Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (25 page)

But the Secret Service was already in place. They're rivals. It got heated. The subtext was clear. This was going to be a big case, and everybody wanted a piece of it. This case could be a ground breaker.

Why did the case suddenly interest even the highest levels of federal law enforcement? Why did this pattern of intrusion, no different really from what the MOD boys had been doing to New York Telephone computers two years ago, now capture the imaginations of the best minds at the U. S. Justice Department?

Suddenly, it had dawned on everyone that this was a whole new area of crime. This was the future in law enforcement. It was going to explode and they had to get ready. This case didn't seem to be only about hackers and the coming information highway. It was about any criminal out there who would have the wherewithal to use high-tech, sophisticated communications to try to outwit the government and commit crimes. This case became a first, the first ever of its kind, and it would set the precedent for years to come in how the government tracked techno-literate criminals.

For the first time in U. S. history, the authorities wanted to put wiretaps on computers. This wouldn't be called a wiretap no, it would be called a datatap. They wanted to identify the boys' every keystroke. Of course, for starters the government also wanted to put traditional wiretaps on John's and Julio's phones.

With evidence from the DNRs, from the traces Kaiser did in the spring, and from phone toll records that revealed every number John and Julio dialed, a judge was convinced to authorize the wiretaps and the datataps. The Justice

Department in Washington, D. C., decided that the Secret Service would run the show, setting up a monitoring headquarters called a wire room. The FBI would assist. That was a big victory for Agent Rick Harris.

Then reality hit everyone. Getting a federal judge's permission was the easy part of this task.

In a normal case, the Secret Service might need a modest amount of equipment to conduct a wiretap on a phone: a few tape recorders, some headphones, a couple of agents working twelve-hour shifts. Oh, and a notepad for the agents to jot down interesting things they hear and want to remember.

This was no normal case.

To set up the simultaneous phone-modem taps in the MOD case in 1991, the Secret Service first obtained an entire suite of rooms in the World Trade Center, where its New York City office was already headquartered.

One-of-a-kind, high-fidelity digital data intercepting equipment was brought up from Washington. More was designed and built on site for the case. A guy with a soldering iron and wire clippers worked away on the stacks of machinery that challenged the strength of the office-issue tables that had to support the weight. The bank of equipment was fifteen feet long, a massive, electric-shop mess of cords and wires and blinking lights, audio components, and big disk drives to store information. Shelves of dinner-plate-size storage tapes lined the walls, and a computer anchored it all, keeping track of the kind of information a DNR could accumulate: number dialed, duration of call, time and day.

The wiretaps on the phones were easy to operate. The government had been doing it for years, and three copies of every phone call were simultaneously recorded so that the court could seal one copy as insurance against tampering, the FBI could seal a second copy for its archives, and the prosecutors could use the third copy to build their case. This configuration of contraptions and tapes, and copies of tapes, and copies of copies was confusing enough, what with the government monitoring two phones at once. Three copies for Julio's calls. Three copies for John's. But the datataps now

that took some doing. You were trying to intercept data from two different computers talking to each other and expecting no interference, and you were not a hundred percent sure about the configuration of those computers. Each computer had its own, unique modem, and modems are quirky.

You've got to insert another device into the middle of this intensive data transaction. When the modem on John's computer meets another modem, it sends out signals. Hi, this is who I am, this is my baud rate, this is how I send information, let's shake hands, pleased to meet you, beeeeppp. If you want to hear the modems' conversation, you've got to use some intercept that will do the job without interfering with the idiosyncratic and sensitive signals. It's like breaking the infrared beam of a burglar alarm without tripping the system. Don't mind me, I'm just standing here quietly. Good luck.

It took a few days to get the datataps running properly, a few more days to capture a reliable stream of data without causing the modems to crash. Then it took a few days to tune the datataps to pick up information that actually meant something and didn't just appear to be a string of random gibberish. But a little welding here, some clipping of wires there, and the federal government's fledgling foray into data entrapment was under way.

Then, John got a new modem.

Everything crashed.

Out came the soldering irons.

There was a lot to keep up with, because the boys were supplying an enormous amount of phone and data conversations to eavesdrop on. Dozens of calls a day. The output was phenomenal, and the authorities were going through storage disks like so many dishes at a diner. Tom Kaiser went downtown for a consultation one day, and what stuck in his mind was the sheer number of people milling around the place

the teams and teams of agents that the government had

assigned to pick up Tom and Fred's original investigation. Rick Harris had to work twenty-hour work days to supervise the government operation, but since he came from a long line of volunteer firefighters, he jumped to the call. It was in his genes

when the alarm goes off, he slides down the pole.

Under Harris's direction, two dozen agents worked twelve-hour shifts for weeks, listening to the intercepts, analyzing the information, transcribing it, keeping up a steady flow of the day's output so that Prosecutor Fishbein would have the ammunition he needed to convince the judge to keep the whole operation up and running for a while longer. It was a wildly expensive undertaking. Every ten days, Fishbein had to go back to court, show the judge examples of the information being culled, convince him that the government taps were obtaining valuable evidence of illegal activities that outweighed John's and Julio's rights to privacy on their own phones. And their own computers.

Amid all this activity, Fishbein and Harris held daily meetings. In the morning. At supper. After midnight. They'd talk about the bits and pieces of information they were gathering; they'd get a judge's permission to send transcripts to computer experts for analysis. They began to realize just how widespread the intrusions were, just how knowledgable John and Julio were about computers. And Fishbein saw other names showing up in the transcripts, names of people that John and Julio talked to all the time: Mark Abene and Eli Ladopoulos. When he asked Harris about the names, Harris seemed to know who these boys were

But by then, the sheer mass of voice and data interceptions was overloading the team. They could hardly keep up. But they had to keep up, because they were committed now

in up to their elbows. They were behind schedule in numbering

and cataloging the data sessions, and the government wouldn't know what actually happened during those sessions until somebody listened to them. What were the kids saying on the phone now, anyway? What were John and Julio up to?

What if John and Julio crashed a switching center that controlled the entire state of Texas? What if the Secret Service were monitoring during the crash, but didn't get a chance to listen until three days later? How would that look?

Harris and Fishbein didn't get much sleep.

Down in Texas, the informers had made an arrangement.

Chris had worked out a deal with the FBI that enabled him to tip off the feds anytime the MOD boys were active. If the New Yorkers called Comsec, for instance, Chris immediately left his office, walked down the street to a certain pay phone, and called Washington. The pay phone seemed secure, but the FBI agent has told Chris never to mention the agent's name on the line. Just to be careful. Chris thought the agent was leery that the MOD boys might have bugged the phone somehow and would prank the agent at home if they knew his name ("Mr. FBI Elite... Mr. FBI Elite... ").

The Comsec crew didn't stop there, though. Comsec was a computer security firm, so it was Comsec's job to inform other companies if their computer systems were insecure, right? Might not be a bad way to drum up new clients, come to think of it.

In the fall of 1991, Scott Chasin phoned Information America, the company that collects tidbits of personal information about people's employment histories and finances. Scott introduced himself to the company's security department, then said, "Do a search in your system for my name. Do you see all the credit reports pulled under my name?" The Information America official searched and found ten recent requests for Scott's credit reports. In other words, ten people had logged in to inquire about Scott. That was pretty unusual, because an individual's credit report usually gets pulled only if the individual has invited scrutiny by applying for a mortgage or more credit cards. Some people's reports don't get pulled ten times in their lifetimes.

"You guys have got to do something about this, " Scott said, explaining that he suspected MOD members had been fiddling with his credit information in an attempt to harass him.

The security official at Information America was astounded. How did they get into our system?

Easy, Scott said. The same way they've been breaking into TRW, Southwestern Bell, and the Bank of America.

They've broken into the Bank of America?

Oh yeah, Scott said. We've been watching them.

Scott said he had evidence the MOD boys had infiltrated a worldwide network that computers use to pass information to one another. He said MOD had access, through the network, to the private transactions of dozens of the world's largest corporations. MOD not only had access to delicate corporate secrets, but it also had the ability to upset a billion-dollar company's financial stability with a single keystroke.

And how did they do it?

Parmaster had this special password.

Nobody knew where he'd got it, or when. It was just part of the Parmaster myth. But man, the things he could do with that password.

Parmaster's real name is Jason Snitker. He only happens to be in New York now because he's on the lam no lie, he's

actually being pursued by the Secret Service. Back in 1988, Jason was charged in Monterey, California where he

attended high school, read way too many spy thrillers, and discovered Jolt cola prior to becoming a fugitive with

breaking into a Citibank computer. The particular computer he was charged with breaching was one that assigned debit card numbers to customers of a Saudi Arabian bank. While he was in the computer, Jason decided to take a souvenir approximately ten thousand valid debit card numbers. Some credit line.

Almost immediately, those card numbers started to turn up on bulletin boards from California to Texas. Free money!

Hackers all over America started charging their long-distance calls to Saudi Arabian debit cards. It was like Robin Hood was sharing the spoils with his Merry Men. And by the time Citibank caught on, who knew how much money had been lost? When they finally caught up with Jason, the bank was asking for $3 million in restitution. Good luck.

Jason turned himself in on December 12, 1988, and that might have been the end of it, since he was a juvenile.

Community service, don't do it again, blah blah, you know the routine. But Jason was an impressionable teenager.

Remember the spy novels. He believed he knew too much. Jason saw a lot of secrets in cyberspace during his hacking days, including what he said were government secrets, like the Killer Satellite. That's how people say Jason described it the Killer Satellite. According to documents he found on TRW's internal computer network (in addition to being a national credit-reporting agency, TRW is a giant defense contractor), the Killer Satellite, once deployed, could focus a death ray on other spy satellites, taking them out of commission. This was Top Top Secret stuff, Jason told people. It made the debit card numbers look lame.

Maybe the government would liquidate Jason to keep him quiet. Maybe it was all a big conspiracy, and he was the only one who knew the truth. He could really get hurt. So Jason freaked. No way was he going to wait around for jail time. Did Lee Harvey Oswald ever see jail time?

So Jason split, and now he's in New York, hiding out around Coney Island. The Secret Service have gotten a tip he's in the area. Ditto the New York State Police. One day, a state police senior investigator goes to a 2600 meeting at Citicorp and insinuates himself among the potted ferns on the balcony. The investigator is looking for Jason. He even brings a camera and takes surveillance shots. But Parmaster doesn't show up.

Some other people have found Jason, though. He's hooked up with MOD.

It's only natural that the best hacker on the West Coast should hang with the best hackers on the East Coast. It turns out they have a lot in common and go way back. Jason can't even remember the first time he encountered Mark. He knows it was on Altos. All Mark cared about then was hacking the phone system. That was cool with Jason. To each his own.

Now, though, the MOD guys had mastered the phone system and were looking for new terrain to conquer. Tymnet had potential.

And Jason had the password. One day, he shares it with Mark during a trade.

That's how it starts.

The password got Mark, John, and Julio into the heart of Tymnet.

In the past, they'd had limited access to this global electronic data network. For years, the MOD boys had been collecting Tymnet dialups, connecting to its system, then leapfrogging into other states or countries. It was kind of like long-distance telephone service for computers. Free.