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

made him look older. On hacking projects, Lewis was the guy I would come to trust most in the world, though he came with a personality filled with contradictions. Very polite, but always trying to have the upper hand. Nerdy, with his out-of-fashion clothing choice of turtlenecks and wide-bottomed trousers, yet with all the social graces. Low-key yet arrogant.
    Lewis and I had similar senses of humor. I think any hobby that doesn’t provide some fun and a few laughs now and then probably isn’t worth the time and effort you put into it. Lewis and I were on the same wavelength. Like our “McDonald’s hacks.” We found out how to modify a two-meter radio so we could make our voices come out of the speaker where customers placed their orders at the drive-through of a fast-food restaurant. We’d head over to a McDonald’s, park nearby where we could watch the action without being noticed, and tune the handheld radio to the restaurant’s frequency.
    A cop car would pull in to the drive-through lane, and when it got up to the speaker, Lewis or I would announce, “I’m sorry. We don’t serve cops here. You’ll have to go to Jack in the Box.” Once a woman pulled up and heard the voice over the speaker (mine) tell her, “Show me your titties, and your Big Mac is free!” She didn’t take it well. She turned off the car, grabbed something out of her trunk, and ran inside… wielding a baseball bat.
    “Complimentary apple juice” was one of my favorite gags. After a customer placed an order, we’d explain that our ice machine was broken, so we were giving away free juice. “We’ve got grapefruit, orange, and… oh, sorry, looks like we’re out of grapefruit and orange. Would you like apple juice?” When the customer said yes, we’d play a recording of someone peeing into a cup, then say, “Okay. Your apple juice is ready. Please drive forward to the window and pick it up.”
    We thought it would be funny if we drove people a little nuts by making it impossible to place their order. Taking over the speaker, each time a customer pulled up and placed an order, a friend of ours would repeat the order, but in a strong Hindi accent with hardly a word understandable. The customer would say he couldn’t understand, and our friend would say something else just as impossible to understand, over and over—driving customers crazy, one after the other.
    The best part was that everything we said at the drive-through also blared out over the speaker outside, but the employees couldn’t override it. Sometimes we’d watch the customers sitting outside at the tables, eating their burgers and laughing. No one could figure out what was going on.
    One time, a manager came out to see who was messing with the speaker. He glanced around the parking lot, scratching his head. There was no one around. The cars were empty. No one was hiding behind thesign. He walked over to the speaker and leaned in close, squinting, as if he expected to see a tiny person inside.
    “What the fuck are you looking at?!”
I shouted in a raspy voice.
    He must’ve jumped back ten feet!
    Sometimes when we were playing these pranks, the people who lived in the apartments nearby would stand on their balconies, laughing. Even people on the sidewalk were in stitches. Lewis and I actually brought friends along with us several times, because it was so hilarious.
    Okay, childish, but I was only sixteen or seventeen at the time.
    Some of my escapades weren’t quite as innocent. I had a personal rule about not entering any phone company facilities, tempting though it would be to actually gain access to the systems and maybe read some phone company technical manuals. But, as they say, it was less like a rule for me than a guideline.
    One night in 1981, when I was seventeen, I was hanging out with another phone-phreaker buddy, Steven Rhoades. We decided to sneak into Pacific Telephone’s Sunset-Gower central office, in Hollywood. Since we were already phone