The Fugitive Game

Wipe


Page 51


   The door knob wiggles.
   Why do they always have to come so early in the morning?
   "Excuse me, who's breaking in?" Mitnick shouts.
   "Open up! It's the FBI."
   Mitnick hops out of bed, unlocks the door and swings it open.
   Mitnick stands eye to eye with a female FBI agent in her late 30's. She's surrounded by several middle-aged male FBI and law enforcement agents in suits, craning to get a better look.
   Kevin Mitnick is stark naked. He takes after Marilyn. He always sleeps in the nude.
   "Can I put some clothes on?"
   Mitnick pulls on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and returns to count the FBI agents, officers of the peace and phone company security personnel. There are more than a dozen of them milling through his apartment, numbering the few rooms, sorting through his things.
   "This is your second time around, Kevin," Special Agent Richard Beasely warns, sitting Mitnick down in a chair.
   "Do you have a cassette recorder I could borrow for a minute?" Beasely asks.
   Why don't you bring your own goddamned cassette recorder?
   Mitnick hands his player to the FBI agent who pops in a cassette.
   CRACK!
   Mitnick looks, and sure enough, the door on his player is broken.
   I'd like to break something of his.
   The FBI agent presses play, and the law enforcement agents gather around to listen. It's a tape recording of somebody who sounds an awful lot like Kevin Mitnick, talking and listening to what sounds like Pac Bell security's voice mail.
   "That's an interesting tape," Mitnick volunteers, impressed.
   Amazing what the FBI can do with technology.
   "Do you have any more?"
   The FBI doesn't. And they don't appreciate Mitnick's sense of humor.
   "Time is running out, Kevin," Beasely tells him in jargon that sounds straight out of a B movie. "Lewis is spilling his guts. You're gonna be left behind."
   "So, are you going to arrest me?"
   Mitnick knows there's no way in the world they are going to arrest him. That's not the way the FBI works: search warrant first, gather the evidence, then arrest warrant. That's why Mitnick's there. He wants to know the FBI's cards before they play them.

*     *     *

KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK.
   Several minutes go by without any response. The agents are getting impatient. They know the hacker's inside, but they don't dare try a forced entry. Why won't he open the door?
   "Lewis De Payne. This is Ken McGuire from the FBI," says the voice on De Payne's answering machine.
   Bonnie Vitello, Mitnick's ex-wife and now De Payne's live-in girlfriend rolls over in bed. They're both deep sleepers.
   "Let us in or we'll break down the door!" shouts a voice on the landing.
   KABOOM, KABOOM, KABOOM.
   De Payne is expecting company. He checks his alarm clock. It's very early. Must be the FBI.
   "Get dressed," he tells Vitello.
   De Payne swings open the door. It's the big Hawaiian, Special Agent Stan Ornellus, a bear of a man at 6 foot three, well over two hundred and thirty pounds, with a hand made for crushing things. Ornellus is from the FBI's old school. He talks tough; he's fond of phrases like, "I think I'll go over and squeeze that little pin head." Ornellus doesn't like De Payne. The feeling is mutual.
   De Payne is enjoying every minute. The comedy, the irony of it all. The FBI, the most powerful law enforcement agency in the most technologically advanced nation on earth, has come to search his modest condo for evidence of his computer hacking. But it's De Payne who knows everything about the FBI, not the other way around. De Payne knows the numbers of the agent's cellular phones, pagers and bank accounts, the names of their wives, their children, their friends at the FBI and the CIA, along with more mundane personal secrets the agents wouldn't want to share with the public.
   "Could I read the warrant?"
   Ornellus hands De Payne the document. De Payne skims down the list, ticking off the names of the numerous agents standing stiffly by as the stray cats swarm on the landing. He knows most of them: Special Agent Ken McGuire of the Los Angeles Office of the FBI, and of course, Terry Atchley, the Pac Bell security agent who helped arrest De Payne and Mitnick back in 1981. Atchley's black hair stands up in an unlikely wave on his forehead, a cigarette permanently attached to his forefinger. Atchley and De Payne don't like each other either.
   Atchley and the agents are thorough. Everything in the stale smelling condominium is potential evidence: Scanners, cellular phones, modems, computers. The agents box well over a hundred computer disks, bag after bag of miscellaneous computer and electronic parts, boxes of computer manuals, and one Pacific Telesis I.D. card in the name of Lewis De Payne. All told the agents fill out eight pages describing their seizure of over a hundred boxes, bags and single items.
   When you're Kevin Mitnick's best-friend and former co-conspirator, the most mundane, private possessions are potential evidence of a global computer hacking conspiracy. The FBI confiscates ordinary telephones, a business card holder, tax forms, telephone jacks, common commercial software programs and a collection of erotic videos that includes three "Ginger" productions, "Gang Bang No. 8," and "Mediterranean Fuckers."
   Bonnie Vitello is forced to hand over her purse to the G-men. She's not allowed to leave the sofa so she tries to do her homework for her night class.
   "If you studied computer science please raise your hand," she asks in her cheery voice.
   No hands go up. Computer science, it seems, is not a prerequisite to investigate computer hackers. But the agents are friendly to Bonnie. At least one of the younger agents thinks she's cute, and insists on following her to the bathroom. A couple even try to help her with her homework.
   And McGuire tries to protect the former Mrs. Mitnick.
   "We're not taking Bonnie's computer," he tells the gruff Ornellus.
   Ornellus has one question for Bonnie.
   "Did he ever touch your computer?"
   "Yes," admits Bonnie.
   "Take it!" orders Ornellus.
   The questioning isn't going the way Ornellus planned.
   "There's this guy, Eric. He's doing really bad stuff," De Payne tells Ornellus in a concerned tone. "He says he lives on Sepulveda but he's really living at McCadden Place."
   Special Agent Stanley Ornellus doesn't want to talk about Eric.
   "These encrypted files on your computer. What's the password?"
   "You fellows have to stop this guy Eric..." De Payne hammers back, spinning the conversation in a circle. He has only one question, and one answer.
   "ERIC. ERIC. ERIC."
   Terry Atchley has a question for De Payne.
   "Did you use SAS?"
   SAS is an automated wiretapping system.
   "I'm not sure," says De Payne. "What legal definition are you using?"
   "Well, we don't want to get attorneys involved," suggests an FBI agent. "They make everything much messier and complicated."
   "I agree," says De Payne. "I just don't know what you mean."
   Atchley tries again.
   "Did you call SAS?"
   "I'm not sure of your interpretation," repeats De Payne.
   Ken McGuire tries Bonnie.    "Do you know what SAS is?"
   "Oh, that's Swiss Airlines Systems. I fly them all the time."
   McGuire smiles.
   "Ah hah!" Ornellus exclaims. "What's this."
   The G-man has burrowed through the tea leaves of De Payne's Argentinean tea bowl.
   He hold up the prize, a tiny micro-cassette.
   The best part of the prank will be revealed in the days and weeks ahead. Soon the FBI will play De Payne's secret tape and hear its own informant, Eric Heinz, talking about how he's tapping people's phones and breaking into phone company central offices. Then, the FBI will get to the matter of De Payne's encrypted hard disk. Without the codes, the FBI may need to send the encrypted files to Washington, D.C. There the Bureau could arrange for some super-computer time to begin the tedious process of decrypting the codes. And if the Bureau spends enough time and enough money, it will peel away the first encryption mask to reveal another encrypted layer. And another and another and another.
   For when you encrypt garbage upon garbage, in the end, even the FBI can only find garbage.

*     *     *

"If you aren't going to arrest me can I go to my dad's?"
   "We need to search your car first."
   A platoon of law enforcement agents escort the hacker past the complex's pool and tennis courts to his car, where they subject the vehicle to a full search. Mitnick can't believe his eyes. A couple of uninvited FBI agents jump in the back seat of his car like kids eager to go for a ride.
   The nerve of these guys.
   Mitnick orders them out, and hops in and guns it. He screeches down Las Virgenes, and then speeds onto the busy 101 freeway:
   Eighty, ninety, one hundred miles an hour.
   What are they going to do? Pull me over for speeding?
   At his Dad's place, Mitnick phones an attorney and his aunt, Chickie Leventhal, owner of Chickie's Bail Bonds.
   "Don't talk to the Feds," Chicky advises her nephew. An hour later, Mitnick emerges from the apartment to an audience of FBI agents.
   "I'm not going to talk," he announces.
   Five minutes later, once he's sure the Feds have cleared out, Mitnick jumps back on the 101 freeway and peels over to Teltec's offices, checking his rear view mirror for a tail. He boots up his hard drive, and scans his directory. This is what the FBI wants, this is what they'll look for in a few minutes or an hour when they arrive with their search warrant: Mitnick's secret files on the FBI.
   Deleting them won't suffice. Mitnick knows that the delete command doesn't erase files, it just abandons them on the disk. Only if the computer runs out of memory will his "deleted" files be overwritten. He's got to erase the files permanently, immediately over-write them so they can never be reconstructed.
   Mitnick types the command in a burst:
   wipeinfo...



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