able to raise enough money for WBAI.
It's a great cause.
And I wanna thank everybody for being so supportive.
And I hope everybody loves my book.
Again, it took two years of hard work to put it together.
And I hope it becomes kind of the catch me if you can,
catch me if you can for the 21st century.
All right.
Well, hopefully nobody will catch you again,
but we'll see what happens.
Thanks, Kevin, for joining us.
And we'll see you later.
212-209-2950.
Manual for off the hook.
I'll see you next week.
Good night.
I need an opening