Free Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla

couldn't be stopped. They were all-powerful.
    Where were they headed? Where would it end? It didn't matter, because they were going together.

FOUR
    Plik indeed. Now, if Tom Kaiser could have seen the kind of activity that the boys in Eli's room were engaged in during the summer of 1989, the events that were to follow, that changed all of their lives, might never have occurred.
    But Kaiser couldn't see through walls.
    As a lawman on the electronic frontier, Kaiser did have some unusual powers, to be sure. He could attach one of those black boxes, a Hekemian Dial Number Recorder (DNR), to your phone. He could keep track of every call you made, every number you dialed, every time you lifted the receiver off the hook.
    But Tom Kaiser was not a magician. The security specialist for New York Telephone had no way of knowing the identities of the trespassers he tracked through the labyrinthine confines of the phone company's privately owned, privately operated computers. To him, all the criminals who broke into his computers were equal. All he could do was follow their footprints. And all the footprints were the same size.
    Kaiser was not a policeman in the traditional sense. He didn't carry a gun or handcuffs, nor did he have the power to arrest anyone. But he was responsible for maintaining order across all the millions of miles of phone lines that New York Telephone owns. He patrolled the busiest beat in America, because it was his job to keep the peace on that last mile where twisted copper wires connect every home and business in New York to the rest of the world. If you broke into New York Telephone's system, it was Tom Kaiser's job to track you. And stop you.
    And he would.
    On this morning in 1989, Kaiser arrived early at his twenty-third-floor office in New York Telephone's headquarters building, smack in the center of one of midtown Manhattan's most spectacular intersections, Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. He glances out the window at the river of traffic that cuts north up toward Central Park, and then logs on to his computer. Kaiser doesn't waste time. He wants to see what his hacker was up to last night.
    Columns of numbers fill Kaiser's screen, a record of all the phone calls that a certain young man in the Bronx known as The Technician made during the past twelve hours. Many of the numbers are familiar to Kaiser by now and are harmless.
    But one of his chores is to chase down the numbers he doesn't recognize. This morning, he sees one.
    By its prefix, he knows it's an internal New York Telephone number. Quickly, he punches it into another database, which lists every assigned telephone number in the New York region. The screen flashes: NEW YORK TELEPHONE CO DIAL HUB
    The words dial hub mean nothing to him. He calls the number, and a modem answers. This is definitely not good.
    Luckily, the one person in the world who can tell Kaiser how bad the situation is has just arrived at his office. Kaiser calls him.
    "Hey, Fred, " Kaiser says to his partner. The hacker has hit a new number. He reads it off, then asks, "What's a dial hub?"
    Fred Staples is incredulous. "They were in our dial hub?"
    "Yeah, what's a dial hub?"
    "Aw shit, " says Staples.
    "What?"
    "How long was the call?" asks Staples.
    "About a half-hour. " "Aw shit. "

    For Tom Kaiser, the whole mess had started with an anonymous letter he got by way of AT&T.
    Somebody had sent the long-distance carrier a single sheet of computer printout paper. Just a couple of paragraphs, no date.
    The letter was sent a few months ago, back in November of 1988. The letter said some kid in the Bronx The
    Technician
    was getting himself into trouble, hacking into telco switches and God knows what else. Kaiser got a lot of anonymous letters. Usually these turned out to be from some landlord who wanted to use a pending phone company investigation as an excuse to evict a tenant. This letter, though, had been sent by someone who clearly cared for the kid in the Bronx. It had a